He loitered on the bridge, putting some distance between himself and the woman with the onion sack, letting her pass unlucky and unsuspecting.
He turned and gripped the rail fiercely and looked down at the glittering, summer-green current forty feet below. It was from this waterway here, Elephant Creek, that the neighborhood had taken its name, although physically it was not a creek anymore but a river. Long after it had gotten its name, two other creeks had been diverted into it upstream to drain a swamp that was to become a rail yard, but still you called it a creek and not a river because the name is the soul of the thing and persists long after the thing named has passed away. He considered the name of the fried snack he’d just eaten and the name of the creek, and the coincidence here. Yet there were no elephants to be seen. The word did not need the thing it stood for. The word, being alive, had an instinct for perpetuating itself.
Below him, at the water’s edge, three boys in short pants threw their shoes and socks to the farther bank, waded knee-deep, but then stopped, indecisive, seeing that the water was too deep to wade and the current far too fast for swimming. They were indecisive because they were jealous of their desire to reach the other side, unknowing that the idea was not to cross or to walk over on a bridge, but to descend into and drown.
Only, the descent was sacred, and therefore private, and so he would have to wait for the crowd and its living stink — smoky and sweat sour — to take its leave. You had to approach the house of the woman with the onion sack slowly and alone.
Where had she gone, the girl in the pinafore, with her pink legs? The pinafore was a contradiction that walked around on a girl in a crowd.
It was going to thunderstorm. The creek would turn brown and swell farther up its steep banks. Soon, privately, the water would fill his shoes. And later on somebody would find him downstream and look into his face and ask, Who was this man, what was his name? And they would print the words in the newspaper for others to read and speak.
A picture and a caption. And the caption would lay bare at last his name, age, and address.
That tree with its branches twisting was a Norway maple. No good for tapping for syrup.
He turned again and faced the unperceiving crowd. And the woman with the onion sack — six minutes before the fact, five, four — ascended the hill, whistling.
“My name is,” he said, and spoke his name, haughty and shame-faced, jangling the big ring of keys in front of her face to wake her up. “Alliterative. Funny. Go on, say it.”
He missed his sister. Preserver of artifacts. Kisser of soft, reassuring kisses down the despairing hours. “The clammy clown is clumsy,” she’d used to say when, refilling the lamp, he dribbled kerosene on the rug in the back parlor, where they read at night before bed.
Who would notice him gone that knew his name? Not the coal man. He only came in wintertime. Not the postman. The jeweler collected his bills from a box at the PO. His barber called him, modestly, Chief.
It was so easy to follow her from a distance of half a block and not to expose his plan of action. In fact, he had no plan. Had he intended ahead of time to climb the stoop and to open the door of the tenement, then surely, fatefully, he would have found the door locked. She went in and closed the door behind her. He saw this from the street, waiting, listening to his heart. Then he climbed the stoop, on which salt was splayed, and pumpkin-seed shells, and held the knob of the door and turned it, and the door opened. If it were necessary to any plan that he find her alone in the apartment, then the apartment door once opened would have exposed a room occupied by others. Fate required that he obey the commandments of his heart only as they revealed themselves, emerging one by one, each at the last moment, as a curb, a stray roller skate, reveal themselves to a blind man making his way with a cane. Here is a door. Open it. Here is a stairwell. Climb it. Listen. Someone has clicked on a radio behind that door, right there. So go ahead. Open the door. See what happens. See what you do. There is a woman.
People had long said, and the many books of regional history and toponymy he’d used to own agreed, that the Elephant of the name derived from a circus that had spent the winter upstream from here during the last year of the Civil War. A young cow had trundled onto the ice, nosing her trunk about for liquid water, and had fallen through and drowned. A painting that depicted this event hung in the foyer of the county historical society.
But several years ago he had made a discovery. He had bought a map of the portion of what would become the Ohio Territory that had been deeded to Connecticut by King Charles II in 1662, the last tract of land, as far as he knew, retained as a colony by an individual state; it was known then as New Connecticut or, as it was still sometimes called, the Western Reserve. The date under the compass rose was 1799. On it, a slim black line described a creek approximately one hundred miles west of the settlement at Conneaut, fifteen miles long, emptying into the lake. The note to the right of the creek read La Fonte—a little extra space between the L and the a. His French dictionary told him it meant a “melting; smelting; thaw; mixture of colors, as in painting;” or “the holster of a saddle.” Or else it was someone’s name. A fur trapper perhaps, Canadian, with a trading post on that site.
He held a magnifying glass in his hand. He looked up from the map. “Oh,” he said aloud, “we have misunderstood.”
Forgetting himself a moment, he called to his sister in the parlor. But she was dead, of course. She had been dead for three years. He was always forgetting.
Now the crowd was gone at last. Night had fallen utterly. He walked off the bridge and found at the end of the rail a muddy, switchback ing path through the bull thistle and sumacs, to the water’s edge. A heap of oil filters rusted on the far bank. He took two steps into the current.
What were the worst days? The very worst? The days when he couldn’t read. His eyes wouldn’t stick to the words. At times a week of this. What was the sadness of weeks like these? It was the sadness of Today, in my mind, has been so void and brief, it’s hardly taken place. Yesterday was only a moment ago. Other days, conversely, he lay on the parlor daybed sunup through midnight reading a big leather-bound book with gilt pages, and his sister brought in his food on a tin platter, and tea, and he got up only to empty his bladder and his bowels. On those days he felt free of the elapsing of minutes: like the long-ago preacher in Prestonsburg said of God, “He does not endure for all time; he lives outside of time.” It was such a sweetness those days in the parlor, to occupy a room, a self, made only of words, the objectness of things having been peeled off and tossed aside. He said his mother’s name, waking her from the dead.
If he could denude himself of his mineral self, leaving only his caption, he would become at last transeunt, transient, timeless.
There was a dream from childhood that returned to this day, a dream in which he was thrust from a precipice by an unseen person and fell, wheeling through the air.
The rocks beneath his feet were slick with moss. The body, even now, struggled to preserve the balance to which it was accustomed. He slipped. He fell neck-deep, his arms twisting behind him to stop the fall, to protect the head. He half-stood again, on a rock deeper down, and slipped again and fell.
Now, above him on the bridge, the nothing at which the arrow of fear pointed took shape. He glimpsed it as it became material. He saw it with his material eyes. It was as real as he was. The shape it took was of a very tall, slender male figure running across the bridge. A boy, fleet of foot, passing in the dark over and away from him.