KATE’S EX-HUSBAND RAY is still here, and sometimes that’s enough. Other days, his failures haunt him. He has a maintenance job for the park district and he drives one of the groundskeeper carts along the hike and bike trail, taking care of small repairs, cleaning up after park events, removing graffiti from bridges and benches. He likes the solitude and the city benefits. Doesn’t like the swollen ankles or the heat, which he’s grown less tolerant of. He often thinks of Kate and the girls. A life he once had that now seems like someone else’s. He’d gone to the girls’ anniversary vigils but had grown a beard for the occasions, stood anonymously in the back, and left early. He knew Kate had moved into one of the condos downtown that he and Kate used to make fun of. Boondoggles, they’d called them. Californication. Months ago, he’d gotten her number from a friend (who advised him, of course, not to contact her) and called Kate. He wanted to tell her that he knew he’d failed them. That maybe if he’d been there, he could have prevented it. That he carries the weight of those forty-seven missing minutes like a stone in his belly. But when he called, he didn’t say anything, just listened to her voice saying hello hello who’s this? and for some reason thought of a bird, its head jerking this way and that. He remembered a wren once getting into the house and he and the girls had closed the curtains and turned off all the lights, and Kate held the cat in her arms, until, in the dark, the wren grew calmer and he placed a towel over it. Silly old bird thinks it’s night, Elizabeth had said, delighted. On the phone, Kate said, “Jack, is this you?” When Ray didn’t say anything, she hung up.
Ray is near the hike and bike trail on Riverside Drive when he sees the fat man on the train trestle that crosses the river. On night shifts, he sometimes chases off kids or drunk university students trying to climb it. He calls his supervisor, says someone’s up on the trestle, maybe a prank, maybe a jumper, hard to tell. He waits but nobody comes, no supervisor, no cop, no siren. The man seems to be frozen up there, staring down at the water. Ray calls up at him. Nothing. Swallows dive around one of the trestle piers. So Ray climbs up, despite his bad ankles and fear of heights, goes out on the trestle, thinking maybe he can talk him down. From up top he can see most of the park and bike path. The high-rises across the river loom over him. When he gets about thirty feet away, he can see that the man is barefoot, his pants rolled up like he’s wading in a creek or in the surf. His shoes are draped around his neck by their laces. He turns toward Ray, calm, like he expected Ray would be along any minute. Is the fishing any good here? the fat man asks. He peers down as if he’s watching a school of them dart around. Ray explains the trestle is off-limits, asks if he can help him, you know, get down. The fat man says maybe so, maybe so. He wants to tell Ray something but first he needs to know a few things, for instance, what was the exact distance from the trestle to the water’s surface? Ray thinks: Just my luck, bat-shit crazy and I stumble on him. Ray tells him he’s only here to be sure the man gets down safe. He appreciates that, the fat man says. Then he doesn’t say anything but Ray can see his wheels are turning. The fat man says he’s fond of weights and measurements. They can tell you the shape of something even if you never saw it. Consider this trestle, he says, and leans out, the metal rail disappearing into his big gut. Ray shoots forward, his heart thudding. But the fat man just eyes the girders and supports down there. Points to this and that. Says something about spandrels and cables and the weight of the thing. All this, he says, only ideas, measurements in a person’s head before it’s built.
Ray looks for his supervisor, a cop car. The sun glares off all that high-rise glass. Heat’s coming on. Ray moves closer to the fat man, but the height is starting to make him dizzy, a little wobbly in the legs.
The fat man says he worked as an assistant engineer for Amtrak for many years, had ridden over hundreds of bridges like this. Ridden across them on the City of New Orleans, which nightly bisected the country from Chicago down through the South. Crossed the five-hundred-foot Pit River Bridge in California, the tallest cantilever train bridge in the world, which also lured the desperate and forlorn. A bridge, the fat man says, is made in the pattern of man, his insides. Cables and trusses, sinew and bone. But, of course, a bridge is also a pattern of the void it spans. Where they touch.
That’s something, Ray says, because he doesn’t know what to say to that.
I was fond of that life, the fat man says.
Well, we’re all fond of life, Ray says.
Ray can see the man is measuring something in his head.
When I was a young boy, the man says, on summer days my friends and I used to climb up this trestle. We’d crouch down on the beams just underneath the tracks. When the train came, there would be a terrible roaring and grinding over us and the sun would be blotted out. The refrigerated cars would pass over and cold water from the condensation would rain down through the timbers. We were quite fond of that. The shock of it. The way it would throw you out of yourself and bring you back again.
The fat man shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his toes as big as spoons.
Ray can hear a siren. Cottonwoods tremble along the riverbank. Something is happening. Ray’s legs go wobbly again. There will be questions about why he didn’t do more, he thinks. Why he wasn’t more persistent or persuasive. Why he wasn’t more capable. Why he wasn’t someone else.
The fat man looks out over the river, shoes yoked around his neck, says he’s never actually been on this train trestle in his life before now. Never been an assistant engineer. Why I tell such lies, I don’t know, he says. He rises up on his toes, grips the sides, and heaves one meaty leg over. The metal seems to groan under him. Then, just as the man is about to go over—and this is the hardest part for Ray to understand—Ray throws himself at the man’s other leg. Grabs him around the thigh, the size of a normal man’s torso. Buries his face in it. The fat man is straddling the trestle wall now. Poised between two worlds. He struggles and twists. Ray’s head hits something hard, once, twice. There’s a roaring in his ears. But he doesn’t let go.
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