No Bridge Home

 

Officer Patrick McCormick peered at the cardboard shack tucked under the overpass. He worked the day-shift beat in Old Town, and buzz on the street reported a bad smell stealing from this isolated hideaway. Skirting a small pile of junk, he crawled into the tight space. His nostrils pinched shut, and he dreaded what he now feared to find.

Boxes fashioned into a shelter with duct tape huddled against the concrete buttress of the bridge. He searched with his flashlight in the half-darkness for a stick to act as a lever under the bottom edge of the structure. The desolate home sank but didn’t open. August sun stalled in the sky as the thermometer pushed 100º; sweat ran down his back, and his shirt stuck to him. After another lift, a vertical rip split the cardboard.

Black flies escaped; death enveloped Patrick like tentacles of a dark vine. His Portland Police Academy training kicked in to prevent him from scrambling backward, but he covered his nose with a handkerchief and pried at the structure until it broke apart with a sigh. In the half-light, he saw the faint outline of a body.

With only six years on the force, Patrick was aware detectives would be assigned this case. The investigative team would spend five minutes to decide causation. The winding track of event leading to death was not important unless murder was involved. Exposure. Drug or booze overdose. Neglect. With these diagnoses, they would tag the body and shovel remains into a bag for disposal.

He poked around in the dirt, justifying his delay to call in his discovery as “good police work.” Beside the body, he found a bottle of oxicodone prescribed for a Maurice Skilton on July 10, 2010, a month earlier, and crumpled in a corner, a scrap of paper with “Two Paths” scrawled in block letters. With latex gloves, he placed the prescription and note in a plastic bag. Unable further to endure the odor, he held his breath while escaping from under the overpass into the light.

His shift wasn’t half-finished, but a body, even of a homeless man, constituted a priority greater than drunkenness or the occasional knife fight occurring on his beat. After calling in a preliminary report, he waited for the detectives. Lights blinking, they pulled up and walked to where he stood. Two were tall and one was short; they all carried masks and gloves. He summarized his findings and handed over the note and the bottle.

“Looks like suicide.” The sergeant spoke in a monotone.

“Yeah, likely the pills,” Patrick conceded. “But I’d like to know what caused him to end up here, now, like this.”

“Shit,” the smallest of the three detectives said. “Dead is dead. Don’t matter whether he loved his mother or not.”

Patrick’s head jerked. Everyone has a past which makes them who they are. When his mother died of heart failure early in his freshman year of high school, his father explained the best he could; but Patrick only understood that something misfired and his mother disappeared. From that day, fear of further abandonment remained his constant companion.

“We need some background in case there are relatives to contact.” The sergeant softened the sharp edge of his colleague. “Find out what you can about this guy from your contacts.”

As Patrick moved away, he remembered hitting long, slow lobs pitched by his father while his mother laughed a quiet, sweet sound. The feel of being held by her faded into a place he could not access, leaving a void filled with a dull ache. On occasions, beyond his ability to predict, this absence flared into a throbbing pain. He believed he could recover only if he discovered why she was gone. This reverie was interrupted by the snicker of the small detective, standing in a huddle with his two colleagues. Patrick flushed but continued walking.

At his mother’s funeral, he wrestled to understand his loss. Had he done anything wrong? Why did she die when others lived? The effort to find answers haunted him whenever he confronted death. If able to penetrate far enough within the mystery of the dead man’s life, he would follow the elusive trail.

With satisfaction, he recalled the sergeant did not take him off the case. Back at his desk, a Google search turned up Maurice Skilton, the owner of a small jewelry store on Broadway.

“Is Mr. Skilton in?” he enquired on the phone.

“That’s me,” a reedy voice answered.

“We’re investigating a situation.” He kept his voice impersonal. “Found an empty bottle of prescription drugs with your name on it.”

“Yeah,” said Skilton, “someone stole my briefcase and pills from my car last week. I was parked in front of the House of Louie catching dim sum for lunch.”

“Report the theft?” Patrick asked.

“Someone jacked down the passenger window and cleaned out anything of value. Hit pay dirt with the oxicodone prescribed after my hip surgery. I didn’t think the cops would be interested.”

“Always notify the police.” Patrick uttered this without conviction because he knew a free-floating street bazaar had absorbed the briefcase and all its belongings, including the painkillers, within half-hour of the theft.

“Probably some homeless guy. No big deal.”

Asshole, Patrick thought as he hung up the telephone.

The sergeant paused at Patrick’s desk near end of shift. “The docs confirmed the obvious—a drug overdose.” Almost to himself, he added, “Two paths? Wonder what other form of suicide he contemplated?”

“Or maybe a path to continue living.” Patrick wished he remained silent, but he reacted to the scaffolding everyone was determined to erect around the meaning of the dead man’s existence.

“Well,” the sergeant dragged out his words. “All we’re looking for now is his name. Also, if there are relatives. Don’t get distracted.” He moved on followed by his two associates.

The shrimp’s voice drifted back to Patrick. “Bums die in the most predictable ways.”  He wanted to plant his foot deep within the little bastard’s rectum.

*****

            The next day, Officer McCormick worked the Princes of the Streets he patrolled, who knew what happened and sometimes why. They trusted him because he didn’t roust them unless heat from the local business community forced him to clean up for a day or two.

“Hey, Thomas, what’s happening?” He halted before an old man, or at least he appeared old, with deep furrowed wrinkles and a ruined nose. After describing the little he had on the dead man, where he was found and in what circumstances, Patrick asked, “You know him?”

“Sure, a loner.” Thomas lowered his fortified wine, cradled in a brown bag. “Called himself Tilson.”

“First name?”

“Yeah.”

“Any last name?”

“Nah.” Street people stuck to first names.

“Any more details?”

“Tilson started as a boozer like me but changed to meds.” He gestured to where drug deals went down. “Check out Antonio. They sometimes hung together.”

Patrick strolled in that direction, nodding at people he recognized. Only familiar with Antonio by sight, he observed him flinch at the uniform. “Hey, relax. Not here to hassle, just talk.”

Antonio eased back into a slouch, but kept his right hand in his pocket. Patrick imagined him touching a packet of pills wrapped in foil, a score costing about $40 and producing enough oblivion to forget most of what needed erasing—at least for a night. “So, what?” Antonio said.

“Got this body. Think he’s named Tilson. I’m trying to locate next of kin.” Straight talk worked better than the tricky foreplay taught at the Academy. He attempted deceit when he was a rookie, but hated the charade, opting instead to swim the crowded streets of Old Town not as a shark looking for prey but as a harmless fish not so different from those he encountered.

“Might know something. What’s in it for me?”

Direct question, thought Patrick. “What’s in it for you is I ignore what you’ve got hidden in your pocket and we both continue to have a nice day.” Antonio considered Patrick’s proposition and nodded. Patrick smiled inwardly. Lucky guess.

“Tilson and I used to panhandle opposite sides of Burnside.” Antonio crooked his head in a questioning way.

Patrick maintained a noncommittal stare.

“He stayed to himself but was real smart.”

“How could you tell?” Patrick asked.

“One afternoon, we were sharing a hit or two behind a dumpster. I felt pretty fine, but he kept blabbing about Brother Raven. How he possessed wisdom to distinguish right from wrong even when mists clouded the thinking of other animals.”

“An Indian dude?”

“Klamath. Wore two braids for awhile. Last time I seen him, about a month ago, he had cut them. Clean for two months, he claimed.”

“You believe him?”

“Maybe. Yeah, probably. No reason to lie. Wouldn’t impress me either way.  He looked like when they take away your happy pills in detox, and all you got left to think about is how shitty life is.”

“What else?”

“He went on about his wife all the time. Weird.”

“Nothing strange about a guy talking about his wife?”

“Yeah, we all talk about exes—the ones who threw us out or whose hearts we broke; but he spoke like she was there, the only light still reaching him.”

“You’re a poet.” Patrick responded in a pleasant way; he didn’t mean any insult. In fact, he liked the way Antonio put it.

Patrick thought of how he met Katie in their sophomore year at the University of Oregon. Drinking too much and studying too little, he was a mess. She begged him to talk until she breached his loneliness; but he came no closer to understanding why his mother left him and held tight to Katie like a life jacket in a boat afloat on a perilous sea of memories.

He shook loose from the past and smiled at the street poet. “Give you a name for this wife.”

“Nope. Only what I told you.”

Back at the station, Patrick called the Klamath tribal administration in Chiloquin, north of Klamath Falls. He spent an hour shuffled to various people, who were none too friendly when he identified himself as a cop.

“All you can give me is that some Indian guy, you think named Tilson, died in Portland?” Finally, a clerk in the Health and Family Services Department, who was willing to talk, answered.

“Yeah, we need to locate relations, if any.” Patrick offered only the official reason for his investigation.

“Well,” the man said, “I’m not sure this is who you’re looking for and I kind of hope not because we played football in high school together, but if he’s the Tilson I’m thinking, he’s a Freeman.”

“Huh?”

“Freeman is his family name.”

“Any relatives still in the area?”

“His parents are both dead, but an uncle called Little Jack lives outside the city.”

“Got a number for him?”He heard the shuffling of papers.

“He worked on the Klamath Falls police force in the late ‘90s….Ah, here it is.”

Patrick dialed. An ex-cop. Chances for obtaining information brightened.

A heavy rumble answered. “Little Jack.” After delivering his spiel about Tilson’s death, Patrick heard deep breathing but nothing more for a long pause.

“Tilson’s my nephew. I can’t believe he’s gone. A good boy. After his parents died, he lived with his Auntie. I couldn’t raise a young kid, but he spent a lot of time with me.”

“The Aunt, she still around?”

“No, she passed.”

Patrick feared this would be all he got. “Uh, can you tell me about him?”

The bass voice sputtered and gathered steam. “After high school, he busted out of this backwater and moved to Portland. Married a black gal named Sharlene. Things went well for him, then not so good once they broke up.”

“You ever visit him up here?”

“Yeah, once when I travelled the Pow Wow circuit.”

“How about after he and his wife separated?”

“No.”

“Got a number for her?”

“I don’t have a new one, but she worked at Chase Bank.”

*****

             Sharlene Freeman was Accounts Manager at the downtown branch. Patrick walked over the next morning, and the guard pointed to a slender black woman speaking on the phone. He wondered if her voice reflected the animation of her face.

As he approached, she surveyed his uniform and said, “Business. Got to call back.” She nodded for him to sit down. “A new account?” Her skin shone, tight cornrows captured her hair, and her voice conveyed openness and warmth. Patrick experienced a sudden twinge about opening a wound the woman in front of him might rather leave untouched.

“No, no account.” He handed her his card. “This is official.”

She started, and her smile faded. “It’s Tilson, isn’t it?”

Patrick nodded and waited for what else she might offer up.

She stared into his eyes. “I’ve been worried.” Her eyes glistened.

“We found his body,” Patrick spoke slowly. “Suicide, I’m afraid. We’re collecting background information.”

Tears escaped Sharlene’s control and slid down her cheeks. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?”

“Of course.” Patrick watched her struggle to compose herself. When she rose, she stood tall and straight. He followed her with his eyes to a bigger desk where she talked to a plump, gray-headed guy slumped behind his computer. The older man smiled and waved her off as if indicating “sure, go out and play; take your time.”

“There is a quiet coffee house down the street,” she said when she returned.

After they ordered, she shifted to the front of her chair, holding herself rigid as if about to confess something part of her would rather deny. “Tilson called about a month ago and asked to meet in the park by the waterfront.” Patrick studied her as he listened. “I hoped we’d have an honest talk and move on with our lives.” She focused on a point somewhere between them. “He was thin.” After a pause, she finished in a low voice. “The conversation didn’t go well.”

He waited.

“What happened to him?” She interrupted her narrative.

Patrick described Tilson’s days on the street. She flinched and bent away.

“Why’d he give up?” Her voice was soft.

He shrugged. “We’re trying to determine the answer.” This was not true, he confessed to himself, because they had a name, a cause of death, relatives notified, and nothing suspicious. For police purposes, the file could be closed…but not yet for him.

“I’ll tell you what I know.” She pushed back in her chair and talked without Patrick interrupting. They met at Portland Community College seven years earlier; he was 23 and she was 22. She pursued accounting, but he took courses in philosophy, sociology, anything to help him unravel why things in life turn out the way they do.

Patrick sniffed like a dog examining its own scent.

“None of the stuff he studied ever earned a dime,” Sharlene said, “but he couldn’t get enough.” After a course on ‘Hegel and Marx,’ he raved about the dialectic of history for months. “I admired his search for answers, but his obsession about the past grew into an open sore.” Her chin trembled.

Patrick interrupted. “Did he ever say anything about two paths?”

“Not exactly,” she appeared confused, adding after a moment of quiet, “that’s the kind of thing he talked about: why one thing happened not another.”

Returning to her narrative, Sharlene said: “We married and moved into an apartment on Mississippi Avenue. In May, 2005 when we graduated, it was time to grow up. I got a job at the bank. He started a food stall called Indigène with French-Indian cuisine.”

Patrick interrupted. “I remember that cart. Loved the fry bread.”

“Yeah, customers asked him where he came from in India. He told them Kerala because that is where he wanted to go most in the world.” She laughed. “Fry bread on the menu should’ve given someone a clue.”

Patrick nodded.

With each paycheck, they saved to build a business. “I fit like the right piece of sky in a puzzle when I leaned against him. All pieces are the same blue, but only two belong together.” Sharlene stopped to collect herself; she’d spoken for ten minutes.

In the silence, Patrick lingered with this image. He had floated alone, a solitary bit of blue, stuck in his past, before he found Katie. After his slice of the sky clicked with hers, he learned over time what he’d forgotten. You can love someone without constant fear they’ll leave you.

Sharlene resumed her story and events came faster. Tilson opened a second cart. “We’ll borrow as much money as we can and open a restaurant,” he crowed. “You’ll join me at La Indigène when we’re established.”

In the summer of 2007, money flowed. They were amazed when the bank advanced them $50,000. Tilson argued they got the loan because he found a peregrine falcon feather. She smiled. “He was always like that— magical.”  A good year to secure a loan, 2007 was a bad time to accrue debt because the market was about to explode. A company near their restaurant where many of their customers worked went bankrupt; people relearned how to make their own lunches. By February 2009, the bank foreclosed. “We lost everything.” Sharlene slumped.

The structure holding Tilson together began to wither and he started drinking. For three months, he stayed home, reading and sucking down beer.  “I can’t find a way forward,” he said. Sharlene could no longer bear to see his misery.

Patrick understood Tilson’s desperation. After he lost his own mother, he hid behind a happy face and marched to high school every day for four long years. His teachers told each other, “If all my pupils behaved like Patrick, I wouldn’t be drinking a third glass of wine at night.” They concentrated on the geniuses and the ADHD-types haunting their days and forgot him. Other students dubbed him “Mr. Mellow” when they bothered to notice him at all. For himself, he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other because he didn’t know what else to do.

“I got tired of no dreams and no partner.” Sharlene checked Patrick’s reaction before continuing. “This brother Ernie, personnel manager at the bank, was hitting on me. ‘You still with that brown-skin boy? Try a real man,’ he said.”

“I wanted nothing to do with his slick talk. ‘You speaking to a happily married woman,’ I told him.” Hesitation crept into her voice, and Patrick sensed she was about to describe the forbidden bite of the apple and expulsion from the garden. The glow of her skin faded and the timbre of her voice flattened.

At her annual company party, Tilson refused to come at the last minute and pulled the sheet over his head, half-drunk. “I’ll celebrate right here,” he said. She felt sorry for herself and drank too much. Mr. Hotshot offered her a ride after the event. She didn’t say no that time.

The skin around Patrick’s eyes tightened.

Sharlene stared at the floor. “I was 28 and couldn’t stand a constant diet of unhappiness.” She seemed unconvinced at her story. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted.”

“We do the best we can,” Patrick said. Her gaze seemed to search his eyes for hidden meaning.

When she arrived home, Tilson said, “You been with Ernie.” His hands clenched together so tight his knuckles turned white. “I don’t know how he guessed and wanted to lie; but I couldn’t.”  A small tear rested on her eyelashes. The final beam linking him to their past collapsed.

That night Tilson slept on the couch without speaking. This continued for two days, until she came home determined to break into the silence in which he hid even if she had to swallow all the pain she had caused. She had already told Ernie he was a jerk, and she wanted nothing more to do with him.

There would be no happy ending, Patrick realized.

“Let’s build something new and beautiful again,” she pleaded, but Tilson stared without moving.

He stood and said, “I must go on a vision quest.”

Over the next year and a half, he called Sharlene every couple of weeks at first, and later less often. Sometimes, he sent postcards, but he never suggested getting together…until a month earlier. By then, she and Adam had dated six months.

You do what you have to do, Patrick reasoned. Tilson remained trapped within the ruins of their Garden of Eden while she moved on.

Tilson arranged to meet Sharlene after work. He described his life but not in the detail related by Patrick. He recounted a recent dream where an eagle flew over him and pointed the way home. At first, she couldn’t find the courage to disclose her news.

Most of us, most of the time, lack the grit to speak hard truths. Patrick reflected as he listened. How do you say I’m sorry, but I found happiness…with someone else?

In the end, Sharlene told Tilson about her new relationship. “It’s too late for us.” She began to perspire. “Adam and I want to marry; I need a divorce.” She thought…maybe she wanted to believe… he might right himself when he accepted he could not reconstruct their past. Tilson nodded, and after a long silence, he walked off without uttering a word.

Patrick was unsure what her story meant, other than life can be capricious. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Freeman.” He rose. “And for Tilson’s. Don’t let his death become your burden.” She rocked as if trying to find a place where she would feel right about herself again.

*****

            For the rest of the day, Patrick contemplated how Tilson may have understood his choices at the end. That night, he told Katie he needed to drive to Klamath Falls on his time off that weekend.

“It’s about the Indian guy whose body you found, isn’t it?”  Katie said. Her tone contained no criticism, only sadness at her husband’s desperate need to probe. “If you don’t learn to let go, you’ll be sucked into the pit that swallows people in the streets you patrol.”

“Yeah,” acknowledged Patrick and brushed a kiss on her forehead. He knew she was right. “Still, I need to talk to his uncle to understand why Tilson decided to give up.”

On the drive down, the dry scent of ponderosa brought both comfort and sadness. He thought about what Katie had said, and the tension between the past and the present. A meadowlark welcomed him with a hopeful trill as he neared Klamath Falls.

At Moore Park off Upper Klamath Lake, Patrick searched the benches on the shoreline under aspens shimmering in the slight, summer breeze. A short but gigantic man took up one side of a picnic table. Little Jack. They discussed trivial things, the weather and the economy, until Patrick steered the conversation toward Tilson.

Tilson’s father Brian was Little Jack’s older brother and a finish carpenter. His mom was librarian at the high school. Both died when he was eleven—driving too fast one night and hit a pot-hole. Flipped three times and the car exploded. No sense to it.

Patrick’s heart thudded in recognition as the story unraveled.

After the crash, Tilson lived with his Aunt Rosie, who had two older boys and didn’t want another. “Better he stayed with me, even in my bachelor digs.” Little Jack’s voice soured. Tilson never discussed life at Rosie’s, but the night after graduation, he packed his personal things in the duffel his father brought back from the War. The only possession he cared about was his father’s tomahawk, a talisman passed to the eldest son in the family to reveal the one true way when you become confused.

Brian once told Little Jack, “I lost my footing in Nam.” After he returned, he swore off drugs and booze, but he still experienced long bouts of blackness. For days, he stayed in the house, tomahawk resting on his lap. A full year passed before he applied for community college using his GI bill. Five years later, he became a journeyman carpenter. He hadn’t forgotten, but he learned to release his grip on the memories of what happened to continue living.

Little Jack drew a photo, snapped four years ago, from his wallet. Patrick recognized the intensity in Tilson’s eyes as the same which had too long stared back at him from the mirror each morning, demanding an account of why life has turned out the way it has. Both men stayed silent for awhile. Little Jack extended his hand and swallowed Patrick’s in goodbye.

On the five-hour return trip, Patrick smelled sage through the half-open window. His mind cycled over what he had learned.

*****

            Patrick called Sharlene on Monday and arranged to meet at the coffee house where they talked before. He related what Little Jack had told him. “Do you know where the tomahawk is?” he asked when he was done.

Sharlene’s head drooped. “I knew he inherited it from his dad, but he never explained its magic.”  She straightened. “About a week before I first met you, I discovered the tomahawk on my doorstep, wrapped and oiled.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Too painful. After I reject him, he leaves me his most valuable possession.”

“To guide you where he was no longer able to follow.” Patrick thought he had come to understand. Death has no rationale; the path forward alone makes sense.

“Why kill himself?” Anger cut through Sharlene’s sadness.

“Sometimes nothing remains to build a bridge to come home.”

Sharlene grew calm again and stared intently at him.

“He wished you to live free from the past.” This final idea escaped Patrick like a sigh, but he felt at peace.

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