The Big Bridge

By Judith Pifferello

What does a girl do when, degraded both physically and psychically, the police just keep handing her back to her fine, upstanding, pillar-of-the-community, mean husband Jack? She runs! And run Darlene does, but not in the traditional sense, because traditional got her nowhere in the past. Darlene Mannington embarks on a harrowing journey, one borne of temporary insanity, perhaps, but one borne of necessity. Fresh out of the hospital with hematoma, bruised ribs, and battered psyche, she plots and carries out her escape – on her bike – from Battle Creek, MI, north nearly 300 miles toward what she calls The Big Bridge, The Mackinaw Bridge, a five-mile expanse that connects Michigan’s lower peninsula to its upper. In her tentative mindset, this is the place that will afford her anonymity to live out her life alone, safe, unhindered by life’s brutality. Of course, that’s not exactly what happens, because not long after her journey begins, she meets Mira, her alter ego, Quixote to her Kafka, another young woman on a different kind of adventure. As they forge north, they not only share life perspectives, but, more importantly, frightening encounters that keep Jack on the forefront of each day. When will these terrifying men in black cars, who seem to appear out of nowhere, attack? It is a story of survival in the wild, both visceral and cerebral. The culmination of the journey is a horrifying confrontation they have been expecting all along that ultimately solves more than one of Darlene's life dilemmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Judith Pifferello
• Release date: Jun 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476452494

Judith Pifferello

Judith Pifferello has lived in Michigan her entire life. She is an award-winning journalist, an avid student of nature and lives on 30 acres with her husband.

Book preview

The Big Bridge

Judith Pifferello

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Judith Pifferello

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Chapter 1

Some fourteen years after we buried Great Aunt Sylvia, I was in need of a drastic plan. Bruised and swollen, I tried to meld into the bleached-out rosebud sheets of Battle Creek General, room 307, bed B. Tentative, unanchored, I finally forced time to plot my strategy, to conceive of an alternate destiny. I conceded my need to go down in history for something besides being murdered by Jack.

Thanks to Great Aunt Sylvia and a helpful hospital nurse, Jack—John Nathan Mannington—finally didn’t win. Jack is six-four. He owned a string of construction businesses and was rich. I, at five-three, was only his wife. This was something like being Jack’s six-thousand-square foot colonial mansion on Park Drive, or his big red, crew-cabbed, long-boxed, chrome-stacked Dodge Ram truck—property to do with as he pleased.

If I hadn’t wielded the lamp base with the broken bulb that day, if I hadn’t skirted the edge of the living room, groped blindly behind me for the door, remembered where I left the cordless, I wouldn’t be here to reminisce. I was finally hit with the imperative. I was about to die. This wasn’t just an angry man getting his kicks slapping me around, like it had been before. His face was blank as he came after me. No sneering. No words of recrimination like before. Nothing in him made me think I’d get off easy this time. Get off with a cracked rib, get off with a ringing ear, a fractured face.

I decided that this time, after all the others, and unlike all the others, I’d better defend myself with more than an upraised arm, so I’d grabbed the lamp. My hand fit around one narrow portion of its brass stem. I flung off the shade and cracked the bulb against the table edge, just like in the movies. I knew the jagged glass could easily gouge out an eye, slice open a jugular. This time I would fight back. Or die.

Wielding my weapon, I reached the half-bath where I had left the phone sitting on the vanity. I shoved the door shut, punched the lock button and flung open a vanity drawer that theoretically, if not temporarily, would keep the door from opening inward. As I hit this button, Jack crashed against the door. I became disengaged from what was happening in my periphery. I was in two distinct places at once. I was in the place where Jack’s attempts to get into the bathroom escalated. I was also in a place where possible safety was one more mere ring away. When Jack busted through the door, splintering the jamb and the drawer, I shoved the phone and the lamp in his face and forced out enough wind to say, cops are coming. He slowly backed away and raised his arms as if to cry temporary uncle, and allowed my safe passage. I hadn’t really counted on Jack being a coward, but still, I had lied. At the moment he had broken through the doorway, I was still listening to those rings. He didn’t know that. When a female voice finally answered, I was forcing each step toward the front door where I momentarily teetered, then folded to the floor. That’s when I sobbed into the phone that my beloved husband had tried to kill me. Jack was across the foyer, just standing. Looking like Jack.

When the police arrived, Jack answered the doorbell—one of those irritating, time-consuming, eight-note, my-dog-has-fleas chimes—and nonchalantly said to them, How ya doin’?

They came in, both men. I sprawled on the cold marble at their feet. Even then, as I wavered in and out of recognition of the inherent gravity of my plight, I also wavered between dignity and humiliation. And too, I had a real concern that Jack would manage to get in one last kick.

One of the cops, as big as Jack, looked down at me and said, Do you need an ambulance, ma’am? followed closely by Do you want to press charges? I nodded through the fog of relief, disbelief, the pain in my left hip where he had kicked me when I tripped, and the blood pouring from my nose. My attempt to breathe brought jagged pains to my left side where I’d hit a coffee table as I fell to the floor following Jack’s kick to my left knee.

I mustered enough clarity of mind to wonder if the cop meant his questions as a joke. Perhaps the little woman is always a joke to some people. If I had shaken my head instead, perhaps when the cops returned to their squad car, they would have had a good laugh on the stupid broad who probably asked for it anyway. Just leave her dying on the floor.

Did other people wonder what it must be like for someone like me, one hundred and eleven pounds, with someone like Jack, two hundred and fifty? Did they think I deserved what I got, or was I too hard on others, expecting them to care, when it might appear I didn’t care, myself? I didn’t want sympathy. But I also didn’t need judgment.

I had other things to consider, too. Like, how Jack told me I know where you live, meaning I had only one priority now—Margie. His threat was not just an implication. He said it aloud. Your sister, just remember your sister. How he told me, I’ll find you if you leave, no matter what, Then, I’ll find her.

Margie had moved to Colorado. I hadn’t told Jack this fact. I had waited for this to happen, for her to get out of town, for her to be out of harm’s way. I didn’t want her to know her worth was minimal, no, non-existent, in Jack’s eyes, so I figuratively held my breath until she made another life for herself. When this happened, I could tend to my business, whatever it might be. I’d know when the time came. This was just one in a long indefinable list of things I needed to sweep aside before I could deal with Jack. It was the fence I’d built between myself and the world I suspected was out there.

I dodged Jack for all those years, not too successfully, thinking it was my due. As was my past habit, I took full responsibility. All blame was mine. I incurred his wrath through carelessness, much as I incurred my mother’s depressed state of mind, and like my mother’s melancholy, Jack’s wrath was incessant.

I sought therapy to learn to be better. The therapeutic process included whining at the therapist. I fretted. I moaned. I twisted my fingers and wiped my damp palms on pant legs and tissues. I admitted my guilt. My culpability lay raw. Intermittently and obsessively, I would interrupt my anguish to remind Dr. Bernstein not to send a bill for unpaid insurance services to my home lest Jack find out, then I’d get on with my sniveling.

The therapist told me my situation was potentially lethal and was not my fault, but his words wafted away in a dissipating vapor. I couldn’t comprehend how I had gotten so far into the predicament. If only I could get it right, do the right thing.

I whined. I knew Jack wanted the grocery receipts, but I couldn’t find the last. I swore I put it in the envelope by the toaster where I put all the receipts. It was this type of fine detail I kept missing.

It doesn’t matter—the circumstances, the details, where the receipts are, why he beats you, Dr. Bernstein said. "It’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that he does beat you."

Dr. Bernstein told me Jack set me up and lay in wait. He called Jack a predator.

He baits you, then crouches for the kill, he said.

I need to recognize this, I said numbly, thinking that’s what was required.

You need to run like hell, Dr. Bernstein said, relinquishing for a brief moment his staid comportment. But his words weren’t in my repertoire. If only I could not break Jack’s rules. Boo-hoo. I became Lilliputian. I sat on a thimble high on a chair in the plush office and blubbered and wailed over how my whole future hinged on my ability to avoid Jack’s humongous foot.

While the big stupid cop asked me if I wanted to press charges, Jack stood four feet from me, glaring down, his right boot tapping, the same boot that kicked me repeatedly not fifteen minutes before.

I continued to lie on the floor, struggling to fight my need to feel less vulnerable by rising to my feet in indignation, while dreading any motion. My inventory of painful places was beginning to tick off in my brain. I knew I would inevitably need to move, but for the moment I listened as the little humane cop told Jack they had to charge him because it was the law.

Look sir, she’s obviously injured, and when she called dispatch, she said you did it, the little cop said.

You’re way out of line, Jack said.

Could someone get me a tissue? I asked, realizing my request wasn’t important in the scheme of immediate things.

Mr. Mannington, the little cop said as if he didn’t hear me, my boss would have my badge if I didn’t at least take you down to the station. You can iron it all out when you get there. But I don’t have the authority to ignore it, sir.

What’s your full name, officer? Jack said. He was puffing in the way only Jack could puff. I am big, he was telling the little cop in a manner no one could ever use against him. I own you, he was letting him know. You, fella, have cooked your frigging goose, he was suggesting in unmistaken terms as the little cop clicked the cuffs shut behind Jack’s big back.

Jack glanced around them toward me, his eyebrows twisted in a knot, expecting me to cover for him, say the roof fell in this time, crawl to my feet, stand upright, lay my arms across my waist and give them a big June Cleaver smile. He was certain I’d say, Damn those basement steps. In the absence of this, I swear Jack squirmed.

The paramedics arrived and prodded my body parts and reorganized my bones into a horizontal line, stuck a needle in the crook of my left arm, and hoisted me onto a stretcher. I gritted my teeth and accepted it as a small payment for the honor of existing. They transported me to the hospital where I spent one night. This time, I had only bruised ribs, a concussion and gash from when he shoved me backward and hit my head on the edge of a door jam, and a massive hematoma on my left thigh. My nose wasn’t broken this time.

Another time, I had my jaw wired, and sucked soupy mashed potatoes through a straw for weeks, and once the retina in my left eye detached. I told the doctor I took a header down the patio steps, or tripped over the garden hose. They were lies. They were always lies.

Jack was back. He spent the night in jail. In Battle Creek, when you are Jack and you try to kill your wife, your punishment amounts to an insincerely raised eyebrow, or perhaps a little whispered warning not to get caught again.

The judge who freed him didn’t care. No doubt, he beat his own wife. When he faced a man like Jack, he looked himself in the eye. He knew Jack wasn’t the only criminal in the courtroom. What was a little marital genocide in the broad scheme of things? He took considered care of the sorry bastard who stood before him with his equally sorry bastard lawyer at his side, when he declared, One night in city jail. When he determined, That’s all the chattel’s worth.

I read in the newspaper once about a judge who threatened a woman with jail because she couldn’t contain her emotions, her sobbing, while she testified against her wife-beating husband. It was such men, such people, who helped convince me of the fallacy that I could never leave.

In a show of force, Jack stood in my hospital room doorway that next morning and glared and grinned. His smirk said, I can’t wait for you to get out of here. I will disassemble you piece by bloody piece and feed you to the neighbor’s dogs and no one will ever know. Then he left.

I considered calling a lawyer, getting a restraining order. But Jack wasn’t one to follow rules. Such demand would only fire his spirit. Would only prompt him to bigger and better things. I let it be. Decided to take matters into my own hands.

My strategy wasn’t much. And to some, it would seem I picked the most difficult of all solutions, but it was my solution. I nagged at a simple, logical plan that included a road map, a backpack of necessities, and my bicycle—the bike I bought for five dollars at a rummage sale down the street the summer before. It had wide tires and wide handlebars and a wide comfortable seat, like my mother’s bike—the one I rode when I was a kid. This was the sum of my investment in my future.

I could have taken the Eldorado, but Jack never allowed me enough money to get far. The last time I drove it to the market, its tank was nearly empty. Jack didn’t use the Caddy. It didn’t as appropriately signify his stature as did his gleaming, high and heavy, big red truck.

I escaped with the Caddy another time, having some witless notion that Jack really didn’t care if I was here or gone, that his threats and jabs were all a sham, meant only to subvert my mental processes.

Two days after Jack delivered one swift punch to my belly, I drove the car to the library. On the way home, I snapped. I continued past the house. I had grocery money in my purse, so I kept driving. That night, after I had driven south into Indiana, I stopped at a small motel. Its insignificance, its suitability to an equally insignificant traveler, drew me to it. In the night, I heard a key in the lock. State troopers pushed past the motel owner, dragged me out of the bed and arrested me as a car thief. I was dressed only in my bra and panties. I pulled on my clothing as the troopers watched. I offered no resistance. I offered no explanation. I didn’t point to my tender belly and say, This bruise is the size of Jack’s fist.

As a result of the incident, I had become anticipatory about the Cadillac. Additionally, I had no resources, no checking account, no charge card. Each week, Jack would hand me cash and tell me I had better account for every penny, thus the receipts.

In the hospital, I plotted a route on the road map a helpful nurse brought me. She didn’t glance at me from the periphery, as others did, as if loose screws jutted from my temples, or perhaps I had sprouted a horn at the end of my nose. Even in my narrow world, I discovered most women are hard on other women. It is as if we count others’ zits and warts as though they are our own, unlike men like Jack who slug fellow wife-beaters on the back and pronounce, "Pass Go; Collect $200."

It was a Wednesday afternoon when the nameless doctor released me from the hospital. A nurse wheeled me through the halls, down the elevator, out the door, where I lied. I told her I had a car in the parking lot. I wanted no one calling Jack and I didn’t want to incur the expense of a taxi.

I had no friends to call. The two or three acquaintances I had made in the neighborhood finally deserted me in favor of other, better people. I’d have friends, then I wouldn’t. This inability to sustain relationships was a shortcoming, as I saw it, and it would be most evident after a friend would visit my home and encounter Jack. He’d effectively put them off by not acknowledging my introductions, ignoring them, and berating me for whatever infraction I’d most recently performed.

I climbed out of the wheelchair at the hospital discharge door and walked away, mustering as much stoicism as my wracking pain would allow, attempting to appear physically unhindered by my plight. The distance home was approximately eight city blocks. I was betting Jack wouldn’t be home when I arrived. However, I hashed out the other possibility as I gingerly walked the streets. I was prepared to hunker under a bush like a wounded animal, indefinitely if the need arose. I continued my trek, telling myself that each step would loosen my muscles, ease the pain.

In some smaller non-physical way my determination worked, but in the larger, head-splitting, physically broken way, I knew time would be needed for me to heal. The July sun beat on me while I forced each step through sheets of pain that threatened nausea. The agony of each step kept me conscious, prevented me from cutting my journey short, from finding a safe haven behind a hedge and slipping into the somnambulistic state I craved. My muscles drew taut in unison, wadding into searing balls of tissue and my heart hammered in my chest. I also knew I was still belaboring under the onslaught of the medication pumped into me for two days.

I approached home from the block in front of it. I knew a space existed where I could peek between houses and determine if Jack’s truck sat in wait. I was lucky. His truck was not parked in the driveway. If he had one virtue, it was his dedication to his business.

Aside from my pain, that I walked home is a testament to my determination. I have an abundance of fears. The two biggest are men and dogs. A few others are incidental, such as elevators and airplanes. I encountered none of these, and no women insisted I be stoned in the town square.

When I arrived, I struggled not to surrender to the beckon of the eider-down pillow on my bed, not to relax for an instant. This became less difficult when I envisioned Great Aunt Sylvia poking me; prodding me on, reminding me of Jack’s possible return.

My watch said nearly two o’clock. I worked quickly, fighting constantly against the will to quit, and found my backpack in a closet in the basement. I brought it to the second-story master bedroom. I’d never used it. Jack ordered one for both of