Waiting on a Bridge of Maggots

By Robb T. White

Waiting for You on a Bridge of Maggots centers on a professional man in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a hardware store manager, whose family—wife, two children—are killed in a plane crash. Coming from the Midwest and a working-class background, he has found the American Dream in a stable life, good salary, “loving” wife and two healthy children. But this good, solid, respectable, middle-class life ends in the opening sentence of the novel.

Unable to handle the shock—not just the death of his entire family but knowing his wife was unfaithful and his love for her was betrayed—he reels into impulsive, dangerous behavior. Having a genetic predisposition to drink, he indulges in alcohol in bars and that soon leads to more chaos in his personal life.

The consequences are rapid and devastating: he destroys his upper-middle-class existence when his neighbor Morghan throws his wife’s infidelity in his face; he will succumb to alcohol and lose his high-paying position at the store. Enabled by insurance money, he will turn his house in an exclusive gated community into an after-hours party scene for a crowd of misfits, intellectuals, drunks, and dope dealers. He will become attracted to a lower-class young woman, abuse her trust, (possibly) rape and impregnate her; he will kill a man in self-defense whose affiliation with an extremist group (Sovereign Citizens) will lead to his neighbors’ house being burned down and his neighbor shot; and, finally, he will be held hostage by family members of the man he killed in a plot to strip him of his remaining wealth. He escapes—is shot by the psychopathic cousin, whom he kills—slowly recovers his health, and returns to a saner life enabled by the love of the young woman and the child she conceived.

The narrator-protagonist is recounting a life-changing series of events that range from his family’s accidental deaths through violence of the most serious kind, arson and homicide, to a descent into the basest depths of his personality to discover who he is and what he can salvage from the wreckage of his once-comfortable, but hollow, existence.

The novel is both a crime novel and a “serious” novel in that the themes of identity and “truth” are continually played off against each other. Other motifs, symbols, etc. will be picked up by the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robb T. White
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310253966

Robb T. White

For the last dozen or so years, Robert White has been writing and publishing noir, hardboiled, and mainstream fiction. He has two hardboiled private-eye novels featuring series character Thomas Haftmann, one collection of short stories, and a crime novel "When You Run with Wolves." Also published recently is an ebook "Special Collections," winner of the New Rivers Electronic Book Competition in 2014. "Waiting on a Bridge of Maggots" is a mix of noir and crime (2015). Ravynheart Press is bringing out a collection of his crime stories entitled "Dangerous Women: Stories of Crime, Mystery, and Mayhem."

Book preview

I had just finished shaving half my face when the phone rang. A voice identifying itself as Commander Duckworth of the Santa Fe Highway Patrol was calling with heartfelt condolences, it said, to inform me that my wife and two children were dead.

I’m not a man given to strong emotions and Colette often accused me of being cold. I did nothing when I heard those words; the phone didn’t drop from my hand. I didn’t gasp out or cry. I didn’t fall to my knees and scream animal sounds. Time is supposed to stop when you hear words like that. I had a floating sensation and I recall the ball of ice forming in my guts. Beyond that, my mind was clear. I asked questions. I received answers from the voice on the phone, which, if I had to guess, belonged to a man of kindness, a man not much like me.

They were flying back from Florida in a small plane owned and piloted by my next-door neighbor Brent Daniels. Brent’s wife Morghan and I had to stay behind because of our jobs. She owns a dress shop downtown and it was prom season. I was overwhelmed with the semi-annual summer inventorying at the store. It was vacation time so my kids Billy and Jeanette were out of school. Brent’s flex-time job at the college where he’s an IT administrator allowed him to schedule his off-time easily. It was the first time any of my family had gone on one of these mini-vacations of his.

I like numbers, especially statistical probabilities, things like that. I’ve never been good with people. My wife was the one who read books. She told me there’s a German word that doesn’t have an equivalent in English. Schadenfreude means harm-joy, literally. I have been leery of flying in planes all my life, and I was ashamed for feeling anything even remotely like relief at not being inside that plane and watching my whole family die in front of me.

It seems strange to recall that I went back into the downstairs bathroom to finish shaving the other half of my face. I usually don’t like to look at my face although Colette always thought me a handsome man. The image of my face looking back at me was a look I had never seen before but I saw myself with a brilliant clarity that made me dizzy from the intensity of my own stare. I closed my eyes and felt my forehead touch the mirror glass. Most of the rest of the day is a blank. I’m not sure of the events of the days immediately after.

There is only one occurrence that stands out clearly. I heard a woman’s scream coming from the Daniels’ house next door. It was one long, piercing cry that broke the early-morning stillness. I heard a door slam and then pounding on my front door. I rushed to open it knowing that Morghan had just been informed of the same news. She rushed past me, as if she were looking for something, her eyes smeared and wild. Her hair was teased up in back as if she had been fixing her hair. She ran into my kitchen and turned around. She was in shock and needing someone, anyone, to comfort her. I opened my arms to her, despite my habit of avoiding emotional displays.

She walked slowly to me, her eyes big with the horror of the tragedy we shared. Then the look on her face changed in an instant as if the muscles of her face were being cinched together, tightened into a mask. Morghan’s full, pretty face was transformed in a split-second into a fox face—narrowed, twisted, teeth bared.

This is for your slut wife, she said. She spat in my face.

She brushed past me without another word. I heard my front door bang open so hard the crescent of decorative glass shattered. Moments later, the door of her house slammed shut. I remained exactly where I was, spittle dripping from my chin, fixed to my floor like a man surrounded by sleeping snakes he’s afraid to disturb. Back in some abyss of time, the world turned and it was no longer dawn but morning and the familiar smell of piñon smoke folded around me.

Chapter 2

The crash occurred east of Satan Pass south of the Chacra Mesa. I knew where without looking at the map: Brent always flew over the Chaco Canyon on his way back from Florida. The sky was clear that night, according to the Highway Patrol, and there were no strong updrafts. Mountain flying is different from other kinds of flying, according to what I remembered Brent saying during our family get-together in our adjoining backyards every Fourth of July.

Brent drank heavily but held his liquor. At the last Fourth picnic, our third since arriving in New Mexico, he’d drunk several mixed drinks whereas Morghan preferred wine coolers. He talked at length about his Piper Saratoga and the mountain flying training course he took when he and his wife relocated from Florida. That’s when the idea came for the trip to Sanibel Island where they time-shared a beachfront house with Brent’s brother from Maryland.

I tried to prepare myself. The officials who planned to meet me at the morgue would want to treat me kindly and hold off from touching me as if I might break. Men would want to shake my hand; women might want to pat my shoulder or touch my arm. Some of course would prefer to distance themselves having seen too much grief over the years and knew that mangled bodies would jerk a violent reaction from anyone. I tried to concentrate on my breathing and I felt a vein tick in my neck like a worm. But being in that chilly, sterile room with the disinfectant smells and the water trickling into drains was hard to bear. Before I walked in, led by the county’s medical examiner and a police officer, a detective, I was afraid they might still be in their body bags. Your mind does things you can’t control.

My wife and two children were under sheets. My wife lay between the bodies of the children she had brought into the world. The pathologist led me to the middle table first and withdrew the sheet from her head to her chin. I was told in the outer room there had been much trauma to all three.

I looked at her face and said, Yes. No one had asked me to identify her so I do not know what compelled me to say it. My eyes scanned her features for damage but she looked as if she used to when I would wake first and look at her sleeping. I’d been told the cause of death was a basic organ collapse of the body. There had not been much fire. I was grateful her face had not been damaged so that her family would not have to see her in a closed casket.

Maybe sensing that I was not going to hold up for long, the pathologist gripped my wrist and led me to my son’s body. His head was badly caved in and there was much damage from fire where the skin had crinkled flesh and turned it black. I nodded again but I was unable to say the word. He took me to my daughter’s table and then I felt my knees begin to buckle. Suddenly I was being held up by a detective and an assistant pathologist who had appeared from behind me, no doubt alerted this might happen.

They positioned me behind the table and, once more, the pathologist rapidly removed the sheet, but this time he exposed more than Jeanette’s head; the sheet caught on rib bones protruding from her chest and I was able to glimpse the devastation to her small body. The detective’s grip tightened on my bicep but I willed myself to remain standing. It took me a moment to realize they were once more waiting for the official identification and so I nodded my head vigorously.

That ended it.

I was led back to the small room where a rectangular window had been cut into the wall. I wondered if that were done for those who could view the corpses but could not bear to walk into that room.

The detective asked me if I wanted to use the bathroom. I said no, I was all right, and I thanked him. I remember signing my name to some forms, but I recall only the last forms, which were authorizing the medical examiner’s office to release the bodies. Colette’s word rippled across my consciousness once more, this time without the attendant guilt. The desire to get out of that place and walk in sunshine was overwhelming, but I knew I could not do that.

The pathologist had a salt-and-pepper van Dyke that I tried to focus on when I was in the hallway waiting for the elevator to take me back into the lobby where he and the detective had met me. They both said things to me, and I do remember snippets of what the pathologist said about the complete autopsy report. The detective said he would contact me in a day or two. He said something about another kind of report and he gave me his card. I put it inside my suit jacket without looking at it.

Somehow I made it outside on my own in the sunlight of the parking lot. I felt a huge headache moving up from the back of my head, and I remember how the light hurt my eyes. When the sheriff’s department phoned me, I was told I should have someone with me to drive me home. I was alone, however, and grateful that no one could see me.

My clothes were soaked with sweat by the time I pulled into my driveway. I had not had anything to drink so far and my stomach was burning. I normally drank a full pot of coffee before going to work. I got out of the car and measured the distance by line of sight to my front door because I wasn’t sure I could make it all way. My legs were betraying me again, like my sweat-soaked body, and my mind seemed to be shutting down all but the most necessary of tasks.

How odd, I thought, as I remembered telling Colette about an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican the day they took off for Florida. A man not far from our gated community had a son who drove home from college in the middle of the night so that he could kill his father and inherit his house and money. The son entered the house, disarmed the security system, tip-toed up the stairs where he bludgeoned his father with a fireplace poker while the father slept. It didn’t kill him, however. The father got up at his usual time and went about the motions of his daily routine like making coffee, stepping outside to fetch the paper. He was found dead in the foyer. The article said that his paleocortex, where all habits are formed, had been responsible for his actions despite the mortal wound.

The doorknob slipped in my hand as if it were greased; sweat was still oozing from all my pores. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Morghan was dressed up and about to get into her car.

She gave me a hard stare; then the muscles around her face relaxed. It looked more like a grimace, a face you’d make after sipping sour milk, than a smile.

I’m—I’m going to see Brent in the hospital, she said.

I must have looked back at her with a weird expression on my face. She quickly got into her car and drove off.

It was news to me that Brent had survived the crash.

I managed to get inside the foyer before I dropped to the floor. I lay there with my face pressed against the cool tile for a long time. I made it up the carpeted stairs, but it took a long time. I would slump over and hang on to the dowels to steady myself. When I reached the bedroom, I fell head first onto the quilt with the Aztec designs my wife had brought home on one of her Taos trips last Christmas.

I slept on and off twelve hours. I remember flashes of dreams and coming to as the dreams bore through my consciousness. Daylight faded to dusk and then evening. The last ragged fragment of dream faded. Colette and I and the kids were hiking a desert trail in Taos when a black bear and her cub crossed our path. I was yelling for the kids and Colette to run as the bear charged. I was sitting up in bed, panting, with my forearms covering my face when I came fully awake.

There it was again, I thought, relief and sorrow mixed in my toxic dream. I tried to cover my hand over my mouth before the bile welling up from my stomach erupted. I sprawled over the toilet bowl until the last dry heave subsided. I was aware of my head hurting with a stabbing pain more than the spasms from my stomach. The water in the bowl was yellow with my empty stomach contents and the smell was foul. I was also aware that my body was rank from the constant sweating.

I showered for a long time and soaped my body as if I were preparing for the martyrdom of shahid. I made it downstairs and my legs did not stumble. The house was dark but the edges of furniture and the things in it were familiar. Still headachy and with a stomach that wasn’t able to tolerate food, I made some green tea and was about to drop bread into the toaster when the image of my child’s burned body seared itself into my mind all over again.

I have heard of convicts isolated for years in segregated units who lose their identities and don’t know who they are as human beings anymore.

Who was I?

A man who was no longer a husband and father.

A man with choices.

A man standing in his kitchen in Santa Fe, alone.

Chapter 3

The funerals were held at the Angels of God Cemetery where the Old Pecos Trail and the Old Santa Fe Trails form an isosceles triangle. I had taken the kids to the Museum of Indian Culture last Christmas Eve, which is located there. The paper-bag lanterns they call farolitos were everywhere. People hung them from walls and doorways and rooftops. We’d just had a heavy snow that morning, and I remembered how the museum’s walkway was lined with them and how the glow they reflected back on the snow made my children happy. We had also just relocated from the Midwest because of my job and everything was still new to us.

My in-laws had flown in from Chicago the day before. That’s where Colette and I had met; it was my first appointment as manager of a store shortly out of grad school. Her brother and sister accompanied them. I offered the house but they wanted to stay at one of the hotels. They were a close family, and the grief etched into their faces showed how they were suffering. We were all cordial and excessively polite with one another, but I knew that the reserve they had always felt for me was still there. I didn’t resent them for it. When we sat at the kitchen table after I had picked them up at the airport, Colette’s father’s hand revealed a tremor that he would control by gripping his coffee mug.

We were not good Catholics as a family but Colette’s mother was very devout. She had taken control of the funeral arrangements and was very forceful with me on the phone in ensuring that a Catholic mass and a Catholic burial were going to be provided. Because they were big donors of their parish in Chicago, I assumed she had pulled strings with the archbishop to enable the accommodations to be made here. I did not resist. I wanted to ease the pain of their loss as much as I could, and in a selfish way, this helped me take my mind off the responsibilities that every other moment threatened to overwhelm me. The semaphoring of the red light on the answering machine never seemed to stop as one call led to another in the whole ghastly business of dying suddenly and being interred.

Colette’s mother took charge around the house as well. She gave instructions to her son and daughter while my father-in-law sat in front of the television. He seemed to be in a daze from the moment they arrived and the only conversation I had with him was over the photos of the Colette and the children from last year’s balloon fest in Albuquerque. His children, both in their thirties, and his wife, would be moving around him doing small errands and tasks in preparation for the funeral. Once in a while, one or the other would burst into a sob or rush off to an empty room to weep. I heard sobs coming from all directions sometimes as my house seemed to take on a keening of its own in the middle of the night. The tasks that kept us all busy, however, proved to have a calming effect on everyone’s nerves.

The day started warm and by noon it was uncomfortably hot. I had showered and shaved just before dawn as I did every morning, but I wanted to take another shower before we left in the limousines provided by the funeral home. My mother-in-law and I got along during this time, a fact Colette would have found ironic as she herself didn’t get along with her own mother. I could see in the mother’s fading beauty how Colette would have come to resemble her had she lived to be that age.

My family did not come down for the funeral. My parents were both dead and I had lost contact with my sisters and brothers years ago. It wasn’t through any fault of theirs but we drifted apart as people in families sometimes do. I didn’t call any of my siblings to inform them. The idea of using a phone to communicate grief was repugnant to me. I would worry about this later, or so I told myself at the time.Colette often mocked me for wrapping my feelings in cellophane, as she once said but throughout the funeral preparations I took a small comfort in the numbness.

The mass was held at St. Michael the Archangel’s and then our small cortege of three cars left for the chapel in the cemetery because of a thunderstorm that erupted just as we left the church steps. The priest said a blessing over the caskets and sprinkled them with holy water. He called my children angels and insisted God’s love was sometimes impossible for us to comprehend but that it was always there. I remembered the sweet sting of the incense wafting from the thurible the priest waved about on its chain from my altar boy days growing up in Northtown on Lake Erie. I used to serve mass for an old Irish priest who clamped down on my hand when I poured wine into his chasuble during offertory. He had silver hair neatly parted and would sometimes cause a scandal because of his drinking in bars.

Colette’s mother had to be held steady under the arms by her son and daughter as the service drew to a close. The idea of leaving them there while the rain battered the tile roof was almost more than I could handle then. For some odd reason, I remembered how Jaqueline Kennedy had asked the honor guard surrounding President Kennedy’s body on the catafalque to turn around instead of facing outward as they always do in military tradition. Soldiers face their enemies and protect their fallen leader. They obliged her and faced the casket because, it is believed she had said to them, he looked so lonely that other way.

As I was leaving with my in-laws, I noticed Morghan standing in the back with the director of the funeral home and his assistants. She did not make eye contact with me.

There were several long, dull days afterward but nothing I can recall clearly. I was not expected back at work for another week at least and I had not given any thought to my job at all, which was strange because there never seemed to be enough time in the day to get everything done when I was at work.

Four days after the funeral, and two days since Colette’s family had flown back to Chicago, I left a message on my assistant manager’s voice mail to call me if he needed me for anything. My bathing and shaving were erratic but I was feeling better and I was getting my appetite back. Colette always had cans of microwavable soup in the pantry for lunch and I was able to get by on that, although I often liked to surprise her with a casserole when I had the time.

It was time that bothered me, that and my thoughts around that time. I was sitting on the couch and I noticed a pair of women’s rain boots in the foyer. Colette’s sister had forgotten to pack them and I just noticed them. Colette had a pair just like them decorated with peace symbols, but Joan’s were brown with purple skull-and-crossbones designs on the side.

I stared at them for a long time. My mind was traveling down paths of memories that seemed to career from one thing to another in the crazy logic of dreams: us at the art gallery in Taos at a studio tour of the Georgia O’Keeffe’s on exhibition, skiing at Angel Fire, where Colette tried to teach me on the bunny slope, or going for a hike along the Sangre de Cristos. The images were blurring, a churning kaleidoscope in my head, when it all disappeared and one thing remained: a memory of Colette and me driving up the Turquoise Trail from Albuquerque back to Santa Fe, both our kids at their grandparents for a couple weeks. Colette was always the more adventurous one, and we were both feeling carefree and as happy as I can ever remember in our marriage, when she suddenly leaned over me, unzipped me and gave me head while I was driving fast on an unpaved section of gravel road. It was exhilarating and dangerous, and I nearly fishtailed us over a cliff taking a corner. We laughed about it later like teenagers and it was something we shared as lovers.

I thought of the Piper going down on the mesa. The children would have been asleep in the back, according to the autopsy report. Colette was in the seat next to the pilot. The autopsy report said her side took the brunt of the impact on that sandstone mesa. How could Brent have not known he was flying into a stand of juniper and piñon trees unless—unless Colette were going down on him the same way she always did with me.

Chapter 4

I knew that returning to work would be awkward. People would smile, say something to cover the awkwardness of the moment. One or two of the women gave me hugs, which I found hard to endure because of the touch of another human being’s flesh after being alone for so long.

The smell of their perfume made my stomach roil.

My assistant manager George had handled the day-to-day transactions in my absence and left me a stack of to-do items that were matters of personnel scheduling. He had deferred inventorying until my return, George said, and as we were past the peak season for lawn-and-garden, there was no hurry. The paint-mixing computer was on the fritz again and the new hire responsible for key-cutting was racking up some customer complaints but there was nothing earth-shaking that needed my attention. I arrived at five in the morning on the second day of my return almost eager to get at the paperwork and sign off some forms, and by nine o’clock that evening, I felt I had made up for lost time.

By midafternoon of my third day back, I felt that people were reacting to me in the normal way except for a couple of the new hires, seasonal employees, who spoke to me in lowered voices so that I had to ask them to repeat what they said. Life had found its equilibrium point, or so I thought. I was doing my best to keep any emotion out of my voice and made every effort to look people in the eye as I passed them in the aisles. The cashiers were all young women who had mostly been with the store longer than I and enjoyed a rapport among themselves. I had worked stores where this was not the case, and I knew what back-biting and gossip could do to the workplace environment. The store’s assistant before the current one had gone to a training seminar for assistant managers in Albuquerque last year and brought back a folder containing tips for dealing with this problem. George loved to talk about ABQ, the locals’ expression for the Duke City, which was George’s irritating expression for it around the store. When I asked why it was referred to that way, he didn’t know.

He liked to bring his folder into the employee lunchroom. He’d try to instruct our employees as if they were his subordinates in some big business plan. He was always taking about taking the store to the next level. I happened to be in there one day when Rosita, the cashier who had been with the store the longest, was named Gossiping Betty by him and she tossed the sandwich she was eating at him. Everyone laughed. They were a good team. I tried to like George because I had to work closely with him, but I found his fanaticism for the company disturbing. With his bland face and boyish demeanor, he reminded me of those old newsreels of Hitler Youth camps