Bridges, Brothers, and Baseball

By James Callan

I smelled the smoke before anything else. Before hearing the sirens. Before
witnessing the crowds. Before becoming a part of them, pressing in to stare wide-eyed at what looked like the end of the world.
Ronnie asked me from the other room if I was making toast, if I had left some Pop-Tarts to blacken on the highest setting. I wasn’t, and I told her so.
“You smell that, though?” She shouted.
It was hard not to. The scent took over our apartment. “Yes,” I shouted back.
Ronnie came out of the bedroom, looking like she just woke up. “I dreamed of
fire,” She told me, sniffing the air. “What is that?”
“Your dream has come true,” I said. “Must be fire.”
Together, we looked out the window; same weed-infested parking lot, same familiar cars, same old row of houses. None of them on fire.
I shrugged. “Let’s hit the road.”

We were on our way to a ball game–Twins versus Royals. It was an average campaign for the Twinkies, middle of the pack in the standings. We hovered around .500 the whole year. Tonight was a low-stakes game, a bit of casual fun for us. Our hearts weren’t really in it–just filling in the hours of an early evening to push us to Whiskey-O-Clock.
Ronnie and I had bought Battlestar Galactica, season two, on DVD earlier that afternoon. The night before, we had shared a bottle of Jack Daniels, finished the liter between us, and crushed the season one miniseries of the classic sci-fi reboot. It’s crazy, in retrospect, to think a low-stakes ball game and a television program were at the forefront of my mind. As it would turn out, that night threw us one hell of a curve ball.
The walk to the Metrodome from my Dinkytown apartment took about 25 minutes–usually. On this particular occasion, it took somewhere in the ballpark of an hour, maybe more. The smoke from outside my door became thicker, darker as we headed towards downtown. It smelled like… “Burnt plastic?”
Ronnie furrowed her nose, sniffed the hot summer air. “Disgusting,” she complained. “It reminds me of the time my brother burned all of my Barbie Dolls.”
Sirens invaded the early evening. Too many of them. It wasn’t normal. Up ahead, there was a crowd of people. I lived less than half a mile from the epicenter of disaster, so it didn’t take us long to get there.
There was fire alright. And it wasn’t fucking Barbie Dolls.
“Holy shit.” Ronnie lowered her shades and stared.
“Fuck.” There were no better words.
The smoke had come from a car fire. One or two or ten. A black chimney of billowing ash bloomed up and outward to bruise the perfect blue sky. Beyond the car fires was an image of Armageddon. Well, that’s how it seemed to me, a guy whose local world lay crumbled before his eyes.
The I35-W bridge, a major highway running through the heart of the Twin Cities, ended in a ragged tear at both ends. The middle bit –the bit that bridged the great Mississippi and its deep, muddy waters– lay scattered in numerous fragments, a giant concrete jigsaw in the river below.
Like everyone else, we stopped to look. It wasn’t your casual diversion. It wasn’t a fender bender on the side of the road. It wasn’t a double-fucking-rainbow. It was a scene straight from Battlestar Galactica. It was like Caprica on fire. Except this was Minneapolis, my home. This was real.
Students from the University of Minnesota were everywhere. It was August and hotter than a pin-up diva twerking across a bed of embers. Open windows delivered the smell of a burning city, the sound of sirens. A major metropolitan highway falling into the river at rush hour–it ain’t the sort of thing to go unnoticed.
Disaster beckoned shirtless boys from their Xboxes. Tragedy pried away tank- topped girls from early reruns of The Hills. The collective youth, sweaty and bored, amassed to witness an actual catastrophe that somehow seemed less real that Xbox gore or reality T.V.
Everyone was there. Everyone was on their phone. Everyone, all at once, trying to call everybody they knew to tell them the news, to determine if they were alright, to make certain they had not been on the bridge.
As a result, the mobile networks were fucked. Totally jammed with the entire city population desperately trying to get through to their friends and family. Cars pulled over. Drivers got out of their vehicles. Everyone was watching a Hollywood action movie that was not a movie at all. Everyone was gripped, absorbed by the polished graphics of real life disaster. After a while, the cops ushered us all away.
It was a little weird when we continued our way down to the Metrodome to watch a baseball game. Men swinging wooden bats at thrown balls. Hot dogs and Nachos. A box of fucking Cracker Jacks. And just down the street? Pandemonium. Six lanes of highway underwater. Yet we left all that behind us. And there we were, drinking 3.2 beers and cheering for Joe Mauer at the plate.
“Mauer runs like a queer,” the guy next to me said, viewing the replay of Joe running to first plate after hitting a line drive single. This guy had a deep voice. Really deep. When he spoke, the timbre of his words sent wicked vibrations through the cheap plastic seats. It tickled my asshole. Every time he spoke. It was as if this stranger who thought Joe Mauer ran like a queer was personally feather-dusting my anus. It was uncomfortable. But in the end I accepted it. I just went with it. Learned to like it. I even asked the guy about who he thinks deserves the MVP, just so I could entice him to speak and send those intimate shivers to tickle my backdoor G-spot.
I remember being ashamed of that. My secret enjoyment. But I wasn’t just being a pervert. Really, I wasn’t. I was using the sensation of a stranger unwittingly playing tickle-tickle with my butthole as a distraction. It kept my head away from the images of burning cars and major roadways collapsed and crumbled, wreckage and dead bodies that I knew lay just outside the stadium walls. Lord knows the baseball wasn’t distraction enough; not a 5-3 loss to the Royals. It was background noise. Nothing more.
The Twins (and Royals) were heralded as heroes that night. Playing the game like they had, rather than opting for postponement. Keeping the crowds off the street. Keeping them from gawking at the end of the world, adding to the chaos.
As we funneled out of the building, the conversation was all about the bridge. Not a single person –not even Joe Mauer himself– cared about the baseball game. The prospect of someone you know being one of the unlucky 13 that had died in the tragedy that evening, one of the 145 that got injured…It put trivial things like baseball on the back-burner of your mind.
“Austin had a job interview today,” Ronnie announced after giving up on the call she had tried to make to her family–the networks were still fucked.
“Oh yeah?” Austin was Ronnie’s older brother, a big-time nerd, but three times smarter than me.
“Yeah,” Ronnie continued as we poured out of the stadium. The air no longer smelled of smoke, but the atmosphere was thick with tension. “It’s the third and final interview for what is essentially his dream job. Supposedly the interviewers dropped Austin a pretty big hint that he was the favored candidate for the position.”
“Dream job, eh?” The concept was out of reach. I worked security at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and had a massive dickhead for a boss. His name was Thor, which was the only cool thing about him. Sometimes, in my frustration, I’d pick up whatever was nearest –a spatula while making eggs, a pencil while jotting down the grocery list, whatever– I’d just pick something up and raise it high, smash it down and pretend I was crushing my boss’s head. I’d mock his corpse –the ruined eggs or splintered pencil– saying I killed him with Thor’s Hammer. It was a bad habit: picking up items, smashing them, pretending to kill my boss. “What’s the position?”
“Some job with Medtronic.”
“Medronic?” Sounded like Transformers. Like a Decepticon.
“It’s a medical device company. They make, I don’t know, medical devices.”
“Like stethoscopes? Tongue depressors? Those little hammers to bonk people’s knees?”
“High tech shit,” Ronnie told me. “If Austin gets the job, he’ll be involved in robot-assisted surgeries.”
“He’s not a Cylon, is he?” We laughed, but not being able to get through to her family was keeping Ronnie on edge.
Robot-assisted surgeries…Fucking hell. Austin was a big deal. An ace student. He had graduated near the top of his class from MIT. Real brainy. Sciencey. He was going places.
Ronnie finally got through to her parents. Turns out the networks weren’t what was holding back her call from getting through. Her parents had been on the other line, talking to Austin. They had been trying to console him, keep him from losing his mind. I overheard Ronnie talking with her folks and got the gist of what happened. He missed his interview, a result of the I35-W falling from the sky. He got tied up in traffic, stranded, and couldn’t get through to Medtronic, what with all the phone networks down and streets jammed like a jumble of logs. He got the bad news hours later, that the job had gone to one of his competitors. Even though Austin had a valid excuse for his no-show, Medtronic had sealed the deal. Austin’s dream job wasn’t in the script.
Ronnie got off the phone and told me she needed to go. She needed to check in on her brother, she explained. Secretly, selfishly, I was bummed that fate had got in the way of watching Battlestar, season 2, with whiskey in my belly and my girl by my side. But London bridges falling down and Austin’s dreams collapsing with them had pulled the plug on an otherwise fine plan for the evening.
I offered to drive Ronnie to her brother’s place. It would be quicker, I reasoned. And quite frankly, I didn’t want to leave Ronnie’s side. This whole event was only about three or four weeks after that magical night we had sex for the first time. It had been the 4th of July. We had abandoned our prime real-estate for observing the firework display to run off and undress, to fuck under an explosion of fireworks. Ronnie’s naked body had been illuminated in reds and blues and golds. It glistened, colorful, beneath my own. Nearby, people cheered in elation. It was as if they were rooting for us. I came at the apex of the firework finale.
That enchanting moment had been less than a month ago. Ronnie and I were still new. We were still in our own personal season one. I was addicted to her. Infatuated. That feeling would never truly go away. Not entirely. But in those early days it was especially strong, and utterly intoxicating. I wasn’t going to leave her side.

We got to Austin’s an hour later. It should have taken a fraction of the time, but with the bridge down and the city in a bit of a clusterfuck, I guess it was to be expected. Ronnie and Austin were close, so she had her own key. We called out and knocked a series of times without response, then let ourselves in.
A window had been left open and a strong breeze had been funneling through the alleyway into the apartment. It caused the sizable, dark shape that had been hanging there to sway like a pendulum. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but when I hit the lights the reality of what was in front of me hit me like a sack of shit thrown from a sky-rise window.
Austin hovered above us, taught upon the noose-end of a rope. He had become the 14th and final victim of the I35-W collapse.
I turned the light back off, turned Ronnie away from her brother, and cradled her in my arms. I ushered her out of the apartment, soothing her as best I could. I held her tight as she sobbed in a violent paroxysm, and called the police. The cops came, asked us questions. Told us to go. Said they’d be in touch.
I never let go of Ronnie that night. I held her while the sun sank low and eventually left the world in gloom. I held her on the couch until well past midnight. I held her in the bed, into the darkest hours of the night, the almost-morning. I held her while she slept, finally, sometime shortly before sunrise.
Never had I seen such tears, such sorrow. I didn’t know anyone could cry quite like that. Explosive, like fireworks. Enduring, like a bridge. Violent, like the moment it falls.
Something solidified deep within me over the course of that long, sorrowful night. My love for Ronnie attached itself to me, became a part of me. I was bound to her, and her, I think, to me. In the deep black of our bedroom we clung to the mattress like lampreys feasting on a leviathan’s carcass. It got cold, despite the summer warmth. My shirt was damp with Ronnie’s tears. It was holy, a baptism of grief. And like a man guided by blind faith, I saw it clearly among the dark: I would love her forever, until death do us part.

James Callan lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand. His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, BULL, X-R-A-Y, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere.