Over the Bridge

by Suzanne Halmi

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

But... how had this happened? Had he been in a Victorian tavern yesterday? Dan walked down the Main Street and passed a bar. It was not the hovel he’d found himself in on his first trip. He supposed there could be an old place outside of town... Oh, what did he know! He knew nothing, not how or why or when or anything.

He found, as he walked along, that he felt more anxious by the minute. Where was he? How was he going to get home? He had no Victorian money, no knowledge of the time period beyond what was, he hoped, common knowledge: they had no cars. And even as he thought that, a horse-drawn cart passed him in the street, slowing down so that the driver in his pressed and spotless uniform could stare at him. MacGregor’s Produce, read the lettering on the side of the cart. MacGregor, for perhaps it was he, scowled at Dan. Dan, for his part, tried to smile at the man, but it was a weak attempt.

And then, here came the police. An officer was approaching Dan quickly from the park, followed by a young boy. “That’s him, sir!” the boy shrilled, and it was enough for the cop to start running.

Dan took off, too, holding one hand to the pocket that held the knife. He’d thought to protect himself from the tavern keeper and his slacker-boy, but should he produce it against the police? What would the cop do when he caught him? What, exactly, did he have to be afraid of here?

He tripped and fell then, scraping his hands and his knees for the first time since he was a kid, and jumped back up as fast as he could, jarred by the fall. He couldn’t feel the sting of the scrapes, that would come later.

Dan kept running, and saw the little bridge ahead. It was the first thing he recognized, and it made his head feel even worse. It was the little bridge he passed over every night, going through town toward his house. He knew the ironwork, the hum of the metal beneath his tires, the length of time it took to cross over it and be nearly home. Beneath it ran the Sett River, narrow but still deep at this point, only getting wider as it passed through the countryside on its way out to the Hudson.

Dan headed toward the bridge, but he was limping now. He must have done something worse than scrape his knees, but he was determined to reach the bridge and cross it. It felt as if he had to cross it. He came down the short hill to the bridge and hit the metalwork with his left foot, and he supposed, later, that that was what messed him up. He stumbled, and someone’s body hit him from behind. He went down, the side of his head hit the metal rail, and he was gone.

When he woke up, he was bloody and battered, but home. In his bathroom, Dan saw he had a black eye coming along, and a cut on the bridge of his nose that, to be honest, he kind of liked the look of. With his beard coming in, he thought that perhaps he looked a little... dangerous.

The time machine in his living room, though, looked just as harmless as it had when he’d first seen it. However, he’d lost all the rest of the previous day and night. He was supposed to go to work today but, he realized as he stood looking at the machine, that wasn’t going to happen.

Dan texted his office about a gastrointestinal illness — people usually didn’t inquire too closely about those; perhaps the last bastion of privacy — and went to the diner to eat. To the disgust of the young waitress, he asked for steak (rare) and eggs (sunny side up) and a double order of toast, no avocado. Yes, he thought, tucking in, this was a manly kind of breakfast. Would his wife have approved? Dan considered this as he took a coffee to go and headed home over the same bridge upon which he’d fallen so recently in his own memory. Probably not. He no longer knew what she had wanted from him, of him. And now, it didn’t matter.

The problem, as Dan saw it, was that the machine only deposited him nearby in time. He didn’t want to stay in Milford. He wanted out, into the world. Could he go see the Giants versus the Dodgers in 1951? Could he be in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945? Could he warn... No, even he knew he wasn’t supposed to change anything in the past. Even he knew that.

“Even you should know,” was what Dicey always said to him during an argument, even after he’d given up his side. Their last argument, the night she’d left, had included this well-used phrase of denigration and disgust: “Even you should know this is no way to live!”

She hadn’t liked the gates or the security. He’d asked, “Don’t you like to feel safe?”

But, in the end, she hadn’t liked to feel safe or to be with him. She’d simply gone. He had no idea where she was; she hadn’t asked for money or even a divorce, although he’d gotten one. To be on the safe side, Dan had told himself, in case he met someone. But he never met anyone, anywhere, who didn’t seem to be annoyed with him, irritated by something that seemed to be beyond his control.

He rubbed his jaw with its stubble coming in the color of his dark hair, threaded with silver, and he wondered if this new look would be any more appealing than his old look had been. He would try it out, one of these days.

Dan dressed conservatively this time, and the cost be damned, he thought. He wore good shoes and heavy dark jeans, a white Oxford cloth shirt, and a blazer. When he looked in the mirror, he was disappointed; he looked much as he always looked, even with the cut on his nose and nicely developing black eye, but he guessed it would have to do. He wanted to be sure he looked okay, that no one would think he was a thief or some kind of unwanted person. He wanted to at least sort of fit in.

This, too, led him back to thoughts of Dicey. She had helped him fit in, here in Milford, where there were few single people. Couples and families ruled in Milford. After all, they seemed as if they had the most to protect. After Dicey left, and he was on his own, his value, in the eyes of his neighbors and certainly in his own, fell precipitously. One is much closer to zero than two.

Dan climbed into the machine and once again faced the unknowable icons. Last time, he’d touched orange and ended up in the nineteenth century in Milford. He didn’t know what he’d done the time before. Tentatively, he touched blue, and nothing happened. Yellow, nothing. Red seemed so intimidating... He touched orange, even though he didn’t really want to go back to the Victorian version of Milford. Nothing. Red was his last choice, his only choice... His hand lifted, his finger descended, and Dan blacked out.

Awakening in darkness, coming to awareness as the cold hit him, the bitter, painful cold of winter, Dan realized he was wet. He moved to sit up, pushing himself up off his belly, and found his hands sinking into mud. He blinked and his eyes began to adjust to the dark, and what light came from the night sky. The sky itself was overwhelming, glittering in a firmament so vast, with stars unnumbered, that he found, after a few minutes, that his neck hurt from looking upward. He’d never seen so many stars!

But as he brought his gaze downward, he saw with dismay that he’d landed on the bank of the river below the bridge. Once again, he was in Milford, the town proper, for he could see the bend on the other side that was his side. His shoulders slumped as, in his mind, he heard once again Fred’s sad comment on the time machine. Always Milford, Dan thought, and he turned to start up the riverbank to the road. He could never get out of Milford. And to think it had been his idea to move here in the first place!

He was covered with mud, so his plan to slip in among the population without any fuss was out of the question. He might as well cross the bridge and go home.

When Dan got to the top, though, he was surprised to find that the metal bridge was not there, but rather a ramshackle wooden one. There was no railing, just shaky boards strung with rope across the water. He didn’t like it at all. He knelt and put his hand to the first board and wondered if he should crawl across. He was cold and a little scared, and more than anything he wanted a hot shower and his own bed.

A sound behind him made him start to his feet. He whirled around to find himself confronting three riders, their dark hair braided, their bodies covered with the pelts of animals. Their horses were very still, as still as the men who rode them, all of them staring at Dan as he stood at the bridge. He could see their breath in the frigid air. One spoke, but it was incomprehensible to Dan, who knew no language other than English. His nerve broke, and he turned to run across the bridge, gaining the halfway point when he slowed, and then stopped.

He was running for home. Again. He didn’t want to look back at the riders and their horses. He didn’t want to look at the bend that would mean he was home. Instead, Dan turned and looked first north, and then south along the river itself. The Sett was deep here, he knew, from the realtor’s chat that day he and Dicey had first come here, drawn by the reassuring sales pitches they’d seen online. Everything was okay in Milford. Everything was safe. They could be happy here, he’d thought, where they were safe. They could stay forever.

But safe doesn’t necessarily make happiness, he’d found.

The way he saw it, standing there, cold, wet, and dirty, he had four choices. He could go back home. He could go back to the riders and see what happened. It was probably nothing good, based on his other interactions with people on his trips. Or he could jump off the north side of the bridge or the south side. He’d most likely be okay hitting the water, although there was always a chance he’d break his neck... or die of hypothermia... or get impaled on a sharp rock.

A rider jumped off his mount and slowly approached the bridge, and Dan, tired of thinking about what might happen, jumped, too.

When he woke up, it was warm, and the sun shone down on him. Dan blinked, and put up a hand to shield his eyes, as he got to his feet. Far upstream, he could see the bridge. It was metal once again. And he was on the riverbank downstream, his clothes muddy and torn. He emptied water and mud from his shoes and put them back on, wincing at how they felt.

He looked across the river to the other side, but he couldn’t tell from his position, exactly which side he was on. Which side was home? The bank was steep here, and it was going to take some effort to get to the top. He might have to walk a while to get to a better place to climb. But which side was home?

Dan started to walk downstream, looking for a good place to get up, to head back to the bridge. He kept walking and walking because nothing seemed quite right. And once he’d walked for a while, he thought about how the Sett led to the Hudson, and the Hudson to the city. Even though the Dodgers had left, and no one wanted to remember the previous wars, what with the current one, and no one like him lived in the city anymore because it wasn’t safe, Dan thought that maybe he could make it there on foot. Not today or tomorrow, because it was pretty far. But maybe three or four days, or a week, if he could find something to eat along the river.

There might be shelters along the way, places to eat and sleep in the small towns which were not so safe as Milford, places where he might meet Dicey or someone like her. Someone who also was tired of hiding from the world behind a barrier of money.

It was a warm day, though, and he was still wet, and he thought that maybe it might be faster, and so Dan stepped into the river and, the current helping him along, he started to swim.