Water Under the Bridge

Wintertime diversions may be a little bit harder to come by, especially living in a hamlet like Lafayette—or Lafalot as I sometimes call it—where the laughs fall too far apart. We still crowd into bars on weekends and Wednesdays, along with the occasional Thursday, Monday, and Tuesday. And what else is there to do on a Sunday but booze up over football, or professional bowling? You can get into a bit of a Robo-drunk mode (I shouldn’t hang that on you; I’m talking about me here), over-serving yourself, dulling the pain of middle America dullsville, hoping for a different outcome from the same old Saturday runaround. And you don’t have to be Einstein to know about the insanity of that routine.

To mix things up a few weekends back, I planned on searching for a dead man who had been thrown off the pedestrian bridge that connects my downtown to the college town. I know that bridge too well. Having traversed it many times, it could have easily led to my own downfall. Mostly, though, it connects me from one town to the next, from a basement dwelling to short-lived escapes and the occasional escapade.

The newspaper recounted a confession of another man. A roommate if memory serves me. The confessor told of a verbal and physical confrontation one December wee hour where one thumped another in the back of his head with a padlock. The one thumped—a 52-year-old man—was dumped into the chilly waters of the Wabash below. After about a month of not turning up, he was presumed dead.

The paper announced a Saturday manhunt in mid-January, rounding up searchers in the Levee by the outdoor skating rink. I tried to gain recruits at a Friday-night gathering at Sergeant Preston’s, a local watering hole. I didn’t think of it at the time, but the large moose heads coming out of the wall should have helped me convince my fellow revelers of the work we could do as make-believe Canadian Mounties. But a buddy informed me that the search party was called off because of the cold. The dead man, surely frozen by this point in his existence, wouldn’t mind remaining among the missing a little while longer. His roommate cancelled Christmas for him, and I wonder if God let him dream of any New Years’ past as he floated downstream.

Sunshine filled the Saturday morning sky; its glow easing the sting of an otherwise bitter cold. I felt good beneath the blue sky (indeed alive), bundled up alongside George, my four-legged roommate who’s always up for a walk and ain’t never been thumped—at least not by me. We trekked south of the pedestrian bridge, along the Wabash Trail, my boots crunching over packed snow, and George giddy in unleashed freedom. A sign told us a little about the river and the trail.

The Wabash—semi-famous in song—begins in northeast Ohio and spills southwest through Indiana, often swimming up against the border of Illinois. A northern tributary to the big Ohio River, the Wabash could eventually connect a traveler (living or deceased) with the mighty Mississippi and even the Gulf of Mexico.

George and I didn’t find the dead man caught up in any branches or alongside the shore within the half mile south of where he last splashed. We had dreams (and I shouldn’t say we because I don’t know how George dreams) of getting our picture in the paper. We saw some other guy tramping around near the water’s edge with a walking stick. “Friggin’ glory hound,” I mumbled to George, who felt content to sniff his leaping way through the brush on some hunt of his own.

But I’m glad none of us found him. Maybe the man would reach the Gulf: sliding past sleepy Indiana towns that would never wake the dead, ultimately getting swept up in bigger-river currents and somersaulting his way to warmer, salty waters. And maybe, just maybe—should any of us be so lucky in death—he’d be watching his floating old self from up high. Somewhere near a glorious sun.