Cassidy Creek Bridge

The rain had called an intermission, but the night air clung like a nervous man's handshake. Jacket and jeans sticking with clammy intimacy, the traveler trudged down the unlit road, resigned to chafing discomfort. It never failed to amaze him when weather that was neither too hot nor too cold utterly failed to achieve just right.

Well, this was Wisconsin.

He came to a bridge nestled into the cracked pavement. It was not much of a bridge, spanning not much of a creek. Shelter all the same. Scrambling and swearing under the weight of his backpack, he slid down the embankment and crept beneath, situated himself and shut his eyes. He smelled the damp and the mud, the wet cement and the moss.

"Hell of a night."

His eyes snapped back open.

A girl sat cross-legged in the shadows of the opposite abutment.

He caught his breath up hard and reined in the runaway gallop of his heart.

"I didn't see you there." He reproached himself for sheer carelessness.

"I guess what they say about the population explosion is true. Africa, India, the Cassidy Creek Bridge."

He grinned, appreciating the humor, admiring her confidence. Then he noticed the distinctive long-necked shape of the rumpled paper sack dangling from her fingers. Disappointing.

"I'll move along," he offered, "if I'm bothering you."

She shrugged. "You're safe."

"I wouldn't hurt you."

"Were we talking about me?" She held out the bottle with mute invitation.

He stayed where he was, on his side of the chattering little creek. "Kind of young for that, aren't you?"

"Preacher's kid. Feeding the stereotype. What's your story?"

"Road less traveled."

"You look more Kerouac than Frost to me. High mileage. Still curious." She took a pull from the bottle without flinching.

"You a runaway?" The question was a technical breech of etiquette. You weren't ever supposed to ask. You might not be allowed to live with the answer. Still, she was unruffled.

"I'll go home in the morning. This time. Probably." She studied his drowned-rat appearance; the worn boots, the quasi-beard that betrayed his own relative youth, and added without irony, "I envy you."

The moonlight receded. Rain started to fall.

He replayed the conversation. Not just a preacher's kid, but bookish. Pressured to excel. Pushed to rebel. Reflecting both traits. "How old are you?"

"Seventeen. You?"

"Twenty-two."

They regarded each other for a while. She was pretty, sitting there in the monochrome shadows and waning moonlight. Blonde hair. Ripped jeans. Self-possessed. He could smell the alcohol, but her eyes were clear. Knowing. She knew Frost and Kerouac. He wondered if she'd read Nabokov, too.

"If we were twenty years older," she rebutted his silent introspection, "it wouldn't matter."

"If we were five years older, it wouldn't matter."

She waited.

"It matters now," he said.

"Five years then," she said. "I'll be waiting here."

The rain came harder, enclosing them, encasing them, entrapping them. Walls of water on either side. Thin partition of water between them. Cassidy Creek. April in Wisconsin.

He felt hot and cold, young and ancient, fascinated and jaded.

She might, he guessed, feel the same.

"I used to be a preacher's kid too," he told her.

She smiled, finding nothing to doubt in the stranger with the clinging wet clothes and the scraggly beard, the high mileage and all the roads not yet traveled.

"Okay," he said. "Five years."

She set the bottle aside. Muddy gravel crunched beneath her Nikes.

He stretched his hand across Cassidy Creek. Just like Moses. The first step toward the Promised Land. Fingers clasped, the pact made.

In the morning, she was gone.