I
Hellish yet rising to heaven, they couldn’t look away. It wasn’t a bridge; it was California’s answer to New York’s arrogance. Merry hoards speckled the shores of the Golden Gate, their bellies swollen with pride and picnic fare. From a sea cliff perched far above the champagne and gaiety, Jim Casey’s hands shook as he raised the last of a half pint to his lips. The booze bloomed in Casey’s blood as his slackened hands sent the empty bottle plunging towards the rocks below, its impact muted by the moan of the foghorn as a wall of gray swallowed the bridge.
II
Casey wet his lips at the sharp stench of liquor cutting through the salty bay air. His billy club tapped his swollen knees as he marched toward the end of his thousandth beat in the Devil’s Acre. A young prostitute puttered into the sooty lamplit bustle, her blouse one button too low. Casey poked his club at her chest, motioning upward. She cursed him and obliged. One more lap around the acre stood between Casey and his nightly numbing and he wouldn’t let this “creature” sully it. Aside from a brief stint on the temperance squads during prohibition, Casey’s career with the San Francisco Police Department was routine and dull, a far cry from his bloody achievements in the French trenches during the Great War. Despite his uncle Owen’s lofty position as Police commissioner, Casey’s mastery of utilitarian violence did little to aid his climb up the city’s political rungs. Brutality was prerequisite for San Francisco politics, but one had to slither into the right rooms, shake the right hands, protect the right people. Casey was muscle, a stooge to men like Owen that possessed the reptilian cunning it took to reach the top and remain there.
III
Uncle Owen was pleased to see the fog concealing his bridge and the wickedness he was summoned to address. Atop her deck a wooden door hinged to a small guard shack thu-thumped in the wind. Owen ducked inside the rickety box. His lanky fingers raised an ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, one, still smoldering, fell to the floor. Despite the evening’s circumstances he couldn’t help but curse the dead bastard – ashtrays were to be emptied three times per shift. “Lazy, the whole lot of them,” Owen muttered as he emptied the ashtray and stepped back into the night, where dim red sirens colored the fog. “Cut the god damn lights,” Owen barked. His deputies obliged, assuming formation before him.
“Where’s the body?”
A shaky private stepped forward, “Mr. Owen, there isn’t one…”
“Then what is there?”
In unison the officers turned around and faced a police uniform neatly folded in the middle of the bridge, weighed down by a service pistol. Under the tidy pile, a piece of report paper fluttered like a damp white flag. Owen studied it: “Forgive me” typed on official SFPD stationary was all the memo read, signed “Pvt. R Caruso.”
One at a time, Owen stood before his men – each of them fighting a shudder as Owen’s black eyes dug into theirs for an answer. Coming up without one, Owen barked orders over the low growl of an approaching V8. “Dispose of the uniform. If anyone asks, he disappeared. Maybe he was talking about Los Angeles, maybe he was talking Mexico.” A thin flick sent Owen’s cigarette over the rail as he faced the moonish glow of headlights cutting through the fog. A beast of a Ford squeaked to a stop in front of the officers. Two men obscured by a black windshield sat in wait as Owen glid to the passenger side. Straight faced and freezing, his subordinates watched as Owen collected a large envelope and ushered the vehicle into the cityside fog. Owen slapped a stack of bills into each of the officers’ hands. McNeal, a green sergeant, stepped forward, his voice cracking. “What about Caruso’s cut?” Owen crept before him and wrapped his bony talons around McNeal’s tie, cinching the knot into a choke. “Worry yourself not…” Owen yanked the tie tighter, “with a dead man’s cut.” McNeal staggered with the release of Owen’s hand. The men on either side lifted their struggling comrade back to his feet. “I’ll have a new man topside tomorrow evening. An Irish man at that.”
IV
A single Edison bulb swayed to-and-fro with the rhythmic stomp of the drunkards in McHenry’s Tavern. Damp shadows plagued the room, alleviated only by the sporadic flash of matches and a handful of blackened foot lamps afront the fiddler. Jim Casey hunched over the bar rail, a sinking fixture of McHenry’s. McHenry himself, a mutton-chopped brute, tended bar, dolling out pints and shots to work-stained patrons. The air flickered between comedy and ripping violence as a square-chinned kid leered at Casey, “San Francisco’s finest.”
Lifting his head from folded arms, Casey studied the kid, barely seventeen. “A pint for me and a glass of milk for the kid.” McHenry ripped a page from his ledger and plopped it in front of Casey, “thirty-five dollars Jim, and we’re square.” Casey fingered the tab, “we’ll square Sunday.”
Grinning, the kid plopped on the stool next to Casey, “let me buy the fine officer a drink.” McHenry filled two pint glasses; the kid took a tepid sip, and Casey, albeit with regret, took his down in two hearty pulls out of necessity and without thanks. Leering at Casey, the kid probed the cloudy corners of his brain for an insult. His soft hand landed with a hollow thud across Casey’s back. Reflexive and swift, Casey caught the boy’s wrist and slammed him against the bar, cracking his ribs and stealing the air from his lungs. A stunned silence exploded across the room as the fiddlers ceased and McHenry reached for his club. Before the kid could limp away, Casey dealt a heavy elbow across the face, crumpling him to the ground. From atop his mount on the soiled floor, Casey disfigured the already unconscious boy with blow after autonomic blow. The empty boom of McHenry’s whale bone club across Casey’s back spared the kid’s life. Capitalizing on the intermission between blows, two stevedores lifted the mangled teenager from the floor and dragged him outside. McHenry retreated behind the bar and the fiddlers carried on. The cold steel of McHenry’s double barrel against Casey’s hot forehead eighty-sixed him into the sharp night air.
After the deafening din of the McHenry’s, the city was silent save for the howl of spectral wind through ruined structures ever blackened by the great fire. Despite his inebriation, Casey’s hackles stood at attention as he staggered through the muddy streets. A hard turn down Gold Street failed to shake the sensation. Shadows grew across the walls of the narrow alley. The firing of his nervous system combined with the flood of booze sloshing in his gut forced the vomit from his mouth, planting him in the gutter. Through flashing cognition Casey struggled to find his feet. It was no use; he’d sleep it off then and there. His vision faded as the liquor rocked him toward unconsciousness. He was filthy, half poisoned, and almost dead in the street, but from his place in the gutter he was without the burden of thought, or the nagging feeling of uselessness that followed him through every facet of life since the war’s end. The feeling was constant, a distant drumbeat echoing from a black canyon deep within him. While a nip from the bottle muffled the beat, obliteration silenced it and offered the fleeting peace of nonexistence. A bald cranial moon pulled Casey from the warm black nothing as Uncle Owen smiled over him, his thin lips peeling into a skeletal grin.
Uncle Owen assessed Casey’s sparse, yet tidy railroad apartment. Three kids, a wife, and a drunkard sharing this space felt impossible to Owen as he watched Casey navigate the space by touch like a blind man. Trying the light switch to no avail, Owen took a seat across from Casey as the latter lit a dim oil lamp. “Martha forgot to pay the damn electric.” Unbelieving, yet diplomatic, Owen poured himself a drink from the half-spent bottle on the table. Footsteps from the depths of the single-story apartment sounded, “Go back to sleep Martha!” Casey slurred. There was no Martha, just a small boy hovering in the dark doorway. Smiling, Owen offered the child his cold right hand, “Good evening, John, it’s much past your bedtime is it not?”
“I was afraid!” Nauseous and partially sober, the hideous beat inside of Casey faintly sounded as his eldest, a boy of seven, eyed him with a skepticism beyond his years. “And why might a strong boy like you be afraid?” Owen asked, inviting the boy to sit in the light. “Because it’s dark in our house. I hate the dark.” “Why don’t you like the dark, John?” The boy slouched in his seat. “Sit up like a good lad for me.” The boy emulated his old uncle’s erect posture, his gaze fixed on Owen’s fine bowler atop the table. Reading his eyes, Owen placed the hat on the boy’s head, filling him with pride. Casey stirred with sloppy disapproval as his son grinned from under the hat. “A man from Germany made it just for me,” Uncle Owen offered. John studied the hat’s imported wool in his miniature fingers. “It’s called a bowler. It’s a gentleman’s hat. Would you like a bowler of your own, John?” John’s jack-o-lantern smile stretched across his tiny, hardened face. Casey shoved his stained police cap across the table, “What about a cap like daddy’s?” Owen sat back in his chair, pleased, and lit a cigarette. “Both are fine hats, John. Now tell me about the dark.”
Pushing the police cap away, John fixed the oversized bowler back atop his head only for it to fall, concealing his eyes. “Because I hear things, but I can’t see ‘em.’” “Them,” Owen corrected. “What kind of things do you hear?” A little jerk shifted the bowler to the back of John’s head, revealing a face shadowed by severity found only in men who’ve lived long enough to be truly afraid. “I hear something walking and sometimes it growls like a dog.” In a rage, Casey jumped to his feet, “that’s enough, John! Go to bed now!” Lamp in hand, Owen led the boy back to his room. The lamp’s golden light vanished down the hall, leaving Casey in the dark trying not to hear, until the light reappeared with Owen scowling from behind it. “John tells me the lights have been out for a week. That’s not good for a boy.”
With swift grace, Owen lit a limp cigarette dangling from Casey’s mouth, illuminating the fog in his nephew’s eyes. “I can help you,” Owen offered with a political smile. Casey stirred at the invitation. “I won’t accept charity.” Owen leaned into the lamplight, “I need men I can trust. A good man is hard to come by, and an honest man, impossible.” Owen fingered his bowler, “You’re a good man, Jim. You’re a drunk, but you’re honest. We all drink old boy, it’s in our bones. But you drink like a man running from something.” Owen studied the worn trench lines of his nephew’s pale face. “You miss the war.” Casey exhaled a cloud of smoke in the dark, “I’m nothing without it.” Owen nodded with understanding, “money helps. Turn the lights back on, put that boy in Saint Ignatius. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. Reminds me of myself.” Feeling the dark, Casey slid the lamp to his side of the table, “You’d give me a raise?” Owen smiled, “I’ll give you a job. Be ready tomorrow evening. We will be topside the new bridge after sunset. Bring what you need for twelve hours in the cold. You’ll need your long gun and your service pistol.”
V
Sober, Casey watched the trunks of the Eucalyptus trees bend against a cold steady gale from the passenger seat of Uncle Owen’s Buick. The bay slammed against the highway jetty, spraying foaming sick onto the asphalt while fog marched through the golden gate like a spectral invader. The foghorn let out a death rattle against the Buick’s windshield, briefly overpowering the evil beat that pounded between Casey’s ears. The Buick’s fog lights broke little of the gray colossus ahead. “Things happen up there, and I need someone I can trust to keep it in the family.”
“What kind of things?” Casey sanded the nerves in his fingers against the diamond plate of his service pistol. “We’ve got a thing going with Hoover’s men. The bridge shuts after midnight – we let them cross into the city from Fort Cronkite. No boats mean no Navy, no Richmond means no San Quentin guards. All that stands in the way of Hoover’s Fords and the city is SFPD and the bridge. I am the SFPD.”
Casey stared at the plush ceiling of the Buick, trying to compute. It was this sort of ineptitude that forbid Casey from ever climbing the city’s political hierarchy, a dullness that only permitted him to obey orders, like a hell hound at the end of Owen’s leash. “Don’t think yourself to death.”
A nervous chuckle spilled from Casey’s mouth, as his cuticle bled against the pistol grip. He felt a stinging wetness and kept sanding the wound. Physical pain was endurable to Jim Casey, a distracting balm against the rhythmic pain spreading within him.
“All you need to do is let the black Fords past your post.” “Yes sir. I can do that.” “Now Jim, I can explain Hoover and his black Fords. But things happen up there that nobody can explain…things that are best kept far away from Randolph Hearst or any yellow newspaper man.” Owen fished a thick envelope of bills from his coat and plopped it into his nephew’s lap. “It’s in my best interest and yours to keep quiet.” A beam illuminated the cabin of the Buick and Owen nodded to the young officer manning a traffic arm, permitting them to rumble past until they glided to a stop in an empty roundabout. “Keep your head down, let those Fords by, and pay no mind to the strange.”
Alone with the thrashing of the bay and the wind’s steady static, Casey stared west at the bridge and its cable lights floating like orbs in the ether. The vulgar scurry of coastal vermin hurried Casey’s march and jerked the meager beam of his flashlight against the mist. At last, Casey rose from the trussed underworld, topside and into the salty night where a sense of pride blossomed in his stomach like a strong spirit. He ran his hands up iced orange steel as the South Tower pulled his gaze towards heaven. His hand throbbed with an icy sting that forced Casey to march onward to his black beat. Through the clouded nothing, a black form materialized ahead. Casey felt for his pistol. “Who goes there!” The form grew larger as the beam of Casey’s flashlight illuminated another tight-stepped officer. “Evening!” Casey called with an alien confidence. Somnambulant and without response, the officer carried on, leaving Casey before the warm glow of a guard shack promising respite from the cold of this place between places.
No bigger than a cell, the spartan guard box offered shelter from the whipping bay wind and little else. From a lone desk chair, Casey’s muscles tensed, every fiber of his physical being formed a taut hide across the drum of his heart. From a wicked valley within the savage rhythm grew deafening. Visions of masked, ancient tribes stomping and writhing to the hellish beat plagued Casey. Radio static jolted Casey back to the earthly realm. Shhhh. “Nephew, come in.” Jim pawed for the receiver, “Sergeant Jim Casey, here.” Shhh. “How you doing up there, old boy?” “All good. Over.” “Good. Good. I need you walking a beat. Between the towers. Keep an eye out for our friends. Over.” “Copy. Who was on last shift? Sorry son-of-a- bitch.” Shhhh. Shhhh. “Walk your beat. Over.” Uncle Owen signed off, leaving Casey alone with the devil’s dance in his heart and no choice but to step into the wailing emptiness suspended over the San Francisco Bay.
The phantom night swallowed the amber life buzz from the cities below. A man could vanish from that bridge, his final struggle muted against its colossal structure. His stained thoughts lost to the forever roar of the breakers. How long would it take a dead man to sink? He’d seen the bloated bodies of his comrades and enemies alike in France, surely, they couldn’t sink unless Lucifer pulled them beneath the surface himself. Would a man float all the way to Shanghai, or at the very least, to Marin? Anywhere but this space between places. He wasn’t prone to rumination. Whiskey was a strong repellent against melancholy and the dreaded beat, as were his usual scraps in the Devil’s Acre. He felt for his flask, just a taste. The burning elixir greeted his stomach. Baarooooohhh! The world vibrated with the foghorn’s blast. Casey took another pull. Baarooooohhh! Violent orange explosions mushroomed behind his eyes. His boots slopped through ankle-deep mud and the tang of gunpowder stung his nostrils. Another swig brought the barbarous screams of men and the crackle of machine gun fire to life.
Casey looked over the icy guardrail down to where the sea should be. There was no sea, instead the scorched no man’s land of France erupted below in seemingly miniature scale. Plumes of smoke rose from bomb craters, tanks roared toward the entrenched lines. Men died with each sporadic burst of violence – some fell, others exploded into a fine pink mist. From his vantage point they were something like toys, but they thrashed with impossible human pain. Casey took another swig. A line of Germans pushed forward. A whistle and boom! sent their little arms and bodies every which way. As he watched the writhing misery below a smile formed across Casey’s lips. A hardy hand on his shoulder snapped Casey back to night on earth. With his pistol in hand, he jolted around only to find nothing. His flashlight scanned the empty black until it clipped an impossible form–neither man nor animal, but something uncanny–stuck between this world and the next. Casey stood frozen as the thing stepped behind the guard shack–scolding breath licked the back of Casey’s neck and a growl like that of a dog plugged his ears and shook his spine. Casey ripped around, firing his weapon at nothing. No form, no man, only night and the gnawing beat from within.
The guard shack slammed shut. Pistol still in hand, Casey ripped the receiver off the radio hook. “Uncle Owen, come in.” Shhhh. As he reached for his flask, the tickle of that envelope caught his hand. A month’s salary for one night of work. He’d get the electric paid first thing and put the boy in Saint Ignatius. Hell, he’d even take Martha shopping on the avenues. It would be easy work if only the whiskey did its job. But nothing worked the way it should in this place between places. Liquor did nothing to mute the beat and scattered mess of flesh and bone that plagued the darkness behind Jim Casey’s eyes, and yet, he found himself missing the battlefield. The automatic nature of violence was the only remedy against the mental agony of the war itself. Shhh. “Owen here. Everything okay up there? Over.”
At three in the morning the fog gave way to the white beam of Alcatraz’s lighthouse and its miserable beacon across the inner bay. The warm lights of the Presidio dancing across the water and the distant lantern glow of San Francisco struck Casey with want for the warmth of McHenry’s Tavern. The Devil’s Acre housed no devil save for man himself. He couldn’t say the same for the bridge he had sworn to protect. The banshee wind was up, and to the west, fog swallowed the guiding light emanating from Point Reyes Lighthouse. Its damp tendrils stole Casey’s guard shack from sight and left him alone, pawing for his flask. The usual soothing balm of liquor now tasted like rank bay water. Casey ejected it from his throat, the rotten brine lingered in his mouth. As he caught his breath, the lights of the city disappeared, and the wind died leaving Casey in a still silence. The beat was gone, leaving Casey alone shrouded in an otherworldly night.
The silence was shattered by the gallop of hooves echoing down the empty deck. Casey ran towards the shack, its door stuck shut. With all his strength, Casey ripped at the handle. Despite his brute force, the door was sealed shut as the scurried clomp closed in. With his pistol in both hands, Casey dealt the flimsy door a kick, loosening it from its frame. One more had to do it. Wham! The door collapsed inward, and Casey staggered into his shack. An American soldier stood with his back to Casey, his rifle shouldered. “Drop your weapon!” Casey barked. Instead, the soldier fired, painting the wall chunky red with the gore from an enemy unseen. “I will shoot!” Casey screamed and fired but the solider casually dropped his rifle and turned around, fingering the sucking chest wound Casey inflicted, and lifted his gaze to meet Casey’s. Casey was staring back at a younger, war-beaten version of himself, his face painted with blood from the slain enemy, boots caked with mud, his uniform tattered. Despite his condition, solider Casey parted his lips and offered a familiar smile. Before Casey could think the soldier was gone and the walls were clean. The ba-bum ba-bum of his heart throbbed between his ears, forcing the flask back to his lips – empty. Shhhhh. “Owen here. How you doing up there, old sport? Over.” Casey yanked the plug from the radio and stepped from the box on the bridge into the night.
The cable orbs hung like ghosts lighting Casey’s path, with each orb extinguishing as he passed. The death of the final orb gave way to a darkness blacker than the deepest canyon inside of Jim Casey. The concrete sank, giving way to mud warm and stinking with the copper tinge of blood. From it, the form rose before him as if birthed from the night itself. Its growl, a rumbling lullaby, warmed him as the black embryonic sludge consumed him in rhythmic pulses. The form grew closer and approached Casey, offering him a hand over the rail.