Letters

Join to these vascular tide-rips and crosscurrents the thunderous pulse of anticipatory excitement — a Bay of Fundy colliding with a Gulf Stream! — such as might be felt by a 67-year-old man who, having learned from sources in the Second Ward that the Pontiac hearse, Drew Mack at the wheel, is preparing to head for East Cambridge and the Choptank Bridge en route to the Big One over the Chesapeake, and from other sources close to “George III” that the red-necks plan to station themselves on the Talbot County shore of that same bridge and bazooka that same Pontiac to Kingdom Come — who having learned this, I say, in the forenoon, has made several fast phone calls from his office, left instructions for other such calls, snatched up said spinning reel and prepacked picnic basket (the news was not unexpected), and been dropped off by his secretary at the second lamppost on pretext of casting after a few hardheads on the running tide…

Where was I? At the conjunction of all these currents, with the oldest case of subacute bacterial endocarditis in the county, a myocardium supposed to have been on the brink of infarction since 1919: no “ticker” now, but an Anvil Chorus in double-time…

Your Stock Bourgeois-Liberal Tragic-Viewing Humanist, if he happens to practice law for a living, will be a soft touch in the needy-but-deserving-client way: a one-man chapter of the ACLU, a little Legal Aid Society. I hope I’ve never exploited the gratitude of poor whites and blacks whose legal fees I’ve written off to BLTVHism; on the other hand, to scorn what they gratefully offer in lieu of cash were priggish, no? And when good people hope they can one day return a considerable service, they mean it from hearts much steadier than mine. Now, Dorothy Miner was one such, in the Second Ward, Drew’s mother-in-law, who, having toiled her life through to build her children’s way out of the ghetto, disapproved of demolitions, whether of bridges or of people. She it was who had apprised me of the bomb plot in the first place, and who now put through the crucial call to Joe Reed, another ex-client, tender of the Choptank River Bridge. From his little house up in the trusswork of the center span, Joe Reed had seen the Chevy pickup go under half an hour before, called his buddy (a third former client) at the liquor store just off the Talbot end of the bridge, and confirmed the intended ambush — which confirmation he relayed to the second lamppost by a single ding of the traffic warning bell at the draw-span gates, hard by. He then telephoned his colleague and counterpart (for whom he had once done a favor) on the Cambridge Creek bridge, who returned the favor by returning the call when the hearse crossed his bridge en route to ours en route to its. Got that? Two dings.

Fishing, you will remember, is permitted only on the west side of our bridge, facing downriver, there being no sidewalk on the east. The incoming tide, not quite slack, still carried fishing lines under the roadway. Only a few black families were out in the heat. It is my custom, like your Todd Andrews’s and my late father’s, not to change out of my office clothes for chores and recreation: I am the only skipjack skipper on the Bay who sails in three-piece suits. But given my purpose, I felt disagreeably conspicuous cutting up peeler crabs for bait in my circuit-court seersuckers — all the while watching the Cambridge shore near Mensch’s Castle, where good Polly Lake (my coeval, my irreplaceable, a widow now) had parked after dropping me off. Thence came, just as I baited my hook with the black and orange genitals of the peeler, best bait on the beast, three flashes in series of her headlights—1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3—and three blasts of her portable Freon airhorn, counterpart to the one in my basket, both from my boat. I returned the signal; my fellow fisherfolk looked around to find the approaching boat, three such blasts being the call to open the draw. Joe Reed replied in kind, set his dingers dinging and flashers flashing, lowered the stop gate just inshore from each end of the trusses, and set the big center span turning on its great geared pivot. As it swung, and his office with it, he also telephoned the highway-patrol barracks up in Easton, advised them that he was having some difficulty closing the draw, and requested troopers to be dispatched to both ends of the bridge to get the waiting traffic turned around in case the problem persisted.