Bridge of Sighs

made them cautious friends, as well as rivals. Jerzy liked to tease Bobby about being a wimpy Catholic who only hung out with girls anymore—a reference to my nickname, I knew immediately—and Bobby asked Jerzy if he wanted to be a singer like his father, a drunk who liked to sing at the top of his lungs before passing out in the gutter by the tannery.
    The closest they ever came to actual hostilities was over me. At the beginning of the school year, the toll takers tried to shake me down, and one of them, Perry Kozlowski, put me in a headlock while the others went through my pockets. But Bobby said to leave me alone, that I was with him and didn’t have to pay. He didn’t question the authority of these boys to consider the bridge their own property, but did insist that I was exempt by virtue of our friendship. “Who says?” Perry wanted to know, as if there were rules governing such exemptions. They argued the fine points while I remained in the headlock, until Jerzy Quinn finally said, “Let him go. He’s not worth it.”
    When they were gone I asked Bobby why he didn’t have to pay, because of course that puzzled me. But Bobby just shrugged, as if I’d asked him to explain all the laws of nature. “Some people just don’t have to, Luce,” he said. “Other people…” We both knew what happened to other people and that I fell into that category. Which was one reason I was so glad to have Bobby’s friendship and also why, at the end of the school year, not long after Mr. Marconi got on full-time at the post office and they moved to the East End, I was so devastated.
             
     
    T HE FOLLOWING YEAR, with Bobby gone, I knew the public school boys would be on the lookout for me. Most days my grade got out on time, which meant I’d arrive at the bridge before they did, and once safely across I’d scramble up the bank and head for Berman Court. Sometimes, as I emerged from the trees and turned toward home, I’d see or hear them coming, hooting and jeering, a couple of blocks away, and if it was too obvious that I was hurrying, they’d laugh and yell “Run, Lucy, run!” and the words would make me do it. Then they laughed all the louder. We all seemed to understand that it was just a matter of time before my teacher would keep our class a crucial minute or two longer, or for some reason they themselves would get out early, and then there’d be a reckoning.
    The day it finally happened, I had no one to blame but myself. I’d stayed late to help Sister Bernadette clap erasers, an honor, and when I started through the yard and along the path down to the stream, I caught a quick movement at the edge of the trees and thought I heard voices coming up from the green darkness below. I might, of course, have simply returned to the school and had Sister Bernadette call my mother to meet me, but as afraid as I was of the boys at the bridge, I was even more afraid of being a scaredy-cat. It was one thing to turn and hurry back to school
after
I’d seen the public school boys at the footbridge, a genuine threat, but it was another to run away from a shadow that might, for all I knew, be that of a first grader. My eraser duty had taken a good fifteen minutes, and then I’d talked with Sister Bernadette for a while, which meant the public school boys had probably come and gone by now. Or such was my reasoning as I continued along the path to the edge of the trees, where I stopped to peer down the bank into the darkness below, my head cocked, listening. There was the sound of the stream, of course, but was that all? Was some other utterance mixed in with or obscured by the burbling of the water?
    I don’t know how long I stood there before starting warily down the path, the trees and the darkness closing in behind me. In the middle of the footbridge lay a workbook. Public school workbooks were different from ours, used year after year, filled in with pencil and then erased at year’s end, the answers still visible on the page, ghostlike, along with the checkmarks identifying incorrect responses. Was it possible for this workbook to be sitting there without its owner nearby? An urgent whisper slipped out of the trees. Still I stood transfixed, waiting, but it was quiet except for the sound of the water and the wind in the upper branches. Stepping onto the footbridge, I immediately heard a sound behind me and, turning, saw a grinning boy come out from behind a large oak to block my retreat. Ahead,