by Virginia Watts

Published by trampset

Nominated for Best of the Net 2019 Nonfiction

The problem with concrete: it has a long lifespan and it’s hard to get rid of. You can’t burn concrete. You can’t dissolve it. The only thing you can do: find a solid that is harder and denser, chemically speaking, and start bashing away.

I am thinking of the Colossuem here: Roman Cement. In dawn’s light, each gladiator may only choose one weapon. The giant with the golden teeth, the missing eye, the bloody kneecaps, steps forward, scans the offerings. He is the only one broad enough and strong enough to wield the spiked, iron ball, large as a mountain boulder. He swings the weighty orb over his head like a Wild West cowboy lassoing a stallion for taming.

The bridge was made of concrete too. The bridge was squat, thick, like the red-bearded troll who lived under it. Wait, it wasn’t a bridge. It was an underpass, resembling the rounded, open mouth of a tunnel, without the tunnel part, and there wasn’t really a troll.

When you turned left at the stop sign beside The Penn Hotel Sports Bar, headed west on Old Chocolate Avenue towards Currey’s Feed Mill and Limestone Quarry, you drove through this portal of concrete, a structure as solid as the Colossuem, permanent as the return of frost. Our Roman hero and his sharp-toothed ball would have needed a lifetime to destroy it, and maybe even that wouldn’t have been enough.

The odd thing was the underpass didn’t have to be there. Nothing ever passed over the top. Apparently, nothing needed to. Maybe a local railroad had once, long before my growing up happened in that little, rural central Pennsylvania town. Let’s assume that is the case, just to try and make some sense of existence.

But really, the distant past mattered little, because standing in the middle of a two-lane road leading to and from places people needed to visit every day, there was that constant: a senseless partition separating cars motoring in opposite directions. The barrier continued there, only because concrete endures better than a lot of other things do.

I rode under and through, then drove through and under, distracted by my real life: I hate going to the dentist. I forgot my spelling book and there’s a quiz tomorrow first period. I’m going to be late for work. But, I never stopped noticing the underpass as it sailed over the car roof, always there when it didn’t need to be.

One date, in a fall of the mid 1970s, a dad turned left at the stop sign beside The Penn Hotel Sports Bar and saw a concrete invitation. It was night, so he flicked his car lights on high beam. The section on the concrete between the two lanes flared up fluorescent and bright, as if under theater spotlight, bare of ivy and other vine.

A dad leaned his head out of the car window, poked his vision through the left hole to be sure there were no headlights approaching from the opposite distance. Then, he gunned it hard; hit concrete dead heart on.

A daughter sat at her desk by the end of the next week, filling in answers to a spelling quiz.

The newspaper said the body was unidentifiable. I forget whether or not any facts were reported about his teeth. The license plate probably made it through. No reason was given for the dad’s decision either. I’ve forgotten too, if he had been drinking or not. Doesn’t matter, does it?

The underpass didn’t buckle, didn’t budge, crack, chip or falter. The only change: a hint of the dad’s pickup truck paint, or was it a sedan, on a concrete face, more like a blemish than a tear. This lasted through many years of rain and snow, still there when I graduated from college. I remember it as forest green.

The underpass endures on that road that used to lead to Curry’s Feed Mill. Now, if you pass through, you will arrive at a fine dining restaurant called “The Mill” instead. To your right, the old quarry, closed, abandoned, and fenced. Quarries are hard to get rid of too. Every so often, another teenager armed with wire cutters ignores the warnings posted there, dives in and drowns with her foot caught in the machinery hiding under black water.

I’ve toyed with the idea of setting up one of those little makeshift memorials back at the underpass, with some red, white and blue plastic carnations and a whirligig and maybe an electric candle like the ones they use in churches now. I’d probably die there too, though, standing with my back to traffic, ass in the air, decorating a mourning wall for someone I never met. How would I explain myself.

It’s probably been too long anyway. Maybe the daughter and her little daughter, if she has one, wouldn’t like that idea or maybe they don’t live anywhere near that town anymore. Maybe they would never find out. Maybe I should do it. Maybe I should take the chance.

Copyright © 2019 Virginia Watts. All rights reserved.