Bridge across the Passaic
Pauly was wrong about the bridge when they said the county would have it fixed by Valentine’s Day, the broken slabs of concrete sealed us on the Dundee Island side for until deep summer – this island white men had bought from native tries for a few hens and a promise to let them till the ground in spring and harvest it in fall.
This as not the first time they fixed this bridge that connected Garfield with Passaic, nor the last, this bridge of heavy metal constructed just prior to the Civil War and seen as too frail to handle the trolley line later, part of a dispute between Boss Marsellus, Boggart and Mercer as to where the line should go, the real orchestrators of progress as crooked as the rusted rails they set deep into the ground – back before my great, great grandfather came along with his New York mob bosses to make them an offer they could not refuse, carving up the farms the Dutch had settled into plots of land for Italians and Jews lured to this part of the state by unscrupulous offers of the American Dream none ever delivered on, they more like Potter than George Baily, giving each a hearth to sit beside to rest after breaking their backs in the mills that lined both sides of the river, continuing the scam the European businessmen from the Bay of Newark had started with their hens and promise of harvest – with more modern rumors of Helmsley-Speare looking to turn the old mills to condos, blocks from the cold water flats in which me, Pauly and the others live.
The Poles live here now, filling in the gaps left when the Italians moved on, Garrick’s aunt renting to many of those who had survived the Holocaust, whose end of life shared the same butcher, baker and candlestick makers we do, Pauly and I buying fruit at the drunken old Pole’s shop on the corner, though Pauly rarely gets his meals there, choosing to hitch a ride from one of us for the three block trip over the bridge to the Garfield side and the Quick Chek near where the Saddle River merges with the Passaic, where once during the Dutch days, a general store stood, and across from it a dye mill, now vacant.
But with the bridge out, we do not take the short route, but must drive down through those old factories that still exist on our street, passed the recycling plant my old friend from grammar school, Mike Riotto runs, and to the 8th Street draw bridge with its massive concrete counterweight hanging over us as we pass, the bulk of which I am constantly fearful will fall on us as we travel under it.
When Pauly can’t convince me or Garrick or even Lewis to drive him, he talks me into walking across the Wall Street bridge with him, as if fearful of what might happen if he went there alone, the guts of the bridge ripped up, but not the walkways on either side, though both of us look down through the gaps at the river below, the brown water polluted by years of mill dumping and spew from the chemical plant just upstream, steaming in the heat of summer, frozen over by blocks of ice this time of year.
George Washington and the British had no trouble crossing this waterway; I wonder why we do, Post’s Ford upstream still has the marker the kids made for it during my great, great grandfather’s time, though it is hidden in weeds, forgotten for the most part, even by the workers in the factory that used to be Ford’s mill on the other side of River Drive and the Dunkin Donuts I buy coffee from when I’m too lazy to job all the way up to the diner near the falls.
We can count the number of bridges that cross this river on one hand, highway bridges, and narrow bridges we rarely take. Pauly has no skin in any of this, his Irish family coming out of Paterson not Passaic or Garfield or Lodi the way my family does. I cannot take a step anywhere here and not stumble on the bones of my ancestors, if not quite as ancient as the Indians or the Dutch, just as invested, the sons of our patriarch building the houses or working in the mills or running the stores in which, the mill workers shopped.
While Pauly thinks about the sandwich he plans to order from Quick Chek as we cross the bridge, I wonder about whose footsteps I am following, which family member did what here before me, my uncle once telling me how he and his brother used to wet down newspaper they brought for recycling so as to make them weigh more and the get more pay for each bundle.
We rarely see the men working on the bridge when it’s cold like this, just the remnants of their having been here, the coffee cups and cigarette butts left where they paused between shift, I recalling the stories friends told me about when they worked for the county
painting lines down Kimberkermack Road, extorting money from some parking lot owner for painting his spaces in, a friend who made a fortune that summer and yet somehow still managed to paint the lines the county paid him to paint.
But in this place, the work moves so slowly it is almost as if they are the ghosts of those who once laid the trolley lines across it, unseen shapes of history nobody seems to recall but me, Pauly insisting on Christmas Eve that it will all be done, when I know it won’t be, perhaps never will be, the ghosts of Marsellus and Boggart still feuding of where the trolley should go, long after the trolley has ceased to exist, and long after the white men from Newark Bay ceased paying their two hens a year for rights to develop this island.
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