Free Like We Care by Tom Matthews

Street bridge into the gritty, torpid water below, ignoring the fact that, as the waters receded, the submerged surface of the flooded road drew nearer and nearer.
    At dusk on the day after the flood, Jeffy Kind dove into the Hard Tar from the overpass, and there was Walter, tangled in something and swelled up dead from having sat at the bottom of the makeshift swimming hole for the last day and a half. Police sent to feel their way down to the bottom of the boggy pool and pull him loose had to give up until the waters went away. Whatever Walter had got himself snagged onto didn’t want to let him go.
    Frank and his mother sat vigil by the side of the flooded road all night, traffic on the 6th Street bridge howling over their heads. It didn’t have to be Walter down there, both thought as they watched the water recede inch by inch. But most likely it was.
    It was past noon the next day before authorities knew the water was low enough to retrieve Walter. All along Hard Tar, all along the overpass, people gathered to watch, until the police had sense enough to close off the area.
    Lucille, too quiet to ever let on how close she was to losing her mind over the past couple days, recognized that this was not the place for Frank. They would return to the house. “Could someone please send word once the job is done?”
    The water was soon only knee deep, and Walter’s swollen body met the air once again. Officer Jack Pouter, who had been known to watch out for Walter when life rose up time and again to send things spiraling, took it upon himself to get in close and set Walter free. What he found broke his heart. Made him mad. Haunted him forever.
    Walter Kolak wasn’t stuck at all. Instead, he had been chained and padlocked to a sewer grate. As the flood began to batter the town and as the waters rushed down the Hard Tar, he had been alive, had fought for air as the deluge quickly rose above his head. Then, when he was dead, the rampaging river tore at his body, held in place by the heaviest gauge chain link available, the kind that Frank used to marvel at in Walter’s hardware store—the kind Walter used to tell his five-year-old son was the very same used to hold down King Kong.
    In his breast pocket, in a plastic sandwich bag meticulously taped shut to keep its contents dry, was a note:
    “I did it.”
    This was not the work of an exceptionally sadistic killer wandering the land, nor an example of the sort of racial viciousness that still thrived in the South of the mid-sixties. Walter did this, by his own hand; he had needed to make that clear. Even in death, he didn’t want to cause anyone any trouble.
    When word got to young Frank, however, the boy heard the same words form a different message. Years later, an adult Frank would explain away those words in a more benign light, but in that nightmarish instant in which the nine-year-old boy was told of the circumstances of his father’s death, when a freshly assaulted mind can hear truths that are too harsh to consider later on, Frank found an air of triumph in Walter’s note:
    “I did it. I accomplished this! I am free.”
    He pictured his old man settling in under the bridge, snapping shut the padlock, dropping the key down the sewer, and waiting patiently for his pain to be washed away—and hoping, this time, that things would work out.

    When the rains came, and low roads took on water—these were the days Frank Kolak smoked. Driving to school that morning, he desperately wanted to stop at the Happy Snack for cigarettes, but he could never bear to wade through the knot of teenagers perpetually stationed in the parking lot. They smoked and drank and did God knows what else there, sullenly flagrant in their disregard for laws and consequences. For Frank to walk among them would require him either to condone their behavior, which he could not, or stop it, which he also could not. As he drove past, he looked longingly at the teenagers lighting up so freely.