Bridgewater Bob

I was a 23-year-old kid with three years of college, sitting in the driver's seat of a Ford F-150 with a convicted sex offender by the name of Bridgewater Bob. We were close to where we both had grown up, farther away from his hometown and nearer to mine. We hadn't spoken much since I picked him up at his dingy apartment at dawn that morning but, coffee in hand, all seemed okay. As we idled with a lineup of morning commuters and waited to take a right, the sun fluttered with a smoky brilliance through the tall thin pine, maple, and birch. This was one of my favorite roads--lined with acres of trees, stone walls, dairy cow and horse pastures--and it always looked hopeful in fall colors.

You never know when an unwelcome hand will end up around your neck. There are certainly a lot of them out there--hands, that is--and they go where they want to for the most part. The odds of a wringing are higher than you might allow yourself to think.

I thought I swung the pickup far enough onto the dirt shoulder to allow room for other cars to pass. I got the first bad feeling in my throat that morning when my side mirror smacked the same on another truck. A little crash of moveable mirrors, not much harm in it. I could see the driver in my rearview motioning insistently for me to pull over but I still had to wait to get to the intersection to make the turn where a spot was available to pull off.

The Edison truck pulled up next to me. Two partners, one an undaunted newspaper reader in the passenger seat and the other a red-faced behemoth emerging aggressively from the driver's side. With forced calm I breezily expressed my regrets at the mishap, thinking that there was little or no harm done and after all it was damage done to the property of a humming monopoly. A totaled truck to Edison was like a broken stapler to the average business. This was a scratched mirror. The barrel-chested lineman would have none of it, angrily blasting me for how long it had taken me to pull over. In terms of minutes, about two; in terms of feet, about 50; in terms of his blood pressure, apparently a shot to the moon. I stated my case evenly, ineffectively, through the wide-open frame of the driver's side window, hoping for sanity to stop by and join us.

"What the fuck were you doing? Huh? You see me wave you over? What the fuck! Don't you know you're supposed to pull over, you f . . ." He raged and reddened and I tried to reason, the damage was slight and, hey, I was sorry and insurance would cover it and it was my fault. Everything faster, things picked up speed.

I realized then that I was sorry the window was all the way down, that my tricky seatbelt was fastened, that my truck was squarely blocked to the roadside by his truck, trees behind and beside me, a telephone pole in front of me.

His beefy left hand took hold of my neck, his other hand in reserve. I grabbed at the knot of his left hand and his tree-trunk wrist. I pressed my head as far back on the seat as possible, hoping to use the rear of the cab to block him from taking a swing with his right hand. He didn't.

He didn't swing, but he twisted my neck. I could make out Bob's hands buried in his lap. I felt my airway cut off, my eyes bulge out of their sockets, pressure in my eyes, tears welling, and I punched his arms but couldn't knock his hands off my throat. On the edge of my blurred vision, I could see the glint of a blade. Bob was holding a knife.

* * *

Landscaping was one of those things that a suburban kid without a portfolio--or a clue for that matter--could pick up to make some cash, keep a shit-box running, and add to other odd jobs to pay school tuition down the road. That's what I did. I also picked up hours at a department store, a real estate sales license, which led nowhere, stringing for a local newspaper, and one night a bartending gig at the 40th wedding anniversary party of a high school friend's parents. There was a creaky old district court judge there who asked for a bourbon and what it was a young man such as I was doing with my life. To which I answered that I had just left college for a while. "Oh, are you trying to find yourself?" he crowed, mocking youth as he hadn't since the summer of love. A little taken aback, I didn't have the presence of mind to say, "No, sir. I'm trying to find money for tuition." Instead, of course, I just smiled dully and poured his drink. He was not the kind of judge who would have let a convicted sex offender like Bob Melanson out of jail, never mind into the backyards of respectable citizens.

But there Bob and I were every day: clearing kids' toys off vast lawns at tony addresses before mowing the grass and accepting a cool glass of lemonade from the lady of the house, who couldn't possibly know who the dark man was that spent two hours every week in her backyard.

All that could be seen from the outside was that the dirty, noisy work of a landscaper was all right with Bob. You couldn't know from his exterior that nearly 20 years as an inmate on the ward for sexually dangerous criminals were behind him, and he was simply laboring to forget that pain. There was no registry for sex offenders in the early 1980s; no scarlet letter to tip you off.

* * *

"I coulda stopped. But I just kep' cuttin' and cuttin' and cuttin'. I didn' give a care if I was dead tired. I just kep' goin'." Bob pushed his few words out hard. They sliced the air with an earnestness like his efforts behind the machine that now marked his time. He sniffled and wiped under his nose with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. The film-like results dried on his upper lip and on the fabric, each imbued with the stench of nicotine buildup and coffee stains. Habits chained to him.

He didn't think a lot about his landscaping work. All he had to do was work. Keep cutting. Forget. For him time moved on with the gasoline-powered scythe through the growth of sodded acres, mulching and dispersing his demons and his past. He never said much, but when he did, he'd talk about work. How much he'd done and how hard it was. He spoke like a comrade, knowing I understood the drudgery, thinking I cared.

I never really knew who Bob was either, until after the violence on the side of the road. I had only heard conjecture or rumors from others in the landscaping crew who had also worked with Bob. They named him Bridgewater Bob after the state mental hospital where he did time. For what exactly, no one really knew. When he was young he had tried to kill someone or there was some kind of sex crime. Maybe both. Bob didn't hesitate to answer when I asked him what landed him in jail.

He said he was in a rowboat on the muddy river, past the mill dam, one Saturday in his hometown. It was a sunny day that ended violent there in murky woods. He mumbled something about hurting someone bad. He might have smirked; there was some movement in the creases of his face. Then, looking down, away from me, straight ahead, he kicked at the debris of autumn, dirt and fallen oak leaves, and said clearly and without emotion, "I stuck my dick where I shouldn't have." She was a young girl. Too young. To him it was now an old fact of his life. Too young. He said nothing else about it.

He was quiet for a while. And I must have asked him about the abuse that goes on in prison. He looked forward with his head slightly down, and formed his words and thoughts just as calmly as he might have had I asked him what he'd brought for lunch. His ill-fitting denim jacket partly hid a weakened body, slightly hunched in weary embarrassment but somehow eking out defiance, a vestige of self respect. He seemed conditioned to be able to talk about what he'd experienced, autopilot. Although he was probably only in his late thirties, he was an old man.

In prison, there's only submission and time. People get crushed there, made into slaves. He didn't say it didn't happen to him. He gritted his teeth. His words drawn out in disgust, he described violent rape: sodomy and then forced fellatio to "clean" the attacker and further humiliate the attacked. Secluded places with no exit. Violence and threats leading to more submission, self-obliteration. Mandatory appointments in boiler rooms, basements, rats' nests, places of devious imaginings and utility. Bob gritted his teeth and gripped the space in front of him ever tighter with his stare. The soft ping and tick of the truck's engine parts, cooling nearby, punctuated his story.

Brushing at the grass dried on his pant leg, he talked about his family. "I'm a Melanson. Melansons is scrappers. They're all like that. Don't know anythin' else. They're all around, the same. You see the name everywhere here--up north." Hardscrabble New England, descended from dark Frenchmen in fur hats and boots who lived with the harsh northern elements and the wilderness and the trade in skins, traps, cruelty. His scrapping forebears paddling canoes.

* * *

On the roadside, as the Edison man strangled me, Bob Melanson sat there the whole time and said nothing. And the newspaper reader in the Edison truck turned the sports page slowly, with a gentle rustle.

Drivers sped by unknowing. Thirty seconds seemed like ten minutes and finally I punched his hand off my neck. A second later the Edison man snapped into paperwork mode, his roadside job done. He noted my plate number and turned toward his truck as I memorized its serial number painted on the side.

Bob's knife was at the ready all the while, hidden among the creases of his baggy jeans and under his hand. "I don't take no shit from fucking nobody. Nobody. That asshole was going to get stuck if . . . I don't take shit," Bob said as he fumed and spat, alternately glaring at the knife, the dash, the exiting Edison truck. His dirty hands trembled.

Later that same morning, Bob told me how he got revenge in prison. The librarian was an inmate too and he angered Bob: wouldn't let Bob have the magazines he wanted. He watched the library to learn when the quietest time was, when the librarian was most likely to be alone and vulnerable. His chance came when some overhead plumbing work was being done and a ladder was left in between some of the stacks. Sneak entry, quick climb, and a worthwhile wait. The quiet hiss of the library's radiators was interrupted as heavy books came down on the librarian. Around his lacerated head, blood expanded on the linoleum floor like a blooming rose on time-elapsed film. Scattered magazines and books drank it; pages united, rippled, and curled. "I fucked him good," Bob said in summary as he struggled to regain composure. Wheezing, needing air, he lit a cigarette instead.

* * *

I was in prison once. A 14-year-old boy visiting the county jail in Springfield, Massachusetts. I departed the new-car smell of a gleaming limousine with my brother-in-law, his friend who was a local official, and Angelo Dundee--the trainer of Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. We entered the sweat-and-tension-soaked air deep inside the old jail. We were to hear Dundee speak to the prisoners. Sugar Ray couldn't make it, he explained. He had a cold, or a stomach problem, or something like that, and had to rest for the next day's fight.

A hundred inmates were standing all around in their denim blues with fu manchus and tattoos and long hair and in belligerent postures inside a large square room with bars over the impossible windows 20 feet above. The hand-worn and steely trappings of prison, the thick gamey scent and pent-up electric energy had frightful potential, like the peril of standing at a high rocky precipice, one misstep or gust of random wind away from a jagged merciless fall. And it was of this that Bob Melanson smelled: the fall of the merciless.

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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