The Chill

by Scott Carson

  Had he just slipped into the water, as he’d planned, his eyes would have been down and he’d have had almost no chance to catch sight of the man in the gray vest standing against the gray-and-white backdrop of birches and oaks. Because he hesitated, though, he spotted motion—or maybe it was the flash of light reflected off the camera lens—and so he looked downstream and saw the photographer.

  The man was wearing jeans and a dark green shirt with the gray vest on top, the wrong clothes to wear in the woods during hunting season. He had a thick shock of jet-black hair and a goatee that was every bit as unnaturally dark, as if inked on rather than grown. He was kneeling on a flat rock just downstream and had a camera on a tripod, pointed up at the dam.

  Pointing at Aaron.

  “Hey! What the hell you doing, man?” Aaron shouted, both embarrassed about being caught out here in his underwear and angry about it, as if the stranger had popped out of his bedroom closet and not a public forest.

  The photographer looked up as if seeing him for the first time. He looked Aaron up and down and cocked his head like he was studying him as a potential subject, and now Aaron was less embarrassed and angrier.

  “Yo, pervert. I asked you—”

  “The name is actually not ‘Pervert’ but Curtis B. Haupring,” the man said brightly. “Photographer.” He chuckled. “As you might have guessed.”

  “Terrific. Point that thing away from me, all right?” Aaron stepped into the water. Damn, was it cold. He felt his testicles shrivel and his cock duck for cover and looked back at the photographer like a shamed boy. The water’s cold! It’s the water!

  The photographer was smiling at him as if reading Aaron’s thoughts, and this was even more infuriating.

  “I’m not kidding. Turn the camera off.”

  “I’m documenting the dam,” the man said softly. “Not you, sir.”

  Autumn in the Catskills seemed to bloom morons with cameras. Out-of-staters or down-staters.

  “Any interest in it?” the photographer asked.

  “In the dam? No. I have zero interest in the dam.”

  The photographer stared at him.

  “No desire to help tell the story of Galesburg?”

  The story of Galesburg? What in the hell is wrong with this guy?

  “That town drowned about seventy-five years ago,” Aaron said, “and, no, I have no desire to help you.” He took another step into the water, now turning his body self-consciously to avoid the camera lens. There was something strange about the way the light reflected off it, glaring and harsh, when the day was so overcast. “I also don’t need any pervert pics, and this area is closed, so why don’t you move on down the road?”

  “If it’s closed, then we’re both trespassing, correct? Or do you have some official capacity? If so, I apologize. I’m just not sure where your badge is kept.”

  Where my badge is… Aaron took a deep breath, lifted his middle finger, and said, “Got your badge right here.”

  The man studied him with that smile again, a wan, mocking smile, and said, “I don’t think you’re what I’m looking for, unfortunately. Enjoy your swim. Careful out there. Current’s strong.”

  “No,” Aaron said, “it’s not.”

  He took a breath and dove. He relished the frigid shock, the way his chest tightened and his lungs clenched.

  Almost immediately, the current snatched him, and he allowed himself to be pulled down, down, down, before he finally began to move. He swam underwater for the first thirty meters and then broke the surface in a smooth ripple, arms stretched out, hands curved, legs driving, every motion a fine-tuned feat of perfect unison, the human body turned to engine. He waited until his lungs were begging for air before he surfaced, and when he finally did, the water was still beating on him, and it was hard to get a full, dry breath.

  It took him a few moments before he realized that some of the pounding water was coming from above. The rain was really pouring down now.

  He rolled onto his back and looked upstream. The photographer was gone.

  5

  The drive to the Chilewaukee Reservoir should have been two hours from Mick Fleming’s house outside of Albany, but it took him nearly three because of the rain.

  It fell unremittingly, and Mick missed an exit sign, which took him twenty miles off course. By the time he finally reached the reservoir he was late and frustrated, and that wasn’t good, because all of his preliminary calculations told him he was going to need full focus today.

  If his math was right, and rains like this one kept falling, the Chilewaukee Dam could be in big trouble very soon. Mick badly wanted his math to be wrong.

  His math rarely was, though.

  His initial assessments were bad: the dam’s age and the rapidly rising water levels combined to make demands on the spillway intense, and the spillway had been on Mick’s critically endangered list for years now. If it kept raining? What was left on the scale of concern then? Dire? Catastrophic?

  He was concerned when he left for Torrance County, annoyed by the drive in the rain and the time he wasted getting lost, then further disgusted to discover two vehicles parked in the lot when he finally arrived. He’d been promised that only the dam supervisor, Arthur Brady, would be on hand for this visit. If Mick’s inspection necessitated a more formal review with more parties present, that would happen soon, but for the first visit he was to be alone.

  That was his only rule, and he was entitled to make it. As the section chief for inspections with the state’s division of dam safety of the department of environmental protection—try fitting all that on a business card—Mick was the front man, the reconnaissance scout. It was a position that he’d earned from years of hard work, yes, but also one that suited him. Many engineers liked a full team for inspections, wanting to engage in debate and hear alternate ideas, relevant memories, and obscure observations. Mick needed to be alone first, though. He’d learned that the hard way over the years. From childhood through college and on into the workforce, communicating with others had always felt like he was talking underwater while everyone else was on the surface. For all of his unique knowledge of structural engineering and a nearly encyclopedic recall of dam disasters and dam fixes the whole world over, Mick struggled to hold focus in a group with people talking all around him, and he struggled even more to communicate his own process. Any crucial discovery that Mick Fleming made was likely to occur in privacy, and thus his initial reviews were to be done solo. Arthur Brady certainly knew that, because Mick had spoken to him just yesterday.

  Why the two cars, then? Who else was here?

  He was flustered as he got out of the car, forgot his pencil in the cupholder, and then dropped his iPad when he reached back for the pencil. He was cursing and brushing water and gravel from the case when he looked up and saw the photographer.

  The man was standing on a wide, flat rock just above the turbid, churning tailwaters. He had a camera on a tripod pointed at the spillway. Despite the pouring rain, he wore no jacket, just a soaked gray vest. No hat, either, his thick, dark hair streaming water, as if he’d just emerged from a swim. If the rain bothered him in the slightest, he didn’t show it. Just raised a polite hand in greeting.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. No trace of sarcasm. Mick looked from the photographer up to the dam and felt inclined to agree. It was beautiful. The massive stone blocks laid like steps, the gatehouse looming like something from another age. It was nowhere near as bland as the modern structures, with their blank faces of concrete.

  It was also nowhere near as safe.

  “Beautiful until it bursts,” Mick said.

  This seemed to intrigue the photographer. “You think it will?”

  Mick didn’t want to get into this conversation—any conversation, really—with a tourist who was apparently happy to trade pneumonia for photographs.

  “It will if I don’t do my job,” he said curtly. “And I’m afraid part of my job will be asking you to leave. This is a closed
area. The signs are very clear.”

  “Apologies. I must have missed them.”

  Mick waved at the Silverado. “You drove right past them.”

  The photographer shook his head. Water sprayed from his hair and beard. “I didn’t drive in. I walked. Out of the woods.”

  Out hiking, dressed like that? He really will get pneumonia.

  “Nevertheless,” Mick said, “it’s a closed area.”

  The man frowned, but it was the look of someone who was about to break bad news rather than someone who’d received it.

  “Do you have some sort of official capacity? Or are we not both in the same trespassing boat?”

  “We certainly are not,” Mick snapped. “My official capacity is that I’m the chief dam engineer down from Albany. Is that sufficient for you?”

  The man’s eyes seemed to brighten. He tilted his head and looked at Mick with real interest for the first time.

  “Chief dam engineer. I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

  Mick was getting good and tired of him now.

  “There is, and I’m it,” he said.

  “I’m documenting the story of Galesburg,” the photographer said. “Do you have any interest in helping me tell it?”

  “Galesburg?” Mick almost laughed. “What I have an interest in is helping keep Torrance from ending up in the same place.”

  The man’s eyes seemed to brighten. “You know of Galesburg, then?”

  “Of course. It was destroyed for the reservoir. Big news in a small town, long, long ago. My grandfather designed the dam, actually.”

  “Your grandfather was Jeremiah Fleming?” The man seemed fascinated by this, and Mick was astonished that he’d ever heard the name.

  “You’ve done your research,” Mick said.

  The photographer smiled, tilted his head, and said, “I can see it now, yes. The jawline, mostly. And about the eyes. Yes, I should have recognized you.”

  Mick felt unsettled by the scrutiny, this stranger talking about his resemblance to a man he’d never even met, a relative who’d been dead decades before Mick’s birth.

  “If you say so. Listen, I really do not have the time to—”

  “You know it’s important that the story of the place be remembered, then. Excellent. You’re one of the few with a personal connection.”

  Mick took a deep breath. “Sure. But the way I’ll remember that story is by making certain it’s not repeated. We don’t need any more flooded-out towns in the Catskills. Now, please—”

  “Of course.” The photographer lifted a placating hand. “I understand. You’ve got important work to do.”

  “That’s right.”

  The man looked from Mick to the spillway with a speculative gaze. “Crucial work, in this weather. So many days of rain.”

  “Yes,” Mick said. “Crucial.” He was taking a breath to offer one last demand that the photographer hit the road, when the man spoke again.

  “I’ll get out of your way, then, and with my apologies, but is there any chance I could take just one picture? Would you mind?”

  “Of me?”

  The man nodded. “It’s a striking background. And with your family connection and your own current role… it’s just very dramatic. You standing in front of all that water, and in the rain… Please, it will only take two seconds.”

  Mick didn’t have many seconds to wait, but when he glanced back at the spillway he had to admit that it did look impressive. And while he wasn’t an egotistical man, he could imagine that the image of the chief engineer out of Albany standing in front of the Chilewaukee Reservoir spillway would be a dramatic photograph. You couldn’t blame the stranger for wanting that shot.

  “One photo,” Mick said, “and then you’re gone. Deal?”

  The man’s smile broke wide and white across his dark goatee.

  “Deal,” he said, and then he lowered his eye to the camera. Mick faced it, standing a little straighter and sucking in his stomach. He had to squint; the lens was reflecting some trapped light that was otherwise missing in the lead-sky day.

  There was a shutter click and a popping flash that turned into squares of brightness, disorienting orbs that floated through Mick’s field of vision. Then they were gone, and the photographer was already standing up with his camera in one hand and his tripod under his arm. Mick blinked at him, puzzled. How had he moved so fast?

  “Thank you, sir,” the photographer said. “I appreciate it, and I wish you luck in the flood.”

  “Sure.” It wasn’t a flood, just rain, but he seemed to be a dramatic fellow.

  “Would you mind telling me your name? For my caption.”

  “Mick Fleming.”

  “Mick Fleming.” He spoke as if tasting the words. “Excellent. Chief engineer, you said? Grandson of Jeremiah Fleming?”

  “That’s right. But I really do have to ask you—”

  “I’m already leaving.”

  And he was. He was walking right back into the woods, angled toward Maiden Mountain, which was very rough climbing.

  “You ought to get a jacket,” Mick called out.

  The photographer just laughed. Mick watched him go, frowning, and then said, “Hey!”

  The photographer turned back. He was barely visible now, obscured by the birch saplings and the sheeting rain.

  “What publication?” Mick said. He was thinking that he wouldn’t mind a copy of that shot. If he told Lori, his wife, she might even frame it. That would give him an excuse to put it up in the office and pretend that it wasn’t his own idea.

  “No publication just yet,” the photographer called back. “I’m freelance.”

  Mick nodded, trying not to show any disappointment. “Even freelancers can use a raincoat,” he said.

  The laugh came once more, and then the photographer was gone, and Mick could finally get to work.

  6

  The current was ferocious, just as Aaron hoped.

  This was the test, see, this was what separated your average swimmer from Aaron Ellsworth. Anyone could swim in an indoor pool or off a Florida beach or in a summer lake. Give them a strong current and a chill that spread through every nerve and engulfed the heart and lungs, and then see what they could do.

  It had been these lonely cold swims under a coal-black sky that convinced him that he wanted to be a Coast Guard rescue swimmer.

  He’d been dominant in Coast Guard training, too. He ate it for lunch. It was supposed to leave you begging for a respite. He begged for more.

  “Natural talent,” the same sergeant who would later kick him out had said on the day Aaron completed his first dark water search and rescue simulation.

  Aaron had been annoyed by that. There was nothing natural about something hard earned, and too often the word talent suggested a gift that had been handed to you rather than a skill extracted from burning muscles and scorched lungs on miserable nights in frigid waters. He understood that a compliment was intended, but didn’t anyone know how damn hard it was to achieve natural talent status, how hard you had to work and how deeply you had to care?

  Natural talent. Sure.

  To say that he was the best swimmer in his class of twelve was a joke. He was better than the other eleven put together. Faster, yes, better endurance, yes, but what separated him was his ability not to panic. Nothing they threw at him in the water scared him, and everything was designed to. It wasn’t long before his instructors and fellow trainees alike realized one thing: Aaron Ellsworth had no fear of death in the water.

  Still they’d sent him home.

  It was panic training that got him, ironically. The drill was simple enough: one recruit would play the role of a hysterical victim, thrashing in the water, and the other would restrain and retrieve him, bringing him toward a basket in the center of the pool that was supposed to simulate a helicopter drop basket.

  The guy they put in the water with Aaron was one of those hoo-rah, chest-thumping assholes who was always trying to be the gro
up’s unofficial leader and morale booster, telling them they had to dig deep, telling them pain was weakness leaving the body, like a walking, talking Nike ad.

  Johnny—that was the guy, a grown man who called himself Johnny—outweighed Aaron by probably thirty pounds, and when he went into victim mode, he went all out. Even if Aaron hadn’t caught him getting whispered instructions, he would have known what was coming. Johnny Brass Balls was going to give Aaron a real tussle, try to show him up.

  Into the pool they went, and Johnny immediately took his panicked-victim role toward Oscar-nominee territory. He was thrashing like there was a downed electric line in the water, knees and elbows flying, hunting for Aaron’s groin, stomach, kidneys.

  With the training officer barking at him incessantly from the pool deck, Aaron had gotten the prick secured with a rear-approach hold and was towing him back toward the rescue basket. It was then, just as they neared the basket, that Johnny decided enough was not enough, and he made a massive shake-and-roll, trying to shed Aaron, but instead dragging them both back underwater.

  Aaron choked as he went under. They slid halfway down to the bottom of the pool, and now their roles had been reversed: it was Johnny securing Aaron in his grasp now, only Johnny was supposed to be playing the victim role, fighting for the surface, not holding Aaron beneath it.

  Aaron’s lungs were scorching by then, the need for a breath urgent. He leaned forward, just enough so that he could see the other man’s eyes. For one instant, one fraction of a second, the communication between them was as complete as if they’d been at the surface and engaged in conversation.

  Help, Aaron’s blue eyes screamed, I’m not faking anymore, I need air, HELP!

  And Johnny’s eyes, dark as a lonely Catskill creek at night, answered: No.

  Something snapped in Aaron then, something born out of fear and grown into rage. Fight or flight had merged and all that remained was a primal desire to be the last one left.

  When Johnny Brass Balls began to turn into Johnny Blue Face, he pushed for the surface, satisfied that he’d won. Aaron didn’t let him go. Instead, he tugged him back down, and now it was Johnny’s panicked eyes looking into his, predator turned to prey.