The Chill

by Scott Carson

  Thought it was your show, didn’t you, Johnny? Thought you were in control. They remained on the bottom, arms and legs tangled together, eye to eye, linked in this pissing match gone terribly wrong.

  Then Johnny blacked out.

  Aaron felt the moment that consciousness left the man in his arms. A final tensioning, then a slackening of every muscle as his lips parted and a stream of bubbles emerged. Aaron, whose own lungs were at their limit, his chest spasming, braced his feet on the bottom of the pool and pushed hard. He shot up, flutter kicking and using his left arm to stroke, his right wrapped around Johnny’s deadweight body. For an instant, as the overhead fluorescent lamps turned the surface into a sheet of gray light, he wasn’t sure that he’d make it. For an instant it seemed he probably would not.

  Then he broke the water and found air and sucked in a gasping breath, taking care not to show desperation, not to cry out in relief. He breathed again, spit water, and then saw that chaos had broken out: everyone was trying to save Johnny.

  “He tried too hard,” Aaron said between gasps. “He wouldn’t stop. He knew what he was doing, and he wouldn’t stop.”

  They’d saved the prick easily enough. Damn well should have been able to; it was a course taught by rescue experts, after all, so what was a little CPR? They got him breathing, and then they took him out, and while Aaron tried to explain the situation, he got the clear sense that from the surface it hadn’t looked the same. Meanwhile, Johnny’s brass balls turned to tinfoil in the ambulance, and he told a different narrative.

  Aaron did it intentionally, he said, had grabbed him and pulled him back under and held him there. Aaron Ellsworth had tried to kill him down in that pool.

  They believed him.

  It was about four hours later that they came for Aaron. He would withdraw, they explained, and be grateful that nobody was pressing charges.

  He looked them all in the eyes one at a time, nodded, got to his feet, and left the room with a salute, an utter absence of future plans, and a brand-new fuck-you attitude.

  Now, ten months and two thousand miles removed from his Coast Guard training pool, he stopped his crawl stroke below the reservoir dam and rolled onto his back as the current clutched him, sweeping him back toward the town that he’d intended to leave forever.

  7

  Mick was studying the spillway when Arthur Brady began hollering his name from the gatehouse.

  “Mr. Fleming? I was beginnin’ to wonder what had happened to you!”

  I got distracted because I was wondering how much longer your dam has, Mr. Brady, and I missed an exit.

  But all Mick said was “Bad drive. Bad weather.”

  “Sure it is. Come on in, come on in. Let’s get outta the rain, get warmed up.”

  Mick had no interest in the gatehouse. The potential problems weren’t there, they were out here in the spillway, which was too old and, frankly, had been a flawed design from the start.

  That wasn’t Arthur Brady’s fault, though. He was a smart man and he was hardworking, but he had no imagination. That was fine for him; he didn’t need to have it. The sad reality was that his job would belong to a robot soon enough. Then again, Mick’s might, too. It stood to reason that at some point robots would design the future generations of themselves, didn’t it? The simple laws of progress seemed to dictate that the definition of rote tasks would shift as technology became—

  “Mr. Fleming?”

  Mick blinked at Arthur. “Yes. Sorry. Lost in my head there for a minute. It happens sometimes.”

  It happened a lot, actually.

  “No problem,” Arthur Brady said with a chuckle as he came down the steps, his bald head bowed against the rain, glistening. They shook hands—Mick just managed to avoid dropping the iPad again—and then he nodded at the two vehicles parked beside his own.

  “I thought operations here were solo shifts?” he said.

  Solo shifts at a critical piece of infrastructure were surprising to many people, but the reality was that even the Hoover Dam might be manned by shifts of as few as six. Smaller reservoirs simply didn’t have the need for much manpower, particularly if they didn’t have shipping traffic or hydroelectric generators. The Chilewaukee had neither, but it held one hell of a lot of water back from the residents in the floodplain below. It was also man-made, and anything made by man had the potential to be laughed at by nature.

  “That’s right, just me,” Arthur Brady said.

  “I saw the two cars, and I wondered.” Mick nodded again at the pickup truck beside him. There was a sheriff’s star on the license plate. Arthur followed his eyes to it, put his big hands in his pockets, and pursed his lips.

  “Sheriff’s truck. Probably looking for meth heads or something. You wouldn’t believe the shit that people try to dump down here, Mr. Fleming. I mean to tell you, people treat this place like it’s their own private—”

  “Sure, sure, I don’t need to hear about all that,” Mick said, nonplussed because Arthur was crowding him and some of the numbers that had been dancing through Mick’s head on the long drive were shuffling back into the shadows. He couldn’t listen to this droning talk. He needed to see, needed to think, and you couldn’t do that and talk at the same time.

  At least, he couldn’t.

  “Right,” Arthur said, rain beading on his glistening scalp. “Of course you don’t.”

  His voice was calm, but his eyes looked wounded. Mick tried to recover by asking him a question he could answer that did matter. Oh, how it mattered.

  “What’s your intake level today?”

  “Hair under seventy thousand.”

  The reservoir was filling at seventy thousand cubic feet per second. Mick took a sharp breath, and Arthur Brady nodded grimly.

  “Record’s eighty-two thousand,” he said.

  The record, Mick knew, had also occurred twenty years ago, which meant that it had been endured by newer equipment. The infrastructure at Chilewaukee had received far more trust than investment over the years. This didn’t set it apart from many of the nation’s dams, but in the state of New York the Chill always lagged behind. It was the bastard son of the grand Catskill Aqueduct. The Catskill and Delaware Aqueducts had been more than just remarkable feats of engineering; they’d been massive public works projects, bringing jobs to the mountains, and water to the city.

  The problem with the Chilewaukee was that they’d never really seen it home. Sometime after World War II the money once slated for tunnels tying the Chilewaukee to the massive Ashokan Reservoir and linking it into the city’s water supply was instead allocated toward other reservoirs and then to Water Tunnel Number 3, a billion-dollar project that was still not completed decades after it had begun. When it was finally finished, though, it would assure New York of an almost peerless water supply—and one that didn’t need, and never really had needed, the Chilewaukee Reservoir.

  They’d spent an enormous amount of money constructing it and destroyed the entire village of Galesburg and the tiny hamlet of Grubb’s Landing on Cresap Creek. Along the way, they discovered that the Chilewaukee was determined not to cooperate. Preliminary engineering on nearly everything proved wrong, especially the logistics of boring tunnels through Maiden Mountain to connect the Chilewaukee to the Ashokan. There’d been better sites from the beginning, and the city moved on to them, coming up with a clever new term to explain that their expensive abortion in Torrance County wasn’t actually a mistake at all.

  The Chilewaukee, they said, was a surplus reservoir: not part of the system yet but available to it in the future. The tunnels connecting it to the rest of the supply could be completed if necessary. In reality, that was never going to happen, and because it wasn’t actually linked into the city water supply, the Chill received far less attention—and funding—than the rest of the reservoirs in the system.

  It had also been the death of Jeremiah Fleming, Mick’s grandfather. Fleming had been murdered on a site visit to the Chilewaukee, killed by furious locals
who’d refused to leave, who simply could not accept the idea of eminent domain.

  He’d been dead long before Mick’s birth, but his professional legacy lingered both through a family of engineers and a majestic, if largely forgotten, dam.

  Mick didn’t think about him often, but on visits to the Chilewaukee, it was hard not to. Maybe that was why he took these inspections a little more personally.

  I won’t let it burst on my watch, Mick thought, and then he asked Arthur Brady what the current release level was.

  “Twelve-five,” Arthur Brady said.

  So the flooded western fork of Cresap Creek that had been dammed to create the reservoir was spewing into the reservoir at 70,000 cubic feet per second, and the Chilewaukee gatehouse was siphoning that off at a rate of 12,500 cubic feet per second. Enough to limit the lake level rise, but not enough to hold balance with it for the long haul.

  This October was beginning to turn into a long haul. Days and days of rain stacked atop each other like something biblical.

  “I’m going to get to work,” Mick said. “I’ll come up to see you when I’m through. I might have some questions.”

  “Sure.” Arthur Brady chewed on the corner of his lip and shot a fretful glance down toward the churning waters in the spillway. “You hear the rumble?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s different. The sound. It’s not like it should be.”

  Mick listened to the cascading water pounding down the stone face of the spillway. It hadn’t changed since he got here, but that didn’t mean Brady was wrong. In fact, Brady was the man most likely to notice a change in timbre.

  “Deeper?” Mick asked.

  “Yup. Like it’s coming more from the chest. Not a head cold anymore.”

  It was, Mick thought, both an apt analogy and a frightening one. Arthur Brady was humanizing the structure—and its ailments.

  “How many years have you worked out here?”

  “Twenty-eight. Said I’d be gone at twenty-five, but I couldn’t do it. I keep hoping to see her repaired before I’m done.” Brady cocked his head and lifted a finger. “Hear it? Right there. The sound is deeper, and not just because there’s more water.” He pivoted to Mick, grim-faced. “It’s like you’ve been sayin’ for years now: that spillway needs to be relined and aerated.”

  “Yes. We will discuss it all. First, I’ve got to make my visual inspection, please.”

  “Right, we can do that.” Arthur started out of the parking lot and toward the trail that wound alongside the spillway.

  “I’ll do it on my own,” Mick said. “It’s about my thought process, do you understand?”

  Arthur, clearly stung, turned and walked back to the gatehouse. “You know where to find me.”

  Mick sighed, unzipped his rain jacket, then took off his glasses and dried the lenses on his shirt. He hadn’t wanted to insult the man, but he couldn’t afford the distraction, either. Strangers did not understand this dilemma. For that matter, not many people other than his wife, Lori, understood him at all.

  That was fine, though. It wasn’t his job to win friends and influence people. It was his job to make sure houses weren’t swept off their foundations downstream.

  He turned back to the spillway.

  The massiveness of a dam made its engineering seem complicated, but the basic principles were simple enough: you built an impediment to the natural flow of water, the water backed up, and, ta-da!—a creek became a lake. You managed the stress by allowing water to breach the dam in a controlled fashion. If you couldn’t release it, the water had only two options: crest the dam or burst it. Over time, it would do one or the other.

  There was no force on earth so determined and patient as water.

  With spillways and gates, though, humans could help the water make its choice. That worked well, provided the equipment could keep up with nature.

  It wasn’t all that easy. Each year dams around the world failed and people were killed. Mick had devoted a lot of years to studying how those tragedies had come to pass and how they might have been averted. The closest partner he saw to the Chilewaukee was Lake Oroville, in California, which had forced the evacuation of 200,000 people. Both the Chilewaukee and Oroville were reservoirs made from rivers, lakes emerging within an existing flow, like a bubble in the blood. They shared two other similarities, and Mick didn’t like either of them: requested maintenance on the spillways had been deferred for years, and people lived in the floodplain.

  And why not? People trusted dams.

  As he strolled down the path, studying the water thundering and growling through the spillway, his glasses misted again and he wiped them clear and replaced them, then stopped and stared and felt his breath catch.

  Were those bubbles rising up from below the surface?

  He stepped closer, squinted, cleaned his glasses again, cocked his head.

  Bubbles. Yes? No? Were they bubbles? It was so hard to tell. With the water roaring this way, the surface current created a dizzying distortion of everything below. It was like driving through a downpour without windshield wipers. Still, he was almost certain…

  Yes, there they are.

  Streams of small bubbles were rising and bursting on the surface, swept away by the current and concealed by the rain, as if the elements were working in tandem to hide evidence of a crime, one diversion and one getaway driver.

  In contrast to the showboating power of the cascade upstream, the bubbles looked tiny, innocuous, and innocent.

  They were the far more terrible threat, though.

  The big water could be managed. That was all the product of design, of careful anticipation. But those bubbles suggested the opposite of anticipation: willful ignorance.

  The concrete that lined the spillway was old and in need of repair, as had been noted in inspection report after inspection report, then dismissed as something that could wait for the next budget. Always the next budget.

  But those bubbles were an indication of a process called cavitation, which meant that the water was striking a rough surface with such speed and turbulence that tiny vapor bubbles were forming and collapsing, forming and collapsing. It sounded harmless until you watched it work away at stone like a million miniature jackhammers.

  Those tiny bubbles had nearly toppled the 710-foot-tall Glen Canyon Dam in 1983. Troubling sounds led dam operators to shut off the spillway, and once the water drained away, they discovered that a crater 32 feet deep and 180 feet long had opened up, threatening to tear a hole in the side of the dam.

  Maybe I’m wrong, Mick thought.

  But he didn’t think he was.

  He decided to walk farther downstream, chasing the tailwaters into the valley. As the force of the water diminished, maybe the bubbles would become clearer, and then he would know for sure.

  While he pushed through the saplings that lined the bank, his shoes growing slick and clotted with damp mud, he realized this walk was little more than an excuse to keep thinking and delay the trek back up to the gatehouse, where he would have to ask Arthur Brady to begin primary steps on the dam’s emergency plan. The only way to be sure of the cavitation risks was shutting off the spillway and sealing in the rising waters behind the dam.

  His glasses misted over once more, and as he wiped them dry, he looked up at the gunmetal sky and swollen clouds. Fat raindrops splattered off his face.

  Yes, he thought, things could get very bad here.

  8

  Aaron had been swept farther downstream than he’d expected, and rather than follow his old tradition and swim back up, knifing through the current in a feat of physicality and willpower, he decided to come ashore and walk back.

  Rather than push himself to the brink, he gave up—no, he decided to quit—several hundred yards downstream. He let the water carry him into a shallow eddy near a gravel bar and then pulled himself out, dripping and gasping and stunned at how little he’d achieved for his efforts. Then again, he’d spent the night in jail and had a hangove
r. No surprise that he wasn’t himself today.

  Then why’d you come here? If you weren’t going to swim it and beat it, why’d you come at all?

  He stepped farther up onto the bank, wincing as rocks bit into the soles of his feet. It was a nasty walk from here. He’d forgotten just how bad.

  He paused and looked back at the water, which was dyed deep brown with all the sediment of the recent floods, the swift current giving it a thin white glaze. He considered getting back in, then shook his head, turned, and started ahead on foot. He felt ridiculous walking in the rain in nothing but his soaked boxers. If his father saw this performance, he’d think that he’d won his argument. Not only had Aaron failed to make the swim, but he looked like a drugged-out lunatic.

  Screw him and Peaceful Passages. There is no chance that I will check into a rehab clinic. I’ll get out of the house, I’ll dial back on the booze and the smoking, and I’ll stop the pills completely. When I’m making good money somewhere, I’ll give the old prick a call and have him visit, have him see just how wrong he was. Give him a check, maybe.

  A check from doing what, though? What job, and where would he find it? He’d burned his bridges in Torrance County without caring because he didn’t want to be here, but… where else was he going to go?

  Any damn place. Pick a spot and—

  He never saw the glass waiting in the rain-soaked weeds. Just brought his bare foot down on it squarely, all of his weight driving the curved base of a fractured Miller Lite bottle into his instep.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, falling onto his ass in the mud and the weeds, grasping his wounded foot with both hands as blood spurted warm and red between his clenched fingers. The base of the bottle never moved, the bottom of it sunk nearly an inch deep into the mud, the edges glistening, as menacing as a rattlesnake’s fangs. He could see the bottle’s neck resting in the grass, the wet label peeling away in strips. It had broken neatly in half, neither side shattering the way a discarded beer bottle should but separating, each end bearing a wicked crescent of razor-edged glass.