by Scott Carson
The man who came to take the picture of the crew that day was a quiet guy with dark hair and a bearded face that would light up now and then with an odd, private smile. He was particularly interested in taking pictures of Teddy Biddle, for reasons no one understood but everyone found funny, because Teddy was a surly son of a bitch. He didn’t like distractions even among his own crew, and he damn sure didn’t like outsiders or interlopers. He tolerated a few photographs and when he’d had enough of it, he got into the cage and vanished below the earth, with the photographer standing above, snapping photos of him the whole way down.
For a few hours after they’d all joked about it, calling him Centerfold Teddy. That was before the accident.
Deshawn never caught who the photographer worked for or what the project was. He just lined up beside the others with his hard hat on and gave the camera the flat eyes that said, This is serious business, because that’s what the photographers always wanted—smiling sandhogs need not apply for photos—and then it was done and he was ready to get back to work, when the photographer approached and asked for his name, age, and hometown.
Deshawn spelled his name, told his age, twenty-three, and answered that, yes, he was a New York native: Queens, to be exact.
“Do you ever think about where it comes from?” the photographer asked.
“Excuse me?”
“The water. Have you seen the place?”
Deshawn shook his head, and the man withdrew a photograph from his bag. It was a black-and-white picture of a two-lane road running straight for the center of a forested mountain in the distance, fences on either side, fields beyond them, fading into more mountains on the photograph’s edges. There were shadows across the road that made it seem like the place was down in a valley somewhere. There was not a building in sight. Just the road. Everything looked parched. Even the weeds alongside the road were withered.
“That’s the source,” the photographer told him.
“Looks dry to me,” Deshawn said, and laughed, because he didn’t know what else to do… and because something about the picture bothered him. He wasn’t sure what. The shadows, maybe? The perfectly straight road that faded from light to dark? The emptiness? Something about the place just felt wrong.
The photographer was looking at him hard, like he was hoping for more, so Deshawn said, “Well, where is it?”
This seemed to please the man. He gave the faintest of smiles and said. “Galesburg.”
Deshawn said, “Looks like a pretty spot,” although in truth he didn’t like the picture.
“Gorgeous,” the photographer told him. “You should take a drive up there sometime. See where it all begins. Mr. Biddle has visited. It seems he’s about the only one.”
Deshawn agreed that he’d have to do that, but he was just being polite. He had no intention of borrowing his brother’s car and driving out of the city on a hot May weekend to see the reservoirs upstate.
Then the accident happened.
It was a few days after the photographer left. One of the muck cars went off the rails, and they were winching it back onto the track, Teddy Biddle guiding the process, standing in the center of the track and motioning with his hands, beckoning, A little more, little more, and then there was a whip-snap sound and Deshawn looked up just in time to watch the steel cable boomerang back and cleave through the center of Teddy’s face and his throat.
Teddy stood for an instant in the same posture he’d been in, feet spread, elbows bent, hands curling inward, asking for a little more tension, just a little more.
Then the blood poured and Teddy fell.
Deshawn was the first one to him, upset but not truly worried. They’d had injuries before; he’d seen plenty of blood stain the stone in these tunnels. Teddy Biddle was going to need some surgery, but he’d be fine.
There was too much blood, though. Deshawn noticed that right away. There was a neat line of blood down Teddy’s face, which was split open from crown of the skull to the chin, but the real problem was down near his collarbone, where blood squirted hot against Deshawn’s hands.
The cable had severed his carotid artery. Cut it clean.
He was dead before they got him back aboveground.
None of the crew said much about it. That was the way it went with sandhogs. Nobody wanted to relive the horror shows. Not when you knew that a man had died for every mile of water tunnel. They all showed up for the funeral, of course, and Deshawn pressed a note into the tear-dampened palm of Teddy’s widow, a few scribbled sentences in which he’d tried to capture the sense of a man’s life and the weight of his death and failed miserably. Afterward some of the guys went out drinking, but Deshawn didn’t feel like that. He wanted to get out of the city. Felt the concrete pressing in on him, the day too damn hot for May, the whole place too damn loud. After the funeral he wanted to find someplace quiet to just sit and think. A quiet place where the wind was clean.
He didn’t know much about Teddy outside of work. It struck him that one of the only things he did know had been imparted by the photographer who told him that Teddy had gone to visit Galesburg.
He headed upstate, too, driving in search of Galesburg.
He didn’t realize the joke was on him until he reached Torrance County. There was no Galesburg. Not anymore. He found the lake, though, and then he found the town of Torrance. An idyllic village with the smell of pines and everything so still and quiet.
He liked that. It felt right for Teddy.
Felt damn strange to Deshawn, though. He hadn’t been out of the city much in his life and had spent almost no time in the woods. The one time his family had gone on a vacation to New Hampshire, they’d gotten lost and his father had been irate and everyone had needed to pee but didn’t want to say it and soon the winding roads and the dark hills had seemed frightening and foreboding to Deshawn. He wasn’t able to appreciate the quiet then, and he didn’t sleep well in the shotgun-style motel where they stayed with the windows open and the pine-scented breezes blowing cool even on a summer night. He was glad to get back to the city.
He’d been a child then, of course. It was different as an adult.
On that hot day when he left the city to find the long-gone town of Galesburg and ended up in Torrance, he appreciated the forested mountains and their cool shadows and silence. He liked the way you could hear small sounds from far off and always tell which direction the wind was coming from. He liked how far you could see from a ridgetop, and the way the lake whipped up into tiny whitecaps when the breeze built into a gust.
He was at the lake when he saw the girl swimming. Pale above the water; paler still underwater. Lean and graceful, though. Small breasts and a tapered waist and flat stomach. He continued glancing back when she came out of the water, glistening, pine needles sticking to her feet, and toweled off. She caught him looking and smiled and he laughed and lifted his hands in apology. She dried off and pulled on a sweatshirt and loose white cotton pants that showed the still-damp black swimsuit bottom beneath and walked over to say hello.
His daughter’s mother.
The next week his body was back in the city, but his mind was in the mountains, wondering when he could get up there again, wondering if it would be the same with her.
He’d asked around about the photographer, trying to see if anyone else remembered him, or where he’d come from, what he was working on. Nobody did. That disappointed him, because he wanted to see the picture again. He wanted to show it to the girl he’d met upstate, because she knew so much about the place. Galesburg. She talked like it was living and breathing instead of submerged. He thought she’d enjoy the picture. Thought maybe she’d know right where it had been and where the road led.
He never found it.
That summer, though, everything was about the girl. Kelly Mathers.
He was back in Torrance the next weekend, and he stayed in a hotel that reminded him of the one in New Hampshire, a long, low building, single-story, with tall pines overhead and only
eighteen rooms in the whole thing. He took Kelly to dinner, walked with her around the town square and out past a park with cannons and signs about the French and Indian War. She didn’t come back to the motel with him that night, but she did the next.
That was the first day of June. Not quite summer but feeling like it.
Deshawn returned to Torrance four of the next five weekends. When he was with Kelly it always started wonderful and then turned strange. Friday nights were perfect, and Saturdays were good. By Sunday morning, though, he’d be ready to leave, looking for an excuse to slip away without being able to put his finger on what was wrong, and then he’d drive south telling himself that it had been fun while it lasted but now it needed to end. There would be no more trips to Torrance County.
Then it would be Monday, back in the noisy city, and he would find himself needing her in a deeper way than lust. Like a thirst.
She liked to make love in the lake. She’d guide him along narrow paths paved with pine needles that would open up on beautiful but isolated stretches of dark water. Deshawn grew to associate the first shock of cold water with an increased desire.
Her legs were so pale in the water. His own seemed to vanish, so that it was the two of them together at the surface, but just one body below. Her fingernails biting into his back and her breath hot in his ear and all around them the soft sounds of water in motion. Sometimes they’d stay until after dark, and then the stars reflected off the surface in a liquid blackness that felt like its own universe, the stars seeming to belong within the water rather than in the sky above.
It had been a hauntingly beautiful place.
Once, shivering against him, her damp arms hugging tight to his neck, she’d whispered that she wanted to pull him under and stay there, just the two of them, alone in their own world, and he’d never have to go back to the city. He could stay in Galesburg, with her. Wouldn’t he like that?
It had been merely whispered passion, but it had chilled him. Such strange wording. But he’d told her yes, yes, of course, he wanted that. He wanted her and only her and he would stay wherever she wanted him to stay.
There were moments when he meant it.
On the last trip she took him to her house. A real pretty place out in the woods, not like anything Deshawn had seen before, no neighbors in sight, no street sounds, nothing but trees in all directions. He thought she was taking him to meet her parents, and he was uneasy about that idea, but when they got there she told him they had the house to themselves, and her hand was resting high on his thigh, and he became immediately more pleased with the idea of seeing her home.
“Come on,” she said, taking him by the hand, her fingertips trailing across his palm before they hooked his own. “I’m gonna take you to school.”
He thought he knew exactly what she meant, what kind of education he was in for. He was watching the swing of her hips as she led him up the porch, and he felt himself swell and stiffen and he thought he was going to like being taken to school just fine. Learn a few new things indeed.
Then they were inside the house and she was opening the door that was hidden behind the bookcase, swinging it open to show the strange dark room beyond. The single student’s desk and the larger teacher’s desk across from it. The chalkboard covered in scrawled equations. The walls lined with framed photographs. Old faces, sepia tints, black-and-whites, no color. Almost all men, it seemed. White men with suits and smiles, and then black men and white men in coveralls, with dirty faces and hard eyes. Picks and shovels in some hands, quill pens and ornate documents in others.
“The hell is all this?” he’d asked.
“The school, fool.” Light, teasing. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“I mean, like… for real, what the hell is all this?”
She laughed and closed the door. He wanted her to leave the door open but felt foolish asking, so he kept silent when she lit the lantern and closed them in with that faint flickering light.
“So, seriously? What’s with the museum?”
“It’s my school.”
“I’m being sincere. Like, sincerely freaked out. Who put all this old shit here?”
“The principal. The teacher.”
“C’mon.”
She kept answering his questions poker-faced. Talking about classes and her teacher—singular: teacher—and how they’d had an emphasis on history and all the while he was feeling more and more certain that he should have stayed in the city.
Finally, she ignored one of his questions, took him by the hand, and led him up to the front of the room, like a teacher guiding a student, walking them up to the chalkboard and the big desk. He wanted to leave, but she was smiling at him, the teasing smile again. Then her lips were on his and her hands were on his belt buckle and suddenly he was braced against the desk, his ass resting against it until she’d pulled him toward her and into her.
It was then, when she leaned her head back and moaned, that he looked up and saw the old wooden planks nailed across the ceiling. They were singed and charred, like wood left in a cold stove, but there was a dampness to them, too.
She kept her eyes to the ceiling the whole time, fingernails biting into his back, legs wrapped tight, hips working rhythmically. He closed his own eyes, trying to lose himself in the sensation. When he did that, though, he thought he could hear water. Drips and splashes, the soft popping echoes of puddles in caves. He opened his eyes again, and she was still looking up, and the planks were darker in the lantern light, water shimmering on them.
He shut his eyes again. Kept them closed after that. When he finished, it was with a shudder and a gasp that seemed loud in the room. She swung herself up against him and held him tight, her legs still wrapped around his hips. Nipped his shoulder and collarbone with her teeth, breathing hard. She didn’t say a word, just stroked the back of his neck and sighed softly, acting like everything was normal.
He was in a hurry to dress and get out of there. He made a joke about her parents coming home and finding them, and ten minutes later they were back in daylight, and he was making excuses for why he needed to drive home that night.
The next Monday he volunteered for an overtime shift on the weekend. The Monday after that, he bought Yankees tickets for the weekend and invited his brother. He kept planting obstacles in front of himself so he couldn’t talk himself into the drive on a Friday afternoon. He did not want to return.
Ten weeks passed before she left the message telling him she was pregnant.
He drove back up then, and that was the first time he met her family. Molly Mathers had sat with him on the front porch of the house and talked as kindly as one could in that situation. She was a trim, handsome woman with a generous smile and a low voice and eyes that felt like interrogation lamps. She didn’t attack him or accuse him of anything, though; didn’t say a single harsh word. Just watched him. It was only after a long stretch of silence, the two of them listening to the cicadas and watching the fireflies glow and then darken in the woods, that she told him he probably would not like it around there.
An observation, not a suggestion. No hard edge to it, as if he wasn’t wanted and he’d be wise to take the hint, but more like a question she was afraid she knew the answer to.
“You probably will not like it around here.”
Deshawn protested, assuring her otherwise, telling her how much he liked the town of Torrance, how much he liked the mountains and the streams and the lake, the quiet and the beauty and the people. How much he liked her daughter.
Then he left and made a prophet out of her.
Molly Mathers was damn good and right with her simple statement: Deshawn Ryan didn’t like it around there at all.
He went back to Torrance a few times each year. Was there when Gillian was born, and for her birthdays, although usually he pressed for them to meet somewhere in the middle. He sent checks each month, but he never went back to the house. Not until the day he came to take his daughter away from it.
He didn’t
like thinking about that house, and for years now it had been easy enough not to. Once Gillian was with him in the city, once their days became a shared thing, it was strangely easy to forget about that odd house in the hills, in fact. Or it had been.
Lately, though, the memories were coming in quietly but constantly, seeping like groundwater through the tunnel walls. As he rode the man car down the rattling rail system that took him away from the Mole and back toward the shaft, another day done, Water Tunnel Number 3 another forty-eight feet toward completion, he couldn’t stop thinking of his daughter up there in Torrance County. Maybe he should visit. He was always letting—making?—her do the drive, believing her stories about missing the city and wanting the time back home.
But shouldn’t a man visit his daughter? Of course he should. See her world, ask her some questions. Maybe tell her some things, too.
Hon, he might tell her, my mind’s been drifting lately. I don’t want you to worry, but I’m seeing things, and maybe worse than that, I’m remembering things.
Not quite yet, he decided as another explosive charge blew down the tunnel and the rock walls shuddered and the dust rose. Because she would worry, and that wasn’t right.
It was his job to do the worrying for the both of them.
UPSTREAM
15
“He’s lying,” Aaron said. “I don’t know why, but he was lying. Obviously, I didn’t kill him, but I hurt him bad. He’s lying about that.”
He watched his father drive silently through the rain, refusing to engage. Somehow this was worse than the terrible moment they’d shared while Aaron confessed to the killing. Once again, his father’s face was wracked with grief—not anger, not disappointment, but grief, which somehow was worse than the others.
He’s lying.
No one would lie in that situation, though. And then there was the minor matter of his healing. Aaron had watched the blood run down the man’s face, had seen him slip into the water and sink… but there’d been no evidence of that. So Mick Fleming hadn’t only lied, he’d healed. Impossible. Obviously and utterly impossible.