by Scott Carson
The woman had known him so well. Understood him better than he’d understood himself somehow. That chilled him and shamed him.
Then there was the promise: She’ll remember when the time is right.
When the time was right for what?
He rose abruptly and hurried out of the room. Left the safe open and the letter on his bed. He’d intended to read the others and then move on to his daughter’s old sketchbook, but now he thought that was a very bad idea.
Just sit and relax. Sit back on the couch and relax and sleep.
There was no way that was happening, though. Not tonight.
He’d lived alone for most of his life and yet he was bothered by the empty apartment now. Good news, though: he was in New York City. The city, as they said, never slept.
Ben’s Porch would be open. That beloved old bar never seemed to close. The West Coast baseball game would still be on, probably, and while Deshawn didn’t care about either team, he could pretend. He could have a beer or two and watch the game and listen to the drunks arguing. He could get away from the damnable sound of that slow, steady drip.
Plink, plink, plink.
Why hadn’t he fixed that faucet? The sound was so loud. How had he possibly ignored it this long?
Tomorrow, he told himself as he pulled on his jacket and grabbed his keys and wallet. Tomorrow I’ll pick up an O-ring and a gasket. Pick up a whole damn faucet, maybe, and just gut the works.
Of course, it wasn’t his responsibility. It wasn’t his building. He could call the super and ask him to do his job. Save his money, make the landlord spend it. That was the idea of the system, wasn’t it? Deshawn didn’t own the problem; he just rented it.
Plink, plink, plink.
The leak wasn’t speeding up, but it seemed so much louder than he remembered. How was that possible?
Because it’s midnight and you had a nightmare and then you opened a box that you shouldn’t have. You let the past in, and you know better than to do that.
He stepped into the hall, closed the door, and locked it. Jogged down the stairs and pushed through the front door and into the chilled night air. The waiting garbage was pungent. Across the street, the kids with the joint laughed. Down the street, cars exchanged horn fire at an intersection. Up the street, the old-fashioned neon sign at Ben’s Porch promised a Corona and a refuge.
The pleasant noise of life drove away the silly bad feelings that could develop from small sounds in darkness. The city blew those small sounds out of his mind like a street sweeper, and whatever faint memory remained from the nightmare was long gone before he reached Ben’s.
UPSTREAM
21
Tyler Riggins drove a Dodge Ram diesel on a lift kit so tall that even Aaron could feel ridiculous swinging his six-foot-three-inch frame into the cab. He’d seen Riggins pick up girls who basically had to climb the tires to get inside the truck, because while Riggins had invested on the lift kit and the tires, he’d neglected to add running boards.
When he pulled into the drive with the big motor growling, Aaron crossed the yard on his one crutch, trying to make the effort look painless, because he knew his father was watching. In reality, his foot ached and burned and all he wanted was a hit of something to knock the pain on its ass. Knock him on his ass. He wanted to sleep for days.
He tossed his crutch into the bed of the truck while he held on to the door handle, then opened the door and hoisted himself upright, lurching into the high passenger seat.
Riggins stared at him over the top of a cigarette.
“The hell happened to you?”
“Stepped on a bottle.”
Riggins began to laugh. He was a big, freckle-faced, redheaded slab of a kid and he should have been fat—once had been, in fact, before he found the weight room. Riggins was obsessive with lifting, but his body only thickened, never leaned up. In high school Aaron had never hung out with Riggins. Once he returned to town, though, most of Torrance High’s best and brightest were long gone to other places, and he came across Riggins in the gym and at the bar and a friendship formed out of the things they shared: alcohol and anger, mostly.
“Stepped on a friggin’ bottle,” Riggins said, choking on his laughter and cigarette smoke. “Oh, shit. You’ve had a day, bro. Started in jail, ended on crutches?”
His cigarette ash fell onto his jeans and he laughed and swept it away. The cab vibrated with honky-tonk guitar and the twanging voice of Shooter Jennings singing “D.R.U.N.K.”
“Drive out of here,” Aaron said. “My dad’s watching. You said you need him to think you’re something other than an asshole, right?”
Riggins was still laughing when he dropped the truck into gear. Black smoke belched into the night, the floorboards shook, and then they were off.
“How pissed is your dad, anyhow?”
“Scale of one to ten, probably a twelve,” Aaron said, but that assessment was taken from the morning, after the eviction from his own house. Just now, though, his father hadn’t looked angry. He’d looked afraid.
“He’s not happy,” Aaron muttered, “but neither am I.”
“Well, shit happens. We picked the wrong night and the wrong street, that’s all.”
They’d sat in his truck, drunk and high, with music blaring, parked outside one of the only bars in town that was guaranteed to have police presence. Wrong night and wrong street. Sure.
“What’d we have last night?” Aaron asked.
Riggins shot him a startled look, his face lit by the dashboard lights, his freckles gleaming.
“We smoked a couple of joints and had a couple of beers, man. Maybe six beers each. Well, no more than eight, anyhow. What’d you do, black out or something?”
“No. But you’re sure it was just weed?”
“What’d you think, I bought some fentanyl-laced shit or something? Come on.”
Aaron was almost disappointed. He’d wanted to hear about a pill or a rock or even a syringe, the type of drugs he’d sworn never to try. Wanted to hear any excuse for what had scrambled his brains so badly today.
“What happened?” Riggins said. He turned down the volume on Shooter.
The pain was rising from Aaron’s foot, climbing his spine, and poking at the base of his skull. Maybe this had been a mistake. Maybe he should’ve taken another Tylenol and turned off the lights and gone to bed.
“It was weird, man,” he said.
“Explain.”
“I can’t. It was just… I guess I didn’t remember last night all that well.”
“Bullshit, Ellsworth. What’s going on?”
Aaron didn’t answer right away. The road rolled along, dead fields and leafless trees fading into the high black hills. Everything looked bone white in the headlights; everything would look gray in the day. Winter in the Catskills was often a two-tone color scheme.
It was too early for winter, though. The trees were leafless only because of the unremitting rains, which had stripped the hills of their autumn colors.
“Aaron? You look like hell, man. Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I had a… premonition, I think. That’s probably what it was. Or at least it’s the way I should look at it.”
“A premo…” Riggins slowed the truck, staring at him. “What did you take last night?”
“Weed and beer, evidently. And then a ride to jail. And then a ride home with my dad. Then I went swimming.”
“Swimming?”
Aaron nodded. “Out in the tailwaters, the way I always used to when I was kid. Start with the current, then swim back against it. I always made it, back then. No matter the weather. I didn’t today, and then I cut my foot halfway to the bone, and then I… I think that I had a premonition.” This sounded right. He hadn’t considered the idea before, but now he liked it. A premonition sounded almost plausible, much like his excuse at the hospital about going into shock. This one was better, though. This one felt more plausible and less desperate.
“What’d you see
?” Riggins asked. “Anything we can lay a bet on down at the Iroquois casino?”
Aaron ignored the sarcasm. “I saw that I’m going to hurt someone. If I keep going like I have been, I am going to hurt someone. I might not mean to do it, but I’ll do it just the same.”
“Oh, you’re not gonna hurt anybody. Unless they ask for it, at least. You’re not the type to start a fight. Seen you end a couple, but you don’t start ’em.”
“It won’t be a fight,” Aaron said. “I’m not sure what it’ll be. But I know it’s going to happen. Today I thought that it already had.”
“Today you woke up in jail. It’s not a great feeling. You’ll get over it.”
Aaron should’ve known that Riggins wouldn’t understand. The night road rolled on, and at length Aaron spoke again.
“I’m going to be out of town for a bit.”
“What do you mean, out of town?”
“Going somewhere to dry out. It’s past time.”
“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me. You’re not talking some Amy Winehouse bullshit, are you? Aaron…”
“It’s past time,” Aaron repeated.
Riggins didn’t speak until they reached a stop sign. Then, with the big Dodge idling, he looked over with disappointment.
“That’s your sheriff daddy talking,” he said. “That’s him, not you.”
“Maybe,” Aaron said. “Either way, I’m gonna listen.”
Riggins groaned and turned away, shaking his head as he hammered the accelerator. They pulled on down the road, on toward the Chill, and Aaron thought about what he’d just said and remembered what he’d written in the old Coast Guard psychology book, that gift from his mother, and suddenly his throat was tight and his eyes stung.
Listen to the water, he’d written, and while that was a child’s fantasy of heroism, maybe it hadn’t been terrible advice, either. He’d been riding toward trouble for too long, and today he’d awoken to that. He’d needed to go to the water for that to happen.
I miss my mom, he thought, a child’s thought if ever there was one, and yet deeply honest. Oh, how he missed his mother.
“You’re no addict,” Riggins grumbled at his side. “Not even close. You choose to have fun, that’s all. It was a bad night, a fluke. Don’t go taking yourself so seriously or letting your old man convince you to.”
They were closing in on the Chill now, the fields no longer visible, the woods crowding the road, which wound uphill on narrow S curves.
“I might not be an addict,” Aaron said, “but after what I saw today, I definitely don’t need any—”
“Damn!” Riggins shouted, swerving at the same time, and Aaron saw the flash of a white SUV’s hood, and for an instant he was certain that they were going to strike it head-on and he was going to die while his father sat awake watching the clock.
Then the big Dodge was fishtailing to a stop, ribbons of rubber left on the asphalt behind them.
“Son of a bitch! I thought that fucker was on the road, coming at us!” Riggins shouted.
Only then did Aaron look in the side-view mirror and see that the SUV was actually parked on the shoulder. Or what was supposed to be the shoulder. The trees were packed in close.
“I did, too,” Aaron said. “If you hadn’t been doing Mach Five through the curves, though, it might not…”
He stopped talking, twisted in his seat, and stared through the rear window.
“That’s his car,” he said. His voice was quiet in the cab, buried beneath Shooter Jennings’s wailing, and Riggins was already pulling away.
“Whose car?” Riggins asked indifferently.
Aaron didn’t answer. He kept facing backward, looking at the white SUV. A Honda Pilot. He remembered it well. He and his father had stared at that car while they waited in the rain for the police to come down and take Aaron to jail.
“Go back,” he said.
“What?”
“Back up, all right? I want to get a clear look.”
“Another premonition? Maybe you do need rehab.”
“Just let me have a look, damn it.”
Riggins sighed, stopped the Dodge, and threw it in reverse. He backed up too fast, and one of the rear tires lost the pavement and plowed a furrow through the mud, spinning damp brown leaves into the air. Then they chunked back onto the road with a jarring bounce and Riggins brought them to a stop beside the Honda. Aaron put his window down and stared down at the Honda from the elevated position of the truck.
“Gimme your phone.”
“What’s the matter with you, man?”
Aaron just extended his hand. Riggins sighed and slapped his phone into Aaron’s palm. Aaron clicked on the flashlight app and shined the light down. The Honda was empty, but an iPad and a leather-bound folder rested on the passenger seat. The same things Mick Fleming had carried.
He looked away from the car and out into the woods. White birches and dark oaks cast spindly shadows that were then swallowed up by the crowded pines that grew thick along the steep banks. Somewhere below, the tailwaters rushed downstream, out of sight but audible.
He felt a prickle along the back of his neck, a cold, mocking fear, as if something out there in the darkness were watching him with amusement.
“The hell is he doing out here at midnight?” he whispered.
“Who?” Riggins bellowed.
Some instinct told Aaron that the sound was too loud and that they shouldn’t linger. His interest in the car was gone; all he wanted now was out of here. Get the truck and get home. Forget that he’d seen this.
Because Riggins saw it, too. How’s that premonition theory working out?
He snapped a picture. The flash popped brightly. He leaned out the window, feeling vulnerable the farther he extended himself into the night, and took another, making sure to get the license plate in this one.
“What the hell are you doing?” Riggins demanded.
Aaron couldn’t begin to explain it. The clean feeling of accepting his own mental breakdown had been good, in a terrible way. But here he sat with Riggins, both of them seeing the Honda Pilot parked in the lonely woods above the Dead Waters in the middle of the night.
Something was wrong, and it wasn’t just with Aaron’s mind.
“Not important, Riggs,” he muttered. “Just get me back to my truck so I can get home.”
“Talk to me, Aaron.”
“Let’s go.”
“Screw that, man. Tell me what’s going on. You made me drive back here so you can take a photo of a—”
“Let’s go!” Aaron shouted.
Riggins’s eyes widened, but not with anger. It was as if he’d seen something in Aaron that unnerved him. It was an expression not that different from the one Aaron had seen on his father’s face when the man named Mick Fleming came walking out of the woods and told them that none of Aaron’s memories were real.
Same car. Same man. What’s he doing in the woods at midnight?
While Riggins drove to the dam, Aaron emailed the photos to himself. He wasn’t sure what he intended to do with them, but he was glad to have them. Something felt wrong out here. With Mick Fleming and with the Chill. With the night itself, the skies finally clearing, but the earth still soaked from days of pounding rain, the trees emptied far too early, winter rushing in where it didn’t belong.
When Riggins pulled into the parking lot, Aaron suddenly didn’t want to get out of the truck. Not down here at the Chill, in this place where once he’d honed skill and built confidence, and where now he no longer trusted himself.
Or maybe it was the place itself that he no longer trusted.
“Okay, boss, there’s your damn truck,” Riggins said. “Listen, go home and sleep it off, okay? Don’t do any dumb bullshit your dad’s been in your ear about. Today got off to a bad start, and it only got worse for you. But don’t take that too seriously.”
Again Aaron saw the bottle burst above Mick Fleming’s eye socket; again he saw the current tug the bleeding and unconsci
ous man into the water and sweep him downstream.
“Right,” he said. “I won’t take it too seriously.”
“Gimme a call in the morning, then. We’ll hit the gym, okay? Nothing else. Clean all-American workout. You can be a good boy.”
“Right,” Aaron said again. “Thanks for the ride.”
When he climbed out of the truck, he almost fell. He’d taken only two limping steps toward his father’s Silverado before Riggins was peeling out in the Dodge, the back tires spitting mud and gravel. Too late, Aaron realized he’d left his crutch in the bed of the truck. He hollered at Riggins to wait, but Riggins didn’t hear him over the sounds of the engine and Shooter Jennings.
“I’m gettin’ D-R-U-N-K!”
Aaron stood in the gravel lot and watched his friend drive away and then turned and stared up at the massive shadow of the dam that held back the Chilewaukee Reservoir. The roar from the adjacent spillway was ceaseless as water thundered down.
A roar so loud he could scarcely hear the voice in the woods.
It was faint but audible, and it came from downstream. A man’s voice, conversational, but the conversation seemed one-sided, because there was only the one voice.
Aaron took a few limping steps downstream, straining to hear the words. They cut in and out like a phone with a bad connection.
Of course, I understand…
Mountains pillaged, cities fed…
Do they heed the warning? No. Not back then and not today. In fact, Mrs. Mathers, it’s probably worse today…
Alarms must be sounded. I agree…
Get their attention? It’s not so easy as the…
Explain that. Tell me what you mean.
That’s not an alarm. That’s…
The spillway roar washed the next words away. Aaron hobbled forward again. On all of his night swims down here, he’d never felt so alone. The height of the dam and the cacophonous sound of the spillway and the black night itself shrunk the world to the sound of the big water and of the faint voice.
He stumbled over a slab of bluestone and almost fell, kept upright with an effort, and then came around a copse of young birches and saw Mick Fleming.