The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  PRIEST: I’m sorry? I wasn’t listening.

  MAYNARD: Those egg things — that you mix up [eggs with] . . .

  PRIEST: Eggbeaters?

  MAYNARD: Yeah — eggbeaters.

  Eventually Tommy Maynard called for a sit-down at the Haunted Mortar and Pestle Inn on Martha’s Vineyard (the so-called Haunted Mortar and Pestle Conference), where the various factions of the syndicate united to remind Carlo the Pliers that they were capitalists and not Jesuits, and that the uncertainty about whether the Records were serious about crime — whether they were in it for the long term — was hurting them with local distributors and had been partly to blame for the murder of the Record Family bludgeon worker Nicholas “Monkey Bars” Scoda while he was shopping for fall clothes in Stamford. In response, Carlo the Pliers revealed that he had become dependent on antihistamines and that this had shaded his judgment, and he renewed his commitment to making the Record syndicate the top crime family in New England. After that, everyone was visibly relieved and went down to the beach for gin and tonics.

  Paul knew all these things, or he could have found them out by reading the newspapers, but still he agreed to have dinner with Carlo Record at a restaurant called the Terrapin down in Madrid. He made no excuses to himself— he was young enough, at twenty-seven, to believe that he could deal in crime as an existential experiment that would not be written against his name — but had he wanted to make excuses, he could have borrowed them from his associates at Clovis, Luken & Pitch, which had been the accounting firm for New England Amusements for many years. One of the excuses had three parts: (1) If Carlo Record was indicted, he would be regarded as innocent until proven guilty; (2) but Carlo had never been indicted; (3) therefore, Carlo must be regarded as extra-innocent. A second excuse took the form of the murderous-cousin analogy, which had been explained to Paul by the senior partner Jack Chance. He and Paul had gone walking one afternoon out by the hurricane barrier. Chance’s feet moved slowly and his hands held a small silver cross inlaid with tablets of lapis lazuli. “Let’s talk about that,” he said. “Say some guy is planning to murder his cousin. He goes to his family doctor, says, ‘Doc, you’ve got to help me. I need some poison to put in my cousin’s soft drink.’ What should the doctor do?”

  “Call the cops?” said Paul.

  “Of course,” said Chance. “A child would say the same thing. But let’s imagine a second scenario. Same guy goes into the doctor’s, same plan to kill his cousin, but this time he doesn’t mention it, because he’s got a bad appendix and he’s too sick to talk”

  “You have to treat him just like you would anyone who is sick,” said Paul.

  “This is equally true,” said Chance. “And for answering both questions correctly — not everyone does — you are rewarded.” He held out the cross; it dangled on a black cord.

  Paul drove down to Madrid, which was seventeen miles from his hometown. Along the way he encountered forests and lakes and hand-painted signs — LOP RABBITS FOR SALE — and vast sod farms offering flat vistas of endless green. Madrid was an inland village in a country of fire. Burned businesses lined the road: a tavern, an auto-body shop, an inn. The blackened timbers and fallen roofs and melted fixtures remained, they had not been bulldozed and carried away, and these charred artifacts in the gathering gloom seemed to underscore not only the failure of the Madrid Fire Department, if there was one, but also the bankruptcy of the dream of camaraderie associated with restaurants, taverns, and hotels.

  Paul arrived at the Terrapin, a white plaster building with exposed framing painted brown. A neon sign glowed in the window. Fall was coming, and the air smelled of grass and the highway. Inside, red lanterns made islands of light, and a glazed slab over a wide doorway carried the inscription FATE CANNOT HARM ME FOR I HAVE DINED WELL. Paul took a table, the only customer. A ceramic bowl offered graham crackers with the image of a turtle baked into the surface.

  A waiter came over. One of his ears was missing or deformed. “Mr. Record has called to say he will be late and that you should go ahead and order your dinner.”

  “Does he live nearby?”

  “Mr. Record says go ahead and order.”

  “Where does he live?” said Paul.

  The waiter laid heavy silverware on the wooden table. “You must mean his Nova Scotia house. He had it taken apart in Nova Scotia and shipped down here on trucks.”

  “Why?”

  “Struck his fancy, I guess. The people didn’t want to sell, but then they had a change of heart.”

  Paul ordered fried calamari, clear chowder, and red wine. The wine rose like leaf smoke in his head. Soon the season would change and the wind would blow, and what place was there in the ever-restoring world for fear of a criminal? And he liked restaurants that served clear chowders. Many restaurants skipped it in favor of the gluey white chowder or the unconvincing red chowder. All of Paul’s cooking knowledge had to do with chowder. He knew, for example, that the first chowder recipe known to appear in North America consisted of a poem printed in the Boston Evening Post in the fall of 1751: “Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory and Thyme / Then Biscuit next which must be soak’d some Time.”

  Paul looked out the window. The sky was fading, and a pond glinted purple at the bottom of a hill. He punched songs into a satellite jukebox and ate the haywire tentacles of the calamari. Record arrived twenty minutes after Paul finished his supper. He sat down and rested on the table the artificial arm, which gave him an air of technical ingenuity. Then he picked up the wine bottle with his hook and read the label. Paul understood now why they called him the Pliers. What had seemed at first glance to be a single tubular hook was in fact two hooks that moved apart and together at Record’s discretion.

  “I’ve read about you,” said Paul.

  Record yawned. “I can’t wake up tonight,” he said. “A lot of what you hear is composed of half-truth and innuendo. The media toss around terms like ‘stooge’ and ‘henchman’ and ‘mob connections.’ I don’t know any stooges. Are you a stooge?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad,” said Record. “Then I could see what one was.”

  “I read that you started out with a carnival game.”

  Record slung his hook over the back of the booth. “It was called Flash-A-Color,” he said. “A ball rolled down a chute onto a table of colored squares, and the players bet on the color where the ball would land when it stopped rolling. That’s all that happened in the whole game. It was just after the war, and people were in the mood for lighthearted entertainment. They wanted to have a good time with no bones about it. Everything I have today follows in one way or another from the game. Now, I say ‘everything I have,’ but I myself don’t have much. New England Amusements is a privately owned holding company chartered in the state of Delaware and the British Virgin Islands. Its interests include shipping, feldspar, vineyards, trash compaction, sweaters, hydropower, miniature golf, circuit boards, oysters, clams, shad, flounder, rubber, and camping equipment. This restaurant is owned by Nonpareil Enterprises, which is a subsidiary of New England Amusements. Our chefs are named Mick and Nick.”

  “Food service looks easy to the novice investor, but you have to be canny to survive,” said Paul.

  “I’ve always been canny,” said Record.

  “I hope the place has insurance,” said Paul. “There are a lot of fires down this way.”

  “It gets very dry.”

  A young man strolled into the Terrapin wearing tasseled leather shoes and a light blue linen suit.

  “This is my son,” said Record. “Carlo Junior.”

  “Call me Bobby” said Record’s son. He turned a chair backward and sat down at the end of the booth. He had a cleanly shaven face and bright, unguarded eyes.

  “That’s his stage name,” said Carlo.

  “Are you an actor?” said Paul.

 
; “I’m a dancer,” said Bobby. “I’ve thought about acting, though. You’re the second person to mention that lately.”

  “I always think that dancing must be pretty competitive,” said Paul.

  “That’s your take on everything,” said Carlo.

  “My job is to have that take.”

  “He’s right, though,” said Bobby. “Especially when it comes to popular dance, which is what I do. It’s a paradox. Popular means ‘that which everybody likes,’ right? But try to think of some venues where you’ve seen popular dance recently. See what I mean? There just aren’t that many.”

  “Well,” said Paul, “by popular dance,’ you mean . . . not ballet, for example . . .”

  “That’s a good question,” said Bobby. “Not ballet, not jazz, not folk, not square dance. But don’t be misled, because it contains elements of them.”

  “When you call him and his girlfriend,” Carlo said to Paul, “it always seems like they’re either about to dance or else they’ve just stopped.”

  “What about tap dancing?”

  Bobby nodded earnestly. “There’s some tap.”

  “There’s a good deal of tap, if you ask me,” said Carlo. “But then he has a regular job too. He’s in the contract department at New England Amusements.”

  “That’s my day gig,” said Bobby.

  Carlo handed his son a graham cracker from the white ceramic bowl. “I always told him to chase his dream,” he said. “I chased mine, so I know it can be done. And if this is his dream, then so be it. It may not be my first choice, but he works hard at it, I can tell you that. Show Paul that funny dance you do.”

  Bobby looked puzzled. “Which one?”

  “That funny one you did the other night.”

  “Oh, O.K.,” said Bobby.

  Carlo Record put a quarter in the jukebox. Bobby removed his jacket, shoes, and socks. His feet emerged big and white from the cuffs of his blue slacks.

  “It’s all talk until you see him,” said Record.

  Vinyl crackled on the sound system, followed by the hammering chords of “Cinnamon Girl,” and for the song’s duration Bobby Record danced crazily around the restaurant. He slapped his knees, jumped on chairs, swung from ceiling beams. His bare feet thundered on the floorboards. The cooks and waiters stood watching from the door of the kitchen. “Hey, Junior’s dancing,” someone said. When the song ended Bobby froze with outstretched arms that rose and fell with his panting. Then he came back to the booth drying his brow with a handkerchief. Paul clapped and Record rapped his hook on the edge of the table.

  “That is something else,” said Paul.

  “He used to go to dancing camp,” said Record.

  “But try,” said Bobby, “just try . . . to get paid . . . for it . . . Somebody order me a beer . . .”

  Carlo Record walked Paul to the door. Outside in the darkness the neon sign laid a green film on the parking lot. “When you run a restaurant you discover that nothing is simple. Now let me thank you for coming to see us.” He reached into his shirt pocket with his hook and brought out a red ticket. “Please accept a coupon.”

  Paul raised his hands. “You don’t have to.”

  “Of course not. Only from the heart. If you buy one entrée, the second is free.” Paul put the ticket in his pocket.

  “And one more thing,” said Carlo. “I got a burlap sack laying around here somewhere. Here it is. You take this and come with me down to the pond.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got turtle lines.”

  They walked together down the grassy hill in the moonlight. “When I catch turtle, the cooks make soup,” said Record. “The customers love it. They love that turtle soup.”

  The little man walked around the edge of the pond, kneeling here and there to pluck lines with his fingers. He had something on one of the lines and began reeling it in — pulling on the filament with his good hand and stepping on the line before it could slide back into the water.

  “What is it?” said Paul. “Is it a snag?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Carlo.

  A snapping turtle crawled from the black water, its horned tail tracing a furrow in the sand. Carlo dropped the line and knelt to wave the hook before the turtle’s marbled eyes. The animal appeared to consider the metallic flash and then hit with terrible speed. The jaws clamped the hook with a leathery thud, and Carlo dragged the turtle up the bank. He wrestled the catch into the burlap sack and tied the neck with twine.

  He worked very efficiently, and Paul could see how natural the hook was for him after all this time.

  6

  Paul left the Terrapin and drove over to his parents’ place in Verona. Shining blacktop rose and fell between yellow lines and banks of trees. His parents lived outside of town on a former dairy farm. They had never farmed, but Paul’s mother’s parents had grown corn and raised cattle. Over the years, most of the farm had been sold off for subdivisions but ten acres had been retained in two parcels on either side of the house.

  The yard light shone on Uncle Bernard’s wide and sagging Buick in the driveway. Uncle Bernard had changed his life the year before, at the news of his son Lane’s suicide in California; he had retired early from the Boston police and left his wife, Triphena, and now he visited Paul’s parents despondently on weekends. Bernard carried letters from Lane in his beret, and he would stop in the middle of a conversation and take one out, unfold it — it would be folded very small — and read it silently. Then he would put the letter away and speak softly to himself. This sort of thing made everyone cringe, but of course no one would say anything

  Paul remembered Lane as an eccentric and sometimes cruel figure, but this is how he remembered all his cousins, and for that matter his brothers and sisters and his parents. So he had to wonder about his memory Paul had visited Lane in Arlington once when they were both teenagers, and they had gone out after dark to hide behind a hedge and throw tomatoes at cars. Lane did this all the time, or said he did, and the drivers could never figure out what had hit them or from where. But on this night a man in a red Mustang slammed on the brakes, jumped out of his car, and made for the hedge where the boys were hiding. The man might have been as old as thirty, and Paul and Lane were thirteen, and they ran from him with the awful knowledge that he would kill them, break them in half, tear their heads off, if he caught them. Paul and Lane split up, and Paul jumped a fence into the yard of a house that happened to have an unlocked back door. In the kitchen he found a girl of ten or eleven, a girl with straight red hair and gently crossed eyes, who said, “Who are you?” A promotional clock for the Rival Dog Food company ticked on the wall by the refrigerator. Paul told her the truth. The girl listened carefully and then locked and bolted the doors of the house. She led Paul to a large sunken living room, where they sat on a couch and watched a television show about panthers in the wild as if they had been doing this all along. Soon the doorbell began ringing and then the face of the man whose car had been hit with tomatoes appeared in the windows of the sunken room, looking so red and contorted that Paul thought it might burn up as old rags sometimes will in a barn. The girl walked to the windows — resourcefully, Paul thought — and closed the curtains.

  Paul told Uncle Bernard and Aunt Triphena this story after Lane’s suicide, giving the incident a carefree slant. Bernard said that it was easy to get in trouble and hard to get out.

  Now Paul’s father, Maurice, was trying to interest Bernard in short-wave radio. They sat together in a little room off the kitchen. Maurice Nash had worked for the Providence & Worcester Railroad until they closed the depot at Verona, and now in retirement he had become a ham operator. An antenna climbed the side of the house like a ladder, and whenever there was bad weather anywhere in the world, or even on the surface of the sun, Paul’s father would be up late exchanging information with people in ot
her countries. He had been a semiprofessional boxer earlier in his life, but this experience had not left him with an expert’s wariness of using his hands on amateurs. Once when Paul was young his father had fought the mailman, and after that the family had to rent a box at the post office in the village.

  “What should I say?” said Bernard, with earphones clamped over his beret.

  “Say hello,” said Paul’s father. “Say whatever you feel like saying. That’s the fun of it. Kotka speaks English. It’s the international language of hams.”

  “Hello, Kotka,” said Bernard. “What? . . . No . . . this is my brother’s radio . . . my brother . . . Maurice . . . Maurice is my brother . . . I don’t have a radio of my own . . . what? . . . well, that’s what Maurice says, but it’s hard for me to think of hobbies since my son died . . . my son . . . Lane . . . it’s a family name . . . yes, exactly . . . you see, he moved to California and I believe that was his big mistake . . . well, it’s all true from what I’ve seen . . . all they say and worse . . . I will despise that state until my dying day . . . I went out there and tried to persuade him to come home . . . everything so phony in California . . . we saw the Rose Parade but I could not talk to him, he would not listen . . .”

  Paul said hello to his father, waved to Bernard, and went upstairs to find his mother, Diana. She sat at a dressing table in her room doing a jigsaw puzzle. Her shoulders bent to the table and her hair fell in gray waves over the pieces. “Did you see your father? This puzzle is the Tulip Festival in a place called Pella.”

  “Dad and Bern are messing around with the radio,” said Paul.

  “Poor Bernard. He stays up all night smoking and in the morning I find his heaping ashtrays.”

  “I have something to tell you,” said Paul. “I’m married now. I got married in New Bedford.”

  She looked up with a puzzle piece in her hand. “Why didn’t you invite us?”

  “It was a civil ceremony,” said Paul. “Have you found the corner pieces?”