The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  “I call this chessgammon,” he said.

  The owl sighed deeply, and a feather floated out of the cage.

  Paul caught the owl feather in his hand. “Why don’t you knock off early?” he asked the owl.

  He went upstairs to his old room. The hallway was lined with built-in cabinets, and he recalled hiding in one of them with his sister Carmen. He remembered hot black air and the corrosive smell of mothballs. Her breath whispered in his ear and toy handcuffs dug into their wrists. Maybe he would go to Racine and surprise her on opening night of this wax play. It was hard to believe that any two people could have been that small.

  He opened the cabinet door as if expecting to find Carmen and himself. Instead, there were towels and candlesticks and a book called The Beginner’s Handbook of Amateur Radio.

  Paul undressed and got into his childhood bed, which stood wooden and cinnamon-colored in a corner of the room. Anything could happen from now on. He had been in over his head, but the meaning of lost things was that they could be regained. For what was America but a place where those who had crossed the laws and customs of a given community could go somewhere else and blend in? He had been called amoral by the lawyers of gangsters and had been glad that they said “amoral” rather than “immoral.” To be amoral was not to be evil but merely to march to a different drum. When he and Mary had set out their garbage in Providence, Scratch the cat would cock her head warily on seeing the garbage bags — “What are these?” she seemed to be saying with that look. “I don’t recall such things before” — and Paul thought the amoral person responded to the concept of goodness the same way Scratch did to garbage bags, as something foreign but worthy of consideration. Even the judge had called him a selfish witness. Her stern remark was supposed to offset or justify her approval of the plea agreement, yet it was true that he had always felt chosen without any particular evidence. But he imagined that everyone felt chosen, and why wouldn’t they? Nature is full of chaos that appears to be ordination.

  He turned on a gooseneck lamp and leafed through the radio book. Quizzes followed chapters:

  38. What may happen to body tissues that are exposed to large amounts of rf energy?

  A. The tissue may be damaged because of the heat produced

  B. The tissue may suddenly be frozen

  C. The tissue may be immediately destroyed because of the Maxwell effect

  D. The tissue may become less resistant to cosmic radiation.

  Some time later he woke thinking he had heard voices. In his heart there still existed that old nighttime anticipation. But it was only his mother cursing the cat. Paul pulled on jeans and a shirt and went downstairs. The cat had wrestled a rabbit into the mud room. Beside a Kiwi shoeshine kit the rabbit had turned into a statue. Its ears quivered and its black eyes shone. Meanwhile, the cat hugged the floor in a killing trance.

  “Is this one of yours?” said Paul.

  “Not yet, anyhow,” said Diana.

  Paul nudged the cat aside with his foot, took the rabbit by the neck, and carried it outside. Detecting motion, the porch lamp flooded the yard with stark light. Paul released the rabbit and watched it hop tentatively down the walk.

  “Run away,” he said.

  Diana came outside carrying the cat and two cans of beer. She let the cat go. The light went out after a while and they sat in the dark on the back steps drinking the beers.

  “I was so proud when you were a special witness,” said Diana. “Isn’t that strange?”

  “I’d say it was wicked strange.”

  “I honestly believe I was prouder of you than I was of Fred when he was named Realtor of the Year.”

  “Don’t tell Fred that.”

  “I can’t account for it,” said Diana. “I find that the older I get, the less I can account for.”

  The next afternoon Paul said goodbye to his mother and father, took the cat and a woven rug for it to ride on, and drove west. There was no good way to cut across Rhode Island and Connecticut. There were quiet, empty towns and churches with onion domes but no divided highways. It was hot and the sunlight shone sharp as a spike. A skunk had been hit near a Bible camp, and picking up the scent, Scratch sat up and opened her mouth, revealing the bone needles of her teeth.

  “Don’t do that,” said Paul. “Close your mouth.”

  10

  The revived Fury floated into Ashland, Connecticut, where a faded orange billboard called the town the Former Match Capital of the World. Padded black and yellow bumpers guarded the loading docks of flesh-colored corrugated warehouses. A bright and empty Chinese restaurant stood among dim stores that would never sell many of their inspirational books, their golden-oak chairs, their tiny prisms hung by threads.

  Then came a series of identical brick buildings on a hill with zigzag rooflines and a row of windows glowing with green light. This was Ashland Fastener and Binder, the factory of Loom’s family, the Hanovers.

  Nearer the center of town he passed a row of big houses with steep blue lawns and multipaned windows reflecting the leaves of trees. On the porch of one of the houses a woman stood dressed in white, gripping a croquet mallet with the head tucked under her chin. In the fading light of afternoon the mysterious woman seemed to represent to Paul the possibility that things could begin to happen in a new town.

  He drove along a dark lake bordered by a park, where a bronze statue of an ancient Greek stood with his back to the water, arms out, palms up, as if to say, “I can’t find the lake.”

  Light towers rose over a rust-red stadium called Paraffin Park. Paul eased his car into the lot and walked into the stadium. He found a baseball game in progress between the Ashland Matches and the Tigers of Roscoe, Ontario. He bought a paper cup full of beer and a pretzel with large salt granules on it and took a seat on the third-base line.

  A home run could land in the lake — that was part of the fun. The Tigers stole bases recklessly, without regard to the likelihood of being thrown out. Their third baseman was a massive lefty named Billy Trautbeck, who during the course of the game banged two line drives to right, both hauled in, and threw himself on grounders with abandon.

  There were hundreds of fans on weathered green benches. Paul had not been to a baseball game in ten years, but he had no trouble placing the voices of the crowd: the man who had played a little ball himself once upon a time; the woman who kept a scorecard and constantly asked her neighbors, “What happened — did he strike out — what just happened?”; the retiree who knew all the rules and shouted lots of rule-based advice.

  Then Paul heard another voice, one he could not place, a boy’s voice that wove the usual encouragements with the names of players into an eerie and songlike lament that reminded him of the prayer call of the muezzin, which he and Mary had heard once on a television special about the Saudi Arabian city of Medina.

  A foul ball arced into the stands; Paul retrieved it from under a bench. In a moment, a girl in a Matches uniform climbed the bleachers and took it back.

  During the seventh-inning stretch Paul found the boy with the unusual cheer. He sat in a wheelchair at the end of an aisle, attended by a woman with a headband and a flower-print dress. The boy leaned forward, blond hair jutting from his forehead, wrists resting on the red railing. He had a direct and canted gaze like that of the young Orson Welles and wore a baseball glove on his left hand. Now a dozen children stepped onto the field to take part in a promotion sponsored by a car dealership. The crippled boy watched as the kids ran across the outfield grass.

  What had been a close game dissolved in errors and pitching changes in the eighth inning, and Paul left the stands to walk through Paraffin Park, where three boys slouched at the base of the Greek statue. “Tourists, tourists, they suck. Bring your daughters so we can fuck,” one of the boys chanted. He wore a Yale sweatshirt over camouflage pants with such vivid markings that
it was hard to imagine the foliage among which they would blend in.

  “You’ve got your pronouns mixed up,” Paul said. “You refer to tourists as ‘they,’ right, so you can’t be addressing them directly. But then you get to the ‘Bring your daughters’ part, and it all breaks down. We don’t know whose daughters you’re talking about.”

  “Of the tourists.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not clear.”

  “The stranger’s right,” said a second boy, who sat crosslegged on the grass with metallic bands encircling his upper arms. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “How about this?” said the first boy. “Tourists, tourists, et cetera. If they bring their daughters, then we can fuck.”

  “Better,” said Paul, “but it lacks impact. ‘If they bring their daughters’ — see what I mean? You’re just sort of musing about the pros and cons of tourists. Like, if they bring a net, you can play volleyball.”

  “Tourists, tourists . . . Now I forgot what I was going to say.”

  “Work on it,” said Paul. “I’m looking for a guy named Loom Hanover.”

  “Hanovers are murderers,” said the boy on the grass.

  “How’s that?” said Paul.

  “Match mouth,” said the boy.

  “Match mouth?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Where does he live?” said Paul.

  “You can see it from here.” The boy stood, moved around the statue, and pointed across the water. “Well, not the house. You can see the dock anyway. They live across String Lake, up in the trees. What you want to do is drive into town and around the lake. Look for the invisible-fence sign. They don’t want anything to do with the rest of us.”

  “How do you know him?” said the boy who had made the tourist rhyme.

  “We went to college together,” said Paul. “Once Loom and I went out to kick a football in a lightning storm in Canada.”

  “We don’t care about that,” said the one with iron vines growing on his biceps.

  String Lake twisted narrowly into the center of Ashland, and the road followed the shore only at intervals, so that what had sounded like a short drive took a long time. The town gave the impression of being a stage set for a play that had closed nineteen years before. Old mannequins wore sequined gowns in the brightly lit window of an otherwise dark store.

  Loom lived in the country. A paved driveway climbed from the road to a large and many-gabled house covered with silver shakes. Round pillars rose from a stone porch, rafters jutted from the edges of the roof, and thick supporting beams crossed beneath the peak of the gables. There were three stories, counting the cupola, with an arbored courtyard beside.

  Paul parked and let the cat out. He knocked on the front door but no one answered, so he walked around the house and down the grass to the lake. A wooden rowboat floated beneath a dock light. He untied the boat, rowed out in the lake, and let the boat drift. He found fishing tackle beneath the seats and cast a treble-hooked spoon with an old Johnson reel the color of shiny green flies. He was not much of a fisherman but he did like casting, letting the lure’s weight do its work.

  The lights of Ashland ringed the northern end of String Lake, and the southern end receded in darkness. After a while the rod bent and line raced out and Paul messed with the drag and the line broke. He rigged the line again, caught a fish and let it go, then worked his way slowly back to Loom’s dock. A dark and overgrown cottage stood north of the Hanovers’ house, but because of the treeline Loom and Alice would never have to look at it.

  The night manager of the Coltsfoot Motel was an old man in a maroon sweatshirt. It encouraged Paul for no good reason when old people wore sweatshirts. He imagined them rising before dawn and lifting carefully folded sweatshirts from modest dressers.

  Another customer came in, carrying a videotape and dressed in a red western shirt with white piping and black shoulders. Paul wondered what the man could be planning, short of an actual rodeo appearance, that would call for such a shirt.

  “The TV doesn’t work in room sixteen,” said the customer.

  “What’s it doing?” said the night manager.

  “It isn’t doing anything, it’s broken,” said the man in the cowboy shirt. “I’ve rented a video. It’s supposed to be an erotic thriller.”

  “Try room twenty-seven,” said the night manager. To Paul, he said, “Are you here for the Lager Festival?”

  “I’m looking for work,” said Paul.

  “I just came from the drinking contest,” said the man in the red shirt.

  “How did that go?” said the night manager.

  “Fun.” The man went out with a different key.

  “The Lager Festival evolved from Old Bobbin Days,” said the night manager, “which evolved in turn from Old Match Days.”

  “Do you know what match mouth is?” said Paul.

  “Certainly,” said the night manager. He straightened. “The workers in the factory were breathing straight phosphorus. Quite right. My grandfather died of match mouth.”

  “Sounds awful.”

  “I don’t really remember him. They say he was quick with a joke.”

  The night manager raised a hinged slab of counter and led Paul down a hallway lit with sconces. He pointed to old photographs on the wall.

  “That’s the train station,” he said. “That’s when they used to race across the lake on skates. That’s my father and me; I’m on the sled. That’s the opera house after the flood.” They came finally to a small silver and white console. The night manager opened the lid. “This is the ice,” he said.

  “Listen, I have a cat,” said Paul.

  “I have no way of knowing that.”

  Paul’s room was on the second floor of the motel. He turned on the television, got into bed, and fell asleep. When he woke up, an old movie was playing. Two men in naval uniforms stood on either side of a table with a terrier on it. Paul wondered why black-and-white movies always seemed louder than color movies. Then he heard a key turning in the lock. The cat jumped from the top of the television and ran into the bathroom. The door opened and a woman flopped into a chair. “He’s asleep. He’s finally asleep, Billy.”

  “You have the wrong room,” said Paul.

  “Billy?”

  Paul turned on a lamp beside the bed.

  The woman seemed fascinated. “My mistake.”

  “What does ‘pedigree’ mean, anyway?” said one of the men on the TV. “Does it stem from the root word ‘pet’?”

  “Can I turn this down?” said the woman.

  “By all means.”

  “I’m looking for Billy Trautbeck. Are you on the team? You’re the second baseman.”

  “No, but I was at the game tonight.”

  “Well, I’m at the game every night,” said the woman. She closed her eyes and folded her hands between her knees. “I’m from Ontario, and I really want to go home. But Billy keeps saying ‘One more game.’ It’s all because of my son. My name is Barbara and my son’s name is Keith. He can’t walk, but he loves baseball.”

  “I think I saw you. Do you have a wheelchair?”

  “Keith does.” Barbara sighed. “It all started when he met Billy Trautbeck at a souvenir show at the shopping center in Roscoe. This was ten days ago. I don’t know what was said exactly, but evidently Billy promised to hit a home run for Keith at the game that night. But it didn’t happen. In fact, he didn’t hit anything out of the infield. He chose just that moment to go into a slump. In the last couple days he’s started to make contact again, but it’s killing him to have let Keith down. I keep telling him it doesn’t matter, but he insists that we follow him on the road until he hits one out. We’ve been to Kankakee and Lafayette and now here.”

  “Maybe you could just read the sports page.”

&
nbsp; “I think I could have called it off, early on,” said Barbara. “But now he’s too deep in the slump. I’m wasting my vacation time and my sick time, it’s almost gone, all of it, and for what? Although today he hit some that seemed sure to go out. I grabbed Keith and said, ‘Watch, honey, we’re going home.”

  “But they stayed in.”

  “Yes.”

  A loud sound came from outside the room. Paul dressed quickly and he and Barbara stepped out onto the motel terrace.Down in the parking lot a man sat in the open door of a car lighting firecrackers and flipping them on the pavement, where they went off around his feet.

  “This place is like a cheap circus,” said Barbara.

  “What do you know about dreams?” said Paul.

  “I have them.”

  “I get off a train and go for a walk on the beach,” said Paul. “There is a soda machine, but when I put money in it a plane passes overhead and crashes in the sea.”

  “Anxiety dream,” she said. “Classic anxiety dream.”

  Barbara went to check on her son — they had a room nearby — and then returned to Paul’s room to watch TV. Turning the channels, they found Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  “That’s François Truffaut,” said Paul. “The great French director.”

  “What’s he doing in there?” said Barbara.

  “I’ve never been able to figure that out.”

  “Oh look, a cat. I love cats,” said Barbara. “They smell so clean. Come here, cat.”

  “She’s called Scratch.”

  “Come here, you big old Scratch. Let me smell how clean you smell.”

  The next morning Paul woke up early and looked through a drawer in the bedside table for something to read. He found a Band-Aid, an ammonia capsule wrapped in clear plastic, and a pamphlet entitled “My Ashland” by someone named Alma Warfield. He shaved, cutting himself in many places, and sat on the bed holding a towel to his neck and reading:

  Ashland is a New England city below Red Mountain and above String Lake. As a rule, the weather is harsher in Ashland than in surrounding towns. Winter rain in Tableville means heavy snow here, and when the wind blows briskly in Damascus, branches or whole trees can be expected to fall on Ashland. The elevation is eleven hundred feet above sea level and the architecture is Grecian, but the pediments are cracked and the Ionic columns wrapped in vines.