The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  “Doesn’t sound like you did anything terrible.”

  “The law hates forgery. It undermines everything.”

  “But you didn’t tell on the painters.”

  “I did not.”

  “Something to hang on to. What kind of things did they paint?”

  “We had a guy in Cleveland interested in all Arab subjects painted before the Depression. I mean anything. All he had to see was a photograph, or sometimes just to hear a description. Very terse phone manner. ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ What he did with them I don’t know. I think he may have sold them in London.”

  “When you say Arab subjects . . .”

  “Street scenes,” said Paul. “A wall, a woman, shadows, a clay vessel. We worked from source books. I would say, ‘Do this one.’ ‘Try combining these two.’”

  “My grandparents painted things like that,” said Loom. “In Tunis.”

  “There’s a market.”

  “What gave it away?”

  Paul tilted his chair back and planted his knees against the table. The ceiling was painted white, with black gaps between the boards. “Some of the guys in the syndicate never liked the paintings. There was no secret about this. It wasn’t what they were used to. They would go out of their way to make disparaging remarks when I came into the room.”

  “The syndicate? That’s what they called it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like that.”

  “Now, what about the woman who drowned?”

  “She taught science and biology at Adelphic,” said Loom. “Her desk was made of black marble that had a curved silver faucet and a gas jet on top. Her name was Linda Tallis.”

  “But her maiden name was Lonborg.”

  “That’s right,” said Loom. “I don’t know how old she was. Early thirties would be my guess. Pale face and pale lips and coarse red hair that she wore over her shoulders. There was a photograph of her one year in the annual, wearing a sweater and holding a skull. Everyone liked that picture. My sister and I thought it was great living next door to a teacher, as if it gave us special leverage. Once I went over to the house — your house — and she wasn’t home, and her husband gave me my first beer, but I couldn’t stand the taste.”

  “I found carvings in the attic.”

  “There would be,” said Loom. “She drowned in the summer. She died in the lake and they buried her up on Red Mountain. There’s nothing else to say about it. My family has always played the villain in Ashland. Some of it’s founded and some isn’t. I will say this: my father was never anything other than generous with us kids. Now ask me one of those questions.”

  “‘In 1866,’” said Paul, “‘the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel laid the groundwork for the theory of heredity with his crossbreeding of . . .’”

  “I know this,” said Loom. “Chickens?”

  “Peas,” said Paul.

  A lush blue darkness blanketed the meadow as Paul walked home. The constellations of fall turned on their slow wheel — Andromeda in chains, her mother sitting in a chair, Perseus zooming to the rescue. Looking up, he stumbled over a stone bank that had once been the foundation of something.

  Paul had a plan. He often had a plan while appearing to play things by luck and accident. Sometimes he had plans that even he did not know about.

  He had noticed, as had everyone else, that banks all across the United States were tripping over their own feet to hook new credit-card customers. The operative principle was that of loansharking: comically profitable rates in exchange for ready cash and no questions asked. Just by taking the job at the Ashland Sun, he had somehow managed to attract the attention of banks in Lincoln, Newark, Fort Lauderdale, and Mexico City, all eager to shoot a little plastic his way.

  This shotgun approach not only suggested a reckless lack of safeguards but confirmed Paul’s belief that the banks and credit-card companies richly deserved to have a slice of their teeming money diverted to a struggling inn in Belgium, and he knew a retired federal agent in Hammerlea, Vermont, who was said to sell the names and social security numbers of the dead. The agent’s name was Shumway, and he had spent so many years monitoring who stood closest to the Cincinnati kingpin Julius Siscovitch that his superiors began to suspect that Shumway himself stood closest to Julius Siscovitch. Paul had met Shumway after the latter had fallen from favor with Washington and been relegated to a supporting role with the President’s Organized Crime and Fisheries Task Force, which had become a partner in the Record Family investigation due to its interest in the outrageous manipulations of the shad market of the late eighties. Paul decided to pay Shumway a visit.

  He lived outside of Hammerlea, on a road that ran along a ridge with a long valley dropping away to the east. Paul approached the house, which was built in the international style and resembled a junior high school. Shumway’s wife said he was out in the field shooting his bow and arrow. Paul walked down behind the house and found Shumway pulling target points from a bobcat poster bound by twin bands of twine to a bale of straw set against a stone wall.

  “The arrow breaks if I miss the bale and hit the stone,” said Shumway. “My theory is that the cost of new arrows will subconsciously force me to shoot better.”

  Paul explained who he was, but Shumway did not remember him and had to be reminded.

  “I didn’t find your situation engaging,” said Shumway. He had a gold tooth that flashed in the sun. “You didn’t even carry a gun. Pencils and numbers, they’re not where it’s at. Give me a case with guns, then I’ll sit up and take notice.”

  “I thought you guys didn’t care for shootouts.”

  “Some don’t. I happen to.”

  “Larry Zumwald had a gun.”

  “I said carry a gun, not have a gun. Big difference.”

  “I threw it away for him,” said Paul.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “He asked me to.”

  “Larry Zumwald. A third of the people associated with Record were halfwits. Zumwald, Ivan Montgomery Stevie Shakes.”

  “But the other two thirds —”

  “Well, I’ll tell you who I respected, because there were some. Tommy Maynard. Eddie Leblanc. Vito Carmona.”

  “Line-Item Vito,” said Paul. “What about Randall Cochrane, who had been a boxer?”

  “He was lost in his scrapbook.”

  “The gun I threw away was a blue Llama pistol with plastic grips,” said Paul. “I put it in a duffel bag and took it on the Block Island ferry. When no one was looking I opened the duffel bag and dropped the gun in the ocean. Then I got out to the island, rented a moped, and took a ride to the Palatine graves.”

  “You are going counterclockwise in a clockwise world.”

  Paul hoisted himself up onto the stone wall. “My alumni magazine thinks I brought down Carlo Record.”

  “Brought down? You couldn’t bring down the venetian blinds. What hurt Carlo Record was the same thing that hurts all of them, to wit: they put a bug on everything he ever touched. They even wired his golf cart.”

  “He’s a good golfer for a guy with one arm.”

  “Not much call for golfing in prison.”

  “Who’s running the thing? Bobby?”

  “Nominally. Bobby is weak. Look out for Bobby. A classic fear biter.”

  “Let me shoot the bow,” said Paul.

  “I don’t want you to break my arrows.”

  Paul and Shumway walked up and away from the target. Paul strapped the leather guard to the inside of his left forearm and pulled on the three-fingered shooting glove. The bow was an old Shakespeare laminate. Paul lay an arrow across the rest, nocked it to the bowstring, and drew the bow until the tip of his index finger touched the corner of his mouth. He looked neither at the bow nor at the arrow but at the picture of the bobcat.
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br />   He put two arrows in the target, and on the third shot his drawing wrist bent, the string slapped the arm guard, and the arrow missed not only the bobcat but the bale and the stone wall. Shumway and Paul climbed over the wall to look for the arrow.

  “Where did you learn to shoot?” said Shumway.

  “Baptist camp,” said Paul. “I’m looking for numbers.”

  “How many digits?”

  “Nine,” said Paul. “I need money to take piano lessons.”

  “It’s true that with a few simple tunes under your belt, you might be more fun at parties instead of a wallflower,” said Shumway.

  “It’s time,” said Paul. “Because the gang is getting tired of my shadow puppets.”

  Driving south to Connecticut, he stopped for lunch in a town lined with antique stores, in one of which he found a large cabinet radio with a round and cleverly constructed tuning apparatus. At first glance the tuner seemed to consist solely of a red metal ring marked with the AM frequencies, which could be selected by turning a knob that rotated a needle extending from a central hub. In fact, the red ring was composed of linked segments that opened like a shutter and disappeared into the periphery to reveal a green FM dial, which in turn opened to reveal a blue marine-band dial, and so on.

  It was an unusual radio, and he would have bought it right then except that it would not fit in his car.

  He got back to Ashland with time to spare before work, so he rented a post office box and then had caraway soup and túrós délkli at a Hungarian place in town. That night he covered the school board in Damascus. This was an organization whose devotion to secrecy made meeting coverage a snap. They decided everything beforehand over drinks at the Arandell Tennis Club and met only to vote without discussion. They fired an English teacher, approved a bid to dredge the pond at the elementary school, and directed the corporate counsel to take depositions for their libel suit against the high school newspaper, all in less than twenty minutes.

  Paul wrote the story and made the police and fire calls. There were eleven police stations and three fire departments in the Sun’s territory. Calling them usually did not yield much, as the dispatchers had long ago learned to say “All quiet,” no matter if town hall was burning and a tiger was on the loose. The more important the development, the less likely a dispatcher would be to give it to a reporter over the phone. Tonight there was a fender bender in Lignum Vitae and strange lights in the sky over Tableville. Paul would have ignored the lights but, as he was getting ready to leave, Chris Bait told him to take a call from a distraught woman. She said a brightly lit craft had hovered over her back yard as she unpinned the wash from her clothesline. Paul took notes but told the woman that he could not make it a story unless she gave her name. She declined, maintaining that people would laugh at her. Paul wrote the story anyway, as it had two sources, the Tableville police and the unnamed woman.

  He went home thinking about the old radio he had seen. He had a table model that would have to do for now. He found himself fascinated with American radio, in which the invisible hand of the marketplace had landed its big dumb finger on forceful opinion. Public radio was still reassuringly measured — he got caught up listening to Cardboard Box Journal, a series about a family living in a cardboard box — but on the AM dial, whether you were right or wrong did not seem to matter so much as delivering your pronouncements with sneering indifference to the subtleties of existence. He thought of starting his own radio station, with the slogan “All forceful opinion, all the time.” He even liked sports radio, although he had little idea who the players under discussion might be; he liked the way the hosts punctuated every third opinion with the phrase “you know what,” as in “If I’m Dutch Perez, you know what, I don’t love Joey Robineau. I like him, but I do not love him.” The commercials were for hospitals and hair treatments, suggesting a listenership of bald men with medical troubles.

  When he was ready to sleep he turned the dial to a deejay in Mount Kisco, New York, who droned like narcotics in the grand old FM style. The patter threaded in and out of Paul’s dreams, but with such bad hearing he did not like waking up to a quiet house. “. . . We are in the two-thirty hour of a Friday morning . . . wheel turning round and round . . . this is the nighttime voice of the tristate gateway, where the frost is on the passport . . . I don’t know about you, but very frankly I’ve got these strange coarse hairs growing out of my eyebrows . . . they’re almost like steel wool, I’m completely mystified . . . driving in tonight, I took a wrong turn and spun completely around . . . it is three-nineteen on some Friday in the October month . . . up next, Kristin Hersh, coming at you in a blazing nightgown . . .”

  Scratch the cat slept on Paul whenever possible — in the flat of his back, in the hollow behind his ear, in the sag of blanket over his legs. The bed stood in the corner of the room, and the cat clung to the edge of a marble-topped bureau like a ragged rain cloud, waiting for him to fade into sleep. Paul shoved her away eight or nine times some nights. The cat snarled, gargled, tripped away, lumbered back. She had figured out a way of leaving the house, through a hole in the bathroom floor, for all the great prey outside. But with the cold coming on, she stayed more and more inside and engaged in deluded scuffles with nothing. Paul got used to odd racing sounds and thumping paws. So one night he had the strangest dream. It must have been a dream, although he felt as if he were awake. Outside the window a full moon burned through black branches. The cat was sleeping on Paul’s legs, and when Paul turned to wave her away, he saw the hand of a woman standing by the bed in a long white shirt, with two great falls of red hair fanning on either side of a pale and curving forehead.

  Her hands pulled at the collar of the shirt. Studs pelted the blanket. Paul sat up in bed and picked up one of the studs. “Men’s shirts will wear longer and look better if you repair rips and tears immediately,” she said in a low and papery voice. “Why not number each shirt inside the neckband to help keep track?”

  Her shoulders twisted free of the shirt, beneath which she wore a dark swimming suit, and with the white shirt drawn like a shawl across her forearms, she took one of his hands in her own. “It’s no trick at all to button a stiff tab collar if you wet the tabs slightly,” she said.

  He eased down the straps of the suit. Her breasts shone softly blue in the dark, and he touched the cold skin of her shoulders. Her eyes sparkled like black stones, round and distant and not looking quite in the same direction. She peeled down the suit, stepped free of it, swung it by a finger, and circled the room slowly, brushing her palm over the marble slab of the bureau. She sat naked on a trunk with her hands folded in her lap. A mirror on the wall above her head gathered the room’s shadows. The moon laid strips of light across her knees and toes.

  “Who are you?” said Paul. “Are you always here?”

  “Is the farm in the sort of community you like?” she said. “Will it be a good place to raise your family?”

  III

  GLOVES

  15

  Out in the country west of Tableville, a naturalist in a red wool coat stood in an earthen trough, surrounded by nine neighbors, and swing reporter Paul Emmons, on a road called Whiskers Lane. It was a cold morning and the wind had been blowing hard for days. Paul wore a pair of gloves and the felt hat that he had found in the attic.

  “This is where it was?” asked the naturalist.

  “And where you’re going to make it be again,” said a woman named Suzie Turner. She pulled her hands into the cuffs of her coat. “Am I right?”

  “Calm down,” he said. “I’m a naturalist.”

  “And I’m an engineer,” said his partner.

  “We’re on your side,” said the naturalist.

  “We don’t take sides,” his partner quickly added.

  The naturalist dropped to his knees in the bed of the missing river. “What we have here is opportunity as well as misf
ortune. With the water gone, the vegetation seizes the opportunity to migrate. You can see this happening. This maidenhair fern is making its move.”

  “That’s all academic,” said a man named Richard Legros. “Nine months out of every twelve, the last sound we hear at night is the water running over the stones. We want our stream back. A ditch full of ferns won’t make us happy. Our children play in that river. Our dogs wade in that river. We have inner tubes. We have canoes. The science of it, we could care less.”

  “The state of Connecticut is not fighting you on this,” said the engineer. “You want to restore the stream. We want to restore the stream.”

  “Do it, then, right?” said Suzie Turner.

  “What my partner and I have to do now,” said the engineer, “is go back and study the USGS maps to figure out where this brook came from.”

  “It’s not a brook, it’s a river,” said Richard Legros. “It courses and rushes.”

  “You called it a stream,” said the engineer. “I’m only going by what you said.”

  “Semantic arguments will get us nowhere,” said the naturalist. “Until we know where the waterway came from, it’s wild speculation to say where it’s gone. One possibility, the obvious one, is that the river has dried up, in the course of natural events.”

  The neighbors rolled their eyes and clicked their tongues derisively. “Our weather hasn’t been dry,” one said. “We’ve had lots of rain. There’s water everywhere. I have water in my basement as we speak.”

  “Rain and snow are only part of what determines the incidence of surface water,” said the naturalist.

  “A big part, though,” said Suzie Turner.

  The naturalist shrugged. “Anybody know what time it is?”

  “A quarter to eleven,” someone said.

  “That’s right,” said Richard Legros. “Run off to some other site.”

  “Patience, Rich,” said Suzie.

  “It’s development,” he said. “Some developer has blocked our river, and because it’s only Tableville, because it’s just a pack of disgruntled nobodies in Tableville —”