by Tom Drury
“The last one on board requests permission to draw up the gangplank,” said the engineer.
“I was born here,” said Richard Legros. “That house right over there — that is my house. What sort of engineering have you done?”
“Coffer dams,” said the engineer.
“Oh boy. Here we go.”
The engineer dismantled his transit and began packing it back into its aluminum case. “There’s only so much abuse I’ll stand and take. I work too hard —”
“You do that,” said Richard Legros.
The engineer glanced at the forked boughs overhead and walked up the bank and through someone’s yard to a blue car with the state seal on the door.
The naturalist looked from the car to the neighbors and back. He started after his partner, but turned at a plastic swing hanging from the branch of a tree. “Has the river ever dried up?” he said. “Even in summer?”
“No,” everyone shouted. “Never.”
“All right. That is a piece of the puzzle.”
After the meeting broke up, Suzie Turner asked Paul into her house. Richard Legros joined them. The three sat in the dining room on wooden chairs with calico cushions tied to the spindles.
“Did we come on too strong?” said Richard.
“You badgered them,” said Paul.
“A lot of us did grow up here,” he said. “We played in the stream as children, and more than likely when we got our first kiss it was over in the woods across the footbridge. That’s where Suzie and I first kissed, although now we are happily married, knock on wood, to other spouses. Right, Suzie? I don’t know. Maybe one stream doesn’t make a difference in the world, but take it away and you better believe you’ll hear a howl from up on Whiskers Lane.”
Paul wrote on his notepad. “What did you say? Hear a yell?”
“A howl. Is that too strong?”
“No, ‘howl’ is good.”
“There was even a family called the Crandalls who would baptize people in the stream,” said Suzie.
Richard laughed. “God, the Crandalls, that’s right! I had forgotten about them. To be honest, though, most people were not fond of the baptisms.”
“There was a petition,” said Suzie.
“And then the Crandalls moved,” said Richard. “It seemed like once they couldn’t baptize, the life went out of them. It was sad, in a way, seeing the moving trucks come and go. But you know what they got for that place? A hundred and forty-nine five.”
“It’s waterfront,” said Suzie.
“It was waterfront.”
“It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if they hadn’t lived upstream from most of the houses.”
Richard took a marbled rubber ball from his pocket and began to squeeze it in his hands. “Maybe we figured their sins would wash down to us.”
“It’s not that,” said Suzie. “But they used oils and so forth. That’s my understanding, anyway — that there was anointment going on.”
Paul drove away from Whiskers Lane remembering his own baptism. He had been twelve years old. His mother had told him it was important that a person choose baptism and not just have it done routinely at birth, as in other denominations. A gangly minister with bare feet dipped him into a pool of water beneath a false floor behind the altar of a church in Crystal City, near Verona. Bubbles rose around Paul’s eyes and he expected that from then on, his prayers would travel first class and win him what he wanted.
The night of his baptism he prayed, for example, that he would be allowed to stay up late and watch The War of the Worlds on television. Instead, he had to go to bed at the regular hour. And then two or three years later he sat on the threadbare davenport in the living room in Verona praying that his brother Aaron would not die. In exchange for the favor of Aaron’s continued existence, Paul would take the money he had saved from chopping wood and buy a rifle that Aaron had admired in the hardware store in town. Promising the dying boy a gun seemed like a novel approach that might catch God’s attention, but as it turned out, God could not be swayed, as Aaron would have been, by the unselfish gift.
“This is yours because I was worried about you,” Paul would have said. “You don’t even have to let anyone else shoot it. It’s all yours.”
From the site of the missing river Paul drove up Red Mountain to see Linda Tallis’s grave. A small and overgrown cemetery ran parallel to the gravel road between a reservoir and a gray and weathered cluster of summer houses. The cemetery lay open to the road. Frost-canted stones leaned left and right, some with military markers, stars and stakes temporary in appearance. MOTHER read one granite block, surrounded by smaller stones into which one letter each was carved. Evidently this mother had named her children “R,” “L,” “S,” and so on. In another part of the cemetery, the carving on a tapered white tower summarized the life of an old-time couple:
MR. & MRS. HADLIME WERE
NATIVES OF DUTCHESS COU-
NTY NEW YORK, AND REMOVED
TO THIS PLACE SOON AFTER
THEIR MARRIAGE; WHICH
TOOK PLACE MAY 7, 1799;
AND ENGAGED IN THE GLASS
BUSINESS HERE, AND WHERE
THEY BOTH LIVED UNTILL
THEIR DECEASE.
Paul walked over rigid and star-shaped moss through the uneven rows of stones. He felt hindered not by any presence of the dead but by his suspicion that they had all worked hard and led earnest lives of a kind unheard of these days. Liars and losers must have gone around in these bones too, but still, he seemed to move through the dust of a bitterly earned disapproval. In another section he saw the little old man who was the night manager of the motel clipping dead vines from the face of a stone. Precise clicks came from his garden shears. Paul did not disturb him.
Linda had a white stone with the inscription SISTER THOU WAST WILD AND LOVELY. She had been born in December 1939 and had died in August 1967. Dead flowers marked the grave, along with a light blue cigarette pack with a stone inside. The cigarettes had been Gauloises; a winged helmet tilted in flight on the front. Paul brushed the inlaid letters of the gravestone and tried to remember who in Ashland had smoked such cigarettes. Terry? Larry? . . . Lonnie. Lonnie Wheeler, the tall motorcyclist who worked at the hospital. That’s right. Having recaptured the name, he tried with less success to imagine the funeral crowd gathered restlessly around the fresh grave of the drowned science teacher.
Paul received three pieces of mail that day: two were credit cards, one silver and one gold, and the third was a letter from Mary in Vertige. He drove up to the house and sat at the table reading the letter, which was typed on onionskin paper with the characters hammered in:
Dear Paul,
A German couple visiting for the weekend went down the river by kayak and into the caves yesterday. They have yet to be found. All of their belongings are upstairs, and the police keep coming by and eating whatever I have just baked. I feel somewhat responsible because when the couple asked me about the caves I said what we always have said — they are safe for people with cave experience [Paul pictured her serious brow and her tongue between her teeth as she backspaced to underline the words] — and of course I gave them a map and warned them about the waterfall. I did everything we always did. I guess the problem is that no one will admit to not having cave experience, at least no one I have ever spoken to. Apparently the couple are of some importance, as journalists from Köln have taken over the third floor in order to follow the search. They are not bad guests but very loud and very agitating to old Rosine. She has been such a help with you gone, but this morning she thoughtlessly dropped a tray of breakfast dishes down the laundry chute. So finally I asked her if something was wrong, and we sat down in the kitchen and she told me a story
It seems that Rosine’s name was Esther until she was six years old. This was in 1942
. At that time her parents, in order to save her life, gave her up to the underground, which stipulated that they could not be told where she would be taken. It would be too dangerous if they knew. Esther was given the name Rosine and placed in a convent in Brussels, and when the war ended she waited for her parents to find her, but they never came. It was presumed that they were dead, and that turned out to be true. Her father had simply disappeared, and her mother had died of pneumonia in Charleroi. Rosine’s mother had to hide from the Germans in a wet haystack. Can you picture it? After the war ended, Rosine was told that she could be Esther once again and go to live with relatives, but no relatives could be found, and she did not want to be Esther anymore, as being Esther had brought her only trouble. She told me that to this day she is angry at her parents for letting her go. It would have been better for all of them to live or die together, in her view. She apologized for putting the dishes in the laundry but said that she could not stand the sound of the German reporters and their shoes on the stairs. Well, I didn’t know what to do. Giving her the day off seemed like a paltry response. So I went outside and found one of the cameramen from Köln smoking by the barn, and I dragged him into the kitchen and told him to sit down opposite Rosine. “Tell him,” I said. “Listen to her.”
The cameraman had no idea what was coming his way. Rosine repeated the story while he took to walking back and forth the length of the table with his hands fumbling with a light meter he wore on a strap around his neck. He said he had come to find a professor and her husband lost in a cave. That’s all he had come for. He said if he could give her back her name, he would do so this moment. Rosine said she wanted more than her name; she wanted her parents. She got up and looked at him across the table. He offered her his hand, but she said a handshake would not bring honor to either of them. So he went out. Then I told her that I would give her the day off, but it would have to wait until tomorrow because I had to run to the doctor in Namur. I am two months pregnant. Please do not interpret this as me wanting you to come back. Cousin Gustave arrived this morning to help deal with the lost Germans. Stay right where you are, thank you, on your doubtful errand. But this is something you are entitled to know, and now you do.
Paul folded the letter and put it back in its airmail envelope. He had no response adequate to the news. He thought of Rosine’s mother in hiding, tried to imagine her pushing the hay aside, digging out from under, peering across a quiet barnyard. It is nighttime. Maybe a light is burning. She is wet and hungry and wants only to come out into the air and stand on the ground beneath her feet. Her mouth is dry, her forehead fiercely hot. She breathes deeply, drawing bits of straw into her mouth. Then she tunnels out, pulling hard with her elbows. She rises and pulls her coat tight around her.
Paul’s radio was broken, so he turned on the television. A drowsy afternoon movie was on. He turned off the television. He went down to the basement and brought up a green and white bucket. It was quite heavy and he almost lost his balance at the top of the stairway. Then he pried off the lid and began applying skim-coat to the rough walls.
The Ashland police had a mounted brigade that they maintained mostly for show, and they had gathered the schoolchildren of the town to demonstrate the usefulness of horses in police work. A cop in riding boots spoke into a microphone so that the hollow tones of his voice flared over the dead grass and tiered bleachers of Paraffin Park. “Now let’s imagine an infant has been born,” he said. “The first infant of the new year, here in our hypothetical city. And the mayor wishes to deliver a small gift to the hospital to welcome the child. But here’s the catch. A long and bitter strike has divided the hospital food service, and informants have informed police that a small group of union troublemakers plans to block the hospital doors in order to upstage the mayor’s visit. Our job is keeping the strikers from the door while allowing the mayor unobstructed access. Again, the solution is equine.”
A group of volunteers moved in from the outfield, yelling and waving signs. Meanwhile, three large chestnut horses, each with braided mane, each bearing an officer, trotted sideways out from the third base line to meet them. The officers wore black gloves and snugged their heels smartly against the horses’ flanks. Then someone in a blue suit got out of a Lincoln Continental and walked in from shallow right field with a red package in his hands.
Alice Hanover folded down a ballpark seat and sat beside Paul. She had come in a Chris-Craft parka as a representative of the mayor’s office.
“This seems like so much propaganda,” said Paul.
“I know what you mean.”
“My wife is having a baby. She wrote and told me in a letter. Very complicated.”
“What’s she like? I picture someone with long fingers.”
“She has normal fingers,” said Paul.
“Where is she again? British Columbia?”
“Belgium.”
“Are you going back?”
“I think we’re getting divorced.”
“You can’t leave everything to her,” said Alice.
“I just got the letter. It doesn’t seem real yet.”
“Loom and I have had our times,” said Alice. “He was in Looking Glass a couple years ago.”
“What’s that?”
“A rehab place. He was drinking way too much, but we decided to stay together. My parents were divorced, and I just think it robs the self-confidence of the kids. I wouldn’t do that to Faith and Chester. My father used to get plastered and come back and bang on the door. It sounded like he was hitting it with a battering ram. Loom is more moderate these days.”
Students behind them chanted, “The people, united, will never be defeated!” and Alice stood and turned around. “Here, stop that,” she said. “These are good issues but we’ll discuss them later.”
“The people, united, would like to see a menu!”
“O.K., very funny, but that’s enough, please.”
She sat down again.
“You have confidence,” said Paul.
“It’s all been acquired since.”
“The green wallpaper’s gone from the house.”
“I can’t tell you how much better I feel having that place lit up.”
“Can you see the lights?”
“From the cupola. What do you do at night?”
“Not much since my radio broke.”
“You can get another.”
“I’ve got my eye on one up in Vermont.”
Although the police-demonstration story, like the Lipizzaner story, concerned a public display of horsemanship, Paul had no trouble writing it, and he wondered if this was because he had respected the artistry of the Austrians but held the cops in casual disregard, based on the right-wing framework in which they had couched their dressage. Or maybe he was just gaining experience.
There was little time to consider the question, however, because he had to hurry up and write the story of the dry stream of Whiskers Lane. He did so, devising what he considered a catchy beginning (“TABLEVILLE — Once you had a river, now it’s gone . . .”), but Chris Bait returned the story for revision with an electronic note saying, “I DON’T LIKE ‘YOU’ LEDES,” which Paul shortened to “I DON’T LIKE ‘YOU’” and sent back to Chris Bait.
Then he revised the story and went to see the librarian who ran the newspaper’s morgue. She had a chair with casters and she would glide around all day, from her desk to the big black books in which the newspapers were collected to the gray banks of file drawers, pushing along with her feet in red tasseled shoes. The filing seemed inconsistent, and some people thought she threw away stories she did not like, either because of the subject or because of the reporters who had written them. She’d had a nervous breakdown and was often absent. She had introduced Paul to her filing system back when he started, and she had seemed stable enough, but then he did not suppose that such peo
ple were always “on.”
Now Paul asked to see the newspapers for August of 1967. The librarian pivoted in her chair, rolled to a window, gazed at the cars driving by. “That may be a problem,” she said. “We used to have those years on microfiche, but now everything is microfilm.”
“I don’t mind if it’s microfilm,” said Paul.
“People don’t understand what a good format microfiche was,” she said.
A dark hooded console for microfilm viewing stood on a table in a corner of the morgue. Paul threaded the smoky film through terraced axles and beveled glass plates. He turned a crank that made the days and weeks blur past. On Sundays the river of text ran narrow, indicating the fragile passage of the small-format TV magazine. The librarian kept talking while he worked. Evidently the city of Ashland had just given out a press release saying that too much surface water was entering the sewer system, and that a company had been hired to test the sewers by blowing smoke through them. What exactly this smoke would reveal had not been adequately explained, but this was not the librarian’s objection. No, what she found annoying was that by the town’s own admission, smoke might enter people’s houses and cause irritation to their nasal passages. The release said experts would be on hand to distinguish the smoke blown into the sewers from the smoke, for example, of a burning house.
“To think that our elected representatives would arrange to have smoke blown into our houses,” she said.
“‘Back out of all this now too much for us,’” said Paul.
He found the story where it should have been, and this surprised him. Memory offered one version of the past, gravestones a second, and newspapers a third, and for all the versions to agree seemed a suspicious coincidence.
FORMER TEACHER IS DEAD IN STRING LAKE;
TEAM OF DIVERS LOCATE BODY OF SWIMMER
Linda Tallis had picked mint that day, had supper, gone for a swim at twilight. Divers brought her up near dawn from eleven feet of water a hundred yards from shore. Eleven feet did not seem like a great depth, and yet, Paul had to concede, it was about six too many. Her family, the Lonborgs, had worked in the match factory and then the bobbin factory. She had been the first of them to go to college. A photograph showed her smiling in a striped dress. Another photo showed the glassy murderous surface of the lake. Linda had left parents, a husband (Roman), a brother (Peter Lonborg), and a daughter three years old (Kim). Roman Tallis told police he had been flying a model airplane when the accident happened.