The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  Other stories on the front page told of Yugoslav farmers who were counting on the Lim and Uvac rivers to “stop a horde of large, aggressive mice,” of fourteen sky divers who had plunged into Lake Erie and could not be found, and of the release of H. Rap Brown on a gun charge. Paul cranked forward in time. The movies in Ashland included Dr. Zhivago (“Zhivago lived only for his exquisite wife Tonya . . . until the moment he saw the enchanting Lara!”) and Africa — Texas Style! (“He came to tame a bucking bronc called Africa!”), and the fashion news included a trend toward “British-type boots that zip up side and back, or sport wide gored insets.” Several days after Linda Tallis’s death, Paul found a report of students reading Shelley for her at a memorial service:

  Oh, there are spirits of the air,

  And genii of the evening breeze,

  And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair

  As star-beams among twilight trees!

  There were student poems as well:

  We’re sorry, barn

  We’re sorry, leaves

  We’re sorry to the humming bees.

  16

  November brought its cold sense of important work to do. but the swing reporter had no organized mission. He worked at different hours every day, rarely followed a story to completion, never wore the paper hats of the stuffers anymore, never went down to the pressroom at all, and he used whatever stray computer screen no one else was using. He had still not been given a desk. Most anyone could tell him to relocate and make it stick. One afternoon, while he was working on a story about the misuse of public funds, the arts reviewer, Will Kiwi, bumped him from a terminal. Kiwi disproved occult claims when he was not reviewing the Fantasticks. Debunking was his hobby, but he had the bad luck to be in a place where few people made occult claims.

  So he upbraided the supermarket tabloids sarcastically, as if anyone in the supermarket believed a word they printed. His column, “Debunker’s Corner,” appeared on Saturdays. Statues did not cry, saucers did not fly, ghosts did not take off their swimming suits. Nothing walked among us but ourselves. Everything that could be known was known already. And this terminal was his to control. Will and Paul had got off on the wrong foot when Will debunked Paul’s credulous report of the UFO buzzing the woman taking her laundry from the line in Tableville. STRANGE LIGHTS MAKE FOR STRANGE JOURNALISM, said the smug headline.

  “I’m working here,” said Paul.

  “Beat it, spaceman,” said Will Kiwi.

  Paul pointed across the newsroom. “Look! It’s the cast of Camelot.”

  “I would buy a whole new pair of shoes just to kick you out of your job,” said Kiwi.

  Paul closed his notebook, gathered his chewed pencils, and set off to find another computer. He walked past the town reporters, where the prettiest woman in the office sat with her small green galoshes up on her desk, entertaining her comrades with a story from the Tableville weekly in which the same name had been spelled three different ways: “Pocock,” “Bocock,” and “Pecock.” The sports staff ate coffee cake and watched a track meet on television. The morgue librarian conferred with the agriculture reporter, and in so doing she had rolled her chair some fifteen feet into the newsroom, the farthest she could go without it seeming ridiculous that she was still in her own chair.

  The librarian and the farm reporter were rumored to be in the middle of an obsessive affair. In an attempt to avoid litigation, the Sun allowed no dating or sexual contact between anyone except couples who were already together, and thus “grandfathered in,” when the rule went into effect, but this ban had had the contrary effect of making everyone promiscuous.

  Paul settled finally into the empty office of the executive managing editor for administration. Few people had a precise understanding of what this person did, and as it was past four o’clock, it was a safe bet she would not be back. The walls of her office were decorated with yellowing cartoons about comical office situations and with pictures of her children in which the flash had often bounced off the children’s eyes, making them look like Satan’s brood.

  Paul called up the story that he was working on and stared at the pulsing letters. This might have been his first exposé but he didn’t really have the goods, so he had to word it carefully. “Proviso funds” existed in most town budgets as a place to lay aside money for unforeseen events such as excessive snowfall and water-main breaks, and while seeming sensible enough, these funds in practice amounted to tempting piles of cash whose uses were understood by very few.

  It was as if the towns were saying, “These taxes will pay for the fire department, these taxes will pay for education, and these taxes, well, we just don’t know what we’re going to do with these taxes.” So if a public safety commissioner in Damascus wanted to buy a rare copy of Ontwa, Son of the Forest, by Henry Whiting, or a public works director in Badger Falls decided one slow Friday afternoon to order a Bose Wave radio to find out what all the excitement was about, or if the Homunculus parks department wanted to fly down to St. Lucia, only conscience would have prevented each from saying, “Hey, what about the proviso fund?” And then there was the woodstove. When Paul confronted the city manager of Ashland about a woodstove that had been purchased out of the proviso fund, the city manager drove Paul out to a stick house in the unincorporated village of Dufresne. Upon knocking and entering, they found a small white-haired lady who sat on a couch with an afghan drawn around her shoulders and her left hand groping for a three-legged metal cane that stood, as it happened, on her right side.

  “This is my mother,” said the city manager. “She can’t shake hands with you because of the arthritis. Mother, this is a reporter who wants to know about the woodstove.”

  “Well, I can too shake hands,” she said. She found the cane and rose slowly. She had a good strong grip. “The stove is a hundred percent effective. It accepts the little logs that I can carry myself. You know, I grew up in the Depression, in Parma, Ohio — such a long way off, it seems now — and I can remember my father saying, ‘Janey, why don’t you take your red wagon down to the depot and see if you can find some coal?’ And that’s exactly what I would do.”

  The book, the stove, the Caribbean junket, and the radio all seemed dubious enough purchases, but Pete Lonborg worried about the proviso fund story, for his scorn of elected officials stopped at the borders of the towns in which the Sun sold copies. Often when Paul opened the file he would find that Pete had been messing around in it, leaving comments such as “??? — PETE” or “WE CAN’T SAY THIS” scattered throughout the text in the highlighted and nonprinting font known as notes-face. (At least it wasn’t supposed to print; some notes-face remarks had got into the newspaper, including, famously, Jean Jones’s sensible “HMM . . . SOMEBODY’S LYING,” which appeared in a story about Christmas trees stolen from town property.) Lately, Pete had come to the conclusion that the proviso fund story could only mention expenditures that were explicitly barred by town charter. Thus Paul had to read many town charters, which were printed in small type and made him wish that he had never undertaken to write about proviso funds in the first place. Telling the story of the city manager’s mother would undermine the enterprise anyway, shifting the reader’s sympathy to the corrupt. It certainly shifted Paul’s sympathy to the corrupt. For that matter, he was corrupt himself. What business did an unclean accountant have making accusations? All in all, the investigative enthusiasm that he had experienced upon hearing about the parks department looking for rare birds in the rain forest of St. Lucia had evaporated like rain itself.

  The story of Linda Tallis, by contrast, remained vivid and strange to his mind. Maybe it fascinated him because he did not have to prove or write it. It had not become a chore in the way that all journalism, no matter how exciting at first, becomes a chore, and quickly, such that a hollow-eyed reporter might respond to the compliment “Good story” by saying, “I hate it.” Also, it had the tragic sea
l of approval, with the angel wings of the dead teacher spreading over the remote chain of events. And all he had to do was find those events and remember them, as he remembered, for example, a pear tree from his youth that had been gauzed over by tent caterpillars, or as he remembered a sickly yellow salve that he had once seen on his older brother Fred’s arm after Fred had managed to burn himself with a soldering iron. Paul had mistaken the salve for the burn itself. He had thought for a while that Fred would have to live forever with a wide and glistening scar on his arm.

  The next place Paul had to go was Red Mountain Infirmary, where Lonnie Wheeler, the Gauloise smoker, worked. The ­infirmary — a hospital, really, with an old-fashioned name — stood on a hill beyond the industrial flats of Ashland, where a broken and slat-sided wooden tower leaned dangerously, having long ago spent its usefulness as some component of a rock-crushing business, and where, farther on, a scrap-radiator concern displayed suits of armor on either side of its front door. The connection was not obvious, as the armor did not appear to have been made from scrap-radiator parts.

  Paul waited for Lonnie Wheeler in the lobby of the hospital. Small birds hopped from branch to branch in a glass enclosure built into the wall. He watched them until he’d had enough and then began reading old news magazines with nothing of interest in them except the starlet cleavage in the personality roundup. A young child wandered, sighing loudly, among the plastic chairs. A television on the wall played a talk show featuring people who had made big mistakes. A couple sat arguing near Paul. Stop arguing, he thought.

  “Well, I can’t pull the plug,” said the man.

  “And I suppose you think I can,” said the woman. With her hands she smoothed a coat — glossy plastic, Mondrian squares — that lay across her lap. “I suppose you think I can march in there and pull the plug like a seasoned professional.”

  “Of course you realize there probably is no plug, per se,” said the man. “In all likelihood neither of us has to literally pull a physical object from, you know, the wall. Maybe just sign a document or two.”

  “Even signing will be difficult for me,” said the woman. “We never should have let him put up the storms.”

  Paul turned his attention to a poster on the wall for National Ear Week. The auditory canal was too complicated, with all those coils and frail bones that seemed like beach detritus. It was amazing that anyone could hear anything,

  Lonnie worked in Housekeeping, and when his shift ended he pushed through double doors carrying a pack of vacuum-cleaner filters. He worked a palm brush over his hair and listened intently to Paul’s rambling question.

  “They’re my cigarettes,” he said. “But I didn’t know her very well. Mostly the one I knew was her husband. You might say Roman Tallis was my mentor.”

  “In what?”

  “Lots of things. I’m from Tennessee originally. I was just a kid when I came to Ashland.”

  “And when would that have been?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m renting their old house. No reason, really. It’s just curiosity”

  “Why don’t you follow me home?”

  As Lonnie drove his motorcycle his coat billowed, making him look like the Michelin man. The Wheelers lived in a Dutch colonial house out past the landfill. Blackbirds paced the spine of the garage and Carrie stood in the wide concrete driveway casting with a fishing pole.

  “This isn’t broken,” she said as Paul got out of his car. “Lonnie, hon, this isn’t broken.”

  “I wasn’t having any luck with it,” Lonnie said. It was an old bait-casting rig with line as thick as twine.

  “You have to feather it. You have to feather it with your thumb. That’s the whole trick. Watch me. Watch what I do with my thumb.” She drew the rod back with both hands and slowly swung it forward. The shining lure on the line sailed across the grass and landed in a white birdbath.

  “How’d you do that?” said Lonnie.

  “Here comes supper.”

  Lonnie tried to cast, but the silver minnow slapped the pavement at his feet and line snarled around the reel. “This is what happened before.”

  “You’re not feathering it, lamb.”

  They all went into the house, where thick linen curtains covered the windows and stacks of magazines and videocassettes leaned in dim corners. It was one of those extra-warm houses with cooking smells and soft yellow lighting into which you could sink and never be heard from again.

  “I was visiting my cousin up here when I met Roman at a construction site,” Lonnie told Paul. Lonnie slouched in a chair with his legs propped on a horse-print footstool so that his feet and head were on about the same level. “I remember Roman stepped on a nail that was sticking out of a board. We could see the point had come up right in the middle of his shoe, but when he got free and took off the shoe, the nail had somehow missed him. It was a weird deal. His foot must have been jammed way back in the shoe, I guess. That was the spring of 1966.”

  “Where was I?” said Carrie. “I wasn’t on the scene yet.”

  “Yeah, you were,” said Lonnie. “Because don’t you remember? We used to have parties up at the windmill, and Roman would bring the keg,”

  “Roman liked kids,” said Carrie.

  “And vice versa,” said Lonnie.

  Carrie looked at her watch, shook it, and held it to her ear. “Not me.”

  “You forget.”

  “I never liked Roman.”

  “You were in the Glove Club.”

  “Wait,” said Paul.

  “Yeah,” said Carrie. “You’re getting ahead.”

  “O.K., you’re right,” said Lonnie. “Let me try again. Let me try again.”

  “I’m going to start supper,” said Carrie. “Why don’t we move this party?”

  The kitchen had the shadowy and labyrinthine quality of the rest of the house. When Carrie turned the lights on, they were under shelves or recessed so that the light angled and cast shadows. Carrie ran water into an aluminum pot as Lonnie opened the pantry and came out with a glass jar of pasta.

  “Roman Tallis carved wood and made stairways,” said Lonnie. “He had a liking for young people. He got along better with them than he did with adults. And I don’t think this is that unusual among the trades. When we first knew him, he was probably, I don’t know, forty-five, and I was nineteen.”

  “And I was eighteen,” said Carrie.

  “You get the idea,” said Lonnie. “His wife, Linda, was younger than he was, too. I didn’t know that much about her background, although I’d heard there’d been some kind of trouble in Montreal when she was a kid. But Roman and Linda, as a family, were . . .”

  “Cool,” said Carrie. “I think that’s fair to say.” She turned a burner on under the pot of water.

  “How so?” said Paul.

  Lonnie dumped the pasta out on a breadboard and began sorting linguine. “They dressed in muslin.”

  “And they had Slim Harpo records.”

  “And with their daughter, you know —”

  “Kim.”

  “With Kim there was some concern, because she hadn’t learned to walk very well. But they didn’t care.”

  “Couldn’t walk,” said Paul.

  “Well, no, she could walk,” said Lonnie. “But she walked you would almost say sideways. It was like one leg wouldn’t unbend completely.”

  “They said she would walk as she needed to walk,” said Carrie. “That’s what Roman said.”

  “They wouldn’t take her to doctors,” said Paul.

  “What do you mean?” said Lonnie.

  “I’m just guessing.”

  “They took her to doctors.”

  “Oh, O.K.”

  “When the state removed her —” said Carrie.

  “But that w
as later,” said Lonnie. “That was not while Linda was alive, Carrie.”

  “No,” said Carrie. “That was later.”

  “Roman had a gun collection,” said Lonnie. “But he didn’t have any shells. Nowhere in the house. And he said he had no interest in shooting. He had been in the war and he said he had no interest.”

  “What war?” said Paul.

  “World War Two,” said Lonnie. “In the Philippines.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He had deep creases in his forehead.”

  “He had huge nostrils,” said Carrie. “When he got angry it seemed like he might just inhale everybody in the room.” She was slicing tomatoes, and she pointed at Lonnie with the broad-bladed knife. “Tell him about when the cop came. The cop and the cop’s gun.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, you tell it.”

  “One time a cop came to tell them to turn down the music — ‘Baby, Scratch My Back’ was playing — and Roman, don’t ask me how, but he got the shells out of the guy’s gun.”

  “And then when he left — which is the good part,” said Carrie.

  “Well, as the cop was leaving, Roman said, ‘Don’t forget your shells.’ And he gave them to him.”

  “And you saw this,” said Paul.

  “Oh yes, we both did.”

  The water boiled, and Carrie dumped Lonnie’s breadboard full of pasta into it. “I didn’t,” she said. “You have me in there all those times I wasn’t there. But tell him who called the cops in the first place. Don’t forget Gilbert.”