The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  “Hell, I’m losing my mind,” he said.

  Mimi Austin found him and drove him home in her car. Paul sat in the passenger seat with the ghost dress swaying before his eyes. “What did you put in my drink?”

  She smiled sympathetically as they waited for the light in the center of Ashland. “Tranquilizer,” she said. “Were you really a member of organized crime?”

  “I went to an induction ceremony once, but it wasn’t me being inducted,” said Paul. “The tent kept flapping in the wind, and the orchestra played the Canon in D Major.”

  “That happens to be one of my favorite songs,” said Mimi. “Loom is agitated. You have to leave Alice alone.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He didn’t have to,” said Mimi. “It’s written all over your face.” She flipped down the passenger-side visor, which had an oval mirror attached. He could see the red letters on his forehead.

  “Having fun?” said Paul.

  Mimi turned a corner and let the steering wheel roll back on its own. “I’ve had better times.” Her hands hovered inches from the wheel with fingers spread. “Once I even rode a ferris wheel.”

  Paul woke up in the morning without any memory of arriving home and went into the bathroom to scrub the words ASK ALICE off his forehead. He felt so lousy even his feet felt lousy. His head ached, in waves. Carrie Wheeler came by while he was eating breakfast in the kitchen.

  “What happened?” she said. “You look bad.”

  “I went to the Fastener and Binder party,” said Paul. “I got hooked up with some woman named Mimi.”

  “Mmm,” said Carrie. He poured some coffee for her, and she got up to find the milk. “Mimi Austin, probably,” she said, with her head in the refrigerator.

  “That’s right,” said Paul.

  Carrie brought milk to the table and poured it into her coffee until it was very light. “The fasteners are a pretty wet crowd.”

  “She spiked my drink,” said Paul.

  “I did a great license photo one time of Mimi. She’s pretty in a hard sort of way.”

  “Loom set me up.”

  “I thought you were friends.”

  “He has his reasons.”

  “We all have reasons. Listen, I found out something about Linda Tallis. Do you remember when we talked about the letter she wrote?”

  Paul held his coffee cup to his forehead. “Not really.”

  “Sure you do,” she said. She got up, ran a dishtowel under the faucet, and rubbed it gently over his wrists. “The letter that Roman found after she died. Well, there’s a lawyer in town who might have a copy. He’s very old, and it’s hard to keep him on the subject. The letter to the daughter, Kim.”

  “On the other hand, the hell with it,” said Paul. “What is Ashland to me?”

  “It’s only a town.”

  “It’s twisted.”

  She opened her handbag and took out a pen and a notebook. “I’m just going to jot down that lawyer’s name on a piece of paper. Then, if you want it, it will be there.”

  “You could leave tomorrow. You could go to California. You could go to New Orleans.”

  “Too shaky for one, too hot for the other. Don’t you read about California? People kill each other for no reason on their complicated freeway system.”

  “You could go to New Hampshire. I have property there, which I would let go for a bag of shells.”

  “You’re confusing your interests and mine.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  He walked her outside, and they stood on the porch listening to the wind coming down from the head of the lake. Tree limbs bent and gritty snow struck their faces.

  “They’re calling for a nor’easter,” said Carrie.

  By evening it was snowing hard and the wind pressed steadily against the cottage. Paul built a fire, drank tea, and listened to the old radio. He worked on a jigsaw puzzle he had found in a musty box in the attic: a deer standing in a swamp. The pieces were thick and they locked together with quiet snapping sounds. He found the corners and set them where he estimated they would be when the puzzle was finished. The radio’s dial glowed softly in the corner by the fireplace, and twisters of snow moved past the windows.

  It was very pleasant to be recovering from a hangover in a snowstorm. His head did not ache anymore, and the cold sweat had evaporated from his skin. He sat at the hearth watching the fire. How amazing fire was, when looked at carefully. The logs that had burned first had crumbled into a bed of a hundred distinct coals across which heat shuddered as if they were still joined. The coals flashed from orange to black to orange again, faster than he could follow. Someone should study this, if they hadn’t already. He had a fleeting understanding that even the uglier events could be redeemed via humble activities. He put on boots and a coat and went out into the weather. The wind roared with a steady sound as if it would never stop. Fallen branches lay half buried in blue-white snow.

  Back inside, he yanked the door shut, and hung his coat on the statue of Linda Tallis. When he turned to the table she was sitting there in a long flannel shirt and thick gray socks.

  “I find it interesting that you can change clothes,” he said. He took the coat from the statue and threw it on the davenport. “This is you, you know.”

  “Lipstick or rouge,” she said, “rub with lard or vaseline. Wash in hot suds. Do not use soap first; it may set the stain.”

  “Too late,” he said. “Do you speak other than in housekeeping lingo?”

  “Empty tin cans also make attractive flowerpots,” she said. “Paint the top and base a bright, child’s-favorite color. Paint the sides in stripes. Glue the seat of a doll onto the center of the top and presto! That youngster of yours owns a very dream of a toy chest.”

  “I could get a Ouija board,” said Paul.

  “Why spend money on expensive new things to achieve effects that new colors can give you?”

  Her eyes met his impersonally, in the way that the eyes of photographs sometimes seem to.

  “What color?” he said.

  “Child’s-favorite color,” she said.

  “Your child.”

  “Presto.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Off for the weekend?” she said.

  “It’s been longer than that.”

  “Men like sweater girls,” said Linda. “That’s what is meant by the ‘stitch in time.’”

  “I’ll look for her,” said Paul. “I don’t know that I can find her, but I’ll try.”

  She went to the fireplace and rubbed her hands before the flames. “Even rain-soaked veils will regain their look of newness with this treatment.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” said Paul.

  She nodded.

  “Did you want to die?”

  She stared into the fire. “‘If your basement runs a fever,’ warns a leading furnace company, ‘your furnace is sick.’”

  “Well, I understand. I think I do. Come to bed.”

  In the bedroom, Paul brushed her hair. It was long and dry and pale red. The brush was hers. He fell asleep with his arm around her waist, but when he woke up in the middle of the night there was no one there. He went out to the living room to turn the radio off. The puzzle was finished but for one piece, which he pressed into place.

  Loom and Paul repaired their friendship in wary increments. They played racquetball at the Y, they hiked on Red Mountain, they toured the Fastener and Binder plant. This was a deafening place, with signs printed in two colors and three languages reminding everyone to wear their earplugs and take their salt pills from strategically located dispensers. Loom had a discount arrangement with the Big Man clothing company, and everyone, even the women, wore Big Man pants and shirts, of dark primary colors, as they stood wea
ring goggles before laser cutters or glided around behind steel carts stacked with pallets of insectile components. A large tent of fogged plastic stood in the center of the floor, where a construction crew was preparing to install a punch press that in theory would allow the company to shoulder its way into the coveted Emery clip trade. Paul and Loom stood by an air compressor inside the tent and watched the workers jackhammering the floor. Chisel placement seemed an art or science. The floor fell away in jagged pieces under the bell-like striking of the hammers. Then one of the thick green air hoses that fed the jackhammers broke at a brass coupling and rose like a cobra before the hypnotized workers. It slashed the plastic tent and turned its attention toward the humans, but Paul quickly reached down and shut off the compressor.

  This thoughtless but useful act seemed to dissolve their enmity entirely, and one Sunday in March Loom took Paul to see the birthplace of Nathan Hale. Loom’s blue car traveled the back roads of Coventry before arriving at a dark red house with nine windows in the front. Dead leaves blew across the lane. There were gardens and fields and a large stone pyramid marking the graves of a horse and a dog that had belonged to someone named George Dudley Seymour. Seymour had been the New Haven lawyer and Hale devotee who bought the house in 1914 and who finally persuaded the U.S. Post Office to issue a half-cent Hale stamp in 1925.

  “Take away Seymour, and Hale would be less known,” said Loom. “Seymour did a lot of good, and I’ll be the first to say that, but I resent all this Seymourabilia. That’s the term I’ve coined for it. The man’s horse died, but the connection with Nathan Hale seems tenuous.”

  A woman named Debbie Wyoming, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, led their tour. She was president of Nathan Hale International and the honorary guide for the weekend.

  “He never lived in this house,” she said as they stood in the hallway outside the room where Nathan Hale’s father, as justice of the peace, had once rendered judgment on his fellow citizens. “This house would have been nearing completion when the British hanged Nathan Hale as a spy, at what is now Sixty-sixth Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. He had gone to Long Island disguised as a Dutch teacher, all dressed in brown. Hale’s last words — ‘I regret that I have only one life,’ and so forth — may have been borrowed from Addison’s verse tragedy about the Roman statesman Cato, which the patriot may have read at Yale. He believed strongly in the education of the female. He was a lively young man who liked to jump into hogsheads and then jump out of them. This portrait here is of one of his nieces, who served as a missionary in China. She is believed to be the lady in white who can sometimes be seen in the rooms upstairs. Back then, even young girls were expected to girdle their bodies.”

  “What is a hogshead?” Loom asked.

  “A barrel or cask holding anywhere from sixty-three to one hundred and forty gallons.”

  Later she showed them Hale’s Bible, his deerskin trunk, a tracing of his silhouette on a door, and the silver shoe buckles that he gave to a comrade for safekeeping before going on his spy journey.

  “In Johnstown we call our annual pageant Silver Buckles,” said the woman. “Nathan Hale had his Yale diploma with him when he was captured. They left him hanging many days.”

  “I’m related to him,” said Loom.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hanover.”

  “Hanover . . . Well, I won’t say you’re not related to him, but much research remains to be done.”

  On the way back to Ashland, Loom told Paul that he was sorry about what happened at the fastener party. “Mimi went overboard. She’s a great manager, but sometimes she shows poor judgment.”

  “I’ve already forgotten it.”

  “You can’t bring back the past. There’s nothing there. It’s only trouble. And I don’t mean with Alice. It’s bad enough with Alice. But it’s just as bad with this woman who died so long ago that no one even remembers.”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “You worry me.”

  “I’ve talked to her.”

  “You worry the living fuck out of me. When you begin talking to statues it’s time to think of getting your own place.”

  “She wants me to find her daughter. I don’t know. Could this be? Maybe I’m dreaming.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Where is the daughter?”

  “No one knows. That’s what foster homes are for. They foster disappearance. I’ve learned two things from running the company, and they are, one, any decision is better than no decision, and two, once you’ve decided something, close your ear even to the best counterargument. Nietzsche knew this well. He said even the will to stupidity is better than constant rehashing.”

  “What did you mean when you said that Linda Tallis became her brother’s meal ticket?”

  “Pete Lonborg sued my parents. That’s all I meant.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “I don’t know. Wrongful dismissal?”

  Loom swung by the Red Mountain windmill on the way back to Ashland. Paul had not seen it before except in Pete’s model. Fieldstones formed a round tower and four blades curved to cup the wind. A padlock secured the wooden door. Loom and Paul climbed onto a ledge from which Loom pulled himself up and through a window in the stone. Paul took the edge of a blade in both hands and pushed. The blades moved and the hub turned, silver and black; the windmill must have been taken care of by someone, or perhaps a committee. Loom called from overhead. Paul walked around the ledge to find him. He had got up inside the windmill and stood now in a high opening on the side of the tower opposite the blades.

  Without warning, Loom jumped from the tower, sailing down with the red plaid lining of his huntingjacket streaming at his sides. His glasses and white hair flashed in orange sunlight. The blue shadow of a blade crawled across the round rough stones mortared into the tower. Loom cleared the ledge on which Paul stood, but he fell back against it after landing in the weeds.

  Paul dimbed down and stood over him. “Are you all right?” he said.

  “I’ve been drinking less and finding that I have tremendous energy.”

  19

  The man who selected the Sun’s letters to the editor took two months’ leave to have his hips replaced, and Paul assumed his duties. Those who wrote to the editor seemed to fall into two categories: people who either did not understand or else ignored the traditional purpose of letters to the editor, and people so given to scornful, know-it-all language that they had a hard time specifying what it was they were scorning. An example of the first category would be a letter from a Brenda Forest in Lignum Vitae, who wrote, “Where and when did the practice of putting candles on birthday cakes originate? It seems like this would have resulted in a lot of needless fires in earlier times before flame-retardant building materials. Don’t you think?” Instances of the second category were more common and used such similar language that they might have all been written by the same person. “Once again the Sun betrays its socialist agenda with a rank cornucopia of broad claims. One is tempted to conclude that the privileges of the media monopoly have befuddled your brains such that you can no longer discern between reasoned reportage and character assassination, while predictably championing the unholy triptych of Mayor Clifton ‘Moscow on Line Two’ Trammell, Hamlet Counsel Marjorie ‘Hearts and Flowers’ Wessels, and Fire Warden Steve ‘No Nickname’ Plum. If you would take the time to study the severance clause of the United States Constitution, which clearly you have not, you would understand that, in a federal republic, fiduciary authority resides EXCLUSIVELY in the so-called third tier, and that your arguments ring hollow indeed.”

  One of the best parts of letters duty was writing the headlines, which, as his bad-hipped predecessor had emphasized, must reflect the content and spirit of the letters no matter how derogatory that content or spirit might be to the newspaper itself.

  SU
N IS FULL OF BEANS

  LANDFILL EDITORIAL EXAMPLE OF BIG-LIE TECHNIQUE

  HOME PLANET OF MONA CHAREN IS QUESTIONED

  READER SEEKS ORIGIN OF CANDLE TRADITION

  The working conditions were also better compared with those of the reporters. Editorial-page employees worked on the top floor of the Temple of Hephaestus and came in at nine or nine-thirty, or ten or ten-thirty. It didn’t really matter when they came in, as long as they were present for the eleven o’clock conference, during which they ate crullers, drank coffee, and engaged in wistful discussions of what it must be like to live in other countries. They took long lunches, followed by a quiet time. Sometimes they made brainstorming field trips to a religious shrine called the Embers. Paul thought that the letter writers who accused the Sun of satanic opposition to gun proliferation would have had their eyes opened if they could have seen the editorial-page department discussing the flat tax in a sun-streaked alcove full of biblical icons, but he also liked the department’s principled refusal to cite these meditative trips in its favor.

  One Thursday, after completing the letters layout for the next day, Paul went to see the lawyer whose name Carrie Wheeler had written on a piece of paper. Rudolph Bonner had an office in a Queen Anne–style house between a car wash and the unemployment office.

  “I’m glad you came in,” he told Paul. “I think I can find the information you seek, but I wonder if you would first witness some signatures for me. Normally I would call on my paralegal, Helen, but she’s having an operation.”

  “What kind of signatures?”

  “Well, I have a man and woman in the other room who are signing over their house and assets to their son,” said the lawyer. “It’s a routine maneuver, for tax purposes. The boy won’t really control anything.”

  The family sat at a long glass table in a conference room. The man and woman stood as the boy scribbled in a coloring book.

  “This is Paul Emmons,” said the lawyer. “He has come to the office on other matters but has kindly agreed to serve as a witness.”