The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  As in any cross section of the population, a surprising number of people had voices that were strong and clear, and Paul drank glass after glass of red wine and laughed along with the crowd, although he often had only a vague sense of what was funny and there were many uproarious lines that he didn’t get at all. Loom Hanover would close the show, as he always did, with a song linked to Ashland’s industrial history. One year he’d done “Needles and Pins,” and another “The Tighten Up.” Tonight he strode onto the stage holding a shimmering green guitar by the neck.

  “Thank you,” he said, then tilted his head sidewise to make eye contact with the band. The song began. And as Loom sang about Romeo and Juliet, and Samson and Delilah, and their loves that couldn’t be denied, the music faded in Paul’s ears, faded to silence, and he seemed to hear other words from a long time ago, from Canada, from a lecture given on chalcedony by the treasured scholar Virginia Lovetree of Sherwood University. “Chalcedony was a type of quartz used by the ancient Egyptians to drive away ghosts, night visions, and sadness. Chalcedony is never crystalline, but translucent and waxy in appearance. It usually is a smoky blue, but it may also be yellow or a cloudy white. The Egyptians used it on their scarab seals.”

  The flashing lights he saw when he got home reminded him of the motorcycle crash that had been his break. He got his police flashlight out of the house and went into the back yard, where he could see tire tracks pressed into the grass. He jogged down through the trees. Spotlights glared along the shore. A young man in dark pants stood back from the water’s edge, examining a white shirt. Paul tried to tell him that he was from the Sun, but the young man did not respond, as he was too busy studying the monogram on the shirt. An old ambulance sat crooked on the sand with an orange cross painted on the side and its back doors flung open. Paul moved up and down the rocky beach among small groups of men and women smoking cigarettes that turned intermittently bright orange and black. Then a diver walked up and out of the water carrying a woman in a black bathing suit. The diver lay the woman on the sand, removed his mask, knelt, and breathed into the woman’s mouth. He tried filling her lungs for some time before looking up. Paul crouched by the body of Linda Tallis. Her eyes had swollen shut and her long reddish hair fanned about her head, entwined with lake weeds. Paul gripped her cold shoulders but could not shake her, could not move her, could not lift her into his arms.

  Back in the house, a man stood at the kitchen counter wearing a broad red shirt with a coconut tree and monkey embroidered on the back. He held a thin wooden propeller in one hand and a strip of emery paper in the other. He would raise the propeller to the light, examine it with squinting eyes, and set to sanding with loud and rasping slashes. From time to time he dipped the sandpaper in a dish of water stationed at his elbow

  IV

  KEYS

  22

  Usually he ignored the safety instructions, out of superstition, as if to prepare for disaster were to invite it, but this time — on the night flight from New York to Brussels, not long after takeoff — Paul examined the plastic card of colorful emergency pictographs and found it to be a work of clever satire. He especially liked the trio of illustrations directing passengers to refrain from smoking or collecting their suitcases or wearing high-heeled shoes in case of the airplane ditching in the ocean. He could not imagine the choice of footwear making a difference one way or the other as the icy water of the North Atlantic flooded the plane.

  The man sitting behind him was one of those passengers who while away the hours by making direct observations to his seatmate. “The Concorde is actually a relatively small aircraft . . . All done with your yogurt, I see . . . Virgin planes are red . . .” Paul fell asleep listening to him discuss some problem he was having with his insurance company — “Given the fact that I was on doctor’s orders, and told to stay on bed rest, I kind of assumed I was in compliance” — and woke up, at the end of the short night, to the spidery shock of sunlight on the world’s rim.

  He realized with a start that he did not know the name that Kim Tallis went by now. He hoped that the Scottish town he had been directed to was not a large town.

  He rented a car at Zaventem airport and drove into Brussels, where he took a room in a clean and modern hotel around the corner from the Place St. Catherine. That night he sat on a scarred wooden bench by a long rectangular fountain with trees and cobblestones all around. Dark water spouted from the mouths of stone crocodiles, and neon tubes of green and orange outlined the facades of the bars and restaurants across the way. Listening to the trickling water and the low rumble of tires on the stones, he felt released from time. Later, he tried to order supper in a restaurant but the kitchen had closed, and he was befriended by an old couple, who sat nearby. The man was from Amsterdam originally but had driven Mack trucks back and forth across the United States in the forties.

  “I jumped ship in New York,” the man explained. “When I first arrived I was too young to drink beer, so I drank root beer. After a time I went down to South America. There I jumped ship also.”

  Every time he talked about jumping ship, he made a gesture of contempt, raising his right fist and slapping his left hand into the crook of his arm.

  “He is hungry,” said the woman. She wore a red dress with black beads sewn in.

  “We will take you,” said the man.

  The couple paid their bill and led Paul down a street with music spilling from a café. It sounded like an accordion, but a woman with thick black glasses was playing an electronic keyboard in the front window.

  “In there,” said the former truck driver, “they have dancing for old people.”

  A piece of plywood covered a hole in the sidewalk and the man pointed it out as they went along. “Be careful,” he said.

  Near the old stock exchange the couple said goodbye to Paul. He crossed the street and went into an Irish bar, but the kitchen was closed there also. Paul drank a pint of Stella and read the International Herald Tribune, with “The Boys Are Back in Town” playing on the sound system.

  ••

  The next morning Paul took the E411 and N4 into the Ardennes. Even out in the country the light stanchions huddled close together along the highways. The Belgians hated to let a road go unlighted.

  A festival was under way in Vertige. Men in red felt jackets walked on stilts, leading a parade down the main street and forcing Paul to make his way through the narrow alleys that cut between stone buildings. He saw Guissard, who owned the grocery store, trying to break up a fight between two small dogs. He seemed to be having no success. Then the road lifted, leaving Vertige behind, passed a walled cemetery with a wrought-iron gate, and arrived at the inn. There a man in purple coveralls stood on a chair at the front door, hammering a trim board back into place as Mary watched with folded arms.

  Paul leaned out of the car window. “Madame, can you direct me to the Festival of Stilts?”

  She turned and looked at him without seeing him, the way that you do when you own a small business. Her belly was round and high, in a long blue dress worn over white leggings with bees printed on them. “You’ll want to go back into town, and I’ll tell you the way.”

  He got out of the car took her hands in his. “Did we do this?”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “I ran into Tommy Maynard,” said Paul.

  She touched the scar. “Is it over?”

  “Almost.”

  “Look at my hair,” said Mary, lifting it with her hands. She wore a diamond on the ring finger of her left hand. “My hair was never like this. It’s because of the protein.”

  Paul felt her hair and it was very thick. “I don’t know what to say, Mary. You just look so . . . full.”

  “I’m stinging with it,” she said.

  “I know nothing about diamonds,” he said. “I couldn’t tell a carat from a facet.”

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p; The man on the chair handed down the hammer, and she took it. “This is Axel,” said Mary.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Paul. “I’ve been meaning to fix that for about three years.”

  “Now it’s done,” said Axel.

  “Axel and Judy are my left and right hands,” said Mary. “They came from Jardins du Saint-Hubert. Pierrick Gilloteaux took one look at the place and said we need a bigger family.”

  “And he would be . . .”

  “Pierrick’s my partner,” said Mary “He came down from Antwerp one weekend and fell in love with Vertige. He deals in diamonds and lace.”

  “That about covers it.”

  “You can try and get my goat,” said Mary “But it won’t happen.”

  “How are the goats?” said Paul.

  “Sheba had kids.”

  “Good for her,” said Paul. “Where is Pierrick?”

  “London.”

  “You work fast.”

  “That’s rich,” said Mary “That’s so rich I could smash you with this hammer.”

  “I can take it,” said Paul.

  “Judy,” shouted Axel. He had come down from the chair and was examining the frayed weave of the seat.

  A woman with red cheeks and wild gray hair looked out of a window “What?”

  “Make a snack tray,” said Axel. “M. Emmons est retour.”

  “How about cheese?” said Judy.

  “Oui, merci,” said Paul.

  When Judy brought out the food, she said she could tell that Mary was going to have a girl by the way she was carrying.

  The guests at the inn included two birdwatchers from The Hague, a Canadian war buff, and a bicyclist named Clement from South Africa. After supper Paul went out to the barn and sat in the clean straw of the goat pen. Sheba and her kids — Jo-Jo, Pin-Pin, and Stanley — came tripping over to lick his face, and he patted the coarse hair on their necks.

  Clement entered the barn tentatively and leaned his arms on the fence of the goat pen. He wore sharply creased khakis and a jacket of waxed cotton. The goats hurried over to the fence to greet the visitor.

  “Good evening,” said Clement. “I hear you’re from America.”

  Paul rose from the goats and brushed straw from his jeans. “That’s right. From Rhode Island.”

  Clement nodded. “I toured America when I was seventeen years old. We rode bicycles in Iowa, Montana, and California, but never in Rhode Island. In Iowa we dipped our wheels in the Mississippi and Missouri rivers — first in one and then in the other. Such a crowd of bicycles as one could scarcely fathom.”

  “What do you do when you’re not riding?”

  “I’m an engineer,” said Clement. “A bicycle manufacturer in Durban sends me anywhere I want to go, testing not only our bicycles but those of our competitors. When I return, I go to my drafting table and make suggestions.”

  “What a great job,” said Paul. “You must have won races and such.”

  “As a rider I am slightly better than average,” said Clement. “What I do have is stamina. There are few mountains that would pose a great problem for me. And I have an understanding of the way that a bicycle works. But as for speed, I am only slightly better than average. The great cyclists of the Netherlands would leave me in their wake. But this makes a kind of sense, for how many of all the bicycles sold worldwide are purchased by top riders?”

  “Very few,” said Paul.

  “Precisely,” said Clement. “I wonder if you have kayaks to rent.”

  “You can get them in town,” said Paul. “There’s a shop next to the Catholic church with a sign that says ‘Descente de la Torchon en Kayak.’”

  Clement yawned. “Excuse me, but I find myself rather tired this evening.”

  “So do I,” said Paul. “I flew back from the United States yesterday.”

  “My greatest memory of North America, do you know, has nothing to do with bicycling. It concerns a restaurant. I’m not even sure what city the restaurant was in, but it consisted of a turning disk at the top of a building.”

  “A lot of cities have them.”

  “Understandably,” said Clement. “It was a clear night, and we could see the city lights as if a golden bowl had been inverted over the sky. There was a lake, I remember that, whatever city it was. We had drinks and sketched our itinerary on cocktail napkins. And then someone noticed that the restaurant seemed to be turning faster than it had been previously. The glasses trembled on the tables. The place was really spinning. At first it seemed comical, but gradually a panic set in. People did not know whether to go to the windows to watch the whirl of lights or to hurry down to the ground. A church choir who had pushed lots of tables together now began to sing. Their singing was most impressive but had no impact on the frightened crowd. I caught an elbow in the eye as I moved to the elevator. The fear was that the restaurant would lose its mooring and sail to the ground like a Frisbee. And when I finally made it through, the door slid open and out came a group of people in shining yellow suits.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Firefighters,” said Clement. “They had come to supervise the evacuation. And I must say they did a good job of it. I wish I could remember the city. No one died, though several were injured.”

  “Would you go in that kind of restaurant again?” said Paul.

  “Oh, most probably I would,” said Clement, “for the reasons that drew me to it initially. I believe in the technology, for one. I believe in the material advancement of the society. I have no doubt that by the time my children are grown there will be a city on the moon, with all the advantages of reduced gravity. Manufacturing, for example, becomes exponentially less costly.”

  “How old are your children?”

  “I’m not yet married,” said Clement. “But certainly someday after I’ve stopped traveling so much, I should say that I will have chil­dren. I look at your wife and I think, Someday, Clement, you will have children of your own, and you will bore them to distrac­tion with stories of riding bicycles in the range of the Grand Teton.”

  “Are you kidding? They’ll love it,” said Paul.

  Clement went back to the house, and Paul fed the animals and changed their straw-specked water. Then Rosine came into the barn. She walked heavily, carrying a bucket of scraps. Paul offered to take it but she held tight to the handle. She gave the scraps to the goats, then went around emptying the buckets of water that Paul had put out and refilling them from the hydrant in the center of the barn.

  “I just did that,” said Paul.

  “J’entends un bruit,” she said.

  Mary gave Paul a sleeping bag, and he unrolled it on the floor of their room. It was a green sleeping bag with pheasants printed on the lining. They lay down — he on the floor and she on her bed. Mary, in her nightgown, settled on her back. “They’re going to induce me on Monday if nothing happens.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Paul.

  “O.K.”

  “You can have Pierrick there too.”

  “He may not be back,” said Mary. “Look, this is a friendship ring. Don’t misunderstand. I’d like for you to misunderstand, but you shouldn’t. It was returned because there was a flaw in the stone. So he let me wear it, he said he wanted me to wear it, and that’s all there is to that.”

  “Diamond dealers don’t give out diamonds on a whim. He could get good money for that stone. Let me see it.”

  “No.”

  “Obviously he’s got your number.”

  “I already have a brother, and you’re not him,” said Mary. “You left me.”

  “You wanted me to leave,” he said.

  “Rub my back,” she said.

  She turned on her side and he knelt beside the bed, kneading the muscles on either side of her spine. He h
ad always thought that, given the chance, he could make women feel less tense. They seemed sometimes to carry a mantle of everyday worry that he felt capable of lifting. This was not a calculated belief but more like a spontaneous illusion, and it was consistent with his amateur’s theory of organic pragmatism in human behavior. Not that he considered the reproduction of his personal cells the point of living — far from it — but he would not have been surprised if his cells had a different take on the matter. He wondered if the physical and emotional rush of making love, that feeling of falling, could be accounted for by the enthusiasm of the cells — as if they were saying, in unison, “Hey, this is more like it” — and if, correspondingly, his sense of sexual mission resulted from a chemical imbalance.

  However that question could be answered, he sensed that in his absence something had changed in Mary. Whether this was due to the pregnancy or to some resolution on her part, she now seemed less needful of whatever help he might offer. She appeared steady and full of purpose, and good for her. Good for her. She had offered to brain him with a hammer, but she had not seemed committed to the notion. Maybe the assertion of vengeful independence was a passport admitting her to a better world where the wind could be heard sighing in the branches. Not to be sarcastic about it. What really got to him was the likelihood that he could not hurt her anymore but only cause her some distant and bemused unrest. Hurting her was not his aim, but he did want to be flesh and blood in her life.

  “I just remembered,” he said. “I need you to make a painting.”

  “Forget it.”