The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  When Robin returned to the waiting room, he saw her unsteady for the first time. She cried softly into a thick white towel, and Paul rose to put an arm around her shoulders. They moved slowly to the window, where the nurse stood waiting. Then Dr. McTawse came out; he had blood on the fringe of his smock. With slashing strokes he wrote a prescription on a clipboard. “She wouldn’t take a general,” said Dr. McTawse. “I told her everyone takes the general, but Miss Redding was disinclined to hear my advice. It was a bit of a tussle.”

  “We could’ve gone somewhere else,” said Paul.

  “It makes no difference to me,” said Dr. McTawse. “I run people in and out of here all day.”

  “We’ll need plenty of painkiller,” said Paul.

  “I’ll give her two bottles of Percodan,” said Dr. McTawse, “and that’s treating her like my own daughter. They were difficult teeth which had grown sideways in the gum.” He pulled down his lip to show where the teeth had lodged as Robin’s eyes widened and her crying became audible through the towel.

  Paul fed Robin pills and stopped to pick up lemon yogurt, bananas, and beer on the way to her house. She had what the lowland Scots call a but-and-ben, on the green ridge above Kirkmadrine. Red tiles roofed the cottage and ivy climbed the walls, and still it seemed a modest place to house someone of Robin Redding’s stature. Paul dropped his keys into a bowl of blue marbles that stood on a table near the front door and helped Robin to her davenport. In the tiny bathroom he rinsed cold water over a washcloth. A box of tampons stood ripped open beneath the sink, and a wooden-handled back scrubber hung intimately on the tiled wall above the bathtub. He looked at his face in the mirror of the medicine chest. The scar was healing, but beyond that he looked older. His whiskers, which he had shaved only the night before, seemed less a sign of freedom from regimentation than proof of repetition and degradation. The black holes in the center of his eyes alone connected him to his youth, and it was good that they did, because when they clouded up, he figured, he would be dead. But that could take years, and, thus enlightened, Paul returned to the davenport with a detour to the kitchen, to fetch a spoon for the yogurt.

  He cooled Robin’s hot brow with the wet cloth and pulled up a chair to watch her eat. He had never seen her eat before and took encouragement from the scrape of the spoon against the curved wall of the plastic cup. He remembered the observant passenger on the plane. All done with your yogurt, I see. Ivy leaves crept along the sills of the windows. Paul said it was a pretty place and asked Robin if the pills had kicked in. She lay back on the couch, closed her eyes, and said she could feel the breeze through the window on every molecule of her face. When Paul had had his wisdom teeth removed, he had almost wished that they could grow back in, so he could get more Percodan, and he told her so.

  “Where did you live then?” said Robin calmly. The gauze that the doctor had stuffed into her mouth made her voice a thick and distant buzz.

  “Providence.”

  “You said that my mother wanted to know about me,” said Robin. “What did you mean by that? You were only surmising,”

  “I mean I’ve seen her and talked to her.”

  With these words he remembered his bereft grandfather, standing aslant in a cemetery in Woonsocket and claiming to have seen Paul’s grandmother and the young dead Aaron standing side by side; and he remembered what a deluded old man his grandfather had seemed, with bumblebees cruising heavily around his ears.

  “But if you’ve read the letter,” said Robin, “everything you know could have come from that, and the rest you could have imagined.”

  “That’s occurred to me,” said Paul. “But I don’t think it went that way. Let me show you something,” He went out to his car and fetched the stamp album from the trunk.

  “This is yours.” He held the album before her eyes and slowly turned the frail manila pages. “You and your mother did this together, because you liked stamps. Isn’t that something?”

  “We didn’t follow through,” said Robin. But she took the album, closed it, and held it to her chest. “Give us a beer, will you?”

  Paul did so. “Now, I’m going to leave this yogurt cup on the chair,” he said. “Do you know what for?” He leaned near her ear and whispered, “So you can spit blood if you need to.”

  “You are a trip,” she said.

  He put some Percodan tablets in his pocket and left Robin looking at the stamp album on the davenport.

  The castle ruins looked safer in sunlight, and the low green profile of Northern Ireland hovered on the edge of the water. Paul explored the lower chambers that had been dark on the afternoon he arrived. Perhaps they had been used for torture, or more likely something mundane — the storage of wheat. In an underground room he took one Percodan and climbed the stairs to the long open room above. A centipede scuttled across his shoe as he sat at the hearth of the crumbled fireplace. It had enough legs for a host of regular insects, and he decided that this was what gave centipedes their creepy quality — the presence of many animals in one. He swallowed another pill. Dose calibration was paramount.

  He remembered his student who had overdosed at the high school in Providence. Paul had gone to see him in the hospital.

  “I was supposed to go to a party,” said the student. “My friend Ned invited me to a party. The problem is that my other friends don’t like Ned. One of my biggest conflicts in life is walking that line between my two sets of friends. Sometimes I dream that I’m standing in a supermarket between the soup cans and the crackers, and I have to choose. For some reason, in the dream I can’t get both.”

  “You can’t mess with needle drugs.”

  “If you could put needle drugs in a bottle, everyone would love them. Everyone would say, Let’s have some more of those needle drugs.”

  Paul said nothing, for he found the student’s logic persuasive.

  “I don’t shoot up lightly, Mr. Nash. You know me — only when the world crowds me in. I keep everything I need in a cigar box in the attic. So I shot up and everything felt simple again, just the way I like it. I came down from the attic and pulled on my coat and took a bus to the school. That’s where everyone meets, in the parking lot, by the incinerator. When you see two cars full of kids stopped in the street, that’s what they’re saying, ‘Go to the school,’ which is very ironic, because no one likes the school. So I was walking through the weeds behind the incinerator when I realized that something was wrong, I fell on my knees and then over on my side. I could see the weeds, and through the weeds I could see a bicycle chained to the incinerator with its front wheel all twisted. Why is it that when you see a chained bicycle the wheel is always bent?”

  “Good question. I don’t know the answer.”

  “I’m not ashamed to die. I mean, I’m not afraid to die, but I am somewhat curious.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “But eventually, I mean. In church they used to say heaven has angels with tinsel hats, but I never believed that. I guess I think it will be like the time I was doing handstands on my desk in study hall and somehow I lost my balance and fell. It made a terrible racket, and the teacher got furious and sent me up to the sickroom. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the sickroom, but it has a good view of the city. And I thought, Well, you can call it punishment, but this seems pretty nice to me. Then no one came to get me all day. I guess they forgot where I was. Finally the sun went down and the lights started coming up all over town. And that would be my best guess of what heaven will be like . . . a little room with a good view where they never come to get you. What do you think of heaven? Or if not heaven, whatever you want to call it.”

  Paul sat back in a hospital chair, resting his heels on the frame of the bed. “My hearing isn’t the best.”

  “We know.”

  “It works out well in class, because when kids mouth off I don’t hear it, so
pretty soon they stop.”

  “Not really.”

  “But even in perfect silence I hear something. It’s like the noise the ocean makes, and sometimes it’s very loud. It’s like someone speaking a language I can’t understand. And I think that when you die that’s all you get — a sound.”

  “You have a shabby theory,” said the student.

  “You’re younger and more optimistic.”

  When Robin’s mouth felt better, Paul commissioned her to ride horses with him on trails near the golf course. Robin rode a former polo stallion named Carton, and Paul rode a towering and barrel-bellied mare. She was by far the widest horse he had ever ridden, with massive legs and a meter’s swing in her gait. They walked or posted the horses down hills and cantered them up. Paul’s horse seemed dismissive of his riding skills until he demonstrated that he had some; then her ears pricked and she began to work. When she overtook the polo horse on a hill, the stallion watched calmly and then extended his black and shining neck and pounded the sandy path. There is no beating a polo horse, except on another polo horse. Robin’s hair streamed behind her in the wind. Eventually they left the trails through a wooden gate and meandered down a narrow road where a workman hammered the tin roof of a house going up by a bridge. Then they cantered along a soft needled path between evergreens, dipping their heads beneath the scratching boughs and arriving in a clearing over the sea.

  “This is my place,” said Robin. “I smoked when I first got to Scotland, and Carton and I would come up here and have a smoke. It was very peaceful.”

  “Smoke sinks right into my brain,” said Paul. “I never buy cigarettes.”

  “I miss them sometimes,” said Robin.

  They watched a big barge moving through the water, followed by a cloud of birds. The barge made its way like a floating city block.

  Robin fell on the way back. Her rein broke on the right side of the bit, and Carton bolted. Robin reached up to take the bit in her hand, and at the same moment the horse jumped something real or imagined in the path, and she tumbled off and landed on the ground. The horse kept running but stopped after a while to look behind. By the time Paul rode up, Robin was on her feet and holding the back of her head.

  “You’ve jinxed me,” she said. “I don’t fall. I never fall.”

  “Are you O.K.?”

  “I will be,” she said. She circled her arms at her sides. “I will be if you’d give me some breathing space.”

  Carton trotted up but would not look at her, as if to spare her the embarrassment; instead, he gazed placidly across the hills.

  “I have to give lessons this afternoon,” said Robin. “I should have known better than to come out here with you.”

  After the accident Paul felt apprehensive about seeing her again, but he had those theater tickets and had given her a lot of business, so two nights later she agreed to see Pain of Youth in Ochterfail. It was performed by a traveling theater and told the story of decadent medical students in reckless Vienna at the turn of the century. After the play they had spaghetti at a restaurant called the Casino and then walked the nearly empty streets of Ochterfail. Robin had cigarettes, and they smoked, and Paul felt a peaceful and dark blue veil dropping over his mind.

  Turning down an alley, they arrived at the dental surgeon’s office, which was in a small house.

  “What do you say, let’s roll out the archbishop’s doormat,” said Robin.

  Paul said he was not familiar with the phrase, and Robin produced a plastic bottle from her purse and splashed liquid onto the door of the house.

  “What is that?” said Paul.

  “Club cleaner,” said Robin.

  She lit a match and tossed it at the door, which began to burn in streaks of yellow-white flame. Paul kicked the door to douse the flames, and three men who happened to be coming around the corner of the alley shouted and gave chase. Robin and Paul ran, but Robin had got a head start, and Paul ducked behind a mobile home with two wheels on the curb and two on the pavement. The three men put out the fire and walked up the alley. And then something lucky happened: a man and a woman stepped out of the back of the mobile home. The three men chased them down the alley, shouting, and finally dragged the young man to the ground. He did not look much like Paul — he had long shaggy hair and glasses — and yet he and his companion had some explaining to do before the men could be convinced that they had the wrong couple. The man showed them the tag on the collar of his shirt, although how this might have established his innocence Paul did not know.

  He found Robin waiting in her car by the theater. She drove south past Kirkmadrine and onto the narrow two-lane road that curved down the Mull of Culloden. It was a clear night with a moon bright as a drum. The farther they drove, the higher the land rose above the water. There was not much out here — knots of houses from time to time, and a caravan park with lighted trailers in which people could be seen moving past the windows.

  “Burn many houses?” said Paul.

  Robin worked her fists around the steering wheel. “A sport told me about it.” That’s what she called her golfing clients. “I couldn’t teach the other day, by the way. Too much of a headache. I called in sick and just lay in my bed remembering things.”

  “Probably you had a little concussion,” said Paul. “But you can go to jail for things like that.”

  The dashboard lights softly lit her face. “I even thought I remembered my mother,” she said. “We were on the porch of a house and she was painting the floor. I want to say she was painting it green, if that’s possible. Was the porch of the house that you lived in painted green?”

  “I don’t think so. But it could have been painted over.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Sure it could. But anyway, as she was painting, some bug got stuck in the paint, and it seems to me she got really upset. She said, ‘Cockeyed bug,’ and I thought this was a literal reference, that the bug must have strange eyes. She was wearing a white shirt with the tails tied over her stomach.”

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “I’m fine,” said Robin, and after another mile or so, she said, “Do you have everything you need? I don’t really know what you came to find out, but maybe you’ve found it and could leave in good conscience. Because I don’t think I want to see you anymore. You put some kind of spell on me. They say that golfers are superstitious, and it’s true. Plus, we really have very little in common.”

  “Just give me the sign.”

  The road ended at a white wooden gate, beyond which a driveway led to a lighthouse with a blue-white beacon that swept over the headland. A sign on the gate said FREE CATS, and though it was late Robin insisted on going up to see about the cats. The gate was locked, and they climbed over it and walked to a small house at the base of the light.

  “Come in, come in,” said the lighthouse keeper. “I just made bean soup. It’s very good. Come in.”

  “You have cats?”

  “They’re all gone. And I thank you for reminding me that the sign must come down. The mother is up in the tower. She is the best mouser we’ve ever had. I say ‘we,’ but out here it’s just me, and I’m eager for the company.”

  Paul and Robin ate soup and biscuits with the lighthouse keeper. The soup was very good, just as he had said.

  “Do you follow the news?” he said. “The Americans are trying to get Mars. With all they have, they now want Mars.”

  Robin touched a napkin to her mouth. “I did hear something about that.”

  Paul said, “I would go to Mars, get a little place and settle down.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” said the lighthouse keeper. “Who can figure out the way things are anymore?”

  Paul and Robin agreed that no one could.

  There was a piano in the parlor, and Robin played while the lighthouse keeper and Paul sat in overs
tuffed chairs and listened to the music. She played “Loch Lomond,” “Bang a Gong,” and “How Are Things in Glocca Mora?” Paul found himself in such a good mood that he sang along with “Glocca Mora,” which he sort of knew because his sister Carmen had been a page turner for the piano player in a high school production of Finian’s Rainbow. He remembered the curtain calls, the cast loaded down with roses, and he faked the words he’d forgotten. Is that little brook still happening there?

  26

  Paul made it back to Ashland one last time. He did not know why he was going or what would follow. The idea of returning to tell a ghost that her daughter was a golf pro in Scotland was so obviously nuts that it never occurred to him. In any case, he found a crew of workmen swarming over the Tallis house, carrying ladders, toolboxes, and buckets of skim-coat. A mason stood on a high ladder chiseling brittle mortar from the chimney while inside painters rolled white latex over the walls. The statue of Linda and a suitcase stood on the front porch as if the statue were waiting for a bus.

  Paul walked over to Loom and Alice’s house, but no one was home, so he went into the kitchen and heated up a can of lentil soup. While waiting for the soup to cook he found the address of Loom’s mother in a phone book. Then he poured the soup into a bowl, broke Crown Pilot crackers over it, and ate. Afterward, he washed the dish and spoon in the sink, put them away, and climbed one set of stairs and then another to the cupola, where ledger books and a letter from an investment firm lay on the table. The letter said that the strategy that had been devised for Loom and Alice had become outmoded, what with blanket bonds sitting dead in the water. Paul looked out the window and saw Mr. Freel the butler lying on a rug in the trough of the roof over the sun porch. Paul raised a window and stepped carefully down the shingles.

  “What’s going on next door?”

  “The house is being renovated in order that it might be sold,” said Mr. Freel. “Your belongings have been packed for you. They could not find any luggage, so Alice picked up some Samsonite.”