The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  “That’s right,” said Alice. “You did, honey. You asked me first.”

  Loom came back downstairs with the children. He explained that Chester had grabbed on to a bedpost, and Faith had pulled Chester by the feet, dragging the post over and through the ceiling grate.

  “Let’s go outside,” said Chester.

  “Good idea, Ches,” said Loom.

  They all sat in the courtyard. Alice brought out a Martin D-45 Dreadnought with pearl inlays — her present for Loom.

  “Play us a song, doc,” she said.

  The children zoomed over the grass while Loom strummed the rosewood guitar.

  “I skinned my knees in a small town,” he sang. “I waxed my skis in a small town. I lost my keys in a small town, oh, and that’s all right with me . . .”

  Later, he and Paul went over to the Tallis house to look at the changes. Loom turned a key in the new lock.

  “Taking the wall out was good,” he said, “although you might have removed the broken plaster.”

  The interior was blank and white, and red tiles covered the wooden floors. A woodstove stood anchored in the hearth, new and black and shining.

  “I don’t get this,” said Loom.

  He was looking at the floor. Framed photographs had been taken apart and left in four stacks: photographs, mats, frames, and glass.

  “Are you going to hang these?” asked Paul.

  “We did hang them. There’s an open house next week. We put them on the wall yesterday.”

  “What are they photographs of?”

  Loom looked through them. “Nothing in particular. Fence posts and all that. But why would the contractor take them down, let alone take them apart?”

  “It’s strange.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” said Loom. “No teacher’s ghost did it.”

  “Her daughter is a professional athlete who lives in Kirkmadrine, Scotland,” said Paul. “She wins tournaments and rides horses. She’s as happy as anyone I’ve met. She had some wisdom teeth out, but she’s over that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Found her.”

  “Tell me something. Who pays for all of this?”

  “Plastic,” said Paul.

  “This is what is wrong with the economy,” said Loom. “Debt is king. Stocks are headed for a fall and everything else is running down a French drain.”

  “That reminds me, I got a new car.”

  Loom and Paul put the photographs back together and hung them once again on the walls.

  27

  They finished their inspection of the Tallis house. The upstairs bedroom had become a kitchen, the downstairs kitchen a bedroom, the old wood shop an exercise room with a stationary bicycle. The only reminder of the mom’s old purpose was a rack of carving tools on the wall.

  Paul took down the V-shaped gouge with the wicker handle. “These were Roman’s.”

  “Yes, and I’m not sure I like the chisels.”

  They left through the basement door and walked up beside the house. Lights flooded their eyes and died away. Tommy Maynard and the car chopper named Bodoni stepped from the darkness. Tommy snapped his wrist, making a yo-yo spin down and back.

  “Want to see me walk the dog?”

  “I thought you were on Martha’s Vineyard,” Paul said.

  “Can’t vacation,” said Tommy. “I get antsy or something. And yet I wish I could, but I can’t. People reading books and walking on beaches, they only depress me. I’m just the wrong kind.” He did some trick with the yo-yo requiring both hands. “I’m just a born worker.”

  “Who are these men?” Loom said to Paul.

  “Introduce us to the guy you’ve killed,” said Tommy.

  “Send him back to his family,” Paul said.

  “They’ll see him again. I understand there’s a lake out there somewhere.”

  “Who are they?” said Loom.

  “They’re tools,” said Paul.

  “I like you, kid,” said Tommy Maynard. “I’d like to kick your fucking head in. And I just may. I don’t know what it is that I’m in such a good mood. I guess I’ve never worked by a lake before.”

  “Find that hard to believe,” said Bodoni.

  “I shot at some people by a pond once but I was only trying to scare them.”

  “You sat and listened to me make a deal with Carlo,” said Paul.

  “Carlo’s dead and burned,” said Tommy. “The doctors gave their all, but there was no hope.”

  “You should honor what was said.”

  “Tough,” said Bodoni, “because we’re not.”

  Tommy put the yo-yo away and took out a gun. “What about this lake I keep hearing so much about. Which way do we go?”

  The lake lay in a series of striations under the moon. House lights glowed in the wooded ring of the shore.

  “It’s all extraneous,” said Tommy. “Like the Vineyard in that respect. It’s beyond my understanding. I’m too simple to get it. Just that it’s so beautiful to the eye, I guess.”

  “That, and recreation,” said Bodoni.

  “Let him go,” said Paul.

  “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,” said Tommy.

  “Is that what this is?” said Loom.

  “Any minute now,” said Tommy.

  “Let us have a cigarette,” said Paul. “Or has that also fallen away?”

  Tommy sighed, switched the gun from his left to his right hand, and found a pack in his coat. “‘Smoke ye all of it, do this in remembrance of me.’”

  “None for me, thanks,” said Bodoni.

  Paul and Loom and Tommy smoked the cigarettes and flicked their ashes on the sand. They were king-size cigarettes and seemed to take a long time burning down. Water lapped the shore and bats darted like rags among black branches. Paul raised the wicker-handled gouge slowly.

  “What do you have?” said Tommy. He aimed the gun at Paul’s heart and grabbed the gouge. “You could get hurt carrying a thing like that.”

  “Just what we don’t need,” said Bodoni, looking past all of them.

  Someone was walking down the beach with a flashlight, a girl, wearing a long red coat over a white nightgown. It was Faith Hanover.

  “Oh Father, there you are,” said Faith. “Come home. Come home and look at this book of Robert Capa photographs. We can look at them together.”

  “In a minute, Faith,” said Loom.

  “See, Father, here’s a picture of a man with a cigarette, carrying his daughter in Sicily. Isn’t it sad? Her leg is broken.”

  She handed the book to Tommy and aimed the flashlight on the pages. The man in the photograph stood with shadowed eyes and held his daughter so that her bandaged leg shone in bright sunlight.

  “This whole time we should have done it at the house,” said Bodoni. “We should have done it in the street.”

  “Hello again, Mr. Nash,” said Faith. “Are these your friends? Good evening, men.”

  “Miss,” said Tommy.

  “Where do we go from here?” said Bodoni.

  Tommy dropped the chisel on the sand. He laughed. They all laughed. The situation seemed funny. “Nowhere,” he said. “The scene is too crowded.”

  “It is crowded,” said Faith, touching the photograph with her fingers. “Who is this in the doorway? It must be the mother. The poor woman. War is so terrible.”

  “We’ll catch you later, Mr. Nash,” said Tommy.

  He and Bodoni left, Loom and Faith went up the beach with the flashlight playing on the picture book, and Paul stood for a long time by the water before making his way up through the trees and around the house.

  The side door of the Sun’s office, in the Temple of
Hephaestus, stood propped open by a bundle of newspapers, and Angela and Ramona sat on the grass near the ash tree. Paul had meant to drive on by, but seeing his former comrades, he pulled over.

  “The token looks broken,” said Angela.

  “I’m leaving town,” said Paul.

  “I thought you already left.”

  “I’m leaving again.”

  Angela tore open a bag of licorice laces and passed it around. “Where to?”

  “South.”

  “Well, we’re done,” Ramona said.

  “Why don’t we go out to the Embers?” said Angela. “We’ll bless your trip.”

  “I’m tired,” said the moist-eyed Ramona.

  Angela slid into Paul’s car and he angled it into the street. An orange neon sign said the palm reader’s shop was open. A policeman walked unsteadily to his cruiser like a wind-up soldier. Ashland dropped away behind them. The road turned west and fell steeply.

  FRIDAY OF EMBER WEEK IN LENT SHRINE, said a sign. NO TRESPASSING AFTER DUSK.

  “Ignore that,” said Angela.

  A cinder lane led to a grotto in the side of a hilt. There were iron benches, tiers of burning candles, and a raised slab of gray stone.

  Angela led him to a dispenser of holy water. It was made of aluminum and looked like a coffee maker on wrought-iron legs. She ran water on her fingers and touched his forehead. They lit candles in smoky red jars and then retreated to the stone table.

  “They serve communion on this, I think,” said Angela. “But what I like to do is stretch out on it.” She pulled herself up onto the table and lay down in her blue jeans and white polo shirt. “The stone is very cool.”

  Paul went back to the candles and began taking the glass jars from their tin holders. He arranged them around the resting Angela.

  “This is so pleasant,” she said.

  He sat down on one of the benches, stretching his arms along the back, and watched Angela surrounded by the flickering red jars.

  “Hey, token,” she said. “I was just having the craziest dream. You know those dreams you have when you’re not really asleep? I was having my car emissions tested and the guy said there was something wrong with the equipment. He said he wasn’t getting a reading. So he opened a trap door and we went down metal stairs to a room full of dancing people. They had this underground place no one knows about. Everyone was dressed in tuxedos and long, beautiful gowns.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It really was.”

  He walked to the stone table and looked at her, and she looked at him, and she breathed out slowly, through her nose, and the warm vapors of her breath moved past his face like the dancing civil servants of her dream.

  He crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania in the middle of the night. It was a big night for car transports. Tree of Life — on the Road to a Better America, read the side of a truck. The clouded sun rose while he was following the Alleghenies.

  It began to rain, and a detour sent him off the highway, where a state trooper stood by a gas station waving his arm. Later Paul stopped in a gravel clearing beneath a sheared rock face. Across the road there was a valley dotted with farm buildings and silos.

  Paul fell asleep and did not wake until dark, when he got out of the car to walk around. Sparks flew — he could see them beyond trees and he went on through. A half-moon and hundreds of stars lit the sky as a man in overalls with a propane torch went about cutting up large metal tanks laid on their sides.

  “What are you doing?” said Paul.

  “You could call it recycling,” said the man, lifting the goggles from his eyes. “Taking the steel out of these fertilizer tanks and cutting them down to a size where they can be processed. They’ll be shipped out to a foundry and melted down. They’ve got to be certain lengths to fit in the big foundries, or in their pots, I should say — their melting pots or whatever.”

  “Got a good night for it.”

  “Oh, it’s a beautiful night out, it’s beautiful. I’m trying to get them done fast before the damned grass turns brown. You know, I’ve had a lot of fires going.”

  “What kind of fuel do you use?”

  “I’m using propane. You can use propane or acetylene. Some people prefer acetylene, which burns a lot hotter. I’ll probably go until my oxygen runs out.”

  “I’m an accountant,” said Paul.

  “Well, the economy is doing real good,” said the man. “People are buying and they’re building. Here’s what I would do if I were you. Stay on 8o until just short of Youngstown and take south to Charleston, West Virginia.”

  Paul took 79 to Charleston, 64 to Louisville, 65 to Nashville, 40 to Memphis, and 55 to Jackson, Mississippi. By then he had had nothing to eat or drink for two days except soda from filling stations, and he felt so light of body and mind that, had he opened the moonroof, he might have floated up and out of the car. The streets of Jackson were broad and curiously empty in the light of noon. He parked near a diner and got a newspaper, which said that it was Saturday. The diner had a blue sailfish mounted on the wall. He ate stuffed red snapper and fried potatoes and drank bottled beer. It was the best food he’d had in his life. Leaving the diner, he heard a band practicing a blues number in an empty tavern.

  My sister’s got a home entertainment center,

  She bought it yesterday,

  She put a hundred dollars down

  With a hundred years to pay,

  And when she turns up the volume

  She’s a thousand miles away

  From Jackson he took 55 to New Orleans, where he got off the interstate and followed a series of ever-smaller blacktops down to the delta. Canals laced the marshes, and a forest of bleached and broken trees rose like fingers from a flooded plain. He drove through a town where moss-draped branches sheltered the main street and where children were boarding a bus in front of an elementary school. Faith Hanover’s voice came back to him: Come home, Father, come home. He kept on, wanting to see the Gulf of Mexico, and arrived at last in an outpost called St. Denis, which was composed mostly of fenced lots containing oil drums and drilling equipment.

  The beach was shallow and separated from the settlement by a ridge of thorny grass. Paul walked on the oil-dark sand and watched a squadron of brown pelicans gliding low and parallel to the coastline. He skipped rocks, collected grains of sea glass. Occasionally helicopters flew overhead. Some were large and hollow-bellied cargo carriers and some were the more familiar passenger models, which cut through the air with an impatient, nose-down tilt. The day was hot and fairly dry.

  Eventually a helicopter descended to the beach and landed. This was perhaps a quarter mile from where Paul stood, but the blades raised such a whirlwind of grit that he had to turn away. As he waited for the rotor to stop, he wondered what would make a pilot land so near the shore with the tide coming in. Or was the tide going out? Maybe the engine had failed. Paul walked closer to the helicopter, which was white with a red pinstripe and stood on sled runners. Sunlight flared on the curving windshield. The door, wherever it might be, did not open, but he had all the time he would ever need in which to hear the pilot’s story. Water covered the toes of Paul’s shoes, the small round rocks rolled underfoot.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Linda Tallis’s remarks come from A Treasury of Household Hints, edited by Michael Gore. The hauntings associated with Mad Anthony Wayne, as well as Virginia Lovetree’s explanation of chalcedony, may be found in The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits by Rosemary Ellen Guiley. The Western Europe Phrasebook of Lonely Planet Publications supplied the sentences to be used by travelers in an emergency. Elements of Rosine Boclinville’s story were inspired by an article in Insight Guides: Belgium.

  Portions of this book have appeared in The New Yorker and Cranta. The author wishes to thank the editors. Thanks also to BB
C Radio 4, which broadcast chapter 1, to Pat Strachan, Larry Cooper, Dawn Seferian, and Camille Hykes, for their diligent editing, and, as always, to Sarah Chalfant.