The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  “Yep,” Abe said. “That’s my cat.”

  “I can see how he recognizes you. He’s practically jumping for joy. He is a he, for your information.”

  The cat had begun to wash its paws, exactly as it did every day upon arriving home. “He lives with me,” Abe insisted. “Sheds all over my furniture.”

  “Highly doubtful. I’ve had him for twelve years. I think I know my own cat.”

  It had been a very long time since Helen had noticed how blue a man’s eyes were, but she noticed now. Talking to a stranger on her back porch went against her nature, but she had done all manner of strange things since she’d learned she was ill. Since that time, she had melted somehow. Things she had hitherto ignored she now felt hugely; time and again, she was engulfed in waves of emotion. When she walked onto her back porch, the scent of grass could make her weep. She could see a handsome man like Abel Grey and be overwhelmed by longing. The sting of cold air was delicious. The appearance of the first star in the eastern corner of the sky was just cause for celebration. Tonight, for instance, she had observed the three bright stars of Orion rising as daylight was fading. She’d never in her life noticed such occurrences before.

  The heat wave was through, the temperature was dropping, and although Helen should have been concerned about her own poor constitution, it was Midnight she worried about on nights like this. Abel Grey was also eyeing her pet with concern, as though he had equal rights to worry and fuss.

  “My cat,” Helen reminded him. “And I’ve got the vet bills to prove it. When he lost that eye the doctor said he’d had a fight with another cat, but I think it was done with malice. Whenever he sees a teenaged boy he runs, so what does that tell you?”

  “That he’s highly intelligent?”

  Helen laughed, delighted. “Malice. Believe you me.”

  “There is a lot of that in the world.”

  There was still a stretch of blue in the dark sky and the lights around the quad had switched on to form a circle of yellow globes, like fireflies in the dark.

  “Think what you’d like,” Helen said, as they said good night, “but he’s not your cat.”

  “Fine,” Abe conceded as he set out for his parked car. He waved as he crossed the green. “You tell him.”

  * * *

  WHEN FRIDAY CAME AROUND AND THE WEEK-END stretched out ahead without plans or responsibilities, Abe was not among those who headed to the Millstone to get hammered in order to forget that Monday was only two days away. He wasn’t fit company, that much was obvious, and even Russell Carter, the mildest among their group of friends, had noted Abe’s bad temper when they’d gotten together to play basketball at the elementary school gym the previous night.

  “I don’t know.” Russell had shaken his head. Abe was cursing every missed layup. “You’re not yourself tonight, Abe.”

  “Yeah, well, who am I?”

  “Maybe you’re Teddy Humphrey, man of a thousand altercations. No offense,” Russell had added.

  Whoever he was, Abe had stopped off at the mini-mart attached to the gas station after work on Friday, where he bought a six-pack of Samuel Adams beer. His plan was to study the autopsy report on the Pierce kid, then go out and get some dinner. He was alive and well, happy enough to have a free evening with one beer started and five more waiting, but the more he looked over the report, the more the details troubled him. The contusions on the boy’s forehead and along his back had been assessed as injuries incurred while traveling with the river’s current. His health had been excellent, although his toxicology report had been positive for THC, noting that he had smoked marijuana within forty-eight hours of his death.

  There was a sense of certainty to such official reports that irked Abe; facts always gave him pause, as so much depended on who the fact finder was and what his point of view happened to be. One detail in particular bothered him all the way through his second beer, so much so that he took the rest of the six-pack into the kitchen and telephoned his father down in Florida. Ernest Grey knew the Haddan River as well as anyone, he was the sort of man whose friends liked to joke would one day have to be surgically separated from his fly rod. In Florida he had bought himself a boat, much to Abe’s mother’s dismay, and had begun fishing for marlin. Still, there was no substitute for trout and Ernest continued to miss the Haddan River. One year, when he wasn’t much more than a boy, Ernest had reeled in the biggest silver trout ever recorded in the county, a catch that had been mounted and was still displayed in town hall, right over the doorway that leads into traffic court.

  Abe first spoke with his mother, Margaret, always the far easier task, for when his father took the receiver there was inevitably an uncomfortable silence between them. But the strained tenor of the conversation changed as soon as Abe mentioned that a boy from the Haddan School had drowned.

  “That’s a terrible situation,” Ernest said. “What bothers me most is that they found fecal matter in the lungs.”

  “Are you saying it’s human waste?” Ernest was really interested now.

  “Human as can be.”

  Abe started in on his third beer. He felt he was entitled to that at least; it was Friday and he was alone. Soon enough, the cat would arrive at the back door, clawing at the screen, happy as hell to be home, in spite of what Helen Davis believed.

  “What that autopsy’s telling you is impossible,” Ernest said with complete certainty. “You won’t find anything like that in the Haddan. We had an environmental study done back when the trout stopped running. That was when the town passed the strictest sewage laws in the Commonwealth.” Neither man mentioned what else had happened that year, how their lives fell apart for reasons they still didn’t understand, how the universe had exploded right under their roof. “A couple of folks over on Main Street had to install completely new septic systems,” Ernest went on. “Cost a fortune and they weren’t too happy about it. Paul Jeremy was on his last legs then and he raised holy hell, but we went ahead with it for the sake of the river and it’s been running clean ever since. So don’t tell me there’s human shit in the Haddan, because there’s not.”

  Abe thought this information over, then he called Joey, asking him to meet him at the pharmacy, pronto.

  “This better be good,” Joey said when he got there. He ordered coffee and two jelly doughnuts without bothering to take off his coat. He didn’t have time to make himself comfortable; he wasn’t staying. “Mary Beth and I were supposed to spend a little quality time together once the kids were in bed. She’s so pissed at me for never being home that I’m not even allowed in the doghouse anymore. ”

  The dog was a little terrier Joey hated, a present for Emily’s last birthday, and it lived, not in the yard or in a doghouse, but on Joey’s favorite chair.

  “What if something was wrong with the autopsy report?” Abe said, his voice low.

  “Such as?”

  “What if he hadn’t drowned in the Haddan River?”

  “You just need one thing to convince me,” Joey said. “Proof.”

  “I don’t quite have that, yet.”

  “What do you have, buddy? Nothing?”

  Abe placed the photograph of Gus on the counter.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” Joey asked.

  “I don’t know. A ghost?”

  Joey laughed so hard they could hear him over in the notions aisle. “Yeah, right.” He slid the photo back across the counter. “And I’m the reincarnation of John F. Kennedy.” He bit into a jelly doughnut. “Junior.”

  “Okay. What do you think it is?”

  “I think it’s a damn bad photograph. I think you’d better hope that gal over at the school you’ve got your eye on is better in bed than she is with a camera.”

  “Maybe the image on that photograph is caused by a field of energy left behind by the deceased.” Abe was refusing to let this go. He remembered old-timers down at the station insisting that murdered men could get stuck somewhere between this world and the next. They were prob
ably just trying to scare Abe when they told him that whenever the wind came up it was one of these dead men, rattling at the doors, stranded here among the living.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Joey said. “Tell me you don’t believe in this crap.”

  “You don’t seem to have a better explanation.”

  “That’s because there is none, Abe. You want to believe that someone who dies lives on in some way, I understand that—hell, I’ve lost people, too. But if you want to convince me of something, give me proof. Something I can see, touch, feel. Not ghosts.”

  Joey had had the very same reaction back in the old days when Abe told him he heard Frank’s voice. As soon as he had seen the look on Joey’s face, Abe had known he’d better shut up. He was feeling that same way now.

  Joey still had time to stop at the mini-mart, pick up a bottle of wine, and try to get back in Mary Beth’s good graces, so he said his good-byes, leaving Abe to get the tab. After he’d gone, Abe had another cup of coffee, while Pete Bycrs looked in the back room for one of the sterilized jars that customers used to bring urine samples to the health center in Hamilton. Abe had had too much to drink and now his head was aching. That pounding in his skull, however, didn’t stop him from setting off once he had the glass jar from Pete. It was a blustery night, with fast-moving clouds illuminated by moonlight. On nights like this Frank could never sit still. People said he was restless, he had too much energy, but in recent years Abe had wondered if it might have been something more: a fear of the dark, and of himself, and whatever it was that was going on inside his head. When they were kids playing hide-and-seek, Frank had always carried a flashlight and he never ventured far into the woods. Once, Abe had come upon his brother in the backyard, looking up at the thousands of stars in the sky as though he were already lost among them, without any hope of finding his way back home. Never had Abe seen such loneliness, even though Frank was only steps from their own back door.

  Thinking about such matters almost caused Abe to miss the first side street that would lead him to the river road. He parked on a sandy embankment, then walked along until he passed onto Haddan School property, even though he knew Glen and Joey never would have approved. He wanted a spot close to where Gus might have first made contact with the river, and therefore made his way to the reedy area nearest Chalk House. Abe didn’t feel like a trespasser; no sweaty hands, no butterflies in the gut. He had spent more time on this river than most men spent in their own living rooms, and could still recall a canoe trip with his father and grandfather at a time when he hadn’t been more than three or four. There had been bowers of green leaves overhead and the slapping sound of water as they moved downstream. Whenever he had tried to speak, the men hushed him, warning that he’d scare the fish away. They were out on the river so long that day, Abe fell asleep in the bottom of the boat and awoke with dozens of mosquito bites. No one would believe him afterward when he swore he’d heard the fish swimming below them as he slept.

  Abe had come to the old flat rock he and Joey used for diving in summers past, sneaking here whenever school wasn’t in session and there was no one who might catch them on private property and call their parents to complain. There were more reeds than Abe recalled, and thickets of thorn bushes grabbed at his pant legs. Nonetheless, he went out onto the rock; his boots got wet and he knelt down and before long his jeans were soaked. He scooped water into the sterile jar, then closed it tightly, returning the jar to his jacket pocket.

  By now, the night was so chilly Abe could see his breath in the air. Soon, a film of ice would form in the shallows, a layer so thin it might remain invisible unless stones were thrown. Since Abe had already come this far, he kept on, past the boathouse. Funny how people can keep things from themselves, but he truly didn’t know where he was bound until he was standing outside St. Anne’s. The hedges were rustling in the wind, and the thin, moonlit clouds raced by up above. He could see Betsy clearly through the window. She wore a cotton robe and her hair was wet from the shower; she sat in a frayed upholstered chair, her bare legs curled up beneath her, as she looked over her students’ portfolios. A lamp inside the room cast a faint light so that looking inside was like peering into an Easter egg in which a scene had been designed, there for anyone to hold in his hand and view whenever he pleased.

  Watching her this way, Abe felt completely reckless, exactly as he had all those years ago when he was robbing houses. Once more he was the victim of desire and circumstance. He could hear the sound of girls’ voices from inside the dorm; he could smell the river, a pungent mixture of mold and decay. He moved a vine that blocked his vision. The difference between now and then was that now he was a grown man who made his own decisions, not a boy breaking into the headmaster’s house. No one forced him to remain outside Betsy’s window; there was no lock and key. A rational man would have turned and run, but this night had nothing to do with reason. Whenever Abe made an arrest he always tried to figure out the offender’s motives. What were you thinking, man? he’d said time and time again as he waited for the ambulance with some teenaged boy who’d crashed his father’s car, or as he drove to the jail in Hamilton with men who had slapped their wives around once too often or too hard. Most recently, he’d confronted a couple of kids who’d been caught stealing cartons of cigarettes from the mini-mart. What were you thinking? he’d asked as he peered into their backpacks. The boys had been terrified and they hadn’t answered, but here at last was Abe’s answer: they weren’t thinking at all. One minute they were standing in the dark with no intention of doing anything out of the ordinary, and the next they were acting on instinct, barreling ahead with no thought in their heads other than I want or I need or I’ve got to have it now.

  It was always possible to go back and consider the path not taken; in retrospect, bad decisions and mistakes leapt out so that even the most irrational individual would eventually see the failure of his ways. Later, Abe would wonder if he’d have been so irresponsible if he hadn’t started in on that six-pack so early in the day, or if he hadn’t stopped at the pharmacy, or if he’d held off going to the river to collect water. One alteration of his conduct might have prevented all the rest, a road strewn with poor choices that had led him to her window and kept him there now.

  He thought about the boy who had died, gone so early he would never spy on a woman like this, all tied up in knots, caught up by his own appetites. Gazing into the yellow light, searching Betsy’s beautiful, tired face, Abe could feel his own hunger; it was bitter and he hated himself for it, but it couldn’t be denied. If he stayed any longer he might circle around to the rear of the building in order to watch her get ready for bed, and then who would he be? The sort of man he’d dealt with a hundred times before, whether it was at the scene of traffic accidents or in the parking lot of the Millstone, a man who was already out of control.

  As he forced himself to turn away, Abe thought about all the times he hadn’t cared; the girls in school he had kissed so thoughtlessly, the women he’d gone swimming with in the river on hot summer nights. There’d been far too many of them; why, there’d even been something with Mary Beth one New Year’s Eve when they’d both had too much to drink, a heated, overwrought incident they both politely chose to forget. He had not cared about a single one of these women, an accomplishment for a man as wary as Abe, something of which he’d been proud, as if he’d won a point of honor by not loving anyone. And so it came as a great surprise to find he could want someone as much as he wanted Betsy. He had thought he could walk through life without any pain; he’d thought solitude would comfort him and keep him safe all the rest of his days, but he was wrong. His grandfather always told him that love never arrived politely, knocking on the front door like a kindhearted neighbor, asking to be let in. Instead, it ambushed a man when he least expected it, when his defenses were down, and even the most obstinate individual, no matter how bullheaded or faithless, had no choice but to surrender when love like this came to call.

  THE VEILED WOMA
N

  AT THE END OF THE MONTH, A cold rain began to fall at a steady pace, hour after hour, until its rhythm was all anyone could hear. This was no ordinary rain, for the rainfall was black, a rain of algae, an odd phenomenon some of the older residents in town recalled from the time when they were children. Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Jeremy, for instance, had played out in a black rain when they were girls and were rightfully punished by their mothers when they flounced home in wet, sooty dresses. Now, the two neighbors stood beneath the shelter of their front porches and called to each other, noting how lucky they were that it wasn’t spring, when their gardens would be ruined by this strange substance, the hollyhocks and delphiniums slick with black gunk, the leaves turned dark as coal.

  People donned raincoats and hats and ran from their cars into houses or stores. Rugs were set out by back doors, but despite any precautions, black footprints were tracked across floorboards and carpets; dozens of umbrellas were ruined and had to be tossed out with the trash. At the Haddan School, the features of Dr. Howe’s statue turned moody and dark, and those who approached him walked on quickly, their feet slap-dashing through puddles that seemed to be made out of ink. Betsy Chase may have been the only one in town who used the black rain to her advantage; she decided to send her students out to photograph the village in the midst of these strange circumstances. Although most of the prints that were later developed were nothing more than murky splotches, there were a few memorable images, including Pete Byers sweeping black rain off the sidewalk, Duck Johnson shirtless and grim as he hosed off canoes at the boathouse, and two black swans, hiding beneath a wooden bench.

  When the rain finally stopped, the gutters flowed with algae and the town stank of mildew and fish. There was some flooding in the usual places: the hollow around town hall, the backyards of those who lived closest to the railroad tracks, the dank cellar of Chalk House. A hydraulic pump was brought in and while people fussed about how to best siphon out the muck that had collected in the basement at Chalk House and worried about what the next serious storm’s effect would be on the structural integrity of the building, Betsy took the opportunity to go upstairs to the attic, to Gus Pierce’s room, empty now, save for the desk and the bed. The windowpanes were splattered with black algae and only a faint, fish-colored light streaked through. Rain had seeped beneath the window, darkly staining the sash. In spite of the dim lighting, Betsy shot a roll of film, recording every angle of the room.