by Brad Ashlock
Naumkin curled up on the divan, washed flat from the sorrows. The day had caught up to him. His eyes resisted at first, but soon succumbed to the warm sanctuary of slumber. Images of dark woodsy paths, snarling dogs, and a shattered fish tank, its spilled contents flapping on the carpet and gulping for air, all gave way to a gray sky where the elephantine clouds rumbled across heaven, faster and faster, darker and darker until the moving shadows were indistinguishable from the nightsoil blanketing the countryside. He is lying on the knoll again. He knew this was a dream, but he couldn’t wake up. He said, “Oh, no!” but he couldn’t escape. His awareness that this was a dream, that this was all in his mind, quickly eroded. (It was never that sure in the first place.) He heard footsteps behind him and remembered the squaw. He knew what she would tell him, where she would point: he didn’t want anything to do with it. He was finished with this madness.
“In the pines—” a girl began to say behind him. It wasn’t Jenny’s voice, but Naumkin didn’t care.
Naumkin turned to face her and barked, “Where the river…”
Standing there in her red coat was Meeko Russell.
“I told your grandfather about the dogs in the forest,” Naumkin said.
“He’s known. Why don’t you return the book? You didn’t want it in the first place.”
“I wanted a Louis L’Amour.”
“It’s OK,” she said, tilting her head sympathetically. “You’ve got potential.”
Naumkin awoke in bright sunlight. His left leg was off the divan, his foot bent awkwardly on the carpet. He sat up and shots of tingly pain pricked up his leg to his groin. He winced and rubbed the sleeping foot until the circulation returned. He squinted and looked across the room at the time on the VCR: 1:04. “Jesus,” he muttered. He had slept for fifteen hours. He sat back and his neck cracked. Groaning, he rubbed it and noticed the book, Warpath, on the kidney-shaped table, its binding perfectly flush with the glass edge. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples; hadn’t he thrown the book across the room? “The book,” he whispered. Meeko Russell had told him to return the book.
He went upstairs, dressed, grabbed the book and went to his station wagon. He backed out, forgot that he had parked the ATV next to the house, and rammed into it. He huffed, backed around the mud-splattered vehicle, and sped off to Rogue. Halfway down the M12, he had to get his sunglasses from the visor; the sunshine reflecting off the snow and rear windows of the cars ahead was blinding. Once in downtown Rogue, he found a place to park on the street and, Warpath in hand, headed across the snow and dirt, the white and brown, toward the caboose.
He passed the mounds along the river, walked up the steps leading to the door of The Book Kaboose, and stepped inside. Bells above the door jingled. The cashier was sitting behind the counter reading a comic book. He was young, overweight, and unkempt. He looked up from The Fantastic Four to acknowledge Naumkin. Naumkin walked up to the counter and laid Warpath on the glass counter that housed vintage books. The cashier glanced up again from his comic, a little furrow squinching between his eyebrows.
“I have to return this,” Naumkin said.
“Do you have a receipt?”
“No. I was in here a week ago. I must return this book.”
“You need a receipt, sir,” the man said, hiding his eyes behind the comic.
Naumkin reached across the counter with one finger and pushed the comic down until the top of it was flush with the cashier’s neck. “I don’t want my money back. I don’t care about that. I want you to take the book back.”
“OK, OK! Just put it back on the pile, then. Between Mystery and Sci-fi. Jesus!” He returned to The Fantastic Four.
Naumkin looked down the narrow corridor to the pile of westerns. The stack was the Tower of Babel, daring to grow tall toward the upper shelves along the wall that held the works of Faulkner, Conrad, Miller, James, Chekhov, and Joyce. How dare genre fiction approach such divinity! Especially westerns. What kind of madman had stacked westerns near literature? Why had Tigran Naumkin allowed himself to become hexed by the clichéd cowboys, platitudinous prostitutes, boring belles, derivative dusty trails, and idiotic Indian battles? He went to the tower of westerns and slammed Warpath so hard on the stack that all the books collapsed into the mystery pile, jumbling together like so many confused languages.
“Hey!” the cashier yelled from the counter.
Naumkin pointed a finger at the fallen tower: “I’ve returned it! It’s done!” he looked up to the ceiling but was really looking at the million layers of air in the sky beyond the roof of the caboose, up and up through the levels, toward the darkness, toward the sound of rushing wind and fleeting passages of purple outer space, higher and higher above the fallen stack of books, above Faulkner, Conrad, Miller, James, Chekhov, and Joyce to the final layer, black like smoked glass, perfectly smooth and gleaming in his mind, the final layer where Meeko Russell must be looking down to him in approval; he had returned the book.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, sir,” the cashier called form the counter.
Naumkin glanced at the man and then back down to the fallen stack. Warpath was down there somewhere, hidden beneath other genre books, waiting to be re-stacked and re-sold. Let it be sold, let someone else get nightmares. He turned and headed back out the door. The man behind the counter muttered a thanks-a-lot as Naumkin whipped open the door with an accompanying frantic jingle jangle of bells, and stepped out of The Book Kaboose into the winter air.
He didn’t know what he expected after he did Meeko Russell’s bidding: trumpets from heaven, a burning bush, an attack from a rabid Rottweiler. Nothing happened, at least not physically. Maybe returning the novel was some kind of catharsis that would end the bad dreams and expose the occult connections he had made as the silly coincidences they were. He walked down the salted steps of The Book Kaboose, hoping that the strange recent detour into the paranoiac weirdness was over, that his life as a simple retired man who had led a great life with a wonderful woman playing a game he loved, and teaching it to children he loved, would continue its stable course. The dreams, the dogs, the missing girl, the pile of pine needles, the whole lot, could just dissipate into memory. Normalcy would return just as Warpath had returned to its origins. Everything was set right.
He stepped down to the macadam and began to head for his car. The brightness of the day abruptly shifted around him; he became an umbra. There was sunshine everywhere except for in his immediate vicinity. The wind picked up and its whistle overwhelmed the sound of the river. Something was casting a large shadow over Naumkin and the Rogue. The shadow swelled from behind; ahead, he could discern its soft, rounded arch as it expanded toward the snowy riverbank. He turned around and discovered the source of the shadow: one of the mounds commemorating the Indians that had once lived here. He recognized it. With dread, he knew it. It was the same hill that he had laid upon in his dreams overlooking the countryside. He was entranced. It was like looking at an icon personified, the apotheosis of all the recent madness, culminating at its crest just when Naumkin had thought he had escaped. The lee of the hill that faced him was devoid of snow. The exposed grass was a dingy green with flecks of emerald that seemed to shimmer like glass. In the strange jade, Naumkin caught glimpses of nightmare imagery: the squaw, the red-eyed dogs, the albino, and the pine needles, all tinged green like a vintage silent movie, all breaking free and shooting into his mind in a whirlwind of glass.
He looked away, squinted his left eye, and tilted his head. He looked back up to the mound. The emerald light effects had ceased. Dying grass was the only green up there now. The wind died, too. The rush of the Rogue River again could be heard along with the occasional passing car or shopper. The girl in his dream, Meeko Russell, had wanted him to come down to The Book Kaboose so he could see these mounds. Indian mounds. To the pines where the river dies. Instead of going to his car, he went to the local library, only about half a mile away.
The mousy librarian was the only other
person in the Rogue Public Library when Naumkin walked through the glass doors and approached the circulation desk. She informed him that he could find information about the mounds in the history section. She brought him to the proper shelves and returned to her station. There were two books on the history of Grand Rapids that had mention of Rogue, and one thin tome published in 1957 about Rogue specifically. These books were non-circulating, so Naumkin brought them to a desk, found a pencil and some scrap paper, and took notes.
The area around Rogue, especially along the banks, echoed the so-called Hopewell Indian settlements in nearby Grand Rapids. The Rogue area Indians—a loose collection of various tribes—had lived here for centuries in peace. French fur trappers were the first whites in the area, but soon the flood of Europeans pushed the natives off their lands and into extinction. Naumkin examined the black and white photographs of the mid-1800’s: bearded men in floppy hats, sleeves pushed up to their elbows, thick suspenders holding up their jeans, all gathered together in front of the Rogue River. These were the Dutch and Irish that had flattened the original Hopewellian burial mounds to make way for what became downtown Rogue. The superstitious Irish, on unearthing the skulls and ceremonial knives and costumes, fled the site with shouts of Erin go brah. The Dutch were unmoved. There were so many bodies that the diggers eventually opted to simply chucking the corpses into the Rogue River. Down the river? To the pines here the river dies. Naumkin looked up from the book, flipped to the index, and rested his finger on maps.
He knew Rogue flowed east and was somehow connected to the Grand River, but did it stop somewhere, empty out into a swamp or lake? Did the Rogue River die? There were several maps in the back of the book he was studying. He traced the thin blue line of the river with his index finger. The Rogue River originated out the swamps near Lake Oberon, meandered lazily between Rockford and Greenville before joining up with the Grand River just outside of Grand Rapids. Disappointed, he flipped to the next map.
This one only indicated land elevation and lake depth. The last map looked interesting but was difficult to read. It was a reproduction of a map of West Michigan from 1857. The thick black outline was jagged and inaccurate; it reminded him of a woodblock print. He wondered if the Rogue River would ever be shown, but after a few seconds, he found it slinking across the page. Near the town of Rogue, according to this map, the Rogue River had a tiny little branch that forked south. Naumkin traced the crude black line again with his finger to make sure he was looking at the right waterway. He flipped to the preceding contemporary map. It showed no fork.
Was this a misprint or did the Rogue of 1857 have a little tributary jutting southward? If so, what had happened to it, and where had it led? You know already, you old patzer. You know it leads to the pines. It has to. That’s where the river dies. Naumkin compared both of the maps and guessed that if there was such a branch of the Rogue River, it had ended, it had died somewhere on Gordon Dudley’s property. What had happened to all those Indian bones the Dutch diggers cast into the river? Had they flowed on to the Grand River, or did they head south down the nameless tributary, collecting in some nameless bog surrounded by pine trees? They were down there; Naumkin was certain of this. Those bones were down in the pines of Dudley’s woods.
He slammed the book shut like a prosecutor punctuating a final devastating argument, found the librarian and asked her to help him find detailed information about the Rogue River on the Internet. In his time, he had surfed the Net here and there, and even played a few cyber chess games, but he wasn’t familiar enough with the library’s system to log-on on his own. The librarian started him on a good search engine, and he took the reins from there. He typed “Rogue+River” “Michigan+history” and pressed the enter button. Google found over thirty thousand matches. Naumkin spent forty minutes narrowing down his search until finding a paper written by a geological graduate student from GVSU. The paper demonstrated the direct and severe effects of industry on the environment. The Rogue River was one of his examples: the tributary which veered left off of the main water (known as Rogue Creek) was used to help power the first Dudley Chocolate factory back in 1888. Thirty years later, the little creek, diverted, polluted, and dammed, simply dried up. It had simply died.
Naumkin closed the geological paper and this time searched “dudley+chocolates history”. He found the company’s official website and clicked there. The site opened with a picture of a little girl, her face and spread open hands smeared in chocolate. The girl was Meeko Russell. He clicked on Company History and read:
Dudley Chocolates began with two men, a dream, and a pair of fine-tuned sweet tooths. Nathan Dudley’s chutzpah and ties to the community combined with Joost Lusker’s vision and capital allowed them, in 1873, to develop a candy store in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the time, they sold hard candies, licorice, and an old-fashioned chocolate whose recipe was passed down from Dudley’s great-grandmother. It’s still the same recipe we use today.
The chocolate became the biggest seller for the little store on Division Avenue, and eventually led the candy shop, Lusker House Candies, to change its name to Lusker-Dudley Chocolates. By 1883, Lusker-Dudley Chocolates sold its Uniquely Flavorsome Chocolates® throughout the Midwest and Canada. It was so successful that by 1888 it was possible to build the first factory of its kind, dedicated solely to chocolate production, in Rogue, Michigan.
After the passing of Joost Lusker in 1890, Nathan Dudley assumed full control of the budding company and dedicated himself to extending Lusker’s vision and standards of quality to every aspect of Lusker-Dudley Chocolates. In 1948, when Nathan Dudley’s son, Albert, became head of the company, the name was shortened to Dudley Chocolates. Names can change, but the flavor of our distinct chocolate stays the same. In 1990, Albert’s son, Gordon Dudley, became CEO. Dudley Chocolates is about family, tradition, and, most important of all, taste.
We’ve been around a long time doing one thing: making world-renowned chocolates for the generations to enjoy, from our hearts to your mouths. Just one bite and you’ll agree that our specially processed coca beans produce nothing if not the most Uniquely Flavorsome Chocolates® since Joost Lusker and Nathan Dudley set up shop back in 1873.
Naumkin had thought Communists wrote bad propaganda. He clicked out of the history section and found a page dedicated to photographic imagery. Naumkin went through each one; the first few pictures were of white-smocked factory workers in one of the Indiana plants. There were 30 jpegs in total, and they didn’t get interesting until the last half dozen. The second to the last was the most astonishing photo: Nathan Dudley is seated beside the financier, Joost Lusker. The photo is from 1880. They are stiff, unsmiling, and rough looking. They look like gangsters; no, they look like the corpses of gangsters propped up after a shootout in front of the warehouse where they sold hooch, women, and maybe cocaine-laced chocolates and cocoa flavored absinth. Nathan Dudley is young and stares into the camera with piercing cold eyes. His partner is considerably older looking at first glance, but upon closer inspection, Tigran Naumkin notices the men are about the same age; Joost Lusker has white hair because he is an albino.
Naumkin tried to scoot away from the image, but the carpeting caught the legs of his chair and turned his jump into an ineffective buck as if the furniture and computer, the entire Internet, had conspired to force him to stay here in front of the monitor, in front of the albino who, in an unforgettable nightmare, had threatened Naumkin’s destruction. He took his medicine and stared into those light eyes that in a colored photograph would be pinker than a bunny’s; he noticed the derby hat in Lusker’s lap which served as a fulcrum for the falcon-headed cane across his knees like a rigged scale. Naumkin robotically reached for the mouse, closed out of the image, closed out of the Dudley Chocolates’ website, and finally the entire Internet. He stood, the resistant chair scuttering a few feet behind him after being bumped by the back of his knees, and passed the librarian on his way out.
“Did you find everything you ne
eded?” she asked.
He ignored her question and continued out the door; it was too comical: he had found everything he didn’t need. He had followed his hunch and researched the Rogue River and Dudley Chocolates to prove to himself that he was completely wrong, that the river didn’t go anywhere to die, that the loose connections were not intricate threads in some complex web, but mere coincidental ribbons of smoke; he would have preferred the confirmation that he was losing his mind than to have the nightmare accredited. He paused at his car door. Maybe he still was losing his mind, maybe, for all he really knew, he had seen a photo of Joost Lusker years ago, catalogued it, and subconsciously waited for the creepiest moment to unleash the imagery into his dreams, a few bullmastiffs thrown in for good measure, just to turn up the fear a bit.
This philosophical quandary was, he surmised while getting into his car, circular. I think therefore I exist. I turn the key therefore the station wagon starts. It was happening, like how art happens, just blowing up preconceived perceptions, ripping open a new space to crawl into for the sake of intensified experience; it didn’t have to make sense with linear logic, there were serpentine paths that led to vistas the straight road could never reach. He was in that mode now, in the art gallery, in the dream theatre, wandering in a maze turning at random the sticky knobs of the shimmering Everywhere Doors.