Walter Falls

by Gillis, Steven;

  I was confused, and told him, “I don’t understand. What does Mother have to do with anything?” He seemed about to answer, then set his jaw and changed his mind. “I don’t understand,” I said again. “What do you mean?” but the guard already had him out in the hall and was leading him back to his cell. I called out once more in vain, for by then my father was gone.

  I turned off Hutzel Boulevard and drove back along the numbered avenues until I reached the Woodberry Aquarium, parked, and went up to the door. The sign stencilled in small black letters on the front window reported the hours of public admission as 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. I stepped inside with fifteen minutes to spare and purchased a five-dollar general ticket. The woman who took my money was heavyset, grey haired with sallow skin, a thin mustache, and dark eyes, dressed in a multicolored smock with the word Woodberry sewn in gold thread above her left breast. She squinted harshly when I asked for directions back to the muskellunge, reproaching my curiosity to visit the tank where the journeyman welder drowned. I offered neither comment nor defense, and walked off in the direction she pointed with a quick wave of my hand.

  I went down two corridors where the smaller tanks were set into the walls and an assortment of colorful fish swam in specially lighted pools of filtered water. The larger tanks were in the east end of the building, the saltwater trophies, the puffers and angels, sand sharks, discus, and eels in 150- and 300-gallon tanks, with a special 5,000-gallon unit for the lemon sharks, groupers, and other large catches. The main freshwater display was a 10,000-gallon system built between the east and west wings, home to the muskellunge and additional lake and river fish ranging from fifty to two hundred pounds.

  I made my way back to the tank and stood staring in through the glass. The setting was natural, with plants and stones and a silt-clay bottom lighted by lamps hidden along the inner columns and down beside the larger rocks. I identified the muskellunge from a chart on the side wall and waited for them to swim by. I could find only one at first and followed her around the circumference of the tank. She was without question an impressive creature. Even in the confines of the tank, the muskellunge, at over eighty pounds and shaped like a steely torpedo, exuded a powerful presence. Intricate creases topped her brown-green skin, with a series of black spots set along her rearmost fin and tail. Her face was lined and handsomely wrinkled, her mouth long and centered back beneath a stout nose. She had intelligent grey eyes, at once dark and soft, which lent themselves to a keen and observant expression.

  I leaned against the tank and began at once to imagine the sequence of events from the other night. I assumed the journeyman must have hidden somewhere until after closing, then found a way into the water from the covering on top. I saw him diving straight down, setting his arms around one of the massive rocks at the bottom, remaining there until losing consciousness and bobbing back toward the surface. (Why he did all this, I could only speculate.) I pictured the muskellunge trying to protect him, could all but feel the cool dark water, and how slowly the minutes must have passed last night; the full black pitch of disaster and chaos within the tank as the muskellunge set themselves against the other fish circling and charging the dead.

  A taped message played over the loudspeaker, informing those of us still wandering about that the aquarium was now closed and the doors would reopen at ten a.m. tomorrow morning. I didn’t move from the tank, maintained a quiet vigil, watching and waiting for the second muskellunge to appear and the other to come back around again. An attendant approached after a minute and politely told me it was time to leave. I asked him then about the mate. “I can only find one musk,” I said. “Is this the right tank?”

  “Yeah, it’s the one.” The attendant was a boy of maybe twenty, pencil thin, with short cropped brown hair, three gold studs in his right ear, and a maroon Woodberry Aquarium vest over a short-sleeved Ski the Ute T-shirt.

  “I thought there were two muskellunge?” I was now confused.

  “There were,” he said. “The other’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “A virus, they think. Something gotten from the dead guy.”

  “But it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A virus can kill a large fish that fast?”

  “A human disease. A foreign strand. It can happen.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this news. I found it hard to believe such a robust creature could die that fast, and walking back outside was genuinely disturbed by word of the other musk’s death. What a horrible night! One thing after another. I imagined the dead fish drawn from the tank with a large net and chain and shaking my head, tried again to make sense of the muskellunge’s decision to stay near the journeyman’s body. I sat in my car and contemplated the question in full, thinking about the fish, and as all things now flowed back to Gee, once more about my marriage. I compared the decision of the musk with that of my father, how faced with the fear of his own marriage crumbling—as Mother’s affair got the best of him and he scrambled for a way to salvage her love by acquiring a steady infusion of cash—he committed himself to a course of action; his effort purposeful, prodigious, and organic, his determination fully realized and not compromised by some insular claim of propriety—and fear—for which Jack had mocked me.

  Of course, just as the muskellunge wound up dead as a result of acting with too much moral hubris, so too had my father’s crime ended in disaster, and how could I say then that one choice was better than the other?

  “You can’t, Brimm.” Jack Gorne was right. “There is no right or wrong, only consequence. Self-interest, Walter! Valuate your desires, ignore all extraneous influences, assess the situation, size up the competition, and do what has to be done!”

  I sighed with a knowledge which seemed long avoided, and shifting back into gear set my jaw exactly as my father had years before and drove across the avenues to my office.

  CHAPTER 8

  Other than the cleaning crew and a few young associates hired to keep an eye on the overseas markets, all of Porter and Evans was quiet. I signed in with the night watchman and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor of the Mortimer & Long Building where I went first into the washroom and rinsed my face and emptied my bladder of whiskey. The lighting inside was unnaturally bright, and as I glanced at myself in the mirror, the coloring of my cheeks and lips appeared a particularly bloodless shade of pale. I went down the hall to my office, shut the door, and sat behind my desk. In my bottom drawer—locked—I kept a small folder fastened with a broad elastic band containing some sixty sheets of paper; all the information pertaining to Tod’s proposals for Happy Meadows and Duroflex Watchbands, along with my research and the purchase and sales transactions from Adam’s Eau. (It was, I suppose, part of my fastidious nature to keep such a record of these deals and all related work product.) Hand printed on a few separate sheets of paper, less detailed than the other notes though sufficiently recorded, was the proposal Tod brought me for selling last year’s athletic shoes in a new second-tier market. (Tod called the project Old Soles.) Although I rejected his pitch early on, I had done some initial investigating and placing the papers for Old Soles in front of me adjusted the glow of my desk lamp and began reexamining the proposal.

  I spent a good hour pondering the possibilities and what it would take to get the project up and running, made a series of new notes on a fresh pad of paper, used the Internet, Standard and Poors, and the Corporate Digest to identify existing manufacturers and distributors, tracked down phone numbers and addresses of potential suppliers, and jotted out the names of people I should contact in the morning. After this, I outlined what I should say to my clients and to Tod and sometime after ten thirty, I returned the pad and notes to its folder and locked everything back in my drawer.

  The whiskey I drank earlier had worn away, leaving me with a residue of weightiness in my arms and legs, though my head remained surprisingly clear, and shifting my attention from Old Soles to the complemental plan conjure
d while driving from the Woodberry Aquarium, I reached for my Rolodex and retrieved Jim Catrell’s number. I’d known Jim ten years, had worked with him on several deals, and followed his career closely. (Jim made his fortune buying and selling companies, liquidating or improving their holdings, merging weak sisters into efficient operations, cutting and revamping as the situation required.) “Hey, Walt,” he had an animated, high tenor tone of voice, forever pitched at a level of exhilaration.

  “I hope it isn’t too late to call, Jim.”

  “What? No. Nonsense. I’m glad you did. We were just watching your wife on the news.”

  “Were you now? How’d she look?”

  Jim laughed. “How do you think? Like a goddess in chains!” I heard the creak of a leather chair as he sat down. (A stout man with short legs which seemed too thin to support his weight, his stride was top-heavy, like a wooden toy designed to rock back and forth at the slightest provocation.) “So it’s civil disobedience now, is it? Excellent! I’ll say this for Geni, she has spunk,” Jim laughed again, then added, “For what it’s worth, I think this whole thing about that girl reporter is bullshit. Civil contempt my Aunt Fanny. They let thieves and addicts post bail, don’t they? The next time your wife wants to chain herself to a fence, you let me know.”

  “I’ll be right there beside you, Jim.”

  “And you should be!” Ruthless in business, Jim’s politics leaned nonetheless left of center. (“Hell,” he crowed, “I’m rich enough to afford it.”) He enjoyed attending parties accompanied by the Greenpeace candidate for city council, and often appeared in restaurants and at the theater with union organizers and the local director of the ACLU. Whenever Gee wrote a controversial article, Jim phoned to mock my more conservative ethic. “So then, Walt,” I pictured him settling back in his chair, “What’s on your mind?”

  I answered his question directly with “Tod Marcum.”

  “Ahh. Geni’s pal.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Quite a character, I’ve heard. Likes to stir things up with his Review.”

  “I thought you might want to meet him.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I don’t know, Jim. For whatever reason people like Marcum amuse you. Besides, he could use your advice. He has peculiar views about business. I’ve helped him out a few times on some stocks and ideas he’s run by me, but I’m no longer comfortable operating in that capacity.”

  “His getting arrested with Geni has soured your good nature?”

  “We’ve had our differences,” I went so far as to admit.

  “So why not hook him up with someone else at P and E?”

  “If it’s all the same, I’d rather not. Anyway, you’re better suited for dealing with his eccentricities.”

  “I see. And it was important for you to set this up tonight?”

  “It was on my mind. There’s a few details I’d like to finish off business-wise with Tod, and it occurred to me to give you a call.”

  “Well, alright then. Yes, I’d love to talk with him.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I can take him to the club, shake the boys up a bit. Let me check my calendar and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  I hung up the phone and made a quick notation beside Jim’s name, imagined Tod joining him for dinner, how they’d hit it off and the conversation they’d fall into. In my capacity at Porter and Evans, I saw Jim socially at a number of functions throughout the year and we sometimes met at Talster’s for a bit of friendly imbibing. I knew from experience Jim’s fondness for brandy and blood-rare steaks, that he liked to talk sports and particularly the Renton Monarchs, and after a few rounds of drink he couldn’t resist boasting of some secret bit of information: future mergers and business deals, impending stock offerings and bank transactions, trades involving corporations and financial institutions he had a fiduciary interest in. Material meant to be held in the strictest of confidence under the letter of the law was all suddenly submitted for discussion. I could remember a half dozen times or more when I found myself saying with a mix of good humor and alarm, “Jim, Jim! Shut up! Don’t tell me anything. I can’t trade on this now with you talking so much. Hell, Jim, you’re costing me a fortune! Stop! Are you trying to get us both arrested?”

  Shortly after eleven, I phoned Gee. I was nervous and took a moment beforehand to consider exactly what I would say, asking first, “Did I wake you?” and hearing Gee’s voice tired on the other end of the line, wondered about Tod. “Is he still there?”

  “No, Walter. Rea and I took him home.”

  “Listen,” I began softly enough, offering then the speech I prepared, affecting an earnest tone, convincing in my delivery, eager to let Gee believe I was sorry for what happened. “I apologize for flying off the handle and not managing the situation better. Your arrest caught me by surprise, that’s all. Still, I should have focused more on what you’d been through and not on how the circumstance affected me, and for that I’m sorry.” I hoped this was enough to regain Gee’s trust, thankful to be speaking by phone, knowing if she had a chance to look at me she’d see at once that I was lying. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and was relieved when Gee answered, “It wasn’t all your fault, Walter.”

  Her concession pleased me. That she sounded, if not absolving, receptive to explanation was good enough for now, though just as I wondered if my apology might actually possess a grain of truth, and if perhaps this was all we needed, a recognition of our errors to put us back on track, Gee found reason to mention Tod. “I’m sure he’ll also forgive you, Walter,” she said.

  Shocked, I could do no more than clench my teeth. “When the time comes, I’ll have to ask him.” I replied, and telling Gee not to wait up for me, that I wanted to finish something I’d started at the office, I promised to be home soon—for she insisted, “There are things we still need to talk about.”—and hanging up, I came from behind my desk, turned off the light and went back down the elevator in a smooth and silent descent.

  The air outside seemed somehow hotter by the time I reached my car, and driving across the numbered avenues, toward Marshall Boulevard and in the direction of campus, I thought about continuing onto Fetzer Street, but decided surprising Tod was not the best-laid plan. I needed him unruffled, not set back on his heels suspicious of me, and parking in front of Greely Hall I walked a block until I found a pay phone. Liddi Faine—Tod’s tenant the last year, halfway through her dissertation on French Female Writers of the Renaissance, and part-time waitress at the Appetency Café—answered on the second ring. It was nearly midnight, and after identifying myself and apologizing for calling so late, I asked if Tod was still up.

  We were casual acquaintances, Liddi and I, having been introduced at a reception Gee brought me to, and at subsequent events, and while our conversations were mostly cordial, I sensed she didn’t like me very much. (She enjoyed teasing me with reference to the amount of time Gee and Tod spent together and no doubt had heard about the day’s debacle and was wondering why I’d called.) “I’d like to stop by if it isn’t too late,” I said.

  “Sure. Wait. Let me check. Tod’s finishing up some work,” she informed me, then left the phone for a moment. The next voice I heard was Tod’s who sounded a bit startled yet invited me over, “Of course, Walter. Yes, come on by.”, without asking what was on my mind.

  I bought a bottle of wine at an all-night drugstore—the gesture seemed a good idea—and returning to the street, walked past Charlie’s Coffeehouse and the Blind Pig. I didn’t plan on leaving my car behind—the distance from campus to Tod’s house was approximately a mile—but turned left off of Marshall and kept on going. The heat in the air plastered my shirt against my chest and caused my pants to chafe my inner leg; the night somehow growing hotter by the minute. Fetzer Street was part of an older neighborhood where more than half the homes were subdivided into three and four apartments rented out to students. I quickened my pace against the arching heat and arrived at Tod’s front door a short whil
e later.

  Liddi let me in. She was one of those oddly attractive women, around twenty-five, her slender form a handsome mix of angles and curves. Slightly tall with a dark complexion and light brown hair cut short and brushed to remove the slightest trace of curl, she wore jeans and a blue T-shirt imprinted with a picture of Che Guevara, a weaved rope bracelet encircling her left wrist, her feet bare and toenails painted a bright shade of orange. “Walter Brimm,” she smiled as if happy to see me.

  The light from inside spilled onto the porch. I stepped into the hall, glad to be out of the heat. The house was small, with narrow halls, a rectangular front room and dining area to the right of the kitchen. Stacks of books, magazines, and newspapers were interspersed around a collection of old furniture, while a print by Milton Avery hung on the wall alongside framed photographs of writers, radicals, and politicians Tod had gotten to know over the years. “Walter,” he approached me from the stairs and clasped my hand.

  I passed him the bottle of wine and asked then for a glass of water. “It’s hot as hell out tonight.”

  “Is it? I hadn’t noticed,” he returned in a moment with ice water for me, a corkscrew, and three glasses. I hoped we might speak alone, but as he motioned me toward the front room, Liddi followed after us and settled into one of the chairs. I sat on the couch across from Tod. “I’m glad you stopped by,” he said. “I phoned your house a while ago, but Geni told me you were still out. I want to apologize for this afternoon. You’d every right to be mad.”

  “All the same,” I waved him off, “I overreacted.”

  “I shouldn’t have butted into your conversation with Rea, and I should have made sure you knew what was going on from the start.”