“Morgan was also blue, and they ran off with him. One of the doctors said they had to run some tests and treat him like a preemie, in light of the stillbirth. Lucinda was groggy as hell but roused herself to demand why they were racing to treat Morgan if he was stillborn. The doctor said no, the second twin might pull through. It was the first who hadn’t made it. Please accept our big sincere condolences. But wait, don’t tell me that baby’s dead, I see him moving, Lucinda said. No, the doctor insisted, there are no vital signs. ‘Then what am I seeing?’ Lucinda practically screamed, and the doctor said he didn’t know exactly, and I could see it too before the doctor shooed the nurse holding Warren out of there.” The bartender set Wil’s fourth beer beside his three empties and stood patiently. The policy here was pay-as-you-go, on a stool or in a booth. My wallet was out before Wil could protest. Least I could do, and a paltry gesture at that. Tipped the man a dollar to forestall even worse service.
“It must have been the lighting, but in those few seconds I stopped being positive Warren was blue, and couldn’t decide if maybe he was gray or purple. And I wondered if it was also the harsh light or if all newborns are like that or if it was part of what was wrong with him, that his skin gave the illusion of being translucent, although I’m sure it wasn’t. It must have been my eyes working under stress, but I had to ask myself if anyone else there noticed anything like that, or if they only saw one more oxygen-starved miscarriage. But the rest of it they couldn’t deny, and that’s what made me question if they were telling us everything, and if maybe they were too cocksure that Warren was already dead. Or maybe they’d seen something like this before and had instructions on blowing it off.”
A gleam of fixation in Wil’s eyes was making me more uncomfortable. He’d strayed into a labyrinth of details built on one meager glimpse, beyond the stage where I could gracefully, or safely, interrupt him. If I tried, I had the distinct impression he’d shut down or storm out. And by no means, obey that perverse urge to blab about Lucinda’s shining amniotic fluid.
“Maybe I’ll never know what I was looking at, but I can tell you what it wasn’t. Warren’s blanket was displaced from the waist up, and not from squirming or flailing or anything deliberate, or spasms or some kind of reflex, or lolling around or tossing. He wasn’t quivering, exactly. That would have been one overall movement. This looked more like bubbling in some way I can’t explain. Like each muscle was straining independently, reaching out on its own. Like it was in danger of pulling apart from those next to it. And there was more that wasn’t possible, the fine hair on his wet scalp lifting like it had a static charge. Thank God his eyes were closed. And wherever the umbilical was, thank God I couldn’t see that either, because I started getting insane ideas about it.”
Wil had been through a marathon trauma. That I could take at face value. How luridly he’d embroidered the details while ruminating and ruminating, I could only guess. So far, treading softly on the thin ice of Wil’s psyche had taken the form of fleeting eye contact and nods between Tabasco-enhanced mouthfuls of a burrito that contained mainly rice, followed by pinto beans and traces of beef. Sawing through the tough tortilla underside with plastic knife, I kept hacking into flimsy plate and antique tabletop. I paused in my vandalism. High time to play a more proactive role and lead my friend, as best I could, away from memories of the delivery room.
In my experience, Wil had always been level-headed, and Lucinda had been high-strung and high-maintenance. How could she not be a basket case if Wil was this close to the edge? “I’m a little surprised you were able to get out of the house with everything going on, but I’m glad you did.”
“We agreed it might be good to spend a few hours apart. Maybe defuse some tension.” Just like that, Wil was channeling his calm, rational self again. Very gratifying! And very stupid of me not to realize that’s when I should have been especially on my guard.
“The other twin? Morgan? He’s okay, then? Is he still in the hospital?”
I checked Wil’s face, and could hear the thin ice crack under our table. “Morgan’s color improved, and he stabilized. Or as they so modestly put it, ‘We stabilized him.’ But he still goes through spells of the same involuntary movements Warren had, and those clowns have no idea what’s going on, so they sent him home and gave us some crap about ‘Let’s see if it passes,’ which is as good as saying nothing. Maybe they had to free up some cribs on the ward and couldn’t be bothered with us anymore, since we were outside the limits of their expertise. Who knows? If ‘it’ doesn’t pass, we might have grounds soon to sue those negligent bastards after all.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” Right. That rang about as true as my congratulations would have, under better circumstances. Here, let’s give the metaphorical steering wheel a nice hard wrench and see if it puts us in a better place. “If you felt like it, and you wanted another break tomorrow, or tonight even, it’d be great having you co-host the show due Friday.”
Wil’s brow creased and his expression grew searching and distant, as if he were already delving into a past life. He chugged half his beer. “I better say no. Might be a problem getting out two nights in a row. It’s tough planning ahead, with the situation at home. That’s something I meant to bring up, actually. In terms of helping on the show, it’s going to be touch-and-go for a while.” Was I oversensitive, or did Wil’s gravitas imply he’d become a man who had to “put aside childish things”?
“That’s fine. I was kind of expecting it.” Shit, I had to cut this meeting short and work fast if I wanted to beat the deadline. But this minute, I needed something to fill the expansive awkward silence. “I’m guessing you’re on paternal leave, or whatever they call it, this week, but when you were last on the job, were you hearing anything about inedible fish? In the reservoir?”
Wil shook his head as if few topics were less germane.
“Okay.” To an uncertain extent, he was here to give me the brush-off, so why did I feel compelled to prove the depth of my friendship? Maybe it was guilt over wanting to clear out and contend with my own issues, which were nothing compared with his. In fact, nothing in my thirty-five years had been half as serious as what he was weathering nowadays. “If you two ever wanted to catch a movie or something, I could babysit. I don’t know how much Lucinda trusts me, but I’m offering.” Naturally I hoped they’d never take me up on it. And supposing they did? I’d have to grin and bear it to uphold my self-respect, kicking myself all the while.
“Thanks. That’s really big of you, Jeff.” He didn’t have to sound so damn astounded that I’d propose an unselfish deed. “And Lucinda likes you, all right? You just have to cut her a little slack these days.”
A startling white commotion came to rest beside my plate. Aha, the napkin I’d given up on, of heavy two-ply paper, half-unfurled, and scarcely marred by a coffee stain at one corner. “Almost forgot it,” the barkeep gruffly confessed, proceeding to load our empty glasses onto a tray on which I narrowly discerned “Falstaff Beer” and a fat cavorting Elizabethan amidst the rust and missing paint. “Did I hear you guys a minute ago say the fish in the reservoir were no good?”
I commended his finely honed ears. Not easy to eavesdrop on us, through the two dozen or so new voices crowding the air since I’d sat down. “I never drink that water,” he continued. “And my dad didn’t, and his dad didn’t either. Grew up on bottled water. Third generation. Everyone drinks that bottled stuff now. Guess we were trendsetters, huh?”
Had to hand it to the Aviator, the last refuge of what I termed the “old Occam” attitude, where our bartender might not give a regular customer the time of day for years, and then buttonhole him like they’d been best pals forever. Or like what happened on my one and only date here with an art-history teacher who should have been wowed by the décor, but who henceforth stopped returning my calls because a fiftyish barfly, who’d never noticed me before, had to lean over our table and make us feel how smooth her face was and palaver at length about ho
w she owed her youthful skin to a daily scrub with her own piss. To this day I wonder if she was on the up-and-up or laughing on the inside at the thought of us going home and dunking our heads in the toilet. And that’s the kind of “old Occam” place the Aviator was and always would be, I reckoned, God bless it.
“Why didn’t your grandfather like the water?” Wil seemed genuinely interested, which I assumed was a well-bred show of courtesy. “What kind of reason did he give?”
“He never said. But from the way he never said it, with the same look someone has when he won’t say what he did during the war, it was obvious he knew what he was talkin’ about. If the fish in there are bad, I’m only surprised it didn’t happen a lot sooner.” Arms folded, feet firmly planted, our bartender stood as if braced for dispute. A Colossus of Rhodes in the manner of Charles Bukowski.
Wisely, though it must have rubbed against his evidence-based grain, Wil replied, “I think your grandfather may have had something there.” Or was he speaking sincerely, based on Parks Department info that he was declining to share with me?
Meanwhile, at the bar, someone I recognized from work was trying to glare holes into us. His path and mine often crossed on the City Hall stairs, but my echelon, I surmised, was too low for him to acknowledge. Except now his casual, listing posture on chrome-ribbed stool marked him as tipsy, and inadvisably eager to converse. “You people never shut up about that water, do you? The hell you know what you’re talking about!”
The bartender was picking up the tray of glasses from our table. He slammed it down again, and all the glasses clinked into each other. “What do you mean ‘you people,’ you goddamn little elitist?”
As goddamn elitists went, this one was less than dapper in pumpkin-colored sportsjacket and big rectangular tortoiseshell spectacles. And worse, prominent teeth and cheeks gave him the air of a portly, balding woodchuck. He pushed his plastic frames back up his sweaty snub nose. “The state tests that water every month! It always gets a clean bill of health. Will you please you read my lips? There’s nothing wrong with that water!”
“You wouldn’t know what to test for, you ignorant fucking hack!” The barkeep was still holding up his end of the shouting match from our booth. Wil’s face mirrored the angst in my heart, though he too must have realized that if the barkeep stepped away from us, it could only signal hairier unpleasantness. Everyone else, from boozers to hipsters, kept their heads down and pretended nothing was amiss, but they were all ears, make no mistake.
“The next words out of your mouth better be an apology, or I’ll have your liquor permit pulled so fast your head’ll spin!” Frequent slurring badly undercut patrician diction. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”
“I know exactly who I’m talking to, Mr. Big Shot Recorder of Deeds. And I got friends on the Licensing Board, and they’ll jeer you out the door. They also have more class than to come in here and start any shit. Now you can get out and stay out.” The bartender’s hand swept regally over our heads. “In front of these witnesses, I ban you for life!”
“I’m not going anywhere, you guttersnipe!” Guttersnipe? I’d have laughed out loud but was afraid it might be received the wrong way. I was also pretty confident that a recorder of deeds was in no position to pass judgment on water quality.
Argument was getting them nowhere. The bartender’s jaw clenched combatively, and he looked his opponent up and down. Estimating his weight? Stubborn bureaucrat had barely bawled out his next syllable when he became part of a blur in transit from the bar to the door. And just like that, he was out on the sidewalk. A puff of fresher air from outdoors wafted into our booth. Did that even qualify as a scuffle? The instant before slamming door prompted the hushed clientele to shudder as one, the bartender shouted, “You oughtta be run outta town! The whole shameless lot of you!”
With a new spring in his step that put nobody at ease, the barkeep fairly swaggered back to our booth. “Sorry you gentlemen had to be at ringside for that. Beers are on me from now till closing.”
We thanked him profusely. He cleared away the tray full of glasses. The flow of conversation had resumed around us. No sign that the evening had ever been other than serene. We indulged in a couple more rounds before the effort to chat about nothing became too much. Each of us had said what he’d come to say before the contretemps, and had that not happened, we’d have adjourned an hour ago. Out front, Wil promised to try watching the Chronicles premiering next week. He’d arrived on foot and thought the walk back would do him good. I assured him I’d be fine on the road. Wouldn’t be my first drive home one or two sheets to the wind. Or the first program I’d cobbled together in that condition. Behind the wheel, I realized I should have asked Wil, or the bartender, or myself why some schmo from City Hall was so incensed at a “guttersnipe” talking trash about the reservoir. Or what they were “guilty” of over there. But of course I hadn’t, because I was a sheet or two to the wind.
4
Qualifying as what my fellow citizens call “eccentric” would be okay if I didn’t have to deal with them Monday through Friday. I swear, some coworkers watch OGAM Chronicles just to give me grief about it. And in accordance with New England village mores, not even to my face. Or maybe I set myself up for abuse by concluding eerie reservoir footage with the rhetorical question, “We’ve cast our eye on the unknown, but will we ever decipher what it means?”
The first broadcast was Wednesday night. After Thursday midmorning break, I sat back down at the wobbly desk where I’d been processing change-of-address notifications. On a memo pad, below “While You Were Out,” was penciled, “Will we desipher what it means? It means you are a fuckup you loser.” Any number of ill-schooled critics could have scrawled that. With well-rehearsed pokerface, I detached top sheet from pad, gently crumpled it, and dropped it in the dented green wastebasket beside the desk. My standard procedure.
Why waste energy getting upset? My voiceover explained clearly and cogently the underlying significance of superficially poor video. A thankless effort, and more fool I when, in my experience, John and Jane Q. Public were most often hidebound, unwilling to see beyond the obvious or even pretend to listen. A much bigger letdown were the several e-mails from OGAM colleagues, who chided me for not getting in touch if I needed material for an episode. From them I had expected more faith in my judgments on occult evidence. Moreover, I wasn’t sure why they assumed I’d routinely call them, when they were seldom available to do anything when I did.
While taping the show, I’d fallen prey to a beery urge and solicited viewers’ spooky stories and family lore about the reservoir and Gorman County. No phone messages or e-mails followed, but within a couple of weeks three handwritten replies showed up in the OGAM P.O. box, which was not a bad rate of return. The moral? I had to start gearing content to an over-seventy audience.
The first note arrived on St. Joseph’s Indian School stationery, a charity that used to send my grandmother plastic kachina dolls as tokens of gratitude:
Dear Mr. Slater,
Like they say about the apple I have never rolled far from the tree and have lived in Pickering my whole life. But when you asked on your program about Gorman County where the lake is now it got me to thinking about my grandfather who moved here when he was a boy. If I can recall he said it was because his father sold the family farm to some Canucks, and that was in Gorman County, near a place where the people went bust after some blight attacked their crops and it drove them crazy to lose everything. My great-grandfather was afraid the blight would spread, so as I said, he shifted to the outskirts of Pickering instead. When he was toward the end of his life, a few years before my time, he heard about them building the reservoir, and he was glad not to be in one of the towns that would of used it, and he called it a damn fool idea, or so my grandfather told me. I hope I have not bored you with this little remembrance from way back when.
Good luck to you,
Earl McGregor
The letter was most surpri
sing for its revelation that Chronicles was on public access all the way out in Pickering, halfway to Pittsfield. As for the rest of it, plenty of Yankee farmers around then had given up on rocky soil gone fallow from overuse, and the feeble crops must have been easy marks for whatever was going around in that era of chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease. Only peculiar to me that clan McGregor hadn’t moved a lot farther west.
A second note had a Paralyzed Veterans of America return-address label on the envelope. Another charity my grandmother favored. The message was somewhat pithier:
Dear Sir:
I am 97 years old. I never lived in Gorman County. My dad grew up in Aylesbury, however. He said that some woods down the road were haunted. They were where the water is now. I was born in Houghton, where he was a foreman in a textiles mill. He refused to drink from the faucet after the reservoir opened. He said it was something about the woods that were down at the bottom, but he was not more specific. I don’t know if he thought the water would be haunted or what that would do to somebody. It was about then he started getting bad in the head, which he was for many years, God rest his soul, so maybe that was why he was that way about the water.
The Color Over Occam Page 3