The Black Brook Read online

  “Are you part of the Fed?”

  “We’re totally independent,” said Lisa. She took a pair of sunglasses from a pocket on the side of her pack and put them on. “Our board is composed of twelve influential people who fly all over the world holding conferences. After Vienna, I go to Stockholm and then on to Reykjavík.”

  “I’ve always wondered what Iceland would be like,” said Paul. “Once I saw a picture of kids riding bicycles on hot water pipes in a strange glacial valley. They wore gloves and scarves.”

  “Reykjavík is interesting. I like it. It’s nothing to rave about. Luxembourg City is nice.”

  They made it to the rocks over the cave by noon. Red hawks wheeled under gray clouds joining slowly in the air. Paul led Lisa down a path that curled around the rocks. The path narrowed and they turned sideways to squeeze through the mouth of the cave. Broken slabs tilted in the ceiling, and gray daylight slipped through the cracks. A circle of rocks formed a fireplace, with brown Orval bottles nested in black ridged cinders. “What do you think?” said Paul.

  “This could be it,” said Lisa. She dropped her pack and stretched her arms above her head. “But I just don’t know.” Her underarms looked cool and pale blue. “I want to feel something. I want to be sure. If my grandfather appeared right now, he wouldn’t know who I was.”

  “Give it a minute,” said Paul.

  “He would say, ‘Who are you?’”

  “This is what he would do.” He removed her sunglasses, cupped the back of her neck in his hands, and pressed his forehead to hers. Her rounded forehead pushed back.

  “Now I feel something;” said Lisa. “I feel you crunching my head.”

  Mist became rain on the way back, and Paul turned on the windshield wipers. Mary had hung the banner for the “Magic Carpet Ride” dance party they threw every Friday night. One way that English speakers could feel at home in Belgium was by turning on the radio, for many of the songs were from the States, although in most instances they were not especially good songs. Paul had never heard the song “In the Year 2525” as often as he did while living in Belgium.

  “I showed Lisa Prendergast the cave where her grandfather died in the fighting,” said Paul. “Well, it might have been the place. She wasn’t sure.”

  “Oh, right,” said Mary. She stood in the parlor with a tomato tin full of sawdust for the dance floor.

  “What part don’t you believe?” said Paul. Mary stared into the can of dust.

  “Did you kiss her?”

  “We went up, we came down,”

  “You kissed her as plain as the look on your face.”

  “We butted heads.”

  Mary sifted sawdust onto the floor. “You sicken me.”

  “You sicken too easily,” said Paul. “You need a vaccination.”

  “Whose name’s on all the papers?” said Mary.

  “Your name.”

  “My name is right.”

  There was a knock on the kitchen door and Paul opened it. A lodger from Hertogenbosch reported that the automatic shoe polisher in the hallway was broken and that the sink in his room emptied very slowly. Paul got a bottle of drain opener and went upstairs.

  II

  MATCHES

  8

  The day after seeing the strange dog trapped in the car in New Hampshire, Paul and Mary drove down to Boston to catch the afternoon plane for Brussels. They flew Ailleurs because of its favorable rates. The ramp did not quite reach the airplane, and sunlight flared on the silver cylinder.

  Mary fanned her face with airline papers. “It’s hot,” she said.

  “Do you have the tickets?” said Paul.

  “I have the boarding passes.”

  “I have the itinerary”

  “I have the baggage stubs,” said Mary She looked through her papers. “I have the boarding passes,” she said again.

  “I can’t hear you,” said Paul.

  “What’s got into you?”

  Paul thumped his ear with the heel of his fist. “I have unequal pressure in my head.”

  Paul and Mary found seats in the loud section over the wings. At least they would not have to worry about hearing unusual snapping noises that might be the first faint signal of a deadly fall. They sat observing the boarding styles of other passengers, who got on in a sideways and vaguely despairing way. Something about overhead bins seemed to bring out a ruthless territorial streak.

  Then the pilot announced a delay of forty-five minutes to an hour. Soon a man and woman in white blouses came down the aisle pushing and pulling a chrome cart.

  “Something to drink on the ground?” said the woman. “Something to drink on the ground?” said the man. The cart might have carried gold bars for the effort required to move it.

  Paul had red wine and Mary white, poured from small green bottles with screw tops.

  “We forgot to get my magazine,” said Mary.

  She did not like to fly without a magazine called Gone Holly­wood. She liked movies, liked nothing so much as going alone to a theater with a book to read until the lights went out. Her favorite movie was Don’t Look Now, with Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, and a bloodthirsty troll in a red hood. But there was another reason she wanted Gone Hollywood: its content meant so little that she felt the airplane could not crash or break apart in the air while she was reading it; a natural law would bar that much irony.

  It seemed to Paul that people who on the ground would read most any magazine that happened to be lying around became suddenly inflexible when flying. Once he had watched a young couple waiting for takeoff at JFK. The woman threw down her magazine and said, “I didn’t want Elle.”

  “What do you expect of me?” said the young man.

  “You imbecile — I specifically asked for Marie Claire.”

  “I’ll go get your magazine,” Paul said now to Mary.

  “Remember, it’s Gone Hollywood.”

  “I remember.”

  The plane was vast and crowded, and Paul moved through it with the halting step that comes from drinking watery wine aboard a grounded airplane with afternoon light drifting flat through clouded windows — a waste of time preceding a bending of time. The stewardess who had given them their wine stood by the door looking disturbed. Paul guessed that she was adding the time it would take to fix the plane to the time she normally got home. Maybe she had cats. She looked like someone worrying about cats in an apartment in a faraway city.

  “Do I have time to leave?” said Paul.

  “Technically, no,” said the stewardess. “But really, yes, because between the two of us, this airplane ain’t going anywhere for a good long while. The wine tells you that. We don’t bring out preflight wine unless we’re assured of ample time for drinking and collecting the cups. It only makes sense. Passengers think it’s good news when actually it’s bad. Meanwhile, there’s a hundred and forty Caesar salads sitting back there that we can’t refrigerate and we can’t send back. I don’t know what’s going to happen with them. There’s a kind of Big Brother mentality this whole company suffers from. If I could get an opportunity to hook on with another airline, I tell you I would be gone like a shot. Just give me a chance, just talk to me and see what I can do.”

  “How are the pilots?” said Paul.

  “They’re a mixed bag.”

  Paul walked stealthily down the empty ramp, where an overhead sign said THE EMPLOYEES OF AILLEURS WOULD LIKE TO THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING THIS AIRLINE AND NOT SOME OTHER AIRLINE. WE KNOW THERE’S COMPETITION OUT THERE — WE WEREN’T BORN YESTERDAY. So as a lone person moving against the tide of airport humanity, he received the usual quick and yearning glances. Airports are so bound up with the idea of reunion that people visiting them — even people who have come only to retrieve a package — automatically scan faces for friends and re
latives long lost. Paul passed the checkpoint of the metal detectors, where guards who were trained to find guns, knives, and explosives were once again barely concealing their boredom at finding only belt buckles and key rings and Saint Christopher medals.

  Paul came to a store in a concourse with the magazine Mary wanted. An actress on the cover held masks of tragedy and comedy over her breasts. So many magazine covers tried to catch the eye with breasts. Even needlecraft magazines showed seamstresses with open shirts. Paul paid for the magazine. He admired the dark green austerity of U.S. dollars. Then he went across the concourse to a lounge, where he stood and ordered a gin martini. Just in front of him was a woman sitting at the bar in a red dress with veined white leaves on it. Cars raced around an oval track on a television set.

  “Who’s winning?” said Paul.

  “Rusty Wallace,” said the bartender.

  The woman in the red and white dress turned around. “Excuse me,” she said. Her eyes were red too.

  “Don’t listen,” said the bartender.

  “You keep out of this,” said the woman. “Sir, I wonder if you might help me. I’m from Switzerland, and it seems I have missed my flight. It all began last night, when my friends and I quarreled. I hope you never quarrel with your friends, for there is nothing quite so upsetting. I was staying at their townhouse near the Public Garden when they confronted me over the sink. I was trying to wash my things on my last night in America when suddenly they are tired of me. ‘Get out,’ they said. ‘Get out of our townhouse.’ So I packed my suitcase and dragged it down to the street. Some of my belongings were wet from the faucet.”

  She stepped down from her barstool, lifted a red vinyl suit- case onto the seat, and snapped open the lid. “Touch my belongings and see if they’re not damp.”

  Paul pressed a soft tangle of pale clothes — straps and borders and buttons. “O.K., they’re damp.”

  “I raised my hand to engage what I believed to be an authorized taxicab driver,” she said. “But I was mistaken. ‘Take me to the airport,’ I said. Because I had decided I would simply stay the night in one of the small chairs. You see, I’m really resourceful and do not require special treatment as some would have it. I can easily sleep in a chair and wake up ready to go. To my surprise, the driver said the charge would be ninety dollars. I knew this was unusually high but consented anyway, a big mistake, for the driver drove directly to a dark street, parked by an empty building with the windows all broken apart and lying in glass particles on the sidewalk, and he said, ‘Everybody out.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘This is the airport.’ And I said, ‘I may be from Switzerland, but this is no airport — why, there are no windows.’ And he said, ‘It’s the back entrance, closest to the Swiss planes.’ He said, ‘You can get out on your own steam or I will throw you on the ground, it’s up to you, this is America.’ And he was a large man, capable of managing his promises. And when I got out of the cab and opened my handbag to pay, he wrestled it from me and drove away. You see, it was nothing more than a sophisticated form of robbery. Well, sophisticated is not the word I mean.”

  “Convoluted,” said Paul.

  “Yes! Convoluted, I like that,” said the woman. “You do understand.”

  “So anyway, there you were,” said Paul.

  “Well, I was fortunate enough to locate some police, but when I explained my situation they took me to a homeless shelter. The beds were so close together with the other homeless that I was afraid to shut my eyes or move. People screamed and cried all night long, it was a living nightmare, and in the morning I hitchhiked to the airport. You don’t understand how laughable this is. Back at home, why, everyone knows me. Not in all of Switzerland, of course, I’m not making that claim, but certainly in my canton. I once ran for public office and am the president of a whist club called . . . perhaps the nearest translation would be the Jolly Jokers. But right now I haven’t eaten anything in many hours.”

  The bartender pushed a phone down the bar. “Why don’t you call up these friends I keep hearing about?”

  “I tried to call them,” she said. “Believe me I did. But they have an answering machine. As they told me themselves, ‘We love our answering machine, for it saves us from ever picking up the phone. Every now and then we listen to the messages, out of curiosity, I suppose, but for the most part it’s like having no phone at all.”

  The bartender wiped his bands on a towel. “What’s their number? I’ll give them a buzz.”

  “You keep out of this.”

  “We don’t give free pizza,” said the bartender. “Pizza is six dollars a slice. That’s the way we work it. There’s a system we adhere to. If I give you one free, they’ll all want one free. Did you ever think of that?”

  Paul gave the woman twenty dollars.

  “She’s no more Swiss than this towel,” said the bartender.

  “It’s nothing to you,” said Paul.

  “I’ll have a slice of mushroom pizza,” said the woman, “and a bottle of Samuel Adams.”

  Paul returned to the airplane, where the haze of thwarted travel hung heavily in the air. People slept, paced the aisles, twisted air jets in their aluminum sockets.

  “I’m going to get off the plane now,” said Paul.

  “Where have you been if not off?” said Mary.

  He handed her the magazine. “What I mean is I’m not going back to Vertige.”

  “I guess I’m supposed to fly now,” said Mary. “I have my magazine and I will fly.”

  “Sell the hotel, Mary.”

  She opened the magazine. “There’s no equity in the hotel.”

  “There should be some.”

  She closed the magazine again and looked out the window of the airplane. “Once I was going to be a doctor,” she said. “Why did I not go ahead with that?”

  Paul took the subway to South Station, where he bought a ticket on a southbound train. He found an empty car, but before long it had filled up with college students. American youth was supposed to be morose and fussy these days, but these kids talked about their summer in Madagascar and sang folksongs.

  The lumberman goes on, till his money’s spent and gone.

  Goodbye, little Annie, I’m off for Cheyenne.

  The train broke down along the shore and sat all night on the tracks. Moonlight slid down a trough of ocean toward houses leaning on stilts. The students played Hearts and drank themselves into hilarity and then quiet sadness. Paul got to sleep but he did not sleep well. When he opened his eyes or wrenched his legs around on the seat, his forehead beaded hot or cold. He dreamed that he had left the train for a walk in the sand. Someone called him back to the tracks but a light flared orange and white down the curve of the beach. On inspection the light turned out to be that of a soda machine, and Paul put a coin in the slot — this was all in the dream — and as he did so, a jet skidded across the sky and snuffed out in the water, sending hot waves of air, plastic, and skin blowing across the surface.

  When he awoke a student leaned over the seat in front of him. Three silver brads perforated the shell of her left ear, and stubby pigtails rose from the top of her head. “You’ve been talking in your sleep,” she said.

  9

  Paul called his parents’ house from a pay phone outside the locked station in Verona, Rhode Island. His father came to pick him up in a red Cadillac with polished chrome.

  “Why have you come back?” said Maurice. He drove with great satisfaction. One hand cradled the wheel and the other rested on his knee. He wore aviator sunglasses. The ride was soft and springy, and when they got to the railroad tracks it felt as if the Cadillac were being lifted by an uncoordinated team. “Did you forget something?”

  “I need my car.”

  Maurice tapped the turn-signal lever with the edge of his hand. “It’ll never run, though it’
s in the barn.”

  “I drove it in there.”

  “But how many years ago, Paul? Think of the years. Things happen to an internal combustion engine sitting idle.”

  “I don’t expect to jump in and drive away. I know it will take work. Mary’s going home and I’m staying here. I’m not asking for miracles.”

  “Is this for good?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how long it’s for.”

  “On the other hand, somebody could shoot out of a building and hit you on the head.”

  Paul shrugged. “That’s all over.”

  “If they say it is.”

  “Yeah, they decide, but I think they have decided.”

  “You were never a fighter. Remember when all the other kids would fight at noon? Remember when they would throw sticks at each other? And I would say, ‘Go and mix it up.’”

  “I was afraid,” said Paul. “Well, I wasn’t afraid of losing, but I was afraid of being seen to lose.”

  “And now when you have something to be afraid of —”

  “Right, and it makes no sense, but nonetheless.”

  They drove past the Shell station where Paul and his siblings used to hang around after closing. They would wire the lever down on the air hose and jam the nozzle into the bucket of window-washing fluid, causing the fluid to bubble into strange shapes and evaporate.

  “You made marriage vows,” said Maurice. “You were married by a bailiff or something, but still there must have been vows.”

  “A justice of the peace.”

  “And just like that you give up on them.”

  “It’s been in the works.”

  “There are things I don’t know and don’t want to know,” said Maurice. “But people do change when they fail in something. Maybe they end up reminding each other of whatever they might have done differently. So that when you look at the person, instead of seeing who she is, you’re seeing the thing in the past that failed.”