The Black Brook Page 11

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Just don’t tell your mother what’s going on. She doesn’t need to know about the gritty details.”

  Maurice nosed the Cadillac under a willow tree and they walked toward the house through the hanging leaves. It was one of those unplumbed New England farmhouses that appear to have fallen into place from a height of three feet or so.

  Paul and Maurice went into the kitchen, where rotary-saw blades painted with landscapes hung above the sink. On the counter by the waffle iron stood an old metal clock under the face of which a boy and girl rocked on swings. Paul’s parents had each devised new interests over the past several years — Diana worked for the Animal Rescue League and Maurice invented board games — and there were animal cages and sketch pads scattered about the kitchen.

  Diana looked through a magnifying glass into a mirror above a sideboard.

  “I think this contact lens must be on the back side of the eye,” she said, “I just got off the phone with Carmen. She’s all excited because her theater group is doing a musical based on Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s called Wax, and it’s about the building of the Johnson’s Wax building in Racine. I can’t imagine such a thing, I don’t see how you’d stage it or what the lyrics would be, but she’s very excited and she asked after you.”

  Carmen was Paul’s older sister.

  “They split up,” said Maurice. “Paul and Mary have split up and he intends to live in the States.”

  “Promise me something,” Diana said to Paul. “I want you to take that cat Scratch with you. She’s become a real problem case. The idea is keeping the animals alive, but all she wants to do is kill.”

  “She always hunted,” said Paul.

  “Oh, that cat is a bad son of a bitch at night,” said Maurice. “One time it killed a mole I swear to God the size of a football.”

  “A cat did this?” said Paul.

  “She’s worse than a cat.”

  “Take your sunglasses off,” Diana told Maurice. “You’re in the house now.” To Paul, Diana said, “She sleeps during the day. Burrows into the insulation of the house, where you couldn’t get her out with a shovel.”

  “They’re basically nocturnal creatures,” said Maurice.

  Paul took a red metal toolbox out to the barn. Light streamed through gaps in the siding, and the fenders of the car shone dull green beneath a sheen of dust. The hubcaps were long gone, the tires flat. The faded no-handguns sticker that had added an off note to Leonard Dalton’s funeral still anchored the corner of the windshield. The door hinge shrieked. He turned the key, but the only sound was a scratching in the fabric of the roof.

  Paul got out of the car and lifted the hood, revealing a tangle of straw and spider webs and sunflower seeds. He found an old broom and swept the engine block. Then be pulled the battery, set it on the earthen floor, wrenched the spark plugs, and spun the wing nut from the air cleaner.

  Mice poured over the sides of the air cleaner when he lifted the cover. The honeycombed paper had been chewed to lace and powder.

  “Nature abhors a filter,” Paul said.

  Maurice opened the big sliding door at the end of the alleyway, letting light in. He pulled a metal cart with oxyacetylene tanks strapped on.

  “The car is full of mice,” said Paul.

  “Well, I’m not surprised.” Maurice fired up the torch and burned the gum off the spark plugs. He wore safety glasses and held the plugs in long-handled pliers before the knifelike flame.

  “You used to light our sparklers with that,” said Paul.

  “I did a lot of things,” said Maurice. He laid the spark plugs in a row on the fender and then opened a can of engine oil and poured some into the holes where the plugs had been. His hands trembled. He had hurt his back working for the railroad and now his hands shook when he lifted them.

  “What’s that for?” said Paul.

  “Lube the rings.”

  “That’s good, and I wouldn’t have thought of it.”

  “Oh hell, Paul, this is basic,” said Maurice. “There’s nothing fancy in what we’re doing now”

  After supper Paul walked out to the grove beside the barn where he and his brothers and sisters used to play. Pale summer light shone on the ragged branches of the evergreens, and the needled ground gave just that much beneath his feet. A circle of rocks marked their old fire ring, but moss covered the rocks and some of them had been turned out of their places. He imagined the faces of his brothers and sisters in firelight and shadow. He pictured the rising orange sparks that he had once pretended were spaceships leaving a burning planet. Verona as he remembered it had been a fair place to grow up, although he had sometimes felt extraneous — not extraneous to the family or the town, but to the universe generally. He had especially felt this way on humid, unmoving afternoons when locusts hummed like power lines in the grass and the sky could not be looked at because it was too hot and too densely blue. Then he and some of his brothers and sisters would ride their bikes over by the Great Swamp, where the wicked soldiers had massacred the neutral Narragansetts.

  Oldest to youngest, the Nash kids had been Fred, Carmen, Paul, Lily, Aaron, and Fletcher. Aaron died the winter he was about to turn eleven. His sickness had crept up on the family, and afterward the doctors said nothing could have been done. But doctors always say that, what else would doctors say? Once Paul had tackled Aaron viciously when they were playing football in the yard. The tackle had been uncalled for, and Paul knew it. He had even ordered Fletcher to hold Aaron up, keep him from falling, until he, Paul, could get over there and lay that savage hit on him. Could a doctor say with certainty that the sickness had not begun from a small point of damage such as might have been inflicted in a gutless tackle, especially when so much is not known?

  Aaron had been thin and fair and given to fevers all his life, but he had always been competitive. When bruises had appeared on his legs, he theorized that he had banged his shins on the metal rails of his bed while jumping in. Really, the blood was springing up inside him wherever it could. On the day Aaron died, Paul and Lily had come home from school to an empty and unlighted house and found a yellow bucket in the bathtub with blood in it. He remembered the blood as filling the bucket, but that seemed unlikely. Slick and dark and deep and still, a lake of blood, a bucket of blood. Wasn’t that a pirate phrase: Yo-ho-ho and a bucket of blood? No. That was a bottle of rum. Paul wished that he had a bottle of rum right now. The bucket had seemed to mock them, had seemed to say, This is all humans are, transient blood, whereas yellow plastic will last for centuries. Later they would find out that Diana had stayed with Aaron all that day, first at the house and then at the hospital, where he was dead by the middle of the evening. Paul imagined his mother kneeling with Aaron as the life flowed out of him and into a bucket. What kind of thing would that be for a mother? What would it do to her? He imagined her gliding through the house, her feet barely touching the floor, running to call the doctor, running back to Aaron, running like mad, convincing herself by the comfort of vigorous action that this illness would break as all the others had, would break and fade into the march of family memory Remember when Aaron was so sick? My God but he was sick. He himself doesn’t remember it. You were so sick, Aaron, it’s just as well you don’t remember it. He imagined Aaron’s last thought. It still amazed Paul that every brain would have one thought at the end, followed by nothing but some distant humming sound. He expected that Aaron’s thought might have had to do with the outdoors. He had been the only one of the kids who liked being outside more than he liked watching television. Even in the bad winters he would hike around the grove in a white stocking cap and blue plaid coat. He would cover bottles with argyle socks, call them birds, and plant them among the trees where he would pretend to hunt them. His hands were always cold. He would press them to the other kids’ faces to demonstrate.

  After
the funeral, people had told Aaron’s siblings that God’s ways were a mystery, as if God had woken up one day and decided that it would be a good thing to make Aaron throw up blood until he died — in which case, Paul thought, “mystery” would not tell the story. Eventually, and this took years, Paul came to believe that God did not give the word on individual cases, did not say, “Kill Aaron Nash, and have that gray horse I like win the Preakness.” Long ago in Verona there was an old man who had made a habit of sitting on a chair in front of the grocery store and memorizing the license plates of everyone in town who drove past. This was more like what God did, Paul thought: maintained a numerical system that accounted for everyone, seemed arbitrary, and could not have been devised by anyone else. God was not love, God was math, but math that gave the appearance of love because it added up.

  If I could walk outside — this might have been Aaron’s last thought — jf I could walk outside I would rough up my hands on the bark of trees and in this way get back to myself . . .

  The sun had gone down, and the day’s heat was sinking into the ground. Paul took from his shirt pocket the flight itinerary. Mary would be over the ocean now, reading for the third or fourth time about Meg Ryan. He tore the paper into strips and burned them in the center of the fire ring.

  Paul and Maurice got the Plymouth running and the next morning took it into Verona.

  “How does it feel?” said Maurice.

  “It feels all right,” said Paul.

  “Is there play in the wheel?”

  “You know, there is, but there always was.”

  They motored by the house of Lars Lamb, Paul’s old friend, and found him sitting in a webbed lawn chair and holding a portable phone in the shade of a huge black pickup.

  “Pull over there and see Lars,” said Maurice.

  Lars got up and walked to the car. His shoulders rolled like those of the wrestler he used to be, although he had gained weight. “Here’s a car that brings back memory.”

  “Tell you what I remember,” said Maurice. “Springing two kids out of the state police barracks for possession of beer as a minor.”

  “That’s right,” said Lars. “The trooper called us illiterate woodcutters.”

  “There was no need for such remarks,” said Maurice.

  “Twenty years,” said Paul.

  “A good twenty,” said Maurice. “The state cops have always disliked Verona.”

  Paul got out of the car and went around to shake Lars’s hand. “What are you doing?” said Paul.

  “Life insurance,” said Lars. “There’s more to it, but that would be the short answer.”

  “What else is there to it?” said Maurice.

  “We consider insurance not as an end in itself but as one tool among many.”

  “Write out a policy for Paul.”

  “I could use the business,” said Lars.

  Tbe running board of the black truck stood shoulder high, and a row of yellow lights crowned the cab. The fat and ridged tires seemed like something from a cartoon.

  “She’s on the market,” said Lars.

  “What’s your asking price?” said Maurice. He sat in the car with his arms hanging youthfully over the side.

  “Fourteen-five or best offer,” said Lars. “That doesn’t even recoup my investment, but at this point just take the thing off my property.”

  “How do you get in?” said Paul.

  “Jump,” said Lars. “Use a stepladder. Pull it up to the front porch and just walk in. Any number of ways. Millie and I bought it together. We both decided.”

  “Lars married Millie,” said Maurice.

  “We both knew about the payments. We weren’t children. We went into this thing with our eyes open.” He swung his arms so that his fists tapped together. “We’re divorced now.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” said Paul.

  “That’s all right,” said Lars. “I remember when we first got the truck, why, the next morning I woke up and ran to the window just to see it in the driveway. We would put the baby on the seat between us.”

  “Not a baby anymore,” said Maurice.

  “He’s in the armed forces,” said Lars. “He began in the army and switched over to the air force.”

  “How’s he like it?” said Paul.

  “He doesn’t tell me anything,” said Lars. “You know, there was a time when monster trucks were so popular that if one came out in the Shopper it would be gone overnight. Now it’s a buyer’s market. You see them all over, big old trucks, nobody wants them. Would you believe I’ve had people tell me they like it but it’s too tall?”

  “It does ride high,” said Paul.

  “But that’s my point,” said Lars. “It’s a monster truck.”

  Two of Diana’s animal-rescue colleagues came to the farm that afternoon with an injured owl. Their names were Mercy and Kevin.

  The owl was in a small cage, which Mercy held at arm’s length. It was a little saw-whet owl with brown and white feathers, a fan-shaped head, and gold-ringed eyes that conveyed dignity and alarm.

  “We call him Milk Toast, because that’s what he likes,” said Kevin. “He’s friendly and inquisitive.”

  “Saw-whets tend to be,” said Mercy. “That’s what gets them into trouble.”

  “What happened?” said Paul.

  “He got hit by a car,” said Diana.

  “Luckily the driver had the presence of mind to stop,” said Mercy. “He was a pediatrician, and he picked the owl up from the breakdown lane and put him in the glove compartment of his car.”

  “Crammed in there with the pens and cigarettes,” said Kevin. “I was on duty that day.”

  They were all quiet for a moment, picturing the owl in the glove compartment.

  “Really, though, it probably wasn’t a bad idea,” said Diana. “Nice and dark and quiet.”

  “He did the right thing for the wrong reasons,” said Mercy.

  That night Paul drove the Fury out of the barn into darkness and down the winding driveway to the road. The air was cool and carried the humid smell of cut hay. He crossed the new bridge while looking at the steel ghost of the old bridge. He wondered if the plan was for the old bridge to fall of its own accord into the new bridge, resulting in big construction contracts all around. In Newport he took Thames Street to the Clam Barn, a warehouse of a restaurant where lobster traps hung from the rafters and garage doors had been thrown open to the harbor. Paul went up to the counter and ordered clam cakes and a plastic cup of Double Diamond, and the waitress gave him a little wooden stand with a number on it.

  “Are you over twenty-one?” she asked.

  “I’m over thirty-one,” said Paul.

  “I have to ask.”

  “It won’t be long before I’m forty-one.”

  “It’s pro forma.”

  He walked to his seat thinking that he could become a janitor in a small town near the Canadian border. Maybe he could read the classics and learn the piano. A man with a simple broom could be a king living near the Canadian border. What do we need money for? Food, clothing, shelter. What else? A movie on the weekend. The Joy Luck Club would be in for a long run. The waitress brought his food and he began to eat. And yet months would go by when he could not pick up any book. Once he had tried and failed to read Bleak House, and it was not long before the police came smashing on the door. Harbor lights drifted in black water. Two men sitting at the next table talked anxiously. Paul gathered that they had been sailing and wracked up a borrowed boat.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said one of the men, who had a white sweater tied around his neck. “It’s true that the hull is leaking, but I’m not sure that it is a hole. It might be some sort of rupture. I would just think very carefully before calling and saying, ‘Duane, it’s a hole, there’s a hole —’”r />
  “A what? A rupture?” said his companion, a heavy man holding a fork in his fist. “Of course it’s a hole. Water’s coming in. That’s all the proof I need. We have to tell him. I have his number on Prince Edward Island.”

  “Listen to me and see if this doesn’t make sense,” said the man with the sweater. “At one end of the spectrum you have emergencies. You have disasters. The best example would be the boat sinks. That case, no question, you call him up. But on the other end you have minor things. A bit of chrome breaks off. You wouldn’t call him on P.E.I. to say a bit of chrome had broken off. It would certainly seem strange if you did. So our job is to figure out where on the spectrum our running aground, or whatever we ran into, lies.”

  “I wish I’d never seen that boat,” said the heavy man. “He’s going to hate us for the rest of his days. I never should have gone below to make sandwiches.”

  “A seam. That’s what I was trying to say. Maybe a seam has come unglued.”

  Paul returned to the house, where his father was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking orange juice and staring at a wire cage in which the injured saw-whet stood preening on a perch.

  “Your mother asked me to watch the owl,” he said.

  “What does he do?”

  Maurice poured a glass of orange juice and set it before Paul. “Not a hell of a lot.” He nodded at the cage. “He does that with some frequency. I’ve been trying to draw him out in conversation. I asked him what flying was like.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “You can’t blame him.”

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking. You shouldn’t stay here, Paul. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for us. It’s not that I’m scared so much as . . . well, yes, it is. It is that I’m scared.”

  “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “Do you need money?”

  “No.”

  Maurice put the orange juice back in the refrigerator. “That’s good, because I don’t have any.” From the top of the refrigerator he brought down a backgammon board set up with chess pieces.