The Black Brook Read online

  “How old are you?” said Mary.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “A cigarette is not out of the question.”

  “Hold on,” said Paul.

  They got dressed and sat on a windowsill to smoke. The rain continued to fall. Mary seemed lost in her thoughts, and ash from her cigarette fell on her sweater.

  “Do you really think I’m a good painter?” she said, as blue pearls of fire raced up the fabric.

  A key turned in the lock of the door.

  “Mary, you’re on fire.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  She slid from the sill slapping her chest and shoulders. Paul pulled her close to smother the flame.

  Light edged over the top of the stacks, and bitter smoke rose from Mary’s sweater. Paul figured that someone from either the college or the police would soon discover that his assault research consisted of watching The Movie Loft and making love to the criminologist’s widow.

  Instead, it was two men, exchanging money.

  “Here,” said one.

  “I never held in my hand a hundred and forty thousand dollars,” said the other.

  “You mean a hundred and thirty.”

  “Didn’t we say a hundred and forty, Bud?”

  “We sure didn’t, Don.”

  “Well, I don’t see how that could be. I told Tim a hundred and forty. That’s what Tim’s expecting.”

  “What you told Tim is between you and Tim.”

  “You could fix it,” said the one called Don. “If you wanted to, you know you could.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You’re tough.”

  “I have to be.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “I don’t smell anything;”

  “What do they do in here?”

  “Nothing anymore. They were doing research at night, but the guy died. You know — that professor who rolled his convertible.”

  “Maybe it was a chemical experiment.”

  “Nah,” said Bud. “It was that smoking professor and that creepy scowling intern. They say he was thrown from the car. That always makes me wonder when they say that. It sounds like it wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, you know? Sounds like you might bounce a couple times and then land on soft grass.”

  “They bounce all right.”

  “Now, how are we going to work this?” said Bud. “You want the money or do I go back and say, ‘It now appears that Don, for reasons best known to himself . . .’?”

  “No, no, no, no. But what you forget is by the time everybody gets their share, I’m left holding the minimum wage. Meanwhile, the addition to my house keeps fading farther and farther from reality Do you have any idea where my kids sleep?”

  “The basement.”

  “Well, that’s right. Their room is in the basement.”

  “You already told me that once.”

  “How would you like to grow up in a room without windows? Would you prefer that? Wouldn’t be much fun, would it? You should hear them. It’s enough to break your heart, oh it really is. On a sunny morning, on a perfectly sunny day, they call up the stairs, ‘Oh Daddy, can you tell us if it’s raining? Should we wear our rain clothes or our sun clothes?’ That’s what they call them, sun clothes.”

  “You kill me, Don. I mean, really. What do I look like, Squirrel Nutkin? Is that how I honestly come across to you? Because say so if it is . . .”

  Then Paul could not hear them, and soon they were gone. Paul and Mary had been pressed together and still for some time.

  “What were they talking about?” said Mary “Who were those people?”

  “I have no idea. Do you think I scowl?”

  “I wouldn’t call it scowling exactly.”

  She pulled the sweater over her head and stared at it.

  “You can forget about that one,” he said. “Did you get burned, Mary?”

  She pressed her hands to her chest, here and there, testing. “I’ve heard of ramie doing that, but I never really believed it.”

  ••

  Paul’s Uncle Bernard and Aunt Triphena lived in a red house with white trim and small rooms in Arlington, over the Somerville line, and Paul had supper there one evening in August. Afterward, he and Uncle Bernard walked in the back yard with glasses of beer. A silver rail fence divided the yard, and beyond the fence two plaster children in straw hats fished perpetually from a stream. A chain saw buzzed distantly over the neighborhood. Bernard Nash was a small man with inscrutable features and a black beret.

  “I hope you were able to take something from being an intern,” he said. “Although it’s too bad about your supervisor.”

  “At least he went out driving.”

  “They say there wasn’t a mark on him.”

  “That reminds me,” said Paul, and without mentioning Mary, he explained what they had overheard on the night her sweater burned. He and Uncle Bernard sat on the silver fence with their heels hooked on a rail.

  Bernard blinked his eyes now and then, snorted, took a drink of beer, and finally said, “Well, hell, Paul. No law in the world against putting an addition on your house.”

  “No. That’s not what I mean.”

  “Let me tell you something,” said Uncle Bernard. “I’m going to tell you something now.”

  “O.K.”

  “Your grandfather told me this in, well, it must have been ’thirty-one or ’thirty-two, somewhere around in there, but it is as true this year as it was the year when he said it, and what he said was ‘Very easy —’ Wait, how did it go? ‘Very easy to get into trouble, very hard to get out.’ And the reason he said this was because someone had fallen down the stairs, and I wanted to help him, and he didn’t think that was such a good plan.”

  “Who fell?”

  “A drunk named Hibby, if you want to know.”

  “It just seemed like I should tell someone.”

  “Well, you did. You told me. And now you don’t have to tell anyone else.”

  “I was in the stacks. I couldn’t see anything.”

  Uncle Bernard poured the last of his beer on the grass. “Of course you couldn’t, and it’s just as well. I’m trying to remember the other thing your grandfather would say. Oh yeah. ‘Be careful what you accept, because that’s what you get.”

  “What did he mean?” said Paul.

  “Just that,” said Bernard.

  When the nights grew colder and the light fell rust-colored and sharp on the tall houses of Somerville, Paul packed his car for the trip back to college. He left the key to the apartment with the woman in the wheelchair. On the way out of town he stopped at a tavern in Union Square to have a farewell drink and write a letter to Mary. He sat at the bar with pen poised over paper. Beside the paper lay an envelope with a stamp. He wanted to say that he was on her side, that he knew she would be a good painter, that he knew she would get another house when the lease was up on the place in Wellesley. So he did say these things, he wrote them on the paper, but once they were written and he could see them in his own hand, they did not seem convincing. Letters always gave him trouble. He would imagine the person he was writing to reading between the lines and getting madder and madder.

  3

  Paul Nash drove back to Sherwood University with the customary mix of curiosity and uncertainty. He had made it through three years of college, but there was no guarantee of making it through the fourth. Perhaps this would be the year when it all broke down. This had been his mindset every fall for the past fourteen years.

  The evening sky assumed ever-deeper shades of blue. Paul rejected the reputation of interstate highways as corrupt or unnatural. Driving north, he could see far into
New Hampshire, the forests growing dark and the white houses and the isolated TV antennas bringing programs to the lonely. He could pass slow drivers as he wished, taking long and revealing glances into their vehicles. Near Tilton, he overtook a massive truck rocking along with a crane mounted on its bed and a man with a red beard riding in the cab of the crane facing backward. The man fixed his eyes on the distance, as if in embarrassment, and Paul wondered if he was being punished or ostracized for something. In Vermont (it was dark by then, with a lopsided moon bobbing in and out of the rear-view mirror), a beat-up station wagon displayed one of those bumper stickers claiming that no one would take away the driver’s gun except by prying it from his COLD DEAD FINGERS, and this threat invigorated Paul with its self-pitying and asinine quality. In the laboratories of the coming socialist dictatorship, he thought, one of the first orders of business would be the invention of a posthumous finger relaxant — like Mentholatum, only stronger. A man with long hair and a complacent, harmless expression drove the vehicle, outlined dimly by dashboard lights; whether he was dead or alive, it seemed, it would be no great trick to pry open his fingers and take a gun from them, but who could say. And for that matter, maybe it wasn’t his car. Paul pressed close to the wheel, for the change of posture, and considered the plight of people driving borrowed cars with hostile or stupid bumper stickers. The radio carried an obscure theological discourse: “The dead have gone to be with God. The living need love, and they need money.” He crossed the border into Canada and passed a Volkswagen Jetta with Kentucky plates, driven by a young woman with nervous eyes and a big stuffed dog pinned between her and the steering wheel.

  Paul raised his right hand, formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and extended the remaining three fingers, as if to assure the woman that everything would work out. She did not see him, and he fell to wondering about the origin of this common hand signal.

  Sherwood University clung to ledges on the banks of Lake Memphremagog. The moon lit the moving water as Paul drove along the eastern shore. The white walls of concrete buildings shifted and glittered in the green haze of a ribbon of street lamps. The campus had its problems, and there was in fact a monthly newsletter called Campus Problems. The buildings leaked when it rained. Ceilings sagged. The course offerings seemed to have been chosen by someone throwing darts at the catalogs of more comprehensive schools. Funding was high but implementation low, and the overall impression was of a campus that had been cut off from civilization by some violent stroke, leaving a dazed band of faculty and students to conduct a warped yet curiously moving caricature of university life, a brave lost campus where rescuers would arrive one day and weep on the grass. Ticks lived in the grass and fed on those walking through. Sherwood’s star scholar was the Egyptologist Virginia Lovetree, who would leave eventually for a job at the University of Michigan. Today, when you read an article about ancient Egypt, it is not unusual to find a quote from Professor Virginia Lovetree of the University of Michigan and formerly of Sherwood University, in Bell Station, Quebec.

  People held the lake to be haunted.

  Paul passed the campus and motored into town, where he shared a house with two other students. The house rose narrow by the railroad tracks with lights burning in the windows. Paul got out of the car. His housemates stood at the edge of the yard looking down into the ravine through which the trains ran. Their names were Loom Hanover and Alice Miller. Loom was tall and had an animated frame, prematurely white hair, and a long and somewhat pointed chin. Sometimes, for a laugh, a student would press a drinking glass onto his or her chin and say, “Who am I?” As for Alice, everyone called her “Little Alice,” for she was fine-boned, though of no little height, maybe five eight or five nine.

  “You just missed it,” said Loom.

  “It’s early,” said Paul.

  “Loom’s motorcycle rolled down the hill,” said Alice.

  “Take a gander,” said Loom.

  “What do you know about that?” said Paul. On the rail bed next to the tracks, the motorcycle lay with its front wheel turned painfully under. It was a big blue-green Trident that Loom had left on the porch of the house all summer while serving an internship in California.

  “We tried easing it down the steps,” said Alice.

  “You should have waited for me,” said Paul.

  Loom slouched over Paul, as was his habit with whomever he addressed. He would speak into the tops of people’s heads as if into a microphone. “We know, Nash,” he said.

  They made their way stiff-legged, like horses, down the over grown bank and dragged the motorcycle away from the tracks. They gathered pieces that had broken off — a mirror, the hollow rubber casing of a footpeg, the red shard of a taillight — and set them by the bike.

  They lay on the ground with their backs to the hill, Loom and Paul on either side of Alice. “It’s only a material thing,” said Loom.

  Loom Hanover would inherit a factory in Ashland, Connecticut, someday and had developed a melancholy style that went hand in hand with his wealth. He played guitar in a band called the Declining Prophets. Whatever he might accomplish would be discounted because of his advantages, and if he accomplished nothing at all, it would not matter. He had said this himself. He had found a quote in a book: “Sons of rich men, when they have anything worth while in them, go through periods of desperation, like other young men. They go to college and read books.” He carried this observation around on a piece of paper in his emu-skin billfold. Small jagged holes pockmarked the clay-colored billfold — proof, said Loom, of the emus’ frequent gouging for group dominance. Paul thought that Loom, with his sheltering wealth, longed for some version of the emus’ experience, that of being alone in a harsh world with no help except one’s own claws.

  Now Loom used the detached motorcycle mirror as a serving tray for three rough-cut and clouded pills, one for each of them. He had spent the summer pasting up a drug guide for a publishing company in La Jolla.

  “I call these soliloquy pills,” he said. “All you’ll want to do is talk. We ought to lay down ground rules or else it’ll just be a constant babble.”

  “What is it?” said Paul.

  “The street name is ‘harbor pilot,’” said Loom.

  They swallowed the pills and watched a woodchuck lumber darkly along the opposite side of the ravine.

  Loom spoke first, concerning the murderous overkill with which the police in a small California town had that summer captured the headquarters of a Maoist organization called the Little Red Schoolhouse. Once you claimed to be a revolutionary in America, said Loom, it didn’t matter if you were the worst-armed fool in the world; the police would not rest until the atoms of your body were dispersed to the winds. This was to make sure that nothing so egalitarian, so opportunistic, and, really, so good as the revolution of 1776 could happen again. The Hanovers claimed to be descended from an obscure branch of the family of Nathan Hale, and Loom said that if Nathan Hale were alive today, the police would hunt him down and kill him without asking questions. Loom said the shells the police fired upon the Little Red Schoolhouse were so powerful that they smashed through walls, glass, steel, blood, bone, and appliances, and came out the other side. The police staggered their positions around the house so as not to catch each other’s powerful shells. As Loom told it, some of those shells might still be going, drifting in the vacuum of space. He said the warlike ammunition proved that the police intended to kill and not merely subdue the Maoist community. He had visited the place days after the confrontation and found people who appeared to be firefighters sitting at a card table on the perimeter of the ashes and playing poker. If anyone asked, they were supposed to say they were making sure that the fire did not rekindle, but their actual job was keeping anyone from sifting through the burned house for evidence that might be used in civil lawsuits against the police.

  “They told you that?” said Paul.

 
“They didn’t have to,” said Loom. “It was understood.”

  Alice leaned forward and tied her shoes with great fascination. She had long black hair and heavy, provocative eyebrows. Her father and mother owned a theater in Yankton, South Dakota, and she had been the last of the three students to occupy the house by the railroad tracks. Paul had invited her to move in after she came to a party at the house in their sophomore year and called him a poet. All he had done to earn the compliment was carry a fluorescent desk lamp into a room full of drinking people, set it on a stereo speaker, plug it in, and turn it on.

  “Hey,” said Alice, “you’re a poet.”

  “I thought there was writing involved,” said Paul.

  “You’re a poet of light,” she said.

  At the party she had worn dark red lipstick that smelled of tranquilizers, and she and Paul ended up sitting between the spindles of the staircase and talking for an hour. It turned out that they were in the same hermeneutics class and had both written papers about Jesus’ edgy behavior at the wedding at Cana, when he spoke sternly to his mother as she seemed to be pressuring him to produce some wine.

  Alice had fallen out with her roommate and needed somewhere to stay. Loom used the house’s third bedroom to store leg weights, and Paul suggested that Alice could take that room. (According to Loom, Nathan Hale had been able to kick a ball very high, and whatever Nathan Hale could do, Loom wanted to do as well or better, and so he worked on his leg strength.) Alice accepted the offer, and Loom transferred the leg weights into his own room, and she moved in. Soon, however, Alice and Loom began sleeping together, at which point she moved into his room and the leg weights went back to the spare bedroom. Now, watching Alice tying her shoes on the evening of his return to Bell Station, Paul remembered how much he hated Loom’s leg weights, which consisted of six pale red canvas cuffs with metal plates sewn in. Loom began every morning by strapping the weights on and clanking them endlessly on the floorboards. While the exercises were going on, Paul would wish for Nathan Hale to rise from the dead and demonstrate his legendary kicking skills on Loom.