The Black Brook Read online

  Alice had managed to tie her hair into her shoelaces, and laughing urgently with her face bound to her knees, she tugged at the knots. She freed her black hair, shook it back, and began her story:

  “When I was a girl in South Dakota, I had some Barbie dolls. Not that many. Maybe I had six. I wasn’t a fanatic the way some girls were, but I would give little parties, things like that, the usual, although none of them could stand up unless I was holding their legs, because their feet were tiny and bent, as if they’d been broken and not set right. People talk about the large breasts of Barbies, but I remember the feet more than the breasts — all these hobbled Barbies falling over their feet. But this isn’t about the dolls so much as it’s about the suitcase I had for their clothes. It was made of blue vinyl, with a brass clasp and an illustration of Barbie and Ken in evening wear on the lid. Barbie had white gloves going up past her elbows. The suitcase was nothing special, but I liked it, I really did. I liked it as much as I liked the dolls themselves, I think, and I kept it in my bedroom, full of dresses and slacks and tiny twisted shoes. This was not a big deal for me, it was one toy among many, but there it was. Well, one day when we were all at school, there was a tornado warning and the principal sent us home early. Our house was three blocks away and so I walked home like I always did with my brother, Frank. The storm was close, and we were scared. I don’t know if you’ve ever been caught in tornado weather, but the sky turns olive green and there is a darkness in the clouds so forceful that the clouds seem to glow. And when you see this awful green sky, you know you’d better hurry home. The trees stretched flat in the howling wind and someone’s lawn chair danced down the street with its aluminum legs opening and closing. My mother met us halfway home and she was yelling things that we couldn’t hear and I think in retrospect we barely got in the house. The wind came through the doorjamb making a music like bagpipes. We went down into the basement and huddled by the deep freeze, playing cat-and-mouse with flashlights while the house shook and crashed. Then it began to rain. We could see the drops pelting the basement windows, and our mother said that if it’s raining, then it’s over. So we left the basement to see what had happened to the house. The first floor was all right but upstairs a box elder tree had fallen through the windows of my bedroom. Branches filled the room, and the floor was covered with broken glass and small stones. My mother and brother and I tried to clean up but it was useless with the tree and everything. But you could climb on the branches without touching the floor and it was while climbing in the branches that I saw the Barbie suitcase buried in the middle of the room. I pulled it from the wet green leaves and dragged it into the hallway where I opened the lid to make sure it still worked. And this is the thing: the clothes inside were all different. I had never seen any of them before. They didn’t even seem manmade. The fabrics shone like fire. I told my mother and later I told my father, but they had no explanation; they were too glad the house hadn’t fallen down to worry about doll clothes. They said I must have gotten the clothes as a present a long time ago and forgot about them. ‘From who?’ I said. ‘Who would know where to get clothes like these? Look at them,’ I said. ‘Look at the way they’re made.”

  Paul and Loom said nothing after Alice finished. They could have asked questions. It was not that they weren’t listening. But the full force of the soliloquy pills had settled over them, making questions seem the product of bad nerves. They all stood together and stretched. Paul’s shoulders felt good, and he smiled in the dark by the railroad tracks. He and Loom and Alice pushed the Trident up the hill through the briars. It was hard to say how badly it was damaged. The wheels turned, anyway, and whether they were bent or not was a matter of guesswork. A train came through, as one always did at a quarter to midnight. The whistle blared, and the silver cars swayed, and the three students faced the train, losing themselves in the shroud of the big racket.

  The train rocked under a bridge and around a bend. Its last light blinked out of sight. “What about your story?” Alice said to Paul.

  They went into the house, into the kitchen, where a light bulb swung gently on its frayed cord, and where yellowed tape held an orange and blue illustrated poster called “The Commune’s Fish Pond” to the wall above the table. In the poster, the members of a commune hauled a net through water, and the net belled with fish. Paul got three bottles of beer from the refrigerator and sat down with Alice and Loom at the table.

  “In high school I had a friend named Lars,” said Paul. “Lars Lamb.”

  “I’ll bet he was a hellion,” said Alice.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “All your stories are about hellions.”

  “Lars was all right in person, but behind the wheel of a car he would scream at drivers who made the smallest infraction. This was in the town of Verona, Rhode Island. You would have thought he had been driving for years and had got tired of bad drivers. But the thing was, he was only seventeen. Something about being in his car just seemed to make him furious. It was a blue Firebird, a pretty car. He screamed at people who didn’t use their turn signals, he screamed at people who slowed down to look at things along the road, and God help you if Lars saw you eating food in your car. He hated that the most — say, if you had a piece of cake behind the wheel. Well, that was Lars. He had big shoulders and had been on the wrestling team until a bunch of us got caught with a bottle of ouzo behind the shop building. It was too bad. He got kicked off the wrestling team, and I got kicked off the football team. For me it wasn’t a big thing. I never played much, and the main thing I liked about being on the football team was being able to wear forearm pads and slam things with my forearms. Sometimes I would even take bites out of the pads. They were made of this dense spongy material that was good to bite. But Lars had wrestled at the top of his class, and I’m sure he missed it. Anyway, in our senior year he started wearing a plastic skull mask while he was driving. Not every time, but often enough. It was a Halloween mask with an elastic string that went around the back of his head. He wore glasses, and what he would do is put the glasses on over the mask, which for some reason heightened the illusion that a skeleton was driving the car. So one day we were leaving the Ann & Hope when Lars let the Firebird roll into the back of a Pinto. We always used to go to the Ann & Hope, steal shirts, and return them for cash. Lars had the mask on, and basically he wasn’t watching where he was going. A woman got out of the Pinto to see what had happened. Lars didn’t scream at her; he was too busy trying to get the mask off before she could see that she had been hit by some goon driving around in a Halloween costume. But his eyeglasses were tangled in the elastic string and he finally gave up. So the woman came over to the window and helped him off with the mask, because she could see the problem, whereas Lars couldn’t see anything by this time. His eyes didn’t even line up with the holes.”

  “Then what?” said Alice.

  “They exchanged insurance papers.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Not exactly. The story shifts to a Saturday night some months later. Lars and I were driving around Newport in the Firebird when some of our enemies penned us in. They jumped out of their cars with chains and tire irons and went to work. Lars sat and listened to the smashing of his car as long as he could, and then he got out. But every time he tried to stop these kids from hitting his car, they threatened to hit him instead. So that was a standoff. Then I got out and began yelling. ‘Go away,’ I said. ‘Go away.’ This was an unexpected strategy, and believe it or not, they went away. I guess they had accomplished what they set out to do. The next day, I went over to Lars’s place to see how the car looked in daylight, and as I was walking up the driveway, I heard the same sort of pounding as I had heard the night before. I pushed up the garage door and there was Lars hitting his own car with the flat side of an ax. There was a loan on the car, you see, so it was fully insured, and he wanted it totaled so he could get a jacked-up Duster he had his eye on. Lars looked l
ike some figure from an American folktale. He gave a little cry every time he hit the car. Because, strange though he may have been, he did not find this easy.”

  Then the stories were over. Paul stood and turned out the kitchen light. When they reached the top of the stairs, Loom and Alice went one way, and Paul went the other.

  Alice Miller and Loom Hanover got married the summer after they graduated from Sherwood University, in the Devil’s Hatrack Wilderness Area in Quebec, with music supplied by the Lac Brome Mandolin Orchestra. Loom had served as chairman of the Marxist-Leninist Steering Committee for two years at Sherwood, but now he seemed eager to marry and assume his place in the family business, which was the manufacture of fasteners. Loom’s father was a member of a fraternal organization called the Saberians Guild, down in Connecticut, and he wore a saber to the wedding, but when he drew it during the rehearsal, a piece of the handle flew off, and so he left it sheathed during the ceremony, on a mossy heath surrounded by gnarled apple trees. The first mandolinist wore a blue stocking cap although the day was clear and warm. Paul served as best man and read from the Song of Solomon, for that was the year that everyone read from the Song of Solomon at weddings. “How beautiful are thy feet with shoes,” Paul read. “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear . . .” The reading made Paul thirsty, and he drank too much at the reception, which took place in the wilderness area’s Howard “Mark” Rafferty Bird Museum, and he danced with Alice, and he smoked cigars in red leather chairs with Loom’s father, Gilbert, but the cigars were old, and dry tobacco spilled down their shirts.

  “Too bad about your saber,” said Paul.

  Gilbert Hanover picked up the sword and scabbard. “Take a look,” he said. He had soft white hair combed like feathers over the crest of his forehead. “It’ll have to be welded.”

  “What kind of fasteners does your company make?” said Paul.

  Gilbert massaged the bridge of his nose in contemplation. “It varies,” he said. “We make everything from submarine fittings to the anchor pins for large plastic cows at steak restaurants.”

  “Are your workers happy?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know, conditions?”

  “Are you Red, kid?”

  “I keep an open mind.”

  Gilbert laughed. “That won’t get the job done.”

  Paul finished a glass of ale and set the glass on the floor. “To me,” he said, “Charles Fourier was on to something with his idea of the phalanx.”

  “Yeah, well, Brook Farm burned down,” said Gilbert.

  “But it could have worked,” said Paul.

  “Ah, wait a while before you know everything”

  Loom’s mother, Evelyn, approached the club chairs wearing a deeply cut black dress with a silver chain around the waist. “Listen,” she said, “the minister wants to get paid.”

  “Write him a check,” said Gilbert.

  “He says his bank won’t take U.S. checks.”

  “Tell him to come see me.”

  “Oh, Gil, just pay the man,” said Evelyn.

  “How much is it?”

  “Six hundred.”

  ‘Pay attention, Fidel,” Gilbert said to Paul. “The revolution will not have the support of the clergy.”

  “Don’t bait the children,” said Evelyn. “Let’s not ruin the beautiful evening.”

  “Tell him it was a grand ceremony.”

  “I will,” she said, and walked away.

  Paul examined the scabbard of the saber. It was made of leather with an etching of a girl falling from a flying ram. “Why say it was grand if you’re mad at him?”

  “Those are the rules.”

  “The rules,” Paul said. “That’s where I get lost.”

  “There are many rules,” said Gilbert. “On Christmas Day, wear a gray sweater with a red tie and drink Bloody Marys. On Easter Sunday, wear a blue suit with an ocher tie, again drinking Bloody Marys, but interestingly, omitting the celery. If after visiting your mistress you feel remorse, and your mistress asks what’s on your mind, say, ‘You are on my mind.’ When you answer the phone and the call is for someone else, do not clamp your hand over the mouthpiece while summoning the intended party. Look everyone in the eye at all times, and don’t look first into the right eye, then the left, and so on, for this is disconcerting. On Arbor Day, drink gin. Keep an orderly toolbox, and do as much of the work around your home as possible, and when you hit your thumb with the hammer, it is considered perfectly acceptable to say, ‘Goddamn it all to hell,’ but beyond this you must not go. If your thumbnail proceeds to turn dark blue, wear a houndstooth suit and switch your wristwatch to the other hand, thus preventing your injury from calling immodest attention to your wristwatch.”

  Paul left the reception at one-thirty in the morning, and on the way back to the college he put his car in the ditch. He walked for several miles under the low dark sky before taking shelter in some sort of wooden feeding station in a pasture, where he fell asleep. In the morning. horses nosed him bluntly in the back, to get at the hay in the feeder. Ragged clouds sailed across the sky. Paul returned to his car and drove it up and out of the ditch. I could have driven out anytime but I just didn’t realize it, he thought. His cummerbund was gone, and he drove to the bird museum to look for it because he had been told by the rental people that loss of any part of the tuxedo would be regarded as loss of the entire tuxedo. The doors swung open onto a deserted museum; glasses, streamers, and cigarette ashes littered the floor. Paul wandered past cases of stuffed birds and into a small room with oak paneling and large panes of glass beyond which lay a diorama. The exhibit had been installed long ago, judging by its faded colors, and replicated a small Pacific island that had been picked clean at the turn of the century. Paul pushed a button set into the paneling, and soon a deep recorded voice spoke over the sound of wind and gulls. The narrator explained that a guano farmer who lived alone on the island had imported rabbits to spice up his diet. In time, the rabbits ate all the vegetation on the island, stripped it to bedrock, and the birds died or flew away, leaving whole species extinct and the farmer a broke and broken man in a ruined landscape.

  Paul graduated late, as he had to take a make-up exam in a bowling class. He barely scraped by, coming up with a spare in the tenth frame to reach a passing score.

  Back at his parents’ farm in Rhode Island, he tried to call Mary Dalton, but her phone had been disconnected.

  4

  Paul taught high school for two years in Providence, but one of his students overdosed, and around the same time he happened to read an article in The Atlantic Monthly called “Why Accounting Matters,” and on an impulse he decided to quit teaching and become a CPA. He joined the firm of Clovis, Luken & Pitch, and took an apartment in a brick building on East Manning Street. The accounting firm, like all of adult life, proved stranger and more tenuous than he had expected. Every year at tax time, when the clients’ returns were signed and sealed, the senior partners would shut themselves in a room with three glasses and a bottle of whiskey to see who could rig himself the biggest refund. Among these haunted figures was Paul’s boss, Jack Chance, a soft-spoken man who seemed equally wary of the tax authorities and of his fellow senior partners.

  Paul did pro bono work for an art gallery near Fox Point and as a result got invited to a party at a sculptor’s house on Morris Avenue one Thursday night in the spring of 1984. The sculptor specialized in bronze insects, and Paul was making his way through a hallway lined with praying mantises when he saw Mary. They left the party together and wandered into a dark church on Hope Street. Paul detected a loose knob on the balustrade of a stairwell, wrenched it free, and flung it into vaulted space. Silence followed, as if time had stopped, and t
hen the globe crashed loudly on other wood. From the church they went to Paul’s apartment building, where low green lanterns lined the walk. Neither of them had protection, so they lay in bed bumping and pressing all night. It was like paradise, beautiful and tense, and the next morning they sat at Paul’s cracked round kitchen table and ate pancakes.

  Five years had passed since they first met, and Mary Dalton had changed careers too. She had given up electronics to concentrate on painting. After Wellesley she had moved to Framingham, and from there to Seekonk, where she now rented an apartment in a house behind a shoe repair shop. She worked these days on a series of paintings depicting towels on a clothesline.

  “Let’s go to the Cape,” she said. “We’ll rent a cabin. We can swim, although it will be pretty cold. Oh, let’s go, Paul. Things haven’t worked out so well for me here. If only I had gotten my insurance settlement, it would have been different.”

  “I thought Leonard had insurance,” said Paul.

  “He had a policy in the works when he died. Some of the papers had been signed, but not all of them, and so they declared that it wasn’t valid. I had to get a loan just to cover the cost of the funeral, and if that isn’t depressing, you tell me. I contacted a lawyer, and he was very enthusiastic at first, but his interest waned over time, and pretty soon he wouldn’t answer my calls.”

  “What happened with the computers?”

  “After Len died, my company was very patient but then it disbanded,” said Mary. “The focus of the scene has shifted to California. Then I heard about something down here, in Seekonk, but it turned out to be a big disappointment. First off, they were writing software I wouldn’t have published when I was in high school. They were trying to develop a system just for pet stores, and so they would sit around saying, ‘All right, what are some of the different breeds?’ It all seemed so makeshift. Then they decided I was too combative, whatever that means. So guess what I’m doing now. We agreed to a parting of the ways, and I’m working in a laundromat.”