The Black Brook Read online

  “How’s that going?”

  “Not as bad as I thought it would be. It’s hot, but at least it’s not a dry heat. If anything, it’s damp.”

  Paul ran hot water over a dishrag and cleaned the lip of the syrup bottle. “You’re not combative.”

  “I can be,” said Mary. She lifted her chin and swept her brushy yellow hair behind her ears. “You don’t know me that well, Paul. What did we have? A few evenings. You really don’t know me so well at all. When I decide I want something, my attitude pretty much becomes one of, ‘All right, hand it over.’ An example would be when Lenny got the job at the college and we had a choice between buying a little house in Watertown or renting the big house in Wellesley. He wanted to buy, he said burglars feed on rented houses, but I loved that house in Wellesley. I sat in the garden on the day we looked at it and I knew that I wanted to keep sitting in that garden. And no one ever burglarized it either. In the long run, of course, it was a mistake, because if we had bought the little house in Watertown, I might be living in it today instead of breathing shoe polish fumes in Seekonk. But I want to look ahead and not fixate on the past. I can’t see you as an accountant.”

  “All my life I’ve been interested in numbers,” said Paul. “I guess it began in grade school when I was able to solve the riddle of Mr. Klopstock and the missing horse. Later I found that if you carry the nine-times table past twenty digits and then remove everything but the threes and sevens, the resulting pattern looks exactly like Stonehenge. At the same time, I knew I didn’t have the patience to be a mathematician. So suddenly it all fell together. Most people think it’s boring, and I admit it can be, but you meet all kinds of people, you travel, you have some laughs.”

  “I didn’t know that accountants traveled.”

  “There’s some travel,” said Paul. “The other day I had to go north of Providence to interview the manager of a silk-screen company. This interested me because I had always thought of silk-screening as an art form, but evidently there are industrial applications too.”

  “Certainly,” said Mary.

  “Yeah. So I got to the address and it was an abandoned church that somebody was using to store washers and dryers. I assumed I must have the wrong place, but then a guy came up from the basement, and I asked him, ‘I must be missing something. Where is the silk-screening done?’ And he said, ‘It’s mostly subcontracted.’ And then he laughed, and I laughed, and that broke the tension.”

  Paul and Mary drove that night to Cape Cod. Paul had never been there. Everyone knows that most Rhode Islanders do not like to drive far, that their limited travel ambitions reflect the narrow dimensions of their state, that people in Providence consider Boston to be as remote as Nome, although it is only thirty-seven miles away. But Paul’s family was not like this. His father enjoyed driving long distances, and the family had always taken arduous vacations involving days and days spent with seven or eight of them jammed into a station wagon, speeding toward Helena, Houston, Winnipeg, or Juarez as if the hounds of hell were biting at the wheels. Six-hundred-mile days were not unusual, and the family would fall exhausted into motel rooms under cover of night, and by the fourth or fifth day bitter hatred colored the atmosphere of the station wagon and the kids would be punching each other viciously in the upper arms, so that at any given moment a child might be suffering either the turbulent remorse of the violent or the spiritual desolation that comes from having been punched sharply in the upper arm. So the Cape had been too close, too easy and now, as Paul drove across the Taunton River bridge, a green steel span from which humble Fall River appeared to be a golden kingdom of light, he enjoyed having Mary next to him, and he felt far from those trapped days of childhood.

  They stayed two nights in one of a series of silver-blue honey­moon cabins on the bay side of the Cape. They could see the water from their cabin and at night could hear the sound of the waves mixed with the occasional traffic on Route 6A. Rough, winter-scarred sand lay all around the outside of the cabin. It rained the first night, and they inventoried the contents of the place: a telescope, a rowing machine, a copy of the Kama Sutra, and a dusty cardboard box with an inflatable vinyl device inside called the Bridal Pillow.

  Paul blew up the grooved and wedge-shaped pillow and put the stopper in. “What do you make of this?” he said.

  Mary took the pillow in both hands, threw it in the air, and caught it. “I think it goes under the bride. It’s a real fifties thing.”

  “What’s wrong with a regular pillow?”

  “That’s for sleep use only.”

  In the morning the sun shone through soft blue haze, and white waves crested randomly. The green water turned abruptly purple farther out, and gulls glided backward on the wind and fell awkwardly into the ocean. Paul and Mary left the door unlocked and drove out to Provincetown, where the boxer Emil Bondurant was training and where the streets were as crowded and lively as the lanes of a country fait. That afternoon they took a whale watch cruise in a strong wind. They saw a fast, rubbery minke and a humpback whale that dove with its forked flukes held high and slapped the water in various ways that the marine biologist aboard said were unusual.

  “You could go weeks waiting to see this,” he said. “This has been a magical day.”

  Heading back to the harbor, Paul and Mary sat behind the bridge, sheltered from the wind, and watched the engine’s high wake, which itself fanned like whale flukes. The sun lay mercury pools of light on the water. When they got back to the cabin on the beach they found the door open. Sand covered the floor and a large blue braided rug.

  “I don’t see how all this could have come through the door,” said Mary.

  “Maybe the windows too,” said Paul. He dusted off the vinyl pillow. “Did you ever think how the marriage ceremony emphasizes the eventual death of the bride and groom?”

  Mary picked up a pair of tennis shoes she had left in the kitchen and took them outside. “I don’t see how you can say that to me,” she said loudly from the porch.

  Paul walked to the doorway. Mary slapped the shoes together. She wore an aquamarine Danskins top, tucked into loose khaki shorts. “What do you mean?”

  “After what happened to Leonard,” she said.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I never thought of that.”

  “But I follow your thinking. The vows do have a morbid quality.”

  “‘As long as we both shall live.’ Come on. That in itself tells you more than you need to know.”

  She sat down on the porch and put the shoes on her bare feet. “It’s supposed to last, that’s all.”

  Paul brought the telescope out of the cabin. “Or think of nature shows on television,” he said. “‘The coyote mates for life.’ What comes to mind? One coyote laid out on the forest floor and the other one shuffling around in disbelief.”

  “To your mind, perhaps,” said Mary. She stood, shaded her eyes, and peered into the doorway of the cabin. “I hope we’re not liable for sand damage.”

  “The cabin is on the beach,” said Paul. “Sand cannot be considered damage.”

  “Where are you going with the telescope?”

  “Looking for whales.”

  “Do they come in this close?”

  “That’s why I’m using the scope.”

  “You know, what I loved most about the whales is the sounds they made.”

  Paul pressed the horns of the tripod into the soft wooden floorboards. “The slapping and the breathing.”

  “Their voices,” said Mary. “They had them on a videotape below decks. They make very haunting sounds.”

  Later Paul and Mary carried the braided rug outside and shook it. They tried to coordinate their motions, but each shake of the rug rattled their elbows.

  They met another couple staying in the cabins that night and inhaled cocaine with them. The couple said they were from
Ohio and had come east to drum up support for a new women’s boxing league. They had been trying to get an audience with the boxer Emil Bondurant. The woman’s name was Melissa, and she showed them her boxing steps on the sand. She wore a green canvas jumpsuit with a wide woven belt of red, yellow, and blue, and she punched Paul in the neck. He had to walk up and down the beach gasping to unknot the muscles.

  “I’m walking in rhythm,” said Melissa.

  Her husband, Clive, caught Paul by the arm. “Don’t mind Melissa,” he said. “She’s knocked me on the deck many times. Sometimes I wish that old cocaine would dry up and blow away.”

  Paul leaned down with his hands on his knees, looking back at the cabin. Melissa vaulted from foot to foot with the light at her back. Mary came out and handed her a beer. Melissa drank and flung the bottle.

  “Whoo,” she cried.

  Clive eventually dragged her back to their cabin. She was one of those people who do not want the night to end. Mary and Paul turned off their outside light and walked down to the bay. They kissed for some time with their feet at the edge of the water.

  In New Bedford they stopped at a pay phone, flipped through the Yellow Pages, and found an advertisement, illustrated with church bells, for a justice of the peace whose house was within walking distance of the lobster museum. He produced a bottle of Freixenet champagne, performed the wedding ceremony, and showed Paul and Mary the tropical fish he kept in murmuring tanks in his basement. “I’m told I have the largest raspora collection in southeastern Massachusetts,” he said. “These little bright fish are cousin to the carp. These are scissortails; these are redfins; these are harlequins.”

  Besides being a justice of the peace, the man said, he was a bounty hunter.

  “Let’s say you find some big guy who doesn’t want to go,” said Paul.

  The justice of the peace led them upstairs to a bureau in the hallway. He opened a drawer and took out a sap that he handed to Paul. Cracks ran like veins through the chocolate leather. “I hit him in the knees with this,” he said. “Then you’re dealing with someone a lot shorter.”

  They moved into a new apartment on Siren Street — three rooms above a dentist’s office. Sometimes they could hear the drill’s high whine, and if they showered midmorning, the water dripped through the floor and onto the dentist’s plants and patients. Every day the carpeting in their living room grew a crop of nylon snags that every night they harvested with a straw broom. Mary’s paints and paintings filled the apartment, smelling of oranges. She had metal shelves and mason jars of brushes and an easel that they had to saw the top off of to make it fit. She had colored powders, tinted liquids, canvas stretchers, and delicate knives, like miniature trowels. In the evenings they played a game in which they took turns being dead weight that the other would be required to drag from the living room into the bedroom and somehow haul up onto the bed. This led always to wild laughter, followed by desperate sex.

  They fought a lot too. Two months into their marriage, Mary began to think he would abandon her. And she objected to his singing. Paul had this tuneless manner of singing old folksongs. His parents had smoked Old Gold cigarettes, and when Paul was eleven years old he acquired, through an Old Gold promotion, a fat paperback called Folk Song U.S.A., put together by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax. Paul had memorized many of the songs, and singing them provided a link to his past. But the lyrics often had to do with couples breaking up or with lovers who, given their descriptions, could not be Mary (“Black is the color of my true love’s hair / Her lips are like some rosy fair”), and Mary would argue that by singing these lines he was subconsciously expressing his desire to replace her with another. She would even react to songs on the radio, as if Paul’s secret mind dictated the playlists of FM stations in Providence and Boston.

  “Man, there’s your theme song,” she would say.

  “Hmm?”

  “I know you want a pair of brown eyes,” she said. “Don’t you think I’m wise to what you’re all about?”

  “What color are your eyes?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Blue.”

  “They’re violet, for all you care.”

  “Blue is close.”

  “You go to hell.”

  Sometimes these arguments ended in brittle silence, and sometimes Mary curled on the carpet, writhing among the nylon blooms, crying out that he obviously wanted a divorce and why didn’t he just say it.

  Paul hated to hear her get that way and thought such stark emotionality could not be doing them any favors. The current wisdom regarding emotions was that they should all be expressed, or “brought to the surface,” no matter their content, but he did not buy this. Sometimes he would respond by taking the broom and sweeping around her, as if to say, “This isn’t happening, nothing is happening, nobody here but us sweepers.” Once he got down on the carpet and tried to hold her still, but they only ended up wrestling, his face inches from hers, both of them breathing harshly, with taut jaw muscles and viselike grips on each other’s arms. Really angry, no fooling around. He could not believe their fresh relationship had warped so soon. He seemed to have failed her in some fundamental way that it was too early for her to know about. It brought to mind the gyroscopes of his youth, how his father would buy gyroscopes every now and then and demonstrate their stable spinning for the kids. But the kids could never get the gyroscopes to work, and after a few tries would have them bent or tangled in their strings, and their father would say, “I can’t believe it, the kids wrecked another gyroscope.”

  5

  The silk-screening company that Paul had spoken of was suffering from an inexplicable surplus of cash, and it was this mysterious money that drew Paul to the illegal side of accounting. He did not give the transition the careful consideration that it undoubtedly called for. It seemed like a game to him, and he liked games. His whole family did.

  So he took three suitcases full of money, converted the cash to traveler’s checks, concealed the checks in a box of L. L. Bean fatwood, and shipped the kindling to a ski lodge in the Pennine Alps, where the checks were fished from the fatwood, picked up, and deposited in the account of a maker of circuit boards in Geneva, which then mailed to Paul’s firm, Clovis, Luken & Pitch, backdated orders and corresponding checks equaling the amount conveyed in the L. L. Bean shipment, minus commission.

  This maneuver proved elegant and unassailable, and it brought the money back to the United States so cleanly that the president of the parent company of Rain-Bow Silk-Screening invited Paul to have supper with him at a restaurant in the town of Madrid. The parent company was called New England Amusements, and the president was Carlo Record, also known as Carlo the Pliers, Carlo from Pawtucket, Pan-Store Carlo, the Shepherd, and Dr. Robert West. The reason he was called Carlo was because he had changed his name from Carl. The reason he was called the Pliers was because he had one real arm and one synthetic one, and on the end of the synthetic arm he had a metal hook.

  Most everyone in Rhode Island knew about this and other aspects of Carlo Record’s life. He was one of those crime figures whose actions and habits and sins were routinely reported in the newspapers but who never seemed to get arrested for anything. For thirty years he had run a criminal organization from a concrete-block bunker on the Providence waterfront. A large man called Ashtray Bob would sit out front and turn away those who did not show the secret ring. The ring ritual had faded out in the late sixties, as even the rackets became more democratic. Carlo the Pliers ruled his kingdom harshly — he was known for hitting his associates on the collarbone with his hook — but at the same time his life had been partly defined by his quietly enduring affair with the Boston scat singer Miriam Lentine. Articles about Carlo Record had scandalized his wife by including a discography of Miriam Lentine, including the albums Against My Religion, Past My Bedtime and Who Are You and How Did I Get Here? (Both are availab
le from PolyGram.)

  Powerful as the Record syndicate was, it did not have the city of Providence to itself. A rival gang existed on Federal Hill, but the relationship between them had grown to be symbiotic over the years, and the two gangs even cooperated on certain ventures, such as an annual picnic at Colt State Park, on the East Bay. In the touchy style of the modern criminal, many of Record’s associates could not tolerate being called by their nicknames to their faces, but Record liked the sound of “Carlo the Pliers.” He had lost his left arm in 1957, when his catboat sailed into a cove of Narragansett Bay and the mast touched a misplaced power line, but he did not become embittered. The catastrophe, in his view, added a jaunty nautical dimension to his image.

  Record had the reputation of being the most conscientious of crime leaders. He insisted on the right of murder victims to have a last cigarette or a drink whenever feasible. He had decided early on to keep out of the drug trade, because it seemed especially immoral. Then he took a second look at the sharking of loans and decided that this, too, was a less than honorable way to make a living, preying as it did on character flaws and economic marginality. Next he ordered a moratorium on slayings (which raised obvious issues of due process) and announced that he was reconsidering the black-market dumping of radioactive sludge which might harm the ecology. It was around this time that Tommy “Mirage” Maynard, the Record Family sub-chieftain of Medford, Mass., and the handbag opener Duncan Priest held their infamous conversation, tape-recorded by the FBI:

  MAYNARD: Pretty soon we’ll be selling those things — going door to door — like human garbage . . .