Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  "There's really nothing I can do," I tell them, intentionally vague.

  "I tend to agree," Goddard says. "But I'm not exactly sure we're on the same wavelength. Are we?" he asks hopefully.

  I am silent for a long moment, and Ian takes that silence for agreement. "I think we are," he says knowingly, conspiratorially, to Goddard.

  Suddenly I am overwhelmed with the desire to go home, to get away from here as fast as I can. I think it was the sound of Ian's voice, the way he looked at Goddard with satisfaction. Suddenly, I know I won't stay for dinner. A part of my life is about to come to an end, relationships that have helped define my life for a decade. Who I am. How people see me. How I see myself. And postponing that with a dinner I don't really want, with people who without question will hate me in the morning, seems to me now a ridiculous waste of time. Of words. Of emotional capital.

  I smile at them, hoping they can't tell that I'm shaking, and I wonder how much money is left in my wallet. It's a small detail, but I find myself hoping there's a five dollar bill in there I can toss on the table when I stand up to go. Like the time I left Reedy in the diner.

  "There's really nothing I can do," I repeat. "I'm not going to tell my daughter she can't tell anyone what she saw."

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  Goddard rubs his chin. "She's eight years old. That probably isn't the end of the world. It's not as if she's president of the Nature Conservancy."

  "It may not be the end of world, Goddard," Ian hisses, for once in his life one step ahead of his boss, "but it will quickly become one major pain in the ass. His daughter will tell her aunt, who will tell Reedy McClure. And he probably will tell the Nature Conservancy."

  "She's nine," I correct Goddard. "And pretty soon she'll be ten."

  "Word will get around," Ian continues. "Within days, it will be all over this state that our lead lobbyist and his little girl saw three catamounts running around smack in the middle of our proposed trail network."

  "Is that true, Scottie? In your opinion, is that what's about to happen?"

  I reach for my wallet inside my sports jacket, still hanging over the back of my chair, and stand up. "Yes, I think so. I think Ian has a pretty good handle on what's about to happen," I tell Goddard.

  Inside my wallet are four ones and a receipt for my dry cleaning. I leave the money on the place mat before me, and drape my jacket over my arm.

  "I'm going to call it a night and head home," I tell the two of them, trembling, dizzy from somethingstanding, maybe, but probably not. No, I know it's not from standing. "I don't think you guys need me here to figure out your next steps."

  Early Thursday morning, well before anyone else arrives at the office, I examine the firm's financial statements, and try to assess the damage from the night before.

  The Powder Peak Ski Resort this year was projected to represent approximately twenty percent of our firm's billings. In a typical year, a year in which the resort isn't battling for expansion permits, it epresents about five percent. The Ver-

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  mont Ski Areas Consortium, a loose affiliation of the state's nineteen ski areas, accounts for about ten percent of our firm's business. That revenue, along with our Powder Peak business, will now disappear.

  Birch, Winston, & Hurley has twelve employees, including its three partners. I doubt we will have nine other employees a month from now.

  Who will be the first person Miranda tells today? Mindy Woolf? Her Aunt Patience? An entire troop of Landaff Brownies? I chose last night not to ask her who she thought she would play with today. I don't want to know. As I tucked Miranda in bed for the night, I told her to tell anyone that she wants everything that she wants, and I said those words, somehow, with a smile on my face.

  I have no plans to tell Reedy myself what my daughter and I saw. I'll let him hear it through the grapevine. Besides, I feel I owe it to my partners, to Duane and Warren, to tell them first. Especially after the damage I have wrought to our practice.

  The sun, still low in the east, warms my hands through the glass windows of my office, and I wander into the hallway to turn on the firm's air conditioning. The low rumble that precedes the first jets of cool air has become for me yet one more sound I will associate always with drought, one more sound thatviscerally, unreasonably, instinctivelynow has the power to frighten me.

  Last night Laura said she was proud of me. I thanked her, but I also corrected her. Ethics and principles really had very little to do with my decision. Make no mistake about it, I told Laura: I do not hope to be a great man or a fine man. I simply do not want to be a terrible father.

  Had I seen the catamounts alone, I wonder in my heart if she or anyone else in the world would ever have known.

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  23

  On a Wednesday evening early in August, exactly fifteen days from the last day that it rained in northern Vermont, Patience sits on the steps of our back porch and asks me to give her away at her wedding next month. She stares out at the yard where Miranda and Laura are playing croquet, twirling her jade pendulum between her thumb and forefinger.

  "I'm flattered," I tell her.

  "Don't be. There aren't many men in my life." "Not a lot of choices, huh?"

  "Few and none."

  Giggling, Miranda sends her mother's red croquet ball between a pair of Colorado spruce we planted the spring before last. The trees, about five feet tall now, look pretty wilted these days. Their branches droop as if covered with invisible snow, and they never did turn their almost transparent blue this summer.

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  "Well, how can I refuse such a polite request?"

  "You can't," she says, not looking at me.

  "Then I will be happy to."

  "Thank you," she says, nodding.

  Laura runs her fingers lightly over a row of needles on one of the young trees, unable to hide her concern.

  "You're welcome. But I have to admit, Patience, for the life of me I don't understand your fixation on tradition. I just don't understand why you feel someonesome manhas to give you away."

  "It's not tradition. It's ritual."

  "Oh. That explains everything."

  Laura taps her ball back into play with one hit. The ball splits the two trees, and rolls to within eight or ten feet of her next wicket. Patience and I both applaud.

  "I never told you this," Patience says, "and I don't know why I'm about to now. I'm probably going soft."

  "Not a chance."

  "I hope not. But I want you to know: I think you did a good thing last month. A lot of people in your shoes would have kept their mouths shut if they saw a couple of catamounts."

  "It didn't do a hell of a lot of good."

  "I disagree. Powder Peak's getting hurt bad in the press these days. They look even worse than usual."

  "They don't care, they're not about to change their plans. They'll begin cutting down trees for the new trails the minute Reedy's appeal is behind them. That mountain will becomeas Goddard Healy would saylogger heaven."

  "Don't they have to hear from the Forest Service?"

  "They did. They got their permit this afternoon."

  "Aren't there any conditions, isn't there something that will slow 'em down at least?"

  I shrug. "I don't know the details, I just know what I hear from people like Roger Noonan, down at the paper. Ask John Bussey. He's their new attorney."

  "Bussey? That little twerp I used to baby-sit?"

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  "The one and the same."

  "What a little shit he was. He used to threaten to tell his parents I beat him if I didn't let him do whatever the hell he wanted. Eight-year-old kid, I'm about fourteen, and he's screaming 'Don't hit me!' the second I remind him it's bedtime and he should turn off the television. What a prick that child was."

  "Is. He still is a prick. But he'll do a good job for the resort."

  While Miranda lines up her next shot, Laura looks at the maple trees beside the barn, so dry this summer tha
t their leaves already are turning, and some have even begun to fall. Unaware that we're watching, she holds her mallet against her side with her elbow, and chews at whatever's left of the nail on her pinky.

  Softball stopped being fun the day I left Goddard and Ian alone at Peak Eats.

  Ian Rawls and his brother, Clark, grew colder than Lake Champlain block ice, and spoke to me solely in the context of the game: when Clark was calling me off a pop-up, or when Ian was coaching third and wanted me to tag up on a fly ball to center. Otherwise, they never even said hi.

  The tension among the three of us was apparent to the rest of the Quarry Men, but there was no one on the team willing to mediate our dispute. As long as Scottie Winston and the Rawls brothers weren't actively punching each other, no one was about to step in and try to patch things up.

  Moreover, it was not as if my teammatesmost of whom were native Vermonters who had lived all of their lives within twenty-five miles of Barre or Montpelierviewed my stand as particularly heroic or noble. As far as Hugo Scutter, one of the engineers involved with the expansion, was concerned, I was jeopardizing his job. His twin aunts told me exactly that. And I could tell that Joel Stebbins, who had been laid off by a Montpelier ski company after six years, suddenly saw in me the

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  sort of self-righteous, smug, and moneyed liberalism that comes from Manhattan, and vacations once or twice a year in his mountains. His hills. His woods. The fact that I had lived in Landaff for close to twenty years, married to one of the local Avery girls, held no weight. I was, abruptly, an outsider.

  My friendship with Reedy McClure became a source of suspicion. Although I had no intention of joining the Copper Project, a point I made clear to both Rawls brothers and the partners in my firm, no one was dissuaded from the opinion that I had suddenly lost my mind. I tried explaining to Ian on two separate occasions that I felt it would be unethical for me to take all of the proprietary knowledge I had gained over my years with Powder Peak, and use it to work for the resort's opponents. That just wasn't going to happen. My decision to tell people I saw catamounts when they asked, to allow my daughter to tell every reporter and writer who called, was not part of some calculated, invidious plan to undermine the resort's expansion. Iteverything from sighting to revelationjust happened.

  Nevertheless, when we played our last game the first day of August, when we lost to a team from Norwich by three runs and were eliminated from state play-off contention, I was glad the season was over. I put my old wooden Hillerich & Bradsby in the hall closet for the winter, not giving a damn if the noxious rays beneath it poisoned the bat for eternity.

  "I just guess we'll have to find a new mountain to ski," Reedy says Thursday afternoon, as we walk together down Montpelier's Main Street. "I've never thought of myself as the type who skis Stowe, but what the hell? People change, right?"

  "Sure do. But don't feel you have to move on my account."

  "Seems to me, they screwed you pretty bad."

  "Not true. They simply fired my law firm. I gave them no choice."

  I loosen my tie, deciding I probably won't return to the

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  office today. It's not quite four o'clock, but without Powder Peak, my days have become very short. If we don't have significant new lobbying business lined up for the next legislative session, we will have to let one of our associates go, as well as one secretary. This too is a ramification of my decision.

  Reedy opens the door to the health food supermarket, and motions for me to go first. Compared to the air outside, the store feels like a refrigerator.

  "We're going to win that appeal next month, Scottie, so I would have to be an idiot to ski at Powder Peak. Ian Rawls would probably have me killed."

  "An accident on a chair lift?"

  "Probably. You know, the safety bar would break, and I'd somehow fall to my death."

  "Yeah, you have to watch out for that stuff."

  "Or some paid assassin on a snowboard would slam into me. Make me a quadriplegic for life."

  I nod my head in agreement. "We used to do a lot of that sort of thing."

  We stroll toward the refrigerator case, stopping before the rows of Tofu Pups, Not Dogs, and Phony Baloney.

  "How do you eat that stuff?)" I ask, waving my hand over the meat substitutes.

  "You get used to it. If I'm willing to spend a good part of my life scrubbing oil off animals so they live, it doesn't make much sense to eat the poor things when I'm done."

  "Oh, God, don't tell me they're now putting penguin meat into hot dogs!"

  He drops an eight-pack of Tofu Pups into his wire basket. "We're barbecuing tonight. Katherine Whiting's coming overPatience and Laura's friend."

  "Ah, the dowsing doctor from Montpelier. Patience sometimes threatens to have her dowse my gene maps. Tell me how I'm going to die."

  Reedy starts toward the aisle marked Fiber. "She's a very fine physician, you know."

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  ''I'm sure she is. Is the barbecue at your house or Patience's?"

  "Patience's. Actually, we're hoping Katherine and her husband will be willing to rent the place."

  "I thought Patience was going to sell it? Bring her dogs and move up to the McClure compound?"

  "We're definitely going to live at my house. We've decided that. But Patience doesn't want to sell her home right now."

  I smile at him. "I gather that would represent just too much commitment?"

  "It has nothing to do with commitment. It has to do with real estate values. She doesn't want to sell until the market bounces back."

  In the midst of the natural bran cereals, special bran beverages, and bags and bags of all-natural carob and bran cookies, are two kinds of Bran Bunsone for meat substitute hot dogs, and one for meat substitute hamburgers. Reedy reaches for one of the packages, and drops the buns in his basket.

  "I got a phone call today from Rosamond Donahue at the Sentinel," he says. "Seems your buddies at the resort have hired some naturalists from Colorado to see if there really are catamounts up on Mount Republic. Did you know that?"

  Without looking at Reedy, I shake my head no. I try to feign disinterest, but the idea that I'm now getting my news about Powder Peak from Reedy McClure galls me. Suddenly, I really have become an outsider: I am outside of Powder Peak, I am outside of the ski industry, I amfor all I knownow outside of whatever development decisions are made both by state officials and Vermont's business community.

  "Yeah," Reedy continues, "they're bringing in a couple of experts on mountain lions. Two guys. They're going to spend some time on the mountain, and see if there's any evidence at all of the animals."

  We walk toward the store's rows of organic vegetables, most of which were probably trucked in from the south. "Why did the paper call you?"

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  "The appeal. They wanted to know what the Copper Project thought of all this."

  "And? What did the Copper Project decide?"

  "I told Rosamond that I thought if Powder Peak really gave a damn about the mountain and the area, they wouldn't plan on draining what's left of the Chittenden River."