The Black Brook

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by Tom Drury


  The steamer was hissing and spitting when he went up to the living room, and he shut it down. Then he thought he heard something. Now, his hearing had never been good. At the trial of Carlo Record and the hotel thief Eddie Leblanc, he had had to cup his hand behind his ear to hear the soft-spoken judge, Clementine Darrigan. As a child he bad been taken to a radical ear, nose, and throat doctor in Newport. This man, who on at least one occasion had worn thin black socks with a hole over the bone of one ankle, would place a rubber tube in one of Paul’s nostrils, give him a drink of water from a pleated white paper cup, and direct him not to swallow the water but to hold it in his mouth while rapidly repeating the consonant k. Then the doctor would squeeze an air bulb connected to the rubber tube, blasting Paul’s young brain right out of his head — that’s what it felt like anyway. It all had to do with his eustachian tubes. Today Paul wondered whether this treatment had done more harm than good. One of the manifestations of his hearing loss was an inability to tell where sounds came from or from how far away. This was especially true at night, due to the lack of visual clues.

  “What’s that?” he used to ask Mary “Is there a moth in the room?”

  And she would roll onto her back and say, in a midnight murmur, “It’s only a truck, only a truck on the highway.”

  The noise he heard now was some sort of whistle that would go off and on. At first he thought it must be the steamer, that the steamer might be “dieseling” or winding down into silence. But it wasn’t that — the sound varied in pitch, almost like singing. He checked the radio. Then he thought of the attic, where he’d never been. You entered the attic by way of a fold-down ladder, nested between ceiling joists. A cotton rope hung from the ladder, with a wooden knob on the end, and Paul pulled on the rope. Springs squealed and the attic smell drifted down: canvas, linen, and tar paper.

  He climbed the ladder carrying the police flashlight and stood in the opening, shining the beam all around. Light fell on books and clothes and cardboard boxes and eccentric wooden chairs. Paul found a stamp album with pages labeled, in careful handwriting, Animals, Birds, Trains and Tramways; but whoever had kept the album had only managed to affix two or three stamps to each labeled page, and after seven pages even the writing stopped, giving the blank brittle pages the mocking poignance of all intended hobbies that come to nothing

  The flashlight’s beam crossed the attic and lit up a shrouded figure near the small window by the chimney. Paul made his way through boxes and clothes. Whatever it was stood beneath a faded tarp edged with brass grommets. Paul gathered the heavy canvas and pulled it slowly away, revealing a statue of a woman. She had a long, delicate nose, blank eyes as in statues of Homer, and hair swept back from her face in carved waves. She knelt holding a candle in gloved hands. Even the flame had been carefully carved, with an inner and outer fire. Bare wooden toes emerged from the braided hem of a long and deeply folded gown. Her shoulders were unnaturally narrow, and the gown had a hood or cowl that began in a V at the base of her throat and rested on her back. Her right hand, set on her raised knee, supported the base of the candle, and her left hand held the upper part near the flame.

  He touched her long fingers, the knuckles and the seams on the back of her glove. The wood was cool and smooth. He imagined the precise incisions, the setting of the chisel, the patient tapping of the hammer. Near the statue a soft felt hat hung from a hook on a rack of wool coats, and he placed the hat on the thick twisting strands of her hair, but this seemed the wrong thing to do, so he put the hat on his own head and looked at her blank eyes for a long time before going downstairs.

  14

  The story of the motorcyclist’s death made the Sun’s front page because of the quotes and observations Paul had gathered, and he was happy to see that he had earned second billing in a double byline with Carolyn Wheat. The next story he wrote concerned the cost of houses in Ashland and took the headline AMERICAN DREAM OVER, which seemed to overstate the problem by quite a bit, but Paul already understood the hit-and-miss nature of writing headlines, which sometimes dissolved into jargon (PANEL SLATED TO MULL WOES), or encouraged mayhem in the guise of warning against it (VIOLENCE FEARED AS MARTIAL ­ARTISTS CONVENE), or adopted the loudmouth tactics of those being written about (MAYOR CALLS FOE BIG LIAR). Even the story about the motorcyclist had carried a misleading headline — CYCLIST DEAD IN LAKE TRAGEDY — which made it seem, first, that the lake had been a factor in the accident, and second, that the lake was named Tragedy.

  Nonetheless, Paul had witnessed a fatality, and it gave him the unearned reputation of someone news happens for.

  “Come over to my apartment,” said Jean Jones, the city editor.

  She lived in the building by the river, where he had seen the woman twisting water out of a cloth. Jean and Paul sat on paisley pillows in the front hall and drank iced tea and smoked marijuana from a pipe.

  “At bottom it’s another sad story, but it illuminates something,” said Jean. She tipped her head back and exhaled. “There are two people I know of who have come into this organization and scored a big fatality right away. You’re one, and the other is me. To see the broken body is one thing, and to look at it quite another.”

  Paul glanced into the apartment. Worn olive velvet covered a davenport and two chairs. “It wasn’t anything intentional. I happened to get behind the bus. I don’t want to make it look like something it wasn’t.”

  She gave him a flat look that, with her dark eyes and full lower lip, created an impression of wistful superiority; she did not want to be wiser than he was, but there it was, a fact that she could do nothing about.

  “There are no coincidences,” she said. “If you hadn’t come along, that story would have ended up being two inches back by the funnies. How stories are played is not an exact science. One time I did a series on the usury rate because I liked the sound of the word ‘usury.’ It turned out to be very boring, but by then it was too late.”

  “Tell me about your big fatality,” he said.

  “I was walking by a house one Friday night when all these kids came running out,” said Jean Jones. “I didn’t hear the shot. People said I must have heard the shot, but it was not so. A man at a party in the house had taken his life. ‘Sometimes I cheat myself’ were his words, then boom. Everyone ran. They said the gun sounded like a small firecracker.”

  “Why did he do it?” said Paul.

  “Maybe it was a party joke gone awry. That’s what I wrote in the story” she said, “a party joke gone awry. People who didn’t like the piece said, ‘What’s the point of this?’ But others knew I was on to something.”

  “What’s the rest of the apartment like?”

  Jean Jones took a pair of surgical scissors and scratched the burned grass from the bowl of the pipe into an ashtray. “We’ll see that another time,” she said. “It’s a sweet little apartment. People say, ‘Don’t you want to go to Boston? Don’t you want to go to New York?’ I say, ‘Why would I want to do something like that?’ I’ve lived all my life here. I know the names of the roads. Chopmist ends in a T-intersection with Dark Entry. Dark Entry goes over Red Mountain and splits into Knife Shop and Hairbow. What would I have in Manhattan that I don’t have here?”

  “Better plays,” said Paul.

  “True,” said Jean Jones.

  “Better food.”

  She refilled the pipe and passed it to Paul. “Say, that reminds me. The Lipizzan stallions are coming to town. Would you care to review them?”

  The marijuana had got into his mind, and he raised his arms, which felt big as timbers. “How can I,” he said, “when I don’t even know what they look like?”

  “Where do you think this dope comes from?” she said.

  “The past,” said Paul.

  “Just outside of Ashland.”

  The stallions performed one night in October at the hockey rink, and Paul
got to sit in the penalty box by showing his press pass. White horses with great round bellies and deep necks floated the length of the rink accompanied by waltz music from Vienna. The horses walked on their hind legs, kicked, exhaled clouds of steam, formed parallel lines that drifted closer and then passed through one another like the wandering threads of a dream. The riders wore brown coats and tight white pants and high black boots. An announcer explained that the horses’ maneuvers were derived from military enterprises.

  Paul drove back to the newspaper after the show and sat down to write his review. He had his notebook, he had a cup of coffee, he had a plastic pack of nearly fluorescent orange crackers with peanut butter. He sat before a black screen at a small metal desk. He had not yet been given his own desk, and he wondered why not. Perhaps they were trying to tell him something by withholding a desk. The time passed but he could think of no words to start with to describe the horses. He decided to look at the national news. With a few clicks of the keys he summoned to his screen the New York Times wire service. There was conflict in the Balkans, idiotic bickering in Washington, something amusing in Tucson, and then the service signed off with the words GOODNIGHT ALL POINTS. Chris Bait came over. He had hairy wrists beneath frayed cuffs and was said to have wives and children in two different towns. “Time’s up,” he said. “What do you have on this Lipizzan thing?”

  “Nothing,” said Paul.

  “We’ll fill the hole with wire,” said the editor. “I’m not making the pressmen mad over a team of horses that come to town every year.”

  The writers and editors of the Sun regarded deadlines as almost a natural force, fixed and mysterious, and they feared the pressmen, as if proximity to rolling metal had made them severe and magical; as if all a pressman had to do was snap his fingers and a reporter or copyeditor would turn to ink and run down a drain. Back-shop people were unionized, whereas the reporters never would be. There had been discussion of an editorial union several years back, and management had sat down with influential members of the staff and fired them.

  Pete Lonborg’s dislike of unions was philosophical and rigid. He saw America as a nation of independent wheeler-dealers, and the idea that someone would need help or contrive to help anyone else just didn’t register with him. When churches were burned, when floods wiped out farms — whenever some widely publicized event made people want to make contributions — he would write editorials calling for caution. How, he would write, did helping people prepare them to make their own way? Poorly, at best. He liked the phrase “at best.” That and “patently absurd” were said to be his favorites. Something else he liked was predicting that a given phenomenon would end in chaos. (When he spoke this sentiment aloud, as opposed to writing it into an editorial, everyone worked hard to keep from laughing, for Pete had managed to live fifty or sixty years without anyone ever explaining to him that the ch in “chaos” was not pronounced like the ch in “chair.”) He hated the president, despised the senators, loathed the congressmen, and sneered at the state representatives, with some exceptions.

  On the night that Paul saw the Lipizzan stallions but failed to think of a word to write about them, Pete Lonborg was working late in his office, standing over a large scale model of Ashland. He called Paul in as Paul was about to punch his time card and leave the building. The model was very detailed. String Lake twisted like an actual string dropped into the landscape, and a windmill stood on top of Red Mountain. The model had cardboard buildings, plaster sidewalks, and plastic trees.

  Pete, who was wearing a thalo-green lab coat, dragged strips of newsprint through a bowl of white batter and laid them one on another to build the ridge between Ashland and Damascus.

  “This will go in the lobby when I finish it,” said Pete.

  “You should get a train to run through it,” said Paul.

  “It’s not a toy,” said Pete. He looked at Paul sternly — the creases beside his mouth deepened, and a shade seemed to fall over his eyes — and wiped his hands on a towel. “Listen, you did a good job with the motorcycle crash. I have to admit I liked the racquet in the saddlebag. It’s the sort of offhand detail that stays in the memory. It’s like when my sister drowned. It’s now been many years. Her name was Linda, and she was a teacher at the Adelphic School. She’d gone for a swim, and I was a young reporter. ‘It’s something to do with Linda, Pete,’ they told me. ‘Something to do with Linda.’ Well, I knew it couldn’t be good. It’s never good news when they preface their remarks like that. I remember I was wearing corduroy, and now I can never see green corduroy without thinking of her. She was a vibrant and loving person, although, to be sure, we had our differences. All her students came to the funeral. What a sight those students made, crowding the street outside the church. It was after she died that I started gathering the capital to buy this newspaper. She had wanted to sing, and she taught science instead, so I vowed I would do what I wanted.”

  Paul spun the little blades of the windmill. “Where did she live?”

  Pete took from his shirt pocket what appeared to be a pen but turned out to be a pointing device that cast a blue dot of light some distance. The light moved across the model of Ashland and stopped on the shore of the lake, opposite Paraffin Park.

  “I miss her,” he said.

  “The Hanover house is over there.”

  “Right next door. And I’ve debated with myself whether to put it in the model. My general rule is no private residences, because where do you stop with that? But it’s so large that I may make an exception. Are you all right?”

  “I drew a total blank on a story tonight.”

  Pete turned off the blue light by pressing it to the flat of his hand. “You’ll get ’em tomorrow, champ.”

  Loom and Paul sat at a card table in the cupola, shuffling cards printed with obscure questions. The butler, Mr. Freel, brought up a bottle of Lagavulin with two glasses on a tray, then bid them good night and retreated down the stairs. The kerosene lantern burned on the wooden table and the lights of Ashland shone from across the lake.

  “There’s no mystery,” said Loom. “Women die. The ceme­teries are full of women, as well as men. Who put you up to asking?”

  “No one,” said Paul.

  “It was Lonborg, wasn’t it?” said Loom. “I know it was. Let me tell you something about Peter Lonborg. Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time he came to me, dead drunk in the dead of the night, and asked me to serve on the board of his newspaper. He begged me, if you want to know. Got down on his knees and followed me around the library like a little short man. And I said, ‘Let me tell you a secret, Pete. There are but two or three people in this town who could do that job. And Pete,’ I said, ‘none of us would take it.’”

  “She was his sister,” said Paul.

  “Who?”

  “I’m saying that the woman who lived in my house was Pete’s sister.”

  “And she drowned,” said Loom. “She was his sister and by drowning became his meal ticket. And you see this is why I hate this topic. Just talking about it makes me speak meanly. Answer a question. ‘At the funeral of Governor Jonathan Belcher of Massachusetts, in 1757, his widow gave away one thousand pairs of . . .”

  “Gloves,” guessed Paul.

  “Gloves is correct,” said Loom. “Now you ask.”

  “I go again, since I got the answer,” said Paul.

  “Oh, of course you do,” said Loom. “On Sunday, the twenty-second of January, 1905, seventy workers died when troops fired on a procession led by Father Gapon in St. Petersburg, Russia. This bloody day would come to be known as . . .’”

  “Bloody Sunday,” said Paul.

  “You get all the easy ones.”

  “Maybe you’re reading the wrong side.”

  “They tend to be either impossible or very easy. Oh — I know what I was going to ask you. What did you do, exactly, when y
ou broke the law? I never heard the whole story.”

  “It’s pretty boring,” said Paul.

  “Sketch the highlights.”

  “I want to hear about Pete’s sister.”

  “I want to hear the crimes.”

  Paul shuffled the question cards. “Using a middleman in Geneva, I made it look as if a lot of money had been earned by a silk-screening company in Rhode Island.”

  “What was in it for the Geneva people?” said Loom.

  “Six percent. Same as realtors.”

  “I’ve never understood money laundering.”

  “If you can’t show an income trail, the IRS plays knick-knack on your head,” said Paul.

  “And that’s all you did?” said Loom. “That’s not very much. I thought there was something about forged paintings.”

  “The media loved the painting angle, but all those charges were dropped. But the paintings were fun, I’ll say that. They started out as something to do on the weekend. We’d add the signature ‘Fitz Hugh Lane’ to old paintings of the shore. We could have done that all the livelong day. Then it got complicated, because we began forging not only signatures but whole paintings.”

  “Students.”

  “I’ll say what I said then,” said Paul. “There were three painters. Two were graduates. One had an MFA.”

  “From the Rhode Island School of Design.”

  “Two were graduates, one had an MFA.”

  “Keep your secrets, I don’t blame you.”

  “I never have gone beyond that. That was the issue once they charged me. The investigators wanted to know who made the pictures and who made the money, and I wouldn’t tell. Although finally I told who made the money.”

 

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