The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  Since the town had changed so much in recent years, with so many new people moving in, it was difficult for Pete to know everyone by name, which meant service wasn’t what it once was. But towns don’t remain the same, they go forward, like it or not; there had even been talk about building a town high school, out near Wright’s old farm, for there would soon be too many students to send to the Hamilton school district. It wasn’t the way it used to be, that much was certain, back when a person would meet the same people at the Millstone on a Saturday night as he’d see at St. Agatha’s on Sunday morning, knowing full well what there was to confess and what there was to be thankful for.

  Lately, Pete had been puzzling over the issue of confidentiality, and it was this topic he was contemplating when Abe came in for lunch on the Saturday after Christmas. The few regular customers—Lois Jeremy and her cronies from the garden club, and Sam Arthur, a member of the town council for ten years running-all cried out a greeting to Abe.

  “Happy holidays,” he called back. “Don’t forget to vote yes on the traffic light by the library. You’ll save a life.”

  Anyone looking closely would be able to tell that Abe hadn’t been sleeping well. Over this holiday break, he’d gone so far as to phone half a dozen hotels in Maine, like a common fool, searching for Betsy. At one hotel, a party named Herman had been registered, and although it turned out to be a couple from Maryland, Abe had been distressed ever since. Sean Byers, on the other hand, looked just fine. He was whistling as he filled Abe’s order, which, like everyone else in town, he now knew by heart—turkey on rye, mustard, no mayo.

  “What are you so happy about?” Abe asked Sean, who was practically radiating good cheer. It didn’t take long for Abe to figure it out, for when Carlin Leander came into the pharmacy Sean lit up like the Christmas tree outside town hall.

  Carlin, on the other hand, was cold and bedraggled; she had just been at the pool and the ends of her hair were a faint, watery green.

  “You went swimming without me?” Sean said when she approached the counter.

  “I’ll go again,” Carlin assured him.

  When Sean went to get Sam Arthur’s bowl of chowder, Carlin sat beside Abe. It was because of a call from Carlin that Abe was here today, and although she hadn’t said what the reason was, Abe grinned as he nodded toward Sean. Love was often the explanation behind most emergencies.

  “Who would have guessed.”

  “It’s not what you think. We just go swimming. I know it would never work out—you don’t have to tell me not to get my hopes up. I’m not that stupid.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.” Abe pushed his plate away and finished his coffee. “I was going to say good luck.”

  “I don’t believe in luck.” Carlin checked out the vinyl-covered menu. For the first time in days the idea of food didn’t make her queasy. She was actually considering a mint chocolate chip ice cream soda. Beneath Gus’s old coat, she was wearing jeans and a ratty black sweater, but as far as Sean was concerned, she could not have looked more beautiful. He stared at her while he fixed a raspberry lime rickey for Sam Arthur, who was there to pick up his insulin and would have been better served had he ordered a sugar-free cola.

  “What’s the other guy in your life going to think if you get involved with Sean Byers?” Abe asked.

  “Harry?” Carlin had refused to think past vacation. Every night when she met Sean at the pool, it seemed as if they would have the school to themselves forever. Some other girl might have been frightened of staying on the deserted campus, but not Carlin. She liked the way her footsteps echoed, she liked the silence that greeted her in the hallways and on the stairs. All of the windows at St. Anne’s were coated with blue ice and when the wind blew, icicles were shaken down from the roof with a sound that brought to mind broken bones, but Carlin didn’t care. She was happy, but happiness can often be figured in minutes. First there were seven days before school began anew, then six, then five, then Carlin stopped counting.

  “I can handle Harry,” she said to Abe now.

  “No,” Abe said. “I meant the other guy. Gus.”

  Lois Jeremy stopped by on her way to pay her check; she wagged her finger at Abe. “You weren’t posted outside town hall when we had our last meeting.” She treated Abe, along with all the members of the Haddan police force, as though they were her own personal employees, but at least she was polite to the hired help.

  “No, ma’am. But I’m hoping to be there next time.”

  “I can’t believe her.” Carlin was livid. “She treated you like a servant.”

  “That’s because I’m at their service.” Abe saluted as Mrs. Jeremy and Charlotte Evans left, and the two women chuckled as they waved good-bye.

  Carlin shook her head, amazed. “You’ve lived here so long you don’t notice when someone’s a snob.”

  “I notice, but if you care about what other people think, you’re a goner. That’s the lesson you learn in Haddan.” Abe reached for his coat. “Thanks for calling me down here. I’m assuming you’re paying my tab, especially now that you have this relationship with Sean. He’ll probably give you a discount.”

  “I called you because I found something.” Carlin opened the black coat to reveal an inside breast pocket, one she hadn’t known existed before that morning. She took out a plastic bag of white powder.

  Once again, Abe felt that his drowned boy wasn’t at all like the Haddan student his grandfather had pulled from the river. This one kept on drowning, and any man foolish enough to get too close might be pulled down along with him.

  “I wasn’t going to show it to you, but then I realized Gus can’t get into trouble. I don’t even think it’s his because I would have known if he was involved with this sort of drugs.”

  But Abe wasn’t so sure. It was astounding how thoroughly someone you cared for could deceive you and just how wrong you could be. Back when Abe was a boy, he was the one who had liked gunplay a little too well. Whenever Wright had taken them to Mullstein’s field for target practice, Frank sat on a bale of hay with his hands over his ears while Abe fired away; he’d shoot anything, even Wright’s big, old twelve-gauge, the one they stole, a gun so powerful that after he pulled the trigger, Abe was often left flat on his back looking up at the clouds in the sky.

  Abe opened the bag, but as he was about to test for the bitter edge of cocaine, Pete Byers stopped him.

  “I wouldn’t eat that stuff, son,” Pete said. “It will burn right through your trachea.”

  Abe thought of all the things the powder might be: baking powder, arsenic, chalk dust, angel dust, cake mix, heroin. Sam Arthur was getting ready to leave, chatting with Sean about the lack of team spirit on the Celtics, mourning the days when Larry Bird could always be depended upon to pull a win out of a hat. The sky had been threatening snow all morning, but only a few flakes fell, just enough to cover the icy roads and make driving treacherous.

  “If you know what this is, Pete, I need for you to tell me,” Abe said.

  People had a right to their own business, didn’t they? Or so Pete had always believed. Take the case of Abe’s own grandfather, who stopped taking his medications at the end of his life, simply refusing to come into town to pick up what the doctor ordered. One night Pete drove out to the farm; he knocked on the door with the nitroglycerin tablets that had been sitting on the counter in the pharmacy for days, but Wright hadn’t invited Pete in with his usual hospitality. He’d merely looked through the screen door and said, I’ve got a right to do this, and Pete found he had to agree. Once a man began drawing the line, judging right and wrong, he’d need the stamina of an angel on earth, dispensing the sort of wisdom Pete Byers knew he didn’t possess.

  It had been difficult all these years, never divulging a confidence, lying beside Eileen in bed with a headful of information he could never discuss. When they went to the inn for the New Year’s dance at the end of the week, he’d know which waitresses were using birth control pills, he’d be a
ware of how Doreen Becker had tried nearly everything for that rash she had, just as he knew that Mrs. Jeremy’s son, AJ, who always went to the inn to pick up platters of cheese and shrimp for his mother’s yearly party, had begun to take Antabuse in yet another attempt to curb his drinking.

  All this knowledge had turned Pete into a man who didn’t comment on much of anything. Frankly, if he heard that aliens had landed in Haddan and were eating the cabbages out of the fields and getting ready for battle, he would simply have told his customers they had better stay at home, doors locked, and take care to spend as much time as they could with those they loved best. All Pete knew was that people deserved privacy; they had a right to meet death as they saw fit and they had a right to live their lives that way, too. He had never discussed a customer or a friend’s personal life, at least not until now. He pulled up a chair and sat down; he had a right to be tired. He’d been standing for the best part of forty-five years, and he’d been keeping quiet that long, as well. He sighed and shined his glasses on the white apron he wore. Sometimes a man did the wrong thing for the right reasons, a decision often made on the spot, much like diving into a cold pond on a broiling August day.

  “Gus used to come in here every afternoon. He told me the boys he lived with were making his life miserable. One time I suggested some medication, because he couldn’t sleep. The worst thing was some kind of initiation he had to go through to be part of the house where he lived. He said they gave him a task they thought no one could complete. They wanted him to turn white roses red.”

  “That was the initiation?” Abe was confused. “No drinking until he dropped? No blindfolds and nights of terror?”

  “They chose an impossible task,” Carlin said. “That way he would fail and they could be rid of him.”

  “But it wasn’t impossible.” Pete held up the packet of powder. “Aniline crystals. It’s an old trick. You sprinkle them on white roses, turn around for a minute, use a mister to add some water, and there you have it. The impossible’s done.”

  Later, as Carlin walked back to school, she stopped at the Lucky Day flower shop. The bell over the door rang as she entered. All the while Ettie Nelson, who lived half a block down from Abe on Station Avenue, waited on her, Carlin thought about the many forms cruelty could take. She had a list too long to remember by the time she had chosen half a dozen white roses, gorgeous, pale blooms, the stalks of which were crisscrossed by black thorns. An expensive choice for a student, which was why Ettie had asked if the bouquet signified a special occasion.

  “Oh, no,” Carlin told her. “Just a gift for a friend.”

  Carlin paid and went outside to find that the sky seemed to be falling. The snow was coming down hard; the sky was misty and gray, with endless banks of dense clouds. The roses Carlin had chosen were as white as the drifts that were already piling up on the street corners, but so fragrant that people all over town, even those who fervently hoped for the return of good weather as they shoveled out doorways and cars, stopped what they were doing in order to watch her pass by, a beautiful girl in tears who carried roses through the snow.

  * * *

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE NEW YEAR, WHEN midnight was near, the van Harry had rented pulled into the parking lot at Chalk House. Carlin might not have been aware of anything, for both the engine and the lights were cut before the van glided into the icy lot, but her sleep was disrupted when Amy turned the doorknob with a click and a clatter, then stole into their room with what she surely believed was caution. Pie had returned earlier in the day, but she was such a deep sleeper she would never have noticed that Amy carried the scent of deception with her, or that as she stripped off her clothes and hurried to bed it was possible to see love bites on her shoulders and throat.

  “Have fun?” Carlin called, in a hoarse, chilly whisper.

  She could see Amy startle, then pull the blanket up to her neck. “Sure. Tons.”

  “I didn’t know you could ski. And I thought you hated cold weather.”

  Carlin had sat up, leaning against the headboard for a better look. Amy’s dark eyes shone, wide awake and anxious. She forced a loud yawn, as though she couldn’t keep from falling asleep. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  Amy turned her face to the wall, assuming Carlin couldn’t perceive betrayal from the back, but such things are infinitely easy to read. Carlin supposed she should be grateful to Amy for making it easier to break up with Harry, but as it turned out she was out of sorts in the morning, the way anyone duped into giving her love away might have been. Harry, on the other hand, acted as if nothing between them had changed. When they met crossing the quad, he grabbed Carlin and hugged her, not noticing her hesitancy.

  “You should have come with us.” Harry’s breath billowed out in the cold. He seemed revitalized and more sure of himself than ever. “The snow was great. We had a blast.”

  Perhaps Harry planned to have them both. It wouldn’t be difficult to go behind Carlin’s back and assure Amy he was trying his best to end it with Carlin, then drag their breakup out for months. He could tell Amy he was a gentleman, and as such, never did like to break anyone’s heart unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Carlin told him as she ducked his embrace. “Come to my room later. You’ll be surprised.”

  She left him there, curious and more interested than he was in most things. That’s what had intrigued him in the first place, wasn’t it? How different she was from the other girls. How difficult to second-guess. He’d have to do some sweet-talking to explain to Amy why he was seeing Carlin, but Carlin had faith that he’d manage to spin a believable tale. A good liar always found excuses, and it seemed clear that for Harry such things came far easier than the truth.

  He arrived before supper, throwing himself onto Amy’s bed, where, unbeknownst to Carlin, he’d spent quite a lot of time, making sure to keep track of the hours Carlin spent at swim practice while he seduced her roommate, not that the assignment had been a chore. Harry fancied the idea of having had two girls in the same bed and he pulled Carlin toward him. Again, she drew away.

  “Oh, no. I told you, I’ve got something to show you.”

  Harry groaned. “This better be good,” he warned.

  He hadn’t even noticed the white roses, there on the bureau in a vase borrowed from Miss Davis. He leaned up on his elbows when he spied the flowers.

  “Who sent those?”

  By now, the roses were limp and imperfect, with the edges of the leaves turning brown; still, in Miss Davis’s lovely cut-glass vase the bouquet was impressive, the gift of a rival perhaps.

  “I bought them for myself. But now I’ve changed my mind. You know how it is when you decide you want something new.” She took the black coat from a hook in the closet and slipped it on. “I realize I want red roses.”

  There was a flicker of distrust behind Harry’s eyes. He uncoiled himself now, the better to watch Carlin’s display. He didn’t like being tricked, still he’d been well brought up and the smile he bestowed on Carlin was not without appeal.

  “If you want red roses, I’ll get them for you.”

  “Get them for Amy,” Carlin suggested.

  Harry ran a hand through his hair. “Look, if this is about Amy, I admit it, I made a mistake. I figured she was your friend, I didn’t expect anything to happen, but she was all over me, and I didn’t say no. If you had gone to Vermont, none of it would have happened. Amy is nothing to me,” Harry assured her. “Come on over here and let’s forget all about her.”

  “What about the roses?” Carlin kept her distance. She had been spending so much time in the water that the white moons of her cuticles had turned faintly blue; her complexion was so pale she looked as though she’d never seen sunlight. She turned her back and took the packet of aniline from the inner coat pocket. There was a lump in her throat, but she forced herself to face Harry. There were only enough crystals to cover one flower, but even before she could add water, as P
ete Byers had instructed, the single rose began to turn color, one vivid bloom, scarlet amongst the rest.

  Harry applauded, slowly. His smile had broadened, although Carlin knew it was not an expression that necessarily revealed what he felt inside.

  “Congratulations,” Harry said, impressed. “Who would have thought a little bitch like you would have so many tricks up her sleeve?”

  Harry had left Amy’s bed and was already pulling on his jacket. He’d always known when it was time to leave and when he’d gotten as much as he could out of a situation.

  “I learned the trick from Gus,” Carlin said. “But of course, you’ve seen it before.”

  Harry came close enough for Carlin to feel him, his body heat, his warm breath. “If you’re implying I had something to do with what happened to Gus, you’re wrong. I wouldn’t have wasted my time on him. I just don’t think it was that great a loss, and you obviously do, and that’s the difference between us.”

  When he’d gone, Carlin took the roses, wrapped them in newspaper, and threw them in the trash. She felt disgusted with herself for having been with Harry, as though she’d been contaminated somehow. She went up to the bathroom and locked the door, then sat on the rim of the tub, letting the hot water run until the room was steamy. She felt filthy and stupid; all those hours she’d wasted with Harry, time that would have been much better spent with Gus. She couldn’t bear it, truly she couldn’t, and that was why she reached for one of the razors kept on the bathroom shelf. But how many times would she have to cut herself to feel better? Would twelve strikes be enough, would fourteen, or a hundred? Would she only be happy when the bathroom tiles ran red with blood?

  The razor should have been cold in her hands, but it was burning, leaving little hot marks in her skin. She thought about Annie Howe’s roses and how hopeless it was to make a strike against yourself. In the end, she did the next best thing. She chopped off her hair without even bothering to look in the mirror, hacking away until the sink was filled with pale hair and the razor was dull. This act was meant to be a punishment, she’d thought she’d be ugly without her hair, to match the way she felt inside, but instead she felt astonishingly light. That night, she climbed out to her window ledge, and as she perched there, she imagined she might be able to fly. One step off the rooftop, one foot past the gutter, that’s all she need do to take off with the north wind that blew down from New Hampshire and Maine, bringing with it the scent of pine trees and new snow.