So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  “Old guy has to crawl on his belly whole way home,” Becky was saying. “Drags his butt into bed. Next morning he’s hardly awake when the phone rings. Wife calling. Starts yelling at him for going drinking and he says, ‘How do you know?’ And she tells him, ‘Bartender called. Said you left your wheelchair down there again.’”

  Kellen and Eric both gave it more of a laugh than it deserved and Josiah stood in silence. Waited until they’d stopped laughing before he said, “I got a joke.”

  Nobody reacted. Not even Becky. Eric didn’t like the guy’s tone at all, and he twisted his bar stool just a touch so he was facing him, then cleared his feet from the rail.

  “Bunch of good ol’ boys are down at their bar, gettin’ lit up,” Josiah said. “Big-ass bear comes into the parking lot, looking for food. Knocks the door open, goes inside. Shit’s in the fan then, old boys running around, bear growling and knocking tables and chairs and shit over. Bear wrecks the place, then breaks the door down and goes away.”

  He paused for a long, dramatic drink of his beer.

  “The drunk boys stand up, dust themselves off, and one says to his buddy, ‘Damn. Put a nigger in a fur coat and he acts like he owns the place.’”

  Eric got to his feet and Becky said, “Shut your fool mouth, Josiah,” as Josiah smiled, looking at Kellen.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Becky said. “Now.”

  Josiah flicked his dark eyes up to Eric, just a cursory glance, and then back down at Kellen.

  “What? Don’t like my joke?”

  Eric moved another step away from his stool, sure now that a fight was coming. Kellen reached out, though, put up a warning hand.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “We’re all telling jokes, right? Just having some fun.”

  The look that crossed Josiah’s face was disgusted and disappointed. He snorted.

  “Oh, you like that joke? Well, I got a few more like it. Might enjoy them, too.”

  “Let me tell one first,” Kellen said.

  Josiah waited, feet spread, hands at belt level.

  “You hear the one about the redneck with a hard-on who ran into a wall?” Kellen said. Paused one beat, then finished: “He broke his nose.”

  Josiah threw the first punch, but Eric was already coming at him, knocked him off balance so that the blow missed Kellen’s head. Eric slammed him into the bar and then leaned back just enough to throw the uppercut he wanted to put into the son of a bitch’s jaw. He didn’t get it there, though. Caught a knee directly in his groin first and then his lungs turned to vacuums as bright, shining agony radiated through his abdomen and filled his chest. He took a stumbling step back and managed to get his head down to avoid Josiah’s fist and catch the bottom of his forearm instead. The blow landed flush on his nose, which promptly opened up and leaked blood over his lips and onto his chin as Josiah just missed with another punch, his fist sliding across Eric’s face, a streak of his blood showing bright on Josiah’s hand now. All this happening as Becky shouted at them from behind the bar and Kellen Cage slipped off his stool without a word.

  Josiah seemed to have lost interest in Eric, turned from him back to Kellen with a wide grin on his face and said, “Come on, boy.”

  Kellen hit him. A flicking left that looked more like a snakebite than a punch, and Josiah’s head snapped back as Kellen easily deflected the return punch and then hit him again, this time in the stomach.

  Josiah’s knees sagged as he stumbled backward, but he took it better than most could have and was coming back for more as Kellen waited on him quietly and Eric straightened with an effort and Becky chambered a round into a shotgun with a ratcheting sound as loud as a bell choir.

  Everybody stopped. For the first time Eric was aware that two men had risen from a booth and were advancing—toward Josiah. Now they stopped short, too.

  “You want to wait on the police,” Becky said, her voice soft and steady as she braced the Remington twelve-gauge on the bar, “that’s fine by me. Otherwise, you better get the hell out of here, Josiah.”

  He gave her a sneer and then turned to the rest of the room, saw no support there. Looked back at Kellen and said, “We’ll finish this’n later.”

  “If you do,” said one of the men from the booth, “he’ll have you swallowing your teeth, Josiah. Now listen to the lady and get your sorry ass out the door.”

  Josiah shoved past Eric, holding the stare with Kellen for a moment before turning to the door. He kicked it open with the heel of his boot and then stepped outside as the door banged off the wall and shuddered slowly back and Eric’s blood dripped onto the floor.

  12

  BACK IN THE PORSCHE, after getting Eric’s nose to stop bleeding and then drinking one more beer to assure Becky that they were at peace with the bar, Kellen turned to him.

  “Well, I’m sorry that happened, because that idiot is in no way representative of my experience in this town.”

  “Shouldn’t have dragged you out to a place like that.”

  “No, man, that’s what I’m saying—it wasn’t the place. I’ve been in there before. In fact, I’ve been in this town a lot, and that’s the first time I’ve ever had anything like that pulled. Which was, to be honest, against my expectation.”

  “Yeah?”

  Kellen nodded as he started the engine. “Some racist history to this state, really. First hotel down here was built by a guy named William Bowles, who was tried for treason because he was involved with something called the Knights of the Golden Circle, which was pro-Confederacy and a forerunner to the KKK. He was a real good guy—indicted for grave robbery, of all things. Wasn’t all him, though. Back when the area was really booming, blacks weren’t allowed to stay in these hotels. Joe Louis wasn’t allowed to stay in these hotels. All the local tourism stuff uses his name today, brags on him being a frequent visitor, but the reality is, he always stayed at the Waddy.”

  They pulled out of the parking lot, Kellen driving with one wrist hooked over the wheel.

  “So when I came down here, wanting to write the black history of the area, I maybe had a sour taste in my mouth from what I knew of the past. As long as I’ve been down here, though, people have been nothing but friendly—with the one exception being our buddy back there, Mr. Bradford. He would be the last of my Campbell’s line. I hope you’re right and you’re looking for a different guy. Because Josiah isn’t going to be a help to you.”

  “I’d say not,” Eric agreed. “But you’ve got to figure my guy is related to him.”

  “I know it. And that’s why I’ll be interested to see what Edgar Hastings has to say. He’s the only person I’ve found in town who has any clear memories of Campbell. But he’s also something of a foster father to Josiah, so best not to mention what happened tonight, I guess. You free tomorrow if I get something set up with him?”

  “Sure.” Eric was touching his face with his fingertips, assessing damage. His lip would be a little swollen in the morning, but he’d kept a cool beer to it, so he wouldn’t look too much the worse for wear.

  “I’ve never heard of another Campbell Bradford,” Kellen said. “It’s strange.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Eric said, thinking that the least strange thing in his day was confusion over the man’s identity. That didn’t come close to the black train or the leaves or that man in the bowler hat, no.

  Kellen dropped him off with a handshake and a promise that he’d call Edgar Hastings the next day. Eric was almost nervous going back into the hotel alone and felt a childish desire to run back into the parking lot and flag Kellen down, ask him to have one more drink. Just stay with me for twenty minutes, buddy, enough so I can look around and make sure the place is an ordinary hotel again and not the friggin’ Overlook.

  For some reason, thinking of Stephen King’s hotel horror story made him smile as he walked back into the atrium and looked around. Yeah, Kubrick would’ve salivated over shooting in this location. It had everything a filmmaker desired—beauty, grandeur,
size, history, and, at least for Eric tonight, a King-size dose of creepy.

  “Couldn’t ask for anything more,” he said under his breath. The hotel had quieted a bit, with just a handful of people left at the bar, the piano player gone, and the piano itself covered up. He didn’t see anything out of place, didn’t hear anything out of place. The hotel seemed sane again.

  He headed upstairs to his room, where he put on every light and then immediately went around turning them back off when the brightness made his headache flare. It was past eleven now. The strangest day of his life was almost done. He felt a powerful need to call Claire, tell her every weird and frightening detail and hear her responses. No, the hell with calling Claire, he wanted to talk to her face-to-face, to see her in this bedroom. And the hell with talking to Claire, he wanted to take her right here on this large, luxurious bed. Wanted to be tugging her jeans off those long legs, wanted to feel them catch on the rise of her ass the way they always did.

  Damn, but he missed her. Felt it the way old people feel arthritis in their bones, an unrelenting agony carried every day, every hour, every minute.

  He’d met her at a deli in Evanston, where she was in her first year of law school at Northwestern and he was merely passing through after visiting a friend, this the summer before he’d moved to L.A. He had finished a sandwich and was sitting at the table with a newspaper, almost ready to go on his way, when she’d walked in with a friend and sat down across the room. He’d watched her cross the room—something about the way the girl moved that loosened his jaw, left him staring with his mouth half open—and she looked over and gave him the smallest of smiles, an awkward gesture more than anything, forced politeness in response to the unanticipated eye contact.

  What he’d read in the newspaper over the next twenty minutes, he couldn’t say. He kept his eyes on it only to avoid staring, and he sneaked looks as often as he dared, watching her talk and laugh and eat a Caesar salad, gesturing with her fork every now and then, waving bits of lettuce around in the air. She was facing him, caught his eye a few more times, gave him another cursory smile. She was eating too quickly, though, and so was her friend, and both were nearly finished with their food and ready to move on into the day before he ever said a word to her. He wanted so badly to say a word to her. He was not insecure with women, had no trouble asking for dates, but approaching a strange woman at a deli at noon on Tuesday was a hell of a lot different than approaching one in a bar at midnight on Friday. And with her friend there, there was that extra barrier of potential eye rolls and laughter.

  Then the friend stood up and left the table, walking to the bathroom. Fate, Eric decided, it had to be fate, because the friend was the last excuse he was giving himself, and now she’d just checked out. He set the paper down and walked over to this dark-haired girl with the wry smile and the amused eyes and said, “My name is Eric, and I would love to buy you a drink.”

  What a breathtakingly original pickup line. She regarded him for a few seconds without speaking, then said, “It’s a deli. They don’t serve alcohol here.”

  To which Eric had responded, “Well, then, how do you feel about lemonade?”

  They’d had the lemonade, and later that night the real drink, and a day later the first kiss and fifteen months after that the wedding vows and the honeymoon.

  “Shit,” he said now, lying on his back in a hotel room in Indiana, Claire a couple hundred miles away. He sat up and reached for the remote, seeking distraction. Don’t let this start. Don’t let these thoughts be the cap to the kind of day you already had.

  He found the remote, then leaned back in bed again and kicked his shoes off and turned to look at TV. When he did, his eyes caught the bottle of Pluto Water on the desk. He frowned, stood up, and walked over to it. The damn thing was sweating. Covered in beads of moisture, a wet ring beneath it.

  When he reached out and touched the bottle, he found it even colder than before. How was that possible? And while on that topic, how was it possible for the thing to be so wet, like a frosted mug of beer sitting in the sun? Could it be leaking? He ran his finger up the outside, collecting the moisture, then lifted his finger first to his nose and then to his lips and dabbed it against them. There was the same faint sweetness, almost like honey. Nothing close to the terrible foulness that had put him on his knees a few days earlier.

  That had been the booze, though. Right? Wasn’t that what he’d told himself? He loosened the old cap again, took a sniff and, yes, there was a touch of honey. It didn’t smell anything like what he’d remembered.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said aloud, looking at the liquid inside. He’d read enough about the mineral water to understand that it was potent stuff, but nothing he’d read explained its behavior, particularly how it managed to stay so cold, let alone its shifting smells and flavors.

  There was still a Pluto Water plant in town, directly across from the French Lick Springs Resort. Tomorrow he’d have to drop in and ask them for some details. That would be the second order of business if the visions kept up, though. If they did, a call to the doctor would come first.

  The black kid had given Josiah something to remember him by, a left eye that was already going purple by the time he got home and studied himself in the mirror, holding a cold can of Keystone to his eye socket and burning with anger and shame.

  He’d taken the only visible damage from the encounter, and that was as bullshit as bullshit got. He was supposed to put that guy on his big black ass. Instead, he hadn’t even landed a real punch. Josiah had lost a fight or two along the way, but he’d never failed to do some damage.

  Shit, he hadn’t even gotten in the better insult. The black kid’s line about Josiah’s pecker was better than that dumb nigger joke. Funny thing was, Josiah wasn’t even racist. Oh, he supposed he could be considered so, but he could be considered anything that was accompanied by a bad attitude and a chip on the shoulder. Didn’t matter if you were white or black or Mexican or whatever. It was a disrespectful world, he’d seen that clear enough since he was a kid, and wasn’t nobody disrespected the world better than Josiah Bradford.

  He used to have some patience. He’d done a good job of waiting, went through each day knowing he’d leave his mark and trying to wait on the right opportunity. Today, though, the patience had slipped away, pulled from his soul by some unseen force the way the moon ebbed the tides back from the beach. It had started with the heat and been furthered by Amos before draining away altogether when Danny Dumb-shit Hastings hit a twenty-five-hundred-dollar jackpot and took to squealing and hollering and drawing a crowd of people who stared at his fat ass like he was somebody special.

  No, Josiah Bradford didn’t have any patience left. And something told him, something in the humid, black night, that it wasn’t going to be coming back anytime soon either.

  He still had the white guy’s blood on his hand, he realized, as he went for another beer. A long streak of it, dried to a rust color. He went to the sink and ran warm water, scrubbed his hand with a bar of soap, and put it under the water to rinse it clean.

  Strangest damn thing happened then—the water went cold. As the blood rinsed off his hand, the warm water went cold, then drove the blood down the drain in a pink-tinged swirl. Soon as the last trace of blood was gone, the water was warm again. It had been a quick thing, an instantaneous shift.

  “Old pipes,” Josiah muttered. Made sense that the plumbing, like everything else in this house, was turning to shit.

  He went ahead and washed his hand a second time.

  Anne McKinney woke just after two a.m., sat up in bed, and blinked against the darkness, short of breath, her chest tight. Heart attack, she thought. Eighty-six years of good health and now death is going to steal in like the proverbial thief in the night, take me in my bed.

  But her breath came back then, and when she laid her palm beneath her left breast she felt her heart thumping along slow and steady. She pushed up on the pillows, wincing as her back howled in p
ain, and then swung her feet down to the cool floorboards, keeping both hands on the bed as she stood up. Out in public, Anne walked with her hands free as much as possible, but here at home it was different. Here she had to use a higher level of caution, because she’d lived alone since the heart attack that took Harold back in March of ’ninety-two, middle of that Duke ballgame with the Hoosiers, the refs making one more terrible call than Harold’s poor sweet heart could take. That was almost twenty years past, and nobody but Anne had spent a night in the house since. She knew it would be a long time before anybody found her if she took a fall in here.

  Originally her bedroom had been a library of sorts, or at least that had been the idea. Mostly, it had been used by the children for games and by Harold for storing odds and ends that Anne wouldn’t tolerate in the living room. She’d stayed in their old bedroom until she was eighty-one, but then the daily back-and-forth on the stairs began to wear on her. She hadn’t admitted it at the time—stubbornness was her most deeply ingrained trait—choosing instead to tell herself that it was simply time for a redecorating and, what the heck, might as well move downstairs for a change of scenery. Now she hadn’t been upstairs in more than a month.

  She stood with her hand resting on the desk beside the bed, giving her legs a few seconds to warm up. Just like a car in cold weather, that’s how you had to look at it. Wasn’t that the car was done if it did a bit of grumbling on a winter morning, it just needed some time. Once you gave it that, it would run as good as ever. Or close to it, at least. Well, it would run. That was the point. It would still run.

  The surface of the little desk was empty except for the things she needed most: her pills, divided into one of those seven-day containers, a wicker basket for mail that was generally empty (nobody wrote Anne much these days), and one of her weather radios. This one wasn’t but a scanner; the ham radio was down in the basement. There were times that she wished to have it upstairs, close at hand, but she wouldn’t ever allow herself to seriously entertain such a notion. The shortwave needed to be in the most stormproof room of the house, and that was the basement. Concrete block walls and only two small windows up at the top of the western wall, right at ground level. When a big one blew in, the basement was the place to be, which meant that was where the radio needed to be.