So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  “This is so much more intense…”

  “And those other experiences were from outside contact,” she said. “You ingested that water, Eric. You put it inside you.”

  “The water.”

  “Of course. Don’t you think that’s what you’re reacting to?”

  Actually, I suspected your dad’s camera. Had to beat the thing to death, in fact. How’s that for a logical reaction?

  “I haven’t really had time to consider it yet,” he said. “But that trip to see the old man in the hospital, that was days after I first tasted the water. Seems like a long time for a drug to stay in your system.”

  “It’s not a drug, Eric. It’s you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re connecting to it, just like you have to things before. The car, the old Indian camp in the mountains, things like that. And I’m not surprised you think this experience is stronger, more intense, because those were just things you looked at. This stuff, you consumed.”

  They talked for a while longer, and it was amazing how much better he felt after he finally hung up with her. Claire had not only accepted his version of what was going on but had also offered a memory that validated it. Sane once again. How lovely to be back.

  He felt a mild tug of shame at the way he’d gone to her with this, and the way she’d listened. After all his recent coldness, he’d turned to her quickly in a moment of need, and she had allowed him to.

  It was, he realized, the longest conversation they’d had since he left. The first long one, in fact, that hadn’t involved heavy arguing or his shouting or her tears. They’d talked like companions once again. Almost like husband and wife.

  That didn’t change anything, of course. But she’d been there when he needed her, and that was no small thing. Not at all.

  There when she was needed, that was Claire. Always and forever, that had been Claire. Until the return to Chicago, until he had no work and no clear prospects. Then where had she been?

  There. In your home. And you walked out and never went back, and she’s still there, she’s still there and you’re the one who left…

  Hell with it. One phone call did not a marriage fix, but it had been good to talk with her and he felt far better now than he had before, shaken but relieved. It was the way you felt after getting sick to your stomach—unsteady, but glad that was over.

  The water made sense. The water applied some element of logic to what had, an hour ago, seemed utterly illogical. And terrifying.

  All right, then, time to move on into the day. There was research to be done, and he figured it would be a damn good idea to start with the mineral water. At any rate, he didn’t need to stay in this room, cowering and questioning his own sanity. The headaches would be gone for a while now. Might as well get to work. Too bad he no longer had a camera with which to do his job.

  Breaking it had felt good, though. Watching it shatter, throwing his full strength into those smashes against the edge of the desk, seeing something else pay a price for his own pain, his own fear. Yes sir, that had felt nice.

  He wondered how Claire would respond to that notion. Something told him it wouldn’t be with surprise.

  The Pluto company was housed in a long stone building of a buttery color. There were two large holding tanks outside and banks of old-fashioned windows, some forty panes of glass in each one, a few of them opened outward to let the air circulate. The entrance led Eric to a flight of stairs, and at the top he found the office, went in, and explained what he wanted to a pretty, brown-haired woman behind one of the desks.

  “You want to talk about the history of the company, your best bet is up at the hotel,” she said.

  “I’m interested in the history, yes, but I’m also interested in the actual water. What’s in the water, and what it does.”

  “What it does?”

  “I’ve seen some of the old promotional materials, things that claimed it would fix just about anything.”

  “There was only one thing that water ever fixed.” She waited for a response and didn’t get it, then leaned forward and said, “It made you shit, mister. That’s all it did. Pluto Water was nothing but a laxative.”

  He smiled. “I understand that, but I’m trying to find out something about the legends that surrounded it, the folklore.”

  “Again, we’re not going to be able to answer that. The only thing we’ve got in common with the original company is the name. We don’t produce that water anymore.”

  “What do you produce, then?”

  “Cleaning products,” she said. “Things for Clorox.” Then she smiled and added, “Well, I suppose that’s got something in common, after all. Cleansers, right? Because the old stuff would clean out your—”

  “I got it,” he said. “Okay. Thanks for your time.”

  There was an older woman at a desk in the back of the room, and she’d been listening and peering at Eric over her reading glasses. As he turned to go, she spoke up.

  “You want to know about folklore, you should look up Anne McKinney.”

  He paused at the door. “Is she a historian?”

  “No, she’s not. Just a local woman, late eighties but with a mind better than most, and a memory that beats anybody’s. Her father worked for Pluto. She’ll answer every question you could think to ask and plenty more that you couldn’t have.”

  “That sounds perfect. Where can I find her?”

  “Well, you follow Larry Bird Boulevard—that’s the street we’re on—right on up the hill and keep going out of town, and you’ll find her house. Nice-looking blue house, two stories with a big front porch, bunch of little windmills in the yard, wind chimes all over the porch. Thermometers and barometers, too. Can’t miss that place.”

  Eric raised his eyebrows.

  “Old Anne’s waiting on a storm,” the gray-haired woman said.

  “I see. Think she’ll mind me dropping in, or should I call first?”

  “I don’t think she’d mind, but if you don’t want to bother her at home, you could go on by the West Baden Springs Hotel at about two. She goes there for a drink.”

  “A drink? Thought you said she was in her late eighties?”

  “That’s right,” the gray-haired woman said with a smile.

  17

  AT NOON THE BAROMETER showed a pressure of 30.20, up a bit from morning. The temperature was at eighty-one but Anne didn’t think it would touch quite so high today as yesterday, what with that light breeze and some cloud cover coming in out of the southwest. Thin white clouds, no storm. Not yet.

  She spent the morning on laundry. Was a time when laundry was not an all-morning task, but the washer and dryer were in the basement, and those narrow wooden stairs gave her some trouble now. Oh, she could take them well enough, just a bit slower. That was true of so much these days. Just a bit slower.

  She had the laundry done by eleven and then made some iced tea and went out onto the porch with the newspaper. The New York Times, which she’d taken for more years than she could count. It was important to know what was going on in the world, and last time she’d trusted TV was the last day Murrow had been on it.

  At noon she got up and checked the temperature and wind direction and speed and the barometric pressure, wrote it all down in her notebook. She had logs going back more than six decades, five readings a day. Make a real interesting record, if anyone cared. She suspected not many would.

  Her weather-watching habits had their roots in childhood. And in fear. She’d been petrified of storms when she was a young girl, would hide under her bed or in a closet when the thunder and lightning commenced. It had amused her father—she could still remember his soft, low laugh as he’d come in to fetch her from under the bed—but her mother had decided something needed to be done about it and had found a children’s book about storms, one with illustrations of dark thunderheads, swirling tornadoes, tossing seas. Anne had been seven when she got the book, had the binding split from countless readings by the time she wa
s eight.

  “You can’t be scared of them, because being scared of them won’t change a thing,” her mother had said. “Won’t make ’em stop, won’t make you any safer. You respect them and try to understand them. More you understand, less you’ll be afraid.”

  So Anne had returned to the book for another reading and started forcing herself to stay at the window when storms blew in, watching the trees bend and the leaves whip through the air as rain lashed the house, drilling off the glass. She went to the library and found more books and kept studying. Had it been a different time, she’d have probably gone up to Purdue and studied meteorology. But that wasn’t how things worked then. She had a sweetheart, got married right out of high school, and then the war was on and he was overseas and she had to get a job, and then he was back and they had children to raise. Children she’d put in the ground already, hardest thing she could imagine anyone bearing, her daughter gone at thirty with cancer, her son at forty-nine with a stroke. No grandchildren left behind.

  She was thinking about her son when she first saw the car approaching slowly up the road, remembering the time he’d fallen off this very porch and landed on a flowerpot below, breaking his wrist. Five years old at the time, and he was trying to stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive, and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never would run out of dust.

  The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown. He needed a shave but seemed clean enough.

  “Anne McKinney? They gave me your name down in French Lick,” he said, swinging the door shut and walking up the steps when she nodded. “I’m interested in Pluto Water. The old stories, the folklore. Think you’d be willing to talk about it?”

  “Oh, I’m willing enough. Day I’m not willing to tell the old tales, you best call the grave digger—if nothing else just so he can hit me in the head with his shovel. Ought to issue a disclaimer before I get to it, though: time I get to storytelling, you best be comfortable. I’ve been known to go on.”

  He smiled. It was a nice smile, warm and genuine.

  “Ma’am, I’ve got plenty of interest and time.”

  “Then come on up here and have a seat.”

  He walked up the steps and offered his hand. “Name’s Eric Shaw. I’m down from Chicago.”

  “Oh, Chicago. Always loved that city. Haven’t been there in years. I can remember riding the Monon up more than a few times, though. In fact, that’s where my husband and I went on our honeymoon. Spring of ’thirty-nine. I was eighteen years old.”

  “When did the Monon stop making that run?”

  “Monon stopped making any runs, period, in ’seventy-three.”

  Thirty-five years ago. She didn’t consider dates all that much, but she’d just rattled two of them off, and they both sounded impossibly long ago. She remembered the day the Monon made its final run quite well, actually. She and Harold went up to the Greene County trestle and watched it thunder on across, waving good-bye as it went. Hadn’t realized exactly all they’d been waving good-bye to. An era. A world.

  “Each of the hotels here had its own train station for years,” she said. “Doesn’t that seem hard to believe now? But here I go—talking away from the topic before we even got started. What was it you wanted to know about Pluto Water?”

  He sat down on the chair across from her and pulled out one of those tiny tape recorders and held it up, a question in his eyes.

  “Oh, sure, if you actually want to listen to me go on about this a second time, you’re more than welcome to it.”

  “Thank you. I was wondering if you could tell me what you’d heard about the… more unusual effects of the water.”

  “Unusual?”

  “I know that eventually people realized it was nothing more than a laxative, but in the early days the stuff had a reputation that went well beyond that.”

  She smiled. “It certainly did. For a time, Pluto Water was reputed to do just about anything short of put a man on the moon. The popular response to your question, of course, would be that as the years passed, people got smarter, learned more about science and health and figured out that all of that had been nothing more than snake oil sales. That the company survived for a time by toning down the claims, advertising it as a laxative, but the world’s finest laxative. Then people saw through that, too, or found a better product, and Pluto Water went the way of a lot of old-fashioned things. Quickly forgotten, and then it disappeared entirely.”

  “You said that would be the popular response,” Eric Shaw said. “Are you aware of a different one?”

  That got her to grinning again, thinking about what her daddy’s reaction to this man would be if he were still here. Why, he’d be coming up out of his chair by now, taking his pipe from his mouth and waving it around to emphasize his point. All the poor man had ever wanted was an audience for his Pluto Water theories.

  “Well, sure, I’ve heard a few,” she said. “My father worked for the company, understand. And the way he told it, the water changed over the years. Originally, they’d just bottle it fresh out of the springs and what you drank was essentially direct from the source. Problem they ran into with that was, the water didn’t keep. They tried putting it into kegs and casks, but it went bad quickly. Unfit to drink. That wasn’t any real dilemma until people realized how much money could be made from shipping the water all over. Then they had to do something about it.”

  “Pasteurization?”

  “Of a sort. They boiled the water to get rid of some of the gasses that were in it and then added two different kinds of salt that fortified it, allowed it to keep. Once they had that process figured out, they bottled it and shipped it all over the world.”

  Eric Shaw nodded but didn’t speak, waiting on more. She liked that. So many people were impatient these days, hurried.

  “The company and most of the people involved with it swore up and down that nothing changed in the water during that boiling and salting.”

  “Your father disagreed,” he said, and she chuckled.

  “He suspected the preservation process changed what the water could do.”

  “You didn’t believe him.”

  “I’d be willing to believe, maybe, that water fresh from the springs had more effect than the stuff they bottled and shipped. Isn’t that true of most things? You eat a tomato from your own garden, it tastes different than the one you buy from the store.”

  “Sure.”

  “He also had a notion,” she said, “that your standard-issue Pluto Water was a special thing, capable of startling healing powers, but that there were some springs in the area that went a touch beyond that. This area is filled with mineral springs. Some large, some small, but there’s a lot of them.”

  “Did you ever hear rumors that the water caused hallucinations?”

  That lifted her eyebrows. She shook her head. “I never heard that, no.”

  He looked positively disappointed but was trying to conceal it, nodding his head and rushing out another question.

  “What about the temperature? I’ve, uh, I’ve heard that it would stay unusually cold. That there was some sort of… a chemical reaction, I guess, and you could leave the bottles out in a warm room but they’d stay cold, even get a little frost.”

  “Well,” Anne said, “I don’t know who you’ve been getting stories from, but they sound like a colorful source. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  He was silent for a moment, eyes concerned, and seemed to be groping for something.

  “But you had the water that had been preserved or fortified, right?” he said eventually.

  “Yes.”

  “What if it had been fresh water, bottled back before they did that pr
ocess?”

  “That would require the water being from before eighteen ninety-three, I think,” she said. “I really couldn’t say much about that, but I never heard anything about any unusual coldness.”

  “What might happen if you drank Pluto Water that hadn’t been preserved?”

  “Well, the way I was always told, it simply wasn’t fit for human consumption after much time had passed.”

  “And if someone did drink it?”

  “If they could actually choke enough of it down,” Anne said, “I do believe it would be fatal.”

  That seemed to rock him. He wet his lips and dropped his eyes to the porch floor and looked a little queasy. She frowned, watching him, wondering about all these questions now, about what exactly she had on her hands here.

  “You mind my asking what you’re working on?”

  “A family history,” he said.

  “Someone that worked for Pluto?”

  “No, but I’m trying to put as much area history into it as I can. I’ll be making a film, eventually, but today I’m just doing some preliminary work.”

  “Who was it filled your head with all those ideas about the water?”

  “An old man in Chicago,” he said, and then, before she could respond to that, he asked, “Hey, is there a river around here?”

  “A river? Well, not right here in town, no. There’s the creek.”

  “I was told about a river.”

  “The White River’s not far. And then there’s the Lost River.”

  The wind kicked up then, set the chimes to work, a sound Anne would never tire of, and she tilted her head to look past Eric Shaw and out to the yard, where the blades were spinning on the windmills. Spinning pretty good, too, a decent breeze funneling through. Still nothing but sun and white clouds, though, no hint of a storm. Odd for the wind to be picking up like this with no storm…

  “The Lost River?”

  His question snapped her mind back. It was mildly embarrassing to be caught drifting off like that, but this wind was strange, grabbed her attention.

  “Yes, sorry. I was listening to the chimes. It’s called the Lost River because so much of it is underground. More than twenty miles of it, I believe. Shows itself here and there and then disappears again.”