So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  Yes, he’d been slow. Or totally stagnant. And gradually the gentle prodding turned to full-on accusations and demands and then things were spiraling down fast and deadly. They’d had one terrible blowup when she happened into a bar and grill downtown for lunch with a friend and found him camped out there with three whiskeys already gone, this at noon. It had been a sighting that led to an unfair conversation later that night, a conversation that quickly turned angry, and when Eric stormed out of the house with a string of expletives and an upended coffee table in his wake, he’d done so with an expectation of returning in a few hours. He’d ended up in a hotel room instead, though, refusing to give her the satisfaction of surrender and one night in the hotel quickly turned to ten and then he was looking for an apartment.

  The bullshit “career” he was involved with now had been as much a guilt trip as anything. He’d wanted to find something so pathetic she had to feel the weight of it. Instead, she’d just told him how glad she was to hear he was working again. Oh, and she was happy to know he could make use of her father’s camera.

  “Made good use of it, Paulie,” he said and let the door to the hotel room swing shut as he got down on his hands and knees and began cleaning up the mess.

  It was no good to be without a video camera, not with these circumstances, when he needed something to tell him what the hell had been real and what hadn’t. He still had the micro-recorder, though. He took that out when he had the camera cleaned up and played a few minutes of his talk with Anne McKinney, enough to verify that everything on the tape progressed as he’d experienced it. He was still listening to it when his phone rang, and he turned off the recorder and looked at the phone, hoping for Claire but instead finding a number he didn’t recognize.

  “Eric? It’s Kellen. I got in touch with Edgar Hastings, the old guy who knew Campbell’s family, and he’s willing to see you. Should be able to straighten out this confusion.”

  “Great.”

  “I’m actually up in Bloomington right now, seeing my girl. Was going to stay overnight, but if I head on back down we can go together.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “No, it’s cool. She’d just as soon throw me out anyhow.”

  Eric could hear a laugh in the background, a sweet female sound that cut him.

  “That’s your decision, Kellen. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I’ll give you a call when I get down there.”

  Eric hung up. The clock told him almost an hour had passed since he left Anne McKinney, which meant she’d probably be at the bar by now. He took a deep breath and picked up the bottle, felt its cold wetness against his skin.

  “Okay,” he said. “Routine sanity check coming right up.”

  She was in an armchair not far from the bar, with a short glass of ice and clear liquid in her hand, a lime perched on the rim. She’d added jewelry since he left her porch, two bracelets and a necklace, and her blouse was different. She’d gotten dressed up to head into town and have her cocktail, evidently. He was hardly into the atrium before she lifted a hand and waved. Good eyes. Eric’s own mother was twenty years younger and wouldn’t have noticed him from this far away if he’d been riding in on a camel.

  The bottle sweated more once it was in his hand, and as he crossed the atrium, a few drops of water fell from it and slid down his wrist and dripped onto the rug beneath.

  Anne’s eyes were already fixed on the bottle as he pulled up a chair, and she set her drink on the table and said, “Well, let’s have a look.”

  He passed her the bottle, and when she took it, her eyes first widened and then narrowed as she frowned, and she shifted it quickly from one hand to the other. A streak of moisture glistened on her wrinkled palm.

  “You’ve been keeping it in ice?” she said, and Eric felt an explosion of relief, almost sagged with it.

  “No,” he said. “That’s just how it is.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “That bottle hasn’t been anywhere other than the desk in the room since I got here. Before that, it was in my briefcase in the car. It hasn’t been near a refrigerator, a freezer, or an ice bucket.”

  “Are you having me on? I don’t understand the trick.”

  “It’s no trick, Mrs. McKinney. This is why I asked about the cold. I thought it was very strange.”

  She was studying his face, looking for some sign that he was the sort of asshole who’d get a kick out of playing a game with an old woman’s mind. Apparently she found none, because she gave an almost imperceptible nod and then dropped her eyes and looked at the bottle again, rolling it over in her hands.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, her voice soft. “Or heard of it. Even Daddy never said anything like this, and he was full of stories about Pluto Water.”

  “Could it be so old that it never went through that boiling and salting?”

  She shook her head. “No. This bottle isn’t anywhere near that old.”

  She used her thumb to wipe some of the frosty condensation clear, then traced the etching of Pluto at the base.

  “This one couldn’t be any earlier than ’twenty-six or ’twenty-seven. I’ll double-check, of course, but this color and this design… no, this would have to be from the late twenties. I’ve got a dozen like it. They made millions of them.”

  He didn’t say anything, just watched her turn that bottle over again and again.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she repeated, and then, without looking up at him, said, “You drank some of it, didn’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “I thought maybe you had. You seemed so worried about what it would do. Looks like you’ve had a good deal of it, too.”

  Yes, by now he’d had at least two-thirds of the bottle.

  “I think there’s something else in here,” she said. “That colored look, the sediment, that shouldn’t be there.”

  “Go ahead and open it,” he said, “and tell me if it smells like Pluto Water to you.”

  She opened it and held it to her nose and shook her head almost immediately.

  “That’s not Pluto Water. It would smell—”

  “Terrible,” he said. “Sulfuric.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s how it smelled when I opened it originally. Since then—”

  “It’s almost sweet.”

  “Yes,” he said, again feeling that relief, this old woman confirming now with multiple senses what he’d feared was a trick of his mind.

  “You asked about hallucinations,” she said, speaking carefully and gently.

  “I think I’ve had a few, all since tasting it.”

  “What do you see?”

  “It’s varied, but I imagined a conversation with a man in Chicago, and then I got down here and thought I saw an old steam train…”

  “That’s the kind they run for the tourists.”

  “It wasn’t that train,” he said. “It was the Monon, the same one you talked about, and it came out of a storm cloud of pure black, and there was a man in a hat hanging out of a boxcar filled with water…”

  He spit all this out in a breath, hearing the lunacy in it but watching her eyes and seeing no judgment.

  “And I’ve had headaches,” he said, “awful headaches that go away quickly when I have another taste.”

  She looked down at the bottle. “Well, I wouldn’t try any more of it.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  She fastened the cap again and then passed him the bottle. He didn’t really want it back in his hands; it was nice to see somebody else handling it. He set it on the table beside her drink, and they both eyed it with a mix of wonder and distrust.

  “I just don’t know what to think,” she said.

  “Nor do I,” Eric said. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew the microrecorder, rewound it without comment, and pressed play. Their voices came back, discussing the water, repeating all of those things that had just bee
n said. He played about thirty seconds of tape, then shut it off and put the recorder back in his pocket. Anne McKinney was watching him with both knowing and astonished eyes.

  “That’s why you’re taping everything. You want to be sure you’re not imagining it. You want to be sure it’s real.”

  He managed a weak smile and a nod.

  “Son,” she said, “you must be scared to death.”

  20

  DANNY CAME BY IN midafternoon, and Josiah was feeling fine, having spent the day sanding and painting the porch rails, with a beer or three for company. Funny, too, because those porch rails had needed paint for years, and he’d never gotten around to it. He’d bought the paint damn near a year ago, figured on tackling the job the next day, but the next day got away from him and soon the paint cans were covered with dust and cobwebs and the porch rails looked worse than ever.

  Today, though, he got to the job simply because he needed something to busy himself with. It was a fine day, warm and filled with promise, one that called for doing something beyond sitting on your ass. Most weekends, Josiah was more than content to sit on his ass; he spent Monday through Friday working for other people, figured he’d earned himself a couple days of doing jack shit. Something was different today, though, in his mind and in his body, as if that evening wind that blew up while he slept on the porch had carried some sort of energy right through his skin. Mark it on your calendars, folks—as of May 3, Josiah Bradford was no longer content to bide his time.

  It was a shame to involve somebody like Danny Hastings in such a plan as this, but fact was, there were some things you couldn’t do alone. Some things called for a bit of help, and though Danny wasn’t ideal in a lot of ways, he was loyal to a fault. They’d been brought up near as family, though they weren’t blood-related, and Josiah had spent much of his childhood kicking the shit out of Danny and then watching the little freckled bastard come ambling along for more, like a dog that doesn’t know how to stop loving its master regardless of the whip. Danny was fire tested by now.

  When Danny arrived in his Oldsmobile Cutlass with the mismatched door, Josiah was pacing the porch with paintbrush in hand, looking for places that needed a touch-up and not finding any. He’d done a thorough job. The house—if it could be called that—was a one-bedroom, cracked-slab-on-sloping-grade shit pile that Josiah never could figure why he’d purchased. It had been a bank repo, bought for a song but still overpriced, and there wasn’t a thing desirable about it except for the fact that it was located within a sprint-car race of what had once been Bradford property. There had been a good-size parcel in Bradford hands once, and generation by generation, it got sold off in bits and pieces to keep the bill collectors at bay, pissed away until there wasn’t anything left at all. Why he wanted to be close to those memories he didn’t know, but somehow he’d found himself drawn back here.

  “Hell,” Danny said, walking up beside Josiah, cigarette dangling from his lips, “I was close to certain you wasn’t never going to get that painted. What got into you?”

  “Boredom,” Josiah said. There was something about the porch rails that offered him a surprising amount of satisfaction, his work shining clean and white and stark under the sun. It had the shine of achievement.

  “Looks nice, though.”

  “Don’t it?”

  “Better’n you anyhow. That black boy poked you good, didn’t he? Your eye looks like hell.”

  “It was a bullshit sucker punch,” Josiah said and walked away. He went to the spigot that hung loose from the foundation—he’d been meaning to mortar it back in for years—and, turning on the water, put the brush under the stream and massaged it with his fingers, watching the white paint wash away from the bristles and waiting on his anger to do the same. Last thing he wanted to hear about was his damn eye.

  “I got a funny story,” Danny began, but Josiah lifted a hand to shut him up, not enough patience in him to listen to Danny carry on about some bullshit or another.

  “You hear what I asked you earlier?” Josiah said.

  “About making some money?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I heard it, yeah.”

  “And you’d like to be in on that.”

  “You was to twist my arm enough, I’m sure I’d agree to it.”

  “Even if it was the sort of thing could get you in a piece of trouble if you were dumb enough to get caught.”

  Danny’s florid face went grave and he took the cigarette from between his lips and tossed it down in the weed-riddled gravel drive, smashed it out with his boots. Wasn’t like he could be shocked by the suggestion—he and Josiah had done some law breaking in their time—but he didn’t look thrilled by it either.

  “I hope you ain’t talking about cooking crank,” he said.

  “Hell, no.”

  That seemed to put Danny’s mind at ease. He’d had a buddy, a guy they all called Tommy Thunder for no reason Josiah could ever recall, who blew up his trailer and killed himself while attempting to fine-tune a batch of meth. Danny, who’d sampled the drug as a user and mover prior to that occasion, had steered clear of it since. Only took one explosion to get his attention.

  “All right. Good. But what is it you’re thinkin’ of?”

  Josiah went up the porch and into the kitchen, came back out with two Keystones and handed one to Danny and cracked the other open for himself.

  “You ever lift your head up when you’re pulling weeds down at that damn hotel?” he asked. Danny also worked on the grounds crew; he had, in fact, gotten Josiah the job.

  “Every day,” Danny said cautiously. He hadn’t opened his beer yet.

  “You noticed any signs up lately?”

  “Always signs up.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m talking ’bout one in particular. List of things going on down there, conventions and tours and shit.”

  “I know it.”

  “You noticed what convention’s heading in next month?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “Gemstones,” Josiah said. “Gonna have an exhibit down in the lobby, cases of diamonds and rubies and shit. A pile of stones worth millions, Danny. Millions.”

  Danny’s face went sour and he took a few steps to the side, started to lean on the railing, then remembered it was wet and stopped himself.

  “A thing like that comes rolling into your town,” Josiah said, “you’d be fool not to capitalize on it.”

  “You got to be kidding,” Danny said.

  “Kidding hell. We’re going to get those stones. Won’t be all that hard either. See, the way I got it figured, a fire clears that building out, and fast. With all the liabilities and shit they got to consider? Man, first flame goes up, that place empties out.”

  “Josiah… you don’t think them guys who own the stones have thought of that?”

  “They can think of it all they want, point is they can’t stop it. You have any idea the sort of scene you’d have down there with a fire going? They call that chaos, son, and you know what happens during chaos? Shit gets lost.”

  “You think they’re not going to notice—”

  “’Course they’re going to notice, numb nuts, what I’m saying is by the time they do, it’ll be too late. We get a fire going, get the building empty and the sprinklers on and then hit those cases fast and get out. You don’t got to worry about alarms because there’ll already be a thousand going off, a few more ain’t gonna mean a damn thing.”

  “All them stones is, like, registered or whatever,” Danny said. “You can’t sell them. Where we gonna sell them? Go on up to the pawnshop and sell stones like that?”

  “We won’t sell them here.”

  “Well, I know that, but where do you think we’re going to do it? We could go all the way across the country—”

  “Won’t sell them in this country,” Josiah said, voice soft, and that brought Danny up, his version of a thoughtful expression coming on.

  “I’m getting out,” Josiah said. “You can come or
not, it ain’t my concern. But I am getting out of this place.”

  “It’s a dumb idea,” Danny said, and the audacity of that blew Josiah away. Danny Hastings calling him dumb? He should’ve swung on him, knocked the red hair right off the top of his head. He didn’t, though. Instead he just stood there and stared. Something was odd about what Danny had just said, and it took a minute but then Josiah figured out what the odd quality was—Danny had been right. It was a dumb idea.

  Dumb, but not impossible. And Josiah Bradford was just about ready to take those odds, like one of the fools who went down to the casino on Friday night knowing they’d get cleaned out but not giving a shit. Worse came to worst, they’d remember Josiah in this town. They’d damn sure do that.

  “It can be done,” he said, but there wasn’t much vigor in his voice. “If you don’t have the balls, all right. But don’t you tell me it can’t be done.”

  Danny was quiet. After a time he opened his beer and then they drank in silence for a while, standing there awkwardly because they couldn’t lean on the rail. Josiah went over and sat on one of the chairs and Danny followed and took the other.

  “Story I had to tell you is that I spoke to my grandpa today. He said a man’s in town asking about old Campbell.”

  Josiah frowned and lowered his beer. “That same son of a bitch I told you about?”

  “The black kid? No. Said there’s another one now. This one is doing some kind of movie. Black kid is helping him.”

  “A movie about Campbell?”

  This was some kind of strange. Josiah’s great-grandfather had been the subject of plenty of old Edgar’s rants over the years, but who in the hell would want to make a movie about him?

  “Edgar’s addled,” he said. “A movie?”

  “What he told me,” Danny said, “was that some guy was down from Chicago working on a movie and wanted to ask about Campbell today.”

  “Well, I don’t know why anybody would want to waste their time on him. Campbell left a lot of nothing behind, and I’m still living off that today.”