So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  “We’ve met him,” Kellen said softly, and he stayed on the couch while Eric stood and went to the door.

  22

  ERIC WATCHED THROUGH THE screen door as the redheaded man walked to the porch and Josiah Bradford hung back, standing in the driveway staring at the Porsche. He was still studying it when his companion came through the screen door without a knock. Edgar Hastings’s grandson entered with his chest puffed out, swaggering in bold and tough, like a cowboy crashing through saloon doors, but the sight of Eric standing so close to the door gave him an awkward moment of hesitation, one that Edgar filled by saying, “Damn it, Danny, show some manners.”

  The redhead looked at his grandfather, then back at Eric, and grudgingly put out his hand.

  “Danny Hastings,” he said.

  When Josiah Bradford left the Porsche he moved quickly, up the steps and across the porch and through the door in a flurry. The door banged off the wall and his eyes found Eric’s and then went to Kellen on the couch. Kellen gave him a little wave and a wriggle of the eyebrows, Groucho Marx if Groucho had been six foot six and black.

  “Edgar, these sons of bitches are asking about my family?” Josiah said.

  Danny still had his hand out, and Eric shook it, said, “Good to meet you. I’m Eric Shaw.”

  Danny pulled his hand back like it had touched hot coals, then stepped away hurriedly and looked to Josiah for guidance. Josiah stood in the doorway with his feet spread wide. Kellen still hadn’t moved from the couch. Now he leaned back against the cushion, stretched, and laced his fingers behind his head, watching them with a lack of interest, as if the scene were unfolding on the TV instead of five feet away.

  “You know them?” Edgar asked Josiah. Then to Eric, “Thought you was from Chicago?”

  “I am,” Eric said. “Just got in yesterday. Haven’t been here for twenty-four hours yet, but it was long enough to meet Josiah and have him take a swing at me.”

  “I believe we encountered that difficult streak you spoke of,” Kellen told Edgar.

  “I’d have beat the shit out of you last night and I’ll do the same today,” Josiah said as he stepped into the living room. The dog hurried away into the kitchen and placed himself behind the table and chairs. Evidently Riley was acquainted with Josiah.

  Josiah pulled up with his face a few inches from Eric’s. “Who are you, and what business is it of yours to come into my town asking about my family?”

  Eric was looking into the other man’s weathered face, burnt by the sun and seasoned by the wind. The skin beneath his right eye was swollen and discolored, streaked with purple and black, a souvenir of Kellen’s left hand. Eric found himself staring at it, something about the color of the bruise reminding him of the storm cloud he’d seen coming with the train. Above the injury Josiah Bradford’s eyes were a dark liquid brown that seemed familiar. Campbell’s eyes? No. Eric had just seen Campbell on the tape that morning, remembered well that his eyes were blue. But he’d seen these eyes, too. They were the eyes of the man on the train, the man who’d played the piano.

  “I asked you a question, dickhead,” Josiah said.

  “I’ve been hired to do a video history,” Eric said, not wanting to stare at Josiah Bradford’s eyes any longer but unable to stop himself. “My client wanted me to find out about Campbell Bradford. I didn’t know a damn thing about you, your family, or anybody else here until I got down here yesterday. Sure as shit didn’t expect to have you acting like an idiot the first night I got in town, begging for a fight.”

  The longer Eric looked into Josiah’s eyes, the worse his headache became. It had swelled into a pain so intense and so demanding that even the conflict of this moment couldn’t distract him from it, and he turned away from him and sucked air in through his mouth, wincing and lifting his hand involuntarily to the back of his head.

  “You been fighting again?” Edgar said. “Josiah, I swear you’re a lost cause.”

  “They was looking for trouble, Edgar.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Ah, he was only joking around with us yesterday,” Kellen said. “Say, Edgar, you ever hear the one about the nigger in the fur coat?”

  Josiah lifted his arm and pointed at Kellen. “You watch your ass.”

  “You watch yours,” Edgar shouted. “I won’t have this carrying on in my house.”

  Josiah dropped his arm, ignoring the old man, and looked back at Eric. “I want to know why you’re down here asking about my family.”

  “I already told you,” Eric said, and he had to speak with his head turned sideways. He didn’t like that body language; it suggested he was intimidated, but he also couldn’t stand to look him in the eye, because when he did, the pain flared worse.

  “You didn’t tell me shit. Working on a movie, my ass. Where’s the cameras?”

  That made a smile creep over Eric’s face.

  “You think it’s funny lying to me? I’ll whip your ass right here.”

  “Like hell you will,” Edgar said, and over by the door his grandson said, “Ease up, Josiah,” in a voice that was near a whisper.

  “Where’s the cameras?” Josiah repeated.

  “I had a little equipment malfunction this morning.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Eric shrugged.

  “Who’s making the movie?” Josiah said. “And why?”

  “I have no interest in answering that question,” Eric said, and this time he got his head lifted and looked Josiah Bradford in the face, taking care to stare at the center of his nose and avoid a direct look into those liquid brown eyes.

  “Well, boy, I’m about to give you the interest,” Josiah said, stepping up and bumping his chest against Eric’s. Eric held his ground as Edgar shouted at Josiah to back off and Danny Hastings shifted uneasily at the door. Kellen stretched his legs out and put his feet up on the coffee table and yawned.

  “You got no right to be asking about my family,” Josiah said, breath warm and reeking of beer. “You got questions? Then you’ll pay for the answers. I got a financial right to anything you do that so much as mentions my family.”

  “No,” Eric said, “you do not. Perhaps you’ve never heard the word biography. I wouldn’t be surprised. Even if I want to make a movie about you, asshole, I’m legally entitled. The good news is, nobody in the world would be interested in seeing it. So rest assured, that won’t be happening. Meantime, if you threaten me again or harass my friend or pull any more of your pathetic, childish shit, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail.”

  “It’s been there before,” Edgar said from his chair. “Going to have to say something different than that to convince him.”

  “Shut up, Edgar,” Josiah said, his eyes still on Eric.

  “Hey,” Danny Hastings said. “No call for that.”

  Eric said, “Thanks for your time, Edgar. You were a help.”

  He walked past Danny, then turned back when he had his hand on the door and watched Kellen get to his feet slowly, letting his full size unfold and fill the room.

  “Get out,” Josiah said.

  Kellen smiled at him. Then he leaned across the coffee table and offered his hand to Edgar Hastings, passed very close to Josiah without touching him or looking at him, nodded at Danny, and joined Eric at the door. Eric pushed it open and they stepped outside. They were halfway to the car when Josiah followed to yell a parting line.

  “You better forget you ever heard the name Campbell Bradford,” he shouted. “All right? You better forget you ever heard his name.”

  Neither of them responded. Eric kept his eyes on the mirror as Kellen started the Porsche and backed around the pickup truck, but Josiah stayed on the porch.

  “Well, that sure was fun,” Kellen said as he backed out of the drive. “Made the trip down from Bloomington worth it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no, I’m serious. I’d have driven an extra hour to see that. You get a look at his eye?” He laughed. “Ah, that made my day. You noti
ce he seemed a little less brave today? No punches, no jokes.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Yeah, well, black eye can do that.”

  There was a blue minivan pulled off on the side of the road not far from the house, and Kellen came dangerously close to sideswiping it, flying along at least twenty miles an hour over the limit.

  Kellen looked over at Eric, eyes hidden by the sunglasses. “You mind my asking you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Seeing as how your Campbell doesn’t seem to have existed in this town… have you stopped to consider that he might be a liar? Might have been pretending to be somebody else for his whole life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In which case, he’s successful, rich, and has a family,” Kellen said, “but he assumed the identity of an asshole from a small town in another state. Why in the hell would anyone do that?”

  “I think that,” Eric said, “is about to become a really important question. I got one other thing I could throw at you, too, but my guess is after you hear it, you’ll probably want to kick me out of your car.”

  Kellen tilted his head, confused. “What?”

  “It’s going to sound crazy, man.”

  “I can dig crazy.”

  “See the thing is… I’ve seen Josiah’s great-grandfather before. I’ve seen that Campbell. I’m almost sure of it. And he’s not the same guy as the one I met in Chicago.”

  “Then, where did you see him?”

  “In a vision,” Eric said, and Kellen pursed his lips and gave a slow, thoughtful nod—Oh, sure, in a vision, of course.

  “You don’t have to believe that,” Eric said, “but before you make any judgments, I’ve got a bottle of water I’d like to show you.”

  23

  AT FIVE THE BAROMETER dropped a bit and the western sky began to fill with tendrils of clouds. They were cirrus, rode very high in the atmosphere, twenty, thirty, even forty thousand feet. The name was a Latin term for a lock of hair, and that’s exactly what they looked like today, fine wisps of white up there against a backdrop of cobalt blue.

  They seemed almost stationary, trapped near the western horizon, but Anne knew that in reality they were moving along just fine. Problem was, they were so high that their speed didn’t show itself. They were serene clouds, looked still and peaceful, but they heralded a change, too. High cirrus clouds like that signaled a pending deterioration in the weather and stronger winds on the way. There was even an expression for it—See in the sky the painter’s brush, the winds around you soon will rush. Interesting thing about today’s clouds was that the wind was already rushing. Had been since yesterday. So if this meant something stronger was on the way…

  She logged the changes in her notebook and then went inside and prepared a vegetable soup. The weather changes didn’t hold her mind as they normally would. Her thoughts were on the strange man from Chicago, Eric Shaw, and that bizarre bottle of Pluto Water. She’d never seen anything like it. So cold. And the man himself, well, he was scared. That much had been obvious.

  She’d heard plenty of folklore about Pluto Water, but even the wildest tales had always claimed it to be a cure, not a curse. She couldn’t remember a single story about visions or premonitions. The town had its share of ghost stories, sure, but none connected to Pluto Water. She believed Shaw, though, believed at least that the visions hadn’t come until he’d tasted the water. And she wasn’t all that surprised.

  This valley, her home for so many years, so many decades, was a strange place. It was a spot touched by magic, of that she was certain, but ill winds often followed the favorable ones here, ebbing flows of wealth and poverty, glory and tragedy. Everything about the valley seemed in a permanent state of flux unlike any other place she’d known. She had some ideas on it, too, but they weren’t the sort you told people about. No, ideas like that would get you laughed at mighty quick.

  She put the soup on the stove and then left the kitchen and faced the stairs that had stood for weeks without supporting so much as a footstep. Well, time to go up. She used the railing and went slowly and tried not to think about a fall, got to the top, and then walked into one of the empty bedrooms, the one that had once been home to her daughter, Alice, and pulled open the closet door. A stack of cardboard boxes faced her, musty and dust-covered and taped shut. A few years ago she’d have remembered which box held the bottles, but it had been a long time since she’d opened them and now she had no idea. Nothing to do but start at the top then. They were heavier than she’d expected, the sort of thing she had no business trying to move by herself, but she knew all the contents were carefully wrapped and would hold up to a little jostling. She dragged the first one off the top until it started to fall and then got her foot out of the way just in time. It hit the floor with a loud thump, dust rising. She got her sewing scissors and set to work on the tape.

  The bottles didn’t turn up until she’d reached the third box from the top, and by the time she got that one open, her joints were screaming and she felt exhausted and didn’t think she’d even be able to eat the soup, wanting only to get off her feet and shut her eyes. Then she got the tape off the third box and her spirits lifted, success bringing some energy back. There were nearly thirty different bottles in the box, all protected by the Bubble Wrap and labeled with a date. It took her only a few minutes to find a match for the one Eric Shaw had shown her. There was a piece of masking tape stretched across the wrapping, the year 1929 written on it. She’d been right.

  She unwrapped the bottle and held it in her hand. It felt cool, but naturally so, the way glass was supposed to feel. Inside, the water was a little cloudy, but not so grainy and discolored as what she’d seen in Eric Shaw’s bottle.

  She left the boxes on the floor. It was one thing to tug them down, another to lift them back up. With the bottle in hand she went back downstairs, checked on the soup, and then called the West Baden Springs Hotel and asked to be put through to Eric Shaw’s room. The phone rang several times, and then she got a machine.

  “This is Anne McKinney. I have an idea…. I’m not sure if it’ll be any help, but I don’t see where it could do any harm either. I found a bottle that’s the twin of yours. Only one I have from that year, and it’s still full. Never been opened. I’ll let you take it. My idea was that you could find a place to test the water. I don’t know who’d be able to do it, but surely there’s a laboratory somewhere that can. They could analyze both of them, and tell you what the difference is. There’s something in your Pluto Water that’s not in mine. It might be a help to you if you knew what that was.”

  She left her number, hung up the phone, and went out to the porch. Her back throbbed when she pushed open the door. Outside the windmills were turning fast and steady, and the cluster of cirrus clouds that had stood in the western horizon at her last check were now directly overhead. The air was fragrant with the smell of rhododendrons and the honeysuckle that grew along the side of the house. An absolutely gorgeous day, but still that wind blew, and those clouds, they were warnings.

  24

  KELLEN CAGE SAT IN the desk chair and stared at the green bottle, touched it gently with his fingertips, and then pulled them back and studied the traces of frost as they melted away, leaving a wet shimmer on his dark skin. Eric had told him all of it by now, and Kellen hadn’t said much yet. He’d held Eric’s eye contact throughout, though, and that was promising. One thing Eric had taken away from years of gradually deteriorating meetings with studio execs—when people questioned your judgment or believed you flat-out crazy, they began to find other places to look during a conversation.

  “I can believe this shit would give you hallucinations,” Kellen said. “What I can’t believe is that you ever drank it in the first place. Looks nasty to me.”

  “It was,” Eric said. “The first time, at least. The second time, it was fine. And that last time, this morning? Stuff was good.”

  Kellen took his hand off the bottle and scooted the chair back
a few inches.

  “Whole time we been talking, it just gets colder and colder.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Kellen eyed the bottle distrustfully. “Good news is, maybe the visions will go away if you don’t take any more of it.”

  That was probably true, but while the hallucinations were terrifying in their vividness, the other side of the coin was marked by what he’d come to think of as withdrawal symptoms, the headache and vertigo and dizziness. His head was throbbing as badly as it had all day, and even while Kellen sat there and told him how repulsive the Pluto Water looked, Eric found himself wanting another sip. Just something to take the edge off the blade that was turning slowly in his skull, a blade that seemed to have found its way to a whetstone in the past half hour. Withdrawal, indeed—he craved that infamous hair of the dog.

  “Likely your mind is just spinning out from whatever’s in the water,” Kellen said.

  “I’m telling you,” Eric said, “that guy in the train, his eyes were a perfect match for Josiah Bradford’s.”

  “I believe it. But you’d already seen Josiah’s eyes. Got an intense look at them last night. So they were already in your brain, something for your mind to fool around with when the water took you on a trip.”

  Possible, but Eric wasn’t convinced. That man on the train had been Campbell Bradford. He was sure of that in the same way that he’d been sure they had the wrong valley on that film about the Nez Perce, and in the same way he’d been sure of the importance of that photograph of the red cottage in Eve Harrelson’s collection.

  The phone on the desk began to ring. Kellen looked at him questioningly, but Eric shook his head. Let it go to voice mail. Right now he didn’t want an interruption.

  “I guess if it’s more than a drug effect, you’ll know soon,” Kellen said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If it’s a drug effect that gives you straight-up hallucinations, then they’ll stay random, right? You’ll start seeing dragons on the ceiling next. But if it’s something else, if you’re seeing… ghosts or something, well, it’ll be more of the same guy, right?”