So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  He was merely trying to complete the fall, but she kept interrupting it, kept trying to lift him up again. Why?

  Because she loves you. And you love her, love her more than you’ve ever loved anything in this world except for yourself, you stupid, selfish bastard, and if you can learn to deal with that, maybe it would be a start.

  She was asleep now. Hadn’t stirred or changed her breathing in a long time, and he thought that it would be safe to touch her, very lightly. He wanted to touch her. He turned onto his shoulder and reached out with his left hand and lowered it, gently as he could, onto her stomach. He felt the fabric of her shirt under his palm and felt the heat of her and the slight rise and fall of each breath. He was sure that she was asleep until she lifted her own hand and wrapped her fingers over his. For some reason when she did it, he held his breath.

  Neither of them spoke. For a long time, they just lay there in the dark with their hands joined across her flat stomach.

  “I should tell you that you are a bastard,” she whispered. “Do you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s exactly what I shouldn’t say, too. Because it’s all you really believe.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  It was quiet. After a long time, she took his hand and lifted it to her face, held his palm over her eyes. She did not speak. Soon he felt moisture on his hand. Tears. She did not make a sound.

  “I love you,” he said again, sliding toward her. “I’m sorry, and I love—”

  “Shut up,” she said, and she let go of his hand and grabbed the back of his head instead, pulled it down roughly and kissed him hard on the mouth. She tightened her fingers in his hair as she held the kiss, his scalp alight with wonderful pain.

  They shed their clothes in an awkward, frantic tangle, trying to help each other but then having to finish alone, graceless and hurried and needy. When she was naked, he rolled on top of her, still kicking his underwear from his feet, and he tried to force himself to slow down, ran a palm along her side and up her thigh in a deliberate, measured stroke as he lowered his mouth to her breast.

  “No,” she whispered, and for a terrible moment he thought she was calling him off entirely, but then she tugged on his shoulders and pulled him upward and he understood that she wanted to move quickly, perhaps because she thought it was a mistake. He was afraid of that, but then her hand was on him and guiding him and all the thoughts in his mind faded and there was only her. When he entered her, she let out a soft gasp and he dropped his face to her neck, her hair tangled about him, and for a moment he lay completely still and breathed in the smell of her hair. Then she lifted her hips and urged him forward, and though he began to move, he kept his face pressed close to hers, where he could hear her and smell her and taste her.

  They were done quickly the first time, lay breathing heavily but not speaking for a while and then began again, this time with a different pace, the slow savoring of one encountering something once feared lost. They spoke in breaths and kisses but not words, and it was quite a while before they were finished again, the sheets now damp with sweat.

  “Your hands are shaking,” she said. Her cheek was on his chest, and she was holding his right hand close to her face.

  “All of me is shaking,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

  Truth was, he seemed to have developed a muscle tremor in his hands, and the headache was returning already. He didn’t want to think about that.

  “It won’t always feel this easy,” she said.

  “I know it.”

  “Do you? Because if you want to keep running, let’s be clear on that now, and not let tonight slow you down.”

  “I don’t want to run, Claire. I want to be with you.”

  “And you want it to be easy,” she said. “Easy, and as planned. You want everything to fit into the plan, your plan. Some of us try so hard to fit into that for you. It doesn’t matter. You still can’t handle the fact that the entire world does not.”

  Her voice was weary when she said it, and he lifted his head to look down at her.

  “You sound like you’ve given up,” he said.

  “On you? On us? Oh, please, Eric. I’m the only one who never will.”

  “Then we can make it work. I know it will not be easy, or as planned. But we can make it work.”

  “You left,” she said. “You left. Don’t you remember that? And now I’m supposed to be thrilled with the idea of you coming back?”

  “You don’t me want to?”

  She snorted out a laugh of exasperation. “I didn’t want you to leave, Eric. But you did. So when you talk about making this work, forgive me if I’m a little hesitant.”

  “I love you, Claire.”

  “I know that,” she said. “The problem is, you’re going to have to figure out how to like Eric a little bit, too. Or at least be at peace with him. Until the two of you can sort that out, I’m afraid I’ll be lost in the middle.”

  She fell asleep soon, her head on his chest and her hand curled around his side, and he watched her, feeling a sense of hope and possibility that had been absent for far too long. They would fix this. They would fix it all.

  Though she did not yet know it, the water had saved him. It was the water that had returned her to him, that had her at his side right now. Without the water, he’d been alone. With it, here she was. It had revived his marriage and it would revive his career.

  The thought returned his mind to Campbell and Lucas and Shadrach, to the story that could lift him to success. He was bothered that the water he’d bottled at the spa had not produced a vision or stopped the withdrawal pains, bothered that he’d required so much from Anne’s last bottle to achieve so little. What he needed was the original. The Bradford bottle. There’d been something different about it, and while the regular Pluto Water had fed the need for a while, it was not doing the job now.

  It’s that spring, he thought, the spring that the boy’s uncle used for the moonshine. There was something different about it, and if I could find that spring…

  If he could find it, the possibilities were damn near endless. If he could find that spring, the world would just about curl up in his palm.

  But he could not find it tonight, and the headache was building and his hands were shaking and he needed to try to hold the dragon at bay if he could. He moved Claire gently, slipped out from beneath her, and went for the plastic bottle he’d filled at the spa. He’d had only a little before falling asleep the first time, and it had not been enough. He’d have to adjust, that was all. A little more, bit by bit, until he found the amount that worked. As the dark hours moved toward the light ones, he drank the water and watched his beautiful wife.

  The planning took longer than it should have, wasted more time than Josiah would have liked. But he didn’t know much of the enemy, had only limited information to work with, and that slowed him.

  He’d hung up on Danny after instructing him to continue to watch the hotel, and then he returned to pacing the woods around the old timber camp and thinking.

  Lucas himself had confirmed that his wife had hired Shaw. Now a woman from Illinois had arrived in the middle of the night, and Lucas had chosen not to send the police after Shaw. Why not? There would be layers to that answer, Josiah was sure, but one of them had just landed at the West Baden Springs Hotel, Carlsbad of North America, Eighth Wonder of the Friggin’ World.

  How to leverage that, though? The simple answer was that Josiah needed control of the situation, and that meant he needed control of both Shaw and Lucas’s wife. He went back to the dead detective’s briefcase and riffled through the papers until he came up with a name. Alyssa. Alyssa Bradford. Pretty name. Probably was a pretty girl. According to the detective’s files, she was thirty-six and Lucas was fifty-nine. Trophy wife.

  The next step was getting control of Eric Shaw and Alyssa Bradford. It wasn’t something he could accomplish with them in that hotel, but luring them out of that hotel and into a place mo
re suitable for his needs was going to be a difficult task. The only person he knew who had any ties to them was that big black kid.

  Wait a second. Wait just one moment, Josiah, use that head on your shoulders.

  He called Danny back.

  “Anything happening?”

  “Nope. Nobody’s come. I wrote down the license plate of that—”

  “Great,” Josiah interrupted. “Now tell me, Danny, you said when you followed him earlier today, he went to Anne McKinney’s house. Right?”

  “Right. Got out of his car and left the engine running and the door open and…”

  Josiah tuned him out, thinking now of the old woman’s house, that lonely, isolated place on the hill outside of town, no neighbors for a half mile in any direction.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just needed verification. You stay awake and watching, hear? I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up in the middle of a question from Danny, feeling a tingle in his limbs now, puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving him a sense of the whole. He had the crucial next step, and it was time to get moving. Dawn would be on him soon, and the less of daylight he saw, the better.

  It would be a long hike, and there was a temptation to try and avoid that, but in the end Josiah relented. He didn’t want to run the risk of taking his truck out on the roads, not even for a short drive. He filled his pockets with shells and took his shotgun, was just out of the barn when he stopped and went back and opened the door to the truck and tossed the wad of cash he’d stolen from the detective onto the driver’s seat. He’d tell Danny to come get it. Danny’d earned that much, no question. Josiah didn’t feel any great sense of loss, handing the cash over. Funny thing, but the more consumed he became with the concept of debt, the less concerned he was with money itself. Now, what kind of sense did that make?

  It was beginning to rain again when he left the timber camp and walked into the woods. Gently so far, but with thick drops and an uncommon humidity for these hours opposite the sun. He hiked up to the highway and then pushed back into the trees, keeping about forty feet from the road. All told, it was probably six miles of solid hiking to Anne McKinney’s, which would take at least two hours going through the brush. If he was at her home by dawn, that would be good enough.

  What Josiah wanted out of this was only what was owed to him. There was a dollar figure to it, and he’d settle upon one eventually, but it started with answers. He was damn sure owed some answers, and he had a feeling—no, an assurance by now—that they weren’t the sort of answers got offered up in conversation. They were the sort of answers got offered up when you had a gun barrel to someone’s head.

  He worked his tongue around his mouth and spat, that taste of tobacco growing. No cars passed on the dark, empty highway, and though the shotgun was awkward to carry, he was making good enough time, tramping along through the wet underbrush and working up a sweat. He’d spent years bitching about this place, promising himself he’d get out of the town someday and never look back. But out here in the woods, no other people around, no buildings or houses or hotels, he could appreciate what it had. It was beautiful land, really, rich and filled with strange gifts. It was the valley of his birth, the valley of his ancestors. Wouldn’t be so terrible if it ended up being the valley of his death, too. No, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.

  The whole place was supposed to be coming alive again, was supposed to be on the threshold of a grand return. There were those who doubted it would happen, but the groundwork had been laid, and those hotels shone beside their casino, and through it all nobody remembered the Bradfords, nobody recalled that Campbell had been the man that made it work for years. Hell with Taggart and Ballard and Sinclair. Some men had visions, others had deeds.

  “They forgot you, Campbell,” Josiah whispered as he ducked under a branch and came up into a wind-whipped burst of rain. “You loved this valley more than any of them. Still do.”

  He should have felt strange to be talking to his dead ancestor, maybe, but he didn’t. Felt close to him, in fact, felt the meaning of blood kin in a way he never had before. They were shared people, he and Campbell. Different versions of the same blood. Now, that was heavy stuff.

  “I’ll make ’em remember you,” he said. “Might have to burn this whole town down to do it, but I’ll make ’em remember you, and I’ll get what’s owed to us.”

  That last notion—of burning the town to the ground in order to see Campbell get his due—lingered in his mind. He envisioned those damn hotels going up in the same way the private eye’s van had, a burst of white-to-orange heat, and he smiled. That would be fucking gorgeous. See the shining dome of the West Baden hotel exploding into a cloud of flame? Yes, that would be as sweet a sight as he’d ever happened across. Wouldn’t be as easy as blowing that van up had been, though. It would require a good bit more than a pocketknife and a cigarette lighter, would require time and high-grade explosives and…

  He stopped walking. The wind had died momentarily but now it returned in an irritable gust, blowing a squall line of rain into his face. It hit hard, the water like pebbles on his flesh, but he didn’t so much as blink. Just stood there staring into the dark.

  High-grade explosives.

  He’d just walked a few miles away from an abandoned timber camp where a box of explosives sat, those strange sausage-looking dynamite strands. It was old stuff, probably not even potent enough to blow. Certainly not worth the walk back, because even if he had the shit, what in the hell was he going to do with it? The shotgun would be all the assistance he required. And yet…

  It had been there for him. A box of dynamite, sitting in a barn that had stood empty for as long as he could remember. It felt almost planned, felt almost… promised.

  All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me.

  Yes, that was a promise. Consistent as clockworks, that’s what Campbell had called himself, and who cared that he was a dead man—he was a stronger friend than Josiah had left among the living.

  He wiped the rainwater from his face and turned his head and spat and looked up at the hill he’d just climbed down, a slow, painstaking climb. No way he could carry that box of explosives all the way to Anne McKinney’s house. Not if he had all day, and he didn’t. He’d have to take the truck, and that was one hell of a risk.

  “That shit won’t even be good anymore,” he said. “No way it’s still good.”

  And yet it was there. As if it had been waiting for him. And all he had to do was listen…

  He was halfway back up the hill before the rain started again in earnest.

  47

  THERE WERE NO VISIONS.

  Eric couldn’t believe it after the first hour—and half of the bottle—had passed, went back and drank the rest down, waited thirty minutes, and started on the second bottle.

  Nothing.

  The headache might have faded. Might have. It didn’t worsen, but didn’t disappear either, and his hands shook unless he held them clenched together. A tremor had taken hold in his left eyelid, too, made it hard to watch Claire, the damn thing fluttering constantly, twitching. This was not good.

  He got back into bed as dawn rose, lay behind Claire’s tightly curled body and stroked her arms and smelled her hair. Her presence was comforting, but still the water’s lack of impact nagged at him. He could go for Anne’s water in a few hours. Maybe that would help. But he was no longer sure that it would, and he was sure that it wouldn’t be enough. Not after the way he’d gone through it tonight.

  So it was the spring, then. The source itself. He had to find it.

  He did not sleep. About an hour after he got back into the bed, Claire woke slowly, letting out a soft groan before stretching and rolling over to face him, and he leaned over and kissed her. When he did that, her eyes opened for the first time and he saw a flicker in them, a trace of anger. What am I doing in bed with you? her eyes seemed to say. You left. Why am I here with you again?

  It would be that way, th
ough. It would have to be. A smooth return wasn’t reasonable; too much had happened, there would have to be awkward, painful moments. But he could minimize them. He could try to do that.

  “Morning,” she said, and he had a feeling she was thinking the same thoughts.

  “Morning.”

  She sat up, pulling the sheet up to cover herself, and ran both hands through her hair, then held them to her face, eyes lost in thought.

  “Is that a What have I done? look or a What do we do now? look?” Eric said.

  “Neither,” she said, and then, “both.”

  But she smiled, and that was enough. He kissed her again and this time she returned it without the same flicker in the eyes.

  “What we do now,” she said, “is the simple part. Today, at least.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We go home.”

  He looked away.

  “Eric?”

  “You said we would talk it out in the morning,” he said. He had his hands pushed hard against the mattress, to still the shaking lest she notice.

  “I also said that I would not stay.”

  “There’s something I need to do,” he said. “Something I need to resolve first. Once it’s resolved, I’ll leave with you. I promise I will leave with you. But first there are a few things I need to know. Document who the boy’s uncle was, for one. That will be a legal help, Claire, maybe an important one.”

  She didn’t respond. He felt desperation creeping on.

  “I need you to understand, Claire, that what I’m going through, what’s happening to me, it’s powerful. It is strong. So I’m just struggling to deal with it, figure it out.”

  “I know that.”

  “Twelve hours, then. Give me that much. Give me one day.”

  “What can possibly be accomplished in a day?”

  “I can try to get the answers I just told you I needed,” he said. “If I can’t do it by then, we’ll leave, go home, and figure the rest of it out from there.”

  I can find that spring in twelve hours. I better. I sure as shit better.