Michael Koryta - So Cold the River

“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.

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 was 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.