So Cold the River

“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.”

“That’s pretty wild,” Eric Shaw said, and Anne smiled.

“Everything that built these towns came up from underground. I walk into those hotels and just shake my head, because when it comes right down to it, they wouldn’t be there except for a little bit of water that bubbles out of the ground around here. If you don’t think there’s a touch of magic to that, well, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“That’s what Pluto was supposed to represent, right?”

“Right. He’s the Roman version of Hades, which isn’t all that pleasant a connotation to most folks now, but there’s a difference between Hell and the underworld in the myths. My father did some studying on those myths. Way he understood it, Pluto wasn’t the devil. He was the god of riches found in the earth, found underground. That’s why they named the company after him, see? Thing my father always found amusing was that in the myths all Pluto was in charge of, really, was keeping the dead on the banks of the River Styx before they crossed it to be judged. So Pluto was essentially an innkeeper. And what followed the water in this town?”

She waved her hand out across her valley, the springs valley. “Inns. Beautiful, amazing inns.”

She laughed and folded her hands, put them back in her lap. “Daddy probably overthought a lot of these things.”

They were quiet for a time then. Her visitor seemed to have something else on his mind, and she was content to sit and watch the windmills spin, listen to the chimes.

“You said you were around the water a lot,” he said eventually. “Think you could recognize a bottle if I brought one to you? Tell me when it might have been made?”

“I sure could. In fact, I’ve got a bunch of them upstairs, labeled with the years. Might be able to find a match. Where are you staying? French Lick or West Baden?”

“West Baden.”

“I head down there in the afternoon and have myself a little sip. If you have the Pluto bottle, you can just bring it down. I’ll be there in a half hour or so.”

That seemed to please him, but he’d looked unsteady over the last few minutes, a fierce bit of worry clearly going on in his head, and she wondered what it was had him so concerned. Maybe he’d harbored hopes of using a lot of nonsense in his film, hallucinations and eerie cold bottles and such. Well, rare was the storyteller who got trapped by reality. She imagined he’d find his way around it easy enough.

He thanked her and got into his car and drove off down the hill, and she stayed on the porch with her hands folded in her lap. He’d come by and sparked memories on a day when they were already warm. She’d been thinking about her son, Henry, that tumble he’d taken off the porch. Then this Shaw fellow arrived and said he was from Chicago and her mind had jumped right off that porch and onto a passenger train. Harold had let her have the window seat and she’d sat with her hand wrapped in his and her eyes on the rolling countryside, the wheels on the track offering a soothing noise, light and steady, clack-clack-clack-clack. He’d helped her to her feet when the train got to Chicago, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her long and hard, and someone on the train had whistled and she’d blushed red as the Monon car that carried them.

Spring of ’thirty-nine, she’d told Eric Shaw. Spring of? ’thirty-nine.

Now she wanted to chase him down the road, pull him out of his car and shout, Yes, it was the spring of ’thirty-nine but it was also yesterday. It was an hour ago, don’t you understand? It just happened, I just took that ride, just tasted those lips, just heard that whistle.

The train had seemed faster than anything to her that day, dazzling in its speed. There were race cars that went faster than the train, though, and planes that went faster than the cars, and rockets that went faster than the planes, but what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?

The day Henry fell off the porch rail and broke his wrist, she’d scooped him into her arms and carried him up the steps and into the house before calling the doctor, doing it easily, without a thought. Today, though, she’d gone down the stairs one at a time, dragging the laundry basket behind her and clutching the railing.

She got to her feet and went inside in search of her car keys, ready to go to the hotel, a place that time had forgotten for a while and then remembered and returned to her.

18

I DO BELIEVE IT would be fatal.

Shit, what an encouraging statement that had been. Eric was past the casino parking lot and the old Pluto Water plant when his foot went heavy and hard to the brake pedal and a car behind him honked and swerved to avoid a collision. The driver shouted something as he went outside the double-yellow and passed, but Eric didn’t turn. Instead, he pulled slowly to the side of the road and into a parking space, staring out of the driver’s window.

Sitting there on a short rail spur in the middle of town was a white boxcar with a red Pluto devil painted on the side. According to the sign nearby, this was the French Lick Railway Museum, and as far as Eric could tell, it consisted of an old depot and a handful of decrepit train cars. Only one of which had caught his eye today.

He shut the engine off and got out. Might as well have a look. The wind came at him right away, warm and heavy, as he walked over to the station. When he entered, an elderly man wearing an engineer’s cap and bifocals looked up.

“Welcome!”

“Hey,” Eric said. “Yeah, look… I was just wondering…”

“Yes?”

“What’s the story on that Pluto boxcar?”

“Good-looking devil, ain’t it?” the man said and laughed as Eric felt a tide of liberation break through him. This train car was real.

“Sure is,” Eric said. “You know how old it is?”

“Oh, fifty year, maybe. Not one of the originals.”

“Okay. You mind if I take a look?”

“Shoot, no. Go on and climb inside if you’d like, but watch yourself. Them cars are taller than they look. Can fall right out of one. Say, you want to go on the next ride? Got a train runs up the valley, locomotive driven, just like the old days.”

“Locomotive driven,” Eric echoed. “They happen to run that in the evenings?”

“I’m sorry, no. Daytime only. Next ride in forty minutes. You want a ticket?”

“I don’t think so. Don’t really like trains.”

The old man looked at him as if Eric had just called his daughter easy.

“I’ve had some bad experiences with them recently, that’s all,” Eric said. “Thanks a lot.”

He closed the door and went back out into the heat and over to the Pluto car. The door was shoved most of the way shut and barely moved when he pushed on it. The size of the thing was impressive—they never looked that