“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 been 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.”
