The Black Brook

Also by Tom Drury

Pacific

The Driftless Area

Hunts in Dreams

The End of Vandalism

THE

BLACK

BROOK

TOM DRURY

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 1998 by Tom Drury

Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

Cover photograph © Henry Lopez

Henrylopezphotography.com

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2306-0

eISBN 978-0-8021-9234-9

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 100113

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

FOR

VERONICA GENG

1941–1997

My poor Captain! He’s going where we are all going, and the only extraordinary thing is that he hasn’t gone there sooner.

Jacques the Fatalist

A Conversation between Tom Drury and Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler: The Black Brook is basically my favorite novel. What’s yours?

Tom Drury: That’s a tough question. I have a number of books that I try to keep nearby. Some are not novels, such as Mythologies by Yeats (though the Red Hanrahan stories make a sort of novella) or the Liaozhai stories of Pu Songling or The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena. The novels include Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata and Oh! by Mary Robison. So I’ll go with Oh!

DH: I’m a Robison fan too, although I’d probably go with Why Did I Ever as my favorite of hers.

TD: I usually find that whatever I’m reading by Mary Robison is my favorite. Oh! is her first novel, and it’s been on my essential list the longest. I can reread it entirely or let it fall open anywhere and I think, Yes, I know this part, it’s great, and I’m happy to see it again, or to find new things that I didn’t remember.

DH: Episodic is often a pejorative when people talk about novels . . .

TD: I’m a fan of the episodic. Plot in my experience tends to lumber into a story and drive everything else out. You do want to create a sense of progression, of increasing stakes, but not in a way that feels mechanical or untrue to life or dull to write. I mean, what is the plot of life? Is life not episodic?

DH: It’s funny, isn’t it, when people talk about whether or not books resemble life, because a novel that was actually realistic would be incomprehensible and dull. The Black Brook feels like life to me, but then stop and remember that it has, for instance, a version of organized crime that probably isn’t very realistic.

TD: That’s true. It’s kind of a screwball syndicate.

DH: Is The Black Brook a crime novel? Is that how you think of it?

TD: Not really. There is a lot of crime, but it tends to be fairly unusual. Absurd, even. I think I was playing off the ways that crime is portrayed in movies and fiction. And Nash’s problems are really more basic than the laws he breaks or witnesses being broken. You could say his transition into the criminal world is a symptom of what’s really going on.

DH: Sometimes when I write about crime I think it’s a cop-out, that it’s such an easy thing to put a story in motion—theft! murder! betrayal!—that I ought to think of something else. I like how The Black Brook turns a convention upside down, that the slow closing in of a threat is of almost no consequence to our hero. It’s like No Country for Old Men, if nobody cared about the money.

TD: Yeah! If Javier Bardem was so busy acquiring hair care products he forgot his pneumatic cattle-gun thing at CVS. I liked weaving everyday elements into conversations among criminals and improvising on the popular notion of gangsters trying to branch into legitimate business or applying unexpected shadings of morality to what they do. That’s what the Haunted Mortar and Pestle Conference is about—the underlings and associates are worried that the syndicate is getting too refined and losing its commitment to crime. And while the gangsters may be funny, they can also be dangerous, which is important. Nash should be afraid of them (as his relatives keep telling him) but either is too heedless by nature or feels so guilty for other reasons that he doesn’t care what happens.

DH: Seems like that ties into the whole shape of the book. People keep getting distracted.

TD: Is that what you like—the distractions? What was going on when you first read it? I’ve often wanted to ask why this book is a favorite of yours.

DH: I picked up The Black Brook—if that’s what you mean by what was going on when you read it—because I read a review of it in the Times by Luc Sante. I’d just met Sante at a conference—I admire his work, and he was very friendly towards a new whippersnapper like myself. But when he talked about writing I disagreed with just about everything he said. This was unusual for me, someone who I thought was a good writer saying things I thought were thoroughly wrong. It got me to thinking, me a new writer with just one book under my belt, about the paths different writers take, and the whole enterprise of literature, the real enormity and diversity of it, opened up for me. It sounds maybe ridiculous to say, but I realized then that there wasn’t a right way to do it.

TD: That reminds me of something Flannery O’Connor said—that it’s always wrong to say you can’t do this or that in fiction. That you can do anything you can get away with, but the thing is, no one ever gets away with much.

DH: One influence I’ve picked up in this book and in your work in general is that of literature that’s very old—epic poems and whatnot. How does that work for you?

TD: When I was a kid I had to go to church every week, and the most interesting thing there was usually the reading from the King James Bible. There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed—lines like that, that have lasted so long. Later, much later, I read the Greek classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Aeneid, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Celtic sagas, etc. I love how those stories were told. The language is clean and direct (as it was, in most cases, written by one poet and translated by another), things happen quickly, the supernatural is accepted as a part of life.

DH: Do you steal from those old stories consciously, then? Look at their structures? Or are they just part of the brain loam?

TD: Mostly I just experience the story I’m reading as fully as I can and let whatever lessons there may be sink in on their own. And epics tend to be relentlessly engaging. Otherwise the ancient storytellers would have lost their audience. When my daughter was eight or nine, I read her the Robert Fagles translation of the Odyssey. She loved it. Then we tried the Iliad, but there were too many ship names and too much violence.

DH: Steady, preferably breathless engagement is often overlooked, I think. With children’s literature it’s sink-or-swim—there aren’t too many children who will give a book the benefit of a fifty-page doubt if things get a little boring—and I’ve always been grateful to have that drilled into me, while other writers are too often taught, one way or another, that the engagement of the reader is secondary to some other goal.

TD: I have this idea that books should be of compelling interest on every page, and I’ve probably pursued that goal at the expense of following rules about how a plot is made. Well, I know I have. But for me that’s okay.

DH: Are all great books funny? This is a question I furrow over.

TD: What conclusion does your furrowing lead to?

DH: Well, when I reviewed another book of yours I took some of my soapbox time to say that all great books are strange.

TD: I agree. What I look for as a writer and reader is something that holds my attention, feels true to itself, and hasn’t been done before, or hasn’t been done in the way it’s being done on this page.

DH: Sometimes I want to add sad and/or funny. It does seem that a good book needs, if not quite humor, a way of looking askance at things.

TD: If you say all great books are anything you’re begging for somebody to raise their hand with an exception, but I can’t think of any that aren’t funny sometimes. If you represent the full array of human activities you’re bound to create moments of humor as well as sadness.

DH: The opening of The Black Brook, with the suffocating dog in the car, has something of the feel of a set piece, even if it doesn’t quite turn into a skit. (And thank goodness for that.)

TD: He’s not really suffocating, he’s just got a defective sense of balance that makes him alarming to watch. I usually start with something like that, a situation that seems to call for action, however misinformed that action may turn out to be.

DH: Being misinformed seems key. I like that Nash has to keep telling people that the forged-painting angle is not relevant, and then it turns out to be the crux of the matter. Was the painting central for you right away? Sante compared The Black Brook to a primitivist painting, and I wondered if that made any sense to you?

TD: Some sense, though I don’t know very much about primitivist painting. I was going by instinct rather than theory. There are a number of people and things in the book, and what you might call plot elements are mixed in with everything else. While writing The Black Brook I had a grid of portraits by Sargent taped to the wall of my office. Each one was supposed to represent a character in the book. I don’t know that it helped organize the book, but it did make the wall more interesting. Anyway at some point I ran across The Black Brook, which seemed very different from the portraits. The paint is rough and impressionistic especially for Sargent and the subject is a young woman sitting by a stream and looking to the side with her face in shadow and her hands in bright sunlight. It’s really more of a landscape-with-person than a portrait. She looks as if her thoughts are far away—she can hardly be bothered with being painted or she’s not aware of it. It was not hard to imagine a dying crime boss becoming fascinated with the painting because I was fascinated with the painting. And it reminded me of the ghost in the novel, who is also kind of elusive.

DH: Did you consider making up a painting?

TD: I don’t think so. I wanted a painting that readers would be able to see. The hardback had a reproduction on the cover, made to look like it had been torn from an art book and taped to the wall of a prison cell. I also liked the idea of gangsters casing the Tate Gallery to see if the painting could be stolen, which I suppose you could do with an imagined painting, but it’s better if it’s there in reality. And a Sargent painting figures into an earlier scene, when Nash sees the mural he did for the Widener Library at Harvard, so it made sense that it would be one of his.

DH: It’s one of the few books I can think of that utilizes a real cultural artifact without being annoying. With so many books the album, the movie star, the reclusive author, feels like cheap cheating.

TD: Uh-oh. I had a reference to the song The Sporting Life by the Decemberists in The Driftless Area.

DH: I know Colin Meloy was tickled by that song’s mention.

TD: Really? That’s a cool thing to know. Have you read Enrique Vila-Matas? Bartleby & Co. and Dublinesque are wonderful novels in which the characters obsess on the work and lives of real authors. You can guess some of them from the titles. My books can seem to come from an older time, so I don’t mind putting in one or two contemporary things as a change-up.

DH: Oh, OK, so sometimes it works. I’m easily swayable when I like a book. I read David Markson, I think everybody should write like David Markson, until I read Pete Dexter or Muriel Spark or Toni Morrison or old Spanish ballads and then everybody should write like that. I mean, A Series of Unfortunate Events is little more than shout-outs and references to other books.

TD: This goes back to what Flannery O’Connor said—some things never work, until they do. What I don’t like is when a novel tells you the brand of watch the character is wearing but I don’t know, maybe that could be done successfully too.

DH: I think I’ve told you this before, but sometimes in a bookstore when I’m trying to convince a friend to buy The Black Brook, I find a passage which begins "The campus had its problems, and there was in fact a monthly newsletter called Campus Problems. I find that passage—even just that line—hilarious and sad. But I understand that other people might think something else about it. So I find that line and say, If you think that’s good, you’ll like this book."

TD: I’m happy that you like that sentence. Just by looking at it you can see how it evolved.

DH: Did you steal that from ordinary life? Is your dialog overheard?

TD: Campus problems was made up. I might use overheard dialogue on occasion, but only if it’s really memorable and I can take it out of its context and put it in a new one. Memory is a good filter. That which sounds interesting today you may forget by next week, but if you remember something for years then you have to assume it has meaning, though you may not know what that meaning is, which is all the better.

DH: I feel like 60 percent of what people say is accidental poetry, with its squiggy grammar, wait-I-changed-my-mind midsentence, slightly-off clichés, the whole bit. I recently met a tech guy who started talking to me and I thought if I transcribed it, it would be the best John Ashbery poem in the history of the world.

TD: I would read that. When I was a journalist I would tape and transcribe whenever possible, even on deadline sometimes, which I don’t recommend if you want to remain on good terms with editors. I liked the old cassette recorders because you could see the reels turning so you knew the thing was working. Now we have digital recorders and there is a light but how many of us really know what the light means?

DH: I had some journalism gigs early on—nowhere near as extensive as yours—and I always thought that transcription was a great crash course in dialog, learning the patterns of it, figuring out how to edit.

TD: I used to love transcribing. I’m not sure why because it’s tedious in many ways and takes forever. But capturing the way that people actually talk—the important things left out, the obscure things added, the direct questions that don’t get answered—seemed really necessary.

DH: Speaking of careers, career-wise this seems like maybe it was your difficult second album.

TD: I was aware of writing something different than The End of Vandalism, which was a novel set in the Midwest and originating from childhood memories though not about children. The Black Brook drew more on my experiences as a reporter in New England in my twenties and early thirties, and it is more troubled and less subject to resolution. There is no strange but self-repairing community for Nash to fall back on. He is out in the world, and some of this feeling of isolation mirrored my own while writing it. It was a hard book to finish. They all are, but this one especially. I did not want to let Nash go without saving him somehow. So I put in some encouraging words from an oxyacetylene torch welder working away happily in the middle of the night. Some people who liked The End of Vandalism did not like The Black Brook, and probably vice versa—though I did think Sante, whom we keep mentioning, was onto something when he likened the book to whistling past the graveyard.

DH: Can you look at it now? I just had to reread a book of mine, published about the same time, and it was like eating ground glass.

TD: I read it last week to prepare for this. First time I’ve ever read it again. I read it as a memoir carried on by other means and it felt all right to remember all the enthusiasms and Deep Questions that inspired the various elements. Where I would do things differently (and one would always do some things differently), I was able to accept the fact that I’m fallible. Hindsight’s killing me/Too much memory—do you know this song? Built to Spill, a very fine song.

DH: Speaking of hindsight, I read The Black Brook for the first time on my honeymoon, a long, five-week jaunt in various European locales, and I saw a path there, in The Black Brook. What I sensed most of all is that it was something made by an individual with an individual point of view. I think it was the first time I understood that that kind of individuality is actually the essence of literature, and every time I reread The Black Brook, it doesn’t just bring me the comfort and joy of reading a novel I really like. It keeps me on the path—my own path, the way the book stays on its path.

TD: And you’re still married.

DH: There you go.

I

RASPORAS

1

It was a hot dry dusty summer day in New Hampshire. Mary and Paul Emmons had just taken a booth in a diner called Happy’s when Mary noticed a dog in a car in the parking lot with its head turned upside down.

What’s the matter with that dog? she said.

Where? said Paul.

Mary touched the screen. Rust flakes fell to the windowsill. Down there.

I don’t see it.

I don’t think it has enough air to breathe.

I don’t see a dog

Paul and Mary were natives of the United States who had lived in Belgium for the past six years. Before that, they had owned a house in Providence, where Paul had been an account­ant. Then he came under indictment and eventually testified in a well-publicized criminal trial, for which the federal government gave him a new identity.

When the trial was over, Mary and Paul moved to Spokane. But they did not like Spokane, things did not work out so well for them there, and after seven months in Spokane they got on a plane and flew to Belgium, where Mary had relatives whom she had visited during her childhood summers.

Mary and Paul ended up living and working in a modest hotel in the Ardennes. Mary managed the inn and Paul kept the books, and between them they had to perform every sort of hotel duty except fixing the electrical wiring. It felt like, and was, a life in exile. Paul had more guilty knowledge than Mary, but Mary had some too. She was not a CPA but she understood numbers.

They had been warned never to come back to New England, but this was the third time they had done so. The urge to return is great among protected witnesses, and the more Paul and Mary came back, the less threatened they felt. They drove past their old house in rented cars with their arms resting in open windows. It was a shame how the place had fallen apart, with tall scorched grass and sagging gutters. They visited Paul’s family down in South County, neither making a show of their presence nor trying to hide. In movies it may seem that gangsters have nothing better to do all day than hunt down and shoot turncoat accountants, but in the Emmonses’ experience the opposite was true.

During these rare visits to the States, however, Paul and Mary found it difficult to get along with Paul’s family. His mother and father, and especially his aunts and uncles and cousins, seemed both jealous of Mary’s Belgian relatives and hostile to Mary and Paul themselves. The truth is Paul’s family had never been that wild about Mary, who even before her banishment among French speakers would lapse into French for no particular reason. And Paul had thrown a cloud over the family, first by conspiring to racketeer and then by informing on people who had once considered him, if not their friend, at least their associate.

After a week of visiting Paul’s relatives in Rhode Island, Mary and Paul were always more than ready to drive up to New Hampshire, where they owned thirty-nine acres of maples and meadows and evergreens, not far from Carr Mountain and the Polar Caves.

A waitress in red shorts and a white sweatshirt brought laminated menus that felt sharp enough to cut paper, Paul and Mary ordered, and as the waitress walked away they could see the small flags of many nations printed on the back of her sweatshirt.

Mary pressed her light thick hair back along the sides of her head, her eyes widened, and she stabbed Paul’s hand with the prong of a barrette. There that dog is, she said. Look now. You can only see him when he’s on this side of the car.

Paul looked. He saw a tan dog whose neck was twisted so that the bottom of the jaw pointed almost straight up. The dog seemed to be staggering in circles. It would climb onto the passenger seat again and again, only to stumble down onto the floorboard each time.

He doesn’t look very good, Paul conceded.

He must be suffocating.

Hard to say from this angle, Mary.

By the time the waitress in the flag sweatshirt brought food to the booth, other patrons had gathered at the windows, making the dog’s predicament harder for Paul to dismiss. A thin man in a black baseball hat spoke up loudly to ask if the driver of the car — a gray Audi with a Princeton sticker in the back window — was in the diner. No answer.

Some people, said a redhead who held a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a lighter in the other. You don’t leave a dog with the windows rolled up in heat like this.

It’s not right, agreed an old man whom some of the others had called Judge, although he did not necessarily look like a member of the judiciary.

And they’re from Princeton, said the man in the black hat. You’d think they would know better.

They have education, all right, but no common sense, said the woman who gripped her smoking materials like pistols.

You know it, Bonnie, said the old man. Some people have learned too much.

Mary put her fork down. I’m not eating.

Maybe it’s unlocked, said Paul.

They walked out of the diner and down a flight of cement stairs to the gravel lot. Sun glinted on the closed windows of the Audi. They tried the handles but there was not even a click that would have suggested engagement with some opening mechanism.

The car had been washed not long ago, and its gleaming charcoal surface, dusted with fine sand, seemed especially closed to Paul and Mary. They stood watching the dog, who climbed and fell, climbed and fell, and whose left ear, they could now see, was turned inside out.

Paul said that the dog almost seemed drunk.

Of course he seems drunk, said Mary. Because what does liquor do? It cuts the flow of oxygen to the brain. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe and now he’s going to die.

Wouldn’t he just pass out?

He will if we stand here long enough, said Mary. He’ll pass out and then die.

Paul put his hands on his knees and made eye contact with the dog. It seemed like the usual dog, dealing with enclosure through meaningless repetitive motion, except that its head and ear were very strange. There must be a tire iron in our car. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Something heavy.

Mary ran off, her yellow dress swaying in the wavering heat. When she returned she carried a cruciform lug wrench that she handed to Paul. He hefted the wrench in his right hand and scanned the smooth curving glass. What would a sensible person do? A swing of the tire iron would either save the dog’s life or simply break the window of an expensive car with a grotesque dog inside. Perhaps the dog had rabies and would jump out and bite them. Then they would have to get all those shots in the stomach, if that was still the treatment for rabies. Perhaps bits of glass would fly into the dog’s eyes, adding blindness to its many other problems.

Mary tapped the glass, chewed her fingernail, placed her hands on her hips. "Vogue la galère," she said.

What if the dog has rabies? said Paul.

I can’t see driving around casually with a rabid dog.

All right. Probably they wouldn’t, said Paul.

Just then a short stout man with a long white apron and a gray goatee came running down the stairs. Wait, he said. I’m Happy.

Excuse me? said Paul.

They call me Happy. I run the diner.

Oh, I got you.

I have an idea where you can find the owners, said Happy. They’re probably down the street at L’Embarras du Choix. That’s another restaurant — they serve French food — and their customers are not supposed to use this parking lot, but a lot of times they do anyway.

Happy’s words made Paul happy, though he understood how keenly Mary had wanted to hear and see that breaking glass.

Hurry she said. There isn’t much time.

Paul loped down the street of the New Hampshire town, past young trees with broken branches, past a newspaper store with model airplanes in the window, past a souvenir shop called Not Just Unicorns. A brass plate bore the name of the French restaurant. Paul stood before two wooden doors with opaque windows, of frosted glass. He wiped the sweat from his eyes. He did not want to go in, because he knew what he would find: people with money. He had tried once upon a time to get money himself and instead had been relegated to a tumbledown inn in Belgium. Not long before this trip, in fact, he had experienced a strange moment of self-awareness at the inn. He had been pouring liquid drain opener into a sink, scratching his stomach and looking absently out at cows standing in the Ardennes rain. Suddenly he had the notion that he had been doing these things forever — pouring, scratching, looking — and that in arriving at this moment he had come at last to his essence. And now, on the verge of entering the restaurant, he felt as if the customers, when their heads turned in his direction, would not see a hero trying to save the life of a dog but someone frozen ludicrously in time with a bottle of drain opener in his hand.

Nonetheless, in he went. Cool air brushed his ears, brown velvet covered round tables, diners huddled over pale glasses, and candles burned with steady light.

I’m very sorry said a waiter, but you can’t come in here wearing tennis shoes.

Won’t be long, said Paul, moving to the center of the restaurant. Excuse me, folks. There’s an Audi parked down the street with Maryland plates and a dog inside. I need to find the owner.

Nothing happened at first. Then a man stood slowly at one of the tables. He wore a canvas jacket with a green suede patch on one shoulder and an expression of infinite patience. I have an Audi, and I have a dog.

It seems to be running out of air, said Paul.

Yes, said the man. That’s what he’s like.

His head is upside down.

Rusty has a problem with his head, said the man. What of it? He laughed quietly. A woman sitting at his table took a drink of wine and gazed mildly around the room. Now Paul heard condescending laughter from other tables as well. It was the very sort of class antagonism that he had anticipated.

Well, I wouldn’t presume to tell you about your own dog, said Paul. But I can tell you this — there’s a mob of people about to knock the windows out of your car.

The man extended his hand and introduced himself as Raymond Scovill, as if Paul had, through his persistence, passed some kind of test. They left the restaurant together and walked to the diner called Happy’s. The sun beat down, but Raymond Scovill stopped to light a pipe and in general could not be hurried. Perhaps by now Mary had broken the window and discovered that the dog was not suffering from oxygen deprivation after all. Paul hoped the window was intact. He hoped that someone cautious had taken charge of the tire iron. He wondered what it would cost to replace the window and clean thousands of slivers of safety glass from the interior. Perhaps a special high-powered vacuum cleaner would be required.

I don’t mind explaining, said Raymond. And it’s a good thing, I expect, that people are concerned. But I can tell you, the dog is fine.

You’ve got to leave some ventilation.

Raymond nodded with a mouthful of smoke. The pipe bobbed up and down. No, you’re right of course. But it’s not as if the car is airtight. I drive around with the windows closed, and I seem to get along all right.

It’s different when the car is moving

Raymond shrugged. Point taken.

What is wrong with the dog?

"It’s a condition of the inner ear. We believe there was an infection that went unchecked when he was a pup. It’s a long story. We picked Rusty up at an animal shelter in Bethesda some years ago. He had arrived at the shelter in much the same shape as you see him in today. Smaller, of course, but functionally the same. The funny thing is that Rusty enjoys traveling. Although I