So Cold the River (2010) (15 page)

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.

“Well, sure, I’ve heard a few,” she said. “My father worked for the company, understand. And the way he told it, the water
changed over the years. Originally, they’d just bottle it fresh out of the springs and what you drank was essentially direct
from the source. Problem they ran into with that was, the water didn’t keep. They tried putting it into kegs and casks, but
it went bad quickly. Unfit to drink. That wasn’t any real dilemma until people realized how much money could be made from
shipping the water all over. Then they had to do something about it.”

“Pasteurization?”

“Of a sort. They boiled the water to get rid of some of the gasses that were in it and then added two different kinds of salt
that fortified it, allowed it to keep. Once they had that process figured out, they bottled it and shipped it all over the
world.”

Eric Shaw nodded but didn’t speak, waiting on more. She liked that. So many people were impatient these days, hurried.

“The company and most of the people involved with it swore up and down that nothing changed in the water during that boiling
and salting.”

“Your father disagreed,” he said, and she chuckled.

“He suspected the preservation process changed what the water could do.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

“I’d be willing to believe, maybe, that water fresh from the springs had more effect than the stuff they bottled and shipped.
Isn’t that true of most things? You eat a tomato from your own garden, it tastes different than the one you buy from the store.”

“Sure.”

“He also had a notion,” she said, “that your standard-issue Pluto Water was a special thing, capable of startling healing
powers, but that there were some springs in the area that went a touch beyond that. This area is filled with mineral springs.
Some large, some small, but there’s a lot of them.”

“Did you ever hear rumors that the water caused hallucinations?”

That lifted her eyebrows. She shook her head. “I never heard that, no.”

He looked positively disappointed but was trying to conceal it, nodding his head and rushing out another question.

“What about the temperature? I’ve, uh, I’ve heard that it would stay unusually cold. That there was some sort of… a chemical
reaction, I guess, and you could leave the bottles out in a warm room but they’d stay cold, even get a little frost.”

“Well,” Anne said, “I don’t know who you’ve been getting stories from, but they sound like a colorful source. I’ve never heard
of anything like that.”

He was silent for a moment, eyes concerned, and seemed to be groping for something.

“But you had the water that had been preserved or fortified, right?” he said eventually.

“Yes.”

“What if it had been fresh water, bottled back before they did that process?”

“That would require the water being from before eighteen
ninety-three, I think,” she said. “I really couldn’t say much about that, but I never heard anything about any unusual coldness.”

“What might happen if you drank Pluto Water that hadn’t been preserved?”

“Well, the way I was always told, it simply wasn’t fit for human consumption after much time had passed.”

“And if someone
did
drink it?”

“If they could actually choke enough of it down,” Anne said, “I do believe it would be fatal.”

That seemed to rock him. He wet his lips and dropped his eyes to the porch floor and looked a little queasy. She frowned,
watching him, wondering about all these questions now, about what exactly she had on her hands here.

“You mind my asking what you’re working on?”

“A family history,” he said.

“Someone that worked for Pluto?”

“No, but I’m trying to put as much area history into it as I can. I’ll be making a film, eventually, but today I’m just doing
some preliminary work.”

“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.

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.