So Cold the River (2010) (7 page)

He ate dinner at the casino’s buffet, taking his time, nothing left to do until nine, when he was supposed to meet the graduate
student. The kid had told Eric he’d be driving down from Bloomington that night, so they’d agreed to meet late and grab a
drink at the hotel bar. Not much else had been said in the e-mail exchange, so Eric had no idea how helpful the kid might
be.

When he got back outside, the grounds were bathed in long shadows, the sun fading behind the tree-covered hills above. There
was a back road connecting the two hotels and the casino, used by shuttles to ferry gamblers back and forth, and he took that
on the return trip. Ahead of him was an old Chevy Blazer with a worn-out muffler, steep tree-lined hills on the left, a low
valley with train tracks on the right. Four deer stood grazing in the valley, regarding the cars curiously but not fearfully.
He had the windows down and his arm resting across the door and his mind was on Claire, disconnected from his surroundings,
until he saw the leaves.

They were down on the right, in a short field that ran between the railroad tracks and a creek. A cluster of dead leaves soaked
by winter snows and spring rains and then baked to parchment under this unseasonable sun. He looked away from the road as
the Blazer in front of him crackled and roared and pulled away, put his foot on the brake and turned the wheel, and brought
the Acura to a stop on the side of the road, watching.

The leaves were spinning in a circle, rising several feet off the ground but remaining tightly packed, swirling in a perfect
vortex. It was the sort of thing you’d see during the fall in Chicago, where the winds eddied between buildings, trapped by
tons of concrete and steel and forced into unusual patterns. But out here, in an open field, when the wind seemed to blow
only out of the west and had nothing to redirect it, that circle was unusual. Even the wind itself seemed tremulous, lending
an uneasy quality to the way those leaves danced and spun. Yes, that was the word.
Uneasy
.

He put the car in park and opened his door and stepped out into the wind, felt it wrap his shirt around his body and lift
warm road dust to his nostrils, a smell that reminded him of summer labor during college, when he’d hauled wheelbarrows around
construction sites for a Missouri masonry company. He left the road with the car running and the door only half closed, an
electronic chime pinging after him, and walked down the short hill and into the tall grass on the other side. Up the little
ridge and onto the tracks, and then he stopped, looking down at those leaves.

The vortex had thickened now, attracting more leaves. It was at least eight feet tall and maybe four feet in diameter at the
top and one foot at the bottom. Swirling clockwise, a little rise and fall in the motion, but generally a perfect circle.

For a moment he was completely captivated, holding his breath and staring, but then his mind kicked into gear and he thought,
Get the camera, dumbass.

He hurried back to the Acura and dug the camera and tripod out, sure that when he turned his back, the leaves would have
settled, this rapturous moment gone. They were still turning, though, and he walked up to the gravel ridge where the train
tracks ran and got the camera set up and turned on.

For this he wanted the zoom reduced as much as possible, a wide-angle shot that captured the bizarre look. The light was poor,
the gray gloom of twilight, but it was enough to work with. Behind the swirling leaves the deer stood at the edge of the tree
line and stared at him. He’d been standing with his eye to the viewfinder for a few seconds before their ears rose and, one
after another in a silent sequence, they took quick leaps into the trees and vanished. It wasn’t until the last one disappeared
that he became aware of a sound, faint at first but building rapidly. Wind was part of the sound—more wind in his ears than
there was in the air, heavy and roaring. There was something else over the top of it, though, light and lilting. A violin.

Now a third sound joined in, lower than both the violin and the wind, and at first he thought it was the steady plucking of
a cello or bass. Then it grew louder and he realized it wasn’t an instrument at all, but an engine, the sound of heavy gears
straining, pounding along in constant rhythm. The violin rose to a frantic shrieking and then vanished abruptly, and the wind
died down and the leaves fell out of the vortex and scattered over the ground, one blowing across the grass and trapping itself
against Eric’s leg.

The engine sound was louder than ever, approaching fast, and Eric turned from the camera and looked up the railroad tracks
and saw the cloud. It was a roiling, midnight-colored mass sitting low on the horizon and blowing in fast. He stood in the
middle of the tracks and stared up at it, feeling the fading sun on the back of his neck but seeing nothing but darkness ahead,
and then the clouds parted and fell back and a train emerged from the center.

It was a locomotive, and that malevolent dark cloud was boiling out of its stack, thick snakes of black steam. A whistle screamed,
and Eric could feel the vibrations under his feet now, the rails trembling with the approaching weight, loose gravel rattling.

The train was moving faster than any he’d ever seen, and he was standing right in its path. He stepped to the side and caught
the tip of one shoe on the rail, stumbled and almost fell as he lifted the tripod and scrambled down off the tracks and into
the grass where the fallen leaves lay. When the locomotive thundered by him, he had to turn from the tracks and lift one arm
to shield his face. Then the whistle split the air again and he looked up at the boxcars whirling by and saw that the train
was colorless, all shades of black and gray except for one white car with a splash of red in the Pluto Water logo. The door
of this car was open and a man hung from it, his feet inside the car and his torso extended, weight resting on the hand clasped
to the edge of the door. He wore an old-fashioned suit with a vest and a bowler hat. As the car approached he looked at Eric
and smiled and tipped his hat. It seemed like a gesture of gratitude. His dark brown eyes held a liquid quality, shimmering,
and Eric could see that he was standing in water, some of it splashing over the side, glistening in the darkness that surrounded
the train.

Then the train was by, an all-black caboose at the end, and the accompanying cloud lifted and Eric stood staring into the
sky, looking at nothing. A car came down the road, swerving into the oncoming lane briefly as it passed the Acura, and the
woman behind the wheel gave Eric a curious look but didn’t slow, went on toward West Baden Springs on the heels of a train
she clearly hadn’t seen.

T
HE SENSE THAT CREPT
over him then was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, reality and the world he knew separating and speeding away
from each other. He’d seen the train so clearly, had smelled the heat and felt the earth shudder. It had been
real,
damn it.

But now it was gone. Faded into the evening air like an apparition, and he was sure that the woman who’d just passed by had
not seen a thing. There was not so much as a trace of smoke in the sky.

Even the wind was gone. That thought brought the spinning leaves back into his mind, and he turned to the camera and flicked
open the display window. The leaves had been real. He had
that
crazy shit on tape.

He punched the rewind button and then play, jumped through some film from the casino until he reached the gloomy field and
train tracks and the…

empty sky.

There were no leaves in the air on this tape. Nothing except the tracks and the trees and the tall grass waving in the wind.

He went back to the casino shots again, played the video all the way through, squinting at the screen, and again saw no trace
of the spinning leaves.

“Bullshit,” he said aloud, staring at display. “Bullshit, you are so full of shit…”

“I thought a camera could never lie,” someone said from above him, and Eric lifted his head and looked up to see a young black
guy watching him. He’d pulled up behind the Acura and gotten out of his car and Eric hadn’t noticed any of it as he stood
there staring obsessively at a camera that was calling him a liar.

“I’m not certain,” the guy said, “but I think I was on my way to meet you.”

Eric cocked his head and gave a closer look. The guy was tall, probably six four at least, and very dark, with short hair
and wide shoulders. Dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt that hung loose and untucked.

“Kellen Cage?” Eric said. This was not who he’d expected to be doing a thesis on the history of a rural Indiana town.

“Ah, so you are Eric.”

“How did you figure that out?”

“In your e-mail you said you were working on some sort of film project. And I’m no detective but I can’t imagine there are
many people walking around here with a camera like that.”

“Right.”

“What are you shooting?” Cage said, surveying the area.

“Ah, nothing. Landscape, you know.”

“Yeah? Well, you ought to park somewhere else, man, or at least close the door. Somebody’s gonna take it off, you leave it
like that.”

Kellen Cage had walked closer, all the way down the hill, and
he looked even younger now. Maybe twenty-five, twenty-six at best. His size was more evident down here, too. Eric wasn’t a
small guy—six feet and one hundred and eighty pounds that had been pretty hard pounds before he’d left L.A.—but this Kellen
Cage, taller and broader and knotted with muscle, made Eric feel tiny.

“So what’s the problem with your camera?” Cage said when Eric didn’t respond.

“Nothing, man. Nothing.”

“You were giving it one hell of a lecture over nothing.” He had his head leaned to the side, was studying Eric with a skeptical
look. Eric didn’t answer, just set to work removing the camera from the tripod and replacing it in its case.

“So what kind of film are you doing?” Kellen Cage asked.

“Oh, just a minor thing, nothing worth talking about but something that pays, and considering doing more. What about you?”

He was struggling with the camera because his hands were shaking, and he hoped Cage hadn’t noticed.

“Been coming down here for months,” Cage said. “Working on a thesis for my doctorate up at Indiana. I’d like to get a book
out of it, though. Came down and thought, man, there’s a lot here. Hate to waste it.”

“Focusing on the hotel?”

“Nope. All the historical attention paid to this place has revolved around the hotels and Taggart and Sinclair, but there’s
a strong black history, too. Joe Louis came down here all the time, used to train here before big fights, thought there was
some sort of magic to the springs. Swore he never lost a fight after leaving the place. He didn’t stay in this hotel, though—stayed
at a place called the Waddy that was for blacks. And they had a baseball team made up of porters and cooks and groundskeepers
from
the hotels who played with the major-league clubs that came down here for spring training. Played
well
with them, is the way it’s told, beat the Pirates once. The black teams they had down here could’ve played with anybody.”

Eric finally had the camera in the bag. It took him a few seconds to realize that Kellen Cage had stopped talking and was
waiting on a response.

“I read some about Louis,” Eric said. “Didn’t know the baseball stuff.”

“Oh, there’s plenty of more important elements to it, but I always catch myself telling the sports side first. Most of what
I’m doing is focused around that Waddy Hotel. It’s important to bring these two hotels back to life. I just want to make sure
the Waddy doesn’t get forgotten.”

Eric slid the camera bag over his shoulder, then went to pick up the tripod, dropped it, and nearly lost the camera bag when
he bent over to pick it up. Kellen Cage reached down and took the tripod.

“You want to go on to the hotel and grab that drink as planned?” he said. “No offense, my man, but you look like you
need
one.”

“Yeah,” Eric said. “Yeah, I could definitely use a drink.”

H
E DIDN’T GO UP
to the room, choosing instead to bring the camera along with him as they walked across the atrium, Kellen explaining something
about the bar’s hours and Eric hardly hearing him.

Don’t overthink it, Eric, the way you did with the Harrelson tape. The way you did in that valley in the Bear Paws. In fact,
those aren’t fair comparisons. There might have been some sort of a tug, those times. Some sort of intuition. But this thing?
That train was in your imagination, brother. Nothing else.

Eric was actually pleased to have Kellen Cage walking alongside him now. Cage promised something valuable—a distraction. Talk
to him, have a few drinks, forget this moment. Forget this trembling in the gut, this foolish, ominous sense.

“What’re you having?” Cage said when they reached the bar.

“Grey Goose on the rocks with a lemon.”

Cage turned and spoke to the bartender and Eric eased onto
the stool, turned and looked back at the sprawling atrium and took a deep breath. He just needed to relax. This thing, well,
it wasn’t anything, really. Not even worth analyzing. Just forget it.

“So, I’m truly happy to hear you’re interested in Campbell Bradford,” Kellen said, “because he’s one of the biggest question
marks I’ve got left. The old boy just disappeared when he left town.”

“Made a pile of money after he went,” Eric said. “His daughter-in-law’s the one who hired me. Said he’s worth two hundred
million or somewhere in that neighborhood.”

“You mean he
was
worth that much,” Kellen said. “Not is. Was. Has to be dead.”

“No, but he’s close.”

Kellen tilted his head back and arched an eyebrow. “The man is alive?”

“He was when I left Chicago, at least.”