The Wells of Hell

I
t was one of those crisp, cold
afternoons in Connecticut when the leaves are rusting off the trees and the sky
is as clear and blue as a child’s eyes. I came bouncing up the driveway of the
Bodines’ place in my dusty Country Squire, my eyes screwed up against the fall
sunlight that sparkled through the trees, my red baseball cap firmly tugged
down and my sheepskin collar firmly pulled up. In the back of the station
wagon, all my wrenches and spanners and lengths of pipe banged and jangled, and
my faithful cat Shelley sat beside me in the passenger seat, his paws neatly
together and his ears shining bright pink.

I pulled up in front of the house
and climbed out. I said to Shelley: ‘You coming?’ But he closed his eyes as if
he was feigning a headache, and that meant he considered it was too damned cold
out there, and he’d rather stay where he was and listen to the radio, the lazy
s.o.b. I said: ‘Please yourself,’ and left him. I walked through drifts of
curled, crunchy leaves to the front verandah. The Bodine house was a big old
Victorian place, set on a low hill on a curve of Route 109, between New Milford
and Washington Depot. This was quiet, rural country, all trees and tiny
hamlets, and now the tourists and weekenders had all gone back to New York
City, it was populated as sparsely as it had been back in colonial days, and
everybody was snuggling themselves down for the winter.

Jimmy Bodine was in back, raking
leaves. He was a young guy, not more than twenty-five, which made him a whole
decade younger than me. He had curly blond hair and buck teeth, and in his
plaid lumberjack coat he looked like somebody out of an old Norman Rockwell
painting. He said: ‘Hi, Mason,’ and leaned on the handle of his rake.

‘How are you doing?’ I asked him.

‘Okay. Pretty raw this morning,
ain’t it?’

I sniffed the sharp, smoky air.
‘You betcha.
Do you want to go inside?’

‘Sure. Alison s got some coffee on.’

He set his rake against the back
verandah rail, and we went in through the screen door to the kitchen. It was
warm and fragrant in there, with copper moulds hanging on an old pine hutch and
a cake cooling on every window-ledge. Alison Bodine was just taking out a tray
of cinnamon and apple cookies, and I thought to myself that when I died there
could be worse ways to go than choking on Alison Bodine’s cookies while making
love to Raquel Welch on a well-sprung mattress.

Alison Bodine looked older than
Jimmy, somehow, but then she’d always been the motherly type. She had dark
hair, drawn back in a bun, and a thin friendly face with wide brown eyes. She
was real small, one of those tiny women you could never hold around the waist,
only round the neck, not without kneeling anyway. She said: ‘How are you doing,
Mason?’ and brought down three pottery mugs and poured coffee.

We sat down at the heavy old kitchen
table and ate cookies while the pale afternoon light came straining through the
windows.

‘You’re having trouble with the well,
then?’ I asked them.

Jimmy just managed to catch a piece
of cookie that crumbled as he bit it. ‘That’s right,’ he nodded, collecting
fragments. ‘It’s pretty recent.
Only about the past two or
three days.
But I’m worried in case we’re going to have trouble with it
during the winter, when the ground’s hard.’

‘Well, you’re right to call me,’ I
told him. ‘What’s going wrong, exactly?’

‘It’s not all the time, but every
now and then the water’s been coming out discoloured.
Kind of
yellowy-greenish.
Not a strong colour.
Just a tint.
And it
don’t
taste of nothing, neither. But it
don’t
look right.’

Alison nodded. ‘I’m kind of hesitant
to use it, you know? I’ve heard all that stuff about seepage and chemical
fertilisers getting into the water supply.’

‘Does it run clear if you leave the
faucets open?’ I asked them.

Jimmy nodded.
‘If
we leave it running for ten, fifteen minutes.’

‘And how about
residue?
Does it
leave a ring around your basin? Is there any sediment in it?’

‘No, nothing.
The water is just tinted.’

I sipped at my coffee. It didn’t
sound like anything very important to me. There were all kinds of factors that
could affect the quality of well water – soil, minerals, seepage – and the only
thing that the Bodines really had to worry about was somebody’s sewage leaking
into the water table. We’d had a pretty wet year, on the whole, and that meant
the ground was saturated. When the underground water levels were as high as
they were now, they could occasionally flow into a septic system, but the
chances of that happening were pretty rare. From what the Bodines were saying,
it sounded to me like their water was filtering through some underground
minerals or vegetable matter, and that was what was colouring it up.

‘The best I can do is
take
a sample,’ I told them. ‘I could have it over to New
Milford this evening, and if Dan Kirk does a rush job on it for me, I could let
you know by this time tomorrow. It doesn’t sound
none
too serious, though. I remember a couple of years ago, up at Kent, an old
fellow turned on his faucet and the water came out the colour of blood. It was
only some kind of potassium in the soil, and all we had to do was dig the well
a few feet deeper.’

Alison gave a vague smile. ‘Well,
that sounds more reassuring. I was worried the water was poisoned.’

‘You haven’t been sick, have you?’ I
asked her.

‘Not at all.
None of us have.’

‘Young Oliver’s okay?’

‘He’s fine.
Tough
as a truckload of logs.’

I finished my coffee, and stood up.
‘Do you want to lend me a glass jelly jar, something of that kind, so that I
can take a sample?’

‘Sure thing,’ said Alison, and
brought me one from her cupboard. I stole another cinnamon and apple cookie
from the plate and stuffed it into my mouth as I followed her through into the
scullery. No wonder I was having trouble with my waistline. A fellow could jog
three miles before he’d burn off one of those cookies.

‘At first I thought it was rust from
the pipes,’ said Jimmy, as we gathered around the sink.

‘Oh, did you?’ I answered, showering
out cookie crumbs.

‘It seemed the natural answer,’ he
nodded. ‘But when it came out the same colour from every faucet, I guessed it
was probably something else. And like I said, there’s no deposit, no flakes of
rust?

I turned on the kitchen faucet and
let it run. At first, it came out clear, but after a little while I began to
notice a distinct coloration. Nothing startling, not like the blood-coloured
water up at Kent, but a pale, unpleasant kind of yellow. Crudely speaking, it
looked like piss. I solemnly took a sample in the jelly jar and held it up to
the light.

‘What do you think?’ asked Jimmy.

I shrugged. ‘Almost nothing right
now, except that it looks as if it’s some kind of mineral. It’s clear enough.’

I smelled the water, but it didn’t
seem to have any particular odour. I passed it around for Alison and Jimmy to
smell, too. Jimmy just shrugged, but Alison sniffed it once, and then sniffed
it again, and said: ‘Fish.’

‘Pardon me?’ I asked her.

‘Well, maybe I’m crazy,’ she said,
‘but it smells to me like
fish.’,
I held it under my
nose again and inhaled. ‘Not that I can detect,’ I told her.
‘How
about you, Jimmy?’

Jimmy tried again, but he shook his
head, too. ‘I think it’s just your imagination, honey. In any case, there ain’t
going to be any fish down our well, now are there?’

I screwed the lid on the jar and
tucked it in the pocket of my sheepskin coat. ‘Whatever it is, Dan Kirk will
find it. He once found insecticide that was seeping through eight layers of
limestone into a subterranean stream and ending up in someone’s drinking water
seven miles away. I mean, he’s the Sherlock Holmes of H2O.’

‘And who are you?’ asked Alison.
‘The Scarlet Pimpernel of plumbing?’

I grinned. ‘Just because I’m
difficult to get hold of, that doesn’t mean I’m impossible to get hold of. I
have to work hard, okay? Right now I’m supposed to be putting in new radiators
round at the Harrison place. Do you know they’re having new radiators?’

‘Sarah told me,’ nodded Alison.
‘Don’t you have any fresh gossip?’

‘The Katz boy got kicked out of
college, if that’s of any interest.’

Jimmy raised his eyebrows.
‘Really?
David Katz?’

‘I knew that already,’ said Alison.
‘Wendy Pitman told me down at the Northville Store.’

‘The Northville Store,’ I remarked,
as we walked back through the kitchen and out on to the back porch. ‘That’s
where they say that if they don’t have it, you don’t need it, and believe me
that’s
true.
Including all the gossip
that’s fit to whisper.’

It was real sharp outside, and I
pulled on my baseball cap. The sun had already sunk beyond the rim of the
woods, and the tops of the trees were irradiated with orange light. Our breath
smoked in the cold, and we rubbed our hands briskly to keep warm. A dog was
barking over at the next house.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as I
know,’ I told Jimmy. ‘But from what I can see here, you don’t have anything to
worry about. You’ve all drunk the water and you’re still walking about and
eating cookies, so whatever it is, it can’t be that serious.’

‘Do you want a bag to take home?’
asked Alison.

‘No, really.
I don’t want to put on any more
weight. I had to crawl along a warm-air duct a couple of weeks ago, and I can
tell you that I only just made it. What a way to die, huh?
Ducted
to death.’

Jimmy and Alison walked around the
side of the house with me. ‘At least that’s better than drowning,’ Alison
remarked.

‘Drowning?’ I asked her. ‘Who said
anything about drowning?’

‘Ask Jimmy,’ said Alison. ‘He’s been
dreaming about drowning for the past week.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t fill your
bathtub so full,’ I told him.

Jimmy looked embarrassed. ‘It’s
nothing. It’s just one of those dreams.’

‘One of what
dreams?’

Jimmy turned on Alison. ‘Why’d you
have to go tell him that?’ he asked her. ‘It’s a stupid dream, that’s all.’

‘I’m an expert on water dreams,’ I
told him. ‘Come on, I’m a plumber and I’ve got myself half a degree in
psychology. Who else could interpret a dream about drowning better than me?
I’ll tell you what your problem is: you have a repressed urge to go down with
the Titanic, thwarted by the fact that it sank over sixty-five years ago. Or
maybe your mother put too much water in your Kool-Aid when you were a kid, and
you’re suffering from dilution phobia.’

Jimmy stuck his hands in the pockets
of his lumberjack coat and shrugged. ‘It’s just one of those stupid dreams,
that’s
all. I dream I’m underwater, under some kind of dark
water, and I want to get out but I can’t.’

‘Is it a long dream?’

‘I don’t know.
Maybe
just a few seconds.
But I wake up and I’m cold and sweating. I mean,
really cold. And I always have this feeling that I’ve swallowed gallons and
gallons of freezing water.’

I walked around the front of my
Country Squire and opened the door. Shelley was still sitting there, listening
to Dolly Parton, and he gave me a haughty wink. I could have kicked that cat’s
ass sometimes, the arrogant way he behaved. Sometimes I wondered who was
running Mason Perkins, Plumbers & Heating Contractors, me or that goddamned
Shelley. I could have kicked his ass.

Jimmy wiped his nose with the back
of his hand, and said: ‘The thing that always gets me is the feeling that the
water has no surface. I mean, it isn’t the water that scares me so much, it’s
the fact that it’s under the ground, underneath tons and tons of solid rock. So
even if I did reach the surface, I couldn’t breathe.’