The Wells of Hell (2 page)

I gave him a sympathetic pat on the
shoulder. ‘It looks like you and water ain’t been getting along lately. Maybe
you’ve been worried about the well.’

‘That’s what I told him,’ said
Alison.

I climbed into my car and put the
window down. ‘If that’s what’s worrying you,’ I told Jimmy, ‘then I’ll make
sure I get you these test results just as soon as humanly possible.’

‘He needs to stop working so hard,
that’s my opinion,’ put in Alison. ‘It could be one of those
struggling-to-succeed dreams, couldn’t it?’

‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘I did almost
all of an advanced course in psycho-analysis, and we had dreams from ordinary
people that would have made your hair go white. What you’ve been dreaming about
is nothing. It’s just an anxiety dream. Take a couple of sleeping tablets
before you go to bed and you won’t ever dream it again.’

Jimmy smiled. ‘Do you charge for
medical advice, as well as for plumbing?’

‘I charge for everything. How do you
think I got so rich?’

I left the Bodine place and gave
them a last toot on the horn and a wave when I reached the letter-box. Then I
turned west on 109 towards New Milford, switching on the lights to see my way
through the clinging dusk. I drove up and down the winding hills and valleys,
my Country Squire whirling up leaves behind me as I went.

I was interested in Jimmy Bodine’s
dream, but I was always suspicious of analysis. That was one of the reasons
(apart from a pregnant sophomore) that my college course in Freud and Jung and
Est
had come to a premature conclusion. Maybe I didn’t take
life seriously enough. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the couch and the collective
unconscious and the role-playing routine. Maybe I was too selfish and didn’t
particularly want to rescue the world from its phobias and its complexes.
Whatever it was, I had quit college halfway through an encounter session,
numbed by the self-indulgent dumbness of it, and I had taken a bus home and
shaved off my beard, in that order. My mother, a short and kind lady with a
strong line in flower-print housecoats, had cried; my father, a taller person
but no less kind, had shaken my hand and told me it was about time I got on
with something useful. That’s when I took up plumbing, and that’s what I’ve
been ever since, Mason Perkins, plumber.

I think, to tell you the
truth, that
I look more like a plumber than a psychiatrist.
I’m six-one, with dark wavy hair, and a long thin face, and one of those
expressions of constant bafflement, like plumbers always have. If I’d taken up
psychiatry, I think my patients would have spent most of their time wondering
when I was going to bring out my wrench and screw their heads on straight by
force. My manner has always been more bathside than bedside, if you get my
drift. I have been married. It didn’t last very long, although she was pretty
nice in her way. Her name was Jane and she wanted a neat, neat house in the
suburbs, and a television set, and a polished Pinto, and I guess whatever it
was that I wanted and
still want, it wasn’t quite that
.
We sat in silence for three years staring at the wallpaper and then she went
home to Duluth. I guess one shouldn’t really try to marry people from Duluth.

But, anyway, here I was, with my
plumbing business in Connecticut, and Shelley, and I was trying very hard with
the waitress from The Cattle Yard restaurant down on the Danbury road, although
I hadn’t gotten much further than unbuttoning her chaps. Life was okay, and not
too hostile, and I felt that I could cope, even if I was ultimately copping
out.

I drove into the outskirts of New
Milford. It’s a sleepy, pretty little town on the Housatonic, with dozens of
picturesque colonial houses, and a main street with a wide grass mall and a
bandstand.

I parked outside of the New Milford
Savings Bank and switched off the engine. Shelley, who had been sleeping
soundly, stretched himself and yawned.

I took the jar of water out of my
pocket and checked that it wasn’t leaking. It could have been the deepening
dusk, but the.
water
looked more darkly tinted than it
had before. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed at it.

It was then that Shelley stiffened,
and bristled, and let out a spitting hiss that made my hair stand on end, too.
He was arched up so much that he was almost bent double, and his tail was
bushed out. His eyes were wide with something that was either fear or hatred.

‘Shelley, for Christ’s sake -’ I
told him.

He stayed where he was, his claws
scraping at the vinyl seat, snarling like I’d never heard him snarl before, I
made a move towards him, -but he only spat harder, and let out one of those
tortured yowls that have people throwing their left boot out of the window in
the middle of the night.

I screwed the lid back on the jar.
Almost at once, Shelley’s fur subsided, and he began to relax.

He still looked at me suspiciously,
but then cats are experts at making humans feel guilty for upsetting or
discomfiting them. I looked back at him with a frown, and then I looked at the
jar again. It was only water, why .should it
make
him
go so crazy?

Maybe Alison had been right, and the
water did smell of fish, or something like fish. After all, both Jimmy and I
liked to smoke an occasional cigar, and perhaps our sense of smell wasn’t as
keen as hers. But then, Shelley didn’t go berserk, even for fish. As a matter
of fact, he preferred left-over pizza to almost any food you could name. He
could possibly go berserk for a pepperoni, but I doubted it.

I climbed out of the car, locked it,
and then I took the lid off the jar of water again and sniffed it.

There was some faint trace of odour,
I had to admit. Some chilly, lingering smell that was more metallic than fishy.
It gave me an odd sensation for some reason, like I’d smelled something that
was very strange and hostile, and I stood there in the dusk of New Milford
feeling unusually lonesome. Beyond the bandstand, three or four children were
playing ball in the gloom. Their laughing was like the cries of birds.

Crossing the green, I mounted the
steps of the New Milford Health Department. There were still lights in the
upstairs window, and I guessed that Dan Kirk and his associates were working
late. I walked inside through the tall black-painted doors, and went up the
broad colonial staircase until I reached the first landing. The building was
brightly lit with fluorescent tubes, and painted a dull Adam green. I went up
to the door marked Health Department, Private, and walked in.

Mrs Wardell was sitting at her desk
in the front office, all upswept glasses and red lipstick, and she said: ‘Hi,
Mason. What brings you down here?’

I raised the jelly jar of water.
‘They’re poisoning the wells,’ I said, melodramatically. ‘Is Dan there, or did
he duck out early?’

‘Did Dan duck out early? Is that a
joke? Dan thinks going home at dawn is ducking out early.

They have a swine disease crisis
over at Sherman.’

‘Can I go straight in?’ I asked her.

I knocked, and went through into Dan
Kirk’s laboratory. Dan was there, sitting at the end of a long varnished
workbench, peering into a microscope. He was young, but very bald, and in his
white laboratory coat he looked like a mad professor, or at the very worst a
boiled egg. I noticed Rheta Warren there, too, and that was always good news.
She was Dan’s assistant researcher, on her first job since she graduated from
Princeton Biological
college
, and compared with most
of the quail around New Milford she was most provocative. She had long
muddy-blonde hair, wide hazel eyes, and a figure that obviously wasn’t meant to
be hidden by a starched white overall. I gave her a more-than-friendly wave as
I crossed the laboratory to have a word with Dan.

‘The plumber cometh,’ I said, and
set down the jelly jar. Dan looked up from his microscope and blinked at it
balefully. Then he blinked at me.

‘My stars said this was going to be
a silly week,’ he told me.

‘What’s silly? This is coloured
water, possibly contaminated.
Fd like you to test it for me.’

He picked up the jar and peered at
it with bulging, shortsighted eyes. ‘Where’d you get this?’ he asked.

‘Out at Jimmy
Bodine’s house.
He says he’s had discoloured water for Two to three days. Alison Bodine swears
it smells of fish, and Shelley seems to think the same way.’

‘Shelley?
Your cat
Shelley?’

‘That’s right. When I took the lid
off the jar he went crazy. When I put it back on again, he returned to his
normal condition of utter indolence.’

Dan switched off the bright light
over his microscope and rubbed his eyes. ‘Do you think Shelley would like a job
here?’ he asked. ‘I have a vacancy for a lab assistant with a good nose.’

‘I’m serious, Dan. All I’m asking is
that you test it.’

Dan Kirk smiled tiredly, and nodded.
‘You know that I have to anyway. If you like, we’ll run through it now. I think
I’ve had a bellyful of swine fever for one day.’

‘Is it bad?’

‘About as bad as
it can get.
Poor
old Ken Follard had to slaughter every .damn pig on the farm.

You can smell burning bacon as far
away as Roxbury.’

I took out my handkerchief and blew
my nose. It was the effect of walking into an overheated laboratory from a
freezing street. I looked at Rheta over the handkerchief as Dan led the way to
the centrifuge, and winked. I guess it wasn’t very romantic, but I believe in
taking every chance you can get.

‘You want to tell me something about
this sample?’ asked Dan, switching on the lights around the grey-painted
centrifuge. ‘Which faucet it came from?
Any other details?’

‘Poured straight
from the kitchen faucet.
Jimmy says it’s the same out of every faucet in the house.’

Dan took the lid off the jar and
sniffed. He paused, considered what he had smelled, and then sniffed again.

‘Maybe Shelley was right,’ he told
me.

‘You think you smell fish?’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’

‘What’s another way?
Turtle soup?’

Dan dipped his finger in the water
and licked it. He frowned, and then licked again. ‘There’s definitely some kind
of unusual taste and smell associated with this water. But it’s pretty hard to
define. It doesn’t taste like any of the usual salts or minerals we get around
here. It’s not like manganese or potassium.’

He tore off a piece of litmus paper
and dipped it into the water. As the water soaked into it, the paper gradually
turned from pale purple to a reddish colour.

‘Well,’ said Dan, ‘that indicates
the presence of acids.’

‘What kind of acids?’

‘I don’t know. We’re going to have
to make all the proper tests. We’re going to start by putting a sample into the
centrifuge, and seeing if we can separate any solids out of it. Did you see if
it left any deposits on the Bodine’s kitchen sink, or maybe their tub?’

‘Not a trace. Mind you, it’s only
been troubling them for a couple of days, and that’s hardly long enough to
leave a stain.’

Dan switched on the centrifuge and
we waited while it whirled the Bodines’ water around and around. Dan said: ‘Did
you see the Hartford game Thursday?’

‘I missed it. Mrs Huntley had a
burst pipe.’

Dan wearily rubbed the back of his
neck. ‘I missed it, too. I was up half the damn night analysing fertiliser.’

Rheta came across the laboratory
with an armful of files and reports. Close to, she was very pretty, in an odd
kind of way. Her nose was a little too short, and her lips were a little too
wide, but what she lacked in symmetry she made up for with an infectious smile.
‘I like men who put their work first,’ she said, in a mock-serious voice, as if
she was presenting us each with a medal. ‘It shows a responsible, moral
character.’

‘That’s me,’ I told her.
‘Pipes before pleasure.’

Dan finished his centrifuge test,
and then he took the water over to the spectroscope. He was a slow, meticulous
worker, and I knew that it was going to be three or four hours before he’d
completed his analysis. As the electric clock on the laboratory wall crept past
seven, my initial enthusiasm began to pall, and I began to feel bored and
hungry, and very much in need of a beer. It was so dark outside now that I
could see my weary reflection, sitting on a laboratory stool with my chin in my
hand. Rheta had almost finished tidying up the rows of test tubes and pipettes
and assorted laboratory junk, and I guessed she was getting ready to quit for
the day.

‘Is this really a job for a girl like
you?’ I asked her, as she put away her Bunsen burner hose. ‘Why didn’t you take
up something interesting, like go-go dancing? Or you could have been a Playboy
bunny with your looks.’

‘Believe me,’ said Rheta, closing
the cupboard door, ‘analysing swine fever samples is a hell of a lot more
interesting than serving cocktails to lecherous people like you.’