Above the Waterfall (8 page)

As I move upstream, vomit scalds my throat like lye. Trout shoal on sandbars and banks. A few gills quiver feebly but most fish are death-paled, browns and rainbows now in name only. Festering sores on streamskin. Dace and war-paint shiners are sprinkled amid the larger fish. Two buzzards stalk the shallows, more overhead, blackly circling like clock hands. The stream rises and narrows. A dead trout vanes in the eddy. On the trail, between two stems of ironweed, a writing spider sways in the web's palm. One eyelash-thin leg poised, as if pausing before finishing its message.

T? R? G?

Gerald couldn't do this.
I know him.
This
isn't
like it was with Richard.

The stream disappears into rhododendron, then sidles back close as the trail dips before rising again. I hear the waterfall and soon after I emerge behind it. A wreath of dead fish circle the pool. Here salamanders and crayfish awash too. The fuel smells stronger, and more red stains appear on the sand and water. It's dye you are seeing, nothing more, I remind myself, but what I see feels like blood.

I walk on up above the falls, where a granite bald pushes back trees to open the sky. Dead trout are here as well, all native.
I didn't likely think any of them speckled trout were still around but one day I was up here and I seen one,
Gerald had said last fall, pointing into the water at one speckled trout and then another as we'd made our way upstream to a last pool before the creek split. I push through leathery rhododendron leaves to that same pool. A speckled trout fins in the center, another in the shallows. They look perfectly healthy so I retrace my steps, find a stain on the granite twenty yards from the waterfall. I rub the dampness with my fingers. Viscous. I raise it to my nose and it all comes back.

We'd hidden behind the school buses that morning. Fuel had been spilled and I'd smelled it, felt it under my shoe soles. Then the policeman rushed us from behind the buses and across the black pavement. Some of us
were screaming and then more screams when ambulances splashed red across our shirts and blouses. The policeman shouted,
It's only red light, children, only light,
herding us onto the grass where too many hands grabbed as flashbulbs burst like the hallway's first loud flash.

The first loud flash . . .

Promise me, children, not a single word,
Ms. Abernathy had whispered, then led us down the hallway single file to the basement doorway. Then the cave feel of tight walls leading to a cool darkening. I am the very last, reaching for Ms. Abernathy's hand as we make our way to the concrete floor. So much silence, the only sound pipedrip. Light slants down from the stair entrance. Ms. Abernathy ushers us toward the light leaking in from the basement door. Almost there when her
shhhhh
stills us. Footsteps come halfway down the stairs and pause. Both my hands clutch Ms. Abernathy's. Another footstep and a shoe and pants cuff appear. The pipe drips loud and my first tears well. I try to squeeze the tears back inside me but the first one falls and I know he has heard it. . . .
Ms. Abernathy stands in the basement door, blocking the exit as I run. Close your eyes, a policeman says as he grabs me. But I look back and when I do my tongue turns to salt.

“Video was taken up at the waterfall this morning,” Tucker told me, “where my workers found the first dead fish.”

Randall Cobb, one of Tucker's security team, tapped a few buttons. The screen changed to black and white and the back of a head passed in front of the camera's lens.

“That was 7:51
A.M.
and this next one is 8:34,” Tucker said.

Randall punched a few more buttons. I could see the face this time, blurry but unmistakable.

“You're acting surprised, Sheriff.”

“It's just that I can't see him doing this.”

“You just
did
see it,” Tucker snapped, “and I don't get why you're surprised. Gerald Blackwelder's gotten away
with everything but poisoning my stream. Why would he figure he couldn't do that too?”

“Are other cameras up there?”

“There's another one fifty yards downstream.”

“Have you checked it?”

“Why in hell do we need to?”

“Just to be sure no one else was up there.”

“Check that other camera between midnight and ten
A.M.
and let the sheriff know if anyone's on it,” Tucker told Randall. “Do it quick.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tucker didn't wear his golf clothes today. He had on a blue cotton suit, dress shoes, a white shirt but no tie. Perhaps it lay on his office desk or even the floor, unknotted then jerked off his collar when he heard what had happened. His frustration became more evident as we stepped outside and saw that a TV news van had pulled into the lot.

“DENR's already supposed to be here,” Tucker fumed. “I can't clean up this mess till they say so. I've got phone calls to make, Sheriff. My hope is you or your deputy's gone to arrest Gerald Blackwelder before I finish them.”

“Let's see what the second camera shows,” I said, “but if you or C.J. talk to any newspeople, I'd appreciate you not mentioning Gerald by name until he's been charged.”

“I'll be the one talking to them,” Tucker said. “I fired C.J. Monday, after Gerald came and threatened me.”

“You fired him?” I said. “But his SUV's here.”

“I gave him two weeks' notice. But after this,” Tucker said, gesturing at the creek, “I told him to clean out his office and leave, which he's doing now.”

“But he couldn't have stopped this,” I said, “or what happened Monday either.”

“You're wrong about that,” Tucker snapped. “Here's the difference between you and me, Sheriff. Unlike you, I don't wait for things to get out of hand before I act.”

“But to fire him—”

“Look,” Tucker interrupted. “C.J. asked me not to talk about him losing his job. I don't even know if he's told his family, though they'll surely know now.”

“C.J.'s been too good an employee for you to do this.”

Tucker glared at me.

“You had your role in this fiasco too, Sheriff. If you'd locked up Gerald on Monday, this fish kill wouldn't have happened.”

Tucker turned and went into the lodge. As I left the porch, a news crew met me. I told the reporter, “No comment,” and walked down the esplanade to where Jarvis waited.

“They've got Gerald on a security camera, right up there where the fish started dying.”

“I guess we ought not be too surprised, but somehow I still am,” Jarvis said. “You want me to go get him?”

“I'll do it, but not yet.”

Tucker's security guard came and said no one was on the other camera, which pretty much sealed it. I looked at the big brown trout and thought of the one C.J. and I had tried to catch the summer of our junior year.
You're smart, Les, but you try to hide it.
But C.J. never hid his smarts. The taunts picked back up some as we entered our last two years of high school.
Teacher's pet, brownnoser.
Neither was true. Some of the teachers didn't like C.J. either, because at times he wasn't above questioning what they said in class. But after that day at his great-uncle's farm, I'd sit with him if I saw him alone in the cafeteria or at an assembly. He'd tried to get me to take college prep courses with him, even said we could study together. When C.J. had come back five years ago, he'd made it a point to tell me that the stay would be temporary, but in the last couple of years he hadn't said much about leaving, and I'd wondered if what my grandfather had told me was true, that if you're born in the mountains, you can't feel at home anywhere else. But now . . .

Becky came out of the woods, the tackle box in her right hand.

“That old man means a lot to her, doesn't he, Sheriff?” Jarvis said.

“Yes, he does,” I answered, “and I'm afraid she's made
herself believe he's someone that he's not. Why don't you check in with Ruby while I talk to her.”

“Okay,” Jarvis said.

You warned her about Gerald and now he's proven you right. The fault is with her, not you.
But that thought did me no good, especially because last night, in one of those 3
A.M.
moments when we're most honest with ourselves, I'd wondered if in some way I'd known on Monday that Gerald would go to the resort and confront Tucker.
No
, I told myself,
I hadn't known that. I'd made Gerald promise that he wouldn't go. This is all Gerald's fault.
But it was like putting a metal washer in a vending machine and it falling straight into the change box. That same hollow ring.

“I found where it was introduced,” Becky said as she joined me. “It's right above the waterfall.”

“Did that confirm what it is?”

“Kerosene,” Becky said, not meeting my eyes. “Some was spilled on the sand, but something else could have been dumped in.”

“But you've got no cause to think something else was?”

“I can't say that for certain,” Becky said. “Nobody can without the sample results.”

“But kerosene,” I said, pitching the word back to her like a baseball, “that's definite.”

I waited but knew I'd have to be the one who said it. I stepped closer, placed my arm gently around her.

“You know this doesn't look good for Gerald. I mean, we both know he's got a temper.”

“Gerald didn't do this,” Becky said firmly as she would if I'd misidentified a wildflower.

“A camera at the waterfall shows him up there this morning. I saw the film and it's Gerald.”

Becky's expression didn't change.

“They're showing some film they took on Monday.”

“He's wearing a different shirt, Becky,” I said softly.

“Gerald didn't do this.”

“I know how much you care about Gerald,” I said, “and I know some of it, probably a lot of it, has to do with your grandparents, what they did for you. But what you owe them, or feel you owe Gerald, has limits.”

“Trout were killed above the waterfall, Les, speckled trout,” Becky said, more emotion in her voice now. “I went up there with Gerald to look at them last fall. If you'd been with us that morning . . . if you had, you'd know he couldn't do this. Those speckled trout, Gerald didn't want to catch them to eat. He wanted them just to
be
there, and to stay there,” Becky said, her voice breaking. “The way Gerald looked at those speckled trout. Les, he
loved
them.”

He loved his son too, but that didn't stop Gerald from burning his son's house down, with kerosene.
That's what I could have said, but instead I withdrew my arm and motioned toward Jarvis and Harold Tucker, who were com
ing to join us. Tucker had taken off the coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He looked ready to dig a ditch or enter a brawl. Whatever it took to straighten out the mess in the creek before him.

“So what did your tests tell you?” Tucker asked Becky.

“Kerosene's a transient phenomenon,” Becky answered.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Kerosene's not very water soluble so most of the damage has been done. DENR will probably issue a drinking water advisory but that may be just a precaution.”

“And until they decide to show up?” Tucker asked.

“We're already putting warning flyers streamside at the park,” Becky said. “You should do the same.”

“For the first time all summer, I've got full capacity this weekend,” Tucker fumed. “These people will want to fish, not worry that the water will poison them.”

“It could have been a lot worse,” I said.

“So it's just kerosene?” Jarvis asked.

“It's kerosene,” Becky said, “but there could still be something else introduced with it.”

“Kerosene dumped at the waterfall,” Tucker said.

“Above the waterfall,” Becky said, “at least fifty yards.”

A droning came from above, quickly became a metallic clamor.

“Shit,” Tucker shouted as a white helicopter,
NEWS 5
on the side, hovered above the lodge. A cameraman leaned
out to film, and then the helicopter flew away. “I've called DENR three times and they still aren't here but everyone else except goddamn
Sixty Minutes
is.”

Tucker's eyes remained on the sky, where buzzards resumed their slow circling. Like a nightmare merry-go-round, I thought, and it was clear from Tucker's face he didn't find it an appealing sight either.

“That's another nice welcome,” Tucker seethed. “Turn left when you see the buzzards. Go do your job, Sheriff. If you had on Monday when Gerald came up here raising hell—”

“He just wanted to talk to you,” Becky said angrily. “Gerald didn't threaten anyone until your thugs came after him. And he didn't kill your fish, Mr. Tucker. I know Gerald and I know he wouldn't do this.”

Tucker placed a hand on his cheek, rubbed upward, touching the hearing aid before adjusting his glasses. Doing it unconsciously, but it seemed a wish that all he'd heard and seen was not real but an equipment failure.

“I've known Gerald Blackwelder a lot longer than you, ma'am,” Tucker said, “and I've seen a side of him maybe you haven't and I'm not even talking about his burning a house down. Long before he did that, I watched him nearly kill a man in a bar fight. Gerald knocked him to the floor and the guy didn't get up, couldn't get up, but Gerald kept punching him in the face, even after the guy
was out cold. I was across the room and I could
hear
the teeth breaking. It took three fellows to get Gerald off him. That man he beat up was in the hospital a week. He lost half his teeth and the vision in his right eye. He would have been in a coffin if Gerald hadn't been stopped. So don't tell me I don't know the man, or what he can or can't do.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping in front of Tucker. “You can go back to the lodge. I'm going to go get Gerald now.”

“Good,” Tucker said, “and about damn time.”

“Do you want me as backup?” Jarvis asked as Tucker stalked off.

“No, it's better if I go alone.”

“You're going to arrest Gerald?” Becky asked, following me as I walked to the parking lot.

“
Detain
's a better word.”

“It means the same thing.”

“Maybe it does,” I said, getting tired real fast of people telling me what to do, “but it's what has to be done.”

“It's wrong to do this to him, Les,” Becky said.

Nowhere near as wrong as C.J. getting fired,
I thought, seeing C.J.'s SUV in the lot.

I was about to get in the car when Becky grabbed my sleeve.

“His heart,” Becky said. “I need to be there. You know I do.”

“Drive your own vehicle then.”

Becky didn't let go of my sleeve.

“Don't you understand that Gerald didn't do this, Les? I don't care what Tucker says. Gerald
couldn't
do this.”

“Maybe you're wrong about what he's capable of,” I said. Then more words blurted out before I could stop them. “You've been wrong before about what a person could do.”

Becky flinched and let go of my sleeve. For the first time since we'd known each other, I'd hurt her.
Yes,
I thought.
Maybe it's not just Pelfrey and Gerald you are wrong about.

When we drove up, Gerald was sitting on the porch, coffee mug in hand, and wearing the same shirt he had on in the video. He smiled and stood.

“Well, I'd not have reckoned a visit from you all this morning.”

I stopped at the front step but Becky went up to stand beside him. She trembled but Gerald didn't seem to notice. He nodded at the helicopter droning above the ridge.

“Looking for dope, I reckon,” he said. “Come up and warm a chair, Sheriff. I've got coffee enough for the three of us.”

“You go ahead and finish that coffee,” I said. “You and me need to go to the courthouse.”

“What for?” Gerald asked, his head tilting slightly, brow furrowed.

“It's just a misunderstanding,” Becky said, taking Gerald's free hand. “Someone poured kerosene into Locust Creek and killed a lot of trout.”

“At the park?” Gerald asked.

“No,” Becky said. “On Tucker's property, above the waterfall.”

“And they think I done it?” Gerald asked after a few moments.

“They've got you on video, Gerald,” I said. “Let's go.”

“I never dumped anything in that creek,” Gerald stammered.

“I know that,” Becky told him, her other hand on his forearm now. “It'll get cleared up soon, it will.”

The porcelain cup slipped from Gerald's hand. Coffee splashed on the porch but the cup didn't shatter.

“Becky,” Gerald said, shaking his head as he spoke. “I'd not hurt them trout. You know that.”

The helicopter must have seen my patrol car, because as I stepped onto the porch it skimmed over the last trees, raising dust and buffeting our clothes.