Filter House (27 page)

The breeze picked up again as we headed towards the beach. Small clouds, light on their feet, flickered past the sun.

I let him get behind me. Wicker creaks. I could hear his footsteps hesitate, sinking lower as he stood trying to decide was this the time and place. We were alone, he had a good clean line of sight, nothing but the wind between his aim and my broad back. But when he stilled and I turned, his hand wasn’t doing nothing but resting on the zipper of his duffel bag, and that wasn’t even open yet. His eyes were focused over my head, far off in space or time. He was listening.

Red-winged blackbirds. Sweet and pure, their songs piped up, trilling away into silence, rising again from that pool of quiet, sure and silver, pouring over and over into my ears. “When I was a boy…” said Jasper. I waited. In a moment he started again. “When I was a boy, there was a creek and a swamp, where the river used to be. I didn’t know, I thought it was just a fun place to play. Some birds there, they sang just like this.”

Well, making allowance for a few inaccuracies (swamp for marsh, and the bird songs had to vary a
little),
this sounded pretty much like his truth. And it made actual sense to me, not like them pipeline dreams of those cowboys sent him here. Now we were getting somewhere. Closer. He’d be making his attack real soon.

I turned back around and trudged a little more slowly along the baskety surface of the bridge. The back of my neck crawled and itched, like itty bitty Jaspers and Granitas were walking all over it. I kept myself in hand, though, breathing deep and regular, balanced on the bubbling well of power beneath my feet, telling myself soon—soon—

He didn’t stop, he just slowed down a hair. I didn’t hear any zipper, either, but when I turned again he had finally pulled his goddamn gun out and it was pointed straight at me. Was it loaded, then? He seemed to think so.

My chest cramped up and my temperature dropped like I’d been dumped head first into Superior. I could wind up contributing my vital nitrogen and phosphorus content to the cycle like right
now.
I let my fright sag me down and grabbed the rails as his eyes hardened and his gun hand tensed. He was a lefty.

With a sudden lurch I threw myself against the side of the bridge and tipped us all into the cool, ripe waters of Smallbird Marsh. The gun cracked off one shot, just before we all made a nice big splash. I shrugged out of my ruana and kicked off my clogs and I knew I’d be okay. Fluff floats. Buddy woofed and Girlfriend yapped, all happy and accounted for.

Girlfriend and I pulled ourselves right up onto the next basket, but the menfolks stayed in a while longer. Buddy loves to swim, and he’s good at it, too. Jasper was floundering, though, wrapped up in weeds and trying to breathe mud. By the time I got him hauled out he wasn’t more than half conscious. Still had a grip on that gun, though. I pried it loose and tossed it back.

Now how to get him up to the offices? I thought about it while I whipped a few of my scarves around his wrists and elbows and ankles and knees. My sash in a slip knot ’round his throat for good measure. I shoved him till he sat mostly upright. “Ain’t this a fucking mess?” I asked him, tilting his head so he could see the tipped over basket, then back around to me. “I
just
had my hair done, got the dogs back from the groomer’s
yesterday,
now you pull this stunt! What in the name of every holy thing were you trying to do?”

“Kill you.” His voice was rough, sort of a wheeze now from coughing up marsh water.

“Well, duh. Yeah. Question is what you thought that was supposed to accomplish?” He just stuck out his bottom lip. Put me in mind of Albinia, age eight.

“Ain’t I done told your bosses, time and again, getting rid of me is gonna do em not one whit of good? Ain’t I told em how it’s the oracle decides whether or not the Water Museum’s ever gonna open up a pipeline and exercise its rights to sell? And if I hadn’t told em, ain’t it right there in our charter, a matter of public record for every passing pissant to read it if he remembers his A-B-Cs? Well, ain’t it?”

My killer kinda shrunk his shoulders in. Breeze picked up some, rustling the reeds. I’m pretty well insulated, but Jasper couldn’t help a little shiver. That was all I got out of him that while, though.

I left him and walked a couple of baskets to the boathouse for a life jacket. Had to untie his arms to get it on, and he wanted to wrestle then, having dried out enough to get his dander up. I got a hold on his nice new necktie and pulled. Finished bundling him up while he was trying to recall if he still knew how to breathe. I gave us both a chance to calm down, then dumped him back in the marsh.

Good thing I had Buddy’s harness on him. I whistled him over, hooked up Jasper’s life jacket and we were on our way once more.

“You’re in luck,” I told my assassin. “Usually we skip this part of the tour, but I noticed you gronking all the technical dingle-dangles. So I figure you’ll get a large charge out of our sewage treatment facilities.”

The jacket worked fine. Buddy paddled joyfully along next to the bridges. He likes to make himself useful.

It wasn’t far to the settling ponds. I gave Jasper plenty of chances to tell me about Colorado wildlife and the dying riparian ecosystem, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood. He was mostly silent, excepting the odd snort when Buddy kicked up too big a wake.

Really, the ponds weren’t that bad. Joy, my youngest daughter, got the Museum a contract with a local trailer park, but they’re pretty much dormant till early May. Right then, the park was mostly empty, just a few old retirees, so the effluent came mainly from my offices and the tanks of a couple friends.

I glossed over that, though, in my lecture. I concentrated instead on wind-driven aeration paddles, ultra-sound and tank resonance, and oh, yes, our patented, prize-winning, bacteriophagic eels. As the ponds got murkier and murkier, Jasper’s gills got greener and greener, so to speak. He held up well. I had dragged him over two locks, and had him belly down on the third when he broke.

“Nonononono!” he gibbered at me. “What is it, what
is
it, don’t let it touch me, please!” I bent over and looked where he was looking. Something was floating in the water. I fished it out. One end of a cucumber had my killer sobbing out his heart and wriggling like a worm with eyes to see the hook.

People are funny.

Girlfriend came up and sniffed the piece of cucumber. It was kind of rotten, and after all, she is a dog. I threw it back to the eels, unhitched Buddy’s harness and rolled Jasper over on his back. “You ready to come clean?” I asked him. He nodded desperately.

I wasted quite a few minutes trying to untie the wet silk knotted around his ankles. Then I got disgusted and sawed it through with my car keys. Still left him hobbled at the knees as I marched him off to the laundry room.

We came in through the “Secret Tunnel,” what the girls like to call it. Really, it’s just a old storm sewer from under the highway. But when I excavated the place and found how close it passed, I annexed the pipe onto my basement there. Handy, sometimes. Grate keeps out most of the possum and nutrias. The big ones, anyways. I locked that into place and set Jasper down on a bench next to the washer, under the skylight.

I nabbed a towel off the steam rack and wrecked it rubbing Buddy down. Took off his poor harness while carefully considering my killer.

He looked a sorrowful mess. His tee shirt was gonna need some enzyme action before you could come anywheres close to calling it white again, and his jeans and jacket weren’t never gonna smell clothesline fresh no more, no matter what. His hat was gone, his hair matted down with algae and such. His eyes were red from crying, his upper lip glistened unbecomingly, and the rest of him steamed in the cool laundry room air.

I prayed for a washday miracle.

“Jasper,” I told him, “you are in a terrible spot right now.” He nodded a couple times, agreeable as any schoolchild. “Sometimes, the only way outta danger is in. You gotta go through it to get to the other side. You gotta sink to swim.

“I’m telling you honest and true that in spite of what went on out there I bear you absolutely no grudges. You believe me?” Again the nod. “Good. Try to bear it in mind over the next few days.”

I reached my shears down from the shelf above his head and cut away the rest of where I’d tied him up: hands first, elbows next, then knees. Those were some nice scarves, too. One my favorite. I was sure hoping he’d be worth it.

“Strip,” I told him. He only hung back a second, then he put off his modesty or pride or whatever, and the rest of his wet, useless things right after. Girlfriend tried to run off with a sock but I made her bring it back. “Dump that shit in the washer.” I had him set it to low, hot wash, cold rinse, add my powder, and switch on. He didn’t seem to know his way around the control panel, and I wondered who’d been taking care of him back home.

Pale goose pimples ain’t exactly my cup of vodka, but Jasper was a nice enough looking young man. Given the circumstances. I admired his bumptious little backside as I scooted him on ahead of me over to the Sunshower. Light shafted down through the glass, glittering off the walls of black sand that lined its path for all of two hundred and fifty feet. It was midday by then, and the water pretty warm. He stayed under there a good, long while. I could tell he was finished when he started to look for a way to turn it off. Weren’t none, of course. It ain’t my job to tell the water when to stop, only to help it through the flow. And naturally, any little deviations I do participate in ain’t nothing like what them so called “Water Interest” cowboys got in mind.

“Leave it, Jasper,” I told him, motioning him on with my shears. Girlfriend gruffed a little bit to underline the suggestion. We took him along the hall past the Glowing Pool and the steps down to the Well. Later, on his way out, I planned on stopping to offer him a sweet, cold dipperful. Like drinking a cup of stars.

Gradually, the way we walked kept getting darker, the skylights scarcer and more spaced out. Joy and Gerrietta’s mosaics running up and down the walls barely glittered by the time we hit the Slipstream, and I heard Jasper gasp as he stepped into swiftly moving water. “Keep going,” I told him, and he sloshed obediently on ahead. The dogs were between us, now.

Somewhere close by came the sound of icebergs calving, the underwater songs of whales. I barely heard them as I fumed to myself, wondering if I loaded up a fleet of helicopters to drop off leaflets and trained a flock of condors to fly across the whole United States with a banner in their beaks, if I could make them idiots realize they were not gonna get their Great Lakes pipeline open by killing me off.

Maybe the first few assassins were just to put a touch of fear on me. Maybe they thought the oracle wasn’t nothing but a sham, and I could be bullied into letting them use the Museum’s exclusive access.

For a while there, looked like they really did want to kill me. With my oldest girl, Albinia, off in the wild blue yonder, there’d be a bit of a legal tussle over the Directorship. Guess they might of planned to take advantage of the confusion ensuing upon my untimely demise.

Lately, most of their moves they seemed to make just purely to annoy me. Sending out an amateur like this here Jasper—

Up ahead, the sloshing stopped. My killer stood waiting for us on the ledge, in the dark.

“Here’s where you’ll be staying.” I opened the door to the Dressing Room. He didn’t seem much taken with the place. Sure, the ceiling’s kind of low, ’cept for that two-hundred-foot skylight. And you got to sleep on the floor or in the sandpit. But that sand is soft, and nice and warm on account of the solar heat-exchanger underneath. “I’ll give you a little while in here by yourself to figure out what you’re gonna be when you come out. Say, a week maybe. Then I’ll come back and you can tell me what you’ll be needing.”

“But—food, water!”

“They’re here.” He looked around at the bare driftwood walls. “You doubting my word? You’re a bright boy, Jasper, I’m sure you’ll find where they’re at in plenty time.”

“I don’t understand. You’re not trying to torture me are you? I mean, if you want a confession I’ve already—”

“You don’t understand? Then let me explain. I don’t need a confession. I got that the first time them cowboys sent someone up here to murder me, fourteen years agone. That’s right, Jasper, you are by no means the first hired killer I met up with, though you have got to be the most naive by a crane’s holler.
Hitchhiking
to the
hit?
Talk about your sore thumbs!”

Jasper turned red from the collarbone up. “My van broke down in Bliss.”

“Yeah, well, guess you couldn’t afford a rental, and probably just as conspicuous to get one of them, anyways. But you coulda just given up. Couldn’t you?”

That’s when my killer started in again about the blackbirds, and added a sheep farm and I don’t know what all else. It wasn’t the sense of his words I paid attention to: none of them ever had much worth listening to to say at this point. The Earth owed them a living, and a silver teat to suck. And it better be a mighty long dug, cause it wasn’t supposed to dry up, no matter how hard them cowboys chewed.

They all seemed to need to give their little speeches, though, so I had got used to sitting politely and listening to the kinds of sounds they made. Rattles and grates and angry, poisonous buzzings was what they usually come up with.