Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [126]
By late Friday afternoon, with the sun not quite visible, thirty people had turned out to watch the flood—a social event, a way to end the day, a break from domestic chores, especially on a cloudy spring evening. One of Jeremy’s friends had brought down a boom box and played Jesus Jones and Biohazard. There was dancing in the bleachers, slowish and tidal, against the music’s frantic rhythms.
Conor’s dreams these days have been invaded by water. He wakes on Saturday morning and makes quiet closed-door love to his wife. When he holds her, or when they kiss, and his eyes close, he thinks of the river. He thinks of the rivers inside both of them, rivers of blood and water. Lymphatic pools. All the fluids, the carriers of their desires. Odors of sweat, odors of salt. Touching Janet, he almost says, We’re mostly water. Of course everyone knows that, the body’s content of liquid matter. But he can’t help it: that’s what he thinks.
After his bagel and orange juice, Conor leaves Janet upstairs with the twins, Annah and Joe, who conspire together to dress as slowly as they possibly can, and he bicycles down to the river to take a look. Conor is a large, bearish man with thick brown hair covered by a beret that does not benefit his appearance. He knows the beret makes him a bit strange-looking, and this pleases him. Whenever he bikes anywhere there is something violent in his body motions. Pedaling along, he looks like a trained circus bear. Despite his size, however, Conor is mild and kind-hearted—the sort of man who believes that love and caresses are probably the answer for everything—but you wouldn’t know that about him unless you saw his eyes, which are placidly sensual, curious—a photographer’s eyes, just this side of sentimental, belonging to someone who quite possibly thinks too much about love for his own good.
The business district of Eurekaville has its habitual sleepy aura, its morning shroud of mist and fog. One still-burning streetlight has its orange pall of settled vaporish dampness around its glass globe. Conor is used to these morning effects; he likes them, in fact. In this town you get accustomed to the hazy glow around everything, and the sleepiness, or you leave.
He stops his bicycle to get a breath. He’s in front of the hardware store, and he leans against a parking meter. Looking down a side street, he watches several workmen moving a huge wide-load steel platform truck under a house that has been loosened from its foundation and placed on bricks. Apparently they’re going to truck the entire house off somewhere. The thought of moving a house on a truck impresses Conor, technology somehow outsmarting domesticity.
He sees a wren in an elm tree and a grosbeak fluttering overhead.
An hour later, after conversation and coffee in his favorite café, where the waitress tells him that she believes she’s seen Merilyn, Conor’s ex-wife, around town, and Conor has pretended indifference to this news, he takes up a position down at the park, close to the bleachers. He watches a rattan chair stuck inside some gnarly tree branches swirl slowly past, legs pointing up, followed by a brown broom, swirling, sweeping the water.
Because the Chaska River hasn’t flooded badly—destructively—for years, Eurekaville has developed what Conor’s son Jeremy describes as a goof attitude about rising waters. According to Jeremy’s angle on it, this flooding used to be a disaster thing. The townspeople sandbagged and worried themselves sick. Now