The Narrows(53)

Ben nodded. But that didn’t help him. He was trying to narrow things down, not broaden them.

“I’ve heard tell of strange things come down from those mountains in my lifetime, and stranger things pulled from the Narrows,” Hogarth went on. “I’ve seen a few, myself. Mutated toads and tadpoles bristling with more legs than a goddamned centipede, if you pardon an old man his language. Stuff like that. These things happened with more frequency back when the factory was in operation, of course.”

“The plastics factory.”

“Pollutants in the water, runoff, things like that. Used to be a guy up on Yew Drive claims to have caught a rockfish with a fully working eyeball growing right outta its side. Can you imagine?”

“Do you believe that story?”

“Sure. Why the hell not?”

“I’ve never seen anything strange down there.”

“That’s because the factory’s been closed long before you were ever born. And mutations like that don’t breed and they don’t live long, neither. It’s God’s way of making sure nature corrects whatever man done screwed up.” He shrugged, as if the whole conversation was suddenly inconsequential. “Heck, I suppose there’s still some freakish things down in the Narrows—and in the mountains beyond—but they’s mostly just legend now.”

“When I was a kid I actually used to swim in there.”

“As did I,” Hogarth said. “Maybe that’s why I’ve lived so long.” The chuckle that followed was a low, rumbling growl clotted with phlegm. “Of course, back then, the Narrows used to flood much worse than it does now, so maybe all the bad that collected in there got flushed out more regularly. Year I was born, most of what was then downtown Cumberland was destroyed when Wills Creek flooded, and all the runoff came right through Stillwater, tearing down bridges, knocking the walls out of homes, and uprooting trees. A baby went missing in that flood, too. The sorry little thing was just pried from its mamma’s arms, was how I heard it told. I remember, when the floodwaters finally receded, there were dead horses and livestock all over the streets. The smell was unbearable. After that, many of the residents moved their farms higher into the mountains.

“It wasn’t until the fifties that the Army Corps of Engineers finally came in and assisted the city in putting in a pump system and retaining walls around the creek down by Route 40 to help alleviate the flooding problems. That was what created the Narrows as we know them now. At the time, it was one of the most costly public works projects in American history. The price tag was something like eighteen million dollars, if I remember correctly.”

Ben whistled.

“Took ten years to finish the project, too,” Hogarth went on. “And while I don’t believe Cumberland has ever had a bad flood since, us folks here in the river valley of Stillwater still get dunked occasionally.”

“I remember one summer when my dad’s entire harvest was washed away,” Ben said. “There were three feet of standing water in the south field. And when the water went away, I remember seeing someone’s front door lying in the mud. Just some random front door to a house, washed up in our yard. It had a decorative oval of glass in its center, completely whole and unbroken. I remember being amazed at how a flood could cause such destruction—destruction enough to tear a door off a house—yet leave the oval of glass completely intact.”

“Crazier things have washed up.” Like that poem about Santa Claus, Hogarth pressed one finger to the side of his nose. “Craziest thing I ever found was a Viking helmet—bullet-shaped thing with the horned tusks coming out of the sides.”

“No kidding.”

“Saw it wedged up in the fork of a tree,” Hogarth said. “I must have been about seven or eight at the time, and a hell of a tree climber. I scaled that tree, pulled the helmet down, and took it home to show my old man. I remember him examining it by the firelight in the hearth that evening—we were living in a tar-paper shack out along what is Tillman Road now—and how he turned it over and over in his big hands. He was afraid of it, thought it meant there were soldiers hiding somewhere in the mountains plotting some attack. My father was a descendant of English pig farmers. He hadn’t the slightest clue what the hell a Viking was, let alone what sort of headgear they wore.”

“What about animals?” Ben asked. “Did any nonindigenous animals ever wash up?”

While the look on the old man’s face conveyed a lack of familiarity with the word nonindigenous, he understood the context and did not miss a beat in answering Ben’s question. “There was a snake once. A big one. And I’m not talking your garden variety mountain snake, Ben. This thing looked like it had come straight out of the Amazon.”

“A python?”

“Lord knows what it was. It was pale yellow with these whitish, wavy markings down its back. It had drowned in the flood and washed up at a dirt intersection that eventually became Calvert Street, right where the Farmers’ Market used to be. Damn thing was as long as a school bus and, at its widest, thicker than a grown man’s upper thigh. Midway along its body was a massive bulge, an indication that it had eaten something before it died.”

Ben finished his ice cream float and slid the glass across the counter. Lost completely in the past, Hogarth did not appear to notice.