Chapter 6: Caught

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     "Get away from there!" commands a man catching Henry in his flashlight beam beside a cyan pool glowing in the full moon peeking over the still-leafed-out trees to the east. "This is Calco property now."

"Just saving this," Henry blurts, his two hands holding up a big flapping bird dripping bluish-green slime.

"You can walk along the river path," the guard relents, "but the next time you trespass by the dye pools I'll have you arrested."

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     Henry had set out from Longwood at dusk like he usually did for night fishing at the point. Crossing westward over the Middlebrook bridge at Talmadge Avenue, he started hearing a cacophany of caws from the sycamores lining the Raritan. When he finally remembered that crows were usually tucked into First Watchung roosts by that time of the night, the hairs had risen into piloerection at the back of his neck. The calls led him to a little rise of newly banked earth just beyond the high water line. Moonbeams broke the tree line as he peered over the hummock, illuminating a downed bird flopping around in a colorful pool.

    Since Henry's fateful previous fishing trip to the point, the Cott-A-Lap Company had started nighttime shunting of waste from their contested Somerville plant to this new site on the uninhabited outskirts of the floodplain. They were hoping that reopening five miles downstream with a portmanteau name would be enough to quell protests at the former location. They were right, and the Calco Chemical Company was digging drainage pools and raising buildings at breakneck pace with hardly a peep from the nearby neighborhoods of the west end of Bound Brook.

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     "Here you go, beautiful," Henry whispers, gently holding both sides of the colored bird and dipping it into the deep pool of the river as it's compadres silently alight onto the overhanging sycamore. "This ought to clean those flight feathers."

With each dip, the bird flaps it's wings and more of the dye drips down over Henry's hands. After a half dozen dunkings, a big black bird emerges from the slime and leaps into flight as he raises his arms into the glorious harvest moon.

"Free at last," he calls into the orange night, citing a song he'd previously heard wafting across this wide hole from a Negro camp on a moonless night.

He's starting toward town along the fishermen's path when the chorus strikes up behind him.

"Oh yeah, Molly's magic," he recalls, striding back to the point and placing the bone, feather, and crystal on the hump of a stone at the edge of the lapping water as the murder alights from the tree, flies across the face of the full moon, and disappears into the eastern darkness.