it looked like piss. I solemnly took a sample in the jelly jar and held it up to the 
light.
    'What do you think?' asked Jimmy.
    I shrugged. 'Almost nothing right now, except that it looks as if it's some kind of 
mineral. It's clear enough.'
    I smelled the water, but it didn't seem to have any particular odour. I passed it 
around for Alison and Jimmy to smell, too. Jimmy just shrugged, but Alison sniffed it 
once, and then sniffed it again, and said: 'Fish.'
    'Pardon me?' I asked her.
    'Well, maybe I'm crazy,' she said, 'but it smells to me like fish.',
    I held it under my nose again and inhaled. 'Not that I can detect,' I told her. 'How 
about you, Jimmy?'
    Jimmy tried again, but he shook his head, too. 'I think it's just your imagination, 
honey. In any case, there ain't going to be any fish down our well, now are there?'
    I screwed the lid on the jar and tucked it in the pocket of my sheepskin coat. 
'Whatever it is, Dan Kirk will find it. He once found insecticide that was seeping 
through eight layers of limestone into a subterranean stream and ending up in someone's 
drinking water seven miles away. I mean, he's the Sherlock Holmes of H2O.'
    'And who are you?' asked Alison. 'The Scarlet Pimpernel of plumbing?'
    I grinned. 'Just because I'm difficult to get hold of, that doesn't mean I'm 
impossible to get hold of. I have to work hard, okay? Right now I'm supposed to be 
putting in new radiators round at the Harrison place. Do you know they're having new 
radiators?'
    'Sarah told me,' nodded Alison. 'Don't you have any fresh gossip?'
    'The Katz boy got kicked out of college, if that's of any interest.'
    Jimmy raised his eyebrows. 'Really? David Katz?'
    'I knew that already,' said Alison. 'Wendy Pitman told me down at the Northville 
Store.'
    'The Northville Store,' I remarked, as we walked back through the kitchen and out on 
to the back porch. 'That's where they say that if they don't have it, you don't need it, 
and believe me that's true. Including all the gossip that's fit to whisper.'
    It was real sharp outside, and I pulled on my baseball cap. The sun had already sunk 
beyond the rim of the woods, and the tops of the trees were irradiated with orange light. 
Our breath smoked in the cold, and we rubbed our hands briskly to keep warm. A dog was 
barking over at the next house.
    'I'll call you tomorrow as soon as I know,' I told Jimmy. 'But from what I can see 
here, you don't have anything to worry about. You've all drunk the water and you're still 
walking about and eating cookies, so whatever it is, it can't be that serious.'
    'Do you want a bag to take home?' asked Alison.
    'No, really. I don't want to put on any more weight. I had to crawl along a warm-air 
duct a couple of weeks ago, and I can tell you that I only just made it. What a way to 
die, huh? Ducted to death.'
    Jimmy and Alison walked around the side of the house with me. 'At least that's better 
than drowning,' Alison remarked.
    'Drowning?' I asked her. 'Who said anything about drowning?'
    'Ask Jimmy,' said Alison. 'He's been dreaming about drowning for the past week.'
    'Maybe you shouldn't fill your bathtub so full,' I told him.
    Jimmy looked embarrassed. 'It's nothing. It's just one of those dreams.'
    'One of what dreams?'
    Jimmy turned on Alison. 'Why'd you have to go tell him that?' he asked her. 'It's a 
stupid dream, that's all.'
    'I'm an expert on water dreams,' I told him. 'Come on, I'm a plumber and I've got 
myself half a degree in psychology. Who else could interpret a dream about drowning 
better than me? I'll tell you what your problem is: you have a repressed urge to go down 
with the Titanic, thwarted by the fact that it sank over sixty-five years ago. Or maybe 
your mother put too much water in your Kool-Aid when you were a kid, and you're suffering 
from dilution phobia.'
    Jimmy stuck his hands in the pockets of his lumberjack coat and shrugged. 'It's just 
one of those stupid dreams, that's all. I dream I'm underwater, under some kind of dark 
water, and I want to get out but I can't.'
    'Is it a long dream?'
    'I don't know. Maybe just a few seconds. But I wake up and I'm cold and sweating. I 
mean, really cold. And I always have this feeling that I've swallowed gallons and gallons 
of freezing water.'
    I walked around the front of my Country Squire and opened the door. Shelley was still 
sitting there, listening to Dolly Parton, and he gave me a haughty wink. I could have 
kicked that cat's ass sometimes, the arrogant way he behaved. Sometimes I wondered who 
was running Mason Perkins, Plumbers & Heating Contractors, me or that goddamned Shelley. 
I could have kicked his ass.
    Jimmy wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and said: 'The thing that always gets 
me is the feeling that the water has no surface. I mean, it isn't the water that scares 
me so much, it's the fact that it's under the ground, underneath tons and tons of solid 
rock. So even if I did reach the surface, I couldn't breathe.'
    I gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. 'It looks like you and water ain't been 
getting along lately. Maybe you've been worried about the well.'
    'That's what I told him,' said Alison.
    I climbed into my car and put the window down. 'If that's what's worrying you,' I 
told Jimmy, 'then I'll make sure I get you these test results just as soon as humanly 
possible.'
    'He needs to stop working so hard, that's my opinion,' put in Alison. 'It could be 
one of those struggling-to-succeed dreams, couldn't it?'
    'Listen,' I told him, 'I did almost all of an advanced course in psycho-analysis, and 
we had dreams from ordinary people that would have made your hair go white. What you've 
been dreaming about is nothing. It's just an anxiety dream. Take a couple of sleeping 
tablets before you go to bed and you won't ever dream it again.'
    Jimmy smiled. 'Do you charge for medical advice, as well as for plumbing?'
    'I charge for everything. How do you think I got so rich?'
    I left the Bodine place and gave them a last toot on the horn and a wave when I 
reached the letter-box. Then I turned west on 109 towards New Milford, switching on the 
lights to see my way through the clinging dusk. I drove up and down the winding hills and 
valleys, my Country Squire whirling up leaves behind me as I went.
    I was interested in Jimmy Bodine's dream, but I was always suspicious of analysis. 
That was one of the reasons (apart from a pregnant sophomore) that my college course in 
Freud and Jung and Est had come to a premature conclusion. Maybe I didn't take life 
seriously enough. Maybe I wasn't cut out for the couch and the collective unconscious and 
the role-playing routine. Maybe I was too selfish and didn't particularly want to rescue 
the world from its phobias and its complexes. Whatever it was, I had quit college halfway 
through an encounter session, numbed by the self-indulgent dumbness of it, and I had 
taken a bus home and shaved off my beard, in that order. My mother, a short and kind lady 
with a strong line in flower-print housecoats, had cried; my father, a taller person but