Read The Canal for Free Online Page A

you called, that's all."
    "Well, I've got news."
    Alan listened.
    "I was out by the canal like you said. Crack
of dawn. I get to the bridge, I go climbing along the banks, and I
nearly stumble on top of some lady. She's out cold, been drinking
or I don't know. Now see, I think she was here all last night and
for who knows how long. I think we had squads of guys crawling all
over this place, but she was a little too far downriver, none of
them saw her. I barely did -- she blends in like, well she looks
like some old garbage.
    "But get this, she was mumbling something
about the bridge. Hard to know exactly what she was saying, but I
definitely heard 'bridge.'"
    "And you think, what? She knows something?
Might have seen something?"
    "Could be. Who knows. But still."
    "I want to know more, crucially," said Alan.
Already, here was a result, the kind of tangible, concrete result
that Joe, with his mystifying non-methods, couldn't deliver. "Have
Womack bring her in. You stay out there and keep looking. I'll meet
Womack at the station."
    Alan hung up. Barely a thought of leftovers
to be found. He briskly yelled in the general direction of the
kitchen, "There's a big thing. I have to run." And he was already
out the door, throwing the unchewed morsel down the storm drain,
already wishing he could have at least washed his hands first,
because it would intensely bother him until he did, but on second
thought there were sanitary wipes in the car, so he'd be okay, and
he already had the car door unlocked, had the key in the ignition,
the engine revving, when Susan called after him.
    She called his name quietly. Would Alan be
home in time for dinner, she wanted to know. Because if so, would
he be minding more chicken?
    *
    Repetition was supposed to be the key to
perfection. In Susan's case, repetition took her cutlets to an
opposite place -- each filet was a step backward from the last, a
un-evolution. She was working her way toward the original mother
filet, something so primal it would be unrecognizable to a modern
palette.
    Why do it? She could tell that Alan took it
personally, that he saw it as some kind of aggression on her part.
But it was something else entirely. Because it seemed to Susan that
wanting to be the best at something seemed so unoriginal. Susan had
a mostly good husband, a good child, and she was secure, in spite
of the fuss she made. She didn't have anything to prove. So why not
fail at something? It was far more interesting, and in fact, it was
liberating. In failure she could be her true self, free from the
influence of expectation.
    Admittedly, she had may have laid it on a bit
thick this morning. But sometimes it was so hard to make Alan
listen. You literally had to have some sort of breakdown to get him
to pay attention. Or more precisely, to get him to start paying
attention to someone other than himself.
    Susan pulled Eugene to her chest and stood
up, carrying him to his high chair and plugging him in. The child
slouched, he'd slide right out through the bottom if you let him.
The kid just didn't bother with gravity. Not that she blamed him.
Who, at some point, didn't wish the rules would just get over
themselves? Give us a break, gravity. Lay off, velocity. Time out,
mass.
    Susan didn't mind Eugene's so-what posture,
not the way Alan did. Eugene wasn't even a year old, so let the
child have his fun. Those are a rare few years when you can be so
careless -- go naked, defecate on a whim, suckle in public -- why
deny anyone that? Susan even found it admirable...well, in
children.
    But Alan, he just wasn't content to let
Eugene be. Lately Alan had been hard at work compiling a series of
educational tests -- meticulous, multi-page documents larded with
arcane math and logic experiments. He argued that mastery of these
tests should be an essential part of Eugene's immediate
development, although clearly the child was too young. But this was
typical of her husband, who tended to be excitable. It was a
predisposition