“Normally I wouldn't care, but every once in a while this factory catches on fire.”
“Goddamn. That must be hell to fight.”
“Eh?”
“All those chemicals. You practically need a reference book for each one.”
“Yeah. Let me tell you, when we get a call for this plant, we're not all that damn happy.”
“Time to roll out the Purple K, huh?”
His face crinkled up. “Yeah, exactly.”
Purple K is a foaming compound they keep at airports to put out exploding 747s. Sometimes useful for chemical fires.
He continued, “But anyway, if there were a fire here, we'd have to get in through this gate.”
“No problem. We're here twenty-four hours a day. If there's a fire, we'll move.”
“What about the gate? I'm told that you've locked the gate.”
“The key's nearby. If there's trouble, we can have the gate open within five minutes.”
“Too slow.”
“Thirty seconds.”
“Okay, that's fine then,” the fire marshal said, then got in his station wagon and drove away. True story. The Boner attorneys just stood with their briefcases twisting in the breeze.
Not much happened on day three. Boner had decided to view the whole thing with amused tolerance. They still didn't have a clue about the sacks of concrete. Back in the plant, toxic waste was backing up in a holding pool somewhere, but they hadn't noticed. Tonight we'd drive away and, if they were very sharp, they'd notice that a manhole had vanished.
In the afternoon Debbie and I decamped to the honeymoon suite where we talked and almost had sex. I refused to leave the bed, just sat there watching the Home Shopping Network, charging up microwave ovens on the Biotronics card, sending them to random addresses in Roxbury, and drinking beer. The three days on the U-Haul had taken a lot out of me. Jim Grandfather showed up and I put the beer away, because the smell bothered him, and he and I sat there quietly, watching football with the sound turned off, listening to Debbie sing in the shower.
In the morning I bathed, borrowed a blow dryer and blew on my hair until I looked like the tail end of a cross-country motorcycle trip. Then I slipped into a fairly modest three-piece suit, put on tube socks, pulled plastic bags on over those and got out my bright-green high-top sneakers, stained and splattered with various toxic wastes. I kept them locked up in a small beer cooler until they were ready to be deployed. Wore a tie that simulated a dead trout hanging from my neck. Jim drove me downtown in his pickup truck and dropped me off. He went out to look for a belt for a washing machine and I walked into the front doors of a large office building.
The security guys were waiting for me and they took me right up to somewhere near the top floor. We did your basic whisk number, whisking through the secretarial maze, and then they showed me into a nifty boardroom where the top-management echelon of Boner Chemical was waiting for me.
It was all choreographed. There were a dozen rich white guys and one of me. Actually, I'm a white guy too, but somehow I keep forgetting. So the white guys were seated in a crescent, like a parabolic reflector, with a single empty chair at the focal point so that they could all point inwards and concentrate their weirdness energy on me. Instead, I wandered over and sat down on an empty chair way off to the side, over underneath the window. Shoe leather creaked and invisible clouds of cologne and martini breath wafted around the room as everyone had to turn around and rearrange. The chairs were massive; a lot of physical effort was involved. They had no coherent plan, so things got pretty raggedy, with some execs sitting way off to the sides and others peering over pinstriped shoulders. All of them were squinting into the sun - a fortuitous accident. I leaned my chair back against the windowsill so that my green sneakers rose into the air. I leaned back there and regarded this nervous phalanx of upper-crusters and got to thinking about what a twisted job this was. I spend days living and working with people who would probably be street puppeteers if GEE didn't exist to hire them. People who keep quartz crystals under their pillows to prevent cancer, who feel the day is lost if they don't get a chance to sing a new 2-4-6-8 chant in front of a minicam. Then I threaten the boards of directors of major corporations. On off days I go scuba diving through raw sewage. My aunt keeps asking me if I've gotten a job yet.
They all introduced themselves but I lost track of the names and ranks pretty quickly. Top execs don't wear “Hello! My name is...” tags on their charcoal-grey worsted. Most were Bonerites, but there were some fiasco people there too.
“Sorry about your dioxin outfall,” I lied, “but don't worry. It's nothing that a few hundred pounds of dynamite won't fix.”
“If you think you can just plug up a Buffalo sewer line, you're wrong, mister,” said the executive with eyeglasses the size of portholes.
“... and get away with it?”
“Yes.”
“Just did. Now, moving on to Item Two,” I said, “we're steamed about your hidden outfall at the base of Niagara Falls. Tomorrow we're going to reveal its existence to the media.”
“I don't know what you're referring to,” said an executive I had mentally christened Mr. Dithers. “We'll have to take it up with Engineering.”
“Item Three: you guys are getting bought out by Basco?”
“The details of that transaction are secret,” said a half-embalmed guy with pale eyes.
“Not totally,” I said.
An executive with a hard-on shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “What exactly are you getting at?”
I whistled. “Insider trading, baby. SEC's number-one no-no.”
Actually, I just made that up on the spur of the moment. But I knew insider trading was going on. There always was. And it would really scare the shit out of these people if they suspected we had some way of bringing the SEC down on them.
“Mr. Taylor, I wonder if I could work an item into the agenda,” said a Class-IV yuppie who'd been spending too much time on the Nautilus. He grinned at me, which was kind of an unusual move in these surroundings, and there was a little stir of, not exactly laughter, but a relaxation, a few moments of unlabored breathing around the room. The air in here was desperately stale and hot.
I threw up my hands and said, “At your service, Mr.-”
“Laughlin. It's kind of hard to remember all these names, I know.”
All this groovy informality was calculated, but up here I'd take informality where I could get it. I dropped the front legs of my chair to the carpet and crossed my legs in the all-American figure-four position, letting the shoe dangle way out to the side. I sipped some of Boner's toxic decaf and stifled a fart. “Okay. What's your beef, Laughlin?”
He looked almost injured. “No beef. Why does it always have to be a beef? I'm just interested in talking to you in less ...” he waved his hands around the room “... claustrophobic surroundings.”
“ 'Bout what?”
“Well, for one thing, whether Sam Horn's going to be as lucky in a tight spot as Dave Henderson.”
“The world is full of Red Sox fans, Mr. Laughlin, and I only sleep with one of them.”
“Touche. Another thing, then. We've got some work going on at Biotronics that would interest you.”
“The Holy Grail?”
He was a little nonplussed. “I don't know about any Holy Grail.”
“Dolmacher's phrase.”
“Ah, yes! He mentioned that the two of you had had a little chat.”
“Verbal combat is more like it. You work for Biotronics, Laughlin?”
The executives crinkled up and chortled.
“I'm the president,” Laughlin said, kindly enough.
Oh yeah. I'd seen his picture in the paper, a couple of months ago.
Thirty floors below, Jim was waiting for me in his rusty pickup, reading the warranty on his washing machine belt. “This must be reality,” I said, climbing in.
“Take it or leave it.”
“Let's go to the Falls,” I said, “and
raise some hell.”
“What happened?”
“Zip. Made an appointment with a young rising star in the cancer industry.”
“To do what?”
“To shop for Grails.”
We went to the Falls. Jim stood up near the top, wearing 501s and some Indian gear, squinting a lot, looking sad and noble for the camera crews and telling dirty jokes to the print reporters. A bunch of GEE people had come down from the Toronto office to give us a hand, so things were well under way by the time we got there. I kept asking where Debbie was and people kept saying “over there,” and eventually I got pointed over to a heavy railing overlooking the Falls. Three climbing ropes were tied to it, leading down the cliff, and Debbie was hanging from one of them down near the bottom, dressed in a stunning Gore-Tex coverall. She and her Toronto pals had located Boner's hidden outfall, right where Alan said it would be, and then started driving pitons into the rock. Toronto had prepared a banner, a forty-foot strip of white ripstop nylon with a big red arrow blazoned on it. They nailed that banner to the cliff, pointing right to the outfall. They took their time, used a lot of pitons and strung eighth-inch aileron cable around the edge of the banner so that the wind wouldn't stretch it away from the cliff. Finally, Debbie took a can of fluorescent-orange spray paint and did what she could to highlight the outfall, make it visible to the cameras. It wasn't a total success, since everything was cold and wet, not ideal conditions for spray paint, but some of it stuck. And if it didn't, well, that's what the arrow was for.
Zodiac
20
WHEN I GOT BACK HOME there was the usual post-trip crap to take care of. Mail and messages. Had to get a birthday present for Auntie. Had to sign a bunch of papers to continue Tanya's “studies” at GEE. They shut off our phone service so we all had to sit down and thrash out about three months' worth of unpaid long-distance bills. In the middle of a spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come in while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony. That was okay. Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we'd untrashed it and cleaned it up, so why not try to keep it that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call this place a “co-op” or a “commune”? How about calling it a “house”? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan?
Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose hair predominated in the shower drain - the women's, since they had more, or the men's, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?
They had gone to extreme inconvenience to save a message for me on the phone answering machine. I had to listen to it three times because I couldn't believe it. It was Dolmacher. He sounded friendly. He wanted me to go up to New Hampshire with him and participate in the survival game - pretending to be a commando in the woods. He was trying to get more people to come up from Boston, he explained, and - get this - the people he worked with were “all terrible nerds.”
I did have to give him one thing: he had the intestinal fortitude to go up there every weekend and do combat with those shaggy inbreds from New Hampshire. They didn't use real bullets, but the dirt and cold were real.
He sounded so damn happy, that's what bothered me. The Grail project must be doing well. And later on the tape, he reminded me of my appointment with Laughlin. What the hell did they want from me?
Shit, maybe they really were on to something. Maybe they'd come up with a way to clean up toxic waste. If so, wonderful. But for some reason the thought bugged the hell out of me.
Maybe I was the only one who was supposed to be a hero. Maybe that was my real problem. If Dolmacher and his grinning, musclebound boss found a perfect way to clean up toxics while I was still sitting hairy and grubby in a Zodiac, riding my bicycle to work, where would it leave me? Left behind and worthless. Meanwhile, Biotronics was pulling some kind of bad cop/good cop drama on me. Scare me and my friends shitless, then, when I figure it out, smile a lot and invite me over for a meeting.
There had also been a series of messages from Rebecca, which they hadn't saved, but they were all the same: I'm trying to get in touch with you, asshole, why don't you call back? So the next time I was in the office I gave her a call.
“How's the wounded warrior?”
Rebecca always had to call me by epithets: the Granola James Bond, the wounded Warrior.
“What do you mean?”
“Pride, S.T. I'm talking about your pride. Last time I talked to you...”
“Oh yeah. The Case of the Disappearing PCBs. Yeah, that one still smarts a little. But I had a good time in Buffalo.” I briefed her on it.
“Been following the Pleshy campaign?”
“That reminds me. They're buying Boner. Big merger, you know. Rumors of insider trading.”
“Let's talk about it. And about the article - remember?”
So we made an appointment. I wasn't sure about the article yet. It might be some fun, in the fish-in-a-barrel department. But then, every once in a while I took a shot at political credibility. A couple of surprisingly well-known local pols have come to me to write policy statements on hazardous waste issues. If I got in the habit of banishing The Groveler in the alternative press, they might shy away from me.
While I was gone, someone had put some clippings on my desk about that jackass Smirnoff. The Terrorist Boy Scouts had held their first meeting and invited all the local press, one or two of whom had shown up. Smirnoff had issued a statement, a rambling statement, just what I'd expect, alternately heaping shit on GEE's head for being too conservative and praising our direct-action techniques. One of the clippings had a photograph, and I could see the back of a member's head, staring up adoringly at Smirnoff, and I was just positive it was Wyman, the guy who had shifted into reverse on the freeway. So I tried to get ahold of him for a while, but he had moved out of his old place and no one knew where he was.
“He's very secretive,” his old roommate explained, “because the FBI is after him.”
“Big fucking deal,” I said, miffing the hell out of his unindicted coconspirator.
I spent the rest of the afternoon writing letters and press releases denouncing the likes of Smirnoff and his idol, Boone, and explaining, in very short sentences, the differences between us and them. Then I trashed them, had the computer wipe them out. They'd never see print, because we don't talk about people like Smirnoff, we just ignore them.
I did have some fun during that first week back. No big actions on the way, no court appearances, no wrecked cars. I mixed up a shitload of papier-mâché and added a new mountain to my train set. I hocked a few more shares of my old Mass Anal stock and bought an antique locomotive. Bartholomew and Debbie and Tess and Laurie and I played a few hundred badminton games after work.
But the most fun of all was when Esmerelda sent me a copy of a photo from the July 13, 1956, Boston Globe, second page of the Business section. It was a picture of Alvin Fleshy, back in his squirrelly, young-engineer days, in fiasco's main facility on Alkali Lane. I recognized the building just by its size: it was their big Chloralkali plant. Same process that had ruined Niagara. They made a lot of chemicals, so they needed a lot of
power. They needed equipment that could handle the power fast. That meant big equipment and lots of it - huge transformers. Many transformers, each the size of a two-car garage.
“NEW EQUIPMENT FOR BASCO. Alvin Fleshy, Senior Engineer, supervises as modern equipment is installed in fiasco's Everett facility. The equipment will be used in the production of industrial and agricultural chemicals.”
Which will be sprayed over most of Vietnam, I mentally added. But the caption didn't matter; I was looking at the photo. Anyone could see that we weren't dealing with just any “equipment” here. We were talking whopping transformers. They were being lowered through holes in the roof.
The fact that fiasco bought a bunch of new transformers in 1956 was not interesting to me. What was interesting was that they had had to get rid of some old transformers to make room for the new ones. And all of them had probably been full of PCBs, hundreds of thousands of gallons of the bad stuff, fiasco had been having PCB problems for years, but nothing of that magnitude.
Fleshy had stashed away a lakeful of toxic waste somewhere, and he'd been keeping it under his belt for thirty years. I wonder if he thought about it at night. I wonder what the stockholders would say when I informed them of it, sent them copies of this photograph.
Suppose they'd taken those transformers and just dumped them on the floor of the Harbor somewhere. Or taken them to one of their lots and covered them with dirt. Sooner or later they'd bust open and then all hell would break loose. It might take a long time - say, thirty years. But it would happen.
And they'd know about it. They'd be sitting there, waiting, worrying. Maybe worrying enough to cover the site with some goons in a Cigarette.
Pure speculation. But it might explain the lobster. Unfortunately, it didn't explain the disappearing PCBs.
I looked at the photo again. Fleshy was smiling that big bright smile that hasn't been seen anywhere since the Fifties. Twelve years later, when he read about the rice oil in Kusho, I'll bet the smile wasn't there.
But there were plenty of smiles at Biotronics, at least for the first ten minutes or so. Laughlin actually sent a car around to pick me up. He said he'd feel terrible if I got run over riding my bike to their offices. Either he was indiscreet as hell, or he wanted to let me know that he knew a lot about me.