Mother Nature Read online

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  THE NEXT MORNING I struggled to find my way to HRC Environmental through a thick, ground-hugging fog. It flowed like milk through the beams of my headlights. Distances were hard to gauge. Large objects like buildings and other cars appeared suddenly and too close, or stayed frustratingly hidden.

  The weather suited my frame of mind. I had awakened from a dream about Dierdre Karsh, and much as I struggled to tap back into the illogic of sleep, I couldn’t remember what had happened in the dream, just that she had been in it, but it left me with the sensation of something exquisitely sweet right next to something frightening. Awake, I felt lonelier and more exposed than ever.

  I had climbed out of bed and dressed quickly, hoping I could don Janet’s undoubtedly saner mental state with her field clothing. No luck. All the way through the fog to HRC, the dream had continued to dog me, as if Mrs. Karsh were still with me, sitting just behind me in the truck.

  It was six-thirty. Half an hour to go until I started this new “job,” and my stomach was grinding. At the deli, Reena was smiling her thousand-megawatt smile, enough to drive the ghosts far enough away that I could jolt myself the rest of the way awake with two fine cups of coffee. I ordered a side of two eggs sunny-side up. That left me with three dollars and seventy-five cents cash to my name.

  As the coffee hoisted my eyelids to full wakefulness, I felt a growing excitement: I was about to learn what Janet had been doing with her working hours, that work that had seemed important enough to her father that he would hire a private operative to bring it to light. Ah yes, the inscrutable Senator Pinchon. I chewed my eggs meditatively, wondering once again what he already knew that he wasn’t telling me.

  At seven sharp I was waiting at the front door of HRC Environmental, wondering where this guy Adam Horowitz was. The door was locked and the lights were still off, so I just huddled against the front wall of the building, trying to shrug off the chill of the fog. The minutes inched by. At last someone appeared in the front office, pulled up a blind, and greeted me with a thoroughly bitter scowl. He was slender and sunken-chested and still young enough to be fighting a severe case of acne that covered his weaselly face and what I could see of his scrawny neck. He shoved open the door and narrowed his eyes. “You’re Hansen,” he insinuated. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I’ve been right here, waiting for you,” I replied, sucked into his adversarial attitude like a cow into quicksand.

  “Damn it to hell,” he muttered, already turning his back on me to stomp through the office. I barely caught the door before it slammed shut, had to break into a trot to catch up with him.

  The drive to the work site was forty-five minutes of seething non-communication against a background of AM news and yak turned up piercingly loud. I gathered that we were inching northwestward along Highway 101, but I still couldn’t see much except for short patches where the fog mysteriously disappeared. The whole time Adam cussed under his breath and gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles blanched. I began to wonder if he was sitting on a pile of tacks.

  At length we turned off the highway and onto a winding two-lane road that led gradually uphill past more vineyard and orchard land. As the ground rose, the mist began to clear, and finally we broke out into a gray overcast. The trees took on a flat gray-green paper-cutout effect against a background of pearl-gray mist. Then we popped into a little town, pulled up by a mom-and-pop grocery store, and Adam spoke directly to me for the first time since he’d opened the front door of HRC Environmental: “You stay here with the backhoe. I’m working the rig down the street. Don’t tell him nothing, just take notes.”

  “What’s the backhoe doing?”

  Adam rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Pulling a tank, what else?”

  “I see,” I mocked, wondering what had happened to my self-esteem that I was sparring with a juvenile. “And all I’m supposed to do is watch?”

  “Observe,” Adam parried witheringly. “Earl knows what to do. But having a geologist”—he named my profession with abundant sarcasm—“on site makes him more legitimate. Don’t worry, he’ll add ten percent to your hourly rate and pass it on to the client.” He looked suspiciously at my Filson vest. “You don’t got a clipboard, do you? Goddamn it, I suppose you’ll have to use one of mine.” He reached behind the seat and spirited up a portable plastic file box and pulled out one of two aluminum clipboards. He gunned the motor of the truck. I got out. Gravel spun around my ankles as he left.

  I looked around. I was in the parking lot next to the store. The pavement had been cleared and marked with yellow paint over an area maybe fifteen feet by twenty, right next to a concrete pad that looked like it had once held a set of gasoline pumps. Truncated pipelines projected up from the earth like hungry eels. Twenty feet away to my right stood a large backhoe, and parked next to it was another pickup truck with camper shell and a flatbed trailer that must have hauled the backhoe. The logo on its door said EARL’S EARTH MOVING, INC.

  Earl was an immense, ovoid man with a narrow, balding skull and jowly, sagging chin a quarter inch thick with whiskers, like his hair and flesh were melting from the top of his head and settling to the bottom. As I approached his truck, he was sitting behind the wheel slurping coffee out of a twelve-ounce polystyrene cup. He turned to watch me. I smiled. Coffee addiction is something to which I can relate.

  Earl paused in his ritual and pursed his rubbery lips in midslurp, eyes half-closed in the rapture of gathering steam off the hot liquid. “Who you?” he grunted.

  “Geologist from HRC,” I replied, imitating his telegraphic speech.

  “Huh?”

  “New.”

  “Uh. You insteadda Adam?”

  “Yuh. He’s down the street, we need him. He was in a hurry, I guess.”

  Earl pursed his lips again, this time in amusement, and shook his head side to side very slowly. “That kid always got his BVDs in a bunch. Well, les’ gedda work.” He knocked the last third of his cup back in a gulp audible half the way down to his middle and unwedged himself from behind the wheel. It was a tall truck, but as he stepped down, his eye level didn’t drop. “Go on getchersef a cuppa coffee. I’ll have this asphalt off fore you know it.”

  Inside the store, I found a large coffee urn next to a dusty display of fishing lures. As I stepped across the threshold, I’d set off a bell somewhere, and presently I saw an elderly man working his way through the displays from the back of the shop. He was a pleasant old codger with a narrow neck and just a few pet hairs combed fondly across the top of an otherwise shiny skull, and he had dark eyes that seemed enormous behind beer-bottle-bottom glasses. “Can I help you?” he sang.

  “I’m with the backhoe out here. I just wanted some coffee.”

  He grinned ear to ear. “Take all you want, little missy, it’s on the house!”

  My heart sank as I thought of Adam’s words about how Earl would charge my time with a ten percent markup. At that, I didn’t even know how much I was costing Earl. “No, I insist on paying.” I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and pulled out one of my last pathetic wrinkly dollar bills.

  The man held up a hand, cheerfully refusing to take my money. I would have dropped it and run for it, if I’d had it to spare, but just then the front door dinged open again and another old coot shambled in, sucking his teeth. “Hey, Phil! What’s the story? Your gas pumps is gone. You want me to drive all the way into Cloverdale to fill up?”

  “Sorry, Stan,” Phil soothed, “County Health Department says my tanks is leaking, and I have to pull ’em or fix ’em, so I’m having ’em replaced. We’ll be without for a little while. This little lady here is helping out, aren’t ya now?”

  I smiled primly.

  Stan bared his false teeth at me. “Hah! I heard about you bloodsuckers! Damn gummint says we got to bury the tanks so we don’t burn the place down, so we bury them. Then you come along and say we’re pollutin’ the ground, so they gotta come out. Then you put your snoopy wells all over
the place and who’s gotta pay? We do! We pay and pay and pay!” He had raised his cane and was shaking it at me, knocking packets of corn chips off a display as the thing wobbled out of control.

  “Now, Stan, it won’t be like that. Will it, missy?” Phil said, smiling hopefully.

  I began to think I was in a bad movie, or at least a bad dream. Backing away brandishing the steaming coffee and clutching the clipboard across my front for protection, I mumbled something articulate like, “Gosh, I don’t know, I’m new here.”

  “Some excuse!” the old man shrilled. “A man works hard his whole life, and for what? You young punks come in here like you own the place, say we’re messin’ up your environment. You whine like pigs! You try working with your hands!” His cane clattered to the floor and he shook his gnarled, spotted hands at me in fury, his ancient head locked forward with anger.

  Suddenly something in me rose up, and words flew out of my mouth: “I’m not a punk! I’ve worked hard myself. These hands have mended fences in a high wind at ten below, dammit, and I won’t be spoken to this way!” I was shaking so hard I dropped the clipboard, and the coffee sloshed onto my bare skin, scalding it.

  With shaking hands, I switched the cup to my undamaged paw. I’d never lost my cool like this before, ever. Or had I? A weird sense of déjà vu slipped through my body like a wave of nausea.

  Both old men stood frozen in place, watching me like I was a rabid mountain lion. Muttering an apology, I picked up my clipboard, turned, and hurried back outside.

  * * *

  EARL PHIPPS WAS already at work ripping up the asphalt concrete that covered the gasoline tanks. He worked steadily, ripping and pushing the broken pieces aside with the bucket of the backhoe, working the levers and brakes from his bouncing throne in the middle of the craft. After the paved surface was up, he started scooping up the earth, great bucketfuls of the gray and tawny layers of pebbly soil. I pulled out the clipboard and took notes, things like, “Commenced work at 8:04 A.M. Removed asphalt concrete.” It looked suspiciously like a daily drilling wire report from an oil rig, but what did they expect of a lowly ex-oil rookie?

  Six feet down, Earl struck the top of a tank, a dull thunk reverberating over the grrrs and whumps of the backhoe. He got out and took a look, peering into the hole from a respectful distance away from the edge. “There’s the unleaded. A one-K,” he commented sagely.

  “A thousand gallons?”

  “Yup. Put it in in seventy. The old leaded ought to be here to the right. It’s been there longer. A five-fifty.”

  “Five hundred fifty gallons.”

  “Yup. Hauler oughtta be here soon. Yo, Vince!” he hollered at a man who was just then wandering up. “Speaka da devil!”

  Vince was a rangy guy dressed in a navy-blue coverall with his name embroidered on the chest. He snubbed out a cigarette he’d been smoking, rubbing it on the sole of his steel-toed boot and slipping the butt into a pocket. “The county on its way?” he asked.

  Earl nodded. “Wonder who’s coming,” he said.

  “Hoping for Lucy, eh? Always chasing skirts, ain’t ya, Earl. Real ladies’ man.”

  “Lucy’s good at what she does,” Earl said demurely.

  “Uh-huh.” Vince batted his eyelashes at Earl. Then he turned to me. “And who’s this bit of lovely?”

  I was just sticking out my scalded hand to introduce myself when a small sedan with a government license plate pulled up next to the backhoe. Out bounced a very appealing young woman carrying a clipboard and a hard hat. Everything about her was buoyant—her smile, her musculature, her bosom, her stride. “Hi, Earl!” she sang, waving an arm high over her head. “Oh, and Vince! Well, the gang’s all here then. Let’s hustle a bustle, why don’t we?”

  After a few minutes of this low-key horsing around, they got back down to work. Lucy had not yet noticed me, which was fine, because it gave me license to watch the proceedings like the fly on the wall the Senator had hired me to be.

  Phil, the old man who owned the store and this hole in the ground, had wandered out to watch, too. He stood shyly by the corner of the building, his gnarly old hands jammed into his back jeans pockets, his eyes bright with interest and a feverish variety of hope. Stan, the old coot with the cane, stood next to him, his expression as dark as rain.

  Earl lumbered back into the backhoe and swung the bucket back into the hole, removing the remaining soil and the pea-gravel backfill from the tops of the tanks. When they were clear, Vince jumped down into the hole and peered into the tanks through what was left of the pipes, checking to make sure they were empty. Then he dropped a load of dry ice into each to settle the fumes. Earl got the backhoe bucket under one end of the leaded gasoline tank and tipped it up, making room for Vince to pass a sling under it. They repeated this at the other end of the tank. When they had the thing adequately trussed, Earl passed a chain through the slings and prepared to hoist the tank out with the bucket of his backhoe.

  “This is the big moment,” Lucy chortled, speaking to me for the first time. She was hugging her clipboard with all the gooey enthusiasm of an ingenue at a bridal shower waiting for the first touching little present to be unwrapped.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Contamination.”

  Earl shoved a lever and the tank lurched into the air, swung, settled, and turned slowly on the chain. A heavy reek of rotted gasoline roiled up from the pit, washing past my nostrils in a nearly palpable wave.

  “Bingo!” Lucy shouted. I turned to look at her. She was smiling cheerfully. She scribbled something on the form on her clipboard. “It’s a stinker, all right!”

  Phil shuffled toward me, still smiling. “How’s it look?”

  I cringed. What could I say? Forget about your retirement funds? “Ah, I’m not sure. I think Lucy just said she thought maybe there was some contamination.”

  Phil’s eyes still held mine brightly. He did not comprehend what I’d said. “Well, I hope it’s nothing bad.”

  “Why don’t you wait inside? I’m sure Lucy will be in shortly.”

  Lucy was hollering to be heard over the engine of the backhoe. “I win again, Earl!”

  Earl waved magnanimously.

  Fixing a manic grin on my face, I again urged Phil to go inside. Smiling his confusion, he did.

  I turned to Lucy, my hands itching to slap her. “You’re happy it leaked?” I demanded.

  Lucy cocked her head to one side. “Oh, it’s just a game Earl and I have. He’s kind of cute: statistically, ninety percent of them are leakers, so I almost always win. Get it?”

  “But—”

  “Oh, come on, you can’t let life get serious. This is just a job. Someone’s got to do it.”

  “But isn’t this going to cost that old man over there his life savings to clean it up?”

  “Oh, maybe not. If he plays his cards right, the SB2004 Fund will pick up the cost of cleanup, or the bulk of it anyway.” To Earl she shouted, “Just set it over there, Earl, and pull the other one, too. Vince, see if you can knock some of the crud off the bottom of that tank, check it for holes.”

  I said, “What’s the SB2—”

  Lucy cocked her head at me again. “You’re new, huh.” With a peremptory lifting of her golden eyebrows, Lucy shifted her clipboard to the other side of her chest and prepared to lecture me. “It’s a state law set up to cover this kind of problem, promulgated in 1992,” she intoned, relishing the legalese. “The tank owners pay into, the Fund each time they have the tanks filled. Monitoring is done on a regular schedule. They have to show that the tank is pressure-tight, and that the gas-in-gas-out inventory tallies properly, or they can’t get their tank-operating license renewed. If it’s a leaker, the tank removal and the first ten thousand dollars of the cleanup is their problem. If there were no water-supply wells within range of the plume of contamination, we could just maybe monitor it for a while, but this is right near all these houses.” She pointed to a place where a downspout from the roo
f of the store was quietly funneling the morning’s dampness into the excavation. “See how fast that water’s moving through that soil? If that well next door doesn’t test positive for benzene, I’ll eat my hard hat, honey.” She turned away for a moment and hollered at Earl. “Hey, Earl! Dump some bentonite in there, will you? You’re turning this hole into a percolation pond!” Back to me, she said, “So this one’ll go for cleanup, that’s all but certain. But if they keep moving forward with the job in good faith, they can apply for reimbursement from the Fund.”

  “Apply? Doesn’t the Fund always pay?”

  Lucy shrugged. “It all depends on where they are on the priority list. The Fund is not bottomless, after all. Private residential tanks get paid back first, then small businesses, then large, then agricultural tanks.”

  “And if the Fund won’t cover this job?”

  I must have let the hostility I was feeling seep into my voice, because Lucy lowered her eyelids halfway, oddly echoing the venemous gaze of the old man with the cane. “He has to take responsibility for his property. You know how it is: mess up, clean up.”

  My neck had gone rigid. “What a solution. Now we can all pay higher taxes to care for him in his waning years.” I pulled a pen out of the pocket of Janet’s Filson vest. Wondering just how Janet had felt when she faced jobs like this, I wrote: 10:45: Representative of County Health Department has mastered the art of officious bullshit-chucking.

  * * *

  BY NOON, BOTH tanks had been hoisted, examined for holes (none were visible, but there was a lot of rust), and lashed to Vince’s flatbed truck for removal to the tank graveyard. The store owner had dutifully signed a form from Lucy that documented a release of toxic materials into the soil, obligating himself to the next level of investigation. Earl had scraped out the remaining pea gravel with his bucket and grunted his way down into the hole to take soil samples for analysis, to document the degree of contamination.