by R.P. Burnham
Chris Andrews found Patti Ryan already having breakfast when he came into the kitchen at a little after seven a.m. For the past several months he had been staying at the house that Patti’s father had given her and her brother Alex a year ago, and this was the usual way his day started. Patti and he were the early risers. Alex, Virgie and Donna tended to sleep in, which was probably a good thing since Chris was not at his best when he first woke up and couldn’t handle the others. Patti, his oldest friend, was different. They had met at Portland High twelve years ago when they were both fourteen and had been friends since. When Chris grew tired of the west coast after two and a half years of radical environmentalism—spiking trees, lying down before bulldozers, working to save the spotted owl, even a stint as a tree sitter high on a giant redwood—and decided to come home, it was Patti, and to a lesser extent her brother Alex, who were the faces attached to the word “home.” His mother had died in a fire three years ago (it was the insurance money from that fire that had financed, and continued to finance, his green activities), and his father had died from a heart attack and from drinking three years before his mother’s death, so he, an only child, had no family in the usual sense of the word.
But he had his friends and housemates for a family. With them he could be himself and know he was among people who shared experiences and core beliefs. He could be at home, not a situation he was used to. When he was a boy his father changed jobs and moved so often that he began to feel like an army brat. He found it hard to make friends. It was a lonely, scared and alienated boy who found Patti and Alex and later Virgie. Like him they cared nothing for the usual high school rigmarole of football, popularity, conventional beliefs and adolescent conformity. Even when his parents still lived, his new friends quickly became his real home. They were all rebellious and distrustful of authority without any particular target, though later the youthful rebelliousness grew into a leftist perspective on life.
He knew the others felt similar bonds to him. Chris and Patti were the first people Alex told that he was gay. When they accepted him for himself, they in turn helped him to accept himself. As for Virgie, she and Chris had an on-and-off sexual relationship for years. She was the real hippie among them, the one who had not yet found her calling and never would. She lived day to day, taking what came her way. But what would she be without the refuge Patti and Alex offered her? She, the child of alcoholics, got by by trying not to let anything bother her. With her too the only home she knew was with them.
That home was, nevertheless, slowly changing into something less adolescent, less free-spirited. The world was calling; the responsibilities of adulthood were pressing in on them. Alex attended law school at U.S.M. during the day and worked as a waiter three nights a week. Patti, after several years of drifting like Virgie, even though she did work on the AIDS hotline and served at a soup kitchen, had finally decided that if she had to work to live she might as well do something that helped people. She had enrolled in the nursing program at U.S.M. and was on her way to becoming a registered nurse. Donna, Virgie’s friend and the final member of the commune, was thinking about getting into teaching, though those plans were on hold: she had recently met a man and was living mostly at his apartment. Chris had not laid eyes on her for the past week.
Chris had come up from his basement room quietly and unobserved. Patti was thoughtfully munching toast on which she had mashed a banana. The morning paper lay opened on the table before her, but she appeared lost in thought.
As always he found her face attractive. She had full lips, a pug nose, soulful dark eyes and sandy hair worn short and parted in the middle. Dressed in her usual night wear, a long T-shirt over her panties, she was heavy-thighed but otherwise shapely and well formed. Briefly back in high school they had been lovers before realizing that their personalities meshed together better as friends than as lovers. And yet he loved her more than any other person in the world.
“Is this the day your father makes his visit-inspection?” he asked, breaking her reverie.
She looked up, momentarily surprised. “No, he’s coming this weekend.”
“Oh,” he said indifferently. “I thought you were thinking of him just now. You seemed lost in thought.” He walked over to the counter to sniff the coffeemaker. One thing he had brought back with him from the west coast was a love of good coffee. He bought some expensive Colombian coffee for the household recently, which his nose told him Patti had brewed this morning. He poured himself a cup.
“I was just thinking about being a nurse. You know, wondering if it was right for me.”
“I thought you already went through that. I thought you—”
“I did, but with a little more work I could be a doctor.”
“A little more?”
She smiled. “That’s the trouble. It would take a lot more work. But, hey, there’s something else, something I saw in the paper. I don’t know what you have planned for today, but there’s an article here about that mercury pollution in Waska that might make you change any plans.”
He had a moment of panic where he felt his heart jolted. That a news item was appearing in the paper about his case meant he had been a fool. He had planned on being the one to break this story and would have been if he had not been distracted by the problem with a water treatment plant upstate. Gardia and other biological pollutants were found in a town’s water supply, and Chris had spent time upstate doing research about it. “Where?” he said imperiously. “Show it to me.”
She handed him the paper. He read hurriedly, looking for the name Ridlon, and was relieved not to find it. The article concerned a young boy named Mark Kimball, who was seriously ill with Minamata disease, almost certainly, the article said, from eating fish his father caught in Pleasant Pond.
“Is that your case?”
“Yeah. And I’m pretty sure that pond is near where I got the highest readings on the Waska River.” He went over to the desk in the dining room where yesterday he had been doing some paper work and took a couple of folders from his briefcase. “I’ve got some maps that will show the location.”
Patti stood to look over his shoulder. “Does this ruin your case?”
“Not necessarily. They don’t know in Waska who’s responsible. I do.” He thought for a moment, weighing some alternatives. “Actually, this might help my case. Before I just had readings. Now we have a victim. If that boy dies, the public will want blood. That’s all to the good.”
Patti walked around to face him and stared, wide-eyed. “What the hell do you mean by that? Do you want that poor boy to die?”
“No, not like that. I’m talking about tactics.”
“Even on a tactical level it’s not a good attitude. It’s counterpro-ductive.”
He was searching through his folders and didn’t answer for a while.
“Well, what do you have to say?”
He shrugged. “It’ll be okay if the kid is just sick. But it would be better, if we want to galvanize the public, if he died. That’s all I’m saying—and, you know, just getting ready just in case.”
She chewed on her lip for a moment as she continued to stare at him. “But would it be better for the boy? For the mother?”
“No, of course not. But to stop illegal dumping and the rape of the earth we need to show people what happens. Does anyone care when a bird dies from pesticides or a raccoon starves? When a raptor is shot?”
“I know someone who does.”
He looked up at her, tilting his head and raising his eyebrows.
“Me. I cried the time we saw the rabid skunk the police shot.”
“You,” he said not quite contemptuously but not kindly either, “you’re too sensitive.”
“And you’re a cold-hearted bastard. That’s what Virgie says, and she ought to know.”
Chris, having found his notes and readings from Waska, started looking through them.
“Well, aren’t you going to defend yourself?”
He looked up momentarily. “What’s
to defend? She’s right.”
“She says you have a one-track mind and that all you really care about is the earth.”
He was examining a map of the Waska River. Pleasant Pond was definitely the place nearest to where he had got the highest readings. Not only that, he saw a road leading to the pond. It was Tooley Road, which he remembered was one of the places he’d found where Ridlon owned property. He grew excited before remembering that Patti needed a reply. He put his finger on Tooley Road and looked up. “She’s right again. But someday the earth will thank me even if now nobody does.”
When she looked—what? disappointed in him? sorry for him?—he saw she needed appeasing. “You know, Patti, a person can’t be everything to everyone. I sure know I’m not perfect, but I do think I’m very good at what I do. The thing I try to do is be realistic. People call us tree-huggers and dismiss us as sentimental fools. There’s a guy in Waska—I haven’t met him yet, but I just know what he’s like. Ridlon’s his name. I’m positive he’s the one behind this dumping of mercury. Well, he considers himself a realist. You only live once, and you damn well better get all you can. He doesn’t care about the earth or other people. To fight people like that you have to be strong. You have to be cynical. You have to be realistic. I’m not going to quit till I nail this creep. And another thing—you can’t reason a guy like that into stopping the rape of the earth. You have to fight him the way he’ll understand.”
Patti’s face softened as she listened. He could tell she would prefer that he be a tree-hugger (a term that would describe her), but at least she could respect where he was coming from.
But instead of responding to the defense of his methods, she changed the subject. “So what are you going to do about this news?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure. My thunder has been stolen. I was hoping to be the guy that exposed this scum and the news that the mercury was in the water, and I would have if I hadn’t been distracted by that water purification plant. But what I can do is find the proof to nail Ridlon. As I said, the people in Waska don’t know who’s behind this mess. I do.”
“So you’re going to see this through?”
He stared at her through narrowed eyes. “Yes, of course I am. What are you getting at?”
She began picking up her breakfast things. “Nothing. It’s only when you came last fall none of us figured you’d last the winter.” She put the dishes in the sink, then turned to place the butter in the refrigerator. “You’re not a homebody, you know. Always on the go. But I’ve got to get into the shower before Alex wakes up.”
He barely noticed her last remark. He was conscious of feeling hurt that she didn’t understand the way he felt about her, but he quickly vanquished that unworthy feeling from his mind. Nature was perfect—when human beings didn’t interfere—but he didn’t expect anything close to perfection from the human world, the place from where Patti’s misunderstanding came. It did, however, and despite himself, set his mind in motion. A chain of associations more felt than logically understood crowded upon Patti’s remark of his not being a homebody and made him think of Ronnie Galant, his best friend when he was seven years old. They were inseparable and did all the boy things together. They walked to school together, ran through sprinklers on hot summer days, played baseball and football, buried dead robins with crude stick crosses, read each other’s comic books and played some of the characters in elaborate games, even wearing capes and masks they’d made in emulation of their heroes’ costumes. They shared treats, made circuses with other kids and gathered their mothers for an audience, watched TV together, and even ate at each other’s house frequently. But when he was seven, his father’s drinking led to his being fired, and they made the first of their many moves, this one across the river to Bedford. It was only a few miles from his old house and best friend but a continent away when you were only seven. Then two years later when they moved back to Waska he found that Ronnie had made new friends and played with him very little. So in those years before he befriended Patti and Alex and Virgie, during which time they moved several more times and his father drank himself into a stupor every weekend and sometimes even on weekday nights, Chris withdrew into himself and trusted nobody.
But that wasn’t why he thought of Ronnie Galant. He wasn’t nostalgic for him. He didn’t feel as if he’d been expelled from Eden. Nothing like that. Experience had long ago hardened him. He would be insulted if anyone suspected him of regrets. It was home that he was thinking about, but Patti was wrong about him. He wanted stability as much as anybody; it was just that he had found it in a different place. Before he had a human home with his friends, he found another home far away from the human world in nature. When he was twelve, mistrustful, alienated, and angry, and probably in danger of becoming lost to drugs, to alcohol or to neurosis, his father moved them upcountry. He saw deer at twilight, raccoons and possums at night, rabbits in the morning, and birds and insects all the time. All of them, even the insects, were wary of his presence, a quality he could relate to in his loneliness and which actually made him feel closer to the creatures of the earth. He started wandering the woods and fields as often as he could and became familiar with the habits of these creatures. Bands of chickadees made regular rounds, often accompanied by woodpeckers, finches and titmice. He discovered where deer liked to drink and sometimes where they slept. He saw that a skunk gave fair warning to allow him space. He watched redwing blackbirds attack any crow that wandered into their nesting area and found out in a book why: crows would eat nestlings if they found them. After learning that, he was always very careful not to be observed when he examined a nest. He learned that the first migrants tended to be the shore birds and again at the library found out why: they nested on the tundra where winter came early. After a while he spent as much time in the library as he did observing nature directly. He didn’t know it, but he had found his life’s work, and he had found another home. What Patti misunderstood to be his wanderlust was really his commitment to his first love and his deepest home.
His reminiscing didn’t last long. The past was the past, and there was work to do. While eating two pieces of toast slathered with butter and jam, he carefully reread all his notes on Ridlon and mercury poisoning, then went out to his car to check his equipment for taking water samples. That was the only thing he owned that he was currently keeping in his car. The rest of his stuff, which wasn’t much, was in his basement room. He was a man who traveled light. All he owned in the world easily fit into the trunk of his small Japanese car. He had a box of files, a laptop and a mobile phone for his “office” equipment. His clothes, mostly dungarees and T-shirts, filled one small suitcase. His library consisted of some dozen or so books, most of them ecological reference books or field guides along with a dictionary and an Internet guide. He could be packed up and on the road in less than half an hour.
When he got back inside Patti was already dressed and ready to go to the hospital. This was a mark of her new efficiency, for she still had twenty minutes before she had to leave. Alex had just called to her from the top of the stairs after taking his shower. He had a problem that Chris couldn’t relate to.
“Hey, Patti,” he yelled anxiously, “did you wash my salmon shirt when you did the laundry yesterday?”
“No, I didn’t have time to do the laundry. Why do you ask?
“Because I’m wearing my charcoal slacks and don’t have anything to go with them.”
“Wear one of your powder-blue shirts.”
“Can’t be done. I don’t feel powder blue today.”
“Chris has that striped shirt, white with reddish-salmon stripes. That should do.” She grinned at Chris. The day Alex wore something of Chris’s would be the day central heating would be needed in hell.
“Yeah, right,” Alex said, not at all amused. “I guess I’ll have to get in a powder-blue mood pronto.”
A few minutes later he came downstairs wearing the powder-blue shirt with a wry expression that indicated he was still n
ot in a powder-blue mood. He had the same dark eyes as his sister, but his hair was also dark. He was heavyset and much concerned about eating properly and managing his weight. He was also concerned about his appearance, something Chris found alien, but he had the ability to laugh at himself and was not really vain. He was honest, hated hypocrisy, and his bête noire was unimaginative people. Chris liked him for those qualities and because he was a loyal friend.
Patti exchanged a glance with Chris. A slight smile passed across her face. To her brother she said, “Don’t worry, you look perfectly fine.”
He sniffed, “Don’t feel perfectly fine,” as he went over to the cupboard and got a box of cereal.
“Chris, why don’t you ask Alex to go with you. He’s a lawyer and would be more useful.”
“Alex is leaving early this morning. That seems obvious?” He modulated his voice to make a question of his second statement, hoping Alex was in fact available.
But he mumbled something about having to see a professor at the law school this morning. His back was turned as he poured milk into his cereal.
“See?” Chris said. “I’m going to have to go alone.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It’d be better with someone with me. I’m not a people person.”
Patti smiled at the confession of his limitations. “Well, ask Virgie. I bet she’d go with you.”
“Are you serious. She’s been distant ever since…”
He didn’t finish the thought because Patti knew all about it. A few weeks ago when Virgie and he were alone in the house, she came downstairs wrapped in a towel after her shower to ask to borrow some toothpaste. One thing led to another and they had a session of lovemaking that lasted the whole morning. What made this behavior problematic was that she was seeing a new guy, so after her passion was spent she told him that she didn’t mean for this to happen. He had shrugged and said, “Well, it did happen.”
“But let’s forget that it did, okay?”
That would be fine with him, he replied, but a few days later when the new boyfriend came around to pick her up, Chris was sarcastic and hostile to him. The guy was wearing dungarees and a matching dungaree jacket with shiny brass studs, so it seemed natural to call him “Stud.” He was short, and when Virgie wanted a cup of tea, Chris said he’d better get the cup since it was way up there on the top shelf.
Virgie kept giving him looks that silently asked him to stop, which had the effect of egging him on. “What college did you go to?” he asked the guy, fully aware that he had just got out of the Coast Guard a few months ago.
Following that episode, Virgie used passive aggression to show her displeasure, but a week later the new boyfriend had disappeared. He asked her what happened, but she wouldn’t talk about it.
So Virgie was a long shot in this horse race, but the only possibility he had. He looked at his watch: it was approaching 8:30, still early for her, but by the time Alex and Patti left he would chance waking her. “Maybe I’ll give her a try,” he said to Patti.
“I bet she’d say yes, especially when she sees how important this is.”
“What’s the problem, Chris?” Alex asked from the breakfast table. “Why do you need someone to go with you? And where are you going?”
“It’s about his mercury-poisoning case in Waska,” Patti explained. “Chris was planning on breaking the story, but it was in the paper this morning.”
Alex appeared not to be listening. Something in the paper had caught his attention, and he was reading the article. But presently he looked up and asked Chris, “Well, if the story is out, what else is there to do?”
“I know the guy who did this polluting. They don’t. His name’s Ridlon.”
“Ridlon? Ned Ridlon from Waska?”
“Yeah. You heard of him?”
Alex busied himself munching some cereal, then tipped his bowl for a final spoonful. “I’ve heard my dad mention his name. He’s a big Republican supporter and has several pols in his pocket. According to my father he has a say on who runs for office locally and statewide. He’s a big fish.”
“A big fish who’s also a big crook apparently,” Patti said.
“Yeah,” Alex said, standing and bringing his bowl to the sink, “but if you’re going to take him on, you might ask my father for help.”
The idea displeased Chris. He thought back to high school when Mr. Ryan had tried to forbid Patti from befriending him. He was active in Democratic politics but socially conservative. To him Chris was just riffraff. And later when he learned that his only son was gay, he had not spoken to him for a year. This was the man Alex was suggesting he ask for help. It was ridiculous, insulting. For a moment a lightning bolt of anger crashed in his head, but he censored it. “I don’t think I’ll need any help beyond facts. It’s facts that’s going to nail this guy.”
Alex looked at Chris with a bemused expression on his face. He knew him well enough to have perceived the anger. “I see you still don’t like my old man. Patti will agree with me, though. He has mellowed. And don’t you think some pols know what Ridlon’s been doing?”
“You mean you think he pays hush money?”
“I’m sure it’s more discreet than that, but yes, I do.”
“Well, I’ll bring them down with him too.”
Alex laughed unpleasantly, something he would never have done in the past. Chris wondered if he was growing worldly and middle-class now that he was becoming a lawyer. “If you do,” he said, “the case will drag on for years. I’m taking environmental law this semester, so you know who you can turn to.”
“Laugh all you want, Alex, but I’ve had experience in this stuff now. I worked with some people in northern California who had similar cases. Once this stuff becomes public knowledge the pols won’t be able to help him. The heat will be too much. I will nail him.”
“He will,” Patti agreed.
Alex put his spoon and bowl into the dishwasher. “How do you know that?”
“Because I know Chris.”
Alex turned and grinned at Chris, this time pleasantly and in a friendly way. “I know him too. You’re probably right.”
That grin defused Chris’s bellicosity. He started thinking more clearly, and when Alex went upstairs to brush his teeth, he turned to Patti. “Patti, before you go, tell me something. Has your father really mellowed? Has he really changed?”
“You’re thinking of Alex’s suggestion, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Well, the answer is yes and yes. He has mellowed. He has changed.”
“So what happened?”
Patti was gathering her pocketbook and jacket. She checked in her pocketbook for something, then glanced at her watch. “A couple things, really. First, the fact both Alex and I are pursuing real careers is a big factor. You remember that his objection wasn’t only to things like Alex’s gayness but that he saw us as hippy idlers. At one time he was only going to do what he considered his duty—get me through Mount Holyoke and Alex through B. U. Then he was going to wash his hands of us. But the other thing was his father’s death last year. He talked to me a few weeks after the funeral about it. It was really quite touching, really the first honest conversation I ever had with him.”
Chris, still having heard nothing that changed his opinion of Mr. Ryan, was starting to feel bored. “So what did he say?”
“He said that sitting at the funeral he thought of his own death and how once death occurs no reconciliation is possible. He had his own issues with his father, so he understood the concept of a generation gap. So he decided to lighten up. That was the phrase he used too, ‘lighten up.’ He started paying for our graduate education and he gave us the house here. He’d been renting it all the years after we moved out to the bigger place on the Eastern Prom. He even bought a lot of furniture for us.” She paused and gave him a significant look. “I know you’re thinking that all this is only money. True. But he is also becoming, or trying to become, more accept
ing. You notice he’s never said anything about you, Virgie and Donna being roomies.”
“He hasn’t said anything, but the way he looks speaks loud enough for me to hear.”
“Okay, maybe, but the thing is that now he knows he’s wrong. You can’t expect someone to give up lifelong ways of thinking overnight, can you?”
“I guess not, but—”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Patti said with great vehemence. “Alex is right about one thing. He could give you good advice on some of those pols. He could be useful. I want you to nail that guy too.”
Chris still couldn’t forget what he had been called back in high school. He passed the possibilities through his mind, but kept going back to the word that reactionary old fart had used. He spat it out: “Would he really want to help riffraff like me?”
Patti smiled indulgently. “Work on it, Chris, just like my dad is working on it. I’m telling you, he would be glad to help. But now I gotta go.” Then she did a strange thing. She came over to him, kissed him, and said, “I love you too, you know.”
He thought about the kiss for a long time. So she had understood him after all. He too was her best friend. He felt so good he started thinking Mr. Ryan would be a good man to work with. If he couldn’t trust Patti, whom could he trust? And he was jovial to Alex when he left to walk over to the university. He joked about doing the cooking tonight instead of his usual contribution to the household, the cleaning up.
“I’ll save you the trouble of burning every pot and pan in the house, Chris. I’ll do my clam spaghetti.”
Now alone in the house with the sleeping Virgie, he didn’t waste any more time thinking about the Ryan family. He went straight upstairs to Virgie’s room where he tapped on her door and without waiting opened it and walked in. “Virgie,” he said abruptly and perhaps a bit too imperiously, “I need your help.”
She was surprised and hastily covered her breasts with the bedsheet. She always slept in the nude, he knew, but her virginal reaction was unexpected. “My, aren’t we modest.”
“I just don’t want you to get any ideas.”
He had to suppress a smile seeing her expression. Of course she was thinking of their little sexual adventure and its aftermath, but what struck him was that she looked exactly the same as she did the day he met her. She hadn’t changed a bit. Her hooded eyes, making her always look sleepy, her impossible paleness (she spent as little time as possible outdoors), her light brown hair, her long elegant neck, all were as pristine as ever. Her mannerisms likewise defied inexorable time and remained the same. She tossed her head and set her thin lips determinedly just as she always did when trying to assert herself. But he knew she was either too lazy or too weak to ever withstand a concerted effort. Handled carefully, he could play her like a musical instrument. Affecting wounded feelings and deep sincerity, he said, “I have no ideas. I’ve got a job to do and need your help.”
“Why should I help you?” She was still trying to be standoffish, but he could see the curiosity in her eyes. It was almost too easy.
“Because this is important. There’s a very sick boy, possibly even dying from mercury poisoning. I want to nail the guy who illegally dumped mercury into a pond.”
His appeal to her compassion worked. He could see her face, which had been set determinedly, soften. “Is the boy really seriously sick?”
“Yeah.”
She looked from Chris down to her hands clutching the sheet over her torso. “I’d like to help, but I gotta find a job today.”
He sat on the bed and looked at her imploringly. “That’s not a problem. You can look through the help-wanted ads as we drive to Waska.”
She shook her head. “Reading in a car makes me dizzy.”
“Well, when we get back, then. I’ll only need your help in the morning. We should be back in Portland by lunchtime.”
When she still hesitated, he put his hand on her thigh and said in a voice tenderly beseeching, “Come on, Virgie. This is important. I need you because I need a woman’s touch. I want to meet the family of that boy and question them. You know me and the social graces. A woman’s presence would put them at ease.”
So, just as he expected, she relented, though she did demand that he leave the room while she got ready for a shower.
A half hour later they were in his car driving to Waska. She munched a banana and a plain piece of bread and had a coffee stuck in his cup holder with which to wash it down. When she looked as if she was going to throw the banana peel out the window, he frowned and said, “No, no. Put it in that plastic bag.” He pointed.
With a shrug she followed his instructions, then languidly yawned and stretched. Despite the coolness of the day, she wore, like him, jeans and a T-shirt. When she saw him glancing at her breasts, she said, “Hey, remember, no ideas.”
“I wasn’t getting ideas. I was thinking that maybe you should have worn a bra. These people may have old-fashioned notions.”
“Well, it’s too late for that now. Unless you happen to keep a spare bra in the car.”
Her sarcasm veiled her real feelings, which he was sure was disappoint-ment at his apparent sexual indifference. Not knowing what to say, he said nothing.
Presently it was she who made an effort to discharge the negative electricity. Tucking one leg under her butt and adjusting the seat belt, she turned in her seat to face him. “Is this the case you were working on last month?”
When he nodded, she asked, “Then how come it’s so important now. Before you put it off.”
“That’s just the trouble. I was hoping to announce the discovery myself, but that sick boy beat me to the punch.”
Virgie looked at him but didn’t say anything. They drove on for a while, rather slowly because they were behind an elderly driver at a place where U.S. Route 1 was single-laned. Chris tapped at the wheel impatiently, and just as they came to double lanes again and he passed the old coot, she said, “How long have you known about the polluting?”
“Of the pond? Well, I didn’t know it. I thought it was the river, but the pond empties into the river in some small brook too small to appear on maps. But it was about a month ago. I got distracted by that upstate business. But now I’m even more sure I can nail this guy Ridlon. I checked the land his company or he personally owns and know he has land on this pond.”
She remained silent for some time, then said abruptly, “You love this, don’t you?”
He glanced at her. She seemed to be quite serious. “Love what? Nailing a creep? Yeah.”
“I mean the action. You love doing this work, keeping busy.”
“Is that so bad?”
“No. It shows you at your best, if you must know. What I can’t understand is what you did tree sitting for two weeks. That doesn’t sound like you. There’s no action. You just sit there.”
He grinned. “That’s a fairly accurate description about how I felt about it. It’s very important to do, but the two-week replacement was all I could handle.”
“So how did you pass the time?”
“One thing, I reread Silent Spring. And I worked on some files I had about Maine. I was already thinking about coming back to New England, but I made the definite decision on that stupid platform.”
“I won’t ask how you went to the bathroom,” she said, emitting a little laugh, “but how about sleeping? Weren’t you afraid of rolling over and falling?”
“Well, you kinda tie yourself down, but we’re in Waska now. There’s a shortcut.” Too late he saw the road as they whizzed by at fifty miles per hour. “Shit! No shortcut. We’ll have to take North Street downtown.”
“Is it much longer? Remember I’ve got to find a job today.”
He shook his head, then after seeing that she was dreamily staring out the window, said, “Not so shortcutty that it would be worth turning around to go back. No.”
She was still curious about the tree sitting and didn’t seem all that bothered that they had lost a few minutes. “How often
did you see people? I mean when you were up in the redwood.”
“Oh, not every day but quite often.”
“Any hostility?”
“Quite a bit actually. Lumbermen types regarded us as enemies. Half the wood in the Pacific Northwest goes directly to Japan for milling now. That’s the timber companies’ doing, but of course they use propaganda to say it’s the greens who are robbing them of their livelihood. So I was called every name in the book. Some threatened me. You know, saying next time they came they’d bring a gun. But there were plenty of supporters too. I had some great conversations. I almost talked one babe into coming up to the platform to have sex. She was willing in one way, but afraid of heights.”
“How awful for you,” Virgie said sarcastically, but she smiled as she said it. They were in Waska now. Chris, concentrating on directions, was silent. They turned onto North Street and passed many beautiful nineteenth-century homes. He remembered hearing that they, together with similar houses on upper Main Street, were the homes of the capitalists and their top boys who ran the textile mills in the heyday of expansion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After these stately mansions they drove through an area of ugly warehouses and small manufacturing concerns, followed by some suburban houses, the older ones split-level or ranch homes, the newer ones the ubiquitous colonial trophy houses of the modern greed-driven MBA types, and then finally they were in the country. They drove by a horse farm with many separate fields and holding pens, all enclosed by white post-and-beam fences. The fields closest to the road held many colts and mares feeding on the green grass. Seeing them, Virgie grew excited. “I always wished I had a horse,” she said, to which Chris merely grunted. The landscape that followed was far less pretty. Mostly woods interspersed with small ramshackle houses and the neglected fields of abandoned farms. Having passed a couple of secondary roads that he had seen on his maps, Chris knew they were getting close. The article in the paper said the Kimballs lived on a dirt road near the Tooley Road, so when he saw the sign for the latter, he slowed down.
He turned into the first dirt road he saw, but stopped almost immediately.
“Is this the road?” Virgie asked.
“I think so, but I have no idea which house they live in.” They could see two or three places, all showing signs that their occupants were very poor. The biggest one, a cape house with a piebald roof with shingles of many different colors and a sagging barn beside it, was right before them. Further down the road they could see two tar-paper shacks.
“Hey,” Virgie said excitedly when she saw a man come out of the cape house and make his way slowly to the barn, “we could ask that guy.”
They got out of the car and approached him cautiously and with growing apprehension. He looked none too friendly.
The man greeted them with an ugly scowl and with his dangerous, angry eyes glaring. Virgie nervously drew closer to Chris. For a moment while he tried to formulate a way to break through this patent hostility, the three of them stared at each other. Finally deciding that the direct approach was as good as any other, Chris asked, “We’re looking for the Kimballs, Luke and Suzy Kimball. Could you tell us where they live?”
The man gathered some phlegm in his mouth and spat contemptuously, eying Virgie as he did so. His foot scraped the ground. “They live down the road a bit. Around the curve.” He pointed and then turned his back on them and walked away.
“I hope the Kimballs are different,” Virgie whispered.
“Yeah, me too. That guy seems to have quite a chip on his shoulder.”
They walked down the road while Virgie’s eyes stared in wonder at the visible signs of poverty. They passed a dirty child about two years old playing with a one-armed doll. She stopped and stared at them. It appeared that she was unattended. He looked at Virgie and shook his head. He could tell she was experiencing a maternal feeling, but this was no time for sideshows.
“There it is,” he pointed as they came around the curve at a place so rundown and neglected it made the other two tar-paper shacks look respectable.
It was a truly dismal place. The house, about forty feet long and shaped like a trailer, had a slant roof like a shed. The whole structure was clearly jerrybuilt and jury-rigged, and the sides were covered with sheets of tar-paper, worn thin and curling in some places. It had three tiny windows, all of different sizes, and a door of peeling paint. An ancient, rusty station wagon and another stripped vehicle of the same make, apparently cannibalized to keep the rust bucket going, were parked on higher ground on the left. The yard before them was lower and comprised either of mud or actual puddles before it rose to the slightly higher ground of the house. Near the front door high, wild grass the color of straw grew up to four feet high. Lower, at ground level, green shoots sprang from the earth. The conditions in which these people lived reminded Chris of some of the places he’d seen on the west coast where migrant Mexican workers lived.
He could see that Virgie was shocked by the squalor. Her eyes widened as she surveyed the house and grounds. But if Virgie was shocked, he wasn’t. Would he be shocked that a woodchuck lived in a hole in the ground or that maggots lived on a dead dog? These were facts of nature. So were the Kimballs. He hoped Virgie would keep her mouth shut and not alienate them by wanting to help them. One difference between a ground-hog and a human being was that the latter held on to his pride, even if there was only a tattered scrap of it left. With Virgie’s soft heart, there was a definite danger of this. He wanted her with him because he knew a woman put people more at ease, but he didn’t want her to talk too much. So as the Kimballs, man and wife, appeared in the door, he greeted them. “Hello, I assume you are the Kimballs. The man down the road told us we’d find you here.”
Luke Kimball was a tall, gangly fellow with a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple. His neck and face were covered with dark stubble. He had thinning dark hair, poor skin and very bad teeth. He seemed ill-at-ease and very shy. His wife was once pretty, Chris thought, and still had a pleasant round face with large blue eyes and faded blond hair with streaks of gray. She, he could tell, was more confident meeting strangers.
“This is Virginia Lawrence, a friend of mine, and I’m Chris Andrews. We heard about your son—”
“Yes,” Virgie interrupted, “and we hope he is getting better.” She addressed her question to the woman.
A look of pain and exhaustion passed over Mrs. Kimball’s face. “He’s about the same. The doctor says it will be awhile before we will know if the medication is cleansing his system.”
Chris, seeing that the woman trusted Virgie, was pleased. He seized his advantage. “I think I know who did this to your son, Mrs. Kimball, and I want to prove it. I investigate polluters, see? People who don’t respect the earth or human beings either. The one who did this poisoning, he did it just to make more money. He was supposed to bring the poison to a place that processed it.”
“Why didn’t he do that, then?” Mrs. Kimball asked.
“Because he had to pay money to do the processing. He’s a greedy, evil man, you see.”
Luke frowned, maybe because he caught a note of condescension in Chris’s explanation. He proceeded more carefully. “I know the man owns property on that pond. Do you know him or ever see him?
“There’s a building across from here. It’s little more than a shed. It must be what you’re looking for. I ain’t seen the man, though.”
“Okay, that’s probably his shed. Can you show it to me?”
Luke rubbed his chin and looked at his wife. “I’d hafta do it right now. I’m startin’ work tomorrow.”
“Now would be fine.”
“Tell him about the trucks, Luke.”
Chris turned. “You’ve seen trucks? Did you see that they had RIDLON RECYCLING written on them?”
Luke appeared embarrassed. “I don’t rightly know. I didn’t notice. Besides, mostly I hear ’em. They come mostly at night down the Tooley Road.”
Excited, Chris squeeze
d Virgie’s arm so hard she yelped in pain. “Sorry,” he murmured.
The Kimballs, man and wife, exchanged a glance. Luke seemed uneasy; Suzy peered at them suspiciously. Fearing that he might be losing them and at the same time feeling his face redden, Chris said, “I accidentally stepped on Virgie’s foot.”
“I’m okay,” she said matter-of-factly. She seemed to understand what he wanted.
“So you hear trucks coming down the road at night. How long do they stay?”
Luke rubbed his chin nervously. “I’m not sure. They ain’t quick visits, if that’s what you mean.”
Chris looked at Luke and then quickly away. The man didn’t like to be stared at. “I’m betting they’re dumping their poisons on those visits. I’d like to have a look at the pond and that shed. Could you show it to us right now?”
Luke looked at his wife. When she nodded, he said, “You might wish you had boots. Out there’s wetlands.” He pointed with his thumb.
“Our sneakers will be okay. We won’t mind getting wet.”
Virgie kept her thoughts to herself as they followed Luke down a barely perceptible path through a small patch of weeds and then across a field of tall grass the same kind as grew in front of the house. There were signs that in early spring the path they followed was much wetter, but here in late April conditions were better. Occasionally Chris could hear and feel the wet squishing sound as their sneakers walked over a damp rug of matted grass, but most wet areas were easily seen and could be walked around. Many male redwing blackbirds challenged them as they crossed the grasslands. The birds had already established their nesting territories and would dive-bomb intruders. Virgie, urban to the core, was frightened by birds swooping just over her head, and Chris had to calm her down by explaining what the birds were doing. His explanation had an added benefit: it made him much less alien to Luke, who listened to his explanation of the birds’ behavior with approval. Seeing this, Chris seized his advantage and began asking Luke numerous questions. How many fish had the family eaten? Was the boy the only one who was sick, or was everyone in the family poisoned to some degree with the mercury? How long had he been fishing at the pond? Who owned the land around the pond?
Luke, by nature laconic, volunteered little information. Rather, it had to be extracted bit by bit. To the question, “How long have you been fishing the pond?” he answered, “A long time.” “And you’ve always eaten the fish?” “Ayuh.” Eventually by this method of interrogation Chris learned that the family had caught and eaten fish from this pond for generations. Through another series of questions and staccato answers he further deduced that the mercury poisoning had to be of fairly recent occurrence. Something Luke said about his older son doing poorly in school threw him off track for a while before he concluded that poor nutrition and lack of mental stimulation could also cause poor people to have so-called slow-witted children. By the time they arrived at the pond he was positive that the illegal dumping had been occurring for only the past few years at most. That conclusion corresponded well with what he knew of Ridlon’s recycling business: it was one of his newer enterprises.
The pond was small, little more than an oval a hundred yards or so at its widest point, and was contiguous with a much larger marsh. Here dead trees looking like spiked telephone poles alternated with scrub pines, poplars and ubiquitous bushes of many kinds. He didn’t have to ask Luke about the shed; it was clearly visible on higher ground across the pond from them. It was about twenty feet in length, single-storied, and of grey, weathered wood that suggested it was already standing when Ridlon got the land—which was probably what gave him the idea of using it as the base for his illegal dumping. He couldn’t remember how Ridlon got the land and building, but he was sure it was for next to nothing.
When Luke looked at him as if expecting more questions, Chris told him he was going to take some readings for later analysis and didn’t need his help anymore. “Thank you for showing us how to get here.”
Virgie said, “I hope your little boy gets better,” to which Luke merely nodded.
Alone now, she asked if he needed help.
“No. I’m going to take some water and soil samples first.” He opened his backpack and took a sample of water from the shore at his feet, then said as he jotted a note on the label, “I’m going to get some samples from the wetland area and find out how or where the pond is connected to the river. You’d better come with me—we shouldn’t get separated.”
A look of fear passed over her face. “Is there danger? Are there wild animals here?”
He smiled and shook his head. “There are plenty of animals, but they are no danger. I just meant we could get separated and it might take time to find each other. You need to find a job today, remember.”
For the next twenty minutes he took samples; then they began walking towards the river to find the brook. To get to it they had to go through thick underbrush. Frequently he had to help Virgie, who was unused to tramping through woods and didn’t seem to have any common sense to call upon when they came to inaccessible places. He had to guide her by telling her where to duck down, where to step over, and often he would hold branches back so that she could get through a particularly tangled thicket. Once she lost her balance as they jumped across a muddy hollow. When he grabbed for her they both ended up in the muck, with her bearing the brunt of it since he landed on top of her. He had already gotten his sneakers and socks wet taking a sample from the marsh and wasn’t bothered by a bit of muck, but she was very uncomfortable and unhappy. When a few minutes later they came to a large outcropping of granite, she refused to go any further. He went on ahead to the riverbank where he recognized a clump of fallen trees that hid the opening of the brook into the river as the place close to where he had taken a sample last month.
“What does that prove?” she asked, rather sullenly, when he excitedly told her about it upon his return.
She looked exhausted. Her hooded eyelids had sunk down even further. He should have felt sorry for her; instead her lack of interest angered him. “A lot,” he retorted. “It shows that the readings I got before almost certainly came from this pond.”
Making their way back to the pond, neither were in very good spirits. He knew she wasn’t going to like it, but he needed to check out the shed before they left. She didn’t protest as strongly as he anticipated, however; if anything, she seemed glad for the chance to sit on a log and rest.
Getting to the shed was easy. He walked across the grassy field and then Tooley Road without encountering any water or thickets. The road was gravel, and he could see evidence of heavy trucks having frequently used it. The shed door was locked with a large padlock. He examined it with an eye to breaking in to the place but decided it would require either a huge bolt cutter to snip the lock or a crowbar to work the hinges loose. The window looked more promising. Its glass was painted white, but he could see well enough to know only a standard window lock secured it. That would be his entrance. Before returning to Virgie he took a soil sample from near the door.
Rested now, Virgie showed signs of impatience when he returned. She rose quickly. “What were you looking for this time?” she asked in a voice tinged with hostility.
“Evidence. If Ridlon was so stupid as to dump stuff into the pond—and he was—all kinds of traces can be found. Later I’m coming back and diving for debris. I’m sure it’s here. Man, is that guy stupid.” He didn’t tell her, however, of his plans to break into the shed. For one thing it was still a backup plan to be implemented only if he couldn’t find clearly labeled hospital refuse on the bottom of the pond. He was also afraid of Virgie’s wagging tongue and all wagging tongues. When they got back to Portland and he connected up with his friend Ted Autello, whom he was going to ask to do the scuba diving for him, he wasn’t even sure he would tell him of his backup plan. He didn’t mind breaking the law, but there was no need for anyone else to know about it.
The best way to avoid any specific talk about the shed was to chan
ge the subject. As they walked up the field and past the Kimballs’ house (with its door tightly shut as if they were receiving no visitors), he asked her about Donna’s new boyfriend. “Who’s the guy Donna’s hooked onto? All I know is he’s in a rock band.”
“He has an ego bigger than Mount Katahdin is the first thing I noticed. I guess it’s because his band is popular now, but I don’t really like him.”
“So what’s Donna’s thing? Is she a groupie?”
“No, I think she just likes the guy.” She thought about that for a moment and added, “Well, maybe she likes the excitement of the rock life a little.”
“I didn’t like that guy you were seeing.”
“So I noticed.”
“He had a big ego too. I never like that type.”
“Well, what about you?”
“Me? I’m different. I serve a cause.”
“But—”
“No buts. I don’t have an ego like that.”
He could feel her staring at him in disbelief. “You don’t believe me?”
She laughed. “No, I don’t. Who wants to get credit for nailing this Ridlon guy? Is it the movement, or is it you?”
“I want to get credit for one reason only. So that I will be taken seriously.”
She shrugged in a way that said, “Okay, whatever you say.”
They arrived at the car. Over the top of it she said, “Next you’ll expect me to believe you didn’t like Andy because he was bad for me.”
“Believe what you want,” Chris said as they both sat down, “but that was my reason.”
She looked at him again, this time with a puzzled expression. She frowned thoughtfully and remained thoughtful through most of the return journey. Only near Portland did he find out what she was thinking.
“I can just as easily look for a job tomorrow,” she said, then nervously studied his face for his reaction.
“What do you mean?” he asked. Already he sensed she was coming on to him.
She was. “Well, the house is empty. We could take a shower to get the muck off our legs, and, you know…”
He reached over and patted her thigh. “Sounds good, but I’ve got to see Ted Autello about scuba diving. I can’t lose any more time on this case. How about a rain check?”
“Okay,” she said, her face suddenly frozen. She reverted to silence before putting on an act that the answer didn’t bother her. “Well, I guess I’ll go job hunting after all. There’s gotta be something out there that would be interesting to do.” She laughed falsely, but a few minutes later when they arrived at the house she again showed her ability to let any disappointment, big or small, wash over her. “Well,” she said with a sweet smile after he thanked her, “I’m glad I could help.”
Carrying his backpack with samples he had gathered on one shoulder, he walked over to the University of Southern Maine campus, only a few blocks away.
He had known Ted Autello for years. When he was an ecology major at the University of Massachusetts Ted was his T.A. in biochemistry and already an activist member of Greenpeace and the Green party. He was in fact the one who introduced Chris into the activist life. They went to many demonstrations together, some of which Patti at nearby Mount Holyoke College participated in as well, and they became campus leaders in these activities. When Chris graduated Ted’s letter of recommendation helped him get his first job at the Maine EPA where he worked for two years before his mother’s insurance money allowed him to be an unencumbered activist. In the meantime Ted, after a postdoc position at Cornell, got an appointment as an assistant professor at U.S.M. His being in Portland was another reason why Chris left the west coast to return to Maine. It was Ted who analyzed the samples from the Waska River that Chris had collected last month. He had recently married and had less time for activism, but he always found time to help Chris with lab work. Today Chris was going to ask him for a bigger favor and was not sure if it would be granted.
He could hear Ted talking to a student about a lab project as he approached the door to Ted’s office. He waited, only half listening to a discussion of the rate of metabolism of some bacteria, while going over in his mind all the arguments for why the favor he was going to ask was so important. He didn’t think it likely, but he was hoping Ted could do it this very afternoon.
Ten minutes later the student, an intense young man of skin and bone and a hunger in the eye, strode past him, and he poked his head into the office. “Ted, you got a few minutes?”
A broad, friendly grin broke across Ted’s face as he rose from his desk. He was short and burly, with a prematurely receding hairline and a thick black beard which made his large head seem even larger. He gave Chris a hearty slap on the shoulder as he said, “Well, well, Chris Andrews himself. How’s Green Maine going?”
For a moment Chris had to recollect the name. When he first came home he had decided to use “Green Maine” for his environmental activities, but since then Patti had told him that it might open him up to ridicule to call a one-man operation “Green Maine.” He hadn’t used the name in weeks. Embarrassed, he grinned sheepishly. “It’s going well, but I’ve kinda dropped the name.”
“What? You’re not about to open an office on Congress Street?” His eyes sparkled and the friendly grin he’d been wearing since Chris entered the office broadened.
He shook his head. “Nothing like that. But I’m not throwing in the towel either. In fact, I’m still working on the mercury-poisoning case you helped me on last month. I need your help again.”
“You’ve got some samples needing analysis?”
“Yes, I’ve got a few more from the pond that I think is the actual site of the dumping.” For several minutes he related the morning’s expedition and the conclusions he’d drawn.
Ted listened attentively. “You mean you think this guy Ridlon just dumped the stuff in a pond where he owns property? Can the guy be that stupid?”
“I think he is, or maybe he’s so arrogant he doesn’t think it will come home to him. Then again, he knew the only people who lived there were swamp Yankees. He probably thought they were the stupid ones. He also probably didn’t think anyone fished the pond. But whatever, if these samples I’ve brought show mercury—and I’ll bet anything they will—it means we could find refuse on the bottom of the pond. With any luck some of it might have serial numbers that can be traced to one of the hospitals or businesses Ridlon has contracts with. We could absolutely nail him. That’s why I’m hoping you can do some scuba diving for me.”
“Scuba diving? That’s what I do for fun. I’m teaching my wife right now, in fact. Is this pond on private property, by the way? That would be a problem.”
“No problem like that. The victim’s grandfather owns part of the land.”
“And what if Ridlon’s men were there?”
“Do you mean legally? They could do nothing. I wouldn’t want them to know what we were doing, though. We could say we were making a scientific study of eutrophication.”
Ted affected to be shocked at such duplicity. He raised his arms simultaneously with his eyebrows. “You mean we would lie to those good people? That would be wrong.”
Chris smiled. That Ted could joke meant he was willing to do the job. But then he got the bad news.
“I won’t be able to get any free time until next week. Finals are coming up, I have lab reports to correct, and I have to get a paper I’m delivering at a conference in two weeks ready. Can you hold off until then?”
“Guess I’ll have to.” He hid his disappointment well, but it ruined his day. The trouble with friends is that they had their own lives. Everybody had their own life. You had to accommodate yourself to them; you had to let go. While he bantered with Ted and his disappointment grew heavier, Virgie’s face in the car came into his mind. Now we’re even, he thought, even as he laughed at Ted’s joke about Ridlon running for the office of the world’s stupidest man. His hypocrisy reminded him of how Virgie was always hiding herself away. Perhaps it took more stren
gth of mind than he had thought to do that. Here he was laughing when what he wanted to do was scream in disappointed frustration, and it took every ounce of his willpower to carry it off. He wanted relief; he wanted to be free from other people’s will. The more he thought about it, the more the answer seemed obvious. There was one way he could make himself forget his disappointment now that he had a free afternoon ahead of him. It would do some good in the world too, for it would make Virgie forget her disappointment.
The Garden
