The Player

by Brad Parks

  Her landing knocked over a small tidal wave of beer and malt liquor. The men had been so tightly bunched there was no avoiding the deluge, and enough of it splashed into them that it quite literally doused their anger. Several of the more-enthusiastic guys in the front row, including the one who had started the chant, got a rather thorough soaking. They just stood there, half stunned and dripping. Had I been the one spilling the drink, I’m quite sure I would have gotten a beating. But since it was Pigeon, they couldn’t summon much anger.

  The song had ended anyway and now that the entertainment had gone down, the crowd dispersed—some to the men’s room, to get paper towels, and some to other parts of the bar. I helped Pigeon dismount from the bar, then handed her a few napkins so she could at least wipe her face. She was somewhere beyond blotto and had grabbed on to my shoulders to help keep herself up.

  “Oh, Pigeon,” was all I could say.

  “You were the one who told me to live a little,” she slurred.

  “Yeah, this may have been a little too much living,” I suggested.

  “I know, I know. It’s just the guys were all so nice and they’ve got these things call Yay … Yay … Yaygerbuhs…”

  “Jägerbombs?”

  “Yeah! That’s it! How did you know?”

  I knew, because I do believe anyone of a certain drinking age—and I imagined that included anyone who had gone to a college party or a rowdy bar in the last ten years or so—had at least one run-in with a Jägerbomb. It was a combination of Jägermeister and Red Bull that, between the alcohol in the former and the caffeine in the latter, got the imbiber both buzzed and buzzing.

  “Drunk on Jägerbombs,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yeah! They’re so much nicer than that awful drink Barry McAlister gave us earlier. It tastes kind of like cough medicine, but in a good way.”

  “Right,” I said. “Just, in the future, try to remember they have a little more kick.”

  * * *

  As I steadied Pigeon, a man approached us. He was dressed like everyone else in the bar—a working stiff—but he appeared substantially more sober.

  “You gotta be Carter,” he said. I recognized this as Mr. Deep Voice, the man who had summoned me to the rescue.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Looks like you got here just in time.”

  “Or maybe a little on the late side,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Your girl and some of us was just talking a little bit at the bar, having a drink. Then one of my boys bought her a shot. She liked it, so we got her another. I didn’t think nothing about it, but then…”

  “She doesn’t exactly have a lot of practice handling her liquor,” I informed him.

  “Yeah, I see that.”

  Pigeon was still trying to find her equilibrium, using me as her fulcrum. Her eyes appeared not to be focusing on anything, then suddenly they zoomed in on the guy in front of us.

  “Oh heyyyy! This is one of my friends!” she said, so drunkenly happy to see him that she gave his chest a thump. He was solid enough that Pigeon’s hand just bounced off him.

  “Yeah,” he confirmed. “That’s me.”

  “Tell him about the dirt!” she blurted.

  I looked at the guy and felt my head cocking. “The dirt?” I said.

  “Wait,” Pigeon interrupted. “I seriously think I need to sit down. The room is getting all … woooo…”

  From long experience with drunks, I knew Pigeon was about ten to twenty minutes away from communing with the porcelain goddess. But she wasn’t quite ready for that, so I guided her to the nearest open table. “Won’t you join us?” I asked her friend.

  He complied and we sat. Now that Pigeon was no longer relying on me as her sole means of support, it was a little easier to concentrate on the guy. He was roughly my age, though I always have a bit of a hard time telling with African Americans—darn them and their unwrinkled skin. He had a plump face atop a thick body, and short black hair.

  “So you’re friends with Tee?” I asked, just because I wanted to establish a little rapport with the guy.

  “Yeah, we go back. You know him?”

  “Good dude,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  I stole a quick peek at Pigeon, who had slumped in the chair and settled into a semicatatonic state. At least she wasn’t feeling any pain. Yet.

  “So, I’m sorry, I don’t think I got your name,” I said.

  “Alan Sutherlin.”

  “And I’m Carter Ross.”

  “You with the newspaper, too?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, and we shook hands properly.

  “I assume you’ve worked down at McAlister Arms?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You still working there?”

  “Nah, my part of the job is over.”

  “Are you with the lawsuit?” I asked.

  “Not me. I never got sick. I know a bunch of guys who did. I just drove a truck, so I wasn’t there most of the time.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So what’s this about dirt?”

  Someone had put 50 Cent on the jukebox, and now we were all, officially, In Da Club. Alan was moving his head to the music a little. He seemed comfortable.

  “Yeah, I was just telling your girl about it. How much you know about brownfield remediation?”

  “I mean, a little. I guess. Why?”

  “Well, here’s how it’s supposed to work, right? You take a truck full of dirt out. You dump it somewhere safe, like in a landfill or something. Then you bring fresh fill back in.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m following you.”

  “Yeah, except with McAlister Arms, we weren’t doing that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First of all, we didn’t have near enough trucks. Normal job, you get like ten, twenty trucks, so you can keep ’em going in and out all the time. You follow me?”

  “Right.”

  “We had, like, two,” he said, then leaned back in his seat.

  “That seems … inefficient.”

  “Not for what we were doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is what I was just telling your girl. We didn’t take the dirt nowhere. We was told to just drive around with it, then bring it back and dump it like it was fresh. They told me I couldn’t tell no one. Said I could get in trouble for participating in illegal dumping, or something like that. I didn’t think nothing of it. I was like, ‘Hey, man, you pay me union rate, I do whatever.’ But then dudes started getting sick.”

  “But, wait, I’m confused. Why wouldn’t they just have you do it the right way?”

  “I don’t know. Money, I guess.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you got to pay a lot to get someone to take your dirty dirt off your hands. There are only certain facilities that can handle it, and most of them are in Pennsylvania, which is a long haul. That costs money. Plus, you got to pay for clean dirt. That costs more money. Plus, you got to get the right number of trucks going. That’s like fifteen, twenty more trucks with fifteen, twenty more drivers. It all costs money. They wanted to make it look like we was cleaning up that site, but they didn’t want to pay for it.”

  I thought back to Vaughn McAlister smugly telling me that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection had given him $6 million for the cleanup and signed off on its completion. The city of Newark had given him another $1.1 million. He had obviously spent a small fraction of that money on the charade that was his cleanup process. I didn’t know what he had done with the rest of it, but it was becoming apparent he hadn’t actually remediated the site.

  Which explained why people were becoming ill. Whatever chemical had been left in that dirt long ago was still there. And Vaughn McAlister had been doing the worst thing possible: stirring it up, getting it in the air so everyone—construction workers, the good people in the neighborhood, even the friendly local
newspaper reporter—could suck it into their lungs.

  “What a bunch of bastards,” I said.

  Alan nodded his head. “And then they act like the people getting sick are just faking it. That’s what really pissed me off. I wasn’t gonna say nothing, because I didn’t know who to say it to. But then Tee told me about you, said you would know how to handle it.”

  I was glad Tee had that kind of faith in me. I wasn’t going to tell Alan, but I didn’t even know where to start.

  * * *

  Alan’s disclosure gave me new leads to pursue, but in the meantime, I had the more immediate problem of what to do about my alarmingly blitzed intern. I escorted her into the men’s room—the guys wouldn’t care—and assisted her through the aforementioned purge of at least some of the poison coursing through her body.

  Once that grim task was accomplished, I considered my next steps. Since she seemed incapable of walking unassisted, I figured driving was out of the question. So I helped her out into the street to my car and, with misgivings—because she was still wet from the booze soup she had spilled all over—shoveled her into the passenger seat. I momentarily lamented what this would do to the Malibu’s cloth seats, which would likely end up smelling like a brewery for a week or more. But I also didn’t see much alternative.

  I got into the driver’s seat and studied her for a moment. Her neck seemed incapable of supporting the unbearable weight that was her head.

  “Pigeon,” I said loudly, as if that would penetrate the haze.

  Nothing.

  “Neesha,” I said.

  She slowly swiveled her head toward me and let out a “Wa?”

  “Where do you live?”

  She groaned.

  “Pigeon, come on, I have to take you home. Just tell me where you live.”

  She sank into the seat, her eyes half lidded. Realizing I wasn’t going to get much of a response out of her, I started gently poking around on her person, trying to find a driver’s license or something else that might have her address on it. The front pockets of her pants had been sewn shut—why twenty-first-century women put up with that kind of nonsense was beyond me—so I rolled her toward me and checked for back pockets.

  She responded by flopping her arms around me, which was not exactly the response I was looking for. It got even more awkward when she buried her face in my neck and started nuzzling me. Not that I took it seriously as any kind of come-on. In her current state, she would have nuzzled Newt Gingrich.

  “Easy there, Pigeon,” I said, but that just made her squeeze tighter.

  Still, it did make the job of checking her back pockets a little easier. Lightly, so she would not confuse it with groping, I ran my hand down her back until I found a rectangular lump that turned out to be a credit card and a driver’s license. I pulled them out, untangled myself from her by gently shoving her back into the passenger seat, and found her address in Edison.

  I read it out loud and said, “That’s where I’m taking you, okay?”

  “Noooooo,” she said, moaning. “Tha’s my parents’ house.”

  I imagined her parents as a pair of strict, traditional Indian Americans. Mom in a sari. Dad with a mustache that looked like Gandhi’s. The kind of mom and dad who had raised themselves an Ivy Leaguer and then pledged her in marriage to a doctor. Then I imagined myself, a white man they had never met, showing up with their daughter, drunk and braless.

  Right. Edison was out.

  “Okay, so where should I take you?”

  No answer. She seemed to have slipped into some lower level of consciousness. I asked the same question two more times and got nothing more than a series of incomprehensible moans. Finally I just gave up and started driving to my Bloomfield abode. It looked like a night on the couch was forthcoming.

  On the way to my house, I started pondering my next move. I now knew why the McAlister Arms site had been making people ill, even if I hadn’t identified the chemical agent at work. I strongly suspected that Vaughn McAlister had pocketed the money earmarked for its cleanup. The question was how Vaughn McAlister had gotten the state DEP to sign off on a remediation that clearly hadn’t been done. Was the DEP just duped by the parade of dump trucks that had come and gone from the site? Shouldn’t there have been more oversight?

  That was about as far as my thinking had advanced by the time I pulled into my driveway, with Pigeon now fast asleep beside me. I prodded her half awake, shucked her out of the passenger seat, and helped her stumble inside. Then I sat her down at my kitchen table and made her drink a full glass of water. I didn’t know if she would remember it enough to thank me later, but operating under the golden rule of inebriation—do unto other drunks as you would have them do unto you—I thought it humane.

  The water seemed to give her a little bit of life. It also seemed to make her aware of how sticky she was, because she asked if she could take a shower. I guided her into my bathroom, provided her a towel and a change of clothes. I didn’t own pajamas for myself, much less for a woman, so a T-shirt and a pair of boxers—which is what I always slept in—would have to do. Then I cleared out, thankful she was functional enough to take care of things from there.

  Eventually, I tucked her into my bed—in pain, but alive. Deadline was already there, and he responded to the presence of a perfect stranger by immediately curling up next to her and purring. I know there are cat owners who imagine that their pets are bonded to them and them alone. I am under no such illusions. My cat is perfectly indiscriminate about human contact. He’ll cuddle with anyone whose body heat is in the neighborhood of 98.6 degrees.

  I was going to find myself a hunk of couch and call it a night, but I checked my phone one last time. During all my shuffling of poor, incapacitated Pigeon, I had missed a call and had a message.

  It was brief: “Hey, it’s Quint. Call me.”

  * * *

  I guess when you go by “Quint,” you can get away with being first-name only. I checked the time he had left the message and it was only a half hour earlier, so there was no danger I’d be waking him up by calling at a late hour. Besides, I had the feeling Quint was a bit of a night owl.

  Sure enough, he answered on the first ring. “Quint here.”

  “Hey, Quint, Carter Ross.”

  “Hey, man, didn’t want you to think I forgot about you. It just took a few days for some of my people to get back to me. But it should be worth the wait, because I think I figured out what you’re looking for.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Cadmium,” he said.

  “Cadmium?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, know anything about it?”

  “How to spell it. But that’s about it.”

  “Well, I tossed those symptoms you gave me off of a bunch of my people. And then finally one of them said ‘cadmium’ and it was a major duh moment, because I should have thought of it sooner. It’s a perfect fit. Every symptom you described is a potential side effect of cadmium poisoning.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Did K and J use cadmium?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So who did down in that part of Newark?”

  “Oh, I have no idea.”

  “But, I mean, was there a specific kind of industry that used cadmium?”

  “A lot of them did,” he said. “It was used in dyes, in plastic, in electroplating. Then people started figuring how bad it was for you, so it’s been phased out of a lot of things. It’s still used in some batteries—that’s why you have to be careful about how you dispose of them. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s cadmium down there. What’s weird is that it would now be surfacing.”

  “Oh, it’s not so weird.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  I told Quint about Alan Sutherlin’s admission to me—that all that dirt was not only still dirty, it was being freshly stirred up. “What I can’t figure out is how the site managed to pass muster with the state DEP when it was only fake remediated,” I finished.


  Quint let out the kind of laugh that told me he didn’t find anything funny. “Yeah, unfortunately, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I hang around with all these environmentalists, and they complain more about the state DEP than they do about the people actually doing the polluting. All I hear about from them is how the DEP doesn’t actually do its job anymore. It makes other people do it.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “This is New Jersey, right? We lead the nation in Superfund sites. And we’ve got a list of something like eighteen thousand other contaminated sites around the state. That’s down from twenty thousand or so, but we’re still finding new ones all the time. Some of them are pretty small potatoes—any place that used to be a gas station or a Laundromat is probably contaminated. It used to be, anyone who wanted to do something with one of those properties had to hire an environmental consultant who had to submit a series of documents to DEP and then wait for approval before they could go on with their project. And it could take forever, because you would, say, submit an assessment and then wait ten months for DEP to say it was okay. Then you’d submit a remediation plan and wait another ten months. You had stuff that was literally getting held up for years.

  “So,” he continued, “a few years back, everyone got so fed up that they changed the laws. They invented something called the Licensed Site Remediation Professional. LSRP for short. The environmental consultants had to apply to become LSRPs, but once they did, they were essentially allowed to do everything on their own. They still have to submit paperwork to DEP, but they don’t have to wait for approval anymore. The LSRP’s green light is enough to keep things moving forward. I guess the DEP still reads the paperwork. Eventually. Theoretically. So there’s still some oversight. But, in some ways, my environmental buddies are right: the DEP is letting the LSRPs do its job for it.”

  “So, if I’m being generous toward DEP, I’d say they streamlined an onerous regulatory process by privatizing it,” I said. “But if I’m being unkind, I say they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that the foxes will be guarding the henhouse.”