Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  It was my opinion that this was a waste of the old man’s money. What did it matter how much contamination there was? I could not only smell but see the leakage: the soil underneath the tanks had turned an unnatural bluish gray, the fumes arising from the hole were quickly giving me a headache, and a rainbow sheen of hydrocarbons was blossoming on the water that was draining into the hole. But Earl labeled the samples, recorded them on a chain-of-custody log, and busied himself packing them in a cooler, probably smacking his rubbery lips over the analytical fee markup to come.

  I at least made headway with my real investigation. Being naturally garrulous, Lucy had no compunction against talking about Janet Pinchon. “She was okay,” Lucy was saying, “kind of hard to talk to. Sort of a fanatic, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lucy tipped her head in thought. “She hung out with those lunatic fringe types a lot.”

  “Who exactly?”

  She shrugged. “I do my best not to get involved. You know, the herbs, drumming, and moon ritual gang. Goddess junkies.”

  The sensuous image of the uncaring Suzanne Cousins filled my mind’s eye. “You think Janet was really into all that?”

  Lucy’s attention began to wander. Other women were clearly not central to her interest. “Who knows.”

  I tried to make my questions include the wonders of Lucy. “Did you do government oversight like this on many of Janet’s jobs?”

  “Not many. HRC’s kind of an old boys’ club. No, that’s an understatement. Anyway, Janet didn’t get out on much Phase Two work. Well, she sampled wells some. I watched her do that a few times.”

  “Wells?”

  Lucy looked at me out of the corner of her eye, one of those how-can-you-be-so-dumb looks. “Groundwater-monitoring wells. Like your pal Adam is installing down the street.”

  Through my teeth, I asked, “What else did she do?”

  “Mostly Phase Ones.”

  Doggedly I asked, “What’s a Phase One?”

  Lucy didn’t bother to answer this question. Not only was my ignorance beginning to bore her, but Earl was moseying toward her. “Lunchtime,” he rumbled. His face went kind of squishy. Unless I miss my guess, he was trying to look cute.

  Lucy glanced at her watch. “Why not?”

  Earl jerked his head my way. “That’s it, toots.”

  “Right.” I handed him his hard hat and scribbled the quitting time down in the little box on my job sheet so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with him. It drives me nuts being shucked off for the Lucys of the world, even by the Earls.

  The two of them wandered off toward a second cooler that Earl had packed with drinks and sandwiches. Scrounging the last few dollars out of the bottoms of my pockets, I bought the cheapest sandwich Phil had to offer (egg salad) and headed down the street to find out what I was supposed to do for the afternoon.

  * * *

  ADAM WAS HARD at it spitting vitriol at two subcontractors who were drilling shallow monitoring wells with a little truck-mounted rig. Watching Adam at work didn’t do much to improve the flavor of the egg salad, but I told myself that working with him could be no worse than mucking out a horse barn with a kicking stallion in the stall. Mind you, I’ve mucked some pretty sour manure in my day. I cleared my throat so he’d know I was there and took another bite of my sandwich.

  Adam spun around on one heel, looked me up and down with an expression that made me wonder if I was crawling with eels, and barked, “Don’t you know better than to eat in the exclusion zone?”

  I froze, my mouth crammed with egg salad, and mumphed, “Huh?”

  “You stepped right over my yellow caution tape!”

  I looked back at the route I’d taken in. He was right, there was a yellow tape fluttering around most of the site, sort of tied to a truck bumper here and wrapped around an old tire there, but I’d come onto the site through a wide gap in the tape where the driller’s helper had apparently taken it down so he could push wheelbarrows full of augered soil toward a stockpile behind the building. So much for site security.

  Adam marched past me and rerigged the tape, cussing viciously—something about snot-nosed bimbos from hell who eat sandwiches and don’t even wear hard hats in an exclusion zone. When he was done, he stomped over to the tailgate of his truck, picked up an indelible pen, and began to make notes on his clipboard.

  I indulged myself in glowering at him while scratching my nose with the middle finger of one hand, and then sauntered over and draped an arm tenderly around his bony shoulders. “Adam, dew drop,” I cooed, “the tanks are all pulled. I help you now, right?”

  Adam went all stiff, his shoulders jamming smack up under his ears. When he realized I wasn’t going to volunteer to take my arm away, he writhed out of range, signaled to the driller, croaked, “Half hour,” climbed into the cab of the truck, and tried to look totally engrossed in a paper sack full of sandwiches. His face had gone kind of white. I wondered if I’d overdone it.

  The driller shut off his rig and wandered over to say hello. Graying hair pulled back into a thick braid extended from under his hard hat halfway down his back. A diamond stud winked from one nostril. “Having fun with old Adam?” he inquired.

  “Barrel of laughs.” Appealing to the driller’s gray hairs, I inquired, “How old is that kid, anyway? I mean, he can’t have more than a year or two on the job.”

  “Just over a year. He’s on the HRC plan: hire kids straight out of school, hang them out to dry for a year or two, then fire them when they start to agitate for more money.”

  “No backup?”

  “Aw, some of the companies we drill for give their kids a cell phone so they can call the office when they have a question. HRC’s so cheap they make him run down the street here to the pay phone. But then, Adam never phones; he’s too proud to admit he’s in a jam, if in fact he knows when he’s in one.”

  “Does he do an okay job?”

  The driller shrugged. “He could be worse. We can generally keep him out of trouble.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Aw, hell, we drill five days a week, fifty weeks a year. We could do these jobs in our sleep. The budgets don’t allow for any real science anyway. It’s just wham-bam, punch your holes in the ground, get in, get out, thank you ma’am. So take it easy on the kid; he’s way over his head out here.”

  I felt like a prize shit. Beating up on a scared kid used to be beneath me. Maybe Elyria was right, I was losing my grip. “So far over his head he could get hurt?”

  The driller squinted at me. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I hear the woman I’m replacing is dead.”

  “You talking about Janet Pinchon?”

  “Yeah.”

  The driller looked at his shadow on the ground. “Nice girl—or woman, excuse me, but they’re so young.”

  “Is there anything I ought to know about her and any safety violations?”

  The driller shook his head in frustration. “There’s not a company we’ve worked for that’s done it by the book. You a mole for OSHA or something? Listen, Adam’s a pain-in-the-butt kid, but he’s trying.”

  “No, I’m just trying to watch my own back.”

  “Good idea, ’cause like I say, these companies like to hang their people out to dry, wring every last drop of earning power they can out of them. We can’t get away with that. A man gets tired, we insist they take time off until they’re safe to go on the site again, because we’re handling heavy equipment all day long, all week, all year. But these engineers and geologists, they’d run them around the clock if they could, put ’em on salary so they can charge overtime and not pay it.”

  “So what did she work on?”

  The driller swept a hand across the scene. “This sort of stuff, sometimes, but she didn’t just do tank yanks and well installations. She did those Phase Ones.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know much about them, except it’s everything before you bring u
s in.”

  “So she’d be working alone?”

  “Yeah. With no one to watch her back.” Shaking his head sadly, the driller walked away.

  10

  I took what was left of my sandwich back out beyond the exclusion-zone tape and settled on a bus bench across the road, nibbling on the sandwich like it was my last meal, poor though my appetite had suddenly become. I dug into my pocket. I had two quarters left. Hell, I thought, this might be my last meal if Murbles doesn’t have that check waiting for me at the motel.

  At the thought of being paid for what I was doing, sharp little fingers of guilt scratched at my heart. Maybe that was my problem, I was having an uncertainty attack. I wasn’t sure I was on the right track. I’d spent the morning learning what Janet seldom did for HRC; how was I going to learn what she did most of the time, and how was I going to figure out what, if anything, it had to do with her death?

  I stared across the street at the drilling site, trying to understand what Adam and the drillers were doing. Certainly this kind of mess caused a lot of financial pain to the property owner, and money was an age-old motivation to kill. But Janet didn’t cause the mess, so why kill her?

  As my appetite became slaked, my mind bogged down in the details, the big picture still too fragmental to be grasped.

  I stretched and admired the view. The fog had long since burned off, revealing, the shapely shoulders of surrounding hills. The little crossroads community sat in a narrow, steep-sided valley carpeted with vineyards. A red-tailed hawk cruised for dinner overhead. I felt sleepy.

  Mother Nature was looking awfully pretty today. How nice it would have been to visit this town, this whole county for that matter, for any other reason than to dig into the nasty side of human nature. I would have preferred to hike up one of these hills into the chaparral, relax, and enjoy life. I told myself that I would have preferred to have a friend to walk with, to talk out what was on my mind. I would have preferred a great many things to the monastic life I was living.

  I closed my eyes and chewed slowly on the remnants of the sourdough roll that had surrounded the smashed egg in my sandwich, thinking that I’d phone Elyria come evening, see if I could get our friendship back on an even keel. She was right, I’d been letting my problems get in the way of things. It wasn’t her fault that she had gone forward with her career and her love life while mine slipped away. It was hard times for all geologists. And my love life was a thing of distant memory. For the thousandth time, I wondered, I made the right decision about Frank Barnes, didn’t I?

  Frank. I hoped his wife was good to him, and could make allowances for his dark moods. I hoped she liked to fish for trout with dry flies up by Yellowstone, and camp out with him under the stars, and— No, don’t think about that.

  I looked back up at the sky, but couldn’t distract myself. Thoughts of Frank kept coming. Word on the grapevine was that he would be a father soon. A good one, I imagined.

  My own father had been the best in the world.

  I threw my sandwich wrapper in the trash barrel by the bench and lurched to my feet, grudgingly thankful to have Adam to pit myself against. With luck, he would behave badly enough to keep me distracted from my wounds until quitting time.

  11

  We worked, or should I say I watched, the drillers built wells, and Adam fussed over his scratchy little notes until just about two, at which time Adam put highway cones on all the well heads, scowled at the site, the driller, and the drill rig, and indicated with nearly inaudible grunts that the site was tidied up enough that we could leave. I walked up to Adam and said, “What’s next?”

  “Sampling,” he hissed. “And you’re going to help, Goddamn it.”

  Me? What was the implication, that I had been goldbricking? I thought of pointing out that I wasn’t even getting paid for this. Except if you figure the five hundred a day Senator Pinchon’s paying me, but that—

  My mental gears jammed, completely confused about who I was and what I was supposed to be doing there. Was I Em the geologist, Em the investigator, Em the nearly worthless rookie tank yanker, or was I someone else entirely? After all, I was wearing Janet’s clothes, I was having her argument with Adam, I was doing her job.…

  I hurled myself into the truck, ready to dive into any task just to get it straight who I was, what I was doing there, and why.

  * * *

  AS WE DROVE to the next site, I reminded myself that I was here to investigate a crime, not to get into personal fights with pencil-necked geeks. I vowed not to react to Adam’s vitriol, to instead treat him with the kind of consideration I’d show any other mangy coyote that had a foot caught in a trap. “So, Adam,” I murmured, “you looked like an old pro, like you’ve got a lot of experience. You been doing this a while, eh?”

  No answer.

  “You must be quite valuable to HRC; they give you an awful lot of responsibility.”

  Still no reply. I wondered if he saw through my bromide, and was just trying to control his disgust.

  I decided to lay the butter on a little thicker. “Have you had a management course or something? I saw how you handled the drillers. They’re a tough lot. You got to really keep them in line, give them lots of direction.”

  Adam’s posture softened. He put an elbow up on his windowsill, even cocked his head to one side, really suave. “Nah. I just know what to tell them.”

  “Well, I’m hoping I can learn a lot from you. I mean, I’m hoping you’ll teach me. I mean, otherwise I’m kind of at sea here.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he preened.

  I glanced his way again. He was fighting to repress a satisfied smile. “A deal, then?” I offered, trying to repress a wave of nausea.

  “Well, now I realize it’ll take you quite a while to learn all this. You got to be willing to do hard work. Outside, any weather. Got to be tough. I’m not so sure a female is going to like that.”

  I had to take a deep breath to restrain myself. “I’m willing to try, really I am.” And then, in an ever-so-natural segue, I asked, “It sounds like you’ve had to work with some difficult women. Has a woman worked for HRC? You know, like someone who put women in a bad light for you?”

  Adam’s face clouded. “Well, yeah. There was this bitch who was here until just a while ago—you’re replacing her, I guess. Prissy little thing, real bad attitude. I told Rauch, I said, shit, you get a female in here, and she won’t quit whining until she gets the softest work.”

  “You came to work here first?”

  Adam lowered his head in a slightly more marked sulk.

  “What was her name?”

  “Janet,” he muttered.

  “Oh, I heard about her. Didn’t she die or something?”

  Adam scowled. “Yeah, but that had nothing to do with this. Shit, she croaks and Rauch starts talking about her like she was a saint or something, did the best work in the company, walked on water in her free time. Shit.”

  Ah, jealousy. Adam had hated Janet while she was alive because she was his competition in grade, and now that she was dead, she continued to haunt him by becoming an object of sympathy. A very toxic mixture. Or was there a message to be read between the lines? Had Janet been a goof-off? A prima donna? Or was Rauch putting on a show of sorrow to deflect suspicion from himself?

  Adam turned from southbound Highway 101 onto a wide, high-speed secondary road that carried us westward across the north end of the Santa Rosa plain through bottomlands planted with grapes, and several miles later turned south onto a road that snaked up into the line of hills I had seen rising west of the ditch site. My interest sharpened. I tried to get Adam to tell me a little more specifically why he held Janet in such contempt, but something about the job we were approaching had him upset, above and beyond his usual state of emotional uproar. As we turned south on Highway 116, a two-laner with wide shoulders, Adam’s knuckles grew white on the steering wheel and he fell into monosyllabic muttering.

  “Highway 116,” I said sharply, trying to
snap him out of his internal pissing match. “Doesn’t this cross Occidental Road near Miwok Mills?”

  Adam twisted up his face and whined, “The Gravenstein Highway,” in the same kind of tone grade-school kids address kindergartners. “Goddamn pet names for roads. Can’t they just call it 116?”

  I got to reading the hand-painted signs posted on trees and telephone poles as we bounced along the curving blacktop. Little ones advertised Hi-Weed Mowing, Rototilling, and missing cats, while bigger sandwich-board signs advertised local events like concerts, Christmas bazaars, and of course, the Miwok Mills Fire Department’s Christmas Spaghetti Feed. It was like driving down a two-lane community bulletin board. “Gravenstein like the apple?” I asked, admiring the groves of apple trees we were passing.

  “And it’s gravenstine, not gravensteen! Can’t they even pronounce the language right?”

  Adam was right, the apple farmers were mispronouncing their German, but was this a reason to run one’s blood pressure through the roof? “You don’t like this part of the county?” I inquired.

  Adam shot me a look of combined rage and panic. “We’re back in the hills now, sister. Bunch of redneck farmers and Volvo-driving trust-fund hippies sitting in hot tubs.”

  “Um—”

  “And they all own dogs. You gotta watch ’em like a hawk. No respect for a working man. Shit!” Adam screamed, swerving to miss a bicyclist who had veered too close to the inside edge of the shoulder for Adam’s taste.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror on my side just in time to see a skinny kid raise one arm of his neon green bicycling spandex in the international salute of forced copulation. It was the Duke, in all his plucked-chicken glory. “Hey, pull over!” I yelled. “I need to talk to that kid.”