Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  “Ma-and-pa groceries don’t put in a new tank?” I thought of the hopeful words of Phil the grocery owner that morning.

  “No. When Ma and Pa have their tank pulled, it hurts them so badly financially that they usually don’t want to risk putting in another. But as importantly for the HRCs, the regulatory climate has turned bust.”

  “Please explain. First fill me in on the boom.”

  Pat smiled. “Just like Janet. The boom. In the mid-eighties, the government regulatory agencies—the Water Board and County Health, the nice folks who saunter out to watch you work—said that tanks no longer in use and tanks that were leaking had to be pulled and examined for ‘unauthorized releases to the soil and groundwater.’ My dear, even the tiniest amount of contamination would set off further investigation. Benzene contamination in the parts per billion. That’s like a thimbleful in a swimming pool. How can you have a tank in the ground for fifteen or twenty years, filling it, say, once a month, and not spill that much? Impossible. Good-bye fifty, a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I was wondering about that. Neither of the tanks I saw come out today had obvious holes in them, but there was so much fuel in the soil around them that I had to stand upwind.”

  Pat smiled sadly. “Sure. I spoke with a fellow who used to deliver gasoline in a tank truck. I asked him how he knew how much gas to put in the tank. He said no problem, he’d just open the overflow valve and pump until he saw fuel flowing through it.” He made an arc with a forkful of salad. “And sometimes he’d get to talking with someone…”

  “And the bust? Lady Lucy of County Health said the mess would have to be cleaned up. Isn’t that more work for HRC?”

  “Well, regulations change. After sticking it to tank owners for eight years, they’re adopting a much less stringent code, only requiring cleanup when drinking-water supplies are threatened. And Lucy and her pals in the state legislature have clamped down on the consultants. The HRCs used to be able to charge liberally for their services, maybe even put together a big enough budget to find out how far the contamination has traveled and maybe how best to clean it up. The RPs—”

  “RPs?”

  “Responsible Parties; people with the mess—paid and paid. By and by, Mom and Pop with their leaking tank screamed rape to the legislature, and rightly so.”

  “What about ‘mess up, clean up’?” I asked, mimicking Lucy’s officious tone.

  Pat rolled his head back and stared at the plain white Sheetrock ceiling of his plain white apartment. “Ma and Pa generally didn’t know what they were getting into when they bought that grocery in the late seventies. They thought they were investing their life savings in a comfortable little community service. ‘Hey, how nice; it’s even got a gas pump! Extra income, and we save the neighbors a trip to town.’”

  “So what did the legislature do about it?”

  “The legislature passed a law. SB2004.”

  “Right, the cleanup fund. Lucy mentioned that. How does that change things for the HRCs?”

  “SB2004 has a few rules. You only get Fund money if you get three estimates, proving that the firm you hired will do the job as cheaply as possible.”

  “So the competition is now fierce.”

  “Exceedingly so, and Mom and Pop are also getting sophisticated and learning how to stall the job. They used to think they had to get the work done right now or something horrible would happen to them. Now they know their property’s probably a write-off anyway, so why not just ignore it and go on with life? The HRCs aren’t getting much work at all.”

  “Why’s the property a write-off?”

  Pat downed the last of his wine and refilled his glass. “Because the banks got smart and all but quit lending money on properties that have those filthy little tanks in them. Imagine you’re a lender who’s taken a property as collateral for a loan, and you find out your collateral is contaminated and your landowner has skipped because he was mortgaged up to the eye sockets in the first place and hasn’t two cents to put toward the cleanup. Now the regulators are coming after you to clean it up. It’s going to cost, say, three hundred thousand. Suddenly your property worth a hundred and a quarter doesn’t look very good to the bank.”

  I sat back in my chair, hands in my lap. This story was all too familiar: the economic shock waves that crash through a society as it finds out about the little flies that come in the ointment of technological advance. I wasn’t sure I was going to like working in the environmental services industry, even for a week.

  Pat advanced the wine bottle toward my glass. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to burden this happy occasion with my defeatist zeitgeist. Have another drop or two?”

  “You were telling me about a woman named Janet.”

  “You don’t want to hear about all that. This is a fine steak I’ve served you, and I intend that you should digest it in peace.”

  “Why did she leave HRC?”

  Pat sighed heavily. “Oh, I don’t know. She didn’t play nicely with the boys. No, that’s too simple. She didn’t really tell me. My dear, I plied her with a lot better vintage than this, trying to find out. She was not a person who liked answering questions.”

  “She mostly asked them?”

  “Just so.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “The same sort you ask. How do things work. Who’s pulling the strings. What do things really cost. Who’s really responsible. How to live with the consequences of our actions. A veritable sponge for ideas and information. I called her the rabbi: she was intent on getting at the truth.”

  “What kind of work did she do?” I asked, hoping to at least find out what a Phase One was.

  “She drilled wells. She sampled wells. But the boys around the shop competed rather harshly for those jobs, and Janet often lost out and did environmental assessments.”

  “Why?”

  “Sexism.”

  “No, I mean why were some jobs more prized than others?” No one had to explain to a survivor of the oil patch what sexism did to the levelness of the great playing field we call the workplace.

  “Oh. Well, the drilling jobs pay better. Bigger margin. Lower liability. The boys aren’t dumb, they take the jobs that will make them look the best at the bottom line. As luck would have it, Janet happened to like doing the assessment work.”

  I stared at him expectantly.

  Pat shook his head at me, smiling, and made the snap, snap, snap gesture again. “Just like Janet. And the answer lies within the question: she liked to ask questions. A natural detective.”

  “And what did she detect?” I asked, proud of my alter ego.

  “Well, like I said, the banks don’t like to make loans on contaminated properties anymore. That hesitancy has spun off a whole other line of investigations, namely reviewing past property usage to see if they’re clean. Have the past owners used hazardous materials on the property, that sort of thing.”

  “A Phase One review?”

  “That’s what it’s sometimes called.”

  “How’s that done?”

  “The client comes to us saying he needs a property reviewed so he could get a bank loan, and Janet would go out looking for potential contamination. Janet was in her element. She’d really dig in there, go right after the quick of the matter. She had all sorts of sources: old codgers who liked to talk, old phone books, fire insurance maps that show where the tanks were buried back in the twenties. She became something of a sleuth. She was good. Almost too good.”

  “Especially if she cared about the truth more than her job?”

  “Especially.”

  13

  When we were done eating, Pat recorked the remainder of the wine, then suggested what he termed a postprandial perambulation. “I have to walk off some of that wine,” he explained. “I have more work to do tonight.”

  “On a Friday night? That’s sinful.”

  “I agree.”

  We put on our jackets and began to stroll among the apartme
nts and out onto the avenue. “Big workload?” I inquired.

  Pat’s face and shoulders sagged. “Oh, just a report. A compliance document called a Work Plan. I’m afraid it’s due Monday.”

  That meant office work over the weekend, and another chance for me to get into HRC’s offices. “Will Cynthia be running some overtime to help you get the report done?” I asked, hoping the answer would be no. I wanted as few witnesses as possible for what I had in mind.

  Pat’s jaws tightened. “No, she will not. This one is on me.”

  I wondered what was going on in Pat Ryan’s professional life. Something about it was not stacking up quite right, which worried me. He was a nice guy—no, an extremely nice guy, the sort I like to befriend—but somehow not perfectly equipped for the rough and tumble of the office place. I resolved to drop by HRC the next day to see if he was there and might let me in, but I would make it worth his while: presuming my advance money had arrived from Murbles, I would bring Pat a nice picnic lunch.

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO Federal Express package from Curt Murbles waiting for me at my motel.

  I checked with the woman in the office, who was sitting behind the counter with a girl about four years old, brushing her rich coal-black hair. I loitered for a while, watching the sensual slide of the brush through the child’s hair, wondering how it felt to love a child so, and at the same time, what it would be like to have a mother who would lavish such care on me.

  * * *

  PAT RYAN DID not appear at HRC’s offices Saturday morning. “Dropping by” became a stakeout, which, after another night of poor rest at the motel, became a fitful snooze while the overcast burned off and the truck slowly heated up. I phoned the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office in search of Deputy Sheriff Dexter, but he was off duty and not expected in until late afternoon. I was advised to try after six. I couldn’t think of any other lines of inquiry to follow, and after hitting Murbles for a week’s pay in advance, I didn’t feel right just taking the morning off.

  At eleven I wandered into the deli, where Reena was refilling the ketchup bottles. She smiled, asked what she could get for me. I scanned the menu on the wall, searching for something fantastically cheap with a lot of calories, my hands thrust deep into my pockets. I was, of course, dreaming.

  “Have some coffee,” Reena said. “Here, is on the house. I need to make a fresh pot anyway.”

  With gratitude, I took the proffered mug and loaded it down with half-and-half.

  “You looking for Mr. Ryan?” Reena inquired.

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  Reena smiled sadly. “Lots of people wait for him,” she sighed, and went back to her chores.

  * * *

  BY NOON, MY stomach was beginning to gnaw and rumble with hunger. At one o’clock it propelled me back to the motel in the tender hope that Murbles had marked the FedEx for a Saturday delivery. Failing all else, I figured I could heat up some water in the little coffeepot in my room and fill my stomach with that. Murbles was no longer a man’s name, it was a sound my stomach made.

  Murbles had, in fact, come through—sort of. There was a FedEx letter waiting for me, but the check inside was not drawn to the full amount I’d stated. Instead, he had sent half of that, with an offhanded note of explanation scrawled on “From the Desk of Curt Murbles” notepaper:

  On consideration, the enclosed check will compensate you for services you will have rendered by the time this reaches you, rather than anticipatory wages. —C.M.

  To add insult to injury, the check was drawn on an account somewhere in Virginia, impossible to cash in California on a Saturday. I decided there was a special seat in hell for the Curt Murbleses of the world. It was a hard seat with a straight back, and it was real, real close to the fire.

  * * *

  I ENDORSED MURBLES’ check over to my credit card account, called the 800 number on the back of the card to get an address, and shoved it in an envelope supplied by the Wagon Trail Motel with a note indicating the urgency with which I needed it credited to my account, then drove it to the express office north of town that took shipments on Saturdays. Luckily, their system was down, so my credit card was not refused in the act of paying itself off. “Yes,” the clerk assured me, “your shipment will be in Simi Valley Monday morning.”

  Monday noon I will again be able to feed you, I told my stomach, as I drove back toward town, so please hang on, I’m doing what I can.

  My stomach allowed as how it couldn’t wait.

  Saturdays are big shopping days in neighborhood supermarkets. I drove around until I found a Lucky’s store, parked the truck, picked out a shopping cart to push around so I’d look like a serious shopper, threw in a couple of boxes of Froot Loops and a package of tortillas to complete the effect, and trolled the aisles for freebies. Sure enough, I found a nice middle-aged woman who was rabidly anxious to have me sample some Polish sausage from her table near the meat counter. Heavens, I just had to taste three different chunks before I was sure I didn’t want to buy that brand for my houseful of growing children and that husband of mine who was always saying, “Gosh, honey, why don’t we have kielbasa tonight?” It was a great day: over by the dairy counter, an elderly man with a winning smile pushed Gouda cheese on me, and score of scores, there was a woman in the junk-food aisle dealing taco chips with a new bean dip. Hey, all three food groups: fat, salt, and fat.

  Back at HRC, I found Pat’s car parked neatly by the front door. I parked the blue truck out of sight to cover my subterfuge should Adam or Mr. Rauch drive by, and circled back to HRC. The door was locked, but Pat’s face brightened when he trotted down the hallway in response to my pounding. “What ho!” he cried, as he pushed the door open. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Oh, I was just passing by,” I answered. “Okay, so I thought I’d come see if I could help you with your report.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “Come on, you fed me a fine meal last evening; the least I can do is be neighborly. Show me what I can do. It’ll help me learn my way around HRC,” I added, nearly gagging on the irony of my own words.

  Pat’s mouth opened and closed like a carp’s for a moment before he seemed able to form his mouth around the English language again: “Nay, kind lady, I’m doing drudge work right now. I was just getting ready to process some words on yon computer. I can’t ask you to be my secretary.”

  “Yes you can. I accept. I’m computer-friendly. Try me,” I insisted, pushing past him and hurrying down the hall toward the one lighted office. I plunked myself into his chair, adjusted it to my height, and pulled his neat pile of lined notebook pages toward me. “Is this what you need typed?”

  “Well…”

  I turned on the computer. It grred and beeped at me as it began to check its memory and boot itself up. Screens full of gibberish flew past, including one that showed me the machine was attaching itself to a local area network. I mentally licked my chops: the computer was on a LAN; what luck! With a little creative hacking, I could search all of the company’s files from this one machine. The computer bleeped me again and the screen prompted me to type in a password. I turned to Pat expectantly, flashing him my best smile.

  Pat rocked back and forth heel to toe, heel to toe, his hands in his pockets. Presently one of those lovely Pat Ryan smiles bloomed across his lips, and he said, “‘Grace.’ It’s my wife’s name. But really, dear Emily, if you do that for me, it means I have to write the next part, which requires further thought. Thought means upper cognitive function, something on which I’ve run a bit low.”

  “Coffee usually helps me with that problem,” I said, typing GRACE into the machine. It whirred and grunted and welcomed me into the secret land of HRC Environmental, Inc.

  For a moment I felt exhilarated. But as I navigated through the menu of the shell program, my spirits sank. Getting past Pat had been a game, and I had played it well. Too well. I had taken advantage of a nice man to get into his company’s stronghold, and
by doing so I could get him into a great deal of trouble.

  Self-chastened, I booted up the resident word processing program and began to type. I would at least do what I’d said I would, as if that might in some small way redeem me.

  Pat leaned forward and wrote something at the top of the first page of his manuscript. “When you get to it, save the file to this file name. You may as well learn the filing system here. Everybody does his own primary typing, and everything goes in this format—see? The file name is the job number, and the extension is a kind of code for the type of document and where it is in the series. LT1 is letter one, SR2 would be summary report two.”

  “So this is WP for Work Plan?”

  Pat grimaced. “WP2. The first version was rejected. When I’m done with the document, I’ll E-mail it to Cynthia, and she’ll archive it to a read-only file on her local drive.” He laughed, a mirthless grunt. “Usually she does the final formatting and printing of the document, but if God is in Her heaven, this one will done before Cynthia comes in on Monday.”

  “Got it,” I said, and began to type.

  It took Pat nearly twenty minutes of fidgeting and pacing before he finally got down to writing again, and even then he was clearly having trouble. Actually, that much was clear from what I had been typing. His handwriting was small and neat, but what he had to say was a mess. Apparently he had as much trouble keeping to the point with his writing as he did with ordinary conversation.

  After another fifteen minutes, Pat stood up and put his pen down with a sigh. “I’m going across to the deli and get a little pick-me-up. Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thanks.” I straightened up, ready for a chance to get at what I’d really come for. Just go, Pat. Go now. Take your time.…

  “Sure,” he said, staring disconsolately at the floor. After another few minutes of dithering, he left. And I went to work. And almost immediately hit a wall. The LAN was set up with the rudiments of security-consciousness, limiting Pat’s password access to little more than his own work and final outgoing letters and reports that Cynthia had archived into read-only memory. I scanned through those, running a search command for Janet’s signature line, but found relatively little. Either she hadn’t written much, or she hadn’t been credited for what she had written. My distaste for HRC Environmental increased.