Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  Frida shot up straight from where she’d been leaning on the counter. “Good on her! I always knew she had a little starch in there somewhere!”

  That was the limit. I wasn’t ready to hear my mother spoken of as a woman with starch, not after all her years of drinking, not after putting her to bed passed out night after night and sneaking around in the mornings so I wouldn’t wake her into one of her rages, and helping Dad do her chores and— “I’m going to town,” I said coldly. With frigid civility I added, “May I borrow that truck, please?”

  Frida laughed derisively. “What, did you want her to stay drunk forever?”

  I wheeled on her. “Don’t you understand? My father worked that ranch alone, day after punishing, blistering day! And where was she? Drunk in the house! He might still be alive if she’d—”

  “No, Em, it’s time you understood. Just who do you think went into town and bought her all that booze? Not her! It’s eight miles into town from that godforsaken ranch, and you know damned well she quit driving near to fifteen years ago. So who bought her that booze, Emmy? Who? It was your father, Em! Your father bought her every Goddamned drop!”

  I stared at my feet so Frida wouldn’t see me cry. My voice came out in a whine: “I want to go to town. May I have the keys, please?”

  Frida made a sound like a dry spit. “Have it your way.”

  * * *

  FRIDA MAY HAVE a temper, but she’s a very practical woman. When it came to selecting a vehicle for me to drive, she chose a brand-new Ford F-250 pickup. Why? “Because it’s plain vanilla and it’ll climb a sheer cliff. If a V-eight was good enough for Al Capone, it’s good enough for you.”

  I smiled grimly, having so recently learned what it was like to drive around in a moving target. Frida’s truck was plain vanilla, all right: all white, and it was so new that it had no easily identifiable marks, not even a nick on it, and she had not yet had the ranch insignia painted on the door. As she handed me the keys, she showed me how to use the cellular telephone, which she kept hidden in the glove compartment. “You plug this here cord into the cigarette lighter, punch these buttons, then talk into it like it was a real phone or something. And use the damned thing, will you? You get your ass in another crack, you dial 911 first and me second, y’hear?”

  I may be ignorant, but I learn fast: the first thing I did was go through the glove compartment and check the registration of the truck. All was copacetic. Registered to Horizons Ranch, Incorporated. Having established the legitimacy of my carriage, I stood back for a moment and admired the thing. It was high, wide, and handsome, with plenty of clearance, big knobby tires, pristine white paint, and lots of chrome. It was a dream truck, all rigged out with wide side mirrors and a big hitch for hauling a horse trailer to the shows, so Frida and her partner could make the best possible impression and get top dollar for their stud and training. I cinched myself in behind the wheel, turned the key, let the smooth resonance of the powerful 7.5-cubic-liter engine ripple through my body, and put her in gear with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

  * * *

  PAT WASN’T HOME. I considered climbing onto his balcony to peek in and see if his things were still there, but decided I was more likely to get arrested as a Peeping Tom than learn anything through that exercise. Instead, I scribbled a note saying I was looking for him and here’s my new number, and jammed it into the crack between the door and the jamb right above the lock.

  I drove next to the County Health Department, LUST Division, in search of Lucy. When I presented myself at the long governmental counter at this agency, I had to first ahem the attention of an overworked secretary who seemed intent on getting a memorandum typed. After signaling three times that she’d be right with me, she hurried off to refresh her coffee, took a sip, and then joined me, panting as if she’d just run the mile in under four minutes.

  I cleared my throat and tried to smile. “I’d like to see Lucy, please.”

  When the secretary spotted the bruises on my neck, her jaw descended in rapturous horror as one hand rose to touch the same places on her own body, and curled her upper lip, like I’d smeared some unmentionable substance across my skin.

  Tugging my collar up to cover the marks, I repeated, “Lucy, please?”

  “Lucy McClintock?” she said, to my throat.

  Gritting my teeth, I replied, “You got two?”

  Still fixated on my throat, she picked up the receiver of a phone on the counter and dialed. What shame did she think I was carrying? I was the attacked, not the attacker. And yet a part of me felt that shame, like a cow too dumb to avoid being cut out of the herd by a wolf.

  In a few moments, Lucy emerged from an inner room. When she saw me, she didn’t smile. “Em Hansen, isn’t it?” she asked crisply. From the tone of her voice, I gathered that she didn’t look on me as quite the object of social stimulus as Earl the Earth Mover Phipps. I was in the “consultant” category, dog’s bodies to be directed with martial precision into impoverishing one mom-and-pop grocery store owner after another.

  “Yes. Thank you for seeing me, Lucy.” I tried to smile again, but all I managed to do was stiffen my lips.

  Lucy led the way through a rabbit warren of tiny office cubicles to the one she called home and pointed to a chair. Plopping her own girlish curves into the chair behind the desk, she said, “Go ahead and talk, I’ve got to finish my time sheet.”

  “You charge the client, too?”

  “Oh, yes. They complain, but let ’em. Mess up, clean up.” She picked up a paper form in a clipboard and scrawled some entries on it. I noticed that one of these was the mom-and-pop grocery where we had met. How long ago had that been? Had it really been only five days?

  Lucy casually assessed this project five hours, although I was certain she had been on site no more than forty-five minutes.

  “You charging for your lunch and driving time?”

  “Of course. And the time it took to pull my notebook together, and file my forms when I got back, and the time it takes to fill out this form. I have the best charge record in the place.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  Dropping the form in her Out basket, she said, “So HRC canned Pat, and now they’re sending you into battle. Does that really seem wise, sending someone as inexperienced as you?” She leaned back in her chair, slung one leg over the other, and lowered her eyelids at my red boots, the better to emphasize how unconcerned she was with my emotional comfort.

  “Replace Pat? I’m not on duty,” I said, fighting off an urge to slap her. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t been in at HRC this week. What’s going on?”

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders carelessly. “Pat Ryan blew another deadline. Weather-All’s looking for blood.”

  “Who’s Weather-All?”

  Lucy knit her eyebrows at me in irritation. “The client.”

  I stared at her blandly. “I’m new here. Kindly enlighten me.”

  Lucy flicked a bit of lint off her pant leg. “Just a messy little site out by the Russian River. Old lumber-processing center. Leaking tanks all over the place. Soil and groundwater both totally contaminated with gas, diesel, waste oil, solvents, all sorts of slop they used to soak wood in. The groundwater’s so shallow that product comes clear to the surface when it rains. You can see it running off in lovely rainbow sheens right into the river. Real idiots: We found this when we went up to inspect the site before approving their application to put in a well farm. We slapped a Cleanup and Abatement Order on them so fast their heads swam, and there’s no way they’re going to pump potable water out of there in our lifetimes.”

  “What’s a well farm?”

  Lucy looked bored, more interested in her own heroics than “the client’s” business. “Oh, they wanted to make a municipal water system, pump a bunch of water out of the riverbank gravels and pipe it to Occidental. Developers.” She said this last word with the same tone some people save for the word “leeches.”

  “Why do they need that?�
�� I asked, remembering the glimpses of the quaint little town I had followed Jim Erikson to Sunday, just before …

  My mind slipped out of gear, avoiding thinking about the way that evening had ended. I came back into focus as Lucy was saying, “… has lousy aquifers, won’t make water like the aquifer around Sebastopol and Miwok Mills. And they need to show the county they have water to get a permit to build.”

  “So Weather-All wants to develop Occidental?”

  “There’s always someone up there who’s bought a big parcel thinking they can make a buck on it. They never quit. They circled like vultures waiting for the kill when we condemned Camp Meeker’s failing septic tanks.”

  “Camp Meeker?”

  “That’s a little place right outside Occidental. They figure great, let’s get a municipal sewer system to Camp Meeker and then hey, Occidental’s only a hop, skip, and a jump away.”

  “Why does it make a difference to them whether they’re on a sewer or septic systems?”

  “Because their ground fails the perc tests for septic systems for the same reason the wells won’t make water. Your ground has to perc or we won’t okay the leach fields. You can have a huge parcel of land—say, ten acres—but if it won’t perc, we won’t permit more than two bedrooms on the whole parcel. No water, no sewer, no development.”

  Was this what the horrifying Liza had been so het up about that she’d tied to take on the County Supervisor at the Spaghetti Feed? “Doesn’t Miwok Mills have some kind of water project?” I asked.

  Lucy stretched, starting to get bored. “Oh, yeah, bunch of local crazies want to take their water district back from the county, run it themselves.”

  “Why?”

  “They think we’re dumping poison in it.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  The conversation seemed to be turning about an elusive central point. I fought to keep it on track. “So Pat Ryan was writing a Work Plan for emergency cleanup?”

  “Yeah. The Water Board served the Cleanup and Abatement Order a month and a half ago, and all we’ve had from the consultant—”

  “HRC.”

  “—Pat Ryan, lead investigator, is a totally unacceptable Work Plan.”

  Lucy’s arrogance and condescension had gone way beyond grating on my nerves; it had nearly cut through them. I couldn’t keep a certain tone of derisiveness out of my voice as I said, “You said the State Water Board served the Cleanup and Abatement Order. So why was the Work Plan sent to you?”

  “County Health has to review it, too. We have to help keep the consultants honest.”

  “So what was wrong with it?”

  “What was wrong with it? It looked like it was thrown together in five minutes by a drunk. We threw it out a month ago and told him to do it right, due yesterday. Now, late again, hand-delivered this morning by your Adam Horowitz, we get this,” she said, rapping a document to the right of her time sheet with her knuckles. I took a squint. Sure enough, Work Plan Draft 2, HRC Environmental Consultants, Pat Ryan officiating as sacrificial lamb. “More rambling trash; it’ll never work. I told Weather-All you were too small a firm to handle a job this big.”

  All I could think of to say to this was, “Pat’s a nice guy.”

  Lucy canted her head forward and looked at me through her eyelashes. “He’s a loser, honey.”

  I dug my fingernails into my palms. How dared this woman flaunt her power like this? And how dared she speak of a kind, decent man like Pat Ryan as if he were a hapless drifter? “What will the client do now?”

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing. Hiring you was probably a ruse to look like they’re taking action. Like they really mean to clean it up.”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t there fines levied against them?”

  Lucy opened a drawer in her desk, took out a half-eaten candy bar, and unceremoniously chomped into it. “Weather-All’s just a front, a corporation. The boys who set it up will string this out as long as they can, which is quite a while. They’ve already managed to get the case assigned to a student intern over at the Water Board who’s pretty green and easy to maneuver. When they’ve gotten their assets moved, they’ll file for bankruptcy and take their dirty business somewhere else.”

  I had to hand it to Lucy. Under all that pompous self-importance she had a brain. “Who are the boys behind Weather-All’s front?”

  “We don’t know. They’re pretty secretive. My guess? It’s drug money getting laundered. Or a bunch of fat cats from Washington running a scam and hiding behind a dummy corporation while they’re in office. There are all sorts of funny guys out there along the river.”

  Needless to say, the moment Lucy said, “Washington,” a red light went off in my head. Could the Good Senator be involved? “Doesn’t the Cleanup Order name the officers of the corporation?”

  Lucy yawned and bit into her candy bar again. “Yes, but they’re front men. Losers.”

  My mind sped forward, making connections. “Is Valentine Reeves one of them?”

  Lucy thought a moment. “No.” Stuffing the last bit of candy into her mouth, she stood up. “Listen, I got to go. I got an appointment to get my hair cut.”

  I looked up at her, jolted into the realization that for Lucy, all these foul doings were just an eight-to-five job. She would leave now and go to the beauty salon, spruce herself up for the holidays, and forget all about Weather-All and dozens of other festering sites of contamination until tomorrow, while the dirty boys moved their assets and the Pat Ryans moved home to Fresno. “Just one more thing: I came to ask about a property by the Laguna de Santa Rosa. For an environmental assessment.”

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders again. “Fire away.”

  I gave the address of Janet’s last job, the old Ferris Place, Jaime Martinez’s roost.

  Lucy shook her head. “That’s not a site.”

  “Meaning?”

  She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her file drawer and passed it to me. “These are all the properties we have files on, or active investigations—all the sites in our jurisdiction with known or suspected releases of toxic materials to soil and groundwater. It’s cross-referenced by address and site name. There’s nothing on Ferris Road. Is that what you came to ask me? You could have looked at the copy on the front desk.”

  With that I had heard one too many snide remarks from Lucy McClintock. I would not slap her, as I so dearly wished to do, but later, in the privacy of my room, I promised myself that I would disassemble her to her last curling eyelash, picking through all her obvious flaws for the one down deep that was truly offending me.

  “Are we done here?” she asked impatiently.

  “No. If I wanted to find a missing tank, how would I look for it?”

  Lucy’s eyes brightened. “A tank? What kind of a tank?”

  “An underground tank, of course. Say I thought there might be a tank that someone had on their property that they didn’t want found. How would I go about finding it?”

  “Well, we’ve already done that. When our governing laws were promulgated and the regulations drawn up that opened this shop, the first thing we did was make a list of all known or suspected tanks. Lots of people hadn’t registered their tanks, but we sent around a questionnaire, and you’d be surprised who came right out and bragged about them. We have lots of lists,” she concluded smugly. “Just what are you after?”

  “I want to know if there might be an unregistered, unreported tank on that site on Ferris Road.”

  “Could be. Lots of agricultural properties have outlaw tanks. The ag lobby fought like crazy to stay outside the regulations. That’s why they’re at the bottom of the SB2004 priority list. Even if that property’s zoned residential but used agriculturally, use prevails in its classification. Now, do you have a suspected tank to report, or are you done here?”

  I looked up. “So you found no tanks at that address?”

  “I already said. If you want to subpoena the delivery records of all the bulk pla
nt operators in the area, and believe me, they have their ways of losing old records, or if you want to find a farmer who’ll squeal on another about his outlaw tank, then you can probably find all kinds of tanks out there that no one’s copping to. Diesel, gasoline, heating oil, waste oil…”

  “Thanks,” I said. “If I—when I find it, I’ll come straight to you. Then what happens?”

  That question earned me one more shrug. “Then we send them a letter telling them to register it and show it’s fit to hold what’s it’s built for, or pull it. You know the rest.”

  This would have to do. As far as the Karsh, family went, it was the only pry-bar I had.

  28

  I found a listing for Swege in Miwok Mills. Granny answered on the sixth ring, not moving as fast as she used to, no doubt. “What do you want?” she shouted into the phone, when I told her who I was.

  “I’m looking for Timmy,” I said sweetly.

  “Timmy? Oh, he’s down at that bike shop, spending money.” I heard a click, then a dial tone. So much for chatting with Granny.

  I found the Duke sitting on the work bench next to Arnie’s bike stand eating the latest thing in sports candy. “If it ain’t Sherlock Holmes,” he crooned with his mouth full. “How’s tricks?”

  Arnie looked up from the wheel he was balancing and smiled. “Hey there,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Loan me Watson awhile.”

  Arnie’s smile broadened. “Sure.”

  * * *

  ON MY SECOND pass past his apartment, I found Pat Ryan carrying a cardboard box of kitchen supplies out to his car. His face was blank, unreadable. It seemed to be melting in the rain.

  I got out of the truck, closing Timmy Swege in so that he couldn’t overhear our conversation. “I heard,” I told Pat. “At least you get to go home for Christmas.”

  Pat stopped, water dripping from the tip of his nose. He stared at the pavement and said nothing.

  “You’re not?”

  Pat forced a smile. “Going to Mother’s. She’s a good cook.”