Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
"Did you see the paper?" Anthony asked when Eric walked in the door. Eric thought the Ant was speeding on something. His ears were twitching so rapidly that the eddy currents were ruffling his thin black hair, and if he had rested his twitching hands on the desktop, the drumming of his fingers would have sounded like a cavalry charge.
"Calm down Ant," Eric said, "Did you want to work here forever?"
Anthony's eyes actually flashed something like hatred for a brief second, then he forced a laugh and assumed a nonchalant manner. "Shit no," he almost spat with derision, then remembered he was inside, "I'm not a lifer like you or Wall."
"It would be too bad for the sergeant," Eric mistakenly sympathized, "I don't know if his marriage could survive it. Anyway," he continued, "It sounds to me like there's a good chance the whole thing will fall through. Didn't the mayor say that they won't sign the deed transfer until the DEP gives the place a clean bill of health?"
Anthony's ears and fingers picked it up another notch, but he kept his voice level and replied with another question. "Do you think they will?"
"The DEP?" Eric laughed incredulously, "They'll try to turn the place into another Love Canal. I just hope they don't start hassling us for health exams and all that. I hate doctors," he corrected himself, "Physicians, I mean." Anthony appeared even more nervous, if that was possible. "You, uh, on something?" Eric asked. "You don't look so good."
"I'm just tired," Anthony half lied, "I've been working a lot of side jobs. Construction." He hadn't counted on medical exams. Anthony never worried about the health effects of asbestos because he believed that his exposure was trivial, but couldn't they count the fibers in parts per billion? Could they tell that he'd been doing illegal work, and tie him to the illegal dumping? "I think I better go home and get some sleep," he mumbled.
Eric watched the Ant drag himself to his car and drive slowly away. Anthony had been acting more and more nervous for the last few months, even Junior had commented on it. Out of morbid curiosity, Eric had broken his promise to himself and actually tried to figure out what the Ant could be stealing. He finally concluded that whatever Anthony was doing, it was on his off hours. That wasn't too far off the mark.
Eric settled in at the desk to work on a train poem. He didn't bother making any coffee, since Colin had offered to bring some when he came by around midnight. Colin had told him that the piece was finished, but he wanted to come by with his camera and hip waders to take some pictures in the cellar where they'd found the drums. He wanted the pictures for window dressing and planned on using them without identifying the Wilkins site. Eric was looking forward to the visit. Colin could probably tell him what was really going on.
Trains like bullets, he wrote, then scratched out and started over.
Chocolates, where the hell did that come from? He shook his head and groaned. He never should have agreed to do the WhamRammer meeting. And why did H Vector want to have Connie answering questions in such a confrontational forum? Whatever he came up with, there sure as hell wasn't going to be one word about radiation in there. Maybe something about empty trains speeding nowhere. He worked for another hour, rhyming and scratching out wasted lines. In the end he wrote out a clean version on a napkin and read:.
Nostalgic, but not something he could stand up and read to a crowd. He put his feet up on the desk, and began running new lines through his head. Eric had been finding it more difficult than he thought to write stuff for Tess. For whatever the reason, his talents mainly lay in the direction of rhyming 'rains' and 'brains', and coming up with a reason for the former to be washing the latter off some smoldering wreckage. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his head bouncing back and forth with the rhythm of the words, when Colin arrived and knocked on the window.
"You looked like you really need this," Colin said, and handed Eric his coffee when the door was opened.
"Can you rhyme 'trains' without 'brains' clogging up your head?" Eric asked.
"Not any more." Colin looked him up and down as if assessing his sanity. "But thanks. Next time someone asks me for the definition of non-sequitur, I'll have a story for them."
"I'm supposed to be writing a poem for some magnetic train protest meeting," Eric explained. "That's why I had my eyes closed when you showed up."
"You had your eyes closed when you accepted the assignment," Colin laughed. "Didn't you ever hear of not shitting where you lay your head?" He cracked open his own coffee and took a generous sip. They were sixteen ouncers from the twenty-four hour store, and what they lacked in strength, they made up for in volume. The caffeine triggered Colin's associative memory, and his expression changed from humor to disbelief. "You're not giving a reading at the meeting in Amherst next week. The same one they're sacrificing your girlfriend at? Nobody could be that stupid."
"Shows how much you know about people," Eric responded defiantly. Colin was right though, and Eric was in the process of making his mind up to punt. The trouble was to come up with a way to do it that wouldn't make Connie think that he was trying to protect her. He decided to ask her sister for advice. Let the university get their moneys worth for a change.
Colin regarded him sadly, weighing the options in his head and searching for the lesser evil. Part of being a professional news hound is knowing when to stay out of the way and let events take their course. On the other hand, Susan had practically come out and asked him to warn Connie off. He wondered where Hardwick stood on all this.
"I hear that there are going to be some real professional scientist baiters in that crowd," he finally said. "The kind that make it look like the questions on 'Sixty Minutes' are agreed on ahead of time."
"Connie's about the smartest person I know," Eric defended her. "How bad could they be."
"The best thing you could do is to slip out and call in a bomb threat right before they start," Colin advised. "There aren't going to be any pro-train people there. It's a circus."
"Connie can handle them," Eric repeated stubbornly.
"Hardwick decided that the train won't fly," Colin said in a monotone. "Too expensive, no demand, and the state has their hands full with the Big Dig overruns and creative accounting. There's just no way that Massachusetts can support the two largest public works projects in the country at once. There isn't going to be a phase two. This meeting is going to be the beginning of the end."
"I thought that this was being pushed by the governor's office," Eric argued. "Hardwick may be a big cheese out here, but he doesn't have that kind of clout in Boston."
"He always comes down on the right side. If the train went through, he'd have made some serious money." Colin stopped. Let Eric work the rest out for himself, he thought. They remained silent for a few minutes, sipping the coffee. Colin decided to try a new subject. "Have you been following Kearn's expose in the Post this week?"
"Oh, yeah. I'm sorry about that, Colin. It doesn't seem fair." Eric was glad for the chance to feel sorry for someone else. "I mean, he just started on this story two weeks ago, after the press conference. You've been working on this angle for months, the he comes along and 'scoops' you.
"Fair," he smiled, "It's the best thing that could have happened. Now I'll have papers bidding up the price. I thought the piece was destined for the Green Valley."
"How's that?" Eric wanted to know. "I thought that being first was everything in the newspaper business."
"It is, but I'm not in the newspaper business. I'm a free lancer. I can't get people to buy my stuff unless they're interested, and they pay more for a sure thing then a flier. With Kearn's story as a leader, and the secondary coverage from the local TV stations, the market is perfect for an in depth investigative story like mine."
"Oh," Eric digested the information, "Congratulations then. When do you expect it to come out?"
"Just as soon as I put on the finishing touches," he tapped the camera significantly. "If everything goes right, I'll get it into the Sunday edition of one of the Boston papers." He lowered his voice, and spoke like an announcer. "A Special Investigative Report: How Loopholes Allowed Fleeing Industries to Abandon Hazardous Waste, or something pompous like that." He grinned and patted his stomach. "Ought to keep me fed for a few weeks, anyway."
Eric gathered up all his accouterments for the round, and Colin scooped up the gym bag with his wading gear. He'd considered bringing some battery powered lighting equipment, but decided in the end to go with the flash. He wasn't trying for artistry, just a recognizable shot of barrels sitting in the water. Except for the occasional story he got in a glossy magazine, the photographs could be re-sized on a color copier without impacting their usefulness. Quality takes a far backseat to content in newspaper photography.
When the round brought them to the spiral staircase, Colin pulled on the hip waders which were held up by suspenders. He looked pretty comical, standing in the beam of a flashlight on the bulging wood brick floor.
"How much film do you have?" Eric asked.
"It's a new role. Twenty-four shots."
"Give it here," Eric held out his hand. "I'll get some pictures of you doing the intrepid reporter thing for a souvenir." Colin handed over the camera. "Squint real tight when I tell you, or you'll end up blinded," Eric advised. "This reminds me of playing six million dollar man when we were kids."
"Seems everything about this place reminds you of when you were a kid," Colin replied. "What does fooling around in the dark in an old mill have to do with the bionic boob." He looked up at Eric, a rung above the water.
"Squint," Eric ordered, sighted the camera on Colin chest before closing his own eyes and pressing the button. The flash penetrated the skin of his eyelids with a brief red glow. "A friend of mine had one of those old instamatics that took a flash cube," he started to explain, "You could trigger it off with no film in the camera. Squint," he ordered again, getting a shot of Colin still on the stairs, but knee-deep in water. The slick little 35 millimeter automatically advanced the film, eager for another shot.
"We'd cut out a small cross in a piece of cardboard, then fold the edges of the cardboard to make the distance right when you held it against your face." Eric demonstrated, turning the camera around and holding it about a foot in front of his own face. "Then we'd go down in the basement, and let our eyes adjust to the dark. I'd hold the cardboard against my right eye, and try to stare forward. My friend would pop the flash without warning, because we'd blink sometimes when we tried it ourselves. Then he'd take the cardboard, and I'd trigger the flash on him."
Colin stood in water halfway up his thighs at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Eric to finish the story. "Squint," Eric repeated, and got a picture of a puzzled looking reporter with his eyes scrunched up who still didn't get the point. "The flash burns a black crosshair on the retina," he explained, "For fifteen minutes or so, we could pretend we had this computer eye. It was pretty fun, but we used up all the flash cubes and his mother wouldn't pay for any more. She said that when we were making enough money to pay our own optometrist bills, we could do whatever we wanted."
Colin reached out for the camera and draped it around his neck. "I guess we know why you wear glasses," he said, and started moving slowly through the water. Eric crouched near the top of the stairs, trying to light as much of the way as possible with his flashlight. Even at his slow pace, gentle swells formed on the surface, and noises came from different parts of the room as floating debris knocked into racks. It took him almost five minutes to work his way cautiously to the row of barrels.
"Don't forget to close your eyes when you shoot," Eric called.
"You'd make a great army officer," Colin called back. "I'm going to shoot off a whole bunch, just to see what I get."
For the next few minutes the basement was lit up by eerie flashes, as if a tiny electrical storm had formed over a miniature sea. Eric turned his back to the light source, and received brief impression of the rest of the cellar each time the flash went off. There was nothing spectacular about the construction, the walls were brick and the ceiling joists heavy timber. He saw that one end of the room was closed off with chain link fencing, but the area behind it was empty. There were several metal charts on the near wall, advertisements for machine tool companies, justified by the useful information they bore on fasteners or drill sizes. The overall impression was no different then that of the upstairs, intentional neglect.
"Mind shining that flashlight over here," Colin called. Eric turned and helped light the way back for the reporter. A few minutes later, Colin was shaking off the wet neoprene, and stowing it away in the gym bag. "Great stuff," he said enthusiastically. "I don't know what effect the water will have, but there were enough of those drums that they'll sort of fade into the background. Real dramatic."
"Could you tell what was in them?" Eric asked.
"The black ones were shut up tight, but I unscrewed the pouring cap from one of the blue ones. It was either cutting oil or hydraulic fluid. I couldn't really tell." Colin tested the side of his forefinger with his thumb for remaining oil, then wiped them both on his leg. "Illegal, but pretty cheap to get rid of, if the drums are sound, that is. I don't know about the water down here though," he added, "It's probably contaminated enough that they'd have to pump it all out into tankers and pay to have it taken away."
The round continued, with Colin occasionally sticking his camera against a storm drain or any dark opening, and taking a shot. "May as well use up the roll," he said. He spent the final shot on the gap where the overhead door on Fourteen building was pulling away from the wall.