Friendswood (21 page)

“But I did see something.”

His mouth looked stricken. “Look, Willa. You just need to pray and look inside of yourself. Look inside of yourself and find out what it was that made you go to that party. What kind of life do you want, Willa? Do you want to be with Jesus or do you want to go it alone? Because I'm telling you, what it sounds to me like—it sounds to me like demons are giving you those signs, and if you'll look closely, you'll see that. Where are those demons coming from?”

Just outside the door, there was the raspy sound of the janitor sweeping in the hallway, the clunk of a bucket.

“Believe me, when the Rapture gets here, it won't come in little daydreams—there will be no mistaking it. God wants all good things for you, Willa. I believe that with all my heart. Do you believe it?”

She knew what she was supposed to say. “Yes.”

“Well, then, good.”

She didn't let herself cry until she got back in the car with her mother, who'd been sitting out in the parking lot, waiting. Willa could smell the cigarettes. “Did that help, sweetheart?”

God was long gone now, hidden somewhere in a cloud.

A
T HOME,
she knelt on the floor, rested her hands on the bed, the tiny flowers on the quilt, the careful highways of stitching, the crumpled mountain of pillow. Her chest tensed up in the silence. She stared at her clenched hands in the lamplight, the faint hairs on her fingers, the wrinkles of her knuckles. She had the feeling that someone was about to break into the house, shatter the glass of the windows with a hammer. Her heart was about to stop. There was a tumor in her that would soon explode. She listened for roaring winds, for the gallop of horseshoes on concrete streets, for monstrous locusts, or a rubbery kind of stretching silence. In the dark outside, beyond her window, she sensed a swirling preparation, a kind of angelic weather.

A minute later, the room seemed very far away. She was looking in at herself through the window, at a girl sitting on the floor in her nightgown, who seemed to have always been there, body glued to the beige carpet. She was a silhouette of a girl praying, like the one she'd seen in an old-fashioned book, candle lit on the table next to where she knelt. She didn't know what to pray. She sent up a wordless thing that was like a blinking light, or the true flicker of that candle in the
picture.

S
HE MET WITH
Councilman Atwater at the coffee shop, glass fishbowls of licorice and bubble gum arranged on the counter. The smell of coffee and
churro
doughnuts was strong, Porter Wagoner lilting over the speakers. Maisie Rodgers had put her in touch with Atwater, who was new to the city council, because he'd mentioned to her his concern over Banes Field. Lee sat at one of the tiny square tables, and he brought over two coffees in small Styrofoam cups. He put down his cup, sat, and rubbed his thighs as he looked again at the photos on the tabletop. She'd printed them in high-definition eight by ten prints, so the cracks in the container's surface were visible, the peculiar pink stains. “It sure looks concerning to me,” he said, wiping his half-bald head with his hand. “And you're pretty certain they reburied it, huh?”

“Very. That's why I'm showing you these. Plus, the professor I work with found some high numbers in the soil samples I got when I took these pictures.”

“It could be bad if the leakage started up all over again. But it could be years before anyone noticed, before there were any real side effects.”

Maisie said he'd only been elected by default because no one ran against him. He had a degree in chemical engineering, but for some reason he worked at the public library now, which meant he wasn't one of the good old boys, even if he had been once.

“My point is,” she said, “we don't even need the container to come up
to show there's trouble. The soil samples I took have benzene concentrations higher than allowable toxicity levels. Have you ever looked at the cancer registry for this town?”

His demeanor was earnest, but his tentative mouth and bland face made him seem like an unfinished person. He stared at her with pale eyes. “Yeah.” He pressed his lips together. “You're right. I don't know if we even need these photos, to tell you the truth. If we can just get someone at the EPA Dallas office . . . or someone at the Texas Commission on the Environment . . .” His voice trailed off.

A tall man wearing an obscenely large silver belt buckle walked up in the line at the counter behind a curly-haired boy and his mother. The man pointed to the stuffed bunny sitting on a shelf in front of a sign that said
DO NOT TOUCH
. “You see that?” said the man to the boy. “When I see that, I just want to touch the thing.” The boy buried his face in his mother's loose, flowery blouse. All of them seemed more made of flesh than Atwater.

“Do you know, back, when was it, five years ago, what one of these EPA guys said to me? When there first started to be talk about building near Banes Field again? I said, ‘Look, can you at least give me a list of all the chemicals buried at the Banes site?' And he said what they always said, ‘We've tested the soil, and it's not a threat to human health.' ‘Well, okay,' I said. ‘What are the chemicals?' ‘We don't know,' he said. ‘Well, then, if you don't know,' I said, ‘how can you say it's safe?' Do you know what he said? ‘Because we don't know it's unsafe.'”

Atwater winced. “Sounds about right. They really don't know what all it might do. I don't even think all of those compounds have names.”

“Do you know anyone over in Dallas who might listen?”

“Maybe. Honestly, it's not easy, as you know, with Texas laws. They're all set up to protect the Goliaths, not the Davids.”

“Can I ask you something? What do you do over at the library?”

“I'm the head librarian. I used to work for Garbit, until I got tired of
the whole nine to five. But I have enough funding. Let's just say I have enough funding to do my own research at this point.” He smiled, and she saw his teeth were chipped. “I'll look at that new study. Was that with Professor Samuels?”

“Yes.”

“And I'll call a couple of people.” He paused, brushed his hand again over the bald part of his scalp. “I'll do what I can.” He smiled again, and it did not fill her with confidence.

Back at the office, she still had a few more minutes to keep the phones manned, so she trolled the Internet for the news.

The local paper ran a story about Taft's plans for Pleasant Forest, the luxury homes he'd build, the jobs it would create, Taft's track record for successful subdivisions. At the end of the article, a sliver of a paragraph appeared. “Now that more than ten years have passed and the land is safe again, cleared by the EPA, local officials are eager to see it well used.”

On the Taft Properties website, there was a photograph of the scrub grass with a bulldozer parked on it, and next to that, an animated slide show of the plans for the first three model homes.

Professor Samuels's wife had sent an email dictated by him, about the other chemicals besides benzene that they'd tested for in Banes Field. There was a 5 percent increase in toluene, and a 7 percent increase in styrene tars and vinyl chloride. It probably wasn't enough different from the other studies for anyone to care, but Lee went back to the research on priority pollutants and looked at the health effects:

Benzene causes chromosomal aberrations in humans.

Long-term exposure to vinyl chloride is linked to liver cancer, brain cancer, and some cancers of the blood.

Sometimes late at night, she trolled the sites online, asking questions of Google, as if it were a tarot reader or a Ouija board or an advice columnist. “How to stop builder who wants to build on toxic site?” The replies
were enigmatic. The story of kids living in an old pesticides factory in Albania. Instructions for building a toxin-free home. The story of a realty company in Florida that built a subdivision right next to a field of buried, unexploded bombs from World War II. She scrolled from one entry to another, sleepless, reading the same information again and again. Though she might start the vigil with a string of hope, by the time she'd followed the strand, she always had the same feeling in the end. She was very, very small, just a pinpoint of energy.

The
Ecological Defense Manual
still lay on the coffee table, brown and unassuming. She picked it up, went back to reading the instructions. “The best way to disable a bulldozer is to introduce an abrasive (salt, gravel, sand) into the oil system. 1) Locate the oil filler cap, 2) remove the cap and dipstick, 3) pour the abrasive through a plastic funnel.” The reasonableness made it sound as feasible as cooking or sewing, or fixing a chair. For a girl, Jack used to tell her, she was pretty good with tools. And she was reasonable. “The monkey-wrenching kit you'll need includes fabric gloves, a plastic jug or bottle, a plastic funnel, and a can of spray lubricant to remove any leftover abrasive grit on the surface.” No one else had seemed this helpful lately; or at least it had been a long time anyway since she'd felt any support in her efforts. “In addition, bring a wrench, preferably one wrapped in black electrical tape to eliminate its shininess and to keep it from banging against another item in your bag.”

She wondered about the author of this book, how much he or she succeeded behind the scenes, without anyone knowing. The text seemed to prepare one so carefully, down to the flashlight with the red beam, less visible in the dark, the advice to buy each piece of hardware at a different store so as not to arouse suspicion. She'd begun to trust the practical, evenhanded voice, and to read the instructions gave her solace, the way she imagined her mother, during her sober periods, had gotten relief from reading her book of inspirational sayings.

Lee could picture herself there at Banes Field with a monkey-
wrenching kit, at the bulldozer maybe, if she methodically followed the careful notes, if she did the act as if the sabotage were really a repair.

L
ATER THAT WEEK,
she sat in her car at some distance from the construction site. She wanted to see what they'd built so far. The empty bulldozer held its square and serrated head at an angle to the ground, and the cement blocks of the foundation lay flat and gray in the turned red dirt. She watched three men work, carrying slabs of metal or pipes over to the foundation, one of them pounding with a hammer, the sun beating down on their yellow hard hats, their brown arms. It seemed inconceivable to her that they were actually building there again, in broad daylight.

She was parked a quarter of a mile from where her own house used to be. One of the construction workers walked closer to her car, and he leaned over and hugged a large spool of wire, then lifted it, but dropped it again. The car smelled like coffee. That same song came on the radio that she'd heard five or six times in the last day, and then, “Once we've executed Osama bin Laden, America can assume its rightful place again. Won't you donate to . . .” She looked to see if she could find the oil filter access and the fuel gauge on the side of the bulldozer (which she'd seen in diagrams), but this far away, the details were blurry.

The cowboy dangled from her rearview mirror—Jack had got it on a trip to Fort Worth: a golly-gee face with a hat way too big for his head and across his belt buckle the words
Cowboy Kitchen
.

It started to rain, at first just a few drops nailing on the car roof and then a spill of them. She could barely see through the gray scrim of water. When she was little, Jess liked to play in the rain, her fat toddler stomach and skinny arms, and she'd ride her tricycle through the muddy ruts in the grass, and no matter how many times Lee called her, she wouldn't come inside.

Lee waited there while the construction workers took shelter somewhere, and the rain poured down around her. She took out some paper and a pen from the glove compartment to note the make of the bulldozer. She drew a diagram of the building site. The thunder sounded like giant rocks falling from the sky.

W
HEN SHE GOT HOME
there was a voice-mail message from Doc giving her the next day off. He was going to a golf tournament. “I see Taft's got his permit,” he said. “Guess there's not much more to be done, but you sure did try, Lee. No one can take that away.” She poured herself a bourbon, and studied the manual. She took out some old toy blocks, laid them on a piece of paper, and redrew the diagram of the site where the building had begun.

On the computer, she followed the links she'd marked, and read again the stories of the Earth Liberation Front, especially the ones posted about those who'd been imprisoned, with websites pleading for support. “The prison refuses to provide a vegan diet.” “Her sentence is years longer than that of another prisoner who committed armed robbery.” There was the case of the half-built Seattle subdivision, burned to the ground; the note posted on one remaining brick wall read: “Built Green? Maybe Black! ELF.” Whenever she saw that acronym, she imagined the activists with pointed ears and small, impish bodies. Even when they were older, they all looked like moribund, pale, vegetarian college kids, bored with their ordinary lives, looking for mischief.

There was a new appeal in the works for the woman who'd set fire to cars in Oklahoma. She'd been sentenced to twenty years. Lee clicked to her link and there was a photo of her with her young sons, sitting on a blanket in the grass, a dog roaming in the background. There was a plea to donate money to contribute to her defense. There was a plea to donate money to her family.