Strong Motion (58 page)

“Matter of opinion, Jack.”

“We’re going to drill this hole. I don’t rule out coming up with commercial quantities of gas and oil, maybe even at ordinary depths. But if we don’t, and if we’ve drilled it here, you know what we get as a consolation prize? An injection well. One that goes so far below the water table that we can direct the waste stream down it from now till kingdom come and still be good neighbors.”

“Legality?”

“I know of no statute,” he says smoothly, “that would interfere.”

So a feasibility study is performed. The more management thinks about Kernaghan’s plan, the more it likes it. Certain workers on the M Line are developing chloracne, a disfiguring and irreversible rotting of the skin caused by exposure to dioxins, and there are disquieting reports coming out of Vietnam about soldiers using Sweeting-Aldren herbicides and turning up with tender livers and intestinal sarcomas and other, more nameless dreads. Half the guinea pigs in a delivery truck unwisely parked for an hour by the M Line’s evaporation pond go into convulsions; the other half are dead. Since the only way to reduce dioxins in the waste stream is to double the reaction temperature, the cost of electricity to pump the waste underground begins to seem reasonable. And when management looks at the effluents from all its other process lines, and feels the winds of regulation and public opinion shifting, the decision is clinched.

Kernaghan pays another visit to Anna, who has been cooking up ever more nasty-smelling synthetic crude in her oven; she looks like a Swiss chambermaid in her white chemist’s apron. He shows her the rental contract for equipment to drill a five-mile-deep hole—the work orders, the authorizations for energy use. She shrugs. “What took you so long?”

“You’re in charge of the drilling. We’re adding ten K to your salary.”

“La, la, la.”

“You have exclusive publication rights. Exclusive rights to the core samples from the deepest hole in eastern North America.”

“Of course. I thank you, Mr. Jack Kernaghan. Really. Was there something else?”

He smiles, unsurprised. “I don’t think you understand that I spent twenty-five years’ worth of leverage to get you this piece of paper. Twenty-five years’ worth of service to the company.”

“This is boring.”

“Boring?” He holds up the rental contract and begins to tear it down the middle.

She can’t stop herself from grabbing his hand. She says, “You think you can buy me.”

“Say I’m proving my love.”

“You tear up rental contract to prove your love?”

“If there’s no hope for my love?”

She takes the contract and reads it carefully. “My Berkshires. What happened to my Berkshires?”

“I did my best.”

She has a beaker of synthetic crude on her desk. She dips a Pyrex stirring rod in it, dribbling the black, viscous stuff from the tip. She lets herself fall backward and her chair catches her, rolling into a wall with the impact. “You want to drill my hole? Good! You want to touch me? Good! You can touch me. But you’ll never touch me.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She stands up and walks in a circle around him, her mouth open as wide as she can stretch it, saying, “La, la, la, la, la.” She laughs. He seizes her, works one knee between her legs, turns on the urgency that has served him so well in the past.

“So, OK,” pulling away from him, “walking filth has smart knees.”

He stands, panting, maddened. “Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you.”

“La, la, la,” tongue wagging. “You’ll never touch me!”

Which was how things stood in the fall of ’69. Bob Holland of course couldn’t understand why Anna had only two modes with Kernaghan—the contemptuous and the vampish—and why Kernaghan would put up with even a minute of being ignored by her as she plied Bob with throaty questions about his work. The “lovers” exchanged brief, cutting phrases and then held long competitions for Bob’s regard which Anna invariably won, Kernaghan receding into his chair to stare at her, his eyes a pair of hate beams, minute after minute, while Bob talked about the country’s history and Anna talked about her personal history, in Paris as a baby, in upstate New York as a girl and adolescent. She turned her face away from the cigarette she held vertically at mouth level, narrowing her eyes and twisting her lips as she blew the smoke straight up. She told Bob that she was like him in loving knowledge for its own sake, that the corporate mind was grotesque and soulless, that she would quit her job in a flash if she weren’t allowed to pursue knowledge with total freedom. She said young people had life and energy and ideals. Old men were drained of their juices and loved money more than beauty, more than anything. And Kernaghan was a sly enough dissembler that when he abruptly left the dinner table, as though hating Anna for flirting—as though powerless to stop her—Bob believed that he was being a bad guest and hastened after his father-in-law, unwilling to be the instrument with which she tormented him. When he turned around, Anna had her silver fox on and her car keys in her hand.

An hour later, when he was in his room typing up notes, he heard her cries, loud enough to have awakened him if he’d been sleeping. He hadn’t heard her car return.

In the morning he found them smoking breakfast ciggies in the east room, thick as thieves, holding hands. They looked at him as if he were the devil they’d been speaking of.

It being a Sunday, all the archives closed, they took him for a drive. Armed guards waved the car through the gates of Sweeting-Aldren’s main installation, and Kernaghan drove the avenues winding among the various process lines at screeching speeds.

“You’re giving me a headache,” Anna said.

“I’m showing Bob what it’s all about.”

The three of them put on hard hats and toured the process structure on the brand-new AB Line, into the maws of which went ethylene and chlorine and out of the anus of which came white prills of polyvinyl chloride. The structure was an orgy of metal forms, twenty cottage-sized modules straddling and abutting and embracing one another tightly, each with its own voice of thermodynamic ecstasy and all with their fat appendages rammed deep into steel-collared orifices; but a rigid orgy, full of power and purpose, never ending. In these plants, chemists transformed the verbs of their imaginations into the nouns of their achievement by adding
-er
or
-or
or -r. There were 5,000-gallon double-arm mixers, paddle blenders with carbon-steel shredder blades, a triple-wall main reactor built like Charles Atlas, an 80-ton two-stage chiller, a jacketed continuous turbulizer, a shuddering particulate-transfer screw feeder, nozzle concentrators, triple-effect evaporators, intensifier bars, a 400-cubic-foot cone dryer, a cylindrical concrete priller, a heat exchanger with stainless tubes and a carbon-steel shell, a 6,250-square-foot vertical condenser, a twin-cone classifier, and a dozen centrifugal compressors. The scary thing was smelling so many smells that reminded you of nothing in the world. They were like alien ideas impinging directly on your consciousness, unmediated by a flavor. This was how it would feel when space invaders came and took control of your brain, some insidious something neither spirit nor flesh filling your sinuses and clouding your eyes . . .

Bob realized he was alone. A mantle of rain was descending on Peabody, closing up the vistas between the surrounding process structures, quarantining the place. Kernaghan and Anna were leaning against a front fender of his car. They exchanged glances. Finally Anna said, “Jack and I were wondering if you had any pot.”

“Pot.”

“Marijuana.”

Bob laughed. It happened that he did, back on Argilla Road. In those days, an ounce would last him months.

Riding northward along the coast, Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder, the impact of those ketones and esters still fresh in his brain, he saw the stone fences wandering through the tangled, scrubby woods and had to force himself not to picture the early settlers in a landscape that looked just like this. He knew it wasn’t until well into the eighteenth century that erosion and repeated plowing had begun to fill the fields with glacial boulders, and that the farmers, running out of wood, had turned to stones to build their fences. And it wasn’t until the Erie Canal and the railroads had opened up the heartland that farming in New England was finally abandoned, its fields reclaimed by trunk and thorn. The sterile waters and monotonous forests of skinny, crownless trees were no more a picture of the nineteenth century than of the seventeenth century; were as alien as the esters in his nose, as her hand on his shoulder, her fingernails on his neck, her fingertips on his earlobe.

He was a boy from the woods himself, from the still-virgin forest of western Oregon. It had only been a year ago, right before his most recent visit to his mother, that Weyerhaeuser had clear-cut the hillside behind her house, reaping a one-time-only profit, and left the land to decay into the river like a shaved, dead wolf. The next time he was home he would see it after “reforestation”: the varied, misty forest of Sitka spruce and hemlock and cedar and northern redwood supplanted by weeds and slash and identical Douglas firs shooting up at geometrical intervals from the loose, bulldozed earth. The same wave of profit-taking that had crashed onto Cape Ann in 1630 was even now rolling out over the Pacific Coast, carrying with it the last of the continent’s virginity.

Anna handled a joint like a cigarette, tapping the ash loose with a long red nail, expelling the smoke through her nose, perching on the edge of the sofa with her legs crossed at the knee. Kernaghan couldn’t keep his face straight. He seemed more interested in simply holding a joint, enjoying its illegality and symbolism, than in taking hits. As it filled with smoke, the living room altered as if a reel were ending in a cheap theater, frames, entire actions dropping out, voices and faces in and out of sync, bright dots and dark squiggles, the room jumping and then taking on the orange tones of the new projector’s bulb; Bob saw that until now the world on the spherical screen around him had been projected by a light with too much blue in it. The gray light in the windows looked like sunshine. The three stoned people crowded around the refrigerator and lifted pieces of aluminum foil, seeing what the cook had left. In the hallway Anna pressed her stomach into Bob’s, kissed him, unbuttoned his shirt, and backed up the hallway bending over with her palms beckoning as if he were a pet she wanted to jump into her arms.

In Beverly, on a no-account street, he followed her into her ordinary little house. The dust ruffles on the overstuffed furniture, the family photographs with their cheap gilded frames, the tawdriness, the poor taste, made him wild about her and as certain of conquest as he was of her La-Z-Boy’s softness when he sank into its arms. She was selecting LPs from a brass stand reminiscent of a dish rack. Kernaghan, who’d been left in the car, was giggling in the bushes, spying through the window, rain snaking down the glaze of his baldness.

They didn’t see him again, but he must have been in the back seat as they returned to Argilla Road, he must have followed them inside, tittering like a leprechaun, and he may even have been watching in the living room the entire time, maybe in the corner where twenty years later Rita would split her head open. Watching Anna load the record changer with Frank Sinatra albums, watching her remove her paisley blouse and Silera bra, watching the white flesh of her midriff bunch into folds as she bent forward to pull her high-heeled boots off and slip her yellow spandex miniskirt and white underpants down her legs. Watching the rippling and rounding of the muscles in Bob’s shoulders, the tensing of his youthful buttocks, the action of his hips. Hearing the smack of her heavy breasts against the flatness of his chest, watching fast breath dry the saliva in the corners of her mouth, hearing him cry out, hearing her tell him, “He can only do it . . . with Dom Pérignon bottles!” Watching him raise her hips from the carpet and replow the warm, moist, trembling earth. Watching the in and out, seeing their chests heave and their mouths angle to cover one another as if they were two half-drowned swimmers in mutual resuscitation, watching the jiggling of her flesh, the sway of his, watching him sprawl across her forking legs, watching him gulp air red-faced and obliviously, until finally he had watched enough and could totter across the room and touch Bob’s shoulder.

“Bob, Bob, Bob!” he said, eyes half-shut with mirth. Bob saw his penis, swollen and perpendicular, a pinkish black instrument.

“Oh my God!” Anna screamed with laughter. “Oh my God!”

Bob could hear her giggling, squealing, shrieking while he put his overcoat and boots on. He stumbled into the rain, across the lawn and through the sterile, altered woods. He smelled woodsmoke and wet leaves, heard the wind being combed by a thousand narrow tree trunks, water from branches slapping the slick leaves on the ground. It was almost Thanksgiving. The dusk and the wet smells and wet sounds were the ones that had once made him shiver when he stepped outside his house for firewood, and made him hurry back inside where it was warm and he could forget the keening wind mourning the dead past of the land, dragging over the hard rooftops, jealous of the life inside. So deep in the stunted woods that the dark bulk of Kernaghan’s house might simply have been night on the horizon, he sank to his knees in the leaves and stayed until the rain had stopped, and his head had cleared, and the sky froze into glittering crystals in the shape of Orion and Perseus, and he’d heard the starter of Anna’s car.

You bought her a condominium?

I helped her with a loan
.

Oh, Melanie
.

Bob, it was an excellent time for her to buy
.

She looks up to you. She takes her lead from you. You know, you don’t have to give her everything she wants. You could give her some guidance instead
.

The money is mine to do what I want with
.

I’m saying if you wonder why Lou got so mad at you, it’s not too hard to figure out. Just think about how it looks to him, why don’t you. Just think about it
.