Strong Motion (59 page)

Give me some credit I have every intention of being fair to him in the long run. But if you could hear the way he harps on the money . . . It’s impossible to have a rational discussion with him. He’s just like you. He’s even worse. I told you, he ruined a sofa. He kicked a Waterford bowl into the fireplace
.

Well, good for him
.

He has no conception of what I’m going through
.

He understands that Eileen takes and takes and takes from you, and he gets nothing
.

Bob, you cannot compare the two
.

Obviously he thinks you can
.

I don’t understand it. Ever since this whole thing started he’s been terrible. I just would not have expected this of him. He’s been storing up resentment
.

You should call him and apologize
.

Oh, now, really. For what? What do I apologize for? I’m the one with the problem! I’m the one who’s caught in the middle!

You should call him and apologize. It’s what you should do, and if you can’t do it, then you can’t complain, either, and you can’t complain if I take matters into my own hands
.

Well, go right ahead. You always know what the right thing to do is. You’ve never, ever, faced a situation where you weren’t sure what to do. Everything’s always been very clear for you. Everything’s simple and nice. You wanted me, you married me. You live your politically correct life, and leave everything else to me, which is what you married me for
.

I married you because I loved you
.

I know that, Bob. I know that. Don’t tell me
—

And I still love you
.

DON’T TELL ME THAT
.

A long silence.

Give it away
, Bob said finally.

Give what
.

The money
.

I will. I’ll give—a lot. I’ll give
—
half! But I have to have it
first.

Give it all and you’ll be happy. Set aside a little for the kids, and a little for yourself. Set aside a million and give the rest away. You’ll be happy
.

I can’t, Bob. I can’t
.

♦

All the while, a hole is being drilled into the earth in Peabody at a cost in labor, equipment, and energy of maybe five thousand dollars a day. Anna tags the core samples as they come up and stores them in a refrigerated building to retard oxidation. She has her own padlock on the building. She couldn’t tell schist from feldspar if her life depended on it, but the samples will be hers alone to study and exploit, and her only thought is
deeper, deeper, deeper
. She still thinks there’s oil or at least methane down there. But delays and costly breakdowns are becoming frequent as the drill bit chews past the one-mile mark. Competitors with new plants are eating into Sweeting-Aldren’s war profits. With the hole now well below the water table, plenty deep for waste disposal, management decides it’s time to eliminate further funding. Kernaghan, however, knows that Anna will leave the company if the drilling stops too soon. He threatens and deceives and cajoles Aldren Sr. into funding the drilling at least through the end of 1970.

Rita can’t figure it out. A number as hot and proud as Anna? With an impotent goat? Obviously Kernaghan has found a way to buy the girl. But the months go by and Anna isn’t promoted, she doesn’t move out of her dowdy pillbox in Beverly, she drives the same old Ford. Certain heavy pieces of jewelry are suspicious, but Rita is sure the girl’s too shrewd to have sold herself for some earrings and a diamond pendant.

“She hates the guy,” Anna’s fellow researchers confide when Rita asks.

“But she sleeps with him.”

“He has Power over her,” they say mysteriously, meaning they have no idea.

Rita visits Anna herself.

“I love him passionately,” Anna says, laughing in Rita’s face; Kernaghan has told her all about Rita. “And he’s crazy about me.”

“So why don’t you marry him?”

“What do I care about marriage? He wants a woman who
sneezes
at money.”

Talking to Anna fans the embers of Rita’s jealousy, turns the warm glow into a white, directed flame. She begins to wonder about the big derrick called the F2 Line, which management has surrounded with a high, opaque fence and which Anna visits daily. Rita begins to snoop, to listen in on occupied telephone lines, to open forbidden drawers, to watch for keys to unattended file cabinets. The more she finds out, the easier it is to read between the lines of memos and decipher her bosses’ winks and decode the remarks they make in hallways. She pieces together the details of Anna’s “research initiative.”

It’s midwinter, the hole now eighteen thousand feet deep, when Rita comes to Anna’s office with two copies of a confidential memo. She gives one to the girl. “Recognize this?”

Anna, bored: “What if I do?”

Rita hands her the other, which is identical to the first—copies to be sent to and destroyed by various executives and Anna Krasner, Research Scientist—except that the words “deep exploratory well” on the copy Anna received are replaced by the words “deep waste disposal well.”

Anna shrugs. “So?”

“Well, my dear, it doesn’t look like lover boy drilled your hole because he loves you. He drilled it to pump waste down. Seems to me that he got you awfully cheap. Wouldn’t you say? Buying you with somebody else’s money? As far as he’s concerned, your dream’s just a giant sewer.”

Anna shrugs again. But a week later she fails to report to work, and a janitor discovers that her desk is bare. She simply vanishes into the greater world that Boston sometimes forgets lies all around it. And Kernaghan has only guesses about why she’s left him. He may suspect Rita, but when he comes to see her, she, being far from through with her revenge, is careful not to gloat.

The company wastes no time in taking down the drilling derrick and putting in a pumping station. In the wake of Earth Day, Congress and Nixon are moving towards agreement on creating an environmental-protection administration and enacting Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Kernaghan suggests that the pumping program be kept quiet, since (a) they’ve been drilling without a license, and (b) given the current ecological hysteria, the public might be alarmed if it learned that highly toxic chemicals are being pumped into the earth, no matter how safe the process is in reality. The chain of command terminating in the actual pumping is carefully broken up, so that only the top executives know the real story, and loopholes of deniability are left for all but one of them. The various plant managers and workers involved in the waste stream are told the fluids pumped at F2 are being stored temporarily in an underground tank, or told the fluids are harmless.

On the day before Kernaghan’s seventy-second birthday, the day of his retirement, when the company’s waste disposal program for the future is firmly in place, Rita appears at his door. She’s been following the conspiracy as it develops, documenting every stage. She’s the secretary of one of the executives involved—maybe even Aldren Sr. She’s come to Kernaghan for blackmail.

“No way,” Louis said. “You don’t blackmail somebody into marrying you. You don’t want to be married to a guy that hates you.”

“Who said anything about marriage? She’s trying to blackmail him, period. She wants all that money he never paid her for her favors. She shows him a list of the documents she has, and she says, Give me X amount of money or else you guys are going to jail. Remember we’re talking about a woman who later defrauded her local bank. And when he sees how serious she is, he starts to weep, genuinely, because he’s tired, and he’s lost Anna, and he’s afraid. He says, Please, Rita, I’m an old man, the best days of my life were spent with you, let’s be friends.”

“But she’s suspicious.”

“Of course she’s suspicious. But it’s hard to see straight when you’ve got
all
the power. He’s on his knees saying marry me. He’s laughing, he’s crying, he’s insane. He’s utterly in her power, and she’s a woman. She can’t quite bring herself to stick the knife in.”

“Yeah, but wait a second, you can’t tell me the most important thing for him was what the woman looked like, and how old she was, and then say, Oh, but he made an exception for ugly old Rita. If money’s what she wants, I mean not marriage, why
doesn’t
he buy her off?”

“Because he loves money just as much! He weighs the problem and decides to marry her. If he marries her, she’s silenced and it doesn’t cost him anything. He keeps the money, and he can still chase all the women he wants. Plus marrying her guarantees her silence over the long term. So it’s the right decision. They get married, and immediately he starts converting his entire portfolio to Sweeting-Aldren stock, to make sure that Rita’s stuck with it. When he dies, his will puts Rita’s allowance from the trust fund at the mercy of company dividends: if she attacks the company, it cuts into her allowance. He probably makes sure that at least Aldren knows this. And so then she’s really stuck. In a sense she’s inherited his entire fortune—obviously she insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement to that effect—but he doesn’t let her get control of it. That’s why there’s the otherwise insane stipulation that the trustees
must leave the assets invested in Sweeting-Aldren
. It’s not because he’s such a gung-ho company man, he’s too smart for that. It’s because he’s getting his revenge on Rita.”

“And Mom’s the one who pays for it.”

“It’s usually the women who pay for it, one way or another.”

♦

Kernaghan had a heart attack in his sleep in 1982. He’d lived eighty years in good health, smoked cigarettes for sixty, and died without pain or terror. Once he was dead and Rita had discovered the mean trick he’d played her with his will, she made a slave of his spirit. He had to knock on tables for her, spell out optimistic messages about the other world with a gliding upturned tumbler, and, most demeaning of all, inhabit the bodies of animals. One week she would look into the eyes of a neighbor’s retriever and patronize her silly husband; the next week Jack would be a blue jay hanging around outside the kitchen windows. “Up to his same old tricks,” she’d say complacently. Her Haitian maid, for one, believed that Rita had been shoved from that barstool because Jack’s spirit couldn’t take the abuse anymore.

A less imaginative woman than Rita, a woman who didn’t require a giant pyramid on the roof and an authentic Egyptian mummy in the basement, could have lived very comfortably on the dividends from her Sweeting-Aldren stock. The chemical industry suffered some declines in the seventies and early eighties, but Sweeting-Aldren suffered less than the rest. Not only did it not have to spend tens of millions on pollution control and waste recovery, but it was able to pass some of those savings on to its customers, and so consistently undersell its east coast competition. The pump at F2 ran so smoothly that the old generation of executives forgot about it and the new generation never learned. It was like the national economy, which began to roar again in the mid-eighties. The country borrowed three trillion dollars to buy some weapons and fund a giant leap forward in lifestyle for the wealthy. When the economy grew, so the argument went, tax revenues would increase and the debt would be paid off. But year after year the national debt continued to increase.

Nature issued her first warning in 1987. Beneath Peabody, in Sweeting-Aldren’s own back yard, the earth begins to shake. It’s no accident. It has always only been a matter of time. Dimly Mr. X, the one executive officially responsible for waste disposal, the one executive who wasn’t granted deniability when the thing was set up in ’72, recalls the concept of induced seismicity. The tremors continue. A worried Mr. X goes to his boss, Aldren Jr., and says the pumping must stop.

Aldren Jr., steely cold, says: “What pumping?”

“Sandy, the pumping at F2. Our primary waste stream?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Aldren Jr. “Common knowledge this company incinerates and recycles all its waste.”

“Joking aside, Sandy, we’re causing a fucking swarm of earthquakes two miles from here.”

With exquisite timing, their office trembles and they hear a distant boom, as from an artillery range.

“I’ve trusted you, X,” says Aldren Jr. “You’ve been world-class, straight tens across the board. And now you’re indicating to me that our disposal costs are going to triple? I don’t think I’m going to remain president if that happens. And I have a personal stake in remaining president. It’s a very meaningful position to me, self-esteem-wise.”

“I’m indicating we’re looking at a little backup in the waste stream. A little temporary quasi hitch. So that we might be well advised to short-term invest in better incineration and recycling. Either that or consider some major holding-tank-type construction.”

Aldren Jr. shakes his head very slowly. “I’m hearing figures,” he says, “in the tens of millions. I’m hearing crippling long-term capital investments here. Here when I can already feel the Spaniards breathing down my neck. Can smell the goddamn garlic, X! You know what they’re doing with their waste? They’re pissing it straight into the ocean at Cadiz. Their tankers fill their guts with it, sail to the mid-Atlantic, and blow it out their asses. The worst of it they put in plastic drums and ship to Gabon, and fucking Cameroon. That’s what I’m competing with. Barely competing with. Fighting tooth and nail to compete with. You hear what I’m saying? I’m saying the old ejectorama for me, the dole and heavy fines and potential time in Allenwood for you.”

Mr. X hears him. He puts a stop to the pumping. With the minuscule waste-processing budget at his disposal, he builds a cluster of huge, flimsy holding tanks on some company land near Lynnfield and stockpiles the most dangerous of his effluents there. The rest of the waste he lets trickle into the sea and air, relying on the company’s good relationship with the EPA to keep him from getting caught. For several years, like a nation trying to be kind of halfway responsible, he holds the line on pumping; and for several years, like the national debt, the stockpile of effluents grows and grows. But finally there’s a natural outbreak of seismicity in nearby Ipswich, and Mr. X’s prudence loses to his fear: he gives the order to resume pumping. Just another half a decade without a seismic disaster, and he’ll be able to retire on a full pension, summer on Nantucket, winter in Boca Raton, play eighteen holes in the morning and have his first Manhattan on the dot of five. Only five more little years! There will be no turning back now. He’s going to cross his fingers, shut his eyes, and pray:
Lord, let it fall on someone else’s shoulders
.