Twist and turn and wheel over to the window to sit staring thoughtfully at the night. The moon was nearly full, its glow like the beam of a flashlight on Lavaca Bay.
She remembered the strangest thing about the “incident,” as her parents carefully referred to it. It had been there in the nightmare too, the only thing not nightmarish about it. There had been someone else standing there looking down at her little twisted body, only that someone hadn’t been there. She knew him. An old man. Her Uncle Jake.
She frowned to herself as she always did at the memory, brushing long black hair away from her forehead. The moonlight pouring through the window gave her face an angelic cast, setting alive the coppery skin and sharp features that reflected her mixed anglo-hispanic heritage.
He’d been sorry, so sorry that he couldn’t have prevented the “incident,” couldn’t have helped her somehow. But he had helped her, simply by being with her. Uncle Jake had always been with her. It was their little secret. When the hospital people had turned her mom and dad away outside the operating room, Uncle Jake had been able to go in with her.
She was thinking of him now, and she was worried, and she didn’t know why she was worried, and that worried her more. He hadn’t been hurt, hadn’t been in an accident. If he had she would have known about it immediately. It would have awakened her faster than any nightmare because it would have been real. Everything that happened to Uncle Jake was real to her.
She’d known when he’d gone into the social security office that time and let his temper get the better of him. He’d gotten himself all worked up, which he wasn’t supposed to do, and his heart, which was the weakest, oldest part of him had started to hurt.
The indifferent expression of the bureaucrat behind the desk had turned to alarm, and other people had been summoned. He’d come out of that okay. Then there was the time he’d been watching the Superbowl and his television had gone on the fritz. He’d gotten real excited and angry at the same time. His heart didn’t hurt as badly that time, but it had scared her anyway.
She hadn’t seen her Uncle Jake in person in many years. Only twice, in fact. Once right after the “incident” when he’d come to visit her in the hospital, and once a couple of years ago when he’d stayed for most of the summer. But he always sent her something for Christmas and her birthday, and he was always there when she needed to talk to him. That was their own little secret, their special secret, her and Uncle Jake, the crippled teenager and the arteriosclerotic old man.
She thought about her unfounded concern and wondered if she shouldn’t ought to try calling him now. No, not until she thought about her feelings some more. Besides, it was late and she didn’t like to wake him. An old man needed his sleep.
She put her hands on the smooth, cool chrome wheels, turned herself and rolled toward one of the two bookcases that rose from floor to ceiling. Both were full, their shelves lined largely with used paperbacks. That had never mattered to Amanda. After all, a book was a book, whether it had a fancy leather binding or a torn paper one. All that mattered were the words.
It was quite a library. Tucked innocuously between the tomes on plants and people and school subjects were books with funny titles, books even her mom and dad didn’t pretend to understand. But at a quarter a book they didn’t care what she bought on their family trips up to Houston.
She studied the shelves and used the mechanical picker to reach up and pluck out one particular volume. It had given her some understanding of herself. Maybe it would help her understand why she was concerned for her Uncle Jake. She worried about him a lot, because she loved him, and because he was special in a way not even her parents suspected.
She wanted above all to protect him. That was ironic, because except for his bad heart Uncle Jake was a robust, energetic man. No matter that he was already into his seventies. At least he could walk, which was something Amanda hadn’t been able to do since the incident. It’s in her back, the doctors had told her parents. It’s in her back, nothing we can do, nothing anybody can do, sorry and shrug and good-bye….
She remembered what walking was. A fading memory now, a sweet innocent remembrance that was one with all her other childhood memories. Pre-incident memories. Her legs now and forever more would be round and chromed and cold.
She turned on the little reading light over her desk and angled it on its gooseneck. Then she leaned back in the wheelchair and began reading. There were a lot of big words in the little book, words that wouldn’t mean much to her parents, but she’d become comfortable with them. She was a good student, at times an exceptional one. But then, when one doesn’t go out on dates or go to parties or go dancing or spend the weekend cruising, one has lots of time for study.
The sonorous dirge of the insects rose over the familiar complaint of the air conditioner and dehumidifier. Something was about to happen, Amanda felt. It somehow involved her Uncle Jake. Perhaps it might reach out to involve her as well, because she was linked as tightly to her Uncle Jake as he was to her. It’s something bad, she thought anxiously. Very bad.
But at least it didn’t feel like it involved trains, though she wasn’t sure about buses. That thought let her relax a little. After a while she fell into a calm, nightmareless sleep. The book slipped from her limp hand to close itself against the floor.
II
The same fat, silver moon that gleamed on Lavaca Bay off the South Texas coast also lit a tiny valley just outside the city limits of Riverside, California. As only the moon watched, sixty and not six hundred rode down into the little valley of death. They were mounted on steel and rubber instead of horseflesh. There were no cannons waiting to blaze away at them. These were not the Crimean heights and the assault on the valley was being carried out with the utmost stealth and silence of which the invaders were capable.
The general who directed the attack held Ph.D’s in chemistry and business administration. His soldiers were armed with graders and backhoes, diesel trucks and tracked dozers. The enemy they fought was as deadly as it was unseen. It did not inhabit the valley so much as permeate it.
Nothing lived in that bowl-shaped depression in the hills east of the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis. A few twisted, gnarled forms thrust bleached fingers toward the moon: the skeletons of the mesquite and cottonwood and scrub oak that had once thrived in the valley bottom. For the past fifty years the water table from which their roots had once drawn nourishment had been poisoned by a bewildering variety of industrial wastes. Now not even a weed could grow there.
A deceptively innocent-looking pond of amber liquid flecked with dirty foam had collected at the valley’s lowest point. The small army of heavily clothed soldiers treated the pool with especial caution. It was a mixture of rainwater and acids, sludge and things with long, tongue-twisting names. Around the central pool rusted and broken metal drums stood guard like heavily ribbed ghosts.
Quietly, quickly, the men and machines went to work. No one spoke. For one thing, the respirators and masks they wore made conversation difficult. For another, continued silence was vital not only to the success of their operation but to the issuance of triple-overtime bonuses for each worker. Those who worked with shovels and suction hoses pulled instinctively and often at the thick gloves protecting their hands.
On the hillsides to east and south a few lights shone dim against the late summer night. Once a backhoe’s gears ground loudly in protest against its operator’s too hasty shifting. Attentive mechanics rushed to mute its complaints, packing extra insulation around the transmission.
The attack had been well-rehearsed in advance. It proceeded with admirable speed. It was already well after midnight. Before the first light of the sun rose over San Gorgonio every worker and machine had to be out of the valley and the work had to be completed.
While the assault continued, similarly masked workers leaned against their trucks up on the east ridge. They conversed in low tones, watching the intense activity taking place below while they waited their turn. The beds of their vehicles carried an odd assortment of vegetation, parodies of the land-scaper’s art. There was young mesquite, some prickly pear, jumping cactus, manzanita … a cross-section of the wild chaparral which encrusted the dry hills of Southern California. No rose bushes, no delicate geranium beds this time. The landscapers who’d been hired to replace the natural vegetation murdered by industrial poisons thought the whole business was absurd. But they had been made to comprehend the urgency, and they certainly understood the money.
As the men watched and waited they occasionally glanced across the valley at the sources of the unwinking lights. But no one emerged from any of the tiny, ramshackle houses lining the opposite ridges to stare curiously at the work going on below. It was the middle of the week. Tomorrow was a work day, crucial to the survival of those inhabitants of the shacks and stucco homes lucky enough to have jobs. They ignored the faint noises in favor of more necessary sleep.
The valley was nothing to them, a dirty but seemingly safe playground for their numerous children. The parents were too occupied with the business of survival to trouble themselves about the valley. Most of them could not even read the long English words which were printed on the sides of some of the broken drums and cannisters lying on the valley’s slopes.
Despite the lack of activity in the homes, other men waited opposite the clean-up crew and the landscapers. These men carried money and solid wood, to be used to discourage attention as the situation dictated. The hours went their way toward morning, however, without interruption from the sleepy citizens snug in their beds above the valley.
In less than an hour the vicious little pond had been sucked dry. The men who had drained it carefully folded up their hoses, mounted their trucks, and drove their armored tankers up the single dirt and gravel road. Intact crates and drums had been loaded into the backs of unmarked trucks which followed the tankers upward.
The graders and dozers went to work. Dump trucks were quickly backed into position. With speed and precision the top fifteen feet of lethally contaminated soil was excavated and loaded into waiting trucks. Thick plastic was used to cover the dirt and seal the loads from sight. Dumpers followed tankers and semis out toward the desert.
Now a perverse parody of the process by which the little valley had been poisoned was played out. Trucks rumbled down into the vale and fresh chemicals in benign combination were worked into the exposed soil. When this was finished it was the landscapers’ turn. They came in with their pickups and flatbeds and proceeded to replace the flora which had once thrived here. As they did so they were careful not to come in contact with the recently treated earth.
Water trucks and men with tanks strapped to their backs moved among the gardeners. Each bush and shrub and patch of carefully manicured weeds was given a healthy dousing of clean, fresh water mixed with concentrated nutrients. Circulating among them all were men and women of different mien. They moved more slowly, more thoughtfully. The jeans and flannel shirts they wore hung unnaturally on them.
They avoided the gardeners and waterers as they stuck things into the ground as seriously as any doctor taking a patient’s temperature. They extracted fragments of soil and crumpled roots, put them in test tubes and added liquids from ready droppers. They whispered the results to one another through their protective masks.
Here and there a few mop-up squads of laborers attacked isolated pockets of still unhealthy soil. The excision had to be total or the cancer might spread enough to ruin the whole night’s work. Nothing could be left for the inspectors, not the slightest hint that fifty years of industrial sewage had been poured into this valley untouched and untreated.
The earth here had been horribly, callously injured. The repair work was thorough and expensive. But the repair was more cosmetic than absolute. The valley could never be the same again. The backhoe operators and landscapers and engineers were morticians, not resurrectors. When they were done the valley would look natural enough. Good embalming always does. But underneath, the substance of the valley, the thing that had made it a healthy, normal piece of the Earth, would still be just as dead.
Benjamin Huddy checked the sky, then his watch. The watch was very expensive and very accurate. Close to four. They’d have to wrap this up soon. The Board of CCM’s western operations would be awaiting his report, back in the tall clean tower the company owned in West L. A.
It would be a pleasure to give that report, he mused. Nothing serious had materialized to challenge the work. There had been no unexpectedly deep pockets of sludge to excavate, no indications of subsurface volatility to avoid, no sign of a shallow aquifer to divert. Judging from the speed with which the landscapers were doing their job, within ninety minutes the valley would once again resemble its undisturbed neighbors which marched off in chaparral-covered anonymity to the east and south.
Nearby the twin bulks of Mounts San Gorgonio and San Jacinto rose nearly twelve thousand feet into the still dark sky. Huddy wished he were atop the latter instead of standing above the valley rubbing sleep from his eyes. It would be nice to take the tram down to Palm Springs. Check into the Lakes or some other resort, take a shower, maybe get in a little tennis. He deserved the rest after this job. Palm Springs and rest would have to wait a while longer though, he knew. The report to the Board and post-operative processing would have to come first.
When the first notification had crossed the desk of some CCM supervisor that the Riverside County inspectors had routinely included the valley on their list of suspected unauthorized chemical dumps, there had been panic stretching all the way back to corporate headquarters in New York. Someone had slipped up. All company dumping was supposed to have been contracted out to subcontractors who couldn’t be tied solely to CCM. But the dump had been in use by CCM local operations for half a century and in all that time, no one had thought to discontinue its use.
Then the report showed up and some employee noted the potential danger to the corporation. Frantic outcries within the hierarchy of CCM’s chemical division had been met by calm responses from those few who’d kept their heads. It was only a problem, albeit a serious one. It required only a solution.
Having risen just high enough within the company to be privy to such dangerous information, Huddy had been the one to come up with an answer. Sensing one of those rare opportunities which occasionally present themselves on the corporate battlefield, he’d worked all night and had appeared at the hastily convened board meeting with charts and statistics detailing his plan. He didn’t mention that Ruth Somerset had helped him put it together.
The board had been impressed. Even Webster, the nephew of CCM’s Chairman’s son-in-law, had found himself shut out. With some reluctance but more relief, the board had agreed to turn the project over to him and an associate. That’s when he’d mentioned Somerset’s name.
Actually, as far as Huddy was concerned, the actual cleanup work was anticlimatic. The hard part had been the intricate maneuvering necessary to set everything up and to delay the inspection team. Persuasion and threat, argument and bribery had done their work, however. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, the county inspectors would arrive to find a simple, uncluttered little valley much like its neighbors instead of an ancient and ill-used dumping site laced with enough toxic chemicals to kill several thousand elephants.
Perhaps it wouldn’t appear quite as lush as the valley next to it, but it would still look healthier than the homesites which ringed it. Not even mesquite grew up there. Only old tires, broken-down fifties cars, beer bottles and cans in ripe and rusted profusion.
CCM would then be able to point out with considerable corporate pride and not a little righteous outrage that the valley in which they were accused of dumping illegal chemicals was a far healthier place than the inhabited dirt road which ran along the surrounding ridges.
Huddy watched contentedly as the landscapers concluded their assignments and the monitoring/test crew moved efficiently among the newly planted trees and bushes. In less than six hours his crews had sanitized both in content and appearance over fifty years of unregulated dumping from Consolidated Chemical and Mining’s Riverside, Barstow and Perris operations. None of the employees involved elected to protest the secrecy. Most of them were full-time CCM personnel who’d do exactly as they were told. For those who were not, large bonuses bought both silence and loyalty.
Besides, even if the operation was somewhat irregular, the end result, the cleaning up of the dump, was beneficial. Wasn’t that all that mattered? No need to penalize the company for the mistakes of the past. If somebody spoke out, workers from the thirties and forties weren’t the ones who’d pay with their jobs. The logic employed varied, but the result was the same. Each employee managed to rationalize the operation to his or her own satisfaction.
Why bring trouble down on themselves? If the dump was all that dangerous it would have been noticed by now, wouldn’t it? Better just to keep one’s mouth shut and do the job. Especially when a negative comment could result not only in losing that job, but in being blackballed by every large company in America.
It’s tough to be outraged when your colleagues don’t feel the same, or when you’ve a family to feed. No, better just to do your work and try not to dream about it later. The work crews operated with a unity of purpose, fueled by fear and greed.
