‘Six twenty-five,’ said Goby, like a mournful agricultural mind-reader.
The Oklahoma sun had wasted no time in bloating the bodies to almost comical proportions so that each dead cow looked like a helium-filled carnival balloon, stomach monstrous and legs akimbo.
Tom thought of photographs he’d seen of Jonestown, the bodies crammed together in death, carpeting the jungle floor, swollen so far beyond the bounds of human dignity that they were merely cloth-splitting Sumo curiosities. He wondered whether Jonestown had smelt like this, and his still-tender stomach clenched.
To distract himself, he squatted at the head of the nearest cow, a big animal with long red eyelashes and a chestnut-and-white hide that cried out to be pinned to a ranch-house wall. The cow’s huge bluish tongue had been pushed from its mouth, making it look faintly ridiculous, like a cartoon character that had been hit with a frying pan.
Tom felt sorry for the cows, and stupid for feeling that way, but there it was.
‘Went in the well,’ said Goby resignedly. ‘Fine one day. Dead the next.’
Tom peered into the well with the farmer, then swung his leg over the buzzy little trail bike Goby had provided and followed in his dust to the point about a mile away where the overground pipeline had split and oil had flowed into a carefully maintained water-course.
Tom shook his head at the vagaries of bad luck. If the pipeline had split ten yards either side of where it had, the oil would have soaked into the dust instead of pouring into Everard Goby’s water.
He sighed and Goby nodded, acknowledging the irony, the implied sympathy and the sheer unfairness of the whole situation.
It was sad for Goby, but Tom wished everything he did was this simple. Oil in the water. Oil comes from a pipeline. Pipeline leads right to the culprit. Unless Farmer Goby had taken an axe to the pipeline for the insurance money, there were no grey areas here, no mysteries. And he’d seen the photos at the farmhouse before they’d left for the dusty pasture. Photos of fat bulls wearing blue sashes, like Miss Oklahoma, champion calves and ribboned heifers, all accompanied by an Everard Goby who was cheerful and modestly triumphant, rather than the man beside him now – grey, beaten down and filled with sorrow in a way that only Mid-Western farmers and displaced Native Americans really seemed to have mastered.
If Goby had done it for the insurance money he’d eat his appropriate NTSB cap.
Still, he called his office to get the oil pump stopped and told Goby he’d come back tomorrow in his coveralls and boots to look at the breach properly. Tom often leaped to unusual theories, but he never leaped to conclusions.
Goby’s wife insisted on feeding him before he went back to the motel; the steaks were thick, the coleslaw home-made, and the two sons friendly and respectful, but Tom still wasn’t concluding a damn thing. Anything was possible. He’d once investigated a light-plane crash where it turned out the pilot had stuck a screwdriver through his own fuel tank before taking off and heading out into the Pacific Ocean with his wife and children on board. Seemed the guy had picked up HIV from his girlfriend, and had decided to spare them all his shame. The egomaniacal asshole.
It was only when Goby’s eldest boy – a raw-boned twelve-year-old – mentioned the 737 going down on a schoolfriend’s property that Tom realized he was not only twenty-four miles from Tulsa, but almost equidistant from the place he’d mentally labelled Buttfuck, Oklahoma.
*
Buttfuck didn’t disappoint. The place closest to the downed jet actually turned out to be named Crossways, but was otherwise just as Tom had imagined it: a collection of about ten run-down farms, each defined by a different hunk of rusting machinery in the yard, along with the regulation cars on bricks, dilapidated henhouses and stringy, angry dogs on lengths of worryingly frayed rope.
A few hundred yards west of ‘town’ he came to the first blue-and-white tape swinging in the slow breeze.
He saw the downed plane before he saw the circus surrounding it. The wreckage sat in the ripe yellow cornfield, surrounded by what looked like old ashes someone had tossed from a fire grate. A few lumps here and there, but mostly just scorching and black and dust scarring the crop.
Cars were parked along the dirt shoulder for what seemed like miles. Cop cars – state, local and Highway Patrol – TV trucks, shiny rentals, dirty rust-buckets, Cherokees, Chevy trucks, compacts.
The human content of the cars was dotted about the landscape. Tom knew there were only three kinds of people around a crash site: the workers, the bereaved and the ghouls. They were easy to distinguish from each other. The professionals moved purposefully, towards the crash, away from the crash, instruments in hands, heads together in businesslike discussion. The bereaved stood in quiet, loose affiliations, barely moving, sometimes embracing each other, but always looking at whatever they could see of the wreckage with dull eyes, as if staring long enough could change reality – like it would all be okay on the action replay. The ghouls craned, shifted position and talked too loudly of what they’d seen on TV and how they knew it was a bad one. They picnicked and put toddlers on shoulders so they could see better; they wanted blood. People were never happy till they’d seen blood, and once they had, they still weren’t happy. They withdrew then, pale and miserable and chastened by their own ghoulish need, or self-righteous and angry that they hadn’t been protected from the sight they’d driven miles to see. There were kids here, after all!
Tom drove past slowly and spotted Lenny Munro in a knot of serious-looking men. Munro was sunburned and appeared tired already.
Tom kept driving until he reached the last of the cars parked on the shoulder, then pulled in and watched the operation with trance-like fascination before he slid his phone from his pocket and called Pete.
‘Pete?’
‘Tom.’
‘You got the results on that bolt?’
‘You finished that job?’
‘I’m there now.’
‘Then how come I just got a call from Munro to say you’re at his crash site?’
Fuck.
‘Way to be discreet, Tom.’
‘Screw that – if you hadn’t expected me to take a look, you wouldn’t have sent me out here in the first place. A fucking five-year-old could have pinned down the dead cows!’
He waited for Pete to deny it, but it didn’t happen. He took a breath and said, more placatingly, ‘Look, I just drove past. There was no more I could do at the farm today. I’ve already told Sunoco to turn the pumps off and I have to go back tomorrow to take a closer look at the breach.’
He heard Pete make an all-purpose sound of disgruntled acceptance so pressed home his advantage: ‘The bolt?’
Pete sounded tense. ‘The lab found evidence of crank-shafting—’
‘I knew it!’ Crank-shafting meant the bolt had been bent by the force of the flanges moving across each other. If that movement had happened suddenly, the bolt would have been sheared in two; crank-shafting meant there’d been repeated or continuous pressure against it for a period before the let-go.
‘Looks like the disc strained against it,’ said Pete.
‘Enough to allow play?’ Tom’s chest was tight with tension.
Pete hesitated only briefly. ‘Yeah. Enough. Maybe a little more than enough.’
Tom stared through the dusty windshield of the rental Toyota and felt himself fill not with satisfaction but with anger.
The fan disc was flawed. Now he could couple that with the theft of the ARC forms, he felt justified in putting two and two together to make four – where ‘four’ was equal to ‘fake part’.
He didn’t have kids but if he ever did have kids and one of them was found curled round a shit-stained toilet, dead of a heroin overdose, he imagined this was how he’d feel about the dealer who’d sold the kid the fatal hit. A low, thrumming anger that chilled the Oklahoma heat and sucked a little light out of the world.
He squinted in his mirror at Lenny Munro, who stood, hands on hips, surrounded by people who wanted answers from him. Too distracted, busy and pressured even to put sunblock on his already-peeling nose.
The site was tough. Clues would be hard to come by. Solutions even harder … ‘Give it to Munro,’ he said quietly.
There was a short, disbelieving silence. ‘You sure?’
Tom knew what Pete was asking. The bolt was his – only his. His lucky break, his hunch … his ticket back, maybe. They both knew it.
‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ he said, and hung up before he could think about what he’d be losing.
He hated Lenny Munro. But right now Munro – and Lucia – needed that bolt even more than he did.
*
Ness called him the next morning while he was straddling the Sunoco pipeline like a long, shiny mustang as it jumped Everard Goby’s water-course and galloped off across the plains. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Hi, Ness. You okay?’ he sidestepped. Neatly, he thought.
