Heat and Light (13 page)

He raises the glass to his lips and finds it empty. “Tell me about the new church,” he says, hoping she didn't notice.

Jess refills his glass. “We're almost ready to move in. The roof is the final thing. I can't wait to get out of that storefront.”

“Well, that was a surprise, too.”

She covers her eyes with her hand. “It's hideous, I know. That carpet.”

“I didn't notice the carpet.”

“You're lying. It's disgusting. I'm amazed anyone comes back.”

“I came back.”

She treats him to a full, dazzling smile. “Yes, you did. But not for a couple weeks.”

“I had to work.”

“On Sunday morning?”

“First tour starts at five.”

“What's a tower?”

“A shift. Sorry. A rig has its own lingo. It's like being in the military. You forget how to talk to regular people.”

She chews thoughtfully. “You've been in Bakerton what, a year now?”

“Ten months.”

“Ten months. And how many actual conversations have you had with people from town?”

“One. You, in Walmart. I guess tonight makes two.”

“My point exactly. If you're going to be here, you might as well be part of the community.”

“I'd say that's a minority opinion. Most folks want us to get lost.” Herc helps himself to more fish. “The ones who've got leases are in a hurry to get their money. But once we tear up their property, they want us to get lost, too.”

She drinks meditatively. “It's complicated, Marshall. Change is hard, especially if you didn't choose it. Most people here didn't. And the town has definitely changed.”

Herc recalls Bakerton as he first saw it, the empty storefronts.
What is it that people miss, exactly? In another ten years it would have become a ghost town.

“A few people are making a lot of money,” she says. “Good for them, but everyone else is affected, too. The noise, the road construction. The other day I could swear I felt an earthquake.”

“People always think that. That's just seismic testing. It's nothing to worry about.”

She looks unconvinced.

“And what about the water supply? I've read about this. There are people out west who can set their tap water on fire.”

“The water will be fine. Trust me. That's a load of—propaganda.” Herc stops himself, just barely, from saying
horseshit.
“Environmental nut jobs trying to scare you. Greenpeace or whoever.”

There's more he wants to say.
I care about these things, too. Nobody wants to dirty up the water.
Hard experience has taught him to keep his mouth shut. Environmentalists aren't reasonable people. To Herc they are fussy housekeepers like his mother-in-law, who lives in a retirement community so tidy it's intolerable to visit: dustcovers on the sofa, lamp shades wrapped in plastic.

There is a silence.

“You don't believe me,” he says.

“It doesn't matter what I think. I don't have enough land for anyone to drill here. But if I did? No way would I sign a lease.”

“I'm not going to try to change your mind. But really, it's not that bad.” He drains his glass. “Okay, it's bad, but only for a little while. A few months total.”

“From your perspective, I guess that's true. But the town is being changed
permanently.
To be honest, it's bringing out the worst in some people.” She refills their glasses. “Bakerton was decimated when the mines closed. Some of those guys still aren't working. Imagine you've been unemployed for months or years, and you see a bunch of workers brought in from Texas or wherever.”

“I never thought of that.” Herc thinks of the rude chambermaid at the Days Inn, the surly locals at the Commercial, the bartender's attitude. “No offense, but it isn't the friendliest town.”

“Is that so surprising? People feel they've been passed over. You're taking their jobs. And if you happen to be black or Hispanic, it can get ugly. I've heard comments I wouldn't repeat, from people who should know better:
I'm not racist, but . . .
”
She drinks. “There was a case a few years ago, maybe fifty miles from here. Four high school football players beat a Mexican man to death. Apparently they got angry when he spoke Spanish to them. The jury acquitted them. They said it was a street fight that got out of hand.”

Herc thinks of the pregnant nurse at the Emergency Room, who eyed Jorge up and down and asked if he was a U.S. citizen. What if he hadn't been? Would she have sent him away?

“The irony is, Bakerton used to be an immigrant town. Polish, Italian, Hungarian. Those people didn't speak English either. Now it's their kids and grandkids who are getting all worked up about immigration.” Jess shifts in her chair. “I don't mean to tar everyone with the same brush. Most people here are lovely. But the ones who aren't tend to be the loudest.”

“Like everywhere,” Herc says.

“Then there are the logistical problems. We have a tiny little hospital, a volunteer fire department. Did you know there's only one policeman for all of Bakerton? Nobody even locks their doors here. We've had zero crime, until now.”

“Are you sure about that? I bunk over at the Days Inn. I can't tell you how many times somebody's broke into a welding truck in the parking lot. Welding leads are made of copper,” he explains. “Drug addicts steal them and sell them for scrap.”

“Drug addicts? In
Bakerton
?” She looks flabbergasted and something else—injured, disappointed, or maybe he's reading too much into it. He recalls the Sunday he and Mickey walked out of her church, skipping the social. Once again, he feels like a heel.

“It's a nice town,” he says quickly. “I like it. But every place has its problems. The fish is delicious.” In fact it is a little dry; he took seconds just to please her.

He eyes the wine bottle, nearly empty now.

“That's a relief. I was shooting for edible. I'm a little rusty in the kitchen. You get lazy living alone. When Wes was sick it didn't seem important. Most of the time he had no appetite.”

“My granddad had stomach cancer,” says Herc. “He always said the treatment was worse than the disease.”

“Yes, that. But not just that.” She is quiet long enough to make him nervous. “Cancer changed him. It changes everybody, I guess, but Wes went a little crazy. He was desperate to know why it happened. I mean, it's a reasonable question. He was so very young.”

Her hand lies palm up on the table. Only now does Herc notice that she still wears a ring. He thinks of his own wedding band, lost years ago on a rig in Arkansas and never replaced.

“I feel a little strange telling you this. Like I'm breaking a confidence. Which, after all this time, is ridiculous.”

How had he failed to notice? Seven years widowed, and still a ring.

“It's none of my business,” he says quickly. “We don't have to talk about it.”

“No, I want to. It's healthy, right?” She lifts her glass and finds it empty. “I'm drinking too much.”

“Or not enough.” He pours the last splash of wine into her glass. “To Wes.”

Her eyes are suddenly moist. “Oh, you're lovely. Yes. To Wes.”

They clink glasses.

“So, okay. He had certain theories.” She drinks deeply. “Remember Three Mile Island?”

“The nucular plant?”

“Yes. He grew up—we both did—right near there. I mean,
right near.
You could see the plant from their back yard.”

“Good Lord.”

“The Peacocks lived next door to us. My mom was pregnant, so we had to evacuate; but Wes's parents stayed. I guess they thought it would be all right. At least, his dad did. Who knows what his mother thought. It was that kind of marriage.”

Herc thinks of his own mother, who was given a weekly allowance like one of the children, the five- and ten-dollar bills kept in an old tin atop the refrigerator—
SAYRE'S BOILED PEANUTS
—along with a pocket notepad. Cleaning house after her death, he'd flipped through the pages, years of small household expenses faithfully recorded—
Milk man 3 dollars
—in his mother's careful hand.

“Anyway, when he got sick, it took him five seconds to decide that was the reason.”

Herc frowns.

“The radiation,” she says.

“Oh. Sure. Well, was it?”

She shrugs elaborately. “His doctor said no, it couldn't have been. But Wes was convinced. He read everything he could get his hands on. By the end he had file cabinets full of papers. Medical studies and so on. But nobody believed him.”

“Did you?”

A long pause.

“I believe he believed it.” She stands to clear the table, stacking their empty plates. “Yikes, I'm a little tipsy.”

Herc rises to help. Later he will try to reconstruct exactly how it happened. He must have taken the platter from her hands before he took her in his arms.

I
t is a work of genius, alive as a human body, the dream of a scientist with the intellect of God. But the scientist himself did not design it. The engineers who designed it have never run it. The operators can't, themselves, maintain it. The maintenance crew has no idea what they're maintaining. They perform procedures outlined in the Handbook, written by someone. They follow the schedule and complete the checklist and hang the yellow tag.

The miracle sits on an island at a bend in the river, three miles downstream from the town. A generation ago, vacation cabins were built here. Farmers grew corn and tomatoes and sent the harvest to the capital by barge. Unit One came online five years ago, a good time for a miracle: cars idling for hours at the Pennzoil, the president kicked out of the White House, Patty Hearst pointing a machine gun in her Communist beret.

Today Unit One is down for refueling. Unit Two has been online just three months. For five weeks it has run at full capacity, powering schools and hospitals, factories and airports, the utility recouping its investment. Unit Two cost seven hundred million dollars. Miracles are not free.

The plant has uncountable moving parts, God's wristwatch: acres of tanks and engines and pumps and chambers, variously heating and cooling, humming and spinning, each calibrated for its single mission, the unique and infinitesimally precise action, the step-turn-dip in the dance. Miles of piping, a small city of valves
opening and closing. A thousand moving parts for each symbol in the equation, a declarative sentence in a wordless language no one actually understands.

In the containment building stands the Babcock & Wilcox reactor, forty feet high and fifteen across, a massive cylinder of reinforced steel. The reactor is the Ark of the Covenant, a receptacle of high purpose. Inside is the uranium core. The core contains fuel rods, a hundred tons' worth: thirty-six thousand tubes coated with zircon cladding, each packed with radioactive pellets. The core generates a lunatic heat; water runs constantly through it. The water turns to steam and is piped to a generator, which powers a turbine.

Which runs to a generator, which feeds a transformer, which connects to the grid.

The grid powers televisions in three states. Eight-track tape players and Weedwackers. The Wear-Ever Popcorn Pumper. The Atari 5600 game console.

The plant is self-regulating, entirely self-sufficient. The lobster shift runs eleven to seven. Two night operators man the controls. The control room is large as an auditorium, bright as an operating theater. The panels add extra illumination: red lights, blue lights, white, green, gold. The panels cover three walls, floor to ceiling. Altogether there are nine hundred square feet of buttons and switches and dials and gauges, tracking each shiver in the system. All in service of the equation, the wordless sentence, the numeric koan in the secret language of God.

Of the six thousand indicators in the control panel, seven hundred fifty are alarms.

An hour before dawn, the two night operators drink coffee and talk about the movie. One has seen it, one has not.

“Pure horseshit,” says the first man. “Looks real, though. The instrumentation and all.” The movie, about a disaster at a nuclear plant, opened twelve days ago. He saw it with his wife, who clutched his arm in rapt and fluttering fascination:
Is it really like that?
Show
ing, for the first time in years, an interest in his work, in him period, the familiar husband transformed into something larger than he'd been that morning, the chronic snorer in a stained undershirt, the bathroom slob.

Yeah, pretty much.
He felt a rush of manful pride, as though he'd taken her for a spin in a sports car.

“I wonder where they filmed it,” says the second man. “What kind of a plant would let them do that?”

The alarm lights run across the top of the back panel, seven hundred fifty glass windows, each three by five inches. When a window illuminates, a message is displayed:
PRESSURIZER LO. REACTOR COOLANT PUMP VIBRATION HI.
The panes are lettered in block capitals, like Valentine candy hearts.

If an alarm trips, the light flashes off and on until the problem is acknowledged. Then it glows steadily until the issue is resolved.

The plant is self-regulating, entirely self-sufficient. Its marvelous autonomy is the central tenet of the Handbook. The maintenance crew knows otherwise, the sixteen men in constant motion. That Wednesday morning, in the turbine room, a tech services a feedwater polisher. The feedwater system cools the reactor. It also owns his soul. To the feedwater system he is a whore on retainer. He services each tank and pump without favoritism, diligent, quietly hostile, a slave to the collective need.

The turbine room is dark and noisy, ribbed with piping. His client at the moment is Polisher 4 (also known as a demineralizer, also known as an ion-exchange tank; this fucker has aliases like a master criminal, wanted in all fifty states). There are eight such polishers, each filled with resin beads to scrub the feedwater. The beads are changed every twenty-eight days exactly, as outlined in the Handbook.

The Handbook weighs nine and a half pounds.

The equation is vision and hallucination, dreamed by wizards who can't change a tire. He'd pay good money to watch them unclog
a feedwater polisher, a hulking piece of junk that clots regularly, in menstrual fashion; the fucking thing worth more than his car, probably, and yet.

Changing the beads is an arduous process. At one time or another, each of the polishers has clogged. The tech flushes them with water and compressed air, as directed by the Handbook. This works only sometimes. At 4:00
A.M.
the shift foreman comes downstairs to help. He clambers up on a pipe and peers through a sight glass.

He's getting too old for this.

For a brief second the pipe quivers beneath him. He recoils instinctively, and just in time. The pipe lurches free of its mounting. The noise is deafening, like a massive engine backfiring. Water races through the compressed air line in machine-gun bursts.

The feedwater valves are controlled pneumatically. A second later, every valve in the system slams shut.

Upstairs, the control room quakes like a plane caught in turbulence. The two night operators are shaken from their chairs. It is thirty-seven seconds past 4:00
A.M.
A siren wails like a cat set on fire. All across the back panel the white lights are flashing.

The night operators are startled, but not worried. There are systems in place for just such eventualities. For all eventualities. In every situation imaginable, the plant itself knows what to do.

There are a thousand parts for each symbol in the equation, a declarative sentence in a wordless language no one need understand.

In a matter of seconds, the plant itself takes action. First the turbine shuts down. The bypass valves open, dumping steam into the condenser, circumventing the turbine. This series of events is described in the Handbook, an article of faith.

Then—for inscrutable reasons—the reactor itself shuts down.

The operators stare in disbelief.

All around them the panels are flashing like fireworks: red lights, blue lights, white, green, and gold. In training drills, systems
fail one at a time; there's never a question where to focus. But now the turbine has tripped. The reactor has tripped. The feedwater system has shut down completely. Temperature and pressure are rising. The operators are surrounded by flashing lights, above and below and behind them.

The shift supervisor makes an announcement over the P.A., as directed by the Handbook.
Unit Two, turbine trip, reactor trip.
Years ago, in the navy, he ran a submarine reactor. He repeats it twice for good measure, his voice strong and confident, militarily gruff.

One after another, safety systems activate. Relief valve. Makeup pumps. Injection pumps. These devices act automatically, at the precise right moment. The Handbook decrees it so.

FIFTEEN THOUSAND PEOPLE LIVE
within a mile of the plant. They have seen the miracle only from a distance—the four cement cooling towers, massive and bell shaped, exhaling steam.

To the fifteen thousand the thing has not yet happened. Showers are taken, breakfasts eaten. (The Remington electric shaver. The Amana Touch Radarange.)

A feed salesman is driving to work, the plant visible in his rearview. He notes absently that no steam rises from the towers. Then he blows his nose and takes a Dristan. His son brought home a cold—from where, the salesman can't imagine. The kid is homeschooled, shy of the neighborhood children. Left to his own devices, he would never leave the house.

This morning is no different. The boy Wesley Peacock plays a board game in his pajamas, cross-legged on the living room floor. The game involves building a complicated mousetrap, a Rube Goldberg–like creation. There are twenty-three plastic parts in red, blue, green, and gold
.
He rolls the die and lands on a white space, then adds the plastic crank to the trap.

The box says
TWO TO FOUR PLAYERS
, but the clever only child learns to ignore such instructions. Wesley takes a turn for the
blue mouse, a turn for the green one. He is used to playing against himself.

It's fun to build this comical wonder, but woe to the mouse who gets caught under! FOR AGES 8 to 14,
says the box.

IN THE CONTROL ROOM
several things are happening, all impossible.

The emergency pumps have started, yet the temperature keeps rising.

The temperature is rising, yet a white light flashes:
PRESSURIZER LO
.

The pressure is dropping, yet a white light flashes:
PRESSURIZER WATER LEVEL HI
.

According to the Handbook, these things cannot happen. Either the instruments are lying, or the Handbook is full of shit.

In the pump house building, a tech stares at a drain in the floor. A second later he hears a smack of footsteps, the radiation chemistry tech running down the hall.
“Get the hell out! Get your stuff and get out!”

Still the water keeps coming, welling up through the drain in the floor.

In the control room men crowd in shoulder to shoulder, aftershave and coffee breath and sharp apocrine sweat, one another's personal smells. What is remembered. The base workings of the limbic brain, the black box recorder always running, taste touch smell hearing, the substance of felt life. Years from now, when the day's events have been deconstructed and debated and reduced to a caption, this data will be missing from the record, the human texture the photographs will not convey.

Across the panel, lights of all colors are flashing. Ominous realities are becoming clear. Steam has overflowed the quench tank. The containment building is flooded with reactor water. In the dome of the building, radiation levels are skyrocketing. Radioactive water
seeps into the pump house building, rising up through the drains in the floor.

From the shift supervisor's office, phone calls are made per the Handbook. First things first: the American Nuclear Insurers Company. Next the state police, the county Civil Defense, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Radiological Health.

The final call is to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, its regional office in the Philadelphia suburbs. The line rings and rings. At last the supervisor leaves a message on an answering machine. No one is there to pick up the phone.

THE FEED SALESMAN'S WIFE IS QUEASY,
a fact she will remember later. She has never had a temperamental stomach, a temperamental anything. She is the firstborn daughter of a large family, raised on farm chores.

She dries the fry pan and eats a cracker for her stomach. Wesley is in the living room and blessedly quiet, playing a game in front of the TV. Her husband disapproves of television and occasionally scolds her
—Bernadette, you know my feelings on this.
But to Bernadette the TV is a help and a comfort, a fact that shames her. Her own parents are Mennonite and have never owned a set. Her mother raised eight children without
Sesame Street
or
Mister
Rogers'
Neighborhood,
without babysitters or disposable diapers. At one point or another Bernadette has used all these things, has used every crutch in existence, to raise her one well-behaved boy.

Mister Rogers is a pastor, which makes a difference. She is grateful to have another adult in the house. Mister Rogers makes himself available for a half hour each morning, to occupy the boy while Bernadette takes a shower or mixes bread dough or mops the kitchen floor, tasks her mother had managed without any help at all, because her mother didn't have a Wesley. The boy is constantly underfoot, hungry for company, amusement, comfort. Bernadette
understands that she has raised a clingy child. She has no one to blame but herself.

Some mornings—she has never told Gene this—she allows Wesley an extra program before she begins his lessons,
Card Sharks
or
The $20,000 Pyramid
. The games are loud and crass but better than the morning soap operas, full of steamy kissing and bosomy women and dialogue that makes her blush.

Wesley comes into the kitchen, his brow puckered. “They took off my program.”

She follows him into the living room. A man in a suit speaks directly to the camera. “It's just the news, sweetie. Let's change the channel.”

“It's on every channel,” says the boy Wesley Peacock.

A state of emergency has been declared on Three Mile Island. There was a small release of radiation to the environment. All safety equipment functioned properly.

Bernadette's stomach does a little leap. She sits on the couch to watch.

ELEVEN MILES AWAY,
in the state capital, six men stand before a pale blue curtain. At the podium is the lieutenant governor, handsome as a movie actor, the youngest in the history of the Commonwealth. He reads from a prepared statement. “The incident occurred due to a malfunction in the turbine system. There was a small release of radiation to the environment. All safety equipment functioned properly.”