The Glass Factory (28 page)

“No problem.”

Colomba lays out breakfast for six. I try to give her my last fifty dollars in American money for food and she says, “I loan it to you. You just do what you got to do. You’ll pay me back.”

“Thanks.”

I call Wai-Wai. She tells me the chemical data printout Faith did for us helped her identify a number of compounds about 106 times faster than chance, but she says that I’m not going to like what she has to say.

“What?”

“That sludge has got a little bit of everything in there. It’s a carbon-based nightmare.”

“So?”

“So all the other chemicals—the trade names I couldn’t identify? They’re new experimental compounds for breaking down the others into less toxic by-products, for containing oil slicks, for neutralizing acids, for speeding up volatilization, for—Fil, he’s going into the environmental protection business.”

I get a good laugh out of that.

“I’m serious, Fil. Environmental cleanup is a growth industry.”

“So he’s going to make a profit by charging us to clean up the mess he’s been making?”

“It looks that way, Fil. Like it or not, this is a legitimate business. We can’t touch it.”

“Anything Morse finances comes from his other murderous enterprises. So much for ‘legitimacy.’“

“Have it your way. Sorry. Whatever else he’s doing,
this
project’s legit.”

“Shit.”

It’s the third day of the EPA’s attempt to get on the Kim Tungsten site, but they’re still being stonewalled. Gina says they should have the search warrant by tomorrow morning. She says she might even come out to serve it herself.

My car’s finally ready, but first I drop over to see how Reggie Einhorn’s doing and thank him for yesterday. I hope it wasn’t too much of a strain on him. He answers the door and I almost let out a frightful yelp. He’s positively gray, like a flagstone on a cloudy day.

I tell him, “You look awful.”

“You don’t look so good yourself,” he says, pointing to my swollen and discolored flesh and day-old bandages. “Well, I guess we showed that punk who he was messing with, huh?” Reggie chuckles, but the chuckle turns into a phlegm-clogged choke and he has a two-minute, disgusting, coughing fit. “I’ll be all right, just hoisted a few too many last night, celebrating my victory over the years. The guys down at Kelsey’s are going to have my lead pipe bronzed. I tell you, it felt just like old times.”

“Yeah, for me too.” A time I’d rather
not
relive. “That’s a real regular crowd place, huh?”

“Sure is.”

“I miss that. Since I left Ecuador I haven’t really had that rock solid crowd to hang with. I’ve never been in one place long enough to make that many friends.”

“Pretty girl like you? Come on. What’s the matter? Won’t let the guys beat you at arm wrestling?”

“I don’t know. It happens. You keep in touch with all
your
friends?”

“I guess not,” he says. “Maybe you’re not enough of a cheap date?”

“Me? Are you kidding? I grew up thinking a good time was dancing on the corner with three girlfriends and a radio. I was happy if a guy would take me to the movies.”

“Ah, the movies today ain’t worth the price of a ticket. Nothin’ but weirdo sex and buckets of blood, and I seen enough of both in the Pacific, young lady.”

I nod. He goes on: “When Vera and me were dating we used to go to the movies all the time. Picture palaces, with uniformed ushers, a fifty-foot screen, and real stars like Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, and the Duke, larger than life. And they ain’t come up with a new idea since. Just use the same old stuff over and over. Last few times I went, I left in the middle ’cause I already knew how it was gonna end.”

I agree with him. “Yeah, I already know the rules for survival if I’m ever in a movie or a TV show.”

“Hmm?”

I count them off on my fingers, one-by-one: “Don’t go for your gun first in a western of any kind.
Never
say, ‘Goodbye, Mr. Bond,’ with a thick foreign accent. Never,
ever
be an unfamiliar crew member on a
Star Trek
landing party—”

Reggie starts laughing and once again the laugh becomes a coughing fit that hurts
me
to watch. He groans in pain as he recovers, rubbing his chest and biceps.

“You better take it easy,” I say.

I’ve been meaning to ask him about his working for Morse, but I figure it’s better just to chat for awhile, not excite him too much.

“Tea?” I head into the kitchen.

“Hack! Ptoo! Sure, why not?” he calls from the other room.

I start the water running. Then I clang around for a pot to boil it in. I call back to him: “You know, I meant to thank you for what you did yesterday, I just didn’t get a chance. You really helped me out when I needed it. Say, where’d you put that tea I brought you, Reggie? Reggie?”

A cold premonition and I bolt out of the kitchen, through the hall, and into the living room. He’s stretched out on his back, eyes looking up beyond the ceiling. He knocked over the end table with the ashtray and the ashes are scattered all over him.

“No. No. No!” I say to no one, feeling for a pulse. Nothing in the wrist, nothing in the neck. No breathing. No eye movement. No response. I start CPR, pumping away at his chest, one, two, three, four, five, hold his nose and breathe through his mouth. I see his chest rise, so his airway’s clean. I repeat. Five pumps and one breath. His chest rises but I’m getting nothing else. Five pumps and a breath and I lunge for the phone, pull it off the table down next to me. Five pumps and a breath. Dial Colomba. Cram the receiver under my chin, five pumps and a breath.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Elvis? Call Stan’s office, tell them to beep him, Reggie Einhorn’s had a coronary! The number’s in my purse. On the hospital bill! Yes! Bye!”

I keep it up for seven or eight minutes. Stan was already on his way up to the hospital. He spun around on the road, made an illegal U-turn across a highway divider and headed back. I have that effect on people.

Eight minutes of CPR and
zip.
Reggie’s got dead eyes—opaque and white, if you’ve ever seen them. And still. He has slipped across the awful gap between person and corpse, gone down that one-way street towards the blind alleys of night. Fade to black. The end.

There’s nothing left to do by the time Stan shows up. He calls the county, relays the correct technical information and waits for the ambulance. He says he’s going to observe the autopsy. I go with him and wait outside for a full three hours.

It took me nearly four years to find someone who even feels like he could make me forget Antonia’s father (that asshole), we have one night of terrific love and now this.

When Stan comes out, he snaps off his rubber gloves and stretches, then sits down next to me, still wearing his full-length OR gown.

“It was a clot, not an arrest.”

“A clot …”

“There was nothing you could have done. If that helps any.”

“It doesn’t.”

Blood clots.
I know that was on the list of symptoms Gina gave me. But which one? Which workplace chemical did this to him?

“A clot: Dammit, Reggie was
murdered.
He and a thousand others like him.”

“Filomena, there’s been no murder.”

“Sure there has. It just took him ten years to die.”

“There was nothing you could have done.”

“No. But I’m going to do something now.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sure, it’s a nice town. It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles. But you can only buy a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all complete, with the original box and tissue paper. That’s the difference. And that makes me want out.
—Raymond Chandler,
Farewell My Lovely

REGGIE EINHORN
was laid to rest in Veterans Memorial Cemetery within sight of a grave marked
WEINSTEIN
, the man who gave him fifty more years of life, after a simple service attended only by neighbors and co-workers. He had no more family.

Death is goodbye forever, and at least I got a chance to say goodbye, forever, to the man who gave me a few more weeks of life. As I watch them lowering his bright new coffin into the thick cold clods of eternal earth, the thoughts fill my head: Jesus, and I thought
I
had it bad … At least I’m alive, I’ve still got a chance.

We’re all doomed from birth, and the only thing that lives after us is what we do while we we’re here.

When everybody’s gone I take out the brown paper bag I’ve been hiding under my arm and I buy Reggie a beer. Domestic. He would have wanted it that way.

We walk home. I think about Reggie and the others like him, like that independent garbage hauler Reggie told me about, the little guy trying to make an honest living by providing cheaper and better service; but the story doesn’t end with him prospering and being respected for his labors. No, the story ends with him getting threatening phone calls from gruff voices that tell him what clothes his daughter is wearing at the playground two blocks away, then dying from three slugs in the chest while trying to make sure the 911 operator gets the damn facts straight. What’s wrong with this story?

As the sky turns red, and the night starts to fall, my putting Antonia to a prayerful rest is interrupted by a low muffled roar that shakes the whole house. I look out the window. A bright orange glow explodes across the horizon out over the wasteland that is Kim Tungsten.

The fire department arrives within minutes and chops the chain off the gate, the police arrive two minutes later to keep the crowd back, but half the neighborhood is already in, jogging after the trucks because the fire is at the other edge of the site. I walk fast. Police cars race past me, trying to contain the crowd, which is tough because most of them are running even with the fire trucks. Why aren’t they setting up a perimeter, I wonder? Why are they so concerned with getting people
out
of here?

“Come on, Fil!” says Billy, gesturing for me to join him.

“I can’t run that fast.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there,” and he runs on ahead.

The police rapidly establish a semi-circle around the fire engines and keep the crowd back. They call for backup, which arrives a few minutes later to seal the gate and drive on the site to ferry the rubberneckers back to safety. But by now it is clear that the local fire fighters do not have sufficient preparation or equipment to deal with hazardous chemicals and get the fire under control. I wonder half-curiously to myself if the water they’re pumping to put it out is so full of inflammable toxics that the two just feed on each other, which would be a kind of poetic justice. Something is certainly wrong, because a young guy, obviously a rookie, sweating buckets in full fire fighting gear, loses his cool and makes a frantic radio call for the Emergency Response Team. That’s the EPA. That’s what the regulations say he’s supposed to do. But he’s new and he obviously doesn’t know he’s not supposed to do what the regulations say because his boss starts shaking him down and I step close enough and shout, “Shouldn’t you be fighting the fire?”

The Chief glares at me like he’s going to remember my face for the next twenty to thirty years. Great. This draws attention and the cops whistle at me, waving me over to them: “Ma’am? Step this way, please. Ma’am? Would you step this way please?” The fire is spreading to Morse’s side of the fence, inaccessible from this side. I’ve got no choice but to cooperate with the authorities, who pack about sixteen of us into the back of a squad car and drive us back to Pleasant Valley Road.

We watch as the orange wound in the nighttime bleeds wider and wider in the distance. Then I break from my catatonia and realize—now’s my chance! I race walk back to the house and get my car keys. The engine coughs and dies. It wheezes. It grinds. It starts. I let it warm up for a minute, against all instinct screaming at me from inside. While I’m sitting there counting backwards from twenty-five, Billy comes up and leans his head in the window.

“Where you going?”

“I thought they might not be watching the front of Morse’s place as scrupulously as always.”

“Can I go?”

Pause. I can’t do
this
alone.

“Okay. Get in.”

“Yes!” He hops in. “Gee, Aunt Filomena, you’re the only person who ever takes me anywhere.”

I could do without the “Aunt Filomena,” but I let it go. The kid needs attention.

But it’s no use. We drive over to Carthage and Morse’s place is sealed tighter than ever, with a pair of security guards inside the fence and out, and enough illumination to blast any critter that comes within buckshot range. I make an illegal U-turn across two lanes of oncoming traffic and head back.