The Glass Factory (31 page)

Don’t get me wrong. Stan’s bedside visits are more than all right. But I can’t kill this yearning.

I sleep and dream. I know it’s a dream because of the upside-down stuff. I’m gathering poisonous mushrooms, something you don’t want to mess with, even in a dream. I’m making a soup. And I wake up thinking: What I wouldn’t give for just
one
curare-tipped blow dart.

Wai-Wai and Gina hit it off instantly. Colomba brings up some hot food, and soon we’re all sitting around my sick bed, a network of subversive women, participating in the continuing chain of passing knowledge down from our foremothers to our children, working outside the system because the system has refused to recognize our problem.

“Oh, this is a hell of a case,” says Gina. “Real charming. We found slop sinks that drain straight into the ground, and monitoring wells filled with crushed gravel to prevent us from taking samples. By the time you pull the sample up, half the stuff has volatilized.”

“And what’s left?” asks Wai-Wai.

“What’s left? Carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene were the most commonly used solvents and cleaning agents in the on-site buildings. They were stored in drums and open evaporation pits that leached into the soil and groundwater.”

Wai-Wai says, “Aside from volatilizing into the air—”

“Wait, there’s more,” says Gina. “Some of the long-time employees remember an explosion in Warehouse Six seventeen years ago, but due to the classified nature of the incident, they do not know the details. Most of the witnesses are dead, prematurely, from chronic improper exposure to hazardous chemicals. We found one former employee who worked there when it was still Prosystems who believed that PCB-filled waste oil was dispersed by spreading it on the site’s dirt roads.”

“Back when Morse owned the site?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“So is there any reason to believe that he’s not doing the same at his new place?”

“Why not? But he’s stopped us at the door so I can’t go in there without a warrant. Even with a toxic disaster next door to worry about. Give me another day or two.”

“But the Morse site looks so innocent, nice landfills with trees on top,” says Wai-Wai.

“Ninety percent of Superfund sites are like that. That’s part of the danger. They do not ‘look’ like toxic waste dumps. The poison was dumped twenty years ago, and it’s all underground with twenty-foot trees growing on top of it. But by the time you detect lead in the drinking water, the neighborhood kids have all got permanent brain damage.”

Pause.

“Madre de dios,”
says Colomba.

“You said it, sister,” I say.

“¿Y para qué pagamos tantos impuestos?”

“What did she say?” asks Gina.

“Gina, you work in New York City
and
Puerto Rico,” I say. “It’s about time you learned some Spanish besides
‘buenos días’
and
‘otra cerveza, por favor.
She wants to know where all our taxes go.”

“Oh, that. I’ve dug up some real classy info on that, too. Did you know that the town of East Carthage is a fiction? It does not exist in any common sense of the term. The site perimeter, one foot outside the fence, is incorporated as the town of East Carthage. It’s an autonomous tax shelter, untouchable by your town authorities.”

“They going to elect a president and start issuing their own money?” I ask.

“They have already, in a sense. They’re immune from the town health agencies.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

“Unfortunately, volatile poisons do not respect town limits.”

“Tell me more about the chemistry of this site,” says Wai-Wai.

“Well, for one, those open evaporation pits are a major threat to the aquifers.”

“The what?” I ask.

“Nice, clean pockets of underground drinking water,” says Wai-Wai.

Gina continues: “They also used to deliberately blow up transformers to test what to do in the event of an explosion. They learned a lot about building better transformers, but they scattered PCBs over the entire neighborhood. I mean, a few nanograms of PCBs in the water is enough to increase the risk of cancer by a factor of seventy.”

“But aren’t PCB concentrations usually higher in sediment and suspended matter than in the associated water column?” says Wai-Wai.

“Yes, because of the high soil adsorption constants for PCBs.”

“What about low-level exposures due to bioaccumulation and slow excretion of PCBs?”

“There’s a real lack of quantitative data concerning the pharmacokinetics of PCBs following inhalation and dermal exposure.”

“Not any more,” I say, cynically.

“They’re not entirely lacking,” says Wai-Wai, pulling out a sheet of Antonia’s drawing paper. She purloins a red crayon and draws two hexagons connected by a single bond. She makes the hexagons mirror images by assigning numbers and their primes to symmetrical angles, finishing up with two arms descending parallel to each other from the center of both hexagons. “These are the chlorides. There can be anywhere from zero to five of them. PCBs would tend to distribute to the liver and muscle tissue, because of their lipophilicity, then they’d be redistributed to the fat, skin, and other fat-containing organs.”

She turns to the rest of us: “That’s why fattier fishes like bluefish tend to contain more PCBs. Stick to the lean bland ones, like flounder.” Bluefish is local, plentiful in Long Island Sound.

“What about embryotoxicity and fetotoxicity?”

Gina says, “It’s severe. Embryos, fetuses, and neonates generally lack the hepatic microsomal enzyme systems that facilitate detoxification and excretion of PCBs.”

“Have you done capillary column gas chromatography with electron capture detection?”

“Sure, there’s been a significant increase in the use of mass spectrometry detectors, but most labs rely on electron capture detectors, which are more sensitive in electron ionization mode—”

“Of course. Two or three times as sensitive.”

“Right.”

And I lie back, just listening to the two of them speaking to each other, confident and comfortable dealing in complex technological terminology that I won’t even attempt to reproduce, unmediated by performance for the benefit of male superiors, who still think of women as either helpless bimbos or frigid brains. Or superwomen.

Ouch. My butt hurts. No superwoman here.

Just watching them work: Slouched on twin beds, Wai-Wai on her stomach, raised up on her elbows, feet in the air reading off Gina’s data reports, Gina sitting in faux-lotus position directly across from her, batting around more data between them than two chips in the old Unisystems 1200. It’s like a pajama party. Well, almost. I wonder, would men sit like this? Oh, why am I analyzing everything?

They must notice my eyes glazing over because Wai-Wai says, “Fil’s getting tired. We better go.”

“No, no,” I say, waking up. They laugh.

“Okay, see you later. Take care.” Wai-Wai bends over to shake Colomba’s hand goodbye, but Colomba is cradling a sleeping Antonia. “See ya.”

“Bye.”

Wai-Wai goes.

“Well, the same for me too—”

“Wait, Gina.”

“Yes?”

“Come here. Sit down.”

Gina sits next to me. Colomba’s slipping Antonia into the other bed. I ask: “What about Morse?”

“Can’t touch him yet, Fil. But we’re going to hurt him. I’ve got Department of Justice authorization to relocate affected residents temporarily, provide alternate water supplies for the community, and begin excavation and pumping of hazardous substances for treatment and disposal throughout the entire Kim Tungsten site. That’s going to block his takeover bid—and the bank loan defaults in three days. Oh yeah: We’re going to mess him up bad.”

“Thanks, Gina.”

“Of course this is not what he deserves.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, he deserves
worse.”

Colomba turns out the light over Antonia’s bed and quietly says goodnight to us.

“Gina, did you ever have a case that just ate you up inside?”

“Sure. Lots of times.”

“Like what?”

“Well—nah.”

“No, tell me about it.”

“Okay. It was out in Jersey. There was a public water supply contaminant: One substance. Now, that’s pretty rare—”

“Especially for Jersey.”

“Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was so bad the Health Department issued a public warning to boil the water. Well, one company was found using the one contaminant—they were dumping it in a seepage pit. They had actually tried to fix it. They spent $800,000 digging it up, aerating it, reburying it. It was naturally flushing to below fifty ppb. But once it’s on the Superfund list, it can’t get off. There’s no bureaucratic mechanism for taking a site off the list. So many offenders try to block us, delay us or belittle me personally for being a woman, but not these guys: It was a black-owned business, the only one in the neighborhood that had provided steady employment for minorities. It wasn’t a big place, maybe thirty or forty employees, but it was all they had. The two owners weren’t worth more than a couple of hundred thousand. And one of them had a mentally retarded daughter who was eating up every penny he was making in health care costs. He opened up his entire financial record for me. And it was all there. He was telling the truth. But even after they spent $800,000 and almost completely eliminated the problem, the machine of governmental procedure forced me to seize their assets and push them into bankruptcy.”

We sit there. I look over at Antonia. Sweet, innocent Antonia. Dreaming with the angels. Puchungo curled up next to her, purring.

A crisis of conscience in the profession.

Gina says, “Why didn’t I just lose the file behind the radiator?”

I squeeze her hand. “Yeah. You probably should have, you just didn’t know it at the time.”

Gina nods. “You have days like that when you were a cop?”

“Constantly.”

“What was the worst?’

“The worst? That’s a tough one.”

“All right. Just a representative sample.”

I smile at her regulation metaphor.

“Okay. We were in the middle of the annual August crime wave, when two unlucky gents picked the wrong victim: He was carrying a gun and he shot them both in self-defense, killing one and leaving the other in a wheelchair. The community hailed him as a hero. This was at the height of the crack wars, and the citizens needed a guy like him to rally around. It didn’t help any that the criminals were black and the victim was white. Now the two guys were low-level career criminals, with about twenty counts each of burglary, assault—meaning muggings—but no battery. No violence against them at all. That seemed pretty unusual, so I did a little checking, and it turned out that the ‘victim’ had been arrested a few times for spraying racist graffiti on buildings and for beating up immigrants, queers, and, one time, a black Good Humor man. So I ask around, real low-key, and find a couple of witnesses who say the two guys were just sitting on the front steps not bothering anybody at that moment, when this other guy walks up and shoots them both so quick and easy they thought it was a hit and laid low with their story for days. So now I’ve got a problem: our ‘victim’ is a racist pig who just murdered a black man. Racial tension was already pretty high because of the Bumpurs case. So I took it to my sergeant. He says, ‘Put it back in the box, Fil.’ The guy’s a hero, and there’s no way anyone’s going to bring him up on murder charges during an election year. I ask him: ‘So we let him go on being a hero?’ He says: ‘I guess so …”

Pause.

“Why do people kill each other, Gina? Why? Just to show whose balls are bigger? Just to get more for themselves? Is that
it?”

We listen to Antonia breathe.

“Goodnight, Fil. Catch you in the morning.”

“Goodnight.”

Not quite. A phone rings a little after 3:00
A.M.
If this is another goddamn threat—It’s Billy. He’s been arrested. I ask him to hand the phone over to a cop and the cop explains, “Traces of marijuana were found on the floor of the vehicle.”