Midnight Haul (7 page)

“Such as?”

“One major thing, specifically: one evening, when she was working alone, staying late, trying to catch up on some work, she saw one of the executives give an envelope to a rough-looking guy who might’ve been a trucker. The trucker took some cash out of the envelope and counted it.”

“That’s it? That’s what she saw? That’s thin, Boone. That’s goddamn thin.”

“I don’t think that’s
all
she found out.”

“Don’t you
know
?”

“I was out of town for about three days, doing some research on the Agent Orange aspect of the book. When I got back, there were half a dozen messages for me to call her. I called. She was dead.”

“She was snooping around for you, then. For your book.”

“Crane, blaming me won’t do any good.”

“I’m not blaming you. Do you know the name of the exec she saw handing the money over?”

“Yes. It was Patrick.”

From the highway, glancing over to the left, yellow-orange light stained the horizon, just above the trees. It was as if the sun were coming up at midnight. They turned off onto a blacktop and followed the signs that led them from one blacktop onto another, and another, and the stain against the sky became a city. A city of lights and smoke.

As the city’s skyline emerged, the only skyscrapers were smokestacks, a dozen of them, emitting ever-expanding grayish white clouds that made seductive patterns as they rose.

Crane had expected the Kemco plant to be big, and it was; but it was more spread out, and closer to the ground, than he’d thought. There was an eerie, almost underwater look to it all, with the shifting smoke backdrop, the green-yellow-aqua outdoor lights strung about like bulbs at a particularly drab pool party. The taller, larger buildings resembled greenhouses, their walls sheets of mottled aqua-colored plastic, cross-hatched with metal, rising up amidst massive inter-twines of steel pipe. There was a massive electrical substation nearby. Numerous one-story buildings. Countless chemical tanks. Off at the sides, huge, squat, silo-like structures huddled like metal toadstools. Just inside a full-to-capacity parking lot, an American flag flapped against a grayish white breeze. The plant was going full throttle, but Crane had yet to see a human being.

Other than Boone, of course. She was driving. They were in her yellow Datsun. They passed a green tin building half a block long: the loading dock for Kemco trucks.

“That’s where the trucks come out,” Boone said, pointing as they approached a graveled area to the left of the loading dock; a small brick building served as a clearing booth for departing trucks, of which there were none at the moment.

“Where do we watch from?” Crane asked.

“You’ll see.”

Opposite the Kemco plant, on the other side of the road they were driving down, was a flat open field; in the darkness it was hard to see how far the field extended. It resembled farmland. They’d passed several farms, within half a mile of the Kemco facility, on this same road; but this field wasn’t being used for farming, or anything else, though perhaps it had once been a dump site for wastes—the proverbial “back forty” used by many chemical plants—long since filled up and smoothed over.

There was room alongside the road to park, which they did, a quarter of a mile down from the truck loading area.

“Are we going to be okay, here?” Crane asked.

“Sure. Nobody’s going to think a thing about us.”

“Yeah, right. What’s conspicuous about sitting out here in the open like this?”

“It’s dark. Nobody’ll see us.”

“A car going by will see us. A truck.”

“Crane, one of the few nice things about the Kemco plant is it’s out in the boonies… and you know what people in parked cars out in the boonies do, don’t you?”

“I think I can guess, but I don’t know what it has to do with us.”

“If a car or a truck goes by, we pretend to be making out. Think you can handle that?”

“I suppose. But be gentle.”

Boone frowned at that, but it wasn’t a very convincing frown.

They sat and watched for an hour, saying very little, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The plant down the way, from this distance, looked like a cheap miniature in a ’50s science-fiction movie. The longer he stared at it, the less real it seemed; yet at the same time, it struck him as being something breathing, something alive. It was the constant billowing smoke that did it, he figured.

Another uneventful half hour passed.

“I don’t know about this,” Crane said. “We haven’t seen a car or truck since we got here.”

“Crane, if we’re patient, we can catch them in the act. You got that? We can wait and watch for the sons of bitches who are hauling Kemco’s shit, follow them to wherever they’re illegally dumping it…” She paused to point at the Nikon SLR camera on the floor between her feet. “… take a few nice candid shots, and we
got
them.”

“And you’re sure this is going to happen at night.”

“It will
probably
be at night. They aren’t called midnight haulers because they work days.”

“It doesn’t look like tonight’s going to be the night.”

“It’s too early to tell. But tonight
might
be the night. Or tomorrow night, or the next night, maybe. This place turns out a lot of waste. We won’t have to wait forever.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“Take a nap. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

“Don’t let me sleep more than eight or ten hours.”

“Crane, we only have to watch a couple hours a night. Between midnight and two, is all.”

“I still don’t know how you arrived at that.”

“I guessed, okay? But they would probably wait till after third shift went on at 11:30, and, if they’re going any distance at all to do the dumping, they wouldn’t want to get started any later than two.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Take a nap.”

“Okay.”

Crane got as comfortable as he could in the Datsun, with her in the driver’s seat. He was following her lead in this because he didn’t know quite what else to do; she had the information, the insights, he needed. So he was going along with her on this effort to link Kemco with “midnight haulers.” But it seemed to him ill-advised at best; and he didn’t want to think about what it was at worst.

This afternoon, at Boone’s, he’d listened to three cassette tapes—interviews with the wives of the three other suicide victims—and he’d found that, for a “journalist” who’d been working on a book for a year and a half, Boone had somewhat less than a professional interviewing style. She pushed her subjects, led them, tried to get them to help her make her preconceived points. (She had not interviewed any of the members of the Brock family—Mr. Brock being the man who killed his wife and two children and himself—as there was no one left to interview.)

Despite her lack of professionalism in interviewing, Boone was an amazing researcher and, from what he’d read so far, her writing style was considerably less hysterical than he’d supposed. Actually, it was a nicely understated style, getting her anti-Kemco points across convincingly. The Agent Orange section of the manuscript alone was devastating—her interviews with Vietnam vets were much more effective than those with Greenwood residents—and she may have been wrong in assuming the book could not stand on Agent Orange alone to find her a publisher.

He was halfway through the manuscript and would finish it tomorrow; but he would need days to absorb Boone’s file cabinet of data on Kemco’s adverse effects on the citizens of Greenwood.

She had cooked supper for him, and it was delicious: lasagna, his favorite. They—Crane, Boone, Billy—ate in the kitchen, a big off-white room with plants lining the windows. Her husband had
been nice enough to leave her all the appliances, but then most of them were built-in.

“This is really good,” Crane told her, between bites.

“You sound surprised.”

“It’s just great. I hope you’ll let me help out on the groceries, while I’m here. And I can do some of the cooking, if you like.”

“You can cook?”

“Isn’t that kind of a ‘sexist’ question?”

Boone smiled. “What’s your specialty?”

“I’m glad you like Italian,” he said. “I do terrific spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Sounds wonderful. Only I’m a vegetarian.”

“Really.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“Well, I noticed the lasagna was meatless, of course, but, then I fix it that way myself. I like it with spinach and cottage cheese like this.” He turned to the boy. “Are you vegetarian, Billy?”

“No!” the boy said. He was looking at his plate as he ate.

“I fix Billy hamburgers or tacos, when he wants,” Boone explained. “I don’t try to force vegetarianism on him. It’s not a religion with me.”

“Daddy feeds me steak,” Billy said. Still looking at his plate.

“Daddy can afford steak,” Boone told her son.

“How long are you going to live here?” Billy asked Crane, turning and looking at him for the first time. His expression was that of a prosecutor with an accused mass murderer on the stand.

“Just a little while, Billy,” Crane said.

“Daddy won’t like it,” Billy said.

“Daddy won’t know about it, either,” Boone said.

“I might tell him.”

“Not unless you don’t want to live with mommy anymore.”

“I might live with Daddy. If
he’s
gonna live here, I might.”

“Mr. Crane is my friend, Billy. He’s helping me work. He won’t be staying here long.”

“He better not.” Billy pushed away from the table. “Be excused?”

“Yes, Billy.”

Billy left the table.

“He’s a charmer,” Crane said.

“He’s not a bad kid. He doesn’t like Patrick and me not living together.”

“Well. No kid in his situation likes that.”

“I don’t think Billy’s going to warm to you, Crane. You might as well get used to it.”

“It doesn’t bother me. I’ve lived with younger brothers. I can put up with it.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“Now that Billy’s gone, there’s something I need to ask about your husband.”

“Yes?”

“How much does he know about this book you’re doing?”

“Nothing, really. Patrick knows I’m writing a book, but he’s never bothered to ask what about. Which is fine with me. As far as I know, nobody at Kemco knows what I’m up to, exactly. And now that ‘suicides’ are becoming an epidemic around here, that’s probably a good thing.”

Earlier she’d told him that she had not yet confronted Patrick with what she knew Mary Beth had seen: that exchange of money between him and a questionable-looking trucker. Now looking across the kitchen table at her, in the house she’d lived in with her husband, Crane could see that as much as she disliked Patrick, as much as her hatred for Kemco was tied in with how she felt about him, she didn’t like thinking Patrick might’ve been part of what happened to Mary Beth.

“This afternoon,” Crane said, “I tried to absorb as much information as I could.”

“I know.”

“I’m just getting started, really. But already something is bothering me.”

“What bothers you?”

“The ‘suicide’ victims. Okay, they all worked at Kemco. But otherwise I see no connection… we have a maintenance man, a foreman, an executive. Then there’s Mary Beth—a secretary, temporary summer help.”

“So?”

“It’s just that the list is too disparate. It’s not a group of people working together, in similar jobs, with similar access to information.”

“They all worked at Kemco. That’s connection enough.”

“No it isn’t. As you’ve said,
everybody
around here works at Kemco. What
other
connection did they have? Boone, I’m going to talk to the wives of those ‘suicides’ myself.”

“Fine.”

“Alone.”

“That’s fine, too.”

“You see, I don’t share your basic assumption that Kemco is evil. That all big business is the enemy of the people. I just don’t buy that naive leftist bullshit, okay?”

“Please. I’m still eating.”

“I just want you to understand that I’m in this only for one reason: Mary Beth. I want to know what really happened to her.”

“That’s easy. Kemco killed her.”

“Kemco didn’t kill her. Possibly some people that work for Kemco did.”

“Kemco killed her. You’re playing games with semantics, Crane.”

“I’m
not
playing
any
kind of
game
!” He was standing. Angry.

“It hurts, doesn’t it, Crane?”

“S-sorry,” he said. Sitting back down.

“I know it hurts.”

He felt words tumble out. “I dream about her. Every night. It’s not the same, exact dream every night. But it’s always Mary Beth, and she’s alive, and we’re together, and we’re doing something, anything. Picnic, a play, at home listening to music and talking. Then I remember she’s dead. Sometimes she touches my lips and shakes her head, smiling: ‘Don’t think about it,’ she’s saying. Sometimes she just disappears.”

He was dreaming now. Mary Beth was sitting by him in a car.

“Crane,” Boone was saying, “wake up.”

He opened his eyes. Lights were coming down on them.

“It’s a truck, schmuck,” she said, crawling over on him, awkwardly.

They embraced.

The truck roared by; emblazoned on its side was KEMCO.

“One of their own,” Boone said, still in his lap, looking back at the receding semi. “That’s no midnight hauler. They’re carrying product, not waste.”

“Here comes another.”

They kissed for a while, as half a dozen trucks rolled by; one truck honked, and they looked up, startled: a truck driver was smiling and waving at them.

When the trucks had passed, Boone got back over in the driver’s seat and said, “We might as well call it a night.”

“Right.”

“They’re not hauling any waste out of here tonight.”

“Right.”

Boone started the car, pulled onto the road. Crane felt uneasy, and a little ashamed, as he had back in the church, at Mary Beth’s funeral, when he’d seen Boone and got an erection. Like the one he had now.

Boone seemed a little uneasy herself.

Behind them, Kemco, like a bad dream, faded. And lingered.