Heat and Light (20 page)

Today a new flyer catches his eye.

Truck noise, traffic, road construction, contamination . . .

HAVE WE HAD ENOUGH YET?

HAVE WE MADE A HUGE MISTAKE?

“Darren Devlin?”

He turns.

“I thought that was you. The hair threw me a little.”

“Mr. Radulski.” Darren passes a hand over his head. “Wow, it's great to see you.” He actually means it. Mr. Radulski had been his high school biology teacher. More than a teacher: he was the father teenage Darren would have chosen, if he'd had a choice.

“It's been a long time, kid. What are you up to these days? Last I heard you were at Johns Hopkins.”

“Good memory.” Darren grins, remembering that Mr. Radulski had written him a letter of recommendation. When Hopkins said yes, Mrs. Radulski had made a celebratory dinner, a cake with Darren's name on it. It seems so long ago.

“How could I forget? In all those years I had exactly one kid get into Johns Hopkins. Penn State, sure. Pitt if they're lucky. But you blew the curve.”

Darren stands there, grinning like an idiot, dreading the next question.

“So what are you doing now? I remember you talking about going to medical school, way back when.”

It's worse than Darren imagined: the kindness and goodwill, the palpable admiration and pride. “Well, I took kind of a U-turn.”

“Nothing wrong with that. There's more money in research, I'd say. Drug development. Though what do I know?” he says humbly, waiting to be edified.

Darren swallows. “Actually, I switched majors. My degree”—he doesn't say
from community college—
“is in sociology.”

Mr. Radulski's smile flickers. He has the sort of face that hides nothing. It's a terrible thing to watch, the disappointment and disbelief.

“I'm an addictions counselor.”

In his eyes, a flash of comprehension. Then embarrassment, pity, concern. “Well, now. That must be interesting work.”

“It is,” says Darren, desperately cheerful. “I mean, it's not science, but I find it interesting. And—” He stops, unsure how to finish this thought. “You know, it's a job.”

“Sure,” Mr. Radulski says heartily. “There's more to life than work, God knows. How are things otherwise? Married? Kids?”

“Still single.”

An awkward silence.

“Well, there's time for all that. Plenty of time.” Mr. Radulski glances deliberately at his watch. “Darren, I should get going. Big day today. My daughter is getting married. You remember Leah.”

He does. Leah had been a grade behind him, a plain, wholesome, congenitally happy girl determined, for unfathomable reasons, to make him her boyfriend. Though he found her boringly well adjusted, Darren had encouraged her, because Leah was his entry into the Radulski family. He'd spent countless evenings at their house, watching movies, lingering at the dinner table. Then he gave Leah a chaste kiss good night and went home to get high, alone in his room.

“Oh, wow.” It should have occurred to him to ask about Leah. “That's—amazing.” He grasps, too late, the tactlessness of this remark. “I mean, that's great news.”

Mr. Radulski claps Darren's shoulder. “We're happy for them. He's a nice guy. A schoolteacher, like her dad.”

“Wow,” Darren says again. “Please give her my best.”

“SMELL THIS.”
Shelby stands at the sink, washing the breakfast dishes. “It smells funny.”

Rich finishes the last bite of scrambled egg and takes his plate to the sink. He's still in uniform—awake since yesterday, an overnight double. An insistent rain ticks at the kitchen windows. It's the kind of gray morning he hopes for after a night shift, ideal for sleep.

“Funny,” he repeats. “Funny how?”

“Like chemicals. How should I know, Rich? It just smells—not clean.”

Outside the noise kicks up, a rhythmic clanging. Rich leans over the sink, runs the water and sniffs. “I don't smell anything.”

“You never smell anything.”

It's true, of course: she's always complaining about odors imperceptible to him. He is married to a bloodhound.

“It's from the drilling. It has to be. Our water was fine before.” She turns on the water and inhales deeply. “You need to talk to those guys.”

“And say what? My wife smells something funny?”

Naturally—inevitably—he is thinking of the farmhouse.
It smells moldy,
Shelby complained and complained, until he finally gave in. Now he's raising his kids in a prefab tinderbox, one step above a trailer. For ten years he's been led around by Shelby's nose.

“The water is fine,” he says.

“You're just being stubborn.” Shelby rinses his plate and places it in the dishwasher. “Don't forget, you're picking up Braden tonight. His practice is over at seven-thirty.”

“Tonight?” Rich feels for the scrap of paper in his pocket.
Honiger 8 yrs old 40K.
“I was going to meet that guy out in Somerset. Have a look at his Honiger. I guess I could take the kids along.”

Shelby does not approve. “That's a long ride for Olivia.”

“Oh. Right.” His daughter is prone, famously, to carsickness. His truck still smells faintly of grape candy, from the time she vomited copiously on the floor, seat, and passenger door. “Can't you take them with you? Olivia, anyway.”

“To my counseling appointment?” Shelby gives her signature twisted grimace. It calls to mind an old, unfunny comedian whose name Rich can't remember. An ugly little man with a bowl haircut, a frequent guest on the TV game shows of his childhood—
Match Game, The Hollywood Squares.

“Forget it,” he says. “I can go to Somerset tomorrow.”

The comedian had seemed, always, a little drunk, if not mildly retarded. What the hell was his name? Rich's sister would know. Shelby, of course, is too young to remember, something he hadn't considered when he married a girl twelve years younger.

“Buddy Hackett,” he says aloud.

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” Buddy Hackett isn't important; Buddy Hackett doesn't matter at all. And yet, in some way Rich can't make sense of, he feels suddenly lonely. It's as though his childhood never happened, because Shelby wasn't there to witness it.

“Pastor Jess says I need to make time for myself.”

Rich keeps his mouth shut, having learned that Pastor Jess is a subject best avoided. She has suggested, according to Shelby, that Rich come along for a joint session, an ordeal he has so far escaped. The whole idea of counseling unnerves him. What exactly Shelby talks about for a solid hour each week, what secrets of their marriage she has confided to the preacher, he truly doesn't want to know. And yet he can't object, because the counseling is free and because Shelby has the kids all day, every day. He can't, without seeming like an asshole, complain about babysitting one night a week.

Again the grimace: his wife is Buddy Hackett in a blond wig. “Are you even listening?” Shelby says.

“All right, fine. I'll pick up Braden.” He rises. “I need some sleep.”

“Try the earplugs.”

“I don't need any goddamned earplugs.”

The master bedroom is shaded at all hours, north-facing. Rich chose it with night shifts in mind. He didn't count on having a gas rig two hundred yards away, lit day and night with klieg lights. Even with the curtains drawn the room is shockingly bright.

He closes his eyes and thinks deliberately of nothing.

Outside, a terrific thrumming kicks up.

He has always been a gifted sleeper, a talent that came in handy in the navy: the ability to sleep anytime, anywhere, the sailor's greatest survival skill. But civilian life has softened him. He squeezes his eyes shut and commands himself:
Sleep, goddamnit. Sleep.

The outside noise intensifies, a mechanized roar like a tropical storm.

He puts in the earplugs. It feels as though he's cramming chewing gum into his ears. Shelby wears them every night, to put up with his snoring. How does she fucking stand it?

He takes the plugs out of his ears.

Pissed, he wanders the house for half an hour, looking for a place to sleep. The kids' rooms have the same problem: the engine noise, the blinding light. Finally he collapses, exhausted, on Pap's old couch, which Shelby had banished to the basement because of dust mites. He sleeps for maybe ten minutes. Then the clanging starts again.

Defeated, he goes out to the deck. The rain has stopped. That the noise isn't any louder outside is a sad testament to the flimsiness of the house.

He looks out over his back yard, what's left of it. With the forest gone, the property looks smaller than sixty acres, stripped and shrunken like a dog in the bath. Behind the house, the crew left a single patch of grass, twenty foot square. Beyond lies a vast expanse of bare earth, dry and cocoa-colored, enclosed with chain-link fence. A bleak view, but not half as bad as what lies over the hill.

The clanging slows and deepens.

Over the hill, mercifully out of view, sit the containment pond and concrete drill pad—surrounded, depending on the day, by a dozen or more trucks. Always there are two construction trailers, one or two tankers.

Now the noise intensifies. Beneath the high-pitched whine is a deeper grinding, some unlubricated-sounding mechanical gyration.

A ray of sunlight cuts through the clouds. The new access road bisects the field like a surgical scar.

AT MIDDAY THE COMMERCIAL
is halfway bustling.
In the dining room every table is occupied, gas people finishing their lunches. The bar side is empty except for a few locals. Rich's neighbor Wally Fetterson watches NASCAR highlights on TV. Nick Blick and Booby
Marstellar chalk their pool cues like gentlemen of leisure, two middle-aged Duanes with nothing better to do.

“Devlin,” Booby calls. “How you been, man?”

“I'm good, Boob.” Rich takes a seat next to Wally and watches Darren pull an Iron City. It startles him, still, to see his brother behind the bar.

Darren gives him a wave. “What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be home sleeping?”

“Don't get me started. Where's Dad?”

“Funeral home,” says Darren. “Some veteran thing.”

Something in the way he says it, a kind of dismissiveness, makes Rich want to pop him one. Not that he's any kind of flag waver. His Gulf War service was so brief, so unexceptional, that he routinely skips the annual Memorial Day parade, feeling like an impostor next to the kids back from Afghanistan and Iraq. After 2003, the ceremony at the War Memorial became a special kind of humiliation, standing at attention as veterans took turns at the podium: Second World War, Korea, Vietnam. In the past, Rich himself had gone to the podium to read a single sentence—
The Persian Gulf War had no local casualties.
A victory lap, the bragging of a generation: on their watch, American warfare had been perfected, the air offense so precisely targeted, so diabolically efficient, that no blood had been spilled. Now Rich's war—officially renamed the First Gulf War—is all but forgotten. Meeting young vets, guys just back from deployment, he feels a strange mix of emotions: relief that he got out when he did; regret, for the same reason. More than anything else, a lingering and powerful shame.

There is a crack of pool balls, Nick's trademark fast break. Booby lets out a holler. Darren's eyes stray to the back of the room. “Jesus, guys, take it easy. Who are those yahoos?”

“Oh, that's just Nick and Booby. You remember them.” Then again, maybe Darren doesn't. A toddler the summer of Three
Duanes, he may have no recollection of Rich's brief infatuation with the guitar. As often happens around his brother, Rich feels his age.

Behind him, Gia Bernardi races out of the kitchen with a platter, generating an actual breeze. She's always racing around the bar, as though waitressing were an athletic event. She sets a hamburger in front of Wally Fetterson, her skirt riding up the back of her thighs.

“That looks good,” says Wally, who isn't looking at the hamburger.

“Behave yourself.” Gia turns her back to Wally and gives Darren a shove, like a bratty kid sister. “
Village of the Damned.
That was the title.”

“Holy shit, you're right. I owe you a sixer.” Darren grins like an idiot. Gia gives him another shove, her hand lingering on his chest.

It's been a long time, years, since Rich saw his brother smile. He ought to be happy for Darren, and yet their laughter grates on him. Just fuck her and get it over with, he thinks. Everyone else has.

He nods toward Wally Fetterson. “How you been, man?”

“Can't complain.” Wally tears into his sandwich. The Fettersons are among the town's new millionaires, or so everyone believes. After his well came in, Wally took an early retirement from the post office. Now he tools around town in a brand-new Humvee. He and Lois are known for extravagant summer barbecues—last year, a pig roast—around their new in-ground swimming pool.

Another hoot from the back of the room. Nick and Booby circle the pool table—joined, to Rich's surprise, by the ugly punk he's seen here before: Gia's friend from the parking lot, the skinhead with all the tattoos.

“I hear they're drilling you, finally. Lois saw Shelby at church.” Wally drinks deeply. “How you holding up with the noise?”

“It's pretty loud,” Rich says.

“Trust me, you'll forget all about it when those checks start coming in.” Wally cups a hand to his ear and pantomimes. “Noise?
What noise?” He's gained weight, his face round as a Frisbee, his nose and cheeks rosy. One
P.M.,
and he's a drunken Santa Claus.

“I was out Number Twelve Road the other day,” he tells Rich. “On the ATV. There's orange flags all over Swedetown. I guess Randy Thibodeaux is next.”