The Why of Things: A Novel (25 page)

She blinks, turns back into the room, where the typewriter sits partially dismantled on her desk, where the telephone rests in its cradle, still warm from Joan’s hand, and where the half-done bust regards her with its single staring eye.

*  *  *

T
HE
boom deflates with a long hissing sound; it looks to Eve as it falls in upon itself like a painfully dying creature, slowly surrendering air until it is a limp strip of canvas floating on the water’s surface. It has worked to contain not only the gas leaking from the truck but leaves and bits of grass and the carcasses of insects, too, which are all pulled with it to the quarry’s edge as a hydraulic reel on the back of a large trailer draws it in. Across the quarry, two men are maneuvering the separator from behind the shrub that’s kept it partially out of view. Eve lifts her camera from where it hangs around her neck, snaps a shot of them, and then another of the oil drum beside it, which is black, with a white circle in the middle containing an image of a big black drop of oil. It seems somehow ominous.

She crouches down and scoops up a handful of soggy leaves from the water, which she filters absently through her fingers as she watches the skimmer slithering in, oddly relishing the cool and slimy feel of the leaves against her skin. She looks down when she feels something else among the leaves, and she is mildly annoyed at first to see that it is a cigarette butt in her hand, imagining one of the policemen at the water’s edge the other night thoughtlessly tossing his butt into the quarry. But then she sees that the butt is a Marlboro. Larry Stephens, she thinks, nodding slowly. It can only be his. She dips the butt into the water to rinse it free of leaves, puts it into her pocket, and stands. She finds herself tempted to go out to 16 Pine Street again, to find him, to confront him somehow. But she knows she can’t, for now. She looks over at Roscoe McWilliams, who is manning the hydraulic reel. “How many gallons in that drum?” she asks cautiously; her mother has warned her against getting in the way as the men do their work.

Roscoe glances over at her. “Fifty-five. More than you had in here.”

“How much do you think we had in here?”

Roscoe frowns, guiding the boom as the reel winds it in. “Hard to say,” he says. “Depends on how much actually leaked from the vehicle. Depends on how much was in the vehicle in the first place.”

Eve looks over at the oil drum, standing alone now at the quarry’s edge. A large dragonfly is perched on the rim, its shimmering wings slowly beating. “So,” she continues, “what happens to the gas when you take it away?”

“Not gas,” Roscoe says. “The gasoline evaporated.”

“Then what was in the quarry? The rainbow thing?”

“The sheen. That’s the light fractions of oil.”

“Okay, so what happens to the oil?”

“It goes to a recovery center. For recycling.”

Eve considers this. “So,” she begins. “If it gets—Wait, am I bugging you if I ask you another question?”

Roscoe McWilliams shakes his head, smiling. “Nope.”

“Okay, so, if it gets recycled, does that mean, like, it could one day get used in another car?”

“More or less.”

Eve frowns, imagining another person driving around with James Favazza’s oil in his car, and not knowing anything about it, or where it came from. “Weird,” she says. “I never thought of oil as having a history.”

The boom is reeled all the way in by now; Roscoe McWilliams fastens it into place and shuts it in. “I never really thought of it that way, either,” he says.

By now, the other two men have gotten the separator around to the near side of the quarry; Roscoe goes over to help them. Eve takes pictures of them as they work, her mind churning. To consider where the oil might end up has made her wonder about where James Favazza’s truck might have ended up once Tim drove off with it the other day, and whether the functional pieces
have been stripped and sold and are now being put to use as parts of other cars. She wonders if a pillaged skeleton is all that remains, and what they might have done with the personal contents that didn’t float up for Eve to collect—the stuff in the glove box, for instance. The other flip-flop. It’s possible that it’s all still in there.

When the men have finished tying the separator down, they roll the oil drum on its edge through the grass, round and round, the oil drop flashing in and out of view. Eve takes a photograph, lowers her camera.

“You doing research, or what?” Roscoe McWilliams asks.

“No,” Eve says. “I’m just curious.”

“How about the camera?”

Eve regards Roscoe McWilliams seriously. “I’m documenting, I guess,” she says. “I don’t know the next time we’re going to have a boom and skimmer in the quarry. And I don’t ever want to forget what happened.”

*  *  *

“S
O
what’d you think?” Dave asks. He and Anders are peeling off their wet suits; Anders feels as if he is removing a layer of skin.

“Pretty incredible, actually,” Anders says. “I was nervous, I have to admit.”

“You do get hooked,” Dave says.

Anders pulls on his T-shirt, wraps a towel around his waist to change beneath. “What would you say’s the best dive you’ve done?”

“Around here?”

“Anywhere. I guess you’ve probably done a lot of diving? Around the world?”

“Not as much as I’d like to. Been down in the Caribbean a bunch of times. Australia.”

“Great Barrier?”

“Nah. West side of the country. Ningaloo.”

Anders nods, though he has not in fact heard of Ningaloo before. He holds tight to his towel as he steps out of his wet trunks beneath.

“Iceland once, too,” Dave continues.

“Iceland?”

“Yeah. Place called Silfra. It’s actually a deep crack in the lava where the American and European tectonic plates meet. Glacier water.
Really
good visibility.”

“Cold, I bet.”

“Freezing, man. Literally, like two degrees Celsius. But totally worth it.”

“What sort of things do you see in a . . . crack in the lava?”

“Oh, man, just
awesome
caves.”

“Caves,” Anders repeats, nodding. He’d been trying to envision what living things one might encounter on such a dive; caves hadn’t occurred to him. He reaches thoughtfully for his shorts from where he’s left them on the front seat of the Buick.

“And sometimes, when you look up? The surface acts like a mirror. So it’s like you’re surrounded, like you’re diving through a tunnel. Pretty crazy.”

“Huh.” Anders considers this, and it gets him thinking about Eve, and the quarry, and his promise that he’d ask Dave what he saw down there. “Listen,” he ventures. “I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“You’re going to think I’m crazy to ask, but . . . what did you see down in the quarry? My daughter is very curious.”

“Nah—I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” Dave waves him off. “Tell the truth, at the time I was pretty focused on the cables, and it’s so dark down there it’s hard to see anything except what your headlamp shows you, but . . .” He shrugs. “Who knows? Those
quarries are hundreds of years old. There could be all kinds of stuff down there.”

Anders nods. He thinks of the photographs he’s seen from the quarrying days, of men on platforms hung alongside great slabs of granite, others on ladders leading from one ledge to the next, evermore down like an Escher print. Somehow he’d never associated that history with the quarry in their backyard. Absently, he shakes open his shorts to put them on; as he does, he hears something clatter to the pavement. He looks down; half visible beneath the runner of the car is the shell he found in Sophie’s desk the other morning, which he’d slipped into his pocket and forgotten. He stares down at it now; smooth and round and bright, it seems to stare back at him from the concrete like an unblinking yellow eye, until suddenly Dave’s hand swoops down upon it.

“Here, man,” Dave says, and he holds the shell out for Anders to take from the palm of his hand.

A
fter lunch, Eve climbs onto her bike and rides the few miles back to the nursery. She drops her bike at the edge of the lot, across which she can see Nestor through the fogged glass of the greenhouse, blurred and featureless, wandering among the plants like a ghost. Four cars are parked outside the nursery; Josie Saunders is helping a woman load trays of flowers—perennials—into the back of one.

But her interest this afternoon is not in the nursery; her eyes travel to the far side of the lot, where there is a sign mounted between two wooden posts that reads:

BAYVIEW AUTO RECYCLING

USED AUTO PARTS

JUNK CAR DISPOSAL

OPEN WED–SUN 7am–7pm

CLOSED MON & TUES

Beneath the sign is a dirt road that leads back a short ways through the trees and over a small ridge, where it disappears from view. Though she’s sweating, Eve feels a shiver of excitement ripple through her body, and she adjusts her backpack. She glances once more toward the nursery as she hurries across the lot, wary of being seen, since the junkyard is closed, but then passes beneath the sign and up the road.

The road is in fairly bad shape, the sides of it eroded away by rain, which has left dry canyons in the center as it washed downhill. Eve follows it up the ridge, choosing her steps carefully; she is barefoot as usual, and there are shards of broken glass from taillights, she imagines, and headlights, and side-view mirrors. In the distance, she can hear the barking of a dog, and she pictures a ferocious rottweiler at the end of a rusty chain, straining against it and snarling as it guards rows of junked vehicles in a wide, empty space on the other side of the ridge.

She is aware that her mission is contrary to her short-lived resolution, but once the likely location of James’ truck had occurred to her, she knew there’d be no denying the urge to find it, not if it might lead to the discovery of clues, or even answers, which, once found, will prove her theory right and so absolve her in her parents’ eyes, she is sure. And she’s not doing anything particularly dangerous or irresponsible. It’s daytime, no one needs her, and she’s thought this out. In her backpack, along with the camera she found this morning, she has brought three coat hangers of varying strength and width, a hammer, a Phillips-head screwdriver, a flat-head screwdriver, and a Baggie full of paper clips, all of which might be essential for the task at hand, which is to gather as much as she can from James Favazza’s truck. She’s not worried about having to pick the main lock, as the driver’s-side window is smashed, but she wants to get into the glove box, which could well be locked. And there could be
other locked compartments; in their station wagon there is a lock on the well between the front seats, and sometimes there are storage boxes behind the cabs of pickups, though to her annoyance she didn’t notice whether there was one on James Favazza’s truck or not.

After several hundred yards and on the other side of the ridge, the road ends in a small dirt clearing where two low buildings sit dark and quiet. One is a cheap-looking white trailer where the sign above the door reads Office. The other building is larger, a wooden storehouse with large windows, which Eve can see houses all kinds of scrap metal and used car parts. In front is a large scale with a sign that assures “Your metal will be weighed properly on our state certified scale.” Near this is a forklift, which is parked in a manner that suggests that whoever drove it last was interrupted in the middle of a job.

But the rows of junked vehicles that Eve had anticipated, among which she was sure she’d find James Favazza’s truck, do not exist. Instead, parked haphazardly beyond the buildings—and some barely even in the clearing, so reclaimed have they been by shrubbery and vines—are maybe only a dozen junked cars in various states of decay. Some are rusted shells of what they used to be, stripped entirely of tires, steering wheels, mirrors, seats; the open hoods reveal that the engines have been pillaged, too. Other cars appear to have been sitting there for less time, and still retain some semblance of functionality, as if with care and effort they might be restored. There are a few as Eve would have envisioned, squished and stacked, though none of them are James Favazza’s red truck. Her disappointment is crushing; she truly had assumed she’d find it here. Even if she hadn’t found a single clue inside, she thinks, it would have been enough just to find the truck itself, just to see it again, to be reminded by something tangible of the reality of what has happened.

Eve sighs, gazing out at the small clearing before her. In addition to the handful of cars, there appears to be all manner of other junked objects, and despite the failure of her errand, Eve wanders among them curiously.

There is an abandoned Airstream trailer, overgrown with shrubbery; when Eve presses her face to the window she can see the linoleum peeling from the floor, the seat cushions ripped and plundered by nesting creatures. Hanging over the side-view mirror is a rusted length of anchor chain, maybe thirty inches long; Eve takes this and drapes it around her own neck, thinking it a perfect item for her father’s garden wall.