If his phone hadn’t been lying face-up on the seat beside him, Joe would have missed Faye’s next call. The motor’s noise drowned both the phone’s sound and its vibration, but he saw its face light up.
It was Faye. Joe knew before he answered that Faye had reached her limit. There had been a tautness to her mouth for a month, but this morning every line of her face said that she’d reached her tipping point. And then they’d lost Liz. All day, his phone had been in his hand more than it had been in his pocket. When he’d boarded the boat, he’d risked losing it to water damage by laying it on the seat next to his thigh. If his wife called him, he wanted to know.
Their dock was in sight, so he cut the motor and used the boat’s own momentum to ease it into place. Faye’s voice was higher-pitched than normal and it was loud in the suddenness of the motor’s silence.
“Joe?”
Joe tucked Michael under one arm and left his father alone to secure the boat himself.
With both feet already pounding the dock, he said, “I’m coming, Faye. Tell me where you are.”
“I’m on the far west side of the island, under that big oak tree standing all by itself next to the water. Something’s not right, Joe. I’m not sure what it is, but something’s not right.”
***
Joe had been wrong. Faye hadn’t broken. In fact, she looked more like herself than she’d looked since…well, in more than a month.
She had met them halfway, saying, “You need to carry Michael. It’s not safe to let him run loose around here.”
Now she was crouched by an open excavation, trowel in one rubber-gloved hand and phone in the other, studying the problem at hand. The focused expression. The pursed lips. The curious squint that should have put wrinkles into the golden-brown skin around her eyes, but somehow hadn’t managed it yet. The impatient shake of the straight black bangs that she was always too busy to get cut. This woman was the person he’d known for more than ten years.
Well, she was almost his familiar Faye. An occasional fidget in her thin shoulders said that all was still not well, but an unanswered question was a tonic for Faye. Now she had one.
Waving the phone, she said, “I checked the Internet. It told me I should call the emergency responders, so I did.”
Balancing Michael on his knee, Joe squatted beside her. He might have asked, “What’s the emergency?” but his nose and eyes were already giving him the answer.
Faye leaned her head in the direction of the dark wet spot spreading slowly down the side of the pit and across its bottom. “Diesel?”
“Smells more like kerosene to me.”
She pointed her trowel at a dark area about midway up the far corner of the excavation. “See that spot? I was working on the corner of the unit, trying to square it up, and the point of my trowel grazed something hard. I felt something give a little, then release. Right away, something wet started bubbling out of the wall. I smelled something strong—kerosene, I guess—as soon as it happened.”
“What did the Internet say we should do?”
“I looked up legal reporting requirements for petroleum spills. Diesel, kerosene…they’re both petroleum, and so’s everything else that smells like that. The emergency response website said that spills bigger than twenty-five gallons have to be reported.”
“That ain’t anywhere near twenty-five gallons,” Joe said, assessing the shallow puddle of glistening liquid at the bottom of the excavation.
“No,” his wife said. “Not yet. But it’s still coming. Who knows where it’s coming from or how to stop it or how bad it’s going to get?”
Joe studied the darkened soil. “Going by how fast it’s spreading from that one little spot, I’d say you poked a hole in a tank or a drum or something. Can’t tell if that buried tank’s more than twenty-five gallons without uncovering it. Couldn’t we have tried that before calling in the environmental people?”
Faye held up a hand, sheathed in a protective glove. “That’s why I’ve got these on. I was all set to dig up the tank myself, because we’d really rather not have emergency responders come out here. The website says that property owners can get saddled with paying for disposal of abandoned waste, even if they weren’t the ones who dumped it. I thought maybe if I tried to uncover the problem, it might turn out to be just a leaky five-gallon bucket and we could legally keep this to ourselves.”
“But you called the emergency people instead of doing the digging yourself?”
She waved the phone again, pointing it at something behind Joe’s back. “Unfortunately, this phone tells me that, in our case, it doesn’t matter how big the spill is. If the state’s waters are involved, we have to call.”
Joe looked where she pointed. An iridescent oil slick spread itself over the water behind him. It hadn’t been there when he arrived.
Michael squirmed in Joe’s hands as his parents watched the water’s surface twinkle with each wave. Joe couldn’t believe this was happening.
Joyeuse Island had miraculously escaped contamination by the Deepwater Horizon spill. Not even one tar ball had washed ashore. Now, after they’d dodged that bullet, an environmental cleanup crew was going to descend on their island? For what? For maybe a quart of liquid kerosene soaked into a small spot of soil? For an oil slick so tenuous that he expected it to be gone by dark? And did he hear Faye saying that there was a good chance they’d have to pay for whatever the cleanup ended up costing? This sounded like writing a blank check to a government agency that had absolutely no motivation to keep down costs.
“It’s the law,” Faye said, and he wanted to remind her that there had been times when she’d been a little casual with the law, and this might have been the time to remember how that was done. Then she said, “And we don’t know how bad it’s going to get. Better to call in the professionals now than to find ourselves sitting in a puddle of petroleum goo.”
“You made the right decision.”
This was true, and Joe was glad to be able to say so. It proved that Faye’s logic circuits hadn’t completely failed. He was looking at a problem that could cost them a small fortune, but that problem had brought him a feeble indication that his hyper-rational wife hadn’t completely slipped away into her grief. He watched the spot of kerosene-stained soil grow bigger by the minute and reminded himself that some things were harder to lose than money.
***
Joe stood in the shade and watched his home being overrun by environmental protection people. His father was enjoying this too much. Sly had been on the dock all afternoon, chatting up serious-faced scientists who obviously weren’t interested in telling him every last detail about their jobs.
Joe didn’t want to talk to those specialists, not at all. He wanted to lurk and observe, because he was a hunter and that was how hunters behaved when faced with potential adversaries.
Joe didn’t like to think of environmentalists as potential adversaries. He shared their goals. Joe figured that he and Faye left a lighter footprint on the world than most. Their house was totally off the grid. They got their electricity from the sun, and their hot water, too. They’d rehabbed Joyeuse’s old wooden rainwater cisterns, so they drank and bathed in what came out of the sky, just like the people who built those cisterns in the 1800s. Joe shot, netted, and grew most of what they ate.
Joe was pretty sure he cared about the earth just as much as the environmental protection people headed for the west end of Joyeuse Island, so they’d ordinarily be his friends. Today, they looked to him like an invading army.
Joe had met the scientists at Joyeuse Island’s only dock, but he’d stayed there just long enough to meet the man in charge, Gerry Steinberg, and to say hello to the sheriff. Steinberg, a not-tall man with graying hair and hazel eyes, had said that he worked for the county environmental agency, but that he was also a sworn deputy working as a detective for the Micco County Sheriff’s Department. He’d explained that this dual arrangement streamlined the investigation of accidents like this one, as well as the enforcement of environmental crimes.
Faye had said, “It’s always good when two arms of the government can work together.”
Joe had thought, “Yeah, because maybe it will save us some time and money,” but he didn’t say anything.
Faye had asked if they should call the investigator “Deputy Steinberg” and he’d said, “Oh, no. Just call me Gerry.”
This made Joe worry that Gerry was trying to be all folksy, so that they wouldn’t notice when he ran up an environmental cleanup bill so big that it would have restored the Everglades to the pristine condition it had enjoyed before the Army Corps of Engineers got hold of it. Joe had noticed that the government was not totally consistent in its approach to environmental preservation. He had also noticed that anything the government touched became immediately expensive.
Gerry was already asking Faye questions as they left Joe and headed for the place where the spill was still happening in slow motion. The sheriff walking beside him hadn’t said much. It was at least a ten-minute walk from Joyeuse Island’s sole dock to the west end of the island, and the two were soon out of sight. Joe occupied himself by seeing just how high he could push Michael’s tire swing without making him squeal in fear. Pretty high, as it turned out.
As he pushed the swing, he considered the size of the crew that had come to check out his little kerosene spill. He saw a need for Gerry, the site manager. He saw a need for Nadia, the chemist who would be using her boat-based lab to test samples of the stinking mess Faye had uncovered. He saw a need for the safety specialist, since somebody had to decide whether the tank (or drum or whatever) Faye had uncovered was going to explode. He maybe saw a need for the nameless helper following Gerry around.
He saw no need, however, for the sheriff himself to show up for this little tiny fuel spill. Something wasn’t as it seemed, but Gerry and the sheriff were keeping their mouths shut.
***
While Faye led the sheriff and Gerry Steinberg across the island, Nadia had stayed behind on the work boat that served as a floating analytical laboratory. Joe had been watching her for half an hour. From his position behind Michael’s swing, Joe could see her packing equipment into one of the coolers stacked on its deck. She periodically went into the cabin to fetch more technical-looking stuff. He could see a reason for every motion she made. This was not a woman who wasted time.
Sly’s mouth had been moving since Joe walked away, so the petite scientist with the Spanish accent had been listening to his folksy come-ons for quite a while.
Sly had led with “Don’t pretty ladies like you get tired of standing in a chemistry lab all day? Don’t the smell ever get to you?”
Nadia had said only, “I like the way my lab smells.”
He’d followed up with “Can I help you load up any of that stuff? It looks too heavy for a little thing like you.”
She’d said nothing, just locked eyes with him as she hefted one fully loaded cooler to waist height and lowered it on top of another.
“Can I come on that boat and get you to explain that lab to me? I like the ladies, but I like smart ladies the most.”
“No, you can’t come on the boat. Not unless your safety training is up to OSHA standards.”
Ouch. Shot down again. Sly didn’t even look flustered. Men like Joe’s father who flirted constantly must see it as like buying a lottery ticket. If you hit the jackpot, great. If not, fork over another dollar and buy another chance to win.
Nadia looked about Faye’s age, early forties, so Sly wasn’t quite old enough to be her father, but he was pretty close. Nadia’s body language said she wanted to push him off the dock and then go wash her ears out with soap.
Holding up a hand to stop the flow of Sly’s words, she took a phone call. Then she pulled something white and shiny out of a bag and put it on. It was a protective jumpsuit, probably disposable, and it covered her from neck to wrists and ankles. Despite the fact that she was putting it on over her clothes, she was going through the motions of getting dressed and Sly was taking an unseemly interest in watching her do that. Joe wanted to go wash his eyes out with soap.
Draping the strap of her equipment bag across her body from shoulder to hip, Nadia hoisted a small cooler. Sly reached out a hand to help her carry it, but Nadia didn’t acknowledge him. Her long dirty-blond ponytail switched from side to side as she set off walking without looking back. Sly dogged her steps like a man who couldn’t tell when he wasn’t wanted.
It might be November, but the air blowing off the Gulf was still damp and sticky. Joe thought Nadia might soon be wishing she’d waited till she got where she was going before putting on a waterproof jumpsuit that would hold in every drop of sweat, but she seemed like a smart lady. She wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
***
Faye squatted beside Gerry as they watched Nadia sample the contaminated soil at the bottom of Faye’s archaeological excavation. Nadia’s trowel wasn’t shaped like Faye’s. It looked more like a garden trowel, designed for scooping soil samples into a jar, rather than scraping the thin layers of archaeological work. Still, there was some overlap in their field technique. Nadia treated each gob of scooped soil with the same care Faye used to brush grains of dust away from something mysterious and long-buried.
Faye could see by the way Nadia handled the trowel and sample jar that they were clean and that they needed to stay clean. Nothing could go into the jar but that gob of soil. After Nadia hauled it back to the work boat, her portable laboratory was going to reveal every single chemical in that soil. Watching the chemist handle the samples with care, Faye felt confident that any god-awful contamination Nadia found would be honestly hers. She could own that god-awful contaminant, whatever it was.
Faye was also confident that, if Nadia’s patience were to be tried much further, she would shove Joe’s talkative and lecherous father off the lip of the excavation and into the stinking puddle of kerosene at its bottom. Presuming it was kerosene.
Maybe it was kerosene and only kerosene. Faye hoped so. Maybe kerosene would be cheaper to clean up than some Love Canal-like PCBs or dioxins or whatever. Faye really didn’t know.
Gerry was saying, “My emergency response crew can get this thing stopped. Whatever is leaking—a drum, a tank, whatever—they have the know-how to uncover it, contain it, and get it out of here before your problem gets any worse. To be honest, if they don’t uncover more than what we’re looking at, you should be fine.”
But what if they did uncover more noxious stuff? Faye pictured dozens of rusty drums buried under the soil in front of her, leaking God knew what. Imagining the cost of cleaning all that up made her feel faint.
“Were you listening, Faye? I said everything is probably going to be fine.”
“What will this emergency response contractor’s crew do?”
“They’ll use shovels and hand tools to uncover the vessel that’s leaking, but gently, so that they don’t bust it wide open in the process. Then they’ll check out the stained soils visually to get an idea of how big your problem is. We call those saturated soils a ‘point source.’ As long as the point source is in place, the contamination will keep spreading. The groundwater’s really shallow here, so if the kerosene reaches it, it will leach out of the soil into the water, given a chance. And since we’re right here on the Gulf, it’s almost certain to spread into surface water. There’s no place else for it to go. That contaminated soil needs to be taken out of here sooner rather than later.”
The darkened soil where Nadia was sampling looked still more sinister.
“And how will the contractor do that?”
“I’m thinking a small backhoe will do it. They’ll load the saturated soil into drums and haul it to an incinerator. They’ll also check the groundwater to make sure it’s clean, and they’ll retest to make sure they didn’t leave any contaminated soil behind. If there aren’t any soil or groundwater contaminants at levels that exceed cleanup standards, then you’ll be good to go.”
A backhoe. Groundwater testing. Drums. An incinerator. Personnel to load the soil in the drums. A boat big enough to carry all that. And a return visit from Nadia and her expensive-looking laboratory boat. Faye was beginning to wonder whether Joe should start whittling some wooden toys for the kids. They weren’t going to be able to afford to buy them much for Christmas.