Vernon was Rand-Atlantic’s Chief Environmental Officer and lived with his daughter Noreen in a ranch house in Arkansas tucked behind a red bud tree and a southern oak that spanned most of the back yard. He stood over six feet tall with salt and pepper hair beginning to thin on top and a cleft in his chin where his mother used to tell him that God had rested his finger before sending him down to earth. He worked around the company’s reclamation ponds, a place where backhoes and four wheelers piled ash from the dregs of the paper mill into mounds. His pager had beeped itself off his desk this morning—a message from his boss about an emergency. “I’m on it,” he paged back.
Noreen bundled up Arlo in the kitchen. They lived in northern Louisiana, and faced each other every morning over a Formica table decorated in last year’s cigarette burns. The TV news described how the Space Shuttle was docking with the Russian Mir, two opposing forces joined together in zero gravity.
“Grab a piece of toast before you leave, why don’t you?”
She untangled her backpack and shook out her blonde ponytail. Every day he thought she looked more like her mother, the same high cheekbones and shell-like ears.
“Late,” she said. “Got to hurry.”
“Not healthy to start your day on an empty stomach.”
“C’mon, Dad. I’m not a little girl.”
“At least get a glass of juice.” Her ponytail flipped him off as she dashed out the screen door. Noreen had become pregnant at 16. Since then, she’d pulled her life together and was studying to become a nurse. She’d be the first in his family to graduate from college. Every day she got that much closer. They both did.
“Wait a sec!” he called, not really knowing what he wanted to say. Probably to wish her well, but didn’t get the chance. Vernon gulped his coffee and left the house, drove to the bridge at the outskirts of Rand-Atlantic’s property. Perlson hadn’t said too much over the pager, just to get his ass down to the river in a hurry. Perlson’s office was in Little Rock; the corporate office in Atlanta. But Vernon worked in the Arkansas town of Hentsbury around reclamation ponds.
Chemicals from the paper mill leached into the water and grew brown spongy things. They grew alongside the entrance to the plant, bright green fronds interlaced with red veins that waved in the afternoon heat like feathers of a peacock’s tail. Flow Gently Sweet Afton. They didn’t care if the groundwater or the soil were polluted, tempted men to pick them for the dinner table—plants that grew in spite of everything transforming the byproducts of a paper mill into the root of a bulbous lavender and white vegetable. And who knows, maybe he should’ve joined the crowd and picked them. But Vernon had always been different.
Years ago, his band had bought a bus from a hippie couple going to Kathmandu or some other godforsaken place. The couple had unloaded their car note and insurance payments on a group of kids who’d wanted to play at dive bars across the country. They had pooled together enough money to buy the VW. Afterward, they gave the bus a new paint job and one of their girlfriends brushed the name of the band, the Do Daddies, on its side. They spent the rest of the afternoon drinking cans of beer. The guys repaired camper beds, built several new ones, installed lockers and a small refrigerator. One of them thought he’d have a good shot at joining a construction crew that was building a new jail a few miles down the road from where he lived. The rest of them hung tight and high-fived each other thinking that the poor fuck had made a terrible mistake. They took off to the sound of Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again unmoored from parents and schools that sought to mold them into upstanding citizens. For as long as he could, Vernon resisted. But six months ago, Rand-Atlantic had promoted Vernon to Hentsbury’s Lead Environmental Officer.
A morning needle of light appeared red and pink on the horizon. Vernon rode past rumpled hills and granite, dampness everywhere. He reached the ponds \.
Vernon noticed a woman taking pictures.
“Ma’am. What do you think you’re doing?” She was black, the same height as Vernon, probably in her late forties, not much older, a cap pulled down over her forehead, hair sticking out like fuzz along the sides of her ears with two sumac-colored strands hanging down her back in a fibrous braid.
The woman looked up, and loosened a red kerchief that covered her mouth. “Helping my grandson with a school project.”
“What kind of project?”
She hesitated. “Science.”
Vernon was a fair poker player and knew a bluff when he saw one. “Find anything? Rattlers? Raccoons?”
The woman shook her head. “Nothing like that. Just taking a few photos.”
“Look, ma’am. We both know you’re not supposed to be here.”
She crossed her arms. “Who says?”
“You’re on Rand-Atlantic property.” He pointed to a sign tacked at the edge of the bridge. He was sure she was a member of the River Watchers, a local group of troublemakers. “This area is closed to the public.”
“I’m in the middle of the bridge. Hentsbury starts right here.” She pointed to the rotting wood and drew an imaginary line with her finger.
“No, ma’am. You’re wrong.” Vernon wanted her to leave. Her black Cherokee was nestled behind a scaffolding of birch trees.
“You work for Rand-Atlantic?”
He took out his ID badge. “Yes.”
“Happy for you. But this is public property.” She read from his badge, her eyebrows arching, “Mr. Vernon Wolfe, Lead Environmental Officer. You can’t tell me anything different.” She gathered up her things and pointed toward the catfish. “You see those fish? They’re all dead.” She picked up her gear and water bottle and walked toward her Jeep. One last time she turned around. “You be careful, Mister, whether you work for Rand-Atlantic or not. Last week, a deer died out here. It was covered with tumors.”
He waited until she pulled away. He should’ve gotten her name. He spent the rest of the morning taking readings. His meter had registered at peak levels, over two hundred parts per million of hydrogen sulfide. Safe levels were at five parts. Men exposed to high doses were lucky not to keel over. Come to think of it, he wasn’t feeling that great himself.