“No. Nothing. The place was immaculate.”
He peels off a strip of wallpaper and examines the wood and chalk underneath. He takes apart one of Deidre’s Dr. Seuss books and picks at the dried glue on the binding. Everything in the garage he throws out, even clean white rags and unopened cans of motor oil.
Deidre has lost six pounds.
He takes Toby and Deidre back to the allergy specialist. “Something is killing my children.”
She runs another series of tests over the next two weeks. Nothing turns up.
He sits on his bed with a brandy. Evening, changing light. Each minute another noise stilled: birds, cars, plastic pails. Dinner’s over, up and down the street. Same old meats. No one’s going out. His mind turns round.
The glass falls off the night table. Getting up he knocks his foot against the bed. “Goddammit!” he yells. He’ll raze the backyard fence, torch the weeds, drive through the plate-glass window at the downtown office of H&R Block. He’ll commandeer the local CBS affiliate and broadcast nasty rumors about the East Coast, the NRA, the national debt — a lovely day in the neighborhood. Top with pineapple sauce, bake for three hours. Right back, we’ll be right back. One two three four, try it at home now. His rage a clear white river through town.
Adams notices that the grass around Pamela’s barbecue pit is dying. He picks and sniffs a handful of yellow blades. The barbecue pit is rusty — it’s brand-new! — and discolored. With his handkerchief Adams clears away the charcoal. The metal at the bottom of the pit is mottled yellow and green. Heat wouldn’t have done that. He asks Pamela where she purchased the barbecue pit.
“At a wholesaler’s. A big discount warehouse north of town,” she says.
“Take me there.”
Hundreds of cars are parked in the fields around the warehouse, and families of shoppers are walking through rows of plastic birdbaths, lawn statuary, clay pots, wind chimes, garden tools. Inside, fishing corks, tire irons, bicycle speedometers, Coleman lanterns, decks of cards. The barbecue pits, identical with Pamela’s, occupy a corner. The first two salesmen Adams encounters know nothing about them except how much they cost. The third salesman says they’re made from metal drums.
“Where’d you get the metal drums?”
He doesn’t know. Adams presses. The salesman guides him to the warehouse manager.
“We bought them in bulk from a little outfit called Drum Corps.”
“What was in them before you bought them?” “I don’t know. What’s the problem?” “I suspect your barbecue pit is poisoning my children.”
The man laughs, then sees that Adams is serious. “Honestly, I don’t know. They’re a little outfit that collects drums from various companies, cleans them up, and sells them to wholesalers like us for storage or, in our case, barbecue pits.”
Adams insists on locating Drum Corps. The manager tries to talk him out of it, but relents when Adams mentions the Better Business Bureau.
Drum Corps is located seventy-five miles east of Elgin. Adams cannot find a telephone number, so the following Saturday he drives to the address given him by the manager. Meanwhile, he has told Pamela not to use the barbecue pit, and to keep the kids away from it.
An old Sinclair gas station, the dinosaur still on its sign, has become the Drum Corps office. Where the gas pumps were, tortured metal strips twist out of the concrete holding a square of splintered wood, about the size of a car door, with DRUM CORPS painted on it. Rusty barrels and drums, half eaten, badly stained. A grizzled collie sleeps near a stack of metal lids.
Adams parks his car by the side of the road. Old cotton fields, fallow now, stretch for miles behind the station. The sun is clear but cold. A young man in a Pink Floyd T-shirt and dusty desert boots walks out of the station, drinking a bottled Coke. “Help you?”
“Yeah. Are you the people who sold a bunch of drums to the wholesale warehouse in Elgin?”
“Might be. Have to check. My dad’s the one who runs things but he’s out fishing.”
“Could you check for me?”
“Sure.”
They go inside. An Italian auto parts calendar featuring a naked brunette and a shock absorber curls on the wall. The calendar is open to October 1973.
“Yeah, ‘bout six months ago. Why?”
“Can you tell me what was in those drums?”
The boy laughs. “No way of knowing. We get ‘em from all over. California, Texas, Louisiana.”
“Who do you get them from?”
“Chemical plants, oil refineries … you’d have to ask my dad.” He makes a loud sucking noise with the bottle.
“What’s your name?”
“Bo.”
“Bo, does your dad know these things are dangerous?”
“No, man, we steam-clean ‘em before we sell ‘em. Twice. Everything is steam-cleaned twice, kills everything, all the germs and everything.”
“I’ve got a couple of kids at home who’ve been sick for two months — ever since my wife brought home a barbecue pit made with one of these things.”
“Hey, we don’t make anything. We just sell ‘em.”
Adams glances out the dirty window. In the pale sunlight, the sight of the rusty orange drums, with their thin eaten edges, tiny holes like cavities in a child’s teeth, and tarnished yellow rings, makes the back of his neck prickle.
“When will your dad be back?”
“Not till tomorrow.”
Adams nods. A dust devil swirls along the edge of the highway, ripping light weeds from the ground. The collie looks up. “Okay, thanks.”
“Hey, look, we make sure the things are clean. Maybe your kids have colds or something.”
“I’ll be back,” Adams says.
One night several months before their separation, Pamela read to him in bed excerpts from Paul Klee’s diary. “‘I am abstract with memories… What takes place is merely an approximation.’”
“I admire his orderly mind,” Pamela said. “I aspire to it. He numbered every thought.
“‘Many variations on the theme Father and Son. A father with his son. A father through his son. A father in the presence of his son. A father proud of his son. A father blesses his son.’”
The following morning, Adams scribbled on a sheet of tracing paper:
1) Father removes half-inch pc. yellow chalk from son’s right nostril.
2) Father ignores wet diaper until son pours oatmeal on radio.
3) Father teaches son to shoot BB rifle, to consternation of neighbor’s knee.
The Better Business Bureau confirms that steam-cleaning cannot effectively neutralize all chemical compounds. Drum Corps has been receiving drums from shipyards in the Texas gulf and from a drilling company in Southern California. In addition, medical centers and utility companies have sent them barrels, some of which contain low-level radioactive waste. Traces of benzene, toluene, and sulfuric acid have been found in the “clean” barrels. Seven months ago the bureau issued a warning to Drum Corps. Adams’ efforts have closed them for good. The wholesale warehouse has been fined two thousand dollars.
Deidre sprawls on the floor reading the adventures of Curious George and Babar, King of the Elephants. Toby wheezes, finishing his homework.
Pamela stands with Adams over the dead spot in the backyard.
“I’ve had nightmares,” she says. “The kids’ bones all twisted.”
The doctors have decided there will be no permanent effects from the exposure, but Adams has dreamed disaster, too: Deidre’s ovaries knotted like thick hard rope, Toby’s lungs exploded like paper sacks. He thinks of their first child, Alan, swimming among molecules as large as billiard balls. He remembers a plastic model of DNA in a college laboratory, the double helix that resembled an unfinished staircase into the hallway of infinity. But he can’t keep his mind on infinity, or Alan, this morning. Babar, King of the Elephants, glows in the dark. Yertle the Turtle, with red unseeing eyes, lights the floor of the sea.