“I will be. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you believe in capitalism, Crane?”
“The problem is I do. I do believe in it, and it pisses me off when I see it get twisted up.”
“Boy, you have been listening to Annie, haven’t you? She can be persuasive, I know. What kind of horror stories has she been telling you?”
“About you, or about Kemco?”
“Crane. Please. I want you to know something. I want you to know that I understand where you’re coming from. Or at least I think I do. Hope I do. Shouldn’t presume that I do, really. But I’m guessing that you took Mary Beth’s suicide hard. That you found it hard to believe anyone as full of life as Mary Beth could end that life, voluntarily.” He stopped and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound so trite. To sound like I’m trivializing this. Christ. May I go on?”
“Yes.”
“I think you ran into Annie. Possibly at the funeral, or maybe later at Mary Beth’s mother’s home, or whatever. And Annie filled your head with her crazy leftist lunacy. Normally you might not have bought it. But it was easier accepting what Annie was saying than accepting Mary Beth’s death as suicide. I’m not far wrong, am I?”
Crane said nothing.
“I know that you’ve been asking some questions,” Patrick said. “I know that you have some suspicions.”
He’d been right: it was Mrs. Meyer. Patrick did not know about the trip to Pennsylvania last night. Did he?
“There are some disturbing statistics,” Patrick was saying. “We’re aware of the number of suicides in Greenwood; we’re aware of some illnesses that may be related to Kemco employees and their families. We’ll be looking into it ourselves.”
“I’ll look forward to that investigation.”
Patrick smiled sadly and shook his head. “She’s really poisoned you, hasn’t she? Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that this is a family squabble? That Annie is getting at me through the company I work for? I sold out, remember? It’s not enough to attack me. She has to attack the institutions I sold out to.”
“All because the poor kid’s stuck in time.”
“That’s right. It’s the ’80s now, Crane, in case you haven’t noticed. Damn near the ’90s, chilling thought though that is.”
“I noticed.”
“How close to her are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I understand you’re staying at her house.”
“I’m just crashing there.”
“Crashing. There’s a Woodstock-era word for you. Did she tell you why we split up?”
“No.”
“Drugs.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was doing drugs. Nothing much. Some hash. Some coke.” His frankness was surprising, if somehow smug.
“You buy coke on thirty grand a year?”
He shrugged. “I dealt a little on the side. That upset her, too. Almost as much as me wearing a suit to work.”
“She said she wasn’t into drugs.”
“She’s lying. Oh, she isn’t now. But back in our college days, she was deep in it, deeper than me. She dropped acid like you take Alka Seltzer.”
“I don’t take Alka Seltzer.”
“Well you get my point. Then she reformed. There’s nothing worse than a reformed anything. She got on her health-food kick. She read books and articles on the bad effects of acid. Same with pot, for Christsake. Said it ruined brain tissue, affected the sexual organs, some bullshit. I don’t know. But she turned fanatic. I tried to do right by her. I stopped dealing. It was dangerous for me, anyway, now that I was with the company. I needed a straighter life-style. So no more coke, no more anything except smoke a little dope now and then. But even that was too much for her. I remember saying to her, the last generation liked its martinis, right? Well I like my pot. But that didn’t cut it with her, because alcohol’s on her shit list, too. It was like living with a religious fanatic. The screaming fucking arguments we had. Christ. But that’s neither here nor there. It got to be too much.”
“It broke up your marriage.”
“Yeah. She was on a real guilt trip, and believe me, it all ties in with what she’s doing now, where Kemco is concerned. She’s worried she fucked up her chromosomes dropping acid. She’s worried about Billy. The repercussions her doper days will have on our son.”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“No. I don’t believe that alarmist bullshit. But she does.”
“I’ll tell you something. Maybe Boone’s motivation for all this does stem from her hating you. But I’ve been reading up on some of your precious chemical industry, and some of what I read scares me.”
He shrugged, swigged the last of the Pepsi. “Haven’t you heard that TV commercial? Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible?”
“So would cancer.”
“You really believe that bullshit Annie tells you?”
“I believe 350,000 Americans will die from cancer this year. And I believe the reason is largely chemical companies unleashing untried, untested chemical compounds on an unsuspecting environment.”
“You even sound like her. Like a goddamn pamphlet. You’re a writer yourself, I understand.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Studying journalism?”
“That’s right.”
“Everybody needs a hobby.”
“Like dumping hazardous wastes in the middle of the night?”
Patrick sat up. “Some of that goes on. Not here.”
“Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “I won’t say some of it hasn’t. I don’t know that any’s going on now. We have a manifest system in this state. We keep track of everything we dump.”
“So you say.”
“So we say. And if somebody says otherwise, they better be prepared to prove it.”
“Maybe somebody will.”
Patrick smiled. “It won’t be you and Annie.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No.” He laughed. “Are you kidding? Annie has no credibility as a journalist. She’s published a few pieces in minor league leftist nothings. You? You’re just a grad student. She’s the ex-wife of an exec at Kemco she wants to crucify. You have your own grudge, where your late fiancée is concerned. With credibility like that, you and Annie are finished before you start. Get serious.”
“You’re as much as admitting...”
“Nothing. I’m admitting nothing. Let me ask you something. Is that shirt you’re wearing one hundred percent cotton?”
“No...”
“You’re goddamn right it isn’t. We probably made fifty or sixty percent of that shirt. You want to talk chemicals? You’re wearing ’em!”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“It has to do with everything. You and Annie and everybody else can blame the chemical industry for America’s environmental ills. But you conveniently ignore the major accomplice: the American public. A public that wears clothes made of synthetic fibers. A public that drives cars made of plastic parts. A public that eats food raised in chemicals, and wrapped for sale in chemicals. A public whose collective ass rests on plastic furniture. A public that includes people like Annie, who buys her ‘No Nukes’ and ‘Live AID’ albums ignoring the fact that records are a petrochemical by-product, then plays them on her stereo, thanks to nuclear-generated electricity.”
“Now who sounds like a goddamn pamphlet?”
“Hey, I’m not ashamed to be working in the chemical industry. I think we provide a service, many services, the public wants. Needs. Demands. The chemical industry’s booming, pal — recessions don’t touch us. $133 billion last year. And next year, who knows?”