“He’s irresponsible in his personal life,” Manon said.
Nick had to admit that this was true. Viondi was either working or playing, either pulling double shifts with his crew, or at a party that could last for days. Nick wasn’t quite certain how often Viondi had been married, but he’d heard reference to at least three wives, and he’d had children by at least three women, not necessarily the same women as his wives.
And Viondi looked like such a roughneck. He was big, with wide shoulders and big biceps and a short-cropped beard. He looked as if he could tear apart a human being with his large bare hands. Just Viondi’s looks made Manon nervous.
For weeks Nick would leave messages on Viondi’s answering machine without a reply, and then he’d know Viondi was working. But then he’d get a call, and Viondi would want Nick to pile with a few other friends into Viondi’s Buick and drive off for a weekend’s debauch in Memphis, or a road trip to Chicago, or to spend some time at the Greenville Blues Festival.
Or sometimes the call was just to go fishing on a Wednesday morning. A Wednesday like today. Whatever the call, it had been easier for Nick to say yes once Manon had gone home to Toussaint. A pair of freshwater gulls wheeled overhead in hopes that someone would clean a fish and give them the remains. Viondi rebaited Nick’s hook with another piece of soap. “You heard from Arlette?” Nick’s heart sank. Just when he’d started feeling good.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s going to France in a couple weeks.” Nick frowned at the river. “I’m not going to get to see her till, maybe, Christmas.”
“Shit. That’s tough. Your old lady ain’t cutting you no slack at all.” Nick found himself wanting to defend Manon. “Well,” he said, “it’s an opportunity, you know. Going to France.”
“Arlette needs a daddy more than she needs a trip to France,” Viondi said. “I’ve kept all my kids in my life, no matter what else happened.” He finished baiting the hook and let it fall. Nick cast, heard the splash, saw the pale chunk of soap sink into the rippling water. Viondi cast, dropped his hook precisely. One of the gulls dipped toward the splash, then decided it didn’t want to eat soap. Viondi began reeling in.
“Why don’t you go down to Arkansas,” he asked, “see your girl?” Nick’s heart gave a little jump at the thought. “My old car wouldn’t make it,” he said automatically. It needed new engine and transmission seals that he couldn’t afford. When he drove it, even the driver’s compartment filled with blue smoke.
“Take the bus.” Viondi gave him a severe look. “It’s not like you’ve got anything critical to do in St. Louis.”
Nick thought about it for a long, hopeful moment, calculating how much it would cost, how long he could afford to be away. As Viondi said, it wasn’t as if he had anything important here, a job or anything. There wasn’t a hotel in Toussaint, he’d have to stay at the boarding house run by Manon’s aunt. Man, Nick thought, Manon would be pissed.
He thought about Arlette’s eyes lighting at the sight of the diamond necklace.
“Tell you what,” Viondi said. “I could use a little R and R down in N’awlins. I’ll drop you off in Toussaint on the way.”
Nick looked at him. “What about those buildings on Chouteau?”
“Nearly done. I’ll let Darrell finish the job.” Darrell was Viondi’s eldest son. “Do him good to have a little responsibility for a change.” Viondi smiled. “I’ve got a weekend’s worth of work first, though, that can’t do without me. How about I pick you up on Monday?”
Hope rose in Nick, but he found that he was wary of hope these days. He didn’t want this to disappear.
“You sure about this?” he asked. “I mean, this is pretty sudden.” Viondi shrugged. “It’s like I’m always telling you, man, you want a flexible schedule, you get a job like mine. Work hard, play hard, die with your boots on.” He looked at Nick. “It’s not too late for you, you know. I’m bidding up a big contract, could use a new apprentice.”
“Well,” Nick said “it may come to that.”
Viondi grinned. “Hey,” he said. “You know why God invented golf?” Nick shook his head. “No idea,” he said.
“So that white folks could dress up like black people.”
A few more hours of this, Nick thought, and he might even start to relax.
As he drove around the bend and the plant came in sight around the pine thicket, Larry Hallock lifted his eyes automatically to the huge cooling tower and found something wrong. His eyes checked in their movement and returned to the tower, the elegant concrete hyperboloid curves whitened by the morning sun.
Something was missing. The plume of steam that normally floated above the tower. Larry was annoyed with himself. He knew that. He knew that the reactor had been shut down for refueling, something that happened every eighteen months or so. He knew that there would be no plume of steam when the reactor wasn’t in operation.
But he’d got used to the steam plume being there, perched above the tower. Eighteen months was just long enough for him to forget how the plant looked when the reactor was shut down. He passed by the old Indian mound that archaeologists, somewhat to the inconvenience of the facility’s designers, had insisted remain on the property. The front parking lot looked full. One of the concessions the power company had made to the locals when they’d acquired the site was that one-third of the plant workers had to come from the immediate area. As there are relatively few nuclear engineers and qualified power plant managers in rural Mississippi, the Poinsett Landing plant was blessed with a large and splendidly equipped janitorial, maintenance, and machine-shop force.
The parking lot was unusually full as workers busied themselves with maintenance and preventative maintenance while the reactor was cold, so Larry turned the Taurus down the fork in the road that led behind the plant, toward the river hidden behind the long green wall of the levee. The long morning shadow of the cooling tower reached across the grass and fell on him as he drove, and in the air-conditioned silence of the car, he felt a chill.
Larry’s feet rang on metal as he climbed the ladder that led up the maintenance truss that ran up the curved roof of the primary containment building. He tilted his head back in the bright yellow hood of the clean suit he wore and kept on climbing. The structure smelled of emptiness and wet concrete. Masses of concrete and steel loomed around him. Below, in addition to the water-filled chamber and the crane, the building was filled with a chaos of tanks, pipes, valves, conduit, ductwork, electric motors, girders, accumulators, and bundles of cable. All of it on a massive scale, dwarfing the suited figures of the crane operators.
Jameel, the foreman who was supervising operating the refueling machine, looked up as Larry passed overhead, then gave a wave. Larry waved back.
“How ’bout the Cubbies?” Larry called down. Jameel was from Chicago and maintained a dogged loyalty to the National League’s perennial losers.
“Two in a row!” Jameel shouted. He gave the thumb’s-up sign.
“Guess they didn’t need Gutierrez after all!”
Jameel made a face. He had complained long and hard about the Cubs’ preseason trade. The refueling was relatively simple, but the scale of it was always impressive. Larry enjoyed his visits to the containment structure, and since the reactor was shut down, and everyone else going through routine maintenance checklists, he had nothing more urgent at the moment than to suit up, enter the containment building, and play tourist.