Max Collins - Midnight Haul

He yelled at them: “Hey! What’s the fuckin’ idea?”

Boone stopped taking pictures and gave the man, who was about ten feet away, a bigger smile than she’d given Crane so far and said, “We’re taking some pictures for our school paper. We’re trying for a mood, here, you know?”

The eyes below the bushy black streaks narrowed: the guy didn’t seem to be buying Boone as a teenager. It seemed a little lame to Crane, too, actually, but he didn’t figure at this point he had much choice but to go along with it.

He moved toward the man, who was still in the doorway, and got between Boone and the guy, blocking her from view — Crane figured he had a better chance of passing for a school kid than she did — and said, “We’re going for contrasts, like, uh, things that’ll look neat in black and white.”

“Horseshit,” the man said, and moved forward, brushing Crane aside, and pointing a finger at Boone like a pissed-off father. He stopped in front of her, his finger almost touching her nose.

“I remember you,” he said. “You were around here last summer asking questions. Taking pictures. Right before the state came down on our butts.”

Boone kept smiling, but the manner of it changed.

The guy returned her smile, but his was as heavy with sarcasm as hers. “Honey,” he said, “it’s been many moons since you were a teenager.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Boone told him.

The guy didn’t take that well. He grunted, and reached at the camera with one hand, latching onto one of her arms with the other, and squeezed. Boone yelped. But she didn’t let loose of the camera.

Crane grabbed the guy by a depressingly solid bicep and tugged, but the guy didn’t give any ground.

“Let her alone,” Crane said, still tugging, still getting nowhere. “Let her alone, will you? We’re leaving now, all right?”

The guy turned away from Boone, though he still held her by the arm, and said, with a spray of bad breath that almost matched the rubbery perfume of the air around them, “You’re goddamn fucking well told you’re leaving, but the film in that fucking camera isn’t,” and he ripped the camera out of her hands, opened the back of it and tore the film out, and flung the film against a nearby wall of barrels.

Then he handed the camera back to Boone and smiled and nodded and Boone swung a small fist at his face and connected, leaving the man’s mouth bloody, the red looking garish in his pale face. He pushed her face with the heel of his hand, like Cagney in the old movie, but minus the grapefruit.

Boone was on the ground, but she wasn’t hurt; she was sitting there swearing up at the guy, who was laughing at her, sort of gently, and Crane swung a fist into the man’s stomach, and surprisingly, doubled him over.

If they had run for it, then, it might have been over, but Crane got greedy. He took another swing, toward the guy’s face this time, and the guy batted it away, even while doubled over, and then came out swinging himself, first into Crane’s stomach, then into the side of his face, and Crane was unconscious for a while.

When he woke up, a minute or so later, Boone was cradling his head in her lap, sitting on the cinders, saying, “Crane? Crane?”

“Is he gone?”

“He went inside.”

“Good. Can we go now?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t break your camera did he?”

“No. The film is good and exposed, though. Did he break anything of yours?”

“My self-esteem. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“You’re going to have a nasty bruise.”

“No kidding.”

She helped him up; he felt a little dizzy. She went and got her camera off the ground while he tried to stay on his feet. Then she walked him toward the Datsun.

“Go fuck yourself,” Crane said.

“What?”

“That’s what you told that guy. I can’t believe you sometimes.”

“I guess I do lack tact,” Boone admitted. “Are you starting to understand?”

They were at the car.

“Understand what?”

She opened the door on the rider’s side. “The seriousness of this.”

He touched the side of his face. “I understand pain, if that’s what you mean.” He got in the car. She went around the driver’s side and got in.

“I also understand why that guy was pissed off at us,” Crane said. “Like anybody in his place would be.”

“You can rationalize anything, can’t you, Crane? Even getting the shit beat out of you.”

She started the car. Crane looked back at the barrels, standing on top of each other, as if to get a better look at them as they drove away.

They were parked alongside the road again. The midnight skyline of the Kemco plant was a study in plastic and steel and soft-focus green-yellow-aqua light, against a backdrop of smoke and smokestacks.

“Why doesn’t it make any noise?” Crane asked. “It’s creepy that it doesn’t make any noise.”

“It isn’t a noisy operation,” Boone shrugged. She was leaned back casually in the Datsun’s driver’s seat, munching on sunflower seeds. The near-darkness they were sitting in made for interesting shadows on her face; she looked quite lovely, for a girl, woman, eating sunflower seeds.

“What are they making in there, anyway?” he asked her.

“Herbicides. Pesticides. Plastics. Lots of things.”

“Useful things,” he countered.

“Right. Like Agent Orange.”

“Are they still making that?”

“Yes, and PCB, until a year ago.”

“Isn’t that a little unfair?”

“Bringing up the recent past? I don’t think so. I don’t think there should be a statute of limitations, just because the murder you committed was ten years ago.”

Crane said nothing.

“I don’t object to everything they make. I know a lot of farmers depend on the stuff... though personally I can’t see eating anything that isn’t organically grown.”

“Jeez, who’d have guessed?”

“What’s with you, Crane?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re really on the rag tonight.”

“I guess I am. Sorry.”

They sat. Boone ate her sunflower seeds, watched the loading-dock area. It seemed a quiet night: not a Kemco truck to be seen. Crane was still studying the Kemco plant itself, fighting ambivalent feelings. His face hurt, from where he’d been hit.

“What are those things?” he asked her, pointing.

“Those fat silo things? Storage vats.”

“What’s in them?”

“Waste, I guess.”

“They’re fucking huge.”

“That they are.”

“You can’t be right. There isn’t that much waste coming out of this one plant.”

“You been reading my research material, Crane. You’re up on how much hazardous waste is produced in this country every year.”

Yes he was. Thirty-two million tons. But somehow it seemed obnoxious of her to mention it right now.

“I also know,” Crane said, “that this plant, like most chemical processing plants, has its own waste-disposal unit. They are not dumping all that shit illegally.”

“Of course they aren’t. Most of it gets dumped in the river.”

“What river?”

“The Delaware River.”

“Where’s that?”

She pointed back behind the Kemco plant. “We can drive straight into it, if you like... we aren’t a mile from it.”

Feeling foolish, he said, “The stuff’s processed when it goes in, isn’t it? It’s probably cleaner than the river it’s going into.”

“Maybe. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to find out about the stuff they can’t run through their disposal unit. The stuff they have to dump.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Crane?”