21
“Finally,” says Shit Pail.
Rupert is starting to feel a little guilty about referring to her as “Shit Pail” in his head, but he doesn’t remember if he’d even caught her name to begin with, and of course, it’s far too late to ask.
“Yes, finally,” he says, shifting his sitting position on the floor. His ass is beginning to ache.
Shit Pail rummages through her bag, which contains everything that’s ever existed in the history of Man. Things falling out include a standard nail file, mints, a protein bar, an airline barf bag, a stale half-slice of white bread, the Shambhala Pocket Classics edition of The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, a row of eight red raffle tickets, a piece of black Basalt, and a knotted, but deflated long orange balloon. That’s just what fell out.
“That took a while,” she says, still pushing her entire arm around in the big, allegedly-handmade, woven Costa Rican bag.
“Well, I wasn’t really trying, was I?”
She stopped and looked at him.
“Yes, sweetie. Had you been trying, you’d have been in like Flint.”
“Flynn.”
“In like Flint. It’s a Movie. Coburn.”
“The film’s title was a play on ‘in like Flynn,’ which referred to Errol Flynn and possibly his sexual exploits, which I assure you wasn’t, nor would be, the case in this story.”
Shit Pail shifted on her shit pail.
“You’re kind of an asshole.”
“I know.”
“Woolah!” Shit Pail yells, jolting Rupert out of his too-self aware pity party of one.
“What?” Rupert lost the thread.
“Sorry. Woolah.” She pulls a blunt out of her bag.
“Weed?”
“And crack. Better than nothing. I forgot it was in here.”
“Screw it. Light it up.”
“Second time smoking crack.”
“First,” Rupert corrects.
“Sure.” She grins, lights up the Woolah and Rupert continues.
22
The following day, beneath an uncharacteristically grey and brooding sky, Rupert and Joe went to the D.E.A.T.H. program site. All the driving around with Jesus had helped Rupert become pretty familiar with the area, and as they pulled down the muddy road in Joe’s muddy ‘89 Yukon through a plain of Pampas grass and Saw Palmetto, passing big, slow-moving, liquid-carrying tanker trucks, he knew he was somewhere near Spanish Point, where Leenda’s burial mound was located.
As they approached the site, Rupert saw that nothing about this operation appeared legitimate. Joe didn’t appear to notice anything amiss, which made Rupert more suspicious.
The flat plain had a massive pit dug into it, and into the side of the pit was the opening to a drift mine, which looked cartoonish—a big, squared tunnel entrance propped up by large wooden beams. Methheads of all stripes and levels of withdrawal walked into the mine with big, empty blue buckets and shuffled out with them full of brackish-looking water. They then walked unsteadily up a rickety set of wooden steps out of the pit, over to a couple of open tanks, up the aluminum steps to the top of those, and dumped the water in.
If Rupert squinted, the entire enterprise resembled a modern-day depiction of the now-discredited theory of slave labor building of the pyramids—the kind of thing you used to see on the History Channel before it was taken over by “reality” shows such as Possum Hunter and Ancient Alien Plumbers. Hundreds of thin, unhappy, sick people toiling zombie-like, performing the time-honored tradition of monotonous, soul-killing slog on behalf of their betters.
When the open tanks were full, the tanker truck alongside it would drop its industrial hose in, suck up the water, cap off, and move out, replaced by another.
A work trailer stood some distance from the pit. A few Tweakers shook and scratched themselves in a short line outside the door. Some tottered around the back where a few barrels had been placed to throw up in. When he or she was finished, they’d dip a scoop into a bucket of sawdust and throw it into the barrel over the fresh vomit, then either return to work, or to the line outside the trailer.
This is pretty fucked up, Rupert thought.
“Joe, does this look normal to you?” Rupert asked.
Joe looked through the windshield at the scene before them, considering it, and then to Rupert:
“Well, I don’t know what it is yet, so I don’t know.”
Unexpectedly astute. But still.
They got out of the Yukon and walked to the trailer. As they neared, a woman in coveralls came out and adjusted her hard hat. She had a sturdy-looking Maglite holstered at her side. More hard hats and inferior flashlights hung along the railing of the trailer steps, for anyone to use, Rupert supposed, though he didn’t see many workers wearing them. He suspected they didn’t much care if a chunk of mine ceiling crushed their heads to a pulp—in their condition, they might have hoped for it.
The woman stopped as she walked down the steps, ignoring the barrage of comments, questions, and outright pleas of the Tweakers who’d been waiting to speak with her. She watched Rupert and Joe as they approached.
Rupert elbowed Joe, who had thumbed the screen of his phone while he walked. The phone was again reholstered into Joe’s back pocket.
“We’re here for the program,” Rupert said.
She examined them, but less Joe than Rupert.
“You don’t look too strung out,” she said to him.
Rupert looked at Joe—Rupert hadn’t noticed he was sweating a little and he had a slight tremor.
“Not yet,” Rupert said.
“Stocked up, huh?”
Rupert shrugged. “Came prepared.”
“Well, it’s only going to make it worse for you in the end,” she snarled, clearly disgusted with everyone and everything around her.
Rupert noticed an embroidered nametag on her coveralls that read Marge.
“Can I call you Marge?” he asked.
“No,” she answered, curt. “You don’t call me anything. Grab a couple of helmets and lights.”
Rupert did and handed Joe his.
“Follow me,” Marge said, and they proceeded to the pit, down the stairs creaking beneath them, and into the mine opening, dodging working Methheads.
The tunnel was black and crudely dug out with a few support structures spaced too far apart for Rupert’s sense of well being. Marge said nothing, but as they progressed, the tunnel grew wider and taller, eventually opening up to about the width of a two-lane road. The deeper they went, the more the scenery changed.
As he tried to avoid the sloshing buckets carried by the teetering Methheads, Rupert let his flashlight beam wander over the walls and ceiling—small calcium carbonate lumps and bumps ran in haphazard formations along the edges of the tunnel, their sources found leaking above, drip, drip, dripping the measured geologic process that would build them into something more. As the trio moved on, the formations grew larger, drifting in shades of chestnut, ochre, tawny, amber and white, creating stalagmites and stalactites, flowstones and helictites, what they called “soda straws”—hollow, cylindrical mineral tubes—and “bacon strips,” when the flowstones grew down in rippling sheets. Rupert had visited a show cave up in Virginia, so this wasn’t entirely new to him. It looked as if they’d mined their way into a natural cave system.
Marge walked fast and soon there was a little distance between them, enough that Joe felt comfortable enough to have a conversation.
“Hey Rupe,” he starts. “Mom started to get a little suspicious last night after you left.”
“Suspicious of what?”
“Of you.”
“For what?”
Someone, somewhere threw up and its sickening echo traveled throughout the caverns, triggering a vomit domino effect that continued throughout their conversation.
“Something about the possibility that you might share our special recipe with some other operations around here.”
“Joe, why would I do that?” The whole we’re-all-big-time paranoia began to irritate Rupert.
“I dunno,” Joe shrugged. “She heard somewhere that you’ve been dealing with Tommy Bananas. Maybe even Bucket.”
Rupert was torn between the concern he felt at knowing people named “Tommy Bananas” and “Bucket” and the speed at which Merideth could obtain this ridiculous information.
“I’ve known the woman for fewer than twenty-four hours!” Rupert stopped and took a deep breath. “I’ve never heard of them, Joe. But so what if I did?”
Joe shook his head. “It’s not how things work, Rupe. You just don’t do that.”
“Know people? You can’t just know people . . . ?”
Joe’s back pocket beeped nine times in various tones, then started ringing.
Rupert’s eyes rolled involuntarily back into his head. “You know, I hear you can keep that from happening . . . I don’t even own one and I know that.”
Joe fumbled with his phone. “I know, but I don’t know how—”
“Hello, The Gorge (Fine Men’s Cloth—”
Joe hung up. “Yeah,” he looked to Rupert. “I need to figure that out.”
“How do you even have any reception in here?”
Finally, Marge stopped for them to catch up.
“Used to be a show cave,” she said. “Till water seeped in from the Gulf.” Another fifteen feet and they rounded a corner, entering a huge, cathedral-sized cavern.
They stood at the edge of what looked like an underground lake.
“Wow,” Joe whispered with the kind of awe that might be inspired by a Close Encounters ship landing. Rupert was pretty amazed, too. He’d seen cavern lakes before, but nothing like the size of this thing. Enormous stalactites pointed down to the water, pocking its surface with a light, eerie rain. Around the edges that were accessible, Methheads came, scooped, and left. Marge pointed her flashlight to a place on the cavern wall across the water where the color lightened considerably about ten feet up.
Must be on an incline, Rupert thought.
“High water mark,” she said. “We’re about halfway there. If you want in on this, you’d better start soon.”
“Why is it being emptied?” Rupert asked, forgetting for a moment why he was there.
“What the hell do you care?”
“Um. I guess I don’t.” Rupert rubbed the back of his head.
“I don’t know,” she answered anyway. “I don’t care either. But I guess it’s cheaper to use these sorry sacks of shi—you guys . . . than to run a length of industrial hose and pump it. Anything to save a buck. Right, let’s go.”
They wove their way back through woozy Tweakers and into the too-bright grey outside.
“Is there paperwork?” Rupert asked as Marge retrieved their helmets and flashlights. She laughed and walked back to the trailer.
“Come back tomorrow, seven a.m.,” she called over her shoulder.
No. Nothing about this was even a little bit legal. Stanley would have had nothing to do with anything like this.
Rupert and Joe walked back to the Yukon and as they passed one of the idling tankers containing a lunch-eating driver, Rupert yelled over the rumbling engine.
“Hey! Spanish Point’s around here, right?”
“Yeah!” the driver yelled back, chewing what looked to be a classic bologna-on-white and jerked his thumb back behind his head. “About half-mile!”
“Thanks!”
They climbed into the Yukon, and Rupert waited until Joe had finished looking at whatever he was looking at on his phone. When he looked up and moved to put the key in the ignition, Rupert asked: “You going back tomorrow?”
“I dunno. Maybe. You?”
“Hell no.”
Sock it to me...