there’s another earthquake,” Louis said, “you should try to stand in a doorway.”
The old man grimaced deafly. “What’s that?”
“I said you should try to stand in an interior doorway, or get under a table. They say it’s the safest place to be.”
“Oh yeah, huh. All right, Louie boy.” Mullins tottered back to his sponge. “Allll right, Louie boy.”
There was an envelope in the mailbox from the law firm of Arger, Kummer & Rudman. It contained two Red Sox tickets and Henry Rudman’s business card. In the rear window of Louis’s room a flowering white bush had appeared and was startlingly ablaze with sunlight, the ecliptic having swung around far to the north since the sun’s last appearance at dinnertime. He made a fried-egg sandwich and watched Hogan’s Heroes. He made another fried-egg sandwich and watched the network news. Midway through this informative half hour, NBC took a trip to Boston and discovered, to its astonishment, that a pair of earthquakes had occurred outside the city. Footage was run of broken plate glass and of supermarket aisles where solitary employees mopped up juice and jelly from fallen bottles. The correspondent related facts that were actually consistent with what Louis had been hearing hourly at WSNE: the Easter earthquake, which had measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and had been followed by several small aftershocks, had caused an estimated $12 million damage in three counties and resulted in fourteen injuries. (Almost all the injuries, as Louis had noted in the Globe, were due to panic, a surprising number of people having seriously bruised or cut themselves while fleeing their shaking homes, and one angler on a causeway north of Ipswich having put a fishhook in his eyelid during a dash to solid ground, and one motorist having steered his car into a ditch.) NBC viewers were then treated to a taste of history (“earthquakes are not unheard of in New England”) and an aerial glimpse of the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, followed by reassuring words from a power-company spokesman, an angry statement from a wine merchant (for him, apparently, nature was just another local with no appreciation of fine vintages), and finally a heartwarmingly inarticulate account of the earthquake from an Ipswich teenager, delivered with much incredulous head-shaking: “It started slow. Then bam!” The correspondent earned the right to say his own name in a low and earnest voice by first saying, in a low and earnest voice, that this earthquake “may not have been the last.” There was a brief, medium-distance shot of the NBC anchorman wearing a wry smirk (he was paid $34,000 a week not to yawn during these shots) before the scene changed to an old-time drugstore with an avuncular pharmacist behind the counter. America watched helplessly as the promotional drama unfolded. Not long ago, on late-night TV, Louis had seen this variety of commercial made fun of. The worried consumer returned to the drugstore and, instead of thanking the avuncular pharmacist for his advice, listed the grotesque disorders and hormonal imbalances induced by the recommended preparation, and ended up (a bit predictably maybe?) murdering him with a gun. This hard-hitting NBC satire had been followed by a real ad, for condoms.
After the news there was baseball, which Louis had been watching between nine and eighteen innings of per evening. While the Red Sox piled up an early 8—0 lead, he paged through the Globe, and for the second time in two weeks the paper gave him an uncanny feeling. It might have been a prank birthday issue with familiar names in it. The lead story in the business section was headlined Sweeting-Aldren Shares Take Another Beating. The woes suddenly besetting New England’s second-largest chemical producer were so numerous that a jump was required to page 67. The company’s latest quarterly report, released this morning, showed a sharp decline in profits, as sales remained flat and rising energy prices and a cyclical shortage of several key raw materials increased production costs. In light of this report, investors on Wall Street continued to react highly negatively to the news on Tuesday that Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody might have suffered significant damage in Sunday’s earthquake; the company’s price per share had already fallen by 4.875 to 64.5—the largest two-day point drop in the company’s 48-year history, and the largest two-day percentage drop since August 11, 1972. Sweeting-Aldren press officer Ridgely Holbine emphatically denied that any production lines had been damaged in the earthquake, but speculation continued to be fueled by the discovery late Monday of large quantities of a greenish effluent in a culvert running through a residential development four hundred yards from a Sweeting-Aldren installation. Holbine said the company was investigating the “extremely remote possibility” of a connection between the facility and the effluent; according to one analyst, these remarks were immediately interpreted on Wall Street as a “virtual mea culpa.” Holbine stressed that Sweeting-Aldren was known to have “perhaps the best environmental record of any player in the industry.” He explained that its energy costs were high because of its commitment to “recycling, not dumping, toxic waste,” and noted that as recently as January, Forbes magazine had cited Sweeting-Aldren’s “established track record as the most profitable chem concern in America.” Nevertheless, the price of a share of the company’s stock had yesterday fallen by more than a point in the last thirty minutes of trading on the NYSE. The fear of further damaging earthquake activity north of Boston, and no less important, the specter of lawsuits raised by the discovery of the effluent, were combining to—
Louis looked up at the TV screen to see a baseball sailing into the visitors’ bullpen at Fenway. The Sox lead had been cut in half. In the kitchen, the telephone rang.
It was Eileen. Nearly a week had passed since Louis had left a string of increasingly sarcastic messages on her machine, but she was not apologetic. She just wanted to say that she and Peter were having a big party at Peter’s on the twenty-eighth. “It’s a disaster theme party,” she said. “You have to wear a costume to get in, OK? You have to. And it has to have something to do with disasters. It won’t be any fun if people don’t dress up, so you really have to.”
Louis was looking down at yesterday’s Globe, which he’d dropped on the outgoing stack after relieving it of its comics. Plain as day the headline on page one: Quake Aftermath: Large Chemical Spill in Peabody.
“Just come, all right?” Eileen said. “You can bring people if you want to, but they have to have a costume too. Let me give you the address.”
Louis took the address. “Why do you want me at this party?”
“Don’t you want to come?”
“Oh, definitely maybe. Just I’m not sure why you happened to invite me.”
“ ‘Cause it’s going to be a lot of fun and lots of people are coming.”
“Are you saying you enjoy my company?”
“Look, if you don’t want to come, don’t come. But I have to get off now, OK? So I’ll see you on the twenty-eighth, maybe.”
According to the Globe, the greenish effluent had first been noticed by residents of a Peabody subdivision on Monday morning, eighteen hours after Sunday’s earthquake fourteen miles to the northeast. A four-year-old boy and his two-year-old sister were playing by a swale adjacent to the subdivision and returned home with “a substance resembling Prestone antifreeze” on their clothing. In the course of the afternoon, homeowners observed that the swale, still filled with runoff from recent heavy rains, was turning green. A cloying organic odor, “like magic marker,” was noticed. As of Wednesday evening the odor had largely dissipated. State environmental officials had so far not succeeded in isolating the source of the effluent but were focusing their investigation on a fenced and wooded property owned by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, and an adjacent five-acre wetland drained by the polluted swale. Ridgely Holbine of Sweeting-Aldren repeated his claim that the company had not discharged significant quantities of industrial waste in Peabody for nearly twenty years. He said the property in question housed a milling facility and a number of small holding tanks for “intermediate processes,”none of which showed any signs of earthquake damage. Meanwhile one Peabody resident, Doris Mulcahey, told reporters that her husband and eldest daughter had both died of leukemia within the last seven years, and that she had not been aware until now that the wooded property four hundred yards from her home belonged to Sweeting-Aldren. “I’m not saying they caused it,” Mulcahey said. “But I sure as heck don’t rule