song thumped over a gaggle of voices. He turned off the engine. Better go see if anyone needed any medical attention before he took down the driver’s insurance and sued him into next week. The idiot.
A door thumped shut at the same time he heard the hard flat thwack of shoes or boots hitting the macadam. Glass crunched.
“Look what we got!” A young voice, high-pitched with excitement. “We caught us a faggot!”
Another thump, more crunching, several whoops almost drowning out the stifling beat of the bass. Dvorak’s hand froze on the door handle. The idiot. He was the idiot. He lunged for his cell phone, had the power on, and actually hit a nine and a one before the blow hit across his forearm, tumbling the phone from his grasp and making him gasp from the flaring pain. A long arm reached down to scoop the phone off the passenger seat.
There were hands on his jacket, tugging him sideways, and he watched as the cell phone arced through the edge of his headlights into the thick young corn. “Queerbait! You like to suck dick? You like little boys?”
He twisted against the hands, groping for his car keys, his heart beating twice as fast as the sullen song, thinking he could still get out of this, still get away, until one of them hit him in the temple hard, not a fist, he thought, as his vision grayed and the keyring jingled out of reach.
In front of him, the headlights illuminated a swath of achingly green corn, cut off from the shoulder of the road by a sagging fence of barbed wire twisted around rough posts. His door was yanked open, and he wanted to think of Paul, to think of his children, but the only thing in his head was how the fence looked like the one on the cover of
“Comere, faggot,” one of them said as he was dragged from his seat. And the pain began.
“This stuff is going to kill us all!”
“Why are we having this meeting? This problem was supposed to have been resolved back in seventy- seven.”
“I want to know if my grandchildren are safe!”
The mayor of Millers Kill squeezed the microphone base as if he could choke off the rising babel with one hand. “People, please. Please! Let’s try to keep some sense of order here! I know it’s hot and I know you’re worried. Skiff and I will answer your questions the best we can. Meanwhile, sit down, raise your hand, and wait your turn.” Jim Cameron glared at his constituents until the more excitable ones grudgingly lowered themselves back into their over-warm metal folding chairs.
The Reverend Clare Fergusson, priest of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, slid sideways an inch in her own chair. She had come to her first alderman’s meeting with the nursing director of the Millers Kill Infirmary, and though she was glad for the expert commentary, Paul Foubert was a good six-feet-four and close to three hundred pounds. He not only spread across his undersized chair onto hers, he also radiated heat. She pulled at her clerical collar in a useless attempt to loosen it. She was sitting next to a giant hot-water bottle on the last and stickiest night of June.
“Yes. The chair recognizes Everett Daniels.”
A gangly, balding man stood up. “Back in seventy-six when they started making such a flap about PCBs, we were told we didn’t have anything to worry about because we were upstream from the factories in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls where they used the stuff. Are you telling us it’s now migrating upstream from the Hudson into the Millers Kill?”
“They did find elevated levels of PCB in our river, Everett. Now obviously, water doesn’t flow backwards. But we are awful close to the core contamination sites and our river joins up with the Hudson just a couple miles from where we’re sitting. The DEP folks don’t know yet if the stuff is coming into the Kill from the wetlands or groundwater or what.”
A woman’s voice cracked through the air. “Why don’t you tell the truth? The stuff is coming from that damn storage dump we allowed in the quarry back in nineteen-seventy! And that new resort development is bringing up the chemical and letting it run straight downhill into town lands!”
“Mrs. Van Alstyne, I asked that everyone raise a hand to be recognized!”
Clare jerked in her seat. The only Van Alstyne she knew in town was Russ Van Alstyne, the chief of police. His wife was supposed to be gorgeous. She made a futile swipe at the damp pieces of hair that had fallen out of her twist and craned her neck for a better view.
A woman in her early seventies stood, sturdy as a fireplug and so short her tightly permed white hair barely cleared the head-tops around her. Clare tried to see the people sitting around. Where was Linda Van Alstyne?
“I was saying it back in Seventy and I’ll say it now, allowing that PCB dump was a big mistake. They said it was air-tight and leakproof and waved a chunk of money in front of the town council until the aldermen rolled over and said yes. Then they put the blasted thing in the old shale quarry, even though a high-school geology teacher, which you were at the time, Jim Cameron, could have told them shale was a highly permeable rock!” She turned her head to address her neighbors. “That means it leaks!”
“I protested against it too, Mrs. Van Alstyne,” the mayor said.
Clare’s mental fog cleared away. It wasn’t Russ’s wife. “That’s his mother” she said to herself. Paul looked at her curiously. She felt her cheeks grow warmer.
“The state cleaned up that site in seventy-nine.” Mayor Cameron continued. “Last tests show traces of PCB in the quarry, but they’re at acceptable levels.”
“Of course they are! The blasted stuff leaked away into the bedrock. Now comes along BWI Development and gives us the same song and dance, this time promising lots of money from the tourists and lots of jobs and what does the board do? Roll over and hand ’em a permit to start plowing and blasting over fifty acres of Landry property. It’s been three months they’ve been working and suddenly we find PCB in the Dewitt Elementary playground. In a playground!”
“Can we just stop the hysterics and stick to the facts!?” An angular blonde stood near the front row. In contrast to the Wednesday night casual dress of the rest of the crowd, she wore a suit so sharply cut it looked bulletproof. “Before we ever started construction, we had to get a permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection. It took them two years to grant it. Two years! They tested the quarry, they tested the
