Grimoire Diabolique

determined to thwart his progress. Smith was a liberal; he was also an over-reactor. He remembered any number of headlines detailing his worst ecological fears. WAYNESVILLE CANCER RATES FOUND TO BE THREE TIMES HIGHER THAN NATIONAL AVERAGE. A.A. COUNTY FINED MILLIONS FOR SECRETLY PUMPING UNTREATED SEWAGE INTO BAY. BROCK CLIFFS NUCLEAR WASTE WATER SEEPS INTO RESERVOIR. And so on. Smith, as a father, felt legitimately paranoid of the faux pas of this new age of progress. Just nights ago he’d read in the Post about containers of toxic waste that had fallen off a truck near an Edgewood elementary school. Some teenagers had opened one of the containers, and had died in hours. Then there was that town up north, an entire community evacuated when cable TV diggers had uncovered a secretly buried consignment of binary waste products, compliments of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. The stuff had been there twenty years. No wonder the town’s miscarriage and birth defect rates had been so high…

 What a world, Smith considered.

 And this thing in the ravine, it looked like a chemical drum of some sort, with bright red stripes like a warning. Smith had spotted it from the back porch with his binoculars. Bird watching, he always told Marie. Oh, that’s nice, dear, she’d said once. It’s wonderful that you haven’t lost interest in your childhood hobbies. This was partly true at any rate; Smith had indeed been an avid bird-watcher as a child. The only thing he watched now, however, was that Donna Whatshername next door, the neighbor’s kid. On days she didn’t have classes at the community college, she’d lie out in her backyard, to work on her tan. What she also worked on was Smith’s libido. Jeeeeeeesus Christ! he must’ve thought a million times, focusing the Bushnell 7x12s. It astounded him, the level to which modern swimwear had reverted. Bikinis these days made the ones Marie had worn years ago look like winter parkas. Smith had a funny feeling that Donna Whatshername knew he was watching her. The poses seemed staged, lewd, nearly masturbatory. Too often the girl would untie her top and idly roll toward Smith’s gaze, her eyes closed as if sleepy. Donna was, to put it eloquently, well-possessed of an ample mammarian carriage, or, in Smith’s less eloquent consensus: Good Christ and Lord Almighty, that is one humdinger of a rack of milk wagons!

All of which had fairly little to do with the bizarre white drum that sat not 100 hundred yards beyond his property line. He’d been focusing up, the usual ritual upon coming home from work, while Marie prepared dinner. Donna sauntered across her own yard as if on cue, all long tan legs, curvy contours, and…mammarian carriage. “Jeeeeeeesus Christ!” Smith muttered, the binoculars close to welded to his eyes. “She ain’t wearing a bikini, she’s wearing dental floss.”

“What’s that, dear?”

 Smith jerked the Bushnells quickly toward the woods. Marie had come out onto the patio, looking domestic as ever in her fuzzy slippers, lilac sundress, and calico apron.

 “A black-throated blue warbler,” Smith feigned enthusiasm. “A female too. You can tell by the pink spot on each wing. They’re rare for this area.”

 “Oh, that’s nice, dear.” Her broad, pretty face shifted in a blink of fuddlement. “I could have sworn you said something about dental floss… Anyway, dinner’ll be ready in ten minutes. Have you seen Jeannie?”

 “Naw,” Smith replied, never veering his gaze from the scape of the woods. “She’s probably watching those Star Trek reruns, as usual. Either that or she’s in her room playing with her Kirk and Spock dolls.”

Marie disappeared back to the kitchen, leaving Smith slightly asweat. Be careful, you idiot. Yes, he’d have to be more careful than this. He felt no shame in his frequent voyeurisms— Looking’s not cheating, he rationalized. It wasn’t like he was having sex with Donna, was it? He was merely reveling in the visual appreciation of her womanhood. What was wrong with that? This was no different than bird watching, espying pretty things in nature, celebrating them. Donna Dental Floss was a rare black-throated blue warbler and nothing more.

But, boy, oh boy, a thought seeped. What I wouldn’t give to—

The most adulterous images betrayed him. Smith humping the foxy coed hell for leather right there in the grass, his eyes crossed. Dog-style, missionary, her feet pinned back behind her ears—it didn’t matter—redepositing one allotment of his semen after the next—

Stop it! he commanded himself. Don’t be a cad!

But cad or not, just as Smith would turn the binoculars back to the bikini-clad human masterpiece in the next yard, he caught one last glimpse of the wood’s descent, and he noticed the—

“What the hell—”

 —white, red-striped drum.

 “—is that?”

 The drum sat half-buried in the ravine, and that’s when Smith dropped the Bushnells and bolted, for it wasn’t only the white drum that he’d seen, but also his 7-year-old silken haired daughter eagerly ambling toward it.

««—»»

“Stay AWAY from that! Smith’s voice cracked through the dense green woods. Jeannie glanced up, and froze. Terror bloomed in the big, bright-blue eyes. Curiosity incarnate had been caught; Daddy the Destroyer was here.

“One more step, young lady, and you lose your dolls for a week,” Smith threatened from the edge of the dried ravine.

“But, Daddy—”

 “For a month,” he embellished. “Now step away from that thing. It’s dangerous. It’s dirty.”

“No it’s not, Daddy,” the little girl replied. “It’s—

 “If you don’t do as you’re told, missy, it’s no more Star Trek. Forever.”

This horrifying consequence reflected an even deeper terror in Jeannie’s shining child-eyes. She paused, peering at the white drum, then backed off. She ascended the ravine’s thatchy slope while Smith himself went down. “Stay there,” he said, pointing a stern finger.

“But why is it dirty, Daddy?”

“It just is,” came his articulate response. He plodded toward the cryptic keg. How can you explain something like this to a 7-year-old? Well, you see, honey, some really bad man decided to dump this drum of tumor-accelerating, carcinogenic, ganglionic-response-inhibiting and probably irradiated toxic effluvium in our back yard because he was too lazy to dispose of it properly. And it’s dirty, dirty stuff, and that means if you get near it your orbital lobes will turn into giant coaxial metastatic masses by the time you’re out of college, and your ovaries’ll be glowing like a pair of fucking Christmas tree lights. “It’s dirty, honey,” he replied instead. “It’s like dog poo. You don’t want to get near it.”

 Her little face looked cruxed. “But you’re getting near it.”

 Smith frowned, choosing a long fallen limb. “That’s because I’m a grownup, and grownups are allowed. But little girls aren’t.”

“That’s dumb, Daddy,” came Jeannie’s haughty response.

 Precocious, Smith thought. The drum, he saw now, had no writing on it, just the bright-scarlet stripes, which made sense. If you’re going to dump hazardous waste illegally, you don’t leave your name and address. And he was sure now that’s what it was. The drum sat on its side as if dropped. At once Smith noticed a meaty scent…

 Like rotten pork, he thought. His nostrils cringed. Or like that cadaver the county cops brought in last summer. It had ripened in the heat for days, hidden beneath humid hay bales. Cooking.

The drum’s rim appeared crimped, offering a small egress. Smith poked the branch into it and pushed. “Aw, shit!” he exclaimed and leapt back. The lid popped off, emptying a gush of black, lumpy sludge into the ravine’s craw. Smith could’ve vomited. The stuff stank worse than a fish market dumpster in high summer.

He gaped at it a moment, his handkerchief to his face. The sludge looked coagulated, like gravy that hadn’t evened. Large bubbles rose from the surface of the spill, percolating, and the stench thickened. Thank God the creek had long-since dried up, otherwise the stream would be hauling this gunk away right now. Smith felt momentarily weird, staring at the crisp, popping bubbles. His sweat rushed—the mass of ichor seemed to waft shifts of heat.

 “Come on.” Smith huffed back up the hillock and led Jeannie away from the ravine. He took long strides,