Zero Hour

Earl pondered that, smoking. Whereabouts? It was a question easier asked than answered. There had been Aroostook, so near the Canadian border the geese flying by overhead would cuss you out in French when you shot at them, and then get the Royal Mounties on your ass for doing it without a license. There had been the bunch of years he’d worked at that poultry-processing plant in Belfast, renting a dump of an apartment on Union Street down the hill near the harbor, where the white trash tenants upstairs would pool their food stamps every Friday to pick up a few six-packs of cheap beer at the grocer’s, start drinking after supper so they’d be bombed out of their skulls by midnight, good and lubed for the fistfights you could always expect to break out between them, and that would often as not spill out onto the road — especially on those hot summer nights when they’d get irritable, peel off their shirts, and wail on each other so hard he could hear the sound of flesh being pounded like raw slabs of beef through his open window. Brother on brother, father on son, husbands on their cheating women’s boyfriends, they’d have all kinds of drunken grudge matches going on till the local cops came to dampen the entertainment.

Earl looked at the U-Haul man in silence, squinting through the cigarette smoke streaming from his nose and mouth. Where did he consider himself from? Aroostook with its cranberry bogs and dead things? Belfast with its bloody chicken guts, and feathers blowing in the streets? Or Thomaston state penitentiary, maybe twenty, thirty miles farther south? A dark and comfortless abode of guilt and wretchedness, that was what the lawmakers who’d ordered it built in the 1820s had wanted for its inmates on the charter they drew up, and they’d absolutely gotten their wish. Three-foot-thick granite walls, nine-by-four max security cells with layers of stone covering them top and bottom, the yard a deep limestone pit quarried out by prison laborers. All that rock, its weight could grind the soul out of a man in no time, and Earl guessed he’d have hung himself long before his dime- and-a-half stretch there was done if not for having kept busy with his wall art. He also guessed it had gone more toward making him what he was than anything or anywhere else he could think about.

The state pen, see ya when I see ya—ayuh, ayuh.

“Come from a spot on the coast called Thomaston,” he said now. “Quiet. Big white Yankee houses, churches, trees, and the quarry on old Limestone Hill. A town where you’d think time was standing still if it wasn’t for the change of seasons.”

The U-Haul man scratched his stubble again.

“Sounds like the kind of place somebody would have a hard time leaving… but then my brother-in-law tells me it’s tough earning a decent wage up there.” He slid a clipboard with an attached pen in front of Earl. “Anyway, here’s the rental application. You want to show me a charge card and your driver’s license while you’re making it out, I can go right ahead and give you the keys to the van.”

Earl took his wallet out of an inner coat pocket, removed the two pieces of ID he’d obtained from Hasul, and passed them over the counter. He didn’t know or care whether Hasul and his people had stolen someone else’s identity, replacing the original photo on the driver’s license with his own, or if they’d somehow had a forgery made to order. The important thing was that the license number and Visa account for a strawman who happened to look exactly like him were both valid, and that the credit line on the plastic was around twenty thou.

Earl was filling out the requested information — his newly acquired name of Gerald Donovan, his bogus address and phone number, this and that — when it occurred to him there might be a thing or two Hasul hadn’t provided that he could pick out of the U-Haul man’s brain.

“Me ’n my friend had to circle around a bit trying to find your lot, noticed all those chemical tanks behind the plant across the intersection,” he said in an offhandedly conversational tone. “You know which factory I mean?”

The U-Haul rep nodded.

“That’d be Raja.”

“Hmm?”

“Raja Petrochemicals,” the rep said. “It’s a fuel refinery… Indian outfit, you’re wondering about its funny handle.”

“Indian like Sioux and Apache?”

“Indian like an order of tandoori chicken and curried rice to go.” The U-Haul man’s whiskered face hung a frown. “What they’ve got in the tanks isn’t anything you’d want on a takeout menu, I can tell you that.”

Earl glanced up from the application form.

“You don’t seem any too thrilled about having them for neighbors.”

“Won’t argue it, Mr. Donovan,” the rep said, reading the name on the driver’s license he’d been handed. “Not with a few hundred thousand pressure pounds of HF stored out there in those tanks you saw driving past the plant.”

Earl put on a mildly inquisitive look.

“HF?” he said. “What’s that?”

“Hydrofluoric acid,” said the U-Haul man. His frown had deepened. “If you were from right around here, or read the same newspaper story I did a while ago, I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

Earl waited for more.

“Stuff’s what they use to make high-octane gasoline, and it’s toxic as hell,” the U-Haul rep said. “Stays a gas when it’s sealed in those tanks, but they ever get ruptured, let it out into the air, it would condense into clouds, even rain, that can eat through glass and concrete. And if you don’t think that sounds bad enough, there’s something about HF that makes human skin absorb it real easy. Soaks right up through the pores into the bone, eats away everything in between. Say it gets inside your eyes, nose, mouth… or you breathe it… I don’t want to be gross, but it’d turn a person’s insides to slush.”

Earl’s writing hand had dawdled over the rental application. “I can see how you wouldn’t forget that article,” he said.

The rep nodded.

“And I haven’t told you the half of it,” he said. “According to what I read, a couple, three years back, dozens of families had to be evacuated from some town in Texas because of a refinery fire that let HF out into the air. Also right around then, Russia had to resettle a few thousand people because it’d been leaking from a government factory… and add those situations together, the amount of HF I’m talking about doesn’t come to a fraction of what’s in Raja’s tanks.”

Lifting his cigarette from its ashtray rest, Earl sucked in a chestful of smoke.

“I expect there’d be some serious precautions against anything happening to the tanks,” he said on his exhale.

“Should be, but aren’t,” the U-Haul man said. “After those psycho terrorists drew a bull’s eye around New York, Homeland Security pushed through a bunch of laws that said chemical companies had to beef up their safeguards. But it hardly bothers to enforce them — you know how it goes. Time passes. Everybody bitches about costs. The cops and feds get busy with other things. Elections come and politicians move on to talking about ‘the children’ and teachers and classroom sizes, like they really give a damn about anybody’s brats but their own. Meanwhile the chemical outfits hire shysters to find all kinds of loopholes and get their lobbyists in Washington to make sure they can relax and sit pretty. Couldn’t be gladder that nobody’s paying attention to them, since improvements cost money, and they’d rather gamble with people’s lives… and I mean millions in Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York just worrying about Raja Petro alone… than spend a nickel.”

Earl was shaking his head in feigned disbelief.

“Sounds damned unbelievable,” he said.

“It does, I know,” said the U-Haul man. “But how the newspaper reporter figured it, the amount of HF gas in Raja’s tanks is enough to kill off not one, two, or three, but four million people, depending on which direction the wind blows.”

Earl had continued to shake his head as he went on writing up his paperwork. He was thinking about what Hasul had said to him earlier on that day: I am the clock whose hand marks the hour. He was wondering, besides, whether that made him the finger that would push the button.

He pulled the ashtray closer, crushed out his cigarette, and returned the clipboard to the man behind the counter.

“Done, I guess,” he said. “Hope my questions didn’t spin your wheels overmuch.”

The U-Haul rep shrugged, scanning the application.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said enduringly. “I’m still alive and kicking, so why complain?”

Earl smiled.