Chapter 16
Bennett came back from the cruiser with his shirt plastered to his back and a printout in a plastic sleeve, and the way he walked told me the night had just gotten bigger than a fence post and a junction box. Rain was coming down in sheets now, drumming on the cruiser roofs and running off the gutters in brown streams, and Vasquez had us all standing back from the trench while Bennett held the sleeve under the cruiser's dome light so the rain wouldn't take it.
"It's a Department of Environmental Quality file," he said. "Microfiche. Somebody scanned it years ago and never indexed it right, which is why it took me so long to find. Sir, you need to hear this."
He read it slowly, finger tracking the lines. In 1975, the county approved an emergency variance for the valley tanneries and solvent plants off Cooper's Mill Road. Their waste ponds were full. Two point four million gallons of heavy chlorinated solvents and chromium waste were ponding behind an earthen dike that was about to breach, and if it breached, all of it went straight into the state river. So the county gave them another way to get rid of it. They drilled forty-one high-pressure injection wells into the limestone karst under the ridge, and they pumped the waste down under seventy-five pounds of hydraulic head, forcing it into the rock itself.
Borehole 9-C, Bennett said, was the central shaft. The high-capacity one. The one all the others fed into. When they were done, they poured six feet of sulfur-resistant concrete down the collar, signed an administrative sealing order, and walked away. Forty-eight hours before the county boundary redistricting, they dissolved the oversight committee. There was nobody left whose job it was to watch the hole.
I stood there in the rain and felt something cold settle in my stomach that had nothing to do with being wet. All these years I had thought of my pump as a machine holding back a puddle, a local problem, a bad patch of ground under two houses. Bennett was telling me it was holding back an ocean. Two point four million gallons of poison, pumped into rock under a ridge, sealed with concrete and paperwork, and then forgotten by every office that had ever touched it.
Vasquez looked at the printout, then at me, then at the trench where my tape and my C-clamp were doing the work of that whole forgotten system. "And this borehole," she said. "Nine-C. That's the one under your garage."
"That's the one," I said. My voice sounded strange to me, flat and far away. "The saddle clamp is bolted to its bypass. The pump pulls the pressure off every time the sensor hits fourteen PSI. Without it, the slabs crack. I told you that part already. What I didn't know, not all of it, was how much was down there."
I kept thinking about the number. Forty-one wells. Not one hole somebody drilled in a hurry, but forty-one of them, a whole system, sunk into the limestone under a ridge where people would later build houses and plant roses. I pictured that earthen dike bulging in the rain, and a county engineer deciding the river was worth saving but the rock underneath us wasn't. They moved the poison from a pond everybody could see into stone nobody could see, poured concrete over it, and called it solved.
Bennett was still talking, quieter now, explaining the sealing order to Vasquez. It wasn't a court order, he said. It was administrative, signed by a county office that didn't exist anymore, and the oversight committee it created was dissolved two days before the redistricting changed which county office even owned the file. After that, there was no file. There was a microfiche in a drawer and a scanned image nobody had indexed, and that was the whole afterlife of two point four million gallons.
"So who enforces a sealing order when the enforcer is gone?" Vasquez asked.
"Nobody," Bennett said. "That's the point, I think. They sealed it and then they unsealed themselves."
Marlene was standing under the edge of her porch roof, hugging herself, her hair dripping. She had come out here to get me fined or arrested over a fence post, and now she was listening to a deputy read her a history of the ground under her own house. "Two million gallons," she said quietly. "Under my house. And nobody told us."
"Nobody told anybody," Bennett said. He turned the sleeve over. There was more on the back, another document, and his face said he hadn't gotten to the worst of it yet. "Deputy Vasquez, there's a second file attached. Dated two years later. I think you should see this before we do anything else."
Vasquez nodded, and Bennett went back to the cruiser to pull it up, and the rain kept coming down, and the pump under my garage kept up its laboring hum, holding back everything Bennett had just described, one cycle at a time.