I nodded.
“Fifth grade. Music class. We were learning folk songs and there was this one called The Happy Miller. All about an indolent fellow who’s happy to sing and dance all day and not toil like the other drudges at the mill, although I never did see how he got any milling done if he spent all day dancing. And you can imagine — me having the last name Miller — what happened. All those little dickenses start calling me Happy. Of course I hated it. What kid doesn’t hate what the other kids call him? But then my daddy heard the kids calling me Happy and that jess pained my daddy. See, daddy’s the one picked my given name — which is Brendan — even before I was born. Brendan ain’t jess a name, see? It’s a calling. It means, in old Celtic, from the fiery hill. Don’t that give you visions of a manly man striding down out of his Celtic castle to fight the good fight against the incoming hordes? Well,” he tugged a curling lock, “I got the fiery hair. But I wasn’t ready to take on the incoming hordes of fifth-graders. And my daddy told me flat-out he didn’t wanna never hear nobody calling me Happy, I guess because that made him Happy’s daddy — Chuckles or Goofy — and my daddy wasn’t much of a chuckler. Still, I did have the last laugh because I got to fuck over my daddy without doing anything to get in trouble. Alls I had to do was beg the kids not to call me Happy.” His eyes shone. “God my daddy hated a victim.” He flicked the water. “Kids eventually shortened the name to Hap. And I did come to get used to it. That satisfy your curiosity?”
I looked away, across the water to the stone arches that rose like Roman aqueduct bridges on the far side of the pool deck, framing a view of blackness that was the night desert. I had to fight off a wave of sympathy that threatened to pull me under.
Hap splashed. “Well, I’ve had me my exercise.”
I looked back to see him lever out of the pool. I said, “I meant the nickname at the nuke plant.”
He stood dripping. He looked down at me. “Milt told you. About five hours ago. In the dining room. Memory not so good?”
“Milt told us what he knew. Scotty’d sure heard about it. I’d guess it’s one of those legendary stories in the nuke industry. I’d like to hear your side.”
“Whyever for?”
To know if I need to be watching my back. “It’s a nasty story.”
He shrugged.
“Okay,” I said, “since you left the table in the middle of it, let me recap. You were working at the nuke plant, keeping watch on a diver in the spent-fuel pool.”
“RC, Buttercup. Radiation Control. In the SFP. You tell my story, you need to talk like the in-crowd.”
“I’m not in the in-crowd.” I didn’t like having to look up at him. Neither did I like the idea of climbing out to face him in my skimpy suit, so I stayed where I was and spoke to his feet. “There was a diver — Drew Collier — installing fuel racks.”
“Fuel rack support plates. Precision, Buttercup.”
“Whatever. Anyway, somebody misread a smudged work order and transferred a spent fuel rod to the wrong place, which was near Collier’s work area. The dive contractor surveyed the area before the dive but didn’t pick up a reading. He said later that the survey meter had been behaving erratically.”
Hap snorted. “Isn’t that what I’ve been going on and on about? A little eff-up here, a little eff-up there.”
“And Collier got too close to the fuel rod.”
Hap nodded at the pool. “Water’s a great shield but you got to watch out for the dose gradients.”
“But you didn’t watch out.”
He folded his arms.
“Collier wore teledosimeters set to alarm at your surface monitor if his dose rate went too high.”
“That’s right. I monitored the readouts and relayed them to Collier on the intercom. Readouts looked a little hinky — I didn’t know why, I didn’t know some inbred effed up the work order and put a rod in the wrong place. All I knew was I didn’t like the readouts so I relayed to Collier to move into a lower-dose area. He relays to me he is in a low-dose area. By the time he stopped arguing, the monitor alarms were going off. So I relayed the standard what the firetruck you doing down there, get TF out.” He shrugged. “You get yourself into a high-rad field and it only takes seconds to get yourself a nasty dose.”
“Your readouts were too low. You should have warned him sooner. Your surface monitor was faulty.”
“Wasn’t mine. Was the dive contractor’s.”
“You didn’t check it before the dive?”
“Sure did. Checked out fine.”
“When Security examined it, afterward, they found NFG written on it, in permanent ink.”
“Youse is in with the in-crowd. Youse knows what NFG means.”
“No fucking good.”
“Weren’t me what wrote it. You want my guess? Somebody wrote it after the fact.”
“By the time the dive master got Collier out, he had a lethal dose.”
“Not for a couple months. Probably wished he’d gone right away.”
I said, “That’s a little cold-blooded.”
“Didn’t cry for him. Doesn’t mean I wished it on him.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?”
His toes curled, as though he was trying for a better grip on the pool deck. He had long big-knuckled toes. “Nobody listens.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. You swim in the SFP, you better take care.”
“Didn’t he?”
“He’s a dumb lunk thinking about getting laid over the weekend instead of what he’s got to look out for in the dive. I give him the spiel but he doesn’t listen. He’s in a hurry because the plant wants the maintenance done yesterday because they’re off-line and it’s costing plenty, so the prevailing mindset isn’t ALARA — it’s ALACA. Keep your exposure as-low-as-cheaply-achievable. Anyway, he gets into his dive suit — kind of like your bug suit — and that’s when he asks me what I already told him that he wasn’t listening to. So I repeat the advice, only he can’t hear too well with a face pump going, so who knows? I tried. He goes in.” Hap suddenly leapt over my head and cannonballed into the pool.
I waited.
He surfaced and hung in place. “Go under and look around.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll add a purty please onto it.”
I ducked under. I saw Hap’s long legs languidly treading water. He was silhouetted by the pool light. I surfaced and wiped my eyes.
“See much?”
“Depends where I looked. You were blocking the light.”
“That’s the thing. The visibility down in the SFP isn’t always what it should be. Especially when you got a bubble on your head and no peripheral vision. And you’re not expecting an irradiated fuel assembly next door.”
“And the surface monitor’s not calibrated right.”
“Was.” Hap lifted his palms. “Maybe it slipped after I calibrated it.”
“The NRC investigated you for tampering.”
“NRC investigated the incident up one side and down the other, fined the plant operator, held a lessons learned meeting.” He slowly sank. “I wasn’t cited. No proof.”
“The plant fired you. The District Attorney filed murder charges.”
He went under.
I waited.
He came up, onto his back, and expelled a spout of water. “I was cleared.”
“You had a motive.”
“Didn’t like him. You like everybody crosses your path?”
“You fought him. At some bar.”
“Wasn’t a bar, was a tavern. Precision, Buttercup. Didn’t fight him. Didn’t get to lay a hand on him. He didn’t appreciate the way I excused myself for accidentally knocking over his glass of ale and so he beat the stuffing out of me. And then he brought out his dingie and whizzed on my poor battered self — right in front of my fellow workers, who jess knocked theyselves out laughing. Daddy would have cringed, iffen he’d seen.”