Babette's head sank out of sight. I watched Heinrich tape the road map to two posts. Then I went down to the kitchen to pay some bills, aware of colored spots whirling atomically somewhere to the right and behind me.
Steffie said, "Can you see the feathery plume from the attic window?"
"It's not a plume."
"But will we have to leave our homes?"
"Of course not."
"How do you know?"
"I just know."
"Remember how we couldn't go to school?"
'That was inside. This is outside."
We heard police sirens blowing. I watched Steffie's lips form the sequence: wow wow wow wow. She smiled in a certain way when she saw me watching, as though gently startled out of some absent-minded pleasure.
Denise walked in, rubbing her hands on her jeans.
"They're using snow-blowers to blow stuff onto the spill," she said.
"What kind of stuff?"
"I don't know but it's supposed to make the spill harmless, which doesn't explain what they're doing about the actual plume."
"They're keeping it from getting bigger," I said. "When do we eat?"
"I don't know but if it gets any bigger it'll get here with or without a wind."
"It won't get here," I said.
"How do you know?"
"Because it won't."
She looked at her palms and went upstairs. The phone rang. Babette walked into the kitchen and picked it up. She looked at me as she listened. I wrote two checks, periodically glancing up to see if she was still looking at me. She seemed to study my face for the hidden meaning of the message she was receiving. I puckered my lips in a way I knew she disliked.
'That was the Stovers," she said. "They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore."
"What are they calling it?"
"A black billowing cloud."
"That's a little more accurate, which means they're coming to grips with the thing. Good."
"There's more," she said. "It's expected that some sort of air mass may be moving down from Canada."
"There's always an air mass moving down from Canada."
'That's true," she said. 'There's certainly nothing new in that. And since Canada is to the north, if the billowing cloud is blown due south, it will miss us by a comfortable margin."
"When do we eat?" I said.
We heard sirens again, a different set this time, a larger sound- not police, fire, ambulance. They were air-raid sirens, I realized, and they seemed to be blowing in Sawyersville, a small community to the northeast.
Steffie washed her hands at the kitchen sink and went upstairs. Babette started taking things out of the refrigerator. I grabbed her by the inside of the thigh as she passed the table. She squirmed deliciously, a package of frozen corn in her hand.
"Maybe we ought to be more concerned about the billowing cloud," she said. "It's because of the kids we keep saying nothing's going to happen. We don't want to scare them."
"Nothing is going to happen."
"I know nothing's going to happen, you know nothing's going to happen. But at some level we ought to think about it anyway, just in case."
"These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don't happen in places like Blacksmith."
She was sitting on my lap by now. The checks, bills, contest forms and coupons were scattered across the table.
"Why do you want dinner so early?" she said in a sexy whisper.
"I missed lunch."
"Shall I do some chili-fried chicken?"
"First-rate."
"Where is Wilder?" she said, thick-voiced, as I ran my hands over her breasts, trying with my teeth to undo her bra clip through the blouse.
"I don't know. Maybe Murray stole him."
"I ironed your gown," she said.
"Great, great."
"Did you pay the phone bill?"
"Can't find it."
We were both thick-voiced now. Her arms were crossed over my arms in such a way that I could read the serving suggestions on the box of corn niblets in her left hand.
"Let's think about the billowing cloud. Just a little bit, okay? It could be dangerous."
"Everything in tank cars is dangerous. But the effects are mainly long-range and all we have to do is stay out of the way."
"Let's just be sure to keep it in the back of our mind," she said, getting up to smash an ice tray repeatedly on the rim of the sink, dislodging the cubes in groups of two and three.
I puckered my lips at her. Then I climbed to the attic one more time. Wilder was up there with Heinrich, whose fast glance in my direction contained a certain practiced accusation.
"They're not calling it the feathery plume anymore," he said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment.
"I already knew that."
'They're calling it the black billowing cloud." "Good."
"Why is that good?"
"It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the situation."
With an air of weary decisiveness, I opened the window, took the binoculars and climbed onto the ledge. I was wearing a heavy sweater and felt comfortable enough in the cold air but made certain to keep my weight tipped against the building, with my son's outstretched hand clutching my belt. I sensed his support for my little mission, even his hopeful conviction that I might be able to add the balanced weight of a mature and considered judgment to his pure observations. This is a parent's task, after all.
I put the glasses to my face and peered through the gathering dark. Beneath the cloud of vaporized chemicals, the scene was one of urgency and operatic chaos. Floodlights swept across the switching yard. Army helicopters hovered at various points, shining additional lights down on the scene. Colored lights from police cruisers crisscrossed these wider beams. The tank car sat solidly on tracks, fumes rising from what appeared to be a hole in one end. The coupling device from a second car had apparently pierced the tank car. Fire engines were deployed at a distance, ambulances and police vans at a greater distance. I could hear sirens, voices calling through bullhorns, a layer of radio static causing small warps in the frosty air. Men raced from one vehicle to another, unpacked equipment, carried empty stretchers. Other men in bright yellow Mylex suits and respirator masks moved slowly through the luminous haze, carrying death-measuring instruments. Snow-blowers sprayed a pink substance toward the tank car and the surrounding landscape. This thick mist arched through the air like some grand confection at a concert of patriotic music. The snow-blowers were the type used on airport runways, the police vans were the type to transport riot casualties. Smoke drifted from red beams of light into darkness and then into the breadth of scenic white floods. The men in Mylex suits moved with a lunar caution. Each step was the exercise of some anxiety not provided for by instinct. Fire and explosion were not the inherent dangers here. This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born. They moved as if across a swale of moon dust, bulky and wobbling, trapped in the idea of the nature of time.
I crawled back inside with some difficulty.
"What do you think?" he said.
"It's still hanging there. Looks rooted to the spot."
"So you're saying you don't think it'll come this way."