you know, and talk to them. Sometime, I talk about Ethiopia."
He left us to be astounded. "Man," Tom said, "that guy's really into it."
The busboy, emerging from the back, had obviously been at the quiet end of Hoa's tantrum. I guessed he'd spent most of his life in this country; he had an openly sullen look on his face, and loped and sauntered and jived between the tables. When he came out of the kitchen, we locked eyes again, for the second time that day. Then he glanced away and his lip curled.
There's a certain look people give me when they've decided I'm just an overanxious duck-squeezer. That was the look. To get through to this guy I'd somehow have to prove my manhood. I'd have to retain my cool in some kind of life-threatening crisis. Unfortunately such events are hard to stage.
We were staging one in Blue Kills, but it wouldn't make the Boston news. That was part of the GEE image: to take chances, to be tough and brave, so that people wouldn't give us the look that Hoa's busboy was giving me.
He didn't know that he was getting fucked coming and going. Basco and a couple of other companies had rained toxic waste on his native land for years. Now, here in America, he was eating the same chemicals, from the same company, off the floor of the Harbor. And Basco was making money on both ends of the deal.
"What're you thinking about?" Tom asked.
"I hate it when people ask me that fucking question," I said. But I said it nicely.
."You look real intense."
"I'm thinking about goddamn Agent Orange," I said.
"Wow," he said, softly. "That's what I was thinking about."
Tom followed me back across Allston-Brighton and home. I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if
you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe-to see you, and to give a fuck-you've already blown it.
Tom mumbled a few things about paranoia, and then I was too far ahead to hear him. We had a nice ride through the darkness. On those bikes we were weak and vulnerable but invisible, elusive, aware of everything within a two-block radius. A couple of environmental extremists in a toxic world, headed for a Hefty bag and a warm berth in the mother ship.
6
WE INVADED the territory of the Swiss Bastards shortly before dawn. At sea we had three Zodiacs, two frogmen, a guy in a moon suit, and our mother ship, the Blowfish. We had a few people on land, working out of the Omni and a couple of rented vehicles. Our numbers were swelled by members of the news media, mostly from Blue Kills and environs but with two crews from New York City.
At about three in the morning, Debbie had to shake a tail put on us by the Swiss Bastards' private detectives. There was nothing subtle about the tail, they were just trying to intimidate. Tanya, our other Boston participant, was driving the car and Debbie was lying down in the back seat. Tanya led the tail onto a twisting road that wasn't sympathetic to the Lincoln Town Car following them. She thrashed the Omni for five minutes or so, putting half a mile between herself and the private dicks, then threw a 180 in the middle of the road-a skill she'd learned on snowy Maine roads last February while we were driving up to Montreal to get some French fries. Debbie jumped out and crouched in the ditch. Tanya took off and soon passed the Lincoln going the other way. The private dicks in the Lincoln were forced to make an eleven-point turn across the road, then peeled out trying to catch up with her.
Debbie walked a couple hundred yards and located the all-terrain bicycle we'd stashed there previously. It was loaded with half a dozen Kryptonite bicycle locks, the big U-shaped, impervious things. She rode a couple of miles, partly on the road and partly cross-country, until she came to a heavy gate across a private access road. On the other side of the gate was a toxic waste dump owned by the Swiss Bastards, a soggy piece of ground that ran downhill into an estuary that in turn ran two miles out to the Atlantic. The entire dump was surrounded by two layers of chainlink fence, and this gate was a big, heavy, metal sucker, locked by means of a chain and padlock. Debbie locked two of the Kryptonites in the middle, augmenting the Swiss Bastards' chain system, then put two on each hinge, locking the gates to the gateposts. In the unlikely event that an emergency took place on the dump site, she stuck around with the keys so that she could open the gates for ambulances or fire trucks. We aren't careless fanatics and we don't like to look as though we are.
I was on the Blowfish, explaining this gig to the crew. Jim, the skipper, and hence their boss, was hanging around in the background.
Jim does this for a living. He lives on the boat and sails back and forth between Texas and Duluth; along the Gulf Coast, around Florida, up the Atlantic Coast, down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, and west from there. Then back. Wherever he goes, hell breaks loose. When GEE wants an especially large amount of hell to break loose, they'll bring in professional irritants, like me.
Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking. They anchor in prominent places and hang banners from the masts. They dump fluorescent green dye into industrial outfalls so that news choppers can hover overhead and get spectacular footage of how pollution spreads. They blockade nuclear submarines. They do a lot of that antinuclear stuff. Their goal is to be loud and visible.
Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. There's no direct action you can take to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is just too fucking nasty. I don't want to get beat up over a baby seal. But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated actions, what the media like to describe as "military precision."
This crew doesn't like anything military. In the Sixties, they would have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical background, not because they're dumb but because they hate rigid, discipline thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. They'd survived a dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in Antarctica, established a beachhead on the Siberian coast. They could do anything, and they would if I told them to; but I'd rather they enjoyed the gig.
"These people here are environmental virgins," I said. We were sitting around on deck, eating tofu-and-nopales omelets. It was a warm, calm, Jersey summer night and the sky was starting to lose its darkness and take on a navy-blue glow. "They think toxic waste happens in other places. They're shocked about Bhopal and Times Beach, but it's just beginning to dawn on them that they might have a problem here. The Swiss Bastards are sitting fat and happy on that ignorance. We're going to come in and splatter them all over the map."
Crew members exchanged somber glances and shook their heads. These people were seriously into their nonviolence and refused to take pleasure in my use of the word "splatter."
"Okay, I'm sorry. That's going a little far. The point is that this is a company town. Everybody works at that chemical factory. They like having jobs. It's not like Buffalo where everyone hates the chemical companies to begin with. We have to establish credibility here."