You can dig a hole and sample the blood of Spectacle Island, a reddish-brown fluid that permeates the entire dump, a cocktail of whatever's been piled up there, mingled together and dissolved in rainwater. But once you analyze it, you know there's more to the island than used diapers, rotting sofas and Sox scorecards. There are solvents and metals, too. Industry has been out dumping its trash.
Sometimes I got the impression that companies were still coming out here and unloading difficult pieces of garbage. That was hard to prove, unless I camped out on the island and waited for them to show up, and I didn't want to live on a mound of garbage. Roscommon's house was close enough.
Our Blowfish expedition was an experiment. I'd been reading about a place in Seattle where they'd constructed houses close to an old covered-over dump site. The houses started to explode spontaneously and it was found that methane gas, created by the decay, was seeping into their basements. So the city sank pipes into the ground to let the gas escape, and if you lit them they'd make nice flares.
We loaded a number of long pipes onto the Blowfish, rented a drilling rig, and cruised out there on a sunny Saturday morning. When we got there, the obligatory crew of under-age shitheels, half a dozen of them, were throwing a party on the fetid beach. They were all standing around a bonfire because there's no place on Spectacle Island where you'd want to sit down. They were drinking Narragansett, which had put them into kind of a traditional Russian mood; whenever they finished a bottle, they'd fling it down and shatter it. They were drinking in a hurry, because it was windy and cool, the place stank and they probably knew the whole trip was a mistake. The tinkling explosions were almost nonstop. Gulls circled, hoping some edible garbage would show up, swooping down to intercept the flying glass.
We anchored a little ways offshore and used a Zode to ferry the equipment onto the island. The Narry drinkers had come out here in someone's dad's boat, an open, four-seat fishing cruiser, and had pulled it up onto the best landing spot. It hurt just to see that, because the bottom of that nice fiberglass hull had probably picked up some long, deep scars. We settled for a less-convenient spot about a hundred yards away, and started piling up our equipment.
I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather. If Bartholomew were here, he could identify their favorite band just by looking at their colors. I stayed on shore with the equipment while Wes ran stuff back and forth. He'd dumped off some pipes and was on his way back to the Blowfish when he noticed that the partyers had found a stack of junk tires. They were swarming like ants on candy, shouting, laughing, calling each other "dude," and throwing them on the bonfire.
My attitude was, who the fuck cares? That's why I'll never be in charge of a regional office. Wes was a different type.
To me it was just some black smoke into the air. Kind of unsightly, a little toxic, but unimportant in the big scheme of things. To Wes it was a symbolic act, a desecration of the environment. It didn't matter that, in this case, "the environment" was an immense garbage dump to begin with. So before I could tell him not to worry about it, he was drowning out my voice with his outboard, buzzing over there to intervene.
Once they got over being stunned, they reacted exactly as you'd expect: went into a blind testosterone rage. "Fuck you! Fuck you!" "Now listen..." "Fuck you!" One of them dragged a strip of burning Goodyear out of the fire, whirled it up into a flaming spiral, and let it fly toward Wes, who had to knock it aside with an oar before he had time to get scared. He shot away, bottles splashing in his wake, and then, of course, they noticed me.
Standing there with a five-gallon can of gasoline, recalling the Road Warrior, I could think of a thousand interesting ways to scare these twits off. Unfortunately, these were the sort who'd be apt to carry guns. If there wasn't a Saturday Night Special in one of their belts, you could bet they had one in the boat. So a frontal assault wasn't a wise idea.
Wes believed anyone could be converted to an environmentalist by negotiation. It hadn't worked, but at least he had the presence of mind to see that they were headed my way. Wes was no expert with the Zodiac, but the water was calm and he could make it faster than the goons could run. Unfortunately the goons had a head start. I ran away from them along the shore, and as Wes caught up with me I waded out so he wouldn't have to pull his motor up, or, worse, forget and skrag the prop.
When I was up to midthigh, he reached me and I took one last step forward, half-falling into the boat. My foot came down on a sharp piece of metal and I felt it slash through the sole of my tennis shoe and gouge me. Then I was lying crosswise on the Zodiac, random pieces of Gallagher's trash pile were splashing into the water around us, and we were headed back to the Blowfish.
We changed course halfway there when Wes noticed that the goons were trashing the equipment we'd left on shore. They were especially interested in the drilling rig, which they started wrecking with the primitive weapons at hand. It was like watching Homo Erectus discover how to make tools out of flint.
Wes brought us to within about a bottle's throw from the shore and shouted at them. I don't think they even looked up.
They did seem to notice when they heard the sound of a second Zodiac motor cranking out some high RPMs. We all looked down the shoreline. Artemis had taken her Zodiac in to shore, tied its stern rope to the back of their fishing boat and tugged it off the beach. Now she was hauling it ass-backwards out to sea.
Later there were loud and long and dull debates about whether this was consistent with GEE principles. It wasn't exactly violence, but it did imply a certain willingness to let these guys starve to death on a pile of garbage, within sight of home. Like most of these debates, this one never got resolved.
It modified their attitudes, though. They stopped pounding on the drill motor and ran back to inform Artemis that she was a "fucking cunt." When this didn't work, they quieted down, watching their boat go out to sea.
In about five minutes, the jerks had dumped all the Narries out of their cooler and were using it to haul water up from the surf and dump it on the bonfire. It never really went out-tire fires never do-but it stopped billowing smoke. '
I asked Wes to take me out to Artemis, then clambered on board their boat, hopped around leaving bloody waffle prints on the deck and checked in the glove compartment.
The gun wasn't the little .22 revolver I'd expected, but a big, chrome-plated cannon, stuck in a stiff new shoulder holster. When I pulled it out, it took me a minute to untangle the straps.
"All six chambers are loaded," Artemis observed. "Not a great idea unless you want to shoot yourself in the armpit." When I shot her an odd look, she shrugged. "My dad was into guns, what can I say."
It looked like someone else had a real jackass for a dad too. I chucked the weapon into the sea. Then, just for the hell of it, I kept rummaging. We had all day, we were already into some serious criminality, and we'd never be prosecuted. But if these pricks gave us any more trouble, I wanted to know where they lived.
Couldn't find a damn thing. Other than the gun, this boat was eerily clean. No papers, no registration, no old beer cans. The life vests were brand new and unmarked. When I climbed back onto the Zode, I had no information at all, nothing but a chemical trace. There was an odor about that boat, and it followed me, unwelcome, onto the Zode. It was on my hand. The smell of some goddamned men's cologne. I'd picked it up from the revolver.