Mike took another hit, continued listening in silence.
“I mean, the only times you ever hear about HazMat are a) when a tanker truck flips over on 83 and there’s no way to hide it, or b) when it’s a fucking Love Canal. You never hear about the little disasters, where maybe it’s only a hundred or a thousand gallons, and it all drains off into some little guy’s yard. Those are the kinds of stories that get slipped between the cracks.
“That’s why this is so unbelievably perfect.”
He paused to shake his head, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. Mike nodded sympathetically. “I mean, I must’ve talked to Chris about this fifty times. He always shrugs it off. ‘No hook,’ he says, ‘Makes local industry look bad.’ Hhhmph!”
He snorted derisively. Mike handed him back the joint. This time, there was no hesitation.
“Meanwhile,” he continued, “every year, we get another eight-million-pound turd in our pants.”
Mike laughed out loud. Kirk smiled, pleased, and sucked on the joint. “And it’s only a matter of time,” he concluded, “before it wakes up and bites off our ass.”
“I like it,” Mike enthused. “If I were you, I’d run with the Giant Ass-Biting Turd motif.”
It was Kirk’s turn to laugh. “In a world of perfect news…” he said, then let it trail off. They grew quiet for a moment, each in his own buzzing, contemplative world.
“So,” Mike said at last. “I hate to bring this up, but…if Chris always has a problem, what’s gonna make this any different…?” Kirk shot him a glaring you dimwit stare. It came to Mike suddenly. “Oh,” he said.
“A hook. Exactly.” Sighing wearily, yet triumphant. “A terrible, tragic, specific incident with lots of exclusive footage. Which means the trick is to nail ‘em while their pants are down, get the shot that everyone wants, and show it before anyone else.”
“I gotcha.”
“The only thing is…” Kirk paused, turning thoughtful. “If it is a local industry, you start to run into trouble with advertisers, you know? And those guys are all in fucking cahoots.…”
Mike nodded. “Country club, Chamber of Commerce…”
“…it’s all a Good Ol’ Boys network. And then you run into the fucking Industrial Development Authority, and that motherfucker Blake…”
“Umm…I don’t know, dude.” All of a sudden, Mike felt a nasty little blast of foreboding run through him. Like everyone else in local news, he had heard stories about Werner Blake. They were not happy stories. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you really want to piss those people off. I mean, seriously. If you push too hard, they could severely fuck you up.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Kirk’s jaw set hard.
“Oh, you don’t think so?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He had locked into Determined Mode. It was amazing, in such moments, how much like a little kid he looked. Mike couldn’t help picturing him in high school: little blond blue-eyed Super Achiever, The Boy Who Could Not Fail. He didn’t seem to understand that anyone can fail. Even the well-heeled sons of the powerful.
Even the sons that their God loved the most.
“Okay.” Mike knew it was pointless to argue. He’d learned a long time ago when to back off if he wanted to get along with Kirk. Keep it light, keep it fun, and run the goddam camera.
“Just watch,” Kirk asserted, eyes flashing. “I’m gonna break this story.” He took another hit, cracked the window, and blew it out, his fantasy blooming bright before his eyes. “I’m gonna make waves on national TV.”
Mike gave a stoned chuckle at the thought. “I bet.”
“Yeah, sure, laugh now,” Kirk huffed. “But I got a good feeling about this. I know what I’m doing.”
He glanced down at the map, then suddenly up, at the unmarked side road directly upon them.
“Oops,” he said. “Turn here.”
“WHOA!!!” Mike hollered, sawing the wheel. The car slid, tires squealing into the turn, chewing up shoulder gravel as it went. Mike seesawed the car, stabilizing it without losing speed. Stoned or no, Mike was good.
“JESUS, man! How ‘bout a little warning next time!” He shook his head, taking the joint back. “I swear, you are the worst fucking navigator…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kirk said. “I get you killed…”
“…and I’ll never speak to you again. Exactly.”
They snickered. It was the secret of their success: reckless Mike and ruthless Kirk, the Two Horsemen of the TV News Apocalypse.
Kirk looked back at the directions. “Oops. Turn here.”
“SHIT!” Mike wheeled sharply, skidded around another one.
This time, the road made an abrupt transition, winding into thickly overgrown woods. “Okay,” Kirk said. “Slow down.” Mike breathed a sigh of relief. “Over there.”
An opening in the trees yawned like a part in heavy drapes.
“This is the place,” Kirk said, as Mike wheeled off the main road and stopped.
Toad Road stretched out before them: a single gravel lane, chuck-holed and foreboding. The sun was all but blotted out by the leafless thicket of branches overhead; thin beams wormed through like tiny spotlights, dappling the rutty surface.
“Fuckin’ aye. This is excellent,” Kirk enthused. “Two and Twenty-three’ll be lucky if they even find this place before we air. We aced out everybody.”
Mike nodded, already appraising the angles. “We should get some pickup shots here.”
“On our way out,” Kirk interjected. “I wanna get in there now.” He fished in the pockets of his cranberry L.L. Bean parka, producing some Binaca and a tiny squeeze-bottle of Visine. He spritzed his mouth, put a glistening drop in each eye, blinked it back, and straightened his tie.
“Okay, this is it,” he said. “We are professionals. There is no dress rehearsal. And this is the big time. Right?”
Mike looked at him, shaking his head. “Anyone ever tell you you’re fucking crazy?”
“Like a fox, buddy.” Winking. “Like a fucking fox.”
And this is how Kirk Bogarde became a star.
They found Hal’s cruiser three-quarters of a mile in: parked neatly on what passed for the right shoulder of the narrow road, just as he’d left it. Mike pulled up ten yards back and parked on the left bank. They piled out.
“Guess we’ll have to walk it,” Kirk said, gesturing to the tree. “Better get a few inches of the car.”
Mike nodded and popped a battery into the camera. It was a pro deck, maybe a hundred times more complicated than a consumer-type camcorder. Mike routinely set levels ahead of time, so that on arrival he just had to pop in a battery and he was ready to rock. He focused on the empty cruiser, did a slow pan up and over to the tangled mass of uprooted flora, and stopped at Kirk.
“Okay,” Kirk said. “How ‘bout a nice pickup shot of me walking by the downed tree, looking pensive?”
“Soul of a poet,” Mike said, utterly deadpan.
Kirk nodded, got himself revved to Geraldo speed. “Toxic Waste,” he intoned. “The Ever-present Menace…no.” Catching himself. “Too wordy. Fuck.”
Mike took a position in the road, focusing as Kirk improvised.
“Toxic Waste: Legacy of Death…”
It was then that they heard the engine cranking.
Hrrrnnn nnn nnn nnn, it groaned, filtering through the dead, bare trees. The choked metallic grunt of an ignition firing. Hrrrnnn nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn.
“What the fuck…?” Kirk whispered, staring at the stormfall blocking the road. Hrrnnn nnn nnn nnn…
And then, in the distance, the engine chugged to life: exhaust blatting as an unknown foot fed fuel to carb, coaxing combustion.
“Someone’s coming,” Mike said.
Somewhere around the bend, a heavy vehicle chugged and heaved onto the road. Coming closer. Heading their way.
“Get ready,” Kirk hissed. “This might be good.”
Mike shrugged and took a position just beh
ind the bumper of the van. It was kinda weird, but what the hey. Kirk hung back and ran through his schmooz options, readying himself for whatever came down the pike.
Then the roar came closer, and the real weirdness started.
The truck was whining and grinding through the gearbox, picking up RPMs at any expense. The way it was burning down the trail, Kirk noted, they had a minute at best to prepare. And it gave no indication of slowing down.
Heading right for Nature’s little roadblock…
Jesus. The realization was sudden, startling and sure. They’re gonna run it. “ROLL TAPE!” he screamed. “They’re going right fucking through!”
“Way ahead of you, dude,” Mike said, grinning. He sighted the road for optimum coverage. Hit the record button.
And history was made.
First, a study in glaring contrast: the six-ton kamikaze whine of pissed-off steel against an ominously still backdrop of trees and mud. Pan and zoom on the thick mass of limbs skewed across the road, moving in as the roar and the grind grow closer.
Passing blip of Kirk Bogarde, mouthing are you getting this? Looking genuinely nervous now, as though this is maybe just a little bit realer than he likes his coverage and he doesn’t even know it yet.
The whine peaks. Rack in and focus.
Then jerk back, as the truck explodes through the branches, letting off a shrapnel shockwave hailstorm of splinters that soar in every direction.
Try to track as the blasted Dodge with the busted-out windshield and a shadow at the wheel bounces and hits the ground running, rocks and slides and never gives an inch as it hits the cop cruiser, spinning it a neat two hundred and seventy degrees to smash into the embankment, sending Kirk diving for cover as it hurtles past, jangling in and out of frame but always coming right at the camera.
Scream in exhilaration as the truck bears down mercilessly, knowing that this is the footage of a lifetime, living for the spectacle captured in the camera’s eye.
Then scream again, for entirely different reasons.
As the truck devours the frame.
The last thing Kirk remembered clearly was the front grille, enormous, bearing down on him. He dove and rolled badly, ate a faceful of mud, and came up in a puddle, barely conscious. There was wind and noise and adrenaline and the scattered impressionist jumblefuck memory of Mike: standing ass-out in the wind, cowboy style, nailing the shot like today was a dream and there was no tomorrow.
Then the truck rolled over him.
And the dream went away.…
Silence.
Kirk opened his eyes.
The sky above was brackish, overcast. He ached as if he’d sprained every moving part in his body. Gilt-backed dark clouds taunted, egging him on.
He’d been out for a few minutes. Time enough to change lives.
And to end them.
“Mike.” Memory, snapping back like a wet towel to smack him in the ass. “Oh God, Mike…” Piecing together the dream. He got up, felt his stomach lurch with the one-eighty spin of his head, and then turned. Scrambling over to his cameraman friend. Or what was left of him.
Kirk had never been good with words, a fact that had steered him away from print journalism and the press. Smushed was the word that came screaming to mind. Unprofessional, but accurate. Mike was smushed.
He lay embedded in a deep mud truck-rut, the knobby tire pattern running lengthwise over his body and right over his face. The truck weighed several angry tons, and the earth had given as much as it could before accepting him into its embrace.
Then it had been Mike’s turn to give.
Kirk puked on his shoes; it was up and out before he knew it. Then he was coughing, coughing and crying, coughing up stringers of coffee and crullers and bile that burned like the tears in his eyes. He sank to his knees. His own lenses went fuzzy, soft around the edges. It gave him a certain detachment, for as long as the tears lasted.
But it didn’t change the facts, bring Mike back to life or make his body go away. He just lay there, his old wire-rim aviator glasses pressed into his face like a cookie cutter in clay. One dead hand stuck up from the rut, bent back horribly, fingers pointing as if to say they went thataway.
The camcorder, miraculously, had been thrown clear. It lay just beyond the grasp of Kirk’s ex-partner in crime. Kirk scrabbled over to it, found it battle-scarred but unbroken. He clutched it to his breast as the last sobs wrenched out of his system.
The truck was a distant roar behind him, fading fast. Toad Road sprawled out before him, the path brutally cleared by the impact. Mike was still laying there, deader than ever.
Kirk sat back on his haunches, staring.
And, with terrible clarity, realized exactly what he had to do.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The little Paradise airport in southern Chanceford Township was to Philadelphia International what a 7-11 was to the European Common Market. Just the thought of flying made Gwen acutely queasy. Of course, nausea at a moment’s notice had proven a linchpin of the Taylor Family Pregnancy, right from the beginning…
“Damn,” Gwen cursed, furious with herself. She’d just spent the last fifteen minutes semihysterically sobbing over absolutely nothing, bullshit that only vaguely had Gary’s face attached. It was like making a Silly Putty imprint of Dick Tracy’s face off the Sunday funnies, stretching it to actual human size, and then saying, “SEE? SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE?”
She’d heard all the jokes and the stats that suggested she’d come to resent him. Fuck them. Had his body ballooned to grotesque proportions? Had all of his internal organs been trash-compacted to make room for their baby? Did he have to pee every five to ten minutes, whether he made it to the bathroom or not?
Of course not. But that wasn’t the point. She didn’t want him to squeeze a bowling ball out his butt, or pull his bottom lip over the top of his head in symbolic solidarity. She didn’t want him to suffer as no man had ever suffered before. At least not most of the time.
No. Her needs were very simple. She just wanted to be loved and supported and blah blah blah by the man of her dreams, who really was Gary, God bless him, no matter what Micki or her mother or anyone said. It was hard to believe he put up with her, what with her mood swings and her irrationality and her HIDEOUS BLOATED ELEPHANTINE BODY THAT NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND COULD POSSIBLY DESIRE and her other little insecurities, not the least of which had to do with her ability to be a decent wife and mother.
Which of course brought her back to the coffee incident—a stupid nonevent if ever there’d been one—and before she knew it she was blubbering all over the dashboard again.
So she was more grateful than words could say when Micki came through the double-glass exit doors. Grateful that her friend had taken it upon herself to travel all this way. Grateful to have such a friend at all.
She felt better at the very sight of her. Gwen quick-wiped her eyes and checked herself in the rearview. Like shit, she thought. Definitely look like shit.
“Look at you, Mama!” Micki called to her as she laboriously lowered herself from the cab. “You look fabulous!”
“Look who’s talkin’!” Gwen called back, assessing the well-fed, well-dressed, absolutely robust-looking figure that approached her, bags in hand. Hard to believe that this was the same old Micki Bridges.
Hard to believe that this was the woman who’d been given less than six months to live, a little over five years ago.
“You look great!” Micki reiterated, closing the distance.
“Bullshit. You look great!”
“Bullshit. You…!”
And then they were laughing and embracing, thrilled to be in one another’s presence once again: celebrating the one true friendship that had lasted them all their lives.
“So,” Micki said as they disengaged. “Where’s hubby?”
“He got called in to work,” Gwen said.
“Oh.” Very dryly. “What a surprise.”
And that, of course, was where the same old crap st
arted up all over again.
The main bone of contention between them had always hinged on their tastes in men. From grade school on, those tastes had been both clearly defined and mutually exclusive.
Gwen favored earthy, grounded, extremely physical men: guys who worked with heavy machinery, played football, rode big bikes, went white-water rafting, and knocked back Buds with a J.D. chaser. She liked men with big hands, steady jobs, and massive, sinewy, bull-shaped bodies; men with fierce loyalties, fiery passions, and healthy appetites that she could trust would be brought home to her, day after day after day.
Micki, on the other hand, did not like to be physically overpowered or remotely dependent. Not even in potentia. Her men were ropier, substantially shorter, more flighty and esoteric. She ate up musicians like truffles, especially sax players. Give her a Juzo Itami film festival, a little Frank Zappa and Baba Ram Dass, good Chablis, great conversation, double chocolate Häagen-Dazs, and serious head for an hour; you could then gift-wrap her and take her home.
But rarely for more than a week.
And so it was that Gwen wound up with a Harley-riding engineer eight years her senior, whom she’d lived with for four years and been married to going on three, and with whom she was having the child of their dreams.
And Micki wound up with a forty-thousand-year-old spirit entity as her permanent life-partner and male companion. Not to mention a handful of lovers on the side.
Not surprisingly, Micki and Gwen had serious problems with each other’s picks; though, much to their credit, Gary and Bob-Ramtha got along better than most of the guys they’d introduced to each other. All in all, it was the most absurd aspect of their relationship.
Because, in virtually every other respect, they loved and admired each other to pieces. Micki, por ejemplo, was smitten with Gwen’s emotional honesty, her bone-deep compassion and sheer innate goodness, her automatic and essentially unconditional love of other people. Most people had to work very hard for the kind of spirit that came to Gwen naturally, and Micki was convinced that she would make absolutely the best mother in the world.
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