Lone Rock

by Duane Lindsay

  “We’ re nearly there,” Adrian said. He sat in a chair and watched Toby. The boy could barely sit still, he kept going to the car, touching it as if he couldn’t believe it was there. “We’ll assemble the body this week, put the glass in, hang the doors, put in the engine—are you listening?”

  “Nope,” Toby answered. He walked over to Adrian and sat down. “When does the upholstery get here?”

  They’d sent the seats out over a month ago. “She promised them and the head liner by the 10th of December,” Adrian said. “I called her yesterday and she said she’s on schedule.”

  “I’m going to ask Deb Mazur to the prom,” Toby said abruptly, He burst out grinning. “I’m gonna walk right up to her and say, ‘Hey! You wanna go to the prom?’”

  Adrian looked back, surprised. “The Deb Mazur? The one you’ve been mooning over since September?”

  Toby nodded. “Yep, she’s the one.”

  “What brought this on?” Adrian asked.

  Toby pointed at the piles of car scattered around the garage. “This did. It’s like we can do anything. We took this old car and we’re bringing it back from the dead, man; this is like awesome.”

  “You’ re feeling pretty good about this, huh?”

  “Damn right! Aren’t you? Doesn’t this make you feel like nothing else matters, like you’re the coolest thing going?” He got up and paced, too jazzed to sit still. “We did this! I mean you and me!”

  He stopped dead and looked very solemn. He hunched over like a mad scientist and cackled madly, “It’s alive! By God, it’s ALIVE!”

  Adrian laughed until his eyes watered. Later, when calm returned he said, “Deb Mazur, huh?”

  Toby, looking smug, said, “Yep.”

  28 – The Kelly Ridge Toxic Waste Incinerator

  Adrian was awestruck. He had never seen anything like the Kelly Ridge Toxic Waste Incinerator.

  It rose from the surrounding desert like the Emerald City of Oz, un-natural in the barren environment, as unlikely as a headdress on a cow. The overall color was light blue, nearly turquoise, from the paint of the enormous tanks, the endless girders and the tall metal tower. At the distance of three miles it seemed tiny, the light brown of the earth dwarfing it. Adrian knew it covered nearly sixty acres and soared over two hundred feet at its highest point.

  The Kelly Ridge Toxic Waste Incinerator. Designed and built by the Government to dispose of those things that weren’t radioactive. That material went to Nevada, an even more desolate place than this, or New Mexico. Nerve gas went to the South Pacific. Kelly Ridge dealt with chemicals that would give Stephen King nightmares.

  Adrian drove slowly over the bad road, raising a thick cloud of dust that drifted into the hot blue sky. He kept the window down and the air conditioner on high, feeling the sweat form on his neck. Fortunately, those chemicals were far from here now. Adrian felt a morbid fear of what would be arriving next year when the plant became operational.

  His job was to program all of the computers that would run the plant. His control system would run the pumps that pushed the liquid from one cleansing tank to another. It would add chemicals and adjust pH balances and run mixers, turning what was bad into something at least better.

  He would also have to program data acquisition, the truly complex part of the operation. Running liquids through a purifying system was nothing new; water and sewer plants had been doing it for centuries. But the new Federal standards for purity required that the operators of the plant prove the chemical were benign, and be tamperproof as well.

  Adrian reached a guard station and a large man in a too tight blue jacket came to the car with a clipboard. He tapped at the window for Adrian to open it.

  “I’m Adrian Beck, from Control-logics.” The guard looked at his list and nodded.

  “You got ID?”

  “Sure.”

  The guard stared at his Colorado driver’s license and back up at Adrian, leaning his head to see the long pale scar across his face. “Yeah, that’s you, I guess.” He handed back the license and gestured. “What happened?”

  Adrian wondered if he’d ever get used to that question.

  “An accident.” A fall, a train wreck, a bomb, he could say anything. Nobody listened.

  The guard pointed to the South of the complex. “That’s where the project manager works. You’ll need to check in with him for your permits and physical safety training.”

  Adrian drove away wondering. Safety training? At an inoperable plant? Why? When he met Bruce Hackbarth, the project manager, his first question was, “The project isn’t safe?”

  Bruce, a short man who weighed at least three hundred pounds, asked in tum, “You never been on a Government site before, have you?”

  “No.” Adrian decided not to mention his field experience consisted of one month in Arizona and an eternity in Illinois. His worn work boots and jeans made him a veteran, they didn’t have to say for how long.

  “Here’s the thing about the Feds, they just love their policies. One of those policies is safety. Safety is job one. We have OSHA regulations that would choke the productivity in any normal business. We’ve got safety rules up the ass. Let me just tell you about them, just so we get off on the right foot, so to speak.”

  “We have,” he ticked the points off on stubby fingers. “Entry and exit blood tests to determine if you’ve been contaminated on a site that has no contaminants. We have respirator fit and training in case you breathe any of the contaminants that aren’t here. We have hazardous materials training to deal with the aforementioned contaminants that—”

  “Aren’t here,” Adrian said with him. Bruce grinned widely, acknowledging the shared joke.

  “Right. We’ve got safety data sheets that tell the physical dangers of any chemicals, including water. We have harness procedures for fall safety on the catwalks. They make me wear two. We have closed space entry procedures, we have flood safety procedures, despite the fact that the last flood happened approximately two million years ago. We have radiation training, though there will never be any radioactive elements present. We have local danger procedures, which consist of identifying the flora and/or fauna which one might encounter in one’s day. These are mainly bees, spiders and Gila monsters, of which we have none.”

  “We miss anything, honey?” He asked a large woman typing at a desk behind him. She was at least sixty, looked like someone’s grandmother and was the most unlikely ‘honey’ Adrian could imagine.

  “Forty-hour OSHA,” she said without looking up. OSHA was the dreaded ‘Occupational Safety and Health Agency.”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “Drowning.”

  “My personal favorite,” said Bruce. “In the event that you work in water more than six inches deep, you are required to have a safety report signed by me and nine other departments as well as a circular flotation device manned by a safety officer located at a distance of not less than ten feet nor greater than twenty-five feet.”

  He smiled. “I teach that class. Last month we had a laborer mucking out a ditch. He had to get into the ditch to remove an obstruction, which I believe was a dead coyote, and since he had to step into the water, the safety procedures kicked in.

  We had a guy standing over him with a life preserver on a rope just in case. Well, it happened that the laborer slipped and did indeed fall to one knee in the approximately seven inches of water, so our safety officer, a smart-ass named Johnson, walked over to the guy and dropped the life preserver on him. Funniest thing I ever saw.

  My point is, we take safety very seriously. You will report to the physician for your physical, you will take all of the safety classes and you will of course follow all procedures to the letter. Are we clear?”

  Adrian, feeling like he’d been assaulted said, “sure.”

  “And one more thing,” Bruce said. “If you’re off site for more than a month you have to take all the safety classes again. We’ve had guys who’ve taken them fourteen, fifteen tim
es.”

  Adrian walked out of Bruce’s office trailer in a daze. The Kelly Ridge Toxic Waste Incinerator, he thought. Home away from home.

  The over-riding emotion he felt, as he went from the doctor’s trailer, leaving behind four vials of blood, to the OSHA trailer, where he left behind a few thousand brain cells, was awe. The plant was marvelous.

  Nearly complete, the plant was Disneyland to an engineer. Towering machinery of exotic purpose, gigantic tanks, some over ninety feet tall and fifty feet wide. You could literally sail a boat in one if there was water and they didn’t arrest you for safety violations. Almost everything was overhead, supported by girders and laced with multi-colored pipes leading everywhere. Catwalks, metal stairs of see through mesh, went upward to exposed heights. Adrian was glad he wasn’t afraid of heights. Everything here was huge. Mostly Adrian felt a sense of achievement. This was mankind at its best, using reason and logic to create wonders in the desert. Here was purpose and accomplishment, art and science combined to work miracles. Here were solutions to huge problems. That those same problems were also man made didn’t detract from the vision: here was the power of the mind unleashed.

  Looking at the towers of steel all around him Adrian felt as if anything was possible.

  In contrast was the company trailer. Small, cheap and brown, it sat on the very edge of the compound like a mobile home ghetto. Flat roofed, unadorned, twelve feet wide by sixty feet long, with four little windows and two flimsy doors, the trailer looked like an old baked rock. Behind it lay desert, bare of any tree or bush. The land was flat and uninviting and Adrian understood why the pioneers had either stopped in Salt Lake or kept going to California. This was no place to stay.

  Certainly that was the idea. What better place to clean chemical horrors than here, light years away from anything growing? Adrian unlocked a padlock on the door and entered. The interior was more depressing than the outside. There were two large nearly empty rooms, each with a built in counter. Two folding tables held an assortment of tool belts and boxes. There were no pictures on the walls or drapes on the windows. The floor was unswept and dirty.

  The barrenness stated clearly that this was the province of men far away from civilization. This was where men worked long hours, wore the same clothes for a month, ate bad food at irregular hours and told obscene jokes.

  Adrian walked to the door and stood on the tiny stairway entrance. He stared upward at the machine rising like a phoenix from the barren ground. For several minutes he let his eyes wander from one unknown element to another, wondering at its purpose.

  He said, “Wow.”

  29 – Corley Looks Back

  Corley Sayres celebrated his fiftieth birthday on September 16th by screwing the sales manager of L’Beck Electronics of Toronto, Canada. Her name was Edie Vandenbecker, a very nice Dutch lady he’d met while seducing her best computer salesman. They lay in bed after dinner at Tretorio’s, drinks at a Sports bar, watching the Maple Leafs on a giant screen television, and sex at Corley’s executive suite in the Montage Hotel.

  He always rented a luxury suite on his birthday. Considering, as he lit a cigarette, he always had sex too.

  “Must you?” asked Edie in a whining voice. Edie lay naked in the King sized bed, the sheets tangled around one knee, a pouting expression on her face.

  “Yes,” Corley answered. He put on dress slacks and a white shirt from the floor, walked barefoot to the huge overstuffed chair near the window. He looked out at the Ontario skyline as he sat down. His interest in Edie was at its lowest since meeting her at an industry convention in Las Vegas. She was looking for prospects, but had found Corley instead. At the time she didn’t realize they were separate things.

  “Paul,” she said, “I’m tired.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “You’ll come to bed soon?”

  “Sure.”

  He waited patiently, inhaling smoke, listening to her settle beneath a blanket. Her breath slowed to a gentle purr. He lit another cigarette and thought about how he had come so far from Midlothian, Illinois to here.

  College was the turning point. He’d started college at the very end of the sixties, when peace was a movement and computers filled entire buildings. He was a contemporary of Steve Jobs who co-created Apple in his garage in California, and of Bill gates who brought the DOS system to personal computers. Both of them had become millionaires—billionaires in Gates case—and Corley had been banned from every computer curriculum in the country.

  Loyola University threw him out for computer fraud, one of the first. He hadn’t thought of it as fraud back then and didn’t really think of it as fraud now. That was so long ago.

  It had been a good idea. The university assigned hours of use on the two mainframes to students working on class projects. Corley made deals with those students, buying portions of their hours, then selling them, along with his own growing programming expertise, to industrial companies who couldn’t pay the huge expense of their own systems. Learning in geometric leaps and profiting handsomely. Corley felt like a modern pirate, and his scheme blossomed for nearly three years before a pre-med student ratted him out.

  Holly Rebnack; he’d gotten her pregnant. He’d offered to pay for an abortion and she refused. She wanted marriage and a provider and when he refused, she went straight to the dean.

  Corley protested in formal hearings that he’d done nothing wrong. The administration postured and spouted some crap about “the sanctity of ethics” and protecting the future of this fledgling industry.” Then they threw him out in a closed hearing to prevent bad publicity.

  Bill Gates paid peanuts for someone else’s program, then sold it to IBM for a fortune and bought Seattle.

  It wasn’t fair, but the world wasn’t fair, Corley had learned. He got up and padded to the bar, mixed a seven and seven, sipping it when he returned to the chair. The whiskey settled into his stomach with a teasing burn and he watched a plane circle the towers of the city. Two A.M. and he wasn’t the least tired.

  In the next three decades he’d done a bit of everything, mostly around computers. He sold them, repaired them, designed programming systems, been an analyst, a maintenance director, a network administrator. He’d married three times, been divorced, paid for three houses around the country and been broke most of his life.

  Then he met Wally Clooner, a mid-level engineer with big plans. Wally wanted to buy a small company in Colorado for the name value and the building. His plan was simple. “We get the name and bid on every job we can. We get the job, then hire the people to do them using the money from advance billing to pay for it all.”

  He needed Corley for his experience with computers and his nerve. Corley Sayres could talk his way into any company, get himself on bid lists closed to little companies like Control-logics. He could actually get the jobs Wally Clooner dreamed of.

  It had been a good idea, and for the first year it worked perfectly. The bids went out, the signed contracts came in and the billing for hours worked by people they hadn’t actually hired yet produced a steady if not gushing stream of money. Corley suggested they form partnerships with other investors, collect a sizeable up front design fee and over the course of several months, let the project die. When those new companies failed, he and Wally collected start up fees of $50,000 to a $100,000. Easy money.

  Wally, as cunning as a badger and smooth as a silkworm, proved able to talk anyone into anything, no matter how hair-brained it sounded to Corley. A machine to burn contaminated soil from leaking service station tanks? He sold that to a group of California dentists, soaked them for $150,000 before admitting failure and bankrupting the new company. A system for monitoring Emissions for the Environmental Protection Agency? Wally sold that one to Westinghouse, who should have known better.

  Nothing wrong with it, just business with an attitude. Everybody had to have an edge, a gimmick that set them apart. That’s what made them successful. And this time, Corley thought, smoking cigarettes in a Canadian
Hotel at 2 A.M. on his fiftieth birthday, he wouldn’t get caught.

  Edie rolled over and the blanket slipped, revealing her. Corley watched for several minutes, then got up and shed his robe. He walked naked to the bed, feeling ready to celebrate again.

  “Edie?” he said. “Oh, Edie...?”

  30 – Feed Him to the Lions

  Roger Detson, the crew supervisor, picked up Adrian in Salt Lake City in a rented car at noon. By one they’d left the last tree far behind. The sun, hidden behind hazy clouds, was a pale yellow glow all around, coming from nowhere in particular. The temperature, for November, was tepid but with no winter snows to impede the road. Ruler straight, Interstate 80 pierced the white desert beyond the great salt sea. The water had long since dried up to become endless white salt dirt, the sight broken only by leaning fences, occasional exits to nowhere and the ribbon of lonely train tracks, east to west, from somewhere to somewhere else.

  They passed Tooele, the exit nothing more than a truck stop motel and a McDonald’s, and Roger, acting as tour guide, said, “That’s where we stay.” He lapsed into silence until they passed Delle, an exit with only a deserted gas station. In the distance, to the South, Adrian looked at an interesting rock formation, a solitary cone rising like a raised fist. With sideways glances he watched it, contemplated pitting himself against its vertical face.

  The thought comforted him, left him feeling less alone in the wilderness as the car buzzed along at ninety with a comfortable drone. Roger began talking just past the exit, his voice calm, his vision on the road, as if Adrian could listen or not. By the time they approached the turnoff he’d covered Genesis, the Garden of Eden, the Snake, Original Sin and the fact that Cain and Abel weren’t twins but their sons Esau and Jakob were, and of course, “Jesus died for our sins, you know.”