The Monkey Handlers Read online

  “The guy underneath is doing something to that thing sticking out from the bottom of the tank,” said the MIT man.

  “You want me to photograph it? We could blow up the picture and see what he’s doing.”

  “No. Sound travels over the desert almost as well as over water. Too risky.”

  “Whatever it was he was doin’, he finished, anyway,” said the cameraman. “He’s headed the hell out of there. The guy on top’s turnin’ something.”

  A puff of hot wind blew a tumbleweed down the side of the wash. It came to rest under the tanker, below the projection from which the ground-level man had retreated. A hot, dirty-colored liquid gushed from the belly of the tanker. It hit the tumbleweed, first charring, then dissolving it. The worker on the top of the car walked quickly to the ladder, descended it, then, coughing, followed his companion back along the side of the car and then to their truck. Behind them, the discharge from the tanker bubbled and hissed as it spread, gallon upon gallon, foul and fuming, through the wash.

  At the exact moment the liquid had started to splash from the valve, the MIT student had depressed the button of a stopwatch. He watched the continuing flow through his binoculars, and when the volume fell abruptly, indicating the mere draining of residue, he depressed the button again, read the elapsed time, frowned, and made a note in his little book.

  “Somethin’ wrong?” the older man asked.

  “Not sure. I’ll need to make some calculations later. One thing, though, that stuff coming out of the tanker wasn’t pure. I was wondering why anyone would dump that stuff. It’s toxic but it’s not waste.”

  “How d’ya know it’s not pure?”

  “Wrong color. That stuff was yellowish gray, almost brown. That’s the way it looks when it’s used, contaminated.”

  “Figures. That’s why they’re dumpin’ it.”

  “Uh-uh. It’s usually recycled. Used for something else. You know, if they use it first for making explosives, the recycled stuff might be used next for, say, petroleum refining.”

  “They’re comin’ back.”

  The two workmen left their truck again and returned to the tanker car. This time, the man who climbed to the top went directly to the forward turret and the ground man to his position underneath him.

  “Closin’ her back up,” observed the older of the two watchers. The workmen retreated carefully, coughing through their masks, to the truck, then drove away the way they had come.

  The sun was lower now, headed down behind a low mountain range to the west. “You ’bout ready?” he asked.

  The MIT student pocketed his stopwatch and notepad. “No. I want to wait until dark.”

  “Yeah. I guess it’d be safer that way. We got enough water?”

  “Yes. But that’s not why I’m waiting. I want to get a sample of what’s in that wash.”

  “A sample? Hell, you said yourself it looks like used. And it says what it is on the side of the tank.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it says it is. But how do we know? And why get rid of it in a toxic-waste dump? Why not recycle? What’s it contaminated with? We get a sample, we analyze it later, we know.”

  “You gotta be nuts. You goin’ down in that wash in all that toxic shit?”

  “It’s called commitment, man.”

  “It’s called lunacy, man. I knew guys like you in Korea—all balls and no brains. It takes a certain amount of intelligence to know when to be scared, you know. Not one of those guys came back. What happens if you get overcome by some gas or something and croak? Then I gotta go down there, retrieve your fuckin’ body, drag it seven miles to the border, then try to exfìltrate without gettin’ my ass shot off by the Border Patrol, the INS, Customs agents, and Christ knows who all else, who will then proceed to indict what’s left of me for murder. I don’t think yellin’ Clean Earth is gonna do any good. They’d be easier on me if I claimed to be with a Satanic cult. A sample wasn’t in the plan. We’re down here to survey illegal toxic dumps being used by American companies payin’ off the locals, expose it, and make ’em stop.”

  “Yeah, I know. But something screwy’s going on here, and it’s not just not recycling. I timed how long it took to empty that tanker. We know its capacity. Even without calculating it, I can tell you it should have taken twice as long.”

  “So it was only half full. So what?”

  “So what company sends half-full tanker cars to Mexico to dump toxic waste? It doubles the cost. And the farther away it comes from, the more it costs in the first place. With what we’ve got, we can find that out exactly. Just punch that serial number and the initials in front of it into the railroad’s IBM Compass system and the UR code’ll tell us every place that car has been in the last thirty days: where and when it stopped, was spotted for loading and unloading, when it was released, where it was going and for whom. And the photograph proves we’ve got the right number. But it doesn’t prove what went into it was what was supposed to.”

  “How we gonna get access to a railroad’s computer system?”

  “You think there aren’t railroad people who care about the environment?”

  The older man pondered that, then said, “Okay, I’m with you. But how we gonna do it? These clothes can’t handle acid, if that’s what it is. And what are you gonna put the sample in? The acid’ll eat up the container.”

  “The thermos. We pour out the coffee, rinse it out with a little water so it’s clean. The inside of the thermos is glass. It’ll handle the acid. We get some uncontaminated rock from another wash to step on and manipulate the thermos with some mesquite branches.”

  “Sure. An’ while we’re stumblin’ around in the dark pickin’ up rocks and wood, the scorpions and Gila monsters and diamondbacks are gonna give us a pass because they appreciate all we’re tryin’ to do for the environment, right? I mean, they know we’re the good guys.”

  “Jesus, Charlie, you went through a war in Korea.”

  “I was a lot younger then.”

  “So then what the hell are you doing out here in the desert now?”

  “I forgot something I learned in Korea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never volunteer.”

  Moonlight was spilling under the trestle and across the wash as Charlie, the Korean War veteran, stood uneasily on newly placed rocks, hanging on to the MIT student’s belt as the young man leaned out over the poisonous muck trying to get the last of it he could into the neck of a thermos bottle he was maneuvering with two sticks.

  “You know, if he’s really lucky,” Charlie said, his voice muffled by the neck cloth he had tied over his nose and mouth against the stench, “by the time he finishes his teens, an American male is familiar with certain odors he’ll never forget: burnt gunpowder, a wet dog, a sweating horse, and an aroused woman—not necessarily in that order. But some things, no kid can’t identify by the time he absolutely has to shave: gasoline, sweat socks left in a locker too long, and battery acid. And right now I feel like I’m standing inside the world’s biggest car battery.”

  “Yeah,” said the young man, “but battery acid is only fifty-percent-strength stuff—and it’ll burn your clothes. Pure sulfuric is in the high nineties—strong enough cold; hot it’s ferocious! This stuff wasn’t pure, but it was hot. It’s been used to dissolve something, then kept hot, all the way here. Why? That’s what I want to know. What … were … they…” he continued, struggling now with his task, “trying to get … rid of? Dioxin? PCBs? Infectious … medical wastes?”

  “God, you’ve got some imagination. Suppose it’s just old battery acid collected at gas stations, like used crankcase oil?”

  “Then it … wouldn’t be … hot. There. Got it. Ease me back.”

  As the two men picked their way up the side of the wash, Charlie said, “You carry that thing back, okay? It ain’t what it used to be, but I’d just as soon not have my dick burned off just yet if it’s all the same to you.”

  The younger man started to laugh, then s
aid urgently, “Hold it!”

  “What?”

  “There. Get down.” He pointed toward a flashing light moving east.

  “Locomotive,” said Charlie, “coming on the main line, moving slow.”

  “They usually rip through here. It may be stopping to pick up the tanker. Keep down. The switch for the spur is just a couple of hundred yards up ahead, and they’ll drop someone off to throw it after the train passes and stops to back up.”

  “What’re you worried about?” Charlie whispered. “Someone comes after us, just throw the sample at him. That’ll fuck him up for good.”

  Two General Motors diesel-electric locomotives, coupled back-to-back, drew past slowly, pulling twenty-six freight cars, a modest load. The caboose had been put in the middle rather than its traditional last-car place, giving its occupants easier access to the length of the train. Duly, the train stopped when the last car, a hopper, was twenty feet beyond the switch. In the moonlight, it was easy for the two activists to see a brakeman drop to earth, throw the switch, then signal with an electric lantern. The locomotive engines gave a short rumble, then subsided as momentum carried the train backward slowly onto the spur. The hopper car coupled with the tanker, and the brakeman waited until it had cleared the trestle and stopped again before he dropped in the safety pin and attached the air-brake hose. It was while the train was stopped dead that Charlie grabbed the MIT man and squeezed his arm. There was no need to have done so, because there was no way the other man could have missed the alarming sight.

  Seemingly from all around the two men, the distance appearing closer than it actually was because of the moonlight, human outlines rose to a half-bent posture from behind boondocks and crept toward the train. Within moments, while the brakeman’s back was turned, they swung aboard. They did so in an orderly fashion, as if led or rehearsed. Moments later, the brakeman signaled and the diesels responded, pulling the train and the newly acquired tanker car and clandestine passengers slowly out onto the main line.

  The two environmentalists hugged the ground until the train was well away, then Charlie said, “Jeeesus! Did you see that? Those guys were all around us. No way they couldn’t have spotted us!”

  “I dunno. We didn’t spot them.”

  “Yeah, but they weren’t moving. We were all over the place gettin’ those rocks, goin’ in and out of the wash. We’re lucky we didn’t get our throats slit!”

  “Why? We weren’t interfering with their plan. They may have figured we were going to try our luck sneaking into the U.S., too. What the hell, it was a big enough train for everybody.” With that, the graduate student stood up, saying, “Well, we’ve got seven miles to do before—”

  MIT never finished that or any other sentence. For the first time since 1953, Charlie heard the sound of a high-powered rifle bullet slamming into flesh right next to him, a split second before the crack of the weapon. As he died, MIT motioned with his hand that Charlie take the sample.

  Charlie did more than that. Moving imperceptibly, never lifting himself from his ground-hugging position, Charlie eased the notebook from his dead partner’s pocket, substituted the thermos for the camera he now abandoned, the film safely in a plastic canister in his pocket, and tied his neck cloth tightly around the dead man’s wrists. That accomplished, Charlie lifted the body’s arms over its head, slid his own head up between the tied arms, rolled it over onto his back, and, moving on his hands and knees, started to crawl forward toward the north. Moments later, two more bullets smacked home into the back of the dead man on top of him.

  Charlie dropped flat and remained motionless, hoping against hope that the shooter would have such confidence in his marksmanship that he wouldn’t bother to check what he had every reason to believe was another dead tribute to his ability. An hour later, as the moon went down, Charlie concluded that he had won his gamble and resumed his crawl. “There are no ex-Marines,” he thought, “only former Marines. And Marines always bring back their dead.”

  As Charlie resumed his crawl, the twin-diesel train remained halted on the U.S. side of the border for the usual checks and inspections. A small knot of men stood to one side, talking. One of them held a Belgian shepherd on a leash. He was a Customs inspector. “Find anything?” an Immigration man asked him.

  “Ha!” snorted a Border Patrol member. “He couldn’t find piss in a boot if’n he held it upside down. What d’ya think they give ’im the dog for?”

  “Bite his balls off, Sam,” the Customs man said, smiling, to his dog. The dog, who had heard this line of banter from these old friends daily for years, paid no attention to the mock command.

  “No shit on this one,” the Customs man replied, “least as far as me’n Sam can find. How ’bout you guys?”

  “Come up with four wets,” said Immigration.

  “You mean,” said the Border Patrol man, “un-doc-u-men-ted a-lee-uns?”

  All but one of the group laughed at this sally. The dissenter was a young, earnest-looking man who said, “Listen, I know I’m new here and all, and I know the dog’s good. But he can’t smell what’s inside the tanker car, and no one looked inside it.”

  The Customs man grinned at his buddies, who did not include the new representative of the much-resented upstart Drug Enforcement Agency. Customs and the DEA had been battling over turf since Lyndon Johnson took the DEA’s predecessor out of the Treasury Department and put it under the Department of Justice. “He wants to look inside the tanker. He’s absolutely right. Get the man a measuring stick and a rag.”

  With elaborate politeness and solicitude, another Customs man brought over a long measuring pole such as those used to measure the contents of underground oil-storage tanks. With it, he brought a dirty rag to wipe it. “Right this way, sir,” he said, leading the way to the tanker, then up the ladder to the catwalk and over to the rear turret.

  The turret was ringed with dogged-down toggle bolts. “What’s that?” the DEA man asked.

  “That there’s the manway. You undo the toggle bolts and flip ’em all back, an’ you can get a man down into the tank to inspect it, repair it, or what have you.” He proceeded to loosen the bolts and flip them to the open position.

  “You’d think,” said the DEA agent, “that if you can get a man in through that manhole thing, the INS would be up here, too, looking for aliens.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said the Customs man. He handed the DEA agent the pole, then tied the rag to the end of it. “Now,” he said, indicating the cover plate over the manway, “just lift back the plate, stick your head down in there, and look. Use your flashlight.”

  Gripping the beragged pole in one hand, the DEA agent lifted back the manway cover plate with the other. He got his head as far as over the opening when he reeled back, dropping the pole, clutching his chest, and coughing furiously. “Gas!” he gasped.

  “Acid. Sulfuric acid. Just like it says on the sign on the side there. You should try that when it’s full.”

  “You … knew!”

  “’Course we knew. It’s our job to know. Here, watch.”

  The Customs man picked up the pole and then, saying, “You think maybe they’re hidin’ drugs or people down there?” he lowered the pole, rag end first, until it hit the bottom of the tank, then swished it around in the residue and drew the pole back up. The rag was gone and the end of the wooden pole was smoldering. He held it out to the DEA agent, who gagged further as the acid-eaten end approached his face, then turned, ran down the catwalk to the ladder, down to the ground, and off toward the small administration building.

  “Hey!” the Customs man shouted after him. “You were right. They were trying to bring in a load of acid. Street value in the millions. You’ll get a medal for this!” He intended to say more but he was laughing too hard.

  “Hey!” shouted the other Customs inspector, still holding the dog. “Don’tcha wanna check the other hole?”

  “Mother … fuckers!” choked the DEA agent. “Mother … f … fuck
ers!”

  His voice was drowned out by the sound of the train leaving.

  * * *

  As Michael Stone stepped behind Stephanie Hannigan into the small living room of her home, he draped his suit jacket, shirt, and tie over his left forearm and asked, “Where’s your head?”

  “Screwed on nice and tight in the usual place, last time I looked,” Stephanie answered. “Why, were you afraid I’d lose it in a delayed reaction to your little contretemps with the motorized morons back there?”

  For a moment, Stone looked puzzled by Stephanie’s response. Then he looked aside with slight embarrassment, chuckling in an attempt to conceal it. “Sorry, force of habit. Navy usage. I’m liable to call your floor a deck, stairs a ladder, ceiling an overhead, and so forth.”

  “So, what’s a head?”

  “Bathroom. I’d like to freshen up a bit.”

  “Aye, aye,” said Stephanie, pointing to what looked like a closet under the stairs. “You’ll find the bare minimum under the ladder there. For more fully equipped facilities, you’ll have to go up the ladder and take the first door to your right.”

  Stone cast a calculating eye on the space beneath the stairs and said, “I’m not sure I could stand up in there.” He headed toward the stairs, saying, “I’ll be down in a little bit.”

  “Wait!” Stephanie exclaimed, darting in front of Stone and holding up her hand. “I’ve got some female things flying from the yardarm up there.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes closed,” Stone said, pretending to move around her. Stephanie scurried up the stairs, saying, “Sorry, classified!” and disappeared.

  Stone smiled to himself as he settled into a sofa that faced a fieldstone fireplace. Inside it, the winter’s accumulation of ash had been removed and replaced by an arrangement of dried flowers. He looked at the coffee table in front of him and concluded that Stephanie had two passions: the law, as evidenced by the latest issue of The Fordham Law Review lying facedown, opened to a discussion of cases in which plea bargains had been held not binding by reason of failure of performance by the defendant; and gardening—witness the current issues of just about every one of the many magazines devoted to that subject.