Assorted Fire Events: Stories

WHAT THEY DID

WHAT THEY did was cover the stream with long slabs of reinforced concrete, the kind with steel rods through it. Maybe they started with a web of rods, then concrete poured over, making a sandwich of cement and steel. Perhaps you’d call it more of a creek than a stream, or in some places, depending on the vernacular, a brook, although over the course of generations it had dug a deep, narrow gorge through that land, a kind of small canyon with steep sides. They covered the cement slabs with a few feet of fill, odds and ends, cement chunks, scraps, bits of stump and crap from excavating the foundation to the house on the lot, which was about fifty yards in front of the stream. Then they covered the scraps and crap with a half foot of sandy dirt excavated near Lake Michigan, bad topsoil, the kind of stuff that wiped out the Okies in the Dust Bowl storms. Over that stuff they put a quarter foot of good topsoil, rich dank stuff that costs a bundle, and then over that they put the turf, rolled it out the way you’d roll out sheets of toilet paper; then they watered the hell out of it and let it grow together while the house, being finished, was sided and prepped for the first walkthroughs by potential owners. The Howards, being the first such people, bought it on the spot. His nesting instinct, he explained, shaking hands with Ingersol, the real estate guy. Marjorie Howard rested the flat of her hand on her extended belly and thought Due in two weeks but didn’t say it. A few stray rocks, or boulders, were piled near the edge of the driveway and left there as a reminder of something, maybe the fact that once this had been a natural little glen with poplars and a few white birches and a easy slope down to the edge, the dropoff to the creek or brook or whatever it is now hidden under slabs of concrete — already sinking slightly but not noticeable to the building inspector who has no idea that the creek is there because it’s one of those out of sight out of mind things, better left unsaid so as not to worry the future owners who might worry, if that’s their nature, over a creek under reinforced concrete. So all one might see from the kitchen, a big one with the little cooking island in the middle with burners and a big window, is a slope down to the very end of the yard where a tall cedar fence is being installed, a gentle slope with a very slight sag in the center — but no hint, not in the least, of any kind of stream running through there. In the trial the landscaper guys — or whatever they are — called it a creek, connoting something small and supposedly lessening the stupidity of what they did. The DA called it a river, likened it to River Styx, or the Phlegethon, the boiling river of blood, not citing Dante or anything but just using the words to the befuddlement of the jury, four white men and three white women, three black women, two male Hispanics. Slabs were placed over the creek, or river, whatever, on both adjacent lots, too, same deal, bad soil, humus, rolled turf, sprinkled to high hell until it grew together but still had that slightly fake look that that kind of grass has years and years after the initial unrolling, not a hint of chokeweed or bramble or crabgrass to give it a natural texture. And the river turned to the left farther up, into the wasted fields and wooded area slated for development soon but held off by a recession (mainly in heavy industry), pegs with slim fluorescent orange tape fluttering in the wind, demarcating future “estates” and cul-de-sacs and gated communities once the poplars and white birches on that section were scalped down to the muddy tire-track ruts. What they did was cover another creek up elsewhere in the same manner, and in doing so they noticed that the slabs buckled slightly upward for some reason, the drying constriction of concrete on the steel rods; and therefore, to counterweight, they hung small galvanized garden buckets of cement down from the centers of each slab on short chains, a bucket per slab that allowed a slight downward pucker until the hardening — not drying, an engineer explained in the trial, but setting, a chemical change, molecules rearranging and so on and so forth — evened it out. So when the rescue guy went down twelve feet, sashaying the beam of his miner’s lamp around, he saw a strange sight, hardly registered it but saw it, a series of dangling buckets fading out into the darkness above the stream until the creek turned slightly towards the north and disappeared in shadow. What they could’ve done instead, the engineer said, was to divert the stream to the north (of course costing big bucks and also involving impinging on a railroad right-of-way owned by Conrail, or Penn Central), a process that involves trenching out a path, diverting the water, and allowing the flow to naturally erode out a new bed. What they could have done, a different guy said, an environmental architect who turned bright pink when he called himself that, ashamed as he was of tooting his own horn with the self righteousness of his title — or so it seemed to Mr. Howard, who of the two was the only one able to compose himself enough to bring his eyes forward. Mrs. Howard dabbled her nose with a shredded Kleenex, sniffed, caught tears, sobbed, did what she had to do. She didn’t attend all of the trial, avoiding the part when the photos of the body were shown. She avoided the diagrams of the stream and lot, the charts and cutaways, cross-sections of the slabs. Nor could she stand the sight of the backyard, the gaping hole, the yellow police tape and orange cones, and now and then, bright as lightning, a television news light floating there, a final wrap-up for the Eleven o’clock, even CNN coming back days later for a last taste of it. What they could have done is just leave the stream where it was and buffer it up along the sides with a nice-looking cut-stone retaining wall, because according to one expert, the creek, a tributary into the Kalamazoo River, fed mainly by runoff from a local golf course and woods, was drying up slowly anyhow. In the next hundred years or so it would be mostly gone, the guy said, not wanting to contradict the fact that it might have been strong enough to erode the edges of the slab support and pull it away or something, no one was sure, to weaken it enough for the pucker to form. The pucker is what they called it. Not a hole. It’s a fucking hole, Mr. Howard said. No one on the defense would admit that it was one of those buckets yanking down in that spot that broke a hole through. Their side of the case was built on erosion, natural forces, an act of God. No one would admit that it had little or nothing to do with natural forces of erosion. Except silently to himself Ralph Hightower, the sight foreman, who came up with the bucket idea in the first place, under great pressure from the guys in Lansing who were funding the project, and his boss, Rob, who was pushing for completion in time for the walkthroughs in spring. Now and then he thought about it, drank a couple of beers and smoked one of his Red Owls and mulled over his guilt the way someone might mull over a very bad ball game, one that lost someone some cash; he didn’t like kids a bit, even innocent little girls, but he still felt a small hint of guilt over the rescue guy having to go down there and see her body floating fifteen yards downstream like that and have to wade the shallows in the cramped dark through that spooky water to get to her; he’d waded rivers before a couple of times snagging steelhead salmon and knew how slippery it was going over slime-covered rock. Other than Ralph Hightower and his beer, guilt and blame was distributed between ten-odd people until it was a tepid and watered-down thing, like a single droplet of milk in a large tumbler of water — barely visible, a light haze, if even that. All real guilt hung on Marjorie Howard, who saw her girl disappear, vanish, gulped whole by the smooth turf, which was bright green-blue under a clear, absolutely brilliant spring sky. All that rolled turf was just bursting with photosynthetic zest, although you could still tell it was rolled turf by the slightly different gradient hues where the edges met, melded — this after a couple of good years of growth and the sprinkler system going full blast on summer eves and Mr. Howard laying down carefully plotted swaths of weed & feed. (She’d just read days before her girl vanished in the yard that it was warmth that caused dormant seeds and such to germinate, not light but simply heat.) Glancing outside, her point of focus was past the Fisher-Price safety gate, which was supposed to mind the deck stairs. She saw Trudy go down them, her half-balanced wobble walk, just able to navigate their awkward width (built way past code which is almost worse than breaking code and making them too narrow or too tall, stupidly wide and short for no good reason except some blunder the deck guy made, an apprentice deck kid, really). She was just about halfway across the yard, just about halfway to the cedar fence, making a beeline after something — real or imagined, who will ever know? — in her mind’s eye or real eye, the small birdbath they had out there, perhaps. What they did was frame the reinforcement rods — web or just long straight ones — in wooden rectangles back in the woods, or what had been woods and then was just a rut-filled muddy spot where, in a few months, another house would come. Frames set up, the trucks came in and poured the concrete in and the cement set and then a large rig was brought in to lift the slabs over to the creek, or stream, or whatever, which by this time was no longer the zippy swift-running knife of water but was so full of silt and mud and runoff from the digging it was more of an oozing swath of brown substance. Whatever fish were still there were so befuddled and dazed they’d hardly count as fish. Lifted them up and over, guiding with ropes, and slapped them down across the top of the stream — maybe twenty in all, more or less depending on how large they were. Then more were put down when they moved up to the next lot, approved or not approved by the inspector who never really came around much anyhow. Then the layers of crappy soil stuff and then the humus and then the rolls of turf while the other guys were roofing and putting up the siding, and the interior guys were cranking away slapping drywall up fast as they could with spackling crews coming behind them, then the painters working alongside the carpet crews with nail guns popping like wild, and behind them, or with them, alongside, whatever, the electricians doing finishing fixtures and the furnace and all that stuff in conjunction with the boss’s orders, and the prefab window guys, too, those being slapped into preset frames, double-paned, easy-to-clean and all that, all in order to get ready for the walkthroughs the real estate guys, operating out of Detroit, had lined up. Already the demand was so high on account of the company which was setting up a new international headquarters nearby. This was a rather remote setting for such a venture, but on the account of low taxes (an industrial park) and fax machines and all the new technology it didn’t matter where your headquarters were so long as it was near enough to one of those branch airports and had a helipad on the roof for CEOs’ arrivals and departures. Housing was urgently necessary for the new people. The walkthrough date in the spring because the company up-and-running date was July 1st. What the ground did that day was to open up in a smooth neat little gape, perfectly round, just beneath the weight of the girt — which wasn’t more than thirty pounds, maybe less, but enough to spark forces already at work, but that doesn’t matter, the facts, the physics, are nothing magical, as one engineer testified, and if this tragedy hadn’t happened — his words — certainty the river itself would have won out, eroded the edges, caused the whole slab to fall during some outdoor barbecue or something, a whole volleyball or badminton game swallowed up in a big gulp of earth. There one second, gone the next was how someone, best left unsaid who, but most likely CNN, described what Marjorie Howard saw — or sensed, because really the phrase seems like a metaphysical poem or maybe a philosophical precept (bad choices on the part of contractors, no not choice, nothing about choice there, or maybe fate or God if that has to do with it, one local news report actually used the phrase Act of God, if it’s a phrase). But it was an accurate account because standing in the kitchen it was like that, seeing her go, watching her vanish, and all the disbelief that she had seeing it, the momentary loss of sanity and the rubbing of her eyes in utter, fantastical disbelief, would burgeon outward in big waves and never go away no matter what, so that between that one second her little girl was there and the one where she was gone was a wide opening wound that would never be filled, or maybe finished is the word. What they did was guide the slabs down, doing the whole job in one morning because the crane was slated to be used on a project all the way over in Plainwell, and then thought while eating lunch from black lunch tins afterwards, feet up on a stump, Ho Hos and Twinkies at the end, looking at the slabs, the river gone, vanished, the creek gone, vanished, nothing but slabs of still-damp cement swirled with swaths of mud — the buckets hanging beneath them out of view — we did a good morning’s work, nothing more, nothing less.