The Poison Well

I

The water in the river behind the Stanton Steel Works had been the color of rust for as long as Frank Keller had been alive, which was thirty-eight years. He had grown up swimming in it as a boy, though his mother had warned him not to. He had worked in the plant since he was nineteen, climbing catwalks and inspecting support beams and learning, over the course of fifteen years, every pipe and valve and drainage outlet in a facility that employed three thousand men.

Frank knew the plant the way a doctor knows a body. He knew where the air was thickest with iron dust. He knew which floors vibrated when the great presses came on at dawn. He knew, most importantly, where the water went after it had been used to cool the steel.

In the spring of 1947, he noticed something he had never noticed before: a new pipe, no wider than a man's arm, running from the chemical treatment building underground and disappearing into the riverbank. It was not on any of the blueprints. He had drawn half the blueprints himself.

He followed the pipe for two hours, crawling through tunnels he had never known existed, until it emerged on the far side of the river and emptied into the water with a sound like a sigh. The water at the point of discharge was darker than the rest of the river, almost black, and it smelled of chemicals that Frank could not name but recognized from his years of breathing the plant's air.

He collected a sample in a glass jar he kept in his desk drawer for just such a purpose. He did not know yet what he would do with it. He only knew that something was wrong.

II

Frank tested the sample in the basement of his row house using a kit he had brought home from the plant's quality control lab. The results took three days to come back, because the lab was understaffed and the man who ran it was doing Frank's work on top of his own.

When the results finally arrived, Frank sat at his kitchen table and read them twice. Then he poured himself a glass of whiskey and read them a third time.

The benzene levels were twelve times the safe limit. The cyanide content was eight times the limit. The heavy metals—lead, mercury, chromium—were off the scale of the testing equipment.

Frank put his head in his hands. He thought of his son Tim, who was twelve and had asthma and spent his afternoons playing baseball in the lot behind their house. He thought of the neighbors who walked their dogs along the riverbank every evening. He thought of the children who had swum in this river when they were his son's age.

He made an appointment with Henry Stanton the next morning. Stanton was fifty-five, the general manager of the plant, and Frank's former boss before Stanton had been promoted and Frank had stayed in engineering. They had played cards together on Friday nights for ten years. Stanton had been godfather to Tim's baptism.

Frank laid the test results on Stanton's desk. He explained what he had found. He showed him the pipe. He told him the numbers.

Stanton listened without interrupting. When Frank finished, he picked up the test results and read them slowly, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. He set them down. He looked at Frank with an expression that was neither angry nor surprised.

"Frank," he said, "do you know how many families in this town depend on this plant?"

Frank did not answer.

"Eight hundred families," Stanton said. "Eight hundred. Your family. The Millers. The Coopers. The people who run the grocery store and the bank and the church. If this plant closes, they close. If they close, this town dies. Do you understand me?"

"I understand," Frank said. "But if the plant doesn't close, the river dies. And the people who drink from the wells die slowly."

Stanton leaned back in his chair. "Nobody drinks from the wells, Frank. The city has a water treatment plant. The river is—well, the river has always been the color it is."

"The chemicals are in the groundwater," Frank said. "They seep into the soil. They get into the wells eventually."

"Eventually," Stanton repeated. He stood up. "Frank, you're a good engineer. You've been a good friend. Don't make me ask you nicely to forget what you saw."

III

Frank tried to do the right thing. He really did. He took his test results to the state health department in Springfield. The clerk who received them filed them under "Environmental Concerns" and told him it would take six to eight weeks for an inspector to visit.

He took copies to the Pittsburgh Tribune. A reporter named Margaret Shaw called him three days later and asked him to meet her at a diner on Fifth Avenue. She was thirty-five, sharp-eyed, and wrote investigative pieces that had taken down two aldermen and a county commissioner.

Frank told her everything. She took notes in a small black book and asked questions that showed she understood the chemistry even though she was a journalist, not an engineer.

"I can run this," she said when he finished. "But I need more than test results. I need names. I need documents. I need someone inside the plant who can confirm what you're telling me."

Frank thought about Stanton. He thought about the other managers. He thought about the men he had worked beside for fifteen years, men who had sons and daughters and mortgages and health insurance that Frank desperately needed because Tim's asthma was getting worse.

"I'll try," he said.

He tried for two weeks. He asked around. He hinted at what he knew. Every man he spoke to either changed the subject or told him to mind his own business. His friend from Friday night cards, a man named Charlie who had shared a bottle of bourbon with him more times than Frank could count, looked at him across the pool table and said, "You're playing with fire, Frank. For your boy."

Frank stopped asking. He sat in his office every day and did his job, inspecting support beams and reviewing structural reports and pretending he did not know that the pipe behind the chemical building was still pumping toxins into the river.

He drove past it every evening on the way home. He watched the dark water flow into the darker river. He thought about Tim's asthma, about the inhaler that cost twelve dollars a month, about the health insurance that kept him employed and silent.

One night in late June, he stood in his kitchen at midnight, holding the original test results in his hand. He stood there for a long time, looking at the numbers, at the benzene levels, at the cyanide, at the heavy metals that would sit in the soil and the groundwater and the bodies of the people who lived downstream for decades.

Then he walked to his desk, opened the bottom drawer, and put the test results inside. He closed the drawer. He went to bed. He did not sleep.

IV

Frank Keller retired from Stanton Steel Works in 1962. He was fifty-five years old and had chronic lung disease that the doctors attributed to years of breathing iron dust and chemical fumes. He spent his mornings in a recliner in his living room, watching the river through the window.

The river was still the color of rust.

On his last day at work, Stanton came to his desk and shook his hand. "You've been a good engineer, Frank," he said. "This plant wouldn't run without men like you."

Frank nodded. He did not tell Stanton about the pipe. He did not tell him about the test results in the bottom drawer. He did not tell him anything.

In the autumn of 1973, the river was declared biologically dead. No fish lived in it. No birds nested along its banks. The towns downstream reported increases in liver disease and neurological disorders. The state health department sent an inspector. The inspector found a pipe that was not on any blueprint. He wrote a report. The report was filed.

Frank Keller was sixty-three years old. He sat in his recliner and watched the river through the window. He thought about the test results in the bottom drawer of his desk at Stanton Steel Works, results that no one had ever read.

He closed his eyes. The river kept flowing.

TI: 85.0 (T1 Despair) | M1:7.0 M3:7.5 M6:6.0 | N1:0.25 K2:0.55 | theta:240 deg (Absurdist Nihilism)