The Breakwall
Robb White
The only people around were
teenagers in
swimsuits and flip-flops heading for the rusted steel ladder some Good
Samaritan placed against the boulders so people can reach the top slabs of
granite without having to maneuver up to the top. My age rendered me invisible
while they passed, gabbling their slang and giggling.
Two old men farther down
relaxed on camping
chairs drinking beer. They used crevices in the massive slabs of granite wall to
hold their rods. To my left, the beach had thinned out except for a few families
with kids teasing gulls, hovering above their blankets and the kids’ outstretched
hands holding potato chips. An older couple with their pants rolled zigzagged the
shoreline, bent over, water lapping at their ankles, searching for glints of
beach glass.
Sunset was an hour, judging
from the shimmering
red disc poised a few inches above the horizon. Locals like to watch the fuzzy
red ball sink into Lake Erie. You’d think it offered a therapeutic balm to the
soul. Maybe it did.
I was jaundiced. I’d
caught that “green wink”
of sun going down and nothing good happened to me. I used to fish off the wall.
At fifteen, a rogue wave knocked me off it into the stagnant pool at the base
of the wall. I spent a week in the hospital coughing with bronchitis from sucking
water into my lungs. Some friends and I walked the mile-long breakwall to the
Coast Guard station at the lighthouse. You have to pass a gauntlet we called “Flat
Rocks,” where the boulders were lower to the water. Waves arced over our heads
in rough weather. I stole a Playboy pinup from a sailor’s locker and
fantasized over her tawny pubic ruff for weeks. Growing up in a drunken
household with parents fighting like dinosaurs turned me into a mouse about to
be trampled. In a small town, everyone knows your family.
The spot where the wave
tossed me over was near
where I stood waiting for Kurt, my contact. He was going to blow the whistle on
an iron-ore smelting plant coming to town. The company’s PR team had done their
job reassuring the town with charts and graphs explaining the particulate
matter release were well within EPA guidelines.
When the Herald-Tribune
took me back, I
was grateful and still ashamed. My story on a corrupt alderwoman turned out to
be a hoax—opposition research planted to make her look like a grifter, and I
took the bait. Adiós, byline. Adiós, reputation. Even my
girlfriend dumped me. Hello, hometown. I thought I’d scraped the shit from my
natal place off my shoes.
Checking my cell phone for
the tenth time
proved useless. He’d call, he said, if he was going to be late. A blind man
could see this exposé was going to be big. I’d barely adjusted to the low pay
and my rinkydink apartment above Bridge Street, where the din from the bar crowds
lasted until three in the morning. I couldn’t take covering street festivals
and spelling bees, interviewing snotty teenaged athletes, morose farmers, and chatty
grandmothers with recipes. The paper’s senior reporter caught anything
worthwhile. He disliked me and would as soon share a fondue fork with me as
share a tip. He’d written a puff piece slavering over the prospect of spin-off dollars
to be produced. Above the fold was a photo of the owners and city big shots
with silver-plated shovels at the ready, beaming for the camera.
He was late. The skeleton
of the plant was
already visible from the breakwall beyond the harbor mouth where Great Lakes
freighters bulging with coal and taconite pellets used to tie up in winter near
Pinney docks.
The chemical factories near
the lake had collapsed
like dominoes when China snapped up most of the Midwest’s heavy industry. The
town’s leaders were eager to reinvigorate heavy industry in our rust-belt town,
now dependent on cottage industries and specialty shops that opened and closed
like crocuses in a spring rain. The beach once resembled a 1960’s Frankie
Avalon-Annette Funicello beach film with hundreds of sunbathers in my youth. At
night, junkies roamed the scrub behind the concession stand for places to sleep
and stumbled around the sand looking for loose change or lost sunglasses. A
woman chased a trio of teenagers down here to the breakwall after they stole
her son’s bike; one of them pulled out a gun and took a shot at her.
When I met him in a bar
on Bridge street, Kurt was
mumbling on the stool next to mine. I wanted to ignore him, another middle-aged
drunk, but bar protocol nixed that and I was curious about his accent: South
African. We began talking. He said he was part of the advance team in town to
train new workers.
“Those morons sold
out the city for a couple
dozen minimum-wage jobs,” I said. “This part of town will reek worse than the
cat-piss smell of a meth lab.” I’d had some familiarity with that as a
crime-beat reporter back in Chicago.
“Worse than you think,
mate,” he said. “Name’s
Kurt, by the way.”
“I’m curious,”
I replied. “Tell me more.”
I told him about Northtown’s
history of
pollution. The posters of black, upside-down Smiley Faces an activist group
planted in the yards of households where a family member died of cancer. When I
was in high school, the Northtown River had to be dredged for PCBs; it took a
decade and we were still ranked on the Superfund map. The big orange water
towers at the coal storage facility below my house sprayed the mountain-sized piles
with water from the river where billions of molecules of Polychlorinated
Byphenyls lurked like trap-door spiders waiting for prey. The lake breezes wafted
droplets into our backyards as far as the breakwall. I got out of town with
sparks flying off my shoes.
He half-turned in his chair
and opened his
hands to show me.
“What the—what
is that?”
I’d never seen anything
like it. Red and blue
fibers sprouting out of the palms of both his hands.
“Morgellons,”
he said, drawing it out into
three syllables with a hiss at the end. “It’s a disease that causes fibers to
grow out of my skin. I have them everywhere on my legs and back, too.”
I googled it later: Morgellons
was a
neurological disease that caused red and blue fibers to grow out of skin.
Something akin to radiation poisoning from cesium. Its affects on the brain were
lethal, progressive mental and physical neurological deterioration. Kurt knew
he was a goner and had little time left.
He wanted revenge on the
owners and
shareholders of the conglomerate that owned his company after the company’s
lawyers were victorious in defeating his lawsuit claiming responsibility for
causing the disease.
“Thirty years, and
I’ll never see my pension,”
he said. “That plant will do it here too. They’ll take their profit and move on
once the damage is done.”
Love Canal came to mind—the
toxic landfill caused
by dumping chemicals in the seventies that killed dozens and harmed hundreds of
people living near Niagara Falls. All the male members of my family had jobs in
Electromet Corporation, Union Carbide, Reactive Metals, and a list of companies
that were here and now gone. Big defense contractors making tons of money who
paid high wages. Left in their wake were dozens of harbor families with dead
relatives from stomach cancer, brain cancer, all sorts of blood and bone
diseases.
Nothing like the uncouth
smash-and-grab robbers
on the TV news, these were sophisticated, financial buccaneers sporting
Rolexes, driving Ferraris and Lambos, relishing their stock options from their
big estates.
“There’s not
much time,” Kurt said. “As you say
you’re a newspaperman, I can get you proof.”
Meeting at the breakwall
was to be the exchange
drop. When we spoke the following day, he told me he was being watched by
“company goons.” He refused to meet me at my place, a parking lot, or anywhere
he couldn’t see them approaching. I suggested the breakwall. It gave him an
excuse if he were to be seen in public standing with someone admiring the lake
view.
No answer: my calls went
straight to voicemail.
The view from the top of
the breakwall revealed
more cars coming to watch the sunset. I climbed down the ladder to head for my car,
kicking myself for not providing him a backup in an emergency.
You didn’t have to
be a crime reporter to
recognize crime scenes. Drag marks in the sand were obvious to a blind man. Two
tracks led off into a narrow path into a thick stand of cattails. The city
built an observation deck behind the breakwall for people to look out over an
inlet where geese, swans, and ducks flourished. Coyotes prowled the perimeter
hoping for an easy score; they weren’t the only predators. City council had
that path roped off when two homeless men ambushed a female jogger and sexually
assaulted her.
The hackles on my neck told
me not to go in
there alone. I’d been there once. You couldn’t see anything from the deck—not
even the breakwall a hundred feet away. Cattails and invasive phragmites overwhelmed
the path and most of the surrounding area. I pushed the stalks out of my way, unable
to see anything but green in front of me with bars of light filled with flying insects.
Fronds from the phragmites waved like pennants over my head. I stepped on cattail
cobs and broken stalks. A dozen yards in, the drag marks disappeared in the muck
trying to suck my shoes off my feet.
No one on the deck the moment
I broke through
into the clearing. Scuff marks resumed on the lip of the deck and led to the
part extending over the inlet. I followed them to the railing. The water was murky,
scummed at the pilings. Sun made rippling designs on the surface. Despite my
heart thumping like a bongo, it looked peaceful. A flock of mallards cruised
past, squawking at me, their teal heads glinting.
Looking down over the deck
boarding, I saw Kurt’s
face looking up at me from the shallow depth; his eyes were open and his teeth
bared in a grimace. No air bubbles from his mouth. Tendrils of crimson blood spooled
out from behind his head. I ran. Fronds whipped my face as I stumbled through
the cattails whipping across my vision.
My hands on the steering
wheel shook and my
vision was blurred from the adrenalin surge.
The story took me half the
night. By dawn, I’d
fully relapsed with shots of vodka but I had the story. Unshaved and
unshowered, still wearing my shoes caked with swamp muck, I burst into the
conference room where the staff was meeting and tossed the report in front of
my boss.
He looked up at me. I looked
around the
conference room at a dozen shocked faces. A single thought in the cartoon
bubbles above their heads: Our big-city reporter has gone completely off
his rocker . . .
“You’ve been
drinking,” he said.
Too late for mouthwash or
toothpaste, I agreed.
My nemesis in the chair
beside him cut his eyes
from mine but the snicker greasing his face stayed.
“Go to my office.
Right now.”
An hour later, I left his
office, jobless
again. The chief of police had called to say there was no body there or
anywhere near the deck.
No paper will touch my story.
I’m written off
as a loser and a drunk.
My new job is unloading
trucks on the graveyard
shift at a DIY store. I’m being followed there and back. A man lurks in the
shadows of the vape shop across the street from my apartment. He’s not a
midnight reveler. He’s watching my place. I keep an eye out for tow motors and
pallets of cement bags. Accidents can happen wherever you look. And sometimes when
you don’t.
-END-
