He had a lot of those. He made them in the Nez Perce style, the Lakota style, the Iroquois style, you name it. He figured the only way to keep the knowledge from being lost was by using it. He could go into the woods armed with just a knife and make himself a birchbark canoe from scratch. “Only did it once, though,” he had explained, “took me two weeks. Anna had to keep coming out with coolers full of baloney sandwiches. I ended up with viral pneumonia.” Which sounded very humble, but he'd finished the canoe, and he still had it in his garage. The bows he made in his workshop, and he had no compunction about shaping them with a belt sander. “The idea,” he said, “is to keep the information in my hand, not to live like a caveman.”
I couldn't really use his bows, even if I'd wanted too. I could draw them but I couldn't hold them steady long enough to sight in on the target. Also, I was nervous. The bowstrings were made of twisted horsehair. I was convinced that one of them would snap, and its ends whip into my eyeball at supersonic speed. Jim killed a few bales of hay for me, and that was about the time Anna came home.
Zodiac
19
THE REST OF THE DAY was brute labor. We lined the back of the U-Haul with plastic and dumped the cement and the gravel in a big mound and stirred it together. Then I went out and found a bar. Around 11:30 I tore myself away from a ski-ball game and allowed myself to be picked up by Alan and Frank in the U-Haul. We drove down to the Boner plant, found the cul-de-sac, and backed the truck up to the manhole. The rest was simple, stupid and obvious. We lifted the lid. We didn't have a manhole cracker, but a big strong guy like Frank can do it with a prybar and a chisel. We formed an assembly line, shoveling the cement and gravel mixture into the gunny sacks and stacking them in the sewer line until it was filled, top to bottom, side to side. Then we did it again so we had a double-thickness wall. We even pounded a few segments of rebar into it to make it all the stronger. By that time the sewer had backed up about halfway and dioxin-laden juices were oozing out between the sacks. I got sick because I'd had three dozen red-hot chicken wings in the course of my ski-ball, and I had to toss them right down the manhole. Probably not the first half-digested load of hot wings to visit those sewers.
Then we took sandpaper and files and removed all the rust from the rim of the manhole lid and its iron seat in the pavement. We squeezed the epoxy glue onto both and glued the lid back in place, then poured a layer of wet cement over the whole thing and just paved it over. We threw a sheet of plywood over the wet cement, then parked the truck's rear wheels on it. We deflated the tires, unscrewed their valve stems, and removed the distributor cap from the engine, and, for our finale, secured the gate into the Boner plant with some Kryptonites. The cement would take three days to set properly and we intended to do a proper job, so we set Alan up as the night watchman, rolled out sleeping bags in the back, and went to sleep, breathing mildly carcinogenic cement dust.
For a night gig, this one turned out to be not bad from the media-circus point of view. No one knew why we were parked here - we figured we'd let them puzzle it out for themselves - but Buffalo loves to see scruffy environmentalists irritate Boner Chemical. A crew came around with donuts at 7:00 A.M. and interviewed us for a local morning show. A whole series of panjan-drums from Boner came around and told us to get off Boner property or we'd be arrested, and we told each one that we were on a public street, not Boner property. Then they sent some lawyers around to tell us the same thing, as though the messenger would make a difference. The cops came around once or twice and we showed them the official city maps. We also pointed out that there were no NO PARKING signs in this vicinity. That satisfied them. California cops would have beat us up and searched our rectums for crack, but these guys thought we were nice, spunky kids.
Then the citizenry started coming around and bringing us food. Two layer cakes. A cherry pie. Seventeen bags of chips. Five assorted six-packs. Six more bags of chips. A total of forty-six donuts. Chips. Frank was horrified. “This is all junk food,” he said, in the privacy of the U-Haul. But when another lady showed up with a blazing red, cherry-flavored cake, he thanked her profusely.
Boner stationed security people around us on all three sides. They hadn't figured out the thing with the sewer yet.
They thought we were using this as a base camp for some kind of illegal assault. Stupid as this would have been, this is how the Boners saw the world.
Once it was dark, they wheeled out big spotlights and aimed them at us. It was very bright. For the people sleeping in back, this was no problem, but for the person on watch it was irritating. What the hell, we wore sunglasses. I had Debbie come around with our big nautical strobe and we set that going on top of the cab. You could see that thing through a brick wall. The flash was so intense it knocked the wind out of you. For the person in the cab, it wasn't bad, but for those security people, staying up all night, staring at us, it must have been lethal. By sunrise, the words U-HAUL were permanently chiseled into their optic nerves.
On day two, the Boner people got a little smarter and called the fire department. This we hadn't counted on. A car pulled up, one of those station wagons with the red light on top, and a guy who was obviously the fire marshal got out. Some of the Boner lawyers scurried up again and flanked him as he approached, as though they were on his side. He identified himself and I told him I was in charge.
“You seem to be blocking a public street,” he pointed out.
“Nobody's using it,” I countered, “It's a dead-end; this gate is locked, and Boner lost the keys.”
“Normally I wouldn't care, but every once in a while this factory catches on fire.”
“Goddamn. That must be hell to fight.”
“Eh?”
“All those chemicals. You practically need a reference book for each one.”
“Yeah. Let me tell you, when we get a call for this plant, we're not all that damn happy.”
“Time to roll out the Purple K, huh?”
His face crinkled up. “Yeah, exactly.”
Purple K is a foaming compound they keep at airports to put out exploding 747s. Sometimes useful for chemical fires.
He continued, “But anyway, if there were a fire here, we'd have to get in through this gate.”
“No problem. We're here twenty-four hours a day. If there's a fire, we'll move.”