All this groovy informality was calculated, but up here I'd take informality where I could get it. I dropped the front legs of my chair to the carpet and crossed my legs in the all-American figure-four position, letting the shoe dangle way out to the side. I sipped some of Boner's toxic decaf and stifled a fart. “Okay. What's your beef, Laughlin?”
He looked almost injured. “No beef. Why does it always have to be a beef? I'm just interested in talking to you in less ...” he waved his hands around the room “... claustrophobic surroundings.”
“ 'Bout what?”
“Well, for one thing, whether Sam Horn's going to be as lucky in a tight spot as Dave Henderson.”
“The world is full of Red Sox fans, Mr. Laughlin, and I only sleep with one of them.”
“Touche. Another thing, then. We've got some work going on at Biotronics that would interest you.”
“The Holy Grail?”
He was a little nonplussed. “I don't know about any Holy Grail.”
“Dolmacher's phrase.”
“Ah, yes! He mentioned that the two of you had had a little chat.”
“Verbal combat is more like it. You work for Biotronics, Laughlin?”
The executives crinkled up and chortled.
“I'm the president,” Laughlin said, kindly enough.
Oh yeah. I'd seen his picture in the paper, a couple of months ago.
Thirty floors below, Jim was waiting for me in his rusty pickup, reading the warranty on his washing machine belt. “This must be reality,” I said, climbing in.
“Take it or leave it.”
“Let's go to the Falls,” I said, “and raise some hell.”
“What happened?”
“Zip. Made an appointment with a young rising star in the cancer industry.”
“To do what?”
“To shop for Grails.”
We went to the Falls. Jim stood up near the top, wearing 501s and some Indian gear, squinting a lot, looking sad and noble for the camera crews and telling dirty jokes to the print reporters. A bunch of GEE people had come down from the Toronto office to give us a hand, so things were well under way by the time we got there. I kept asking where Debbie was and people kept saying “over there,” and eventually I got pointed over to a heavy railing overlooking the Falls. Three climbing ropes were tied to it, leading down the cliff, and Debbie was hanging from one of them down near the bottom, dressed in a stunning Gore-Tex coverall. She and her Toronto pals had located Boner's hidden outfall, right where Alan said it would be, and then started driving pitons into the rock. Toronto had prepared a banner, a forty-foot strip of white ripstop nylon with a big red arrow blazoned on it. They nailed that banner to the cliff, pointing right to the outfall. They took their time, used a lot of pitons and strung eighth-inch aileron cable around the edge of the banner so that the wind wouldn't stretch it away from the cliff. Finally, Debbie took a can of fluorescent-orange spray paint and did what she could to highlight the outfall, make it visible to the cameras. It wasn't a total success, since everything was cold and wet, not ideal conditions for spray paint, but some of it stuck. And if it didn't, well, that's what the arrow was for.
Zodiac
20
WHEN I GOT BACK HOME there was the usual post-trip crap to take care of. Mail and messages. Had to get a birthday present for Auntie. Had to sign a bunch of papers to continue Tanya's “studies” at GEE. They shut off our phone service so we all had to sit down and thrash out about three months' worth of unpaid long-distance bills. In the middle of a spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come in while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony. That was okay. Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we'd untrashed it and cleaned it up, so why not try to keep it that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call this place a “co-op” or a “commune”? How about calling it a “house”? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan?
Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose hair predominated in the shower drain - the women's, since they had more, or the men's, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?
They had gone to extreme inconvenience to save a message for me on the phone answering machine. I had to listen to it three times because I couldn't believe it. It was Dolmacher. He sounded friendly. He wanted me to go up to New Hampshire with him and participate in the survival game - pretending to be a commando in the woods. He was trying to get more people to come up from Boston, he explained, and - get this - the people he worked with were “all terrible nerds.”
I did have to give him one thing: he had the intestinal fortitude to go up there every weekend and do combat with those shaggy inbreds from New Hampshire. They didn't use real bullets, but the dirt and cold were real.
He sounded so damn happy, that's what bothered me. The Grail project must be doing well. And later on the tape, he reminded me of my appointment with Laughlin. What the hell did they want from me?