The principle is simple. If there's poison coming out of a sewer, you should be able to trace it to its source. It helps to have a map of all the sewer lines and where they feed into one another. I find the CSO on my sewer map and, just like that, I know which neighborhood it's coming from. Once I get to that neighborhood, my map tells me where the key manholes are and, by running tests under those manholes, I can narrow it down even further.
Besides a manhole tool, the only requirement is some kind of quick, simple test for the presence of the toxin you're tracing. Preferably it's a test you can perform right in your vehicle. I had something like that for organic chlorine compounds, a test built into small plastic test tubes. They were about the size of shotgun shells, so when this whole mess had started I'd made up several dozen and stashed them in an army-surplus bandolier. With that slung over my shoulder and my manhole cracker in my hands, I was a toxic Rambo, prepared to rain media death upon the bad guys. We were all set.
It wasn't that romantic, though. I sat down in the back with my coffee and a penlight while Bart drove around aimlessly on the Mass Pike, trying to determine if we were being tailed. I studied my sewer map. Dorchester Bay had many CSOs and I had to figure out which one of them I'd been looking at. My technique was kind of like Boy Scout orienteering. I was about four blocks over from Summer Street, I knew how a couple of landmarks happened to line up, and that allowed me to figure my position on the map.
My toxic CSO wasn't just any CSO, certainly not of the neighborhood variety. It wasn't even a Boston CSO. It was the outlet of a long tunnel that ran all the way from Framingham, out in the extreme southwestern suburbs. Framingham had no place to dump its overflow - they didn't even have a river - and they'd had to construct an underground river that ran for some twenty miles east-northeast to Dorchester Bay. Overflow from Framingham and the neighboring town of Natick ran down that pipe. Somewhere along those twenty miles, someone was throwing huge amounts of organic chlorine compounds into the flow.
I was tempted to go straight to Natick and start sampling there. Although it's a little outside Route 128, it is prime territory for Route 128 corporations. But there was also a chance that someone had tapped into the line between Natick and the outlet. If we got out that far, ran a test and found nothing, we'd have wasted an hour driving out and back. So I traced the tunnel eastwards and picked out a promising manhole in a Boston street. We would start there.
“Roxbury, James,” I said.
“Oh, good. Right near the museum, right?”
“Wishful thinking. It's a mile south of here.”
“Oh. You mean for real Roxbury.”
“Sorry, that's where the tunnel is.”
Let me explain something about Bart: he wasn't as dumb as he sounded. He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.
We didn't know how to get there and had to find it by reputation - “don't go down that street any farther - it'll take you right into Roxbury.” We had to follow a bunch of that kind of streets.
But eventually we found our manhole. It was in the right land of a four-lane street. I had Bart pull just past it, then I threw open the back doors of the van, reached out and snared the lid with my tool and hauled. It took some doing but I got it off. I climbed down in there with my bucket-on-a-rope and had Bart back up to conceal the hole. He closed up those back doors and switched on the emergency flashers.
The main thing was not to act like a pair of scared, lost, white guys. Bart was pretty good at it. In his black leather and his black van, with his longish hair and loud music, he clearly was not a lawyer with a flat tire.
Plus, I had my part of it down to a science. I went down the ladder, braced myself so my hands were free, lowered the bucket on the rope and took my sample. Took a leak, too. Twenty seconds' work. Then back up the ladder. But I could hear the roar of a radiator fan, I could see headlights in the van's undercarriage. Someone was pulling up behind us. And until the van moved, I was trapped in the manhole.
Door slam. Footsteps. Knock, knock. Music turned down, window descended.
“Can I help you officer?”
I didn't know how to take that. Cops.
“You have a problem here?” Old white Townie voice. I could draw you a sketch of this cop without having seen him: fifty, stubby iron-colored hair, a big, solid spare tire.
“Stalled the engine and my battery's too low to turn it over now. And I know this is a bad neighborhood, officer, so I just rolled up the windows and locked the doors and waited for one of you guys to show up.”
“Good move, son, you did the right thing. Hey, Freddy! Bring her around here.”
Freddy moved the cop car up and they performed the jump-start. I relaxed. Right above my head was more evidence of Bart's concealed intelligence: he'd gotten one of those magnetic key holders, and hid some spare keys in the undercarriage of the van. “Okay, now get out of here, kid!”
“Okay! I'm just gonna sit here idling for a few minutes and let the battery recharge, okay?”
“Son, if you don't mind, I'd prefer to escort you right out of this neighborhood.” Wonderful idea from my point of view.
“Hey, I appreciate that, officer, but it's okay. I got an equalizer in here.”
“Okay. Well, don't press your luck. This ain't your part of town.”
“Thanks again!” And then, deliverance. Bart pulled the van forward; I got out and replaced the lid; and we were the fuck out of there. Not a single gang even looked our way. Bart had to be physically restrained from stopping at a Louisiana catfish restaurant for a 1:00 A.M. dinner.