I finally left around four. All during the long drive home through the evening rush hour I listened to Caroline’s and Louisa’s voices debating in my head. I could understand Louisa’s strong wish to protect her privacy. She was dying, too, which gave her desires more weight.
At the same time I could empathize with Caroline’s fear of isolation and loneliness. And after seeing the Djiaks close up, I understood why she’d like to find other relatives. Even if her father turned out to be a real jerk, he couldn’t have a crazier family than the one she already knew about.
In the end I decided to look for the two men Louisa had talked about last night and this afternoon—Steve Ferraro and Joey Pankowski. They’d worked together at the Xerxes plant, and it was possible she’d gotten the job through her lover. I’d also try to track down the grocery clerk Connie had mentioned—Ron Sowling or whoever. East Side was such a stable, unchanging neighborhood, it was possible that the same people still owned the store and that they would remember Ron and Louisa. If Ed Djiak had come around playing the heavy father, it might have made an indelible memory.
Making a decision, even one to compromise, brings a certain amount of relief I called up an old friend and spent a pleasant evening on Lincoln Avenue. The blister on my left heel didn’t stop my dancing until past midnight.
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6
The Mill on the Calumet
In the morning I was ready early, at least early for me. By nine I had done my exercises. Skipping a run, I dressed for the corporate world in a tailored navy suit that was supposed to make me look imposing and competent. I steeled my heart against Peppy’s importunate cries and headed for the South Side for the third day in a row. Instead of following the lake down, this morning I went west to an expressway that would spew me into the heart of the Calumet Industrial District.
It’s been over a century since the Army Corps of Engineers and George Pullman decided to turn the sprawling marshes between Lake Calumet and Lake Michigan into an industrial center. It wasn’t just Pullman, of course—Andrew Carnegie, Judge Gary, and a host of lesser barons all played a part, working on it for sixty or seventy years. They took an area about four miles square and filled it with dirt, with clay dredged from Lake Calumet, with phenols, oils, ferrous sulfide, and thousands of other substances you not only never heard of, you never want to.
When I got off the expressway at a 103rd Street, I had the familiar sensation of landing on the moon, or returning to earth after a nuclear decimation. Life probably exists in the oily mud around Lake Calumet. It’s just not anything you’d recognize outside a microscope or a Steven Spielberg movie. You don’t see trees or grass or birds. Only the occasional feral dog, ribs protruding, eyes red with madness and hunger.
The Xerxes plant lay in the heart of the ex-swamp, at 110th Street east of Torrence. The building was an old one, put up in the early fifties. From the road I could see their sign, “Xerxes, King of Solvents.” The royal purple had faded to an indeterminate pink, while the logo, a crown with double X’s in it, had almost disappeared.
Made of concrete blocks, the plant was shaped like a giant U whose arms backed onto the Calumet River. That way the solvents manufactured there could flow easily onto barges and the waste products into the river. They don’t dump into the river anymore, of course—when the Clean Water Act was passed Xerxes built giant lagoons to hold their wastes, with clay walls providing a precarious barrier between the river and the toxins.
I parked my car in the gravel yard and gingerly picked my way through the oily ruts to a side entrance. The strong smell, reminiscent of a darkroom, hadn’t changed from the times I used to drive down with my dad to drop off Louisa if she’d missed her bus.
I had never been inside the plant. Instead of the crowded noisy cauldron of my imagination, I found myself in an empty hall. It was long and dimly lit, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls that went the height of the building, making me feel as though I were at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Following the arm of the U in the direction of the river, I came at length to a series of cubbyholes cut into the interior wall. Their walls were made of that grainy glass used for shower doors; I could see light and movement through them but couldn’t distinguish shapes. I knocked at the middle door. When no one answered I turned the knob and went in.
I entered a time warp, a long narrow room whose furnishings apparently hadn’t changed since the building had gone up thirty-five years ago. Olive-drab filing cabinets and gun-metal desks lined the wall across from the doors. Fluorescent lights hung from an old acoustic-tile ceiling. The outer doors all opened into the room, but two had been blocked shut by filing cabinets.