Poachers (14 page)

Kilpatrick’s Sinclair station was a flat gray cinder-block lump with a shed against the back and a faded green sign. Beside two antique gas pumps stood the rhinoceros, giant head lowered, right front foot lifted as if it were pawing the ground. Its purpose, Steadman guessed, was to attract customers. But from the looks of this dump the rhino might soon be out of a job.

Like you, pal, Steadman thought, watching old Kilpatrick suck on his unfiltered Camel and glower through drugstore reading glasses at the paperwork Steadman had spread across the office desk. Above them, also glowering, was a dusty crow nailed to a piece of driftwood.

“Get to it,” the old man said. “I ain’t got all day.” Even his breath smelled like gasoline.

“Your underground tanks,” Steadman began, “where you store your fuel—”

“I know what they are.”

Steadman unfolded a pamphlet that explained corrosion in simple terms. “Did you know they’ve probably been leaking for years?”

Kilpatrick stubbed out his cigarette in a clamshell ashtray. He lit another and smoked while Steadman gave his usual pitch, how the storage tanks needed a leak detection system or, according to federal regulations, there’d be no choice but to shut down the station. At best, if the tanks were secure, leak detection wells could be installed for around a grand. At worst, Kilpatrick’s tanks would have to be excavated and replaced with new EPA-approved above-ground units, a cost of several thousand dollars. When Steadman finished there was a long silence, which he finally broke with his usual remark about doing good for the environment.

“The environment?” Kilpatrick snatched off his glasses. “Take you a good long look out the window yonder at the
environment
.”

Steadman gathered his papers, politely, and closed his briefcase. Outside, the hot white sky, the two-lane blacktop, the distant pine trees. No house or building in sight. Just the rhinoceros, baking in the sun.

When Steadman returned two days
later—he always gave customers time to check his background—Kilpatrick was smoking and leaning against the rhinoceros with his arms folded. He wore baggy coveralls black with oil.

What he’d do first, Steadman explained, unloading his hand auger, was dig holes around the underground tanks, for soil samples. “I’ll go down a few feet,” he said, “and that’s where we’ll find your contamination.”

The auger—stainless steel, extendable to twelve feet—was warm from sunlight.

Kilpatrick squinted at the corkscrew blades. “You plan to dig with that thing? By hand?”

Steadman shouldered the auger. “You want to show me where your tanks are buried?”

Kilpatrick nodded toward the right side yard of the station, then limped over the concrete and went into the glassed office and eased himself into a folding chair. Steadman watched him open the Coke machine and fan the cool air into his collar, then draw a Budweiser from the rack and pry off the lid with a bottle opener from his coveralls pocket.

Around the building was a jungle of grass, bitterweed and briars out of which stuck two four-inch-diameter pipes with padlocked caps: the ports used for measuring and filling the underground tanks. Steadman leaned the auger against the wall and walked over and gave each pipe a solid kick. He knelt and sniffed them, then took hold of the left one and started working

it back and forth. After a minute he had the pipe wiggling, and soon it came out of the dirt in his hands—a foot-long length not connected to anything. He tossed it in the air and caught it. Kilpatrick wasn’t the first station owner to pull something like this. They’d do anything to knock him off the scent, and their bullshit usually helped subdue his guilt at closing them down.

Steadman dropped the pipe, collected the auger and walked behind the building, past a rusty trailer and the rickety shed. The dirt back here was stained with oil—Kilpatrick could be fined if Steadman chose to report him. Greasy shapes lay scattered about, transmission housings caked with grime, torque converters, leaky oil filters and stacks of cracked car batteries. There was an old bathtub full of greenish water and an anvil with a dog skull on it.

On the other side of the station Steadman kicked away a milk crate to reveal two rusty ports, the real ones, locked with combination locks. He chose a spot a few feet east and took hold of the auger’s T-shaped handle and began twisting. The ground was hard, rocky, but Steadman’s arms were hard, too, his skin brown from digging hundreds of holes through miles of gravel in the hot sun. Hell, with the gas-powered jackhammer in his toolbox, not even concrete would stop him.

His smart-ass co-workers called him the LUST—Leaky Underground Storage Tanks—man. Steadman couldn’t imagine a less-suited acronym. He found nothing lusty about gasoline contaminating the groundwater. And he hadn’t lusted for anybody or anything in a long, long time. He’d been given this nomadic grunt-work as punishment for his behavior on his last project at the civil engineering firm which specialized in hazardous waste cleanup. He’d been head geologist in the re-mediation of a large chemical plant. On his first day, he learned that for

years the plant had been dumping blood red chemical by-products into the Alabama River. This was no surprise, but what pissed him off was that each morning two clueless black workers—without safety gear—had been sent out in a motorboat to net the dead fish floating on the surface. Steadman, before several laborers restrained him, had nearly shoved the plant engineer into the river.

He was three feet into his fourth hole, the dry dirt growing softer farther down, when the cellular phone in his truck chirped.

“Happy birthday to me,” his father’s dry voice sang, off-key.

After two choruses, Steadman interrupted him. “It’s not your birthday yet.”

“Hell, I know that, boy. It’s tomorrow.”

“Try December,” Steadman said. “Five more months.”

“Knock off the bullcrap and give me a hint, squirt.”

Steadman sat on the tailgate, remembering that two days ago had been his mother’s birthday; she’d been dead six years and this wasn’t the first year he’d forgotten. “Dad,” he said, “are you okay? Do the nurses know you’re on the phone?”

“The hell with them, it’s not
their
fiftieth.”

It’s not yours either, Steadman thought. His father was seventy-eight; this was his first year in the home.

“Bigger than a shoebox, I hope,” his father said.

“What is?”

“My present. That goddamn dog you gave me last year must’ve run off.”

The dog, a black Lab, a gift from Steadman’s mother, had died of old age a decade ago. Steadman moved the phone to his other ear. He recalled that on trips into the country his father had always picked up hitchhikers, but made them ride in the back of the truck with the dog.

“Dad,” Steadman said. “Listen. I’ve got one for you: crows.”

“Easy. A murder.”

This was a childhood road game; his father used to name an animal and Steadman was supposed to give its group title: an army of frogs, a parliament of owls, like that.

“Turtles,” Steadman said.

“Let’s see…” His father would do this all day, like a dog who never tired of fetching. “A bale.”

“How about…” Steadman looked over by the gas pumps. “Rhinoceroses.”

A pause, and Steadman pictured his father, who still wore the safety glasses required by his last job. He’d be standing at the pay phone, in his blue jumpsuit, right hand tapping his ample belly. Probably wearing his steel-toe work shoes, too.

“A pride?” he said. “Pride of rhinos?”

Behind Steadman a door slammed. Kilpatrick came limping around the building carrying his folding chair and a six-pack. He suddenly looked smaller.

Steadman stood up. “Dad, I’ll call you later.”

Kilpatrick opened the chair and sat in the narrow strip of shade the building offered and watched and drank as Steadman resumed digging, twisting the auger deeper into the ground. He thought he could smell gas already.

“Regular divining rod, ain’t you?” Kilpatrick said, crossing his legs. He didn’t have socks, which bothered Steadman. Like the smelly bastard was on vacation. “I do declare,” he said, “you plumb determined to shut me down, ain’t you?”

Steadman wiped sweat from his eyes. “You know what? If you want the truth, I’d rather not.”

“The hell,” Kilpatrick said. “You so goddamn eager to rurn a fellow’s living you’ll find some gas in the ground if you have to

pump it there your own damn self. That’ll be my last sale,” he said to the sky, “three gallons for this here smart aleck to pour in the dirt.”

“You trot on over here,” Steadman said. “Stick your snout in this hole, see what you smell.”

Kilpatrick stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and put it behind his ear. Steadman stepped aside and rubbed his biceps as the old man came over and squatted, steadying himself on the auger handle, which stood upright like a detonator. He made loud sniffing sounds.

“What you smell there?” Steadman asked.

“Not a thing.”

“How about that.” Steadman stooped beside Kilpatrick. “I declare if I don’t smell gasoline.”

“Shit,” Kilpatrick said. He belched. “You smell what you want to. If you was horny enough, you’d smell pussy in that hole.”

“I don’t guess you’d strike your lighter and hold it there,” Steadman said, taking the old man’s elbow to help him up.

Kilpatrick yanked his arm away.

“Got me a boy,” he said. “Played ball for Auburn. If he was here today, he’d knock your dick in the dirt and we’d let that goddamn handle there be your grave marker.” He stalked off, stopping to collect his chair and beer.

The hole Steadman had been digging was four inches across and three feet deep. The goods. That’s what his father had called the petroleum deposits he’d found. Steadman knelt and took a handful of soil and let it fall through his fingers. He longed to touch something undeveloped, uncontaminated. His father used to come home excited about a pocket of crude they’d hit. He would kiss Mom on the lips, then scoop her and Steadman into his lap and tell them how the dinosaurs had died mysteriously,

how after millions of years, fermenting in the earth, they’d become oil. As he fell asleep those nights, Steadman imagined himself a famous archaeologist in a field jacket, a miner’s light on his pith helmet, brush in hand, whisking away age-old dust to uncover the prehistoric bones of an unknown species, a rib cage the size of a ship’s hull, a skull big enough to sleep in.

He got to his feet and went to the truck after soil sample jars. Soon he had them filled and neatly labeled. He brushed himself off, then got into the truck and pulled to the pumps to buy gas, if it hadn’t all leaked out. The phone rang, his father again, with the right answer: “
A crash, goddammit. A crash of rhinos
.” Steadman said he’d call him back later.

The unleaded pump was slower even than Kilpatrick: four cents…six cents…eight cents…. Steadman thought he’d be staring at the rhinoceros all day. He’d seen such things as a kid on tractor excursions when he and his father stopped for gas, each station as they drove deeper and deeper into the country stranger than the one before. In those days, owners often tried to attract customers with gimmicks—a two-headed pig preserved in a vat of alcohol, an albino rattlesnake that swallowed live opossums, free Choctaw arrowheads.

Kilpatrick’s rhino, though, seemed more impressive: stretching past the regular gas pump on one end and the unleaded on the other, it was almost as long as Steadman’s truck and nearly its breadth. With the pump running, he approached the rhino and touched its flank, gray and dry and rough as the side of a mountain. He brought his fingers to his nose; they smelled musty and leathery, a little oily, like an old saddle.

Clumps of stiff hair stuck out of the rhinoceros’s leg joints and hung from its low-slung belly. Its eyes were marble, sad, bovine, and Steadman imagined it chewing grass in an African field, egrets

and wrens across its broad shoulders and back. If any lion or water buffalo wandered too close, the rhino would toss its great tank of a head, horn slicing through the air like a scimitar. He slid his fingers down the slope of its neck and along the stiff ears, the bony eye ridges, the snout, the smaller lumplike horn and the larger, more formidable curved horn. Something rose in Steadman’s chest and his fingertips tingled. It felt like he was touching his own past.

“My boy done that,” Kilpatrick said. He stood in the office door with his hands in his pockets. “Got him a job in a carnival after he tore up his knee playing ball. That rhino died and him and some of his friends, clowns and midgets and shit, they tied it on a trailer and stole it before anybody could burn it or whatever the hell you’d do with a dead rhino.” Kilpatrick chuckled. “That crazy boy skinned it and mounted it. He weren’t too smart, but he was a swooft running back and hell on wheels in taxidermy.”

Steadman pressed his shoulder against the rhinoceros’s flank. He could barely move it. It had small, delicate legs and its feet, except for the one lifted, were nailed to wooden planks with inlets for a forklift.

“What does he weigh?” Steadman asked.