The Nix(70)

Then crossing the Mississippi River and Samuel trying to hold his breath for the whole span of that great concrete bridge, looking down and seeing the barges traveling south, and tugboats, pontoon boats, speedboats pulling inner tubes on which people—pink specks from this height—bounce. They exit the interstate and turn north and follow the river all the way home, to where his parents come from, where they grew up and became high-school sweethearts, is the story he’d been told. Up Highway 67, the river on his right, past the gas stations that advertise live bait, the American flags flying from VFWs and public parks and golf courses and churches and boats, the occasional John Deere tractor halfway on the shoulder, the occasional Harley riders who stick out their left hand to greet other Harley riders going the opposite direction, past the quarry where orange gravel gets kicked up by tires, past the speed limit signs rigidly enforced, and past other signs too, some torn back by buckshot—DEER NEXT TWO MILES, CAUTION PLANT ENTRANCE, THIS HIGHWAY ADOPTED BY THE KIWANIS CLUB. Then the red-and-white stacks of the nitrogen plant coming into view, followed by the massive white vats of Eastern Iowa Propane, the behemoth ChemStar facility that regularly makes the whole town smell like burned breakfast cereal, the grain elevator, the little townie businesses: Leon’s Body Shop, Bruce’s Beauty Hut and Firearm Repair, Sneaky Pete’s Rare Finds Antiques, Schwingle’s Pharmacy. Toolsheds in backyards built from aluminum siding. Second garages whose walls are all exposed Tyvek. Houses with three or four or maybe five operational and sometimes meticulously maintained and decked-out automobiles. Teens riding on mopeds, little orange flags whipping above their heads. Kids in bare fields riding four-wheelers and dirt bikes. Trucks towing boats. Everyone using their blinker.

The memory felt so specific because so little had changed. As Samuel took the drive again, to interview the grandfather he’d not seen in decades, he saw how everything was more or less the same. The Mississippi River valley still looked green and lush, despite being one of the most heavily chemicalized places in the country. The towns along the river still flew flags from almost every house. Ritualistic patriotism had not been dampened by two cruel decades of labor outsourcing and manufacturing shrink. Yes, the gravitational center of town had crept away from the quaint old downtown toward the big new Walmart, but nobody seemed to mind. The Walmart parking lot was bustling and full.

He saw all this as he drove around. He was, as Pwnage suggested, doing research. He was trying to breathe in the town, trying to feel what it would have been like to grow up here. His mother never spoke of it, and they rarely visited. Once every other summer, generally, when he was a kid.

But Samuel still received a trickle of information about the old hometown, and knew his grandfather was here, slowly wasting away from dementia and Parkinson’s at a nursing home called Willow Glen, where Samuel had an appointment later in the day. Until then, he planned to explore, observe, do research.

First, he found his father’s childhood home, a farm near the banks of the Mississippi. He found his mother’s too, a quaint little bungalow with a big picture window in one of the upstairs rooms. He visited her high school, which looked like any generic high school anywhere. He took a few photographs. He visited the playground near his mother’s house—the standard swing set, slide, monkey bars. He took a few photographs. He even visited the ChemStar facility where his grandfather had worked for many years, a factory so large it was impossible to take in all at once. Built along the river, surrounded by train tracks and power lines, it looked like an aircraft carrier had tumbled sideways out of the water. A mess of metal and tubing that kept going for miles, furnaces and chimneys, concrete bunker-looking buildings, steel holding tanks, round vats, smokestacks, pipes that all seemed to lead to a massive copper dome on the far north end of the factory, where if the light was shining properly it looked like a second, smaller sun rising from the ground. The atmosphere around the factory was sulfurous and overheated, a smell of exhaust, burned carbon, thin and difficult to breathe, like there wasn’t quite enough air in the air. Samuel photographed all of it. The holding tanks and twisted pipes, the brick smokestacks breathing a white cumulus vapor that disintegrated into the sky. He could not fit the factory’s whole apparatus into one frame, and so he walked down its length photographing panoramically. He hoped the photographs would shake loose something important, hoped that he could see some connection between the brutality of the ChemStar facility and his mother’s family, who for so long were tied umbilically to it. He took dozens of pictures, then left for his appointment.

He was driving to the nursing home when Periwinkle called.

“Hey, buddy,” said his publisher, his voice all echoey. “Just checking in.”

“You sound far away. Where are you?”

“In New York, in my office. I have you on speakerphone. There are protestors outside my building right now. They’re yelling and screaming. Can you hear them?”

“I can’t,” Samuel said.

“I can,” Periwinkle said. “They’re twenty stories down, but I can hear them.”

“What are they yelling?”

“I cannot actually hear them, I should say. Their speeches or whatever? Mostly I hear the drumming. Whole rock operas of it. They are drumming in a circle. Loudly and daily. Reasons unclear.”

“This must feel strange to you, being protested against.”

“They’re not protesting me, per se. Nor my company, specifically. More like the world that brought my company into being. Multinational. Globalization. Capitalism. The ninety-nine percent is, I believe, their catchphrase.”