White Noise - Don Delillo [47]
“There’s been a correction,” Heinrich told her. “Tell them they ought to be throwing up.”
A helicopter flew over, headed in the direction of the accident. The voice on the radio said: “Available for a limited time only with optional megabyte hard disk.”
Babette’s head sank out of sight. I watched Heinrich tape the road map to two posts. Then I went down to the kitchen to pay some bills, aware of colored spots whirling atomically somewhere to the right and behind me.
Steffie said, “Can you see the feathery plume from the attic window?”
“It’s not a plume.”
“But will we have to leave our homes?”
“Of course not.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Remember how we couldn’t go to school?”
“That was inside. This is outside.”
We heard police sirens blowing. I watched Steffie’s lips form the sequence: wow wow wow wow. She smiled in a certain way when she saw me watching, as though gently startled out of some absentminded pleasure.
Denise walked in, rubbing her hands on her jeans.
“They’re using snow-blowers to blow stuff onto the spill,” she said.
“What kind of stuff?”
“I don’t know but it’s supposed to make the spill harmless, which doesn’t explain what they’re doing about the actual plume.”
“They’re keeping it from getting bigger,” I said. “When do we eat?”
“I don’t know but if it gets any bigger it’ll get here with or without a wind.”
“It won’t get here,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because it won’t.”
She looked at her palms and went upstairs. The phone rang. Babette walked into the kitchen and picked it up. She looked at me as she listened. I wrote two checks, periodically glancing up to see if she was still looking at me. She seemed to study my face for the hidden meaning of the message she was receiving. I puckered my lips in a way I knew she disliked.
“That was the Stovers,” she said. “They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They’re not calling it a feathery plume anymore.”
“What are they calling it?”
“A black billowing cloud.”
“That’s a little more accurate, which means they’re coming to grips with the thing. Good.”
“There’s more,” she said. “It’s expected that some sort of air mass may be moving down from Canada.”
“There’s always an air mass moving down from Canada.”
“That’s true,” she said. “There’s certainly nothing new in that. And since Canada is to the north, if the billowing cloud is blown due south, it will miss us by a comfortable margin.”
“When do we eat?” I said.
We heard sirens again, a different set this time, a larger sound—not police, fire, ambulance. They were air-raid sirens, I realized, and they seemed to be blowing in Sawyersville, a small community to the northeast.
Steffie washed her hands at the kitchen sink and went upstairs. Babette started taking things out of the refrigerator. I grabbed her by the inside of the thigh as she passed the table. She squirmed deliciously, a package of frozen corn in her hand.
“Maybe we ought to be more concerned about the billowing cloud,” she said. “It’s because of the kids we keep saying nothing’s going to happen. We don’t want to scare them.”
“Nothing is going to happen.”
“I know nothing’s going to happen, you know nothing’s going to happen. But at some level we ought to think about it anyway, just in case.”
“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”
She was sitting on my lap by now. The