White Noise - Don Delillo [48]
“Why do you want dinner so early?” she said in a sexy whisper.
“I missed lunch.”
“Shall I do some chili-fried chicken?”
“First-rate.”
“Where is Wilder?” she said, thick-voiced, as I ran my hands over her breasts, trying with my teeth to undo her bra clip through the blouse.
“I don’t know. Maybe Murray stole him.”
“I ironed your gown,” she said.
“Great, great.”
“Did you pay the phone bill?”
“Can’t find it.”
We were both thick-voiced now. Her arms were crossed over my arms in such a way that I could read the serving suggestions on the box of corn niblets in her left hand.
“Let’s think about the billowing cloud. Just a little bit, okay? It could be dangerous.”
“Everything in tank cars is dangerous. But the effects are mainly long-range and all we have to do is stay out of the way.”
“Let’s just be sure to keep it in the back of our mind,” she said, getting up to smash an ice tray repeatedly on the rim of the sink, dislodging the cubes in groups of two and three.
I puckered my lips at her. Then I climbed to the attic one more time. Wilder was up there with Heinrich, whose fast glance in my direction contained a certain practiced accusation.
“They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” he said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment.
“I already knew that.”
“They’re calling it the black billowing cloud.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“It means they’re looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They’re on top of the situation.”
With an air of weary decisiveness, I opened the window, took the binoculars and climbed onto the ledge. I was wearing a heavy sweater and felt comfortable enough in the cold air but made certain to keep my weight tipped against the building, with my son’s outstretched hand clutching my belt. I sensed his support for my little mission, even his hopeful conviction that I might be able to add the balanced weight of a mature and considered judgment to his pure observations. This is a parent’s task, after all.
I put the glasses to my face and peered through the gathering dark. Beneath the cloud of vaporized chemicals, the scene was one of urgency and operatic chaos. Floodlights swept across the switching yard. Army helicopters hovered at various points, shining additional lights down on the scene. Colored lights from police cruisers crisscrossed these wider beams. The tank car sat solidly on tracks, fumes rising from what appeared to be a hole in one end. The coupling device from a second car had apparently pierced the tank car. Fire engines were deployed at a distance, ambulances and police vans at a greater distance. I could hear sirens, voices calling through bullhorns, a layer of radio static causing small warps in the frosty air. Men raced from one vehicle to another, unpacked equipment, carried empty stretchers. Other men in bright yellow Mylex suits and respirator masks moved slowly through the luminous haze, carrying death-measuring instruments. Snow-blowers sprayed a pink substance toward the tank car and the surrounding landscape. This thick mist arched through the air like some grand confection at a concert of patriotic music. The snow-blowers were the type used on airport runways, the police vans were the type to transport riot casualties. Smoke drifted from red beams of light into darkness and then into the breadth of scenic white floods. The men in Mylex suits moved with a lunar caution. Each step was the exercise of some anxiety not provided for by instinct. Fire and explosion were not the inherent dangers here. This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born. They moved as if across a swale of moon dust, bulky and wobbling, trapped in the idea of the nature of time.
I crawled back inside with some difficulty.
“What do you think?” he said.
“It’s still hanging there. Looks rooted to the spot.”
“So you’re saying you don’t think it’ll come this way.”
“I can tell by your voice that you know something I don’t know.”