Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

a thick, oily residue. For many years, Lunhill would send the still bottoms to a waste facility in Louisiana for incineration. This is the best method to destroy dioxins, but it’s also the most expensive. So trying to save a couple bucks, Lunhill contracted the services of the Midwest Petrochemical Corporation. But unbeknownst to Lunhill, MPC didn’t know shit about waste disposal. So they subcontracted the job to a guy named Russell Canto, who owned a local waste oil business.”

He took a sip of Coke, then asked, “You with me so far?”

I nodded.

He continued, “In addition to the waste oil business, Canto owned an oil spraying business.”

“Oil spraying? This is a thing?”

“Yeah. They spray oil to keep the dust down on farms and dirt roads.”

This made sense, and I waved for him to keep going.

“In 1986, the town of Simon Beach hired Canto to oil its twenty-three miles of dirt roads. Over a two-year stretch, he ended up spraying 160,000 gallons of waste oil, much of which he was getting from the Lunhill plant in Verona.

“Over the course of the next few years, a bunch of animals started dying and a lot of the citizens of Simon Beach were diagnosed with chloracne, horrible lesions on the face and neck, which is consistent with dioxin poisoning.” He paused, then said, “That’s when the EPA came in and started testing the soil. They found dioxin concentrations as high as 0.3 parts per million along the entire network of roads.”

“What concentration is considered safe?”

“0.1 parts per billion.”

Yikes.

I asked, “So why didn’t they just go in and clean up all the roads?”

“A week after the tests came back, there was the worst flood in Simon Beach history. The Meramec River rose to like fifteen feet higher than usual.”

“And that contaminated the entire town?”

He nodded and said, “So President Ronald Reagan created the Simon Beach Dioxin Task Force and they came in and bought out the eight hundred residential properties and thirty businesses for like forty million dollars.”

“And just like that, it’s a ghost town?”

“Yep.”

“Did Lunhill get sued?”

“Everyone got sued: Lunhill, MPC, and Canto. But because Canto was subcontracting with the MPC, who had the account with Lunhill, he claimed ignorance—that he had no idea what was contained in the oil. He had to pay out a couple hundred thousand dollars, but he filed for bankruptcy and I’m not sure what ever happened. But Lunhill and MPC both had to pay out two hundred million.”

“Do you think Lunhill should have been held responsible?”

“It was their oil,” he said, matter-of-fact.

I asked, “So, ethically, you have no problem working for Lunhill?”

Brian puffed out his cheeks. “I fully understand why people don’t like the company: Agent Orange, saccharine, DDT, Simon Beach. I totally get it. But over the last couple decades they have done far more good than harm. And now they are leading the fight against the world’s imminent food production problem. So no, I have no problem working for them.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re off the hot seat.”

He let out a long exhale, then asked, “How’d I do? I have my first sales call next week.”

I told him he did great, then inquired, “Is your sales call over the phone or in person?”

“In person.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

He scrunched his nose. “I guess.”

“That day,” I said, “maybe lay off the egg salad.”

Brian excused himself to use the bathroom, and I made my way to the dessert bar and grabbed a tapioca pudding. I was disappointed it wasn’t the same Snack Pack Harold often snuck from the cafeteria at the nursing home. In actuality, it was rice pudding. I wondered if it was Golden Rice pudding. Was I meeting my daily requirement of Vitamin A while ingesting such a delicious snack?

I made a mental note to mention Golden Rice Pudding to Brian. And that I wanted royalties when it saved all of humanity.

As for Brian, he had laid a good deal of information on me over the past hour. Many of my initial judgments about Lunhill had been, if not completely refuted, then at the very least, softened.

But learning more about Lunhill and what they did was only half the reason I made the road trip. The other reason, the main reason I came today was to talk to someone who knew Neil Felding. I wasn’t sure if it was a calculated decision on the part of Allison the executive, but I wasn’t going to get much from the guy who had worked at Lunhill for three days.

I surveyed the tables of the cafeteria. It was closing in on 1:30 p.m. and there were only a few lunch stragglers remaining. Two men at one table. Then a lone woman at another. The men were both in suits and ties. The lone woman, on the other hand, was clad in jeans and a gray blouse, and her hair was in a bird’s nest of a bun. Even from twenty feet away, I could see the dark bags under the woman’s eyes. She was either a cook, a custodian, or an overworked scientist.

I finished the last of the pudding, stood up, and meandered over to the woman. I asked, “Do you mind if I join you?”

The woman gazed up at me. Up close, the bags under her eyes were a light gray. She moved around her salad with her fork and said, “Uh, okay.”

She was maybe in her late forties and had an unmistakable aura of owning three or more cats.

“I’m Thomas,” I said, taking the seat next to her.

“Sheila,” she said, more to her salad than to me.

I came right out with it. “Did you know Neil Felding?”

Her eyes doubled in size, but she didn’t answer.

“You knew him, didn’t you? You worked with him?”

She glanced around, then slowly nodded.

“How long did you work with him?”

“Six years.”

“Did you guys get along?”

“Yeah.”

I waited for her to elaborate, to say how nice a guy he was, that he was brilliant. She didn’t.

“Why was he fired?”

She stirred her salad around