“And the stuff some people throw out needs handling a certain way. That’s why the regulations are there, not just to give the bean counters more beans to count.”

I imagine an assembly line in an old factory in the former USSR. It’s gray and the strip lights are blinking and men with mustaches in matching, boxy uniforms are making little lines on paper every time a bean rolls by . . .

“. . . which is why my wife only used cloth diapers on our four boys.”

Shit, I missed something.

“Not the explosions, of course. I don’t reckon we were thinking too much about explosions if I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. But pack them in too tight and pressure . . . it’s a . . . ah . . . it’s literally a ticking time bomb.”

I think I also heard that ducks have corkscrew penises. Wait, no way. Whoever told me that was totally fucking with me. Sometimes I’m so gullible it’s embarrassing.

“Ya see?”

“Yeah, wow . . . Intense.”

“Yep, just a matter of time—I told ’em . . .”

“Ahoy, Small-fry!” Rose, thank God. “Did Earl get you all filled in?” I nod. “Crazy stuff, huh?”

I nod again.

“So word is they’re evacuating Duck, that’s what Hazel says.”

For the next few minutes I just listen, and from what I’m able to piece together from Rose and Earl gabbing with the other Wrinklies, the explosions on Duck are from illegal trash dumping, like thirty or forty years ago. Portsmouth City used to pay the owner to bury garbage there because their landfill was full, and construction on the new one was running behind. The site out here wasn’t set up like a proper landfill (and this is where Earl loses me again, something about checks and standards and regulations and pressure gauges or something) so the trash didn’t get buried in the special, nonexplosive way that it usually is. Once the new landfill was finished they stopped the Duck Island operation. Once the island wasn’t generating income, the owner covered over the dumping site and sold it cheap to the University of New Hampshire, who set up a marine science research lab there. I don’t know why people need to come out to some nowhere island to study fish, but I don’t ask because Earl probably knows the answer, in detail. So anyway, the problem was disposable diapers. If they get put under too much pressure for years and years, they can just blow up. So now the college kids on Duck have to pack up their stethoscopes or whatever and evacuate or risk getting maimed by the most heinous landmines of all time.