Paul put up his hands. “All right, Hoss. You the boss.”

“You just stay out here and keep these things rumbling.”

“You got it,” he said, turning around.

“How soon can I get a hundred and eighty pounds?”

“Foreman’s gone to get me a man. We’ll scrape the flues, adjust the atomizer, put a bigger pipe on the injector, and shoot in whatever crap you got for fuel. Me and the fireman’ll say Hail Marys until the safety valve goes off.”

The fireman showed up, and it was LeBlanc’s redneck, Gatlin. He was skinny and seemed lost in his old overalls. He nodded at Paul and said only, “Things been rough,” then picked up a scraper rod. They cut off the fuel supply, beat open the smoke box doors, put on wet caps and goggles, and began to scale corrosion and soot out of the hot flue pipes. In three and a half hours, the two of them brought the plant back to life, and the tin sheds and outbuildings were spouting clouds of silver vapor. Paul and the rusty-faced Gatlin sat on a two-by-twelve propped up on cinder blocks and drank tin cup after tin cup of ice water from a galvanized Igloo cooler.

“Man,” Gatlin said, shaking his head like a retriever. “Even the water tastes like cleaning fluid.”

Paul was too sweated-out to talk. He looked past the overhang toward the office, where Colette came out of the back door with Bucky Tyler. They stopped and talked, Colette smiling like a plump schoolgirl. Bucky patted her stomach, then slid his hand around to her backside. She pushed him away, laughed, and got into her car.

Gatlin shook his head, grabbed Paul’s cup, drew another charge of ice water, and put it under his nose.

*   *   *

For two months, Paul nursed the steam plant, and the company site began to pile up with mountains of green rock sitting in pools of gelatinous slop. Instead of being satisfied with his modest though profitable recycling business, Bucky sought out more and more dangerous items to deal with, some of which he had no idea how to process. Paul watched as a small tank farm sprang up, soon to be filled with insecticide from Italy, orange oil from Arizona. One day the boiler fuel was laced with a potent liquid that nearly exploded in the firebox when Paul opened the atomizers in the morning. All day, his stack smoke was green.

One stormy December noon during a cloudburst, Paul and Gatlin sat eating lunch, their backs against the fire doors, their faces wincing at a cold blast of air coming off the swamped yard, where puddles linked to form one sheet of chocolate sludge.

Paul washed down a bite of ham poor boy with a swallow of root beer. “This place has got to be breaking some kind of law.”