At midnight the baby was kicking like a swimmer and her insides bulged and groaned low down. She sat on the sofa and leaned on the arm, panting. Paul’s mother called and said that he was stable, though he had not said a word.

For a long time, Colette had been on the phone, getting numbers from various operators. Monday she drove home on her lunch hour but did not eat, spending the whole time talking to a DEQ man in Baton Rouge and then a friend of his in Washington. Her calls threaded through the bureaucracy of several government agencies until she found a voice that she could trust.

At quitting time, Bucky disappeared with an oil man in a bad suit, driving off toward New Orleans and a boozy meal. Colette stayed on until the watchman visited at five-fifteen, and then she put a new toner cartridge in the Xerox machine and began making copies of invoices and scale tickets that showed contents of shipments and points of origin. She made sure to copy current inventory of everything in vats, tarp-covered storage heaps, barges, and “the well,” an abandoned dry hole that was on the property when the fish plant was first built. Bucky pumped the most aromatic items down into this rusty nub of pipe, which never seemed to fill up. Pulling the list of chemicals mixed for burning in the boilers, she stared at the pages, finding it difficult to keep her mind on what she was doing. At seven-fifteen the watchman came in again, as he did again at nine-fifteen when she was finishing up with Bucky Tyler’s illiterate personal business letters, which she had pulled from the safe. One of them bore this colorful sentence: “You gennelmen from Planetoil can send me dead babies floating in sianide and I’ll charge you ten dollars a gallon, bury it, and tell the dumbass feds its green Jell-O. They believe any fucking thing you tell them.” She made five copies of that one.

She drove to Beewick and woke up her uncle Lester, who was a notary, making him read her cover letter and then affix his seal to it over her signature. The next morning before work, she mailed off two boxes of papers, one to Baton Rouge, one to Washington. Her phone rang three days later. Certain agencies had been watching Tyler’s plant already, she learned. She imagined the Washington boys to be like old ladies praying for things in church instead of going out and making what they want to happen happen.