To Pay Paul

By Michael Scott Curnes

An Eco-Thriller 17 Million Years in the Making

Seamus Quinlan is a geophysicist with a problem neighbor that also happens to be his employer-the Manhattan Project's once top-secret Hanford Nuclear Site, currently the largest radioactive waste cleanup project anywhere on the planet.

After Seamus's father succum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down Wind Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777298876

Book preview

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This novel is a work of fiction based on events and people both real and imagined. In instances when real people intersect in a blend of actual and fictionalized events real people’s names have been mostly altered. In the interest of preserving historical accuracy, the author has made the decision to include the actual names of elected politicians involved in specific government proceedings or legislation when these associations are already deemed to be part of the public record.

Dedicated to the memory and featuring the Men at Work poetry of

William Witherup

(1935 – 2009)

&

to ALL the other outspoken and sadly lost or suffering

Downwinders:

You were robbed and you are remembered.

I cleaned my house and garden

and I was feeling gay;

Then came that nasty wind and blew

my garbage can away.

Blow ye winds of Richland,

Blow ye winds high-o,

Blow ye winds of Richland,

Blow, blow, blow.

That fearful termination wind,

Can’t stand it anymore;

Each time I sweep

the dust so deep

blows underneath my door.*

* Lyrics from a song written by Charlie Wende in the late 40s commemorating the dust and winds at Hanford Site—otherwise known as the Manhattan Project’s nuclear plutonium production complex on the bank of the Columbia River in south-central Washington State.

Chapter One

You knew all along you were robbing Peter, right?

Peter who?

"Not Peter who. Think of Peter as the future, Pops. Gerald Quinlan’s over-educated son, Seamus, adjusted the worn bill of his Tri-City Dust Devils baseball cap, squeegeeing the sweat off his forehead and into his hair. Think of Peter as now or even tomorrow, if that helps."

Ah, the father said—thinking, as he always did, that in Central Washington, having a PhD was about as useful as turn signals on a tractor. The skinny octogenarian groaned, realizing his last surviving son was just being clever again. He played along. "And Paul was back then—the past, I suppose? He sucked on his Marlboro, holding the nosepiece and oxygen tubing a cautionary arm’s length away from his cigarette. The same past I suppose you feel I screwed up royally?" he added with a smoky exhale.

Precisely. Seamus stared his father down for a beat before revealing a trace of that classic Quinlan grin. He shared his father’s good Irish looks and the same crooked smile—pleasant features that helped him wriggle out of most entanglements. What he couldn’t always sidestep was the quicksand that had oozed between them like a slurry of topsoil after a rigid downpour, ever ready to swallow him whole.

The hunter green painted living room where the two of them sat like a pair of wax figures in an Americana showcase, was all shadows, plaids, and sunlit rays of dust. Seamus, on the made-to-order extra-long sofa from Sears, was bolstered by color-coordinated groupings of his mother’s hand-embroidered pillows. He supposed there had never been complete silence—awkward or otherwise—inside that battered, early-twentieth-century farmhouse. Having so far defied every weather-oddity that the past century had hurled at it—from unrelenting dust squalls to extreme temps, droughts and freak out-of-season snowstorms—the dirty white house with the paint-curled green trim, had been the homestead of the Quinlan Family for five generations. With a large covered porch on its leeward side and landscaped by nothing more than Russian thistle (more commonly known as sagebrush) and the occasional tuft of cheatgrass, the two-story, four-bedroom farmhouse was unluckily located halfway between the dusty, nothing towns of Washtucna and Kahlotus, directly east—forty-six miles downwind from Hanford Engineer Works; or HEW, as the last two generations of Quinlans rather un-affectionately referred to as their employer and family-killer.

Whether it was the tainted and prevailing wind that scooted down the coulees to sandblast the dickens out of the siding and shingles; the constant rumble of semis hauling grain, sawmill wood chips, or sweet onions on the adjacent State Highway 260; or the summer thunderstorms that rattled the windows but rarely cleaned them or replenished the surrounding gullies—there was never complete silence in this desolate place.

And inside what should have been a very haunted house, but somehow wasn’t, there was a constant chorus of noises distinct from the clamor outside. The old copper pipes clanked and groaned in what sounded like a secret language that the Quinlan kids made games out of trying to translate. In later years and stashed behind the ratty blue plaid recliner in the living room, was an oxygen concentrator the size of a bar fridge that vibrated the floorboards and hissed a steady, high-register hum around the clock. An equally audible and wheezing Gerald Quinlan, Seamus’s father—or Pops, as he’d always called him—was tethered to this machine by a hundred-foot run of tubing that served as his leash, limiting both his mobility and his existence. Pops, the last Quinlan of his generation, was rendered housebound with late-stage prostate cancer paired with a hearty helping of COPD. He stubbornly lived alone on a property that still spanned most of its original 160 acres—minus the state road right-of-way that had expropriated a dozen or so acres from the family holding several decades ago. Nobody who had visited the farm had missed that the closest town was called Harder, Washington—since living anyplace else couldn’t have been more difficult.

Gerald’s bony hand roughly repositioned the nasal cannula in his hair-choked nostrils, but it was still crooked. Let me ask you a question, he said. What choice do you think any of us had back then?

How about the choice between wrong and right? his son said, sending the question back at him like a boomerang he’d barely touched.

Come on! Gerald said, coughing. With all your fancy science degrees, Professor Quinlan—you can’t tell me you believe for one minute it was that simple. Rather than make eye contact, the eighty-three-year-old man stared through the dirty glass of the window—his only portal to the outside world. Then, with a flick of his BIC lighter, he lit his second cigarette since the conversation had begun. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, lifting a finger with some effort toward his son’s face. How about the choice between abandoning my pregnant girlfriend (your mother, rest her soul)—he made a lazy sign of the cross with his cigarette hand—or providing for a family? He grunted and gasped, brushing ash from his trousers. Or how ’bout the choice between asking questions and playing dumb? Never mind the choice between staying dumb and getting educated. He took another drag. The late 50s and early 60s—well, they weren’t like today, son. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we couldn’t fucking Google it or whatever to find out.

He waved a finger, sending the sunlit house dust into a spiral before continuing. I was eighteen and a half years old. He started counting, moving to his second finger. I’d gotten your mother pregnant. The third finger required him to move his cigarette to his other hand. I went to the only place where there was work and—he sucked on his cig and extended a fourth digit—for thirty years, I did what I was told, which was mostly to keep my trap shut because it meant a paycheck, you know? Real security in a goddamn uncertain and scary-as-hell-time. He seemed to feel his rebuttal could use an exclamation point, but he was out of fingers and didn’t have the lung capacity to raise his voice. There weren’t any choices back then, son. His hand erased the scoreboard in the stale air. We were civilians in the throes of a nuclear arms race, and we didn’t understand who the real enemy was.

Your own government, would be my guess, Seamus said, knowing it made him sound like a smart-ass.

These father-son debates always got tripped up on the rhetorical, tumbling fact-over-fiction through the dust that their fantastic theories always kicked up. There was a not-quite-affirming pause between the men as Seamus tried to figure out what Pops was staring at, looking through that dirty eight-paned side window next to his recliner chair like he did all day long. For his part in this brief intermission, Pops issued an impressively long straw of cigarette smoke. Particles of grit levitated between them like miniature helicopters, suspending for seconds before beginning to descend, only to lift again in the afternoon sun that streamed through the chink in the faded orange gingham curtains. Seamus and Gerald knew all about half-lives. Not only was it a term for measuring the interval of time it took for one-half of an atomic nucleus of a radioactive sample to decay and become inert, but it also seemed to describe the fate of each member of the Quinlan Family. Except for these last two, all the others had died from their cancers, with their lives only half-lived.

Father and only surviving son were the latest but not the last of the downwinders to blame HEW for what ailed them. Seamus was 56 years old and outwardly appeared fit and rugged as a 4-H show horse, but he had already overcome his own troublesome interlude of testicular cancer that he’d fortunately caught in his early thirties. He could not name a cancer-free relative on the family tree. For Pops and his butt cancer, as he jokingly called it, time was sprinting toward the finish line, which is why Seamus could rearrange his work schedule at Hanford. At least three days each week, he would travel to the rural homestead to support his father’s dwindling needs and ardent wish to die at home. Seamus brought groceries his father wouldn’t eat and medication refills for pills he’d stopped taking. During these visits, Seamus sought advice and sometimes answers. He was always keen to unpack the last of the secrets that no longer served either of them.

Robbing Peter. These days, Seamus overused that cliché—or was it an idiom? (What was the difference?) Maybe it was a metaphor. Or a paraphrase of a parable? The expression struck him as biblical, though Seamus was not scripturally literate, despite his other scholastic achievements. Maybe it referred to a pair of Christ’s disciples run afoul. He would have to look that up—Google it. He chuckled at his father’s limited grasp of modernity, especially since there wasn’t a computer in the house. On second thought, maybe he would just try to stop using the saying so much. More likely, he would do neither. That was okay, too, since everyone but his father seemed to understand what he meant when he said it.

Pops had dozed off again. Seamus extracted the burning cigarette from between his yellowish fingers and snuck a drag even though he had ostensibly quit again. He knew that was just another promise he couldn’t keep, like telling Pops that he would never sell the farm after he was gone. Even though he’d mostly grown up in the city, Seamus and his brothers had been shuttled to their grandparent’s house for weekend sleep overs where they rode the horses and practiced roping. And during summer chore season, the Quinlan boys came up for extended camp-outs in a musty green, eight-man army tent that their Great Uncle Percy had stolen from the military while stationed at Camp Farragut. Beyond sentimentality, which was neither science nor purposeful, Seamus really had no practical use for the place. He rose from his chair and took the cigarette butt to the sink to douse it. These parts had always been tinder-dry, and the closest fire station had to be over forty minutes away in either direction. In a family of smokers, sink-dousing your butts is just what you did—the second habit you followed religiously.

And why did they all smoke? They’d all worked at HEW, where twenty-five-cent cigarette vending machines outnumbered the employee bathroom stalls. Since becoming operational in the mid-40s, HEW had deviously encouraged its labor force to smoke their lungs out. They built a whole culture around tobacco use. As Seamus understood now, that ploy was so Hanford could avoid liability—any future cancers could be blamed on nicotine instead of radiation. Back then and on his first paying job, even sixteen-year-old Seamus kept his pockets full of quarters—or the similarly sized metal washers that the vending machines also took, since the machines didn’t give a shit about his lungs either. He continued to smoke on and off during the decade he was away from Hanford at school, but by the time he returned to Hanford to start his real career, he’d mostly smartened up and was taking his health more seriously.

He turned on the cold-water tap, and air leaked out of the tap with a noise that sounded like the word no. He had slightly better luck with the hot water tap where a spurt of rust water sprayed into the stained porcelain basin, but stopped instantly, followed by a clank sound that served as the exclamation mark. The house had no water!

What the hell? Seamus whispered as he spit on the end of the cigarette. He parted the orange gingham curtains to let in more light so he could examine the under-sink compartment and have a look at the plumbing. A sizeable house spider seemed surprised to see him and scurried out of the way of the prying hands reaching in to check out the pipes. He righted himself, retrieved his baseball cap and sunglasses off the table and didn’t bother tiptoeing across the kitchen, since every floorboard in the place seemed booby-trapped, long betraying any attempt to come or go undetected.

Though his mother was long deceased (thyroid plus metastatic breast cancer), Seamus could still hear her yelling after him to mind her frayed nerves, and so he stopped the screen door from slapping against the doorjamb. Twenty-six years working as a secretary at Hanford, Abigail Quinlan had been absolutely frayed, if the companion definition of frayed also meant cooked. They’d all been frayed and betrayed by HEW—but somehow, while they were still alive, everyone had derived an almost pleasant, though morbid, solidarity from their various cancers.

Seamus made a beeline for the well at the holding pond, thinking about his dad as he strode past the barn. His baseball cap couldn’t shield his eyes from the desert glare that bounced off the beige-almost-albino dirt, and the heat rose in successive waves that forced him to clench his eyes mostly shut and pant through his mouth. He passed under the leafless and fruitless apple tree that his great-great-grandfather Fergus had planted and then grafted, in a failed quest to create a Quinlan variety that was resistant to worms. Though the tree had been dead a hundred years, it still stood, roots cemented in desiccated earth—serving as another parable, idiom, metaphor, and constant reminder that death (and worms) would come for them all. Indeed—on each of the last half-dozen visits to check on Pops, Seamus had sensed that the Reaper had already arrived. He was just patiently biding the time, rocking back and forth in that wicker chair on the front veranda that had always teetered and tottered on the Quinlan porch, in perpetual motion.

Having been a middle child in a brood of his own male siblings, Gerald Quinlan was as clever as he was opportunistic. He had taken advantage of a momentary wealth of related farmhands to make a break with the family farm and strike out on his own. This misunderstood expression of independence resulted in a twenty-five-year stint off the farm while Gerald lived in Richland to be closer to HEW and to start his own family. According to the math, his dad had otherwise spent sixty-three years of his life in that clattering farmhouse. He’d been born in 1935, on the same kitchen table, which was always bigger than their perpetually shrinking family ever warranted. Now that Seamus was thinking about it, that table opposite the kitchen sink had never hosted an impressive gathering of uncles and cousins and grandparents—not at Thanksgiving, and not even on St. Patrick’s Day, when you’d expect an Irish family to hoist their shamrocks together. No, sadly, the only significant gathering of the Quinlan clan lay six feet under the hump of a hill that gradually rose in the distance behind the house. The twentieth-century Quinlans had so far been a consistent lot. They worked at Hanford. They propped up the farm. And they died prematurely from their cancers. Pops—Gerald—at age eighty-eight, was an anomaly only because he’d broken the Quinlan survival record and made it to old age.

A younger Gerald had been compelled to take up reoccupation of the homestead in 1986 when his father passed from liver cancer in his 70s. All his brothers and uncles had already been buried out back. Seamus knew he would be expected to heave the same family mantle onto his own shoulders, because he couldn’t sell the family cemetery, and he would soon be the last Quinlan left above ground. Besides, there were no rural house buyers anymore. The pandemic, recession, war in Eastern Europe, and the commodities and stock market crash had all jammed up the prospects of transacting real estate. Plus, any farmland speculators had somersaulted away with the tumbleweeds fifty years ago, chased by the nipping rumors that Hanford had contaminated the soils within a 200-mile radius. Holding onto the farm through this turmoil had worked out okay for Gerald, but it was going to cramp Seamus’s future. Either Pops was mostly deaf or he had trained himself to sleep through the noise—but Seamus was a light and fitful sleeper. Already obsessed with impending doom given the state of the environment and other world news, he did not look forward to being harnessed to this acreage for the rest of his life.

Rounding the corner of the faded red-almost-pink barn on its north side, Seamus began ascending the natural and Quinlan-fortified berm that contained the pond that had once been surface-fed by nearby Harder Springs in his great-great-grandfather’s time. While the springs still fed the subterranean aquifer via natural plumbing—through fissures and ancient lava tubes—in modern times, the spring water was brought to the surface using a mechanical pump attached to a windmill that never ran out of wind which meant the pond never ran dry. Every few seconds Seamus heard another sixteen-wheeler whiz past on his right, and the hot wind that prevailed from the southwest down the coulee rushed his left ear. What he didn’t hear was the windmill’s rotors or the squeaks and swooshes of the pump cylinder as it dipped beneath to slurp the dregs of the aquifer as if through a soda straw. When he crested the hill, he could see why. The pond was bone-dry, cracked like a clay bowl left too long in a kiln. Now, how in the hell had that happened? Seamus wondered. Sure, it was coming up on the middle of July, but in his memory not even in the worst drought on record for these parts (it had lasted 116 weeks—from January 2014 to March 2016) had the pond dried up completely. With his hand extending the bill of his baseball cap to further block the sun from his eyes, he could see across to the windmill on the opposite bank. It wasn’t rotating, even though Seamus could feel the wind against his sweaty back. He trudged across the dry pond bed, crouching midway to insert his hand into one of the cracks. He thought his fingertips would touch mud, but they didn’t. This desertification was not fresh, he realized, trying to remember the last time he’d checked the water level. The pond was out of sight from the crush gravel driveway where he’d pulled in from the highway. There might have been a sightline through a back bedroom window in the farmhouse, but Seamus hadn’t been upstairs for years, and frankly doubted that his father had either, since he’d mostly made himself comfortable on the main floor and slept in his chair.

Seamus reached the base of the windmill and looked up, instantly seeing part of the problem. Something was stuck between the rotors, jamming the blade and chain mechanism. He walked to the ladder side of the derrick, and hand over hand, climbed up to inspect it. The talons at the end of a bracelet of still-connected bones told him it had likely been a barn owl. Whatever the species, it was still clutching a swatch of fur that looked like it might have belonged to a small rabbit, or maybe a very young coyote pup. He imagined the pair struggling in mid-air before accidentally flying into the spinning blades. That miscalculation might have killed them instantly, but something about the way the talon clutched its prey told Seamus there had been protracted suffering. He barely touched the pelt and the last of the tendon-connected bones fell away.

He saw that one of the blades was bent, so he forced the hot and malleable metal back into shape. When he let go of the wheel, it spun freely again. After hearing some clanking from below, Seamus squinted to focus with anticipation on the end of the screened discharge pipe that was supposed to be underwater. He began descending. Cocking his head and straining his ears for the sound of gurgling, he flashed back to earlier summers in his life, which he’d spent splashing, tadpoling, and rafting. He remembered hockey winters, too, when he’d face off against his two older brothers, goalie Sampson (double lung cancer) and forward Sean (hepatocellular carcinoma). The blades of their skates would often catch on the stalks of exposed cattails. Someone would be sent flying into the snowdrifts, while the others fell into unstoppable laughing fits that left the goal undefended.

The right side of Seamus’s asymmetrical face had always featured this one permanently arched eyebrow, giving everyone the impression that a smile was always about to follow. Thinking back on his childhood now, the right side of his face did lift into a smile recalling those carefree hockey days with his brothers, while the left side felt so weighted down from the grief of losing nearly every member of his immediate family, that it couldn’t really register any emotion at all. Head-on, Seamus thought he must have looked like those Greek tragedy masks of Thalia and Melpomene—two unresolved solitudes but on the same lopsided face. Given the preponderance of that questioning eyebrow, people who didn’t know better might have wondered if he’d suffered a stroke. After university, Seamus cultivated a ridiculous horseshoe moustache that he thought would draw the focus away from his hyper-brow. His lip caterpillar went through different iterations of bushiness, but he’d kept it fastidiously trimmed for the past twenty-five or so years. Sure, it made him look like some porn star stuck on the cover of a 70s Playgirl magazine, but he never heard anyone mention his eyebrow again. His was just one of those handsomely crooked faces that simply wasn’t read easily—something he used to his advantage when delivering good and not-so-good news. Lately, he had to plumb deep for any good news, and since he fretted over everything, he feared the eventual atrophying of his happy face would just get added to the pile of coming disasters he couldn’t avoid, stop, fix, or gloss over.

Seamus skipped the last two rungs and hopped flatfooted onto the parched ground, launching a dust cloud. The hot noon wind whisked it instantly away. At ground level, the squeaks and bangs of the windmill getting up to speed sounded like a year-end kindergarten orchestra recital, but the racket wasn’t raising water. Not one drop issued from the end of the nearby pipe. At the base of the windmill, Seamus peeled back the cracked rubber well seal and poked his face into the stale void. He didn’t smell water, foul or fresh. He shouted a hey! into the hole and the echo was dull and delayed. Even as a farm boy, he knew the water table should have sent his voice back to him more quickly. The fact that it didn’t wasn’t a good omen—not this early in the summer. But then, the world’s climate was being upended, and with it, old norms, seasons, cycles, and almanacs. You didn’t have to lecture him on climate change. He was usually the one behind the lectern, harping on everyone else to pay more attention to the existential threats faced by all species and ecosystems. With his distinctive and booming baritone voice, he probably gave six, maybe eight talks a year, not just in the Tri-Cities where he lived, but at Central Washington University in Ellensburg where he often guest lectured for their advanced geology department. On the world stage, though he humbly played this down, Seamus was considered a—if not the—preeminent authority on prehistoric basalt lava flows; his expertise vaulted by his enthusiastically received and peer-reviewed thesis on the formation of the Columbia Basin. Public speaking was just a hobby for Seamus that played to his middle-child need for attention and his adult passion for geology. After publishing his thesis, he had enjoyed zipping from one international conference to the next, but those opportunities—even the guest-lecturing at CWU—had mostly dried up before the pandemic.

As for his paying gig, Seamus was almost a thirty-year career geophysicist on the US Department of Energy’s multidisciplinary field team, part of a tri-lateral partnership responsible for the impossible task of remediating the 586-square-mile, highly radioactive Hanford Nuclear Complex. Thirty-five years after the cleanup had officially started, Hanford still ranked as the most toxic and contaminated place on the planet. While Seamus could recite the numbers manufactured to impress outsiders, he wasn’t sure they’d made the place safer. He was more inclined to characterize the whole charade as one of the longest-running make-work projects and public relations stunts in American history. On the one hand, that at least meant Seamus had job security. On the other, he realized he probably should have been more discerning about taking the position when it was offered to him thirty years ago. He had been fresh out of university, armed with a PhD and thinking he wasn’t cut out to settle into the boredom of academia. He had already been working at HEW since high school as a soil technician to pay his own way through eight expensive years of schooling. By the time he’d earned his doctorate, Seamus and the family name were known, trusted and bankable entities when the Department of Energy came recruiting in the Hanford lunch rooms. Landing a US Government job had its perks, he’d been counselled and eventually persuaded, but now that this job had swallowed his whole career and eaten up over two thirds of his life, he found himself looking a lot in the rear-view mirror. Wouldn’t it have been better to be ending his career at a prestigious university on a high scholastic note, rather than limping out of Hanford with a plutonium-powered wristwatch still sounding the alarms and peddling the apocalypse? Facing imminent catastrophe head-on was damn exhausting work. He had never been a convincing liar, and so he tended to mosey off script, skipping the sugar-coating and window dressing, to tell it as he saw it. This, of course, made the government PR types twitchy. But it also made Seamus