DETECTIVE STORY

The Reverend Armenus Thomas was exceptionally large and muscular. He was known to lift and carry a pair of Chevy transmissions across his shop, gripping the steel bell housings one in each hand, a herculean feat. He worked on Fords, Chevys, Pontiacs and so forth; he didn’t work on imports.

Tom hired me, once, to clean the windows of his transmission shop. I thought I had done a good job, but I heard later that the Reverend was not happy with my work, and he never hired me again. I don’t recall if I ever got paid. Maybe he just forgot, or maybe I’ve forgotten since. If not, I must have let the matter drop because the Reverend was known to be an honest and scrupulous man, a man of few words and an impeccable, though murky, reputation. At middle age he was very much my senior, and I tended to respect my seniors.

Tom and I never hung out or made small talk. To me he was a shadowy figure in an oversized ballcap and grimy blue coveralls, lumbering back and forth across his transmission shop, staring obliquely into space mulling over some mechanical problem, muttering, working it out in his solemn and solitary way.

I didn’t know Tom very well, and I might have addressed him as Mr. Thomas, or maybe just Tom. Maureen, though, had a habit of referring to him as Black Tom, a fairly obvious nickname since the rest of us were white. Blackness was immensely honorable among us revolutionaries, but still alien. We wanted to be casual and comfortable with our soul brothers, but we were not.

Beside his weekday transmission shop business, Tom had another life down in northeast Denver where he was a pulpit Reverend at a gospel church. But we never discussed religion.

There was more to Tom’s history than transmissions and pulpits. Tom used to live in Minneapolis, where he was employed as a professional thug. Tom had done unpleasant jobs for reasonable pay, and to earn the long term benefits of mutual obligation among a certain circle of associates. Jobs unpleasant both for the deliveryman and the recipient, but sometimes necessary at a certain time and place. Jobs never talked about, all that stuff no more than a bad dream now. Nothing left in the world but a few old friends, connections rarely spoken of, or to. Armenus Thomas had long since seen the light, been born again, and had traveled far in his heart and shoes from those mean streets.

I had met Tom through Steven, and Steven through Ted and Maureen. We all admired Steven, who had been to other countries and continents, and who seemed to have deep connections in both the counterculture and the underworld. He knew exotic people. Steven had a noble bearing but he was dissolute, in fragile health, a self-described recovering schizophrenic. Equal parts Lord Byron and Svengali, Stephen was charismatic, sly, slender, given to lounging around his curtained little downtown house in dramatic costumes—robes and leather, rich colors and patterns. Lounging and holding court was what Steven did best. His messengers and co-conspirators, the characters we casually called his court, might call or come knocking at any hour.

Ted, on the other hand, was a hairy giant with a protruding belly and voluminous beard under dirty thick-lensed horn-rim glasses, shuffling around in old slippers and a pungent sweatshirt. Ted was, had been a graduate student of philosophy for the last few years. After dropping out of the priesthood he divided his time between trying to explain Leibniz’ monads to the rest of us and dropping acid, preferably Owsley or windowpane, then staying up all night hairy-bear naked in front of the fireplace in his comfy old house on the Hill talking about those monads, the universe, the impending revolution and so forth. He didn’t smell as bad when he was naked; the sharp body odor remained but it lacked the sour overtones of his clothing.

Ted and I had met the first time when I was a sophomore at a Jesuit high school where he was a recently-ordained priest of the Society of Jesus. Young Ted the Novice in his black suit and white collar drilled us though second-year Latin every weekday afternoon. He didn’t smell much back then, and he was merely chubby. His beard was already full but had not yet reached its full rasputinesque grandeur. In Latin class he was known to lean over a boy hard at work at his desk conjugating verbs, lean way over him, gently rubbing his black paunch back and forth against the boy’s back. This amused us by way of gossip, but he was not cruel or overly serious like some of the priests, so none of us hated him, as far as I knew.

Now a college student, I had run into the new Ted in the old humanities building on campus where the 100-level philosophy courses were taught. He had quit the priesthood and had already been on campus for years. I was still half-living with my parents, still in my own home town, and happy to have a second, more social home among the freaks who lived on the Hill near the campus. I introduced Ted to some other students I knew, he did the same, and before long I would drift up to his house on long breaks between classes to eat a sandwich or smoke a joint or talk at length on the rarefied subjects that excite some first-year college students. Or used to.

Ted’s wife, Maureen, was a fair match for him both in size and smell. She was obviously an intelligent woman (they had met at Loyola) so I was all the more shocked at her lack of personal hygiene and saucy pride in her feminine miasma. Tad bragged about how Maureen had once stolen a textbook for him, shuffling it out of the store between her legs, no undies, trusting her folds of sticky flesh to hold the book in place. Ted showed us the book. It was not small, and it stank.

Maureen would cook a broth of meat and root vegetables in a massive tureen on the stove in the kitchen, which was probably the most unsanitary room in the whole filthy house. The soup was invariably tasty, and it was safe to eat, at least for a few days, if it was thoroughly boiled from time to time. But when Maureen made a lot of soup, she left it open and tepid for days in its pot on the stove. More than once her old, bacterial soup sent some unsuspecting guest or roommate to bed or the toilet or the hospital.

A cast of characters came and went through Ted and Maureen’s house. A few of them were clean-cut, studious, quiet, honest students just passing through on the way to a well-understood career. More of them were drifters, dealers, musicians, maniacs, visionaries, petty thieves or con-men, proletarian ciphers, incipient Luddites or Jacobins. Some of them actually had dramatic backstories or terrible secrets. The rest of us were tentative, still hazy in outline, hanging loose and trying to pay attention. And Stephen had considerable charisma. We were all a part of his court, a loyal following, though most of us were never sure which kind of character he really was.

TO BE CONTINUED....

SEPTIC

A week is a long time to live without a formal toilet of some kind, especially in Colorado in the middle of February. What we had instead of a toilet was five acres of private property. Most of it was weedy pasture, sage flat, and juniper thicket. Our neighbors were not the nosy kind. Anyway we had bushes for privacy. In these parts there are no homeowners’ associations or restrictive covenants to prevent this kind of thing.

We were pragmatic and resourceful. We were not constipated. We always neatly buried our deposits. We were not savages, after all.

This all came about after my wife and I had lived in an old house out in the county for about five years. Our toilet flushed well enough, most of the time, except when our relatives visited. Then the thing flushed slowly and reluctantly. After they’d gone I would clean the tank valve then run coathangers and drano through the tiny outlets under the lip of the bowl. All wasted effort, of course. I was avoiding the reekingly obvious, drifting deep in the fetid currents of denial.

An inevitable morning came, late in winter, when the device again got sluggish in response to my own ablutions. And I noticed something unusual in the back yard, just outside the bathroom window, before heading to my office. A puddle. I drove off trying not to dwell on it.

The next morning I took a shovel and poked at a patch of sod that was now under an inch of water. I scraped away mud to expose big chunks of slimy wood that seemed to be… floating… until I punched through into deeper water. I stopped, found a long willow branch, and probed the dark abyss.

Time to call in a professional, I thought. February. Mud wherever the ground was not frozen, fresh snow expected tonight.

It was twilight by the time Alman, a dirtwork man I knew, arrived pulling a backhoe on a trailer behind his dual-axle pickup. By now his day should have been over, a strenuous one no doubt. Instead he unloaded and started the machine with its bar of floodlights, gently pushed down and rolled over my flimsy fence, jockeyed around into position and got down to the job itself, just as it began to snow.

The snowflakes were bright in the floodlights while he tore into the backyard and in minutes reduced my shovelwork to a swamp of muck and water. He dragged pieces of sodden black railroad ties up from a hiding place six inches below the surface of our lawn. Because that spot through the years had always been unaccountably green, I gradually had taken to believing that Nature favors the neglectful. I may not have been entirely wrong, but wrong enough.

Alman finally dragged away a dozen old timbers that had covered a cinderblock tank. The hold underneath was splashing full, a dark sparkling void against the thin snow surrounding it. It was full dark by the time he drove his backhoe back up onto its trailer.

(Railroad ties are saturated with creosote. They are thick, heavy, and long-lasting, but they rot eventually when immersed. My ties probably came from the Dolores and Rio Grande or the McPhee Railroad of a century ago when trains ran all through these valleys and forests. The narrow-gauge trains carried timber, machinery, and fruit. Spur lines collected timber destined for a Denver box factory. This is fine fruit country and the foothills were covered in orchards once— apples, peaches, cherries, apricots, even one foolhardy stand of avocados, everything you need to stay regular.)

I put some cash in Alman’s left hand and shook his right one. His hard cold work had left us surrounded by a chewed-up ruin of backhoe tracks and tangled fence wire and mud.

The next professional who visited us came a few days later, in a special truck driven at some expense from a town fifty miles away. It was a tanker truck with a cute company name and cute logo and it came equipped with a large pump and a fat hose.

The driver was a jolly-looking man with a broad moustache and strong hairy arms. He wore bright orange coveralls and black rubber gloves. He brandished a large hammer with an orange handle.

“Pardner,” he said to me in a fatherly (yet not necessarily a clean or healthy) way, “you and I are going to have The Talk. We are going to discuss Poop 101.” He grinned with obvious relish. Here was a man who actually knew some shit, and knew that he knew it, and was professionally authorized to spread it around.

I don’t remember profound or novel insights enlivening the jolly man’s well-polished Talk. Poop, having fallen into a septic tank, dissolves (mostly) and the liquid flows laterally through an array of perforated pipes.[1] The excremental fluid seeps out of the pipes then magically disappears into the earth. When the magic doesn’t happen fast enough, a big pumper truck with a cute logo extends a thick hose behind the flowers through the metallic throat of your tank, sucks your troubles away, then drives off.

None of this prim story applied to the situation in my back yard. What I had was a cinderblock pond brimful with liquid, shit, and liquid shit, currently surrounded by a mudbog. Somewhere out beyond Ground Zero lay the inert remnants of a leech field long dry, its frail pipes clogged with clay or choked with a spidery rootwork from summers dead and gone.

This cinderblock tank, now open to the sky, had been our septic system entire. Whatever comfort we had enjoyed through the years happened thanks to porous cinderblock, stacked without mortar, the rich effluent slowly percolating through the back yard— a simple and altogether natural process, in fact a near-perfect exoneration of the Neglect principle, at least until the roof fell in.

Getting the big pumper truck into position was a bit awkward, its hose barely reaching into the dark pond. We lost the poppy patch and some trim on the tool shed. The orange-suited man used his orange-handled hammer it to pound a few snaps and seals on the hose end, then switched on his pump. It ran for about four minutes while the surface of the dark fluid receded. Then the pump shuddered and went abruptly silent.

“I’m done.” he said, giving me his pity grin. You poor sucker. “Too much debris down there. Debris clogs the hose, burns out the pump. Not worth it.”

Not worth it, I thought, no, not worth it even for the standard house-call, not to mention the surcharge for mileage, the poppies, and the shed….

Then the jolly man and pumper truck were gone. I stood alone, staring at a chaos of contamination, nonsensical shapes poking up through the glistening coal-sheen surface, musing, what a complete load of crap.

I knew what I had to do.

On a shelf in a shed I had a disposable coverall, given me by a friend who worked as a hospital operating room technician. It was a white zip-up complete with feet, hood, and gloves. The shed also contained a pair of tall rubber boots, a ladder, rake, shovel, and tin bucket.

The rest of the day was routine: Climb down the ladder to the slick submerged floor of the chamber, scoop or somehow maneuver stuff into the bucket (depending on the shape and consistency of particular pieces), climb the ladder with bucket in hand, step out to cross the mud apron, walk randomly to some new spot in the snowy field, and pour fragrant muck upon the earth. Return empty, descend the ladder, fill the bucket, and so forth.

Deep in the tank I found and cut taproots from nearby trees and pelagic mats of rootlets. Some things were harder to explain: A wrench. A scythe. Some kind of wheel. Sections of iron pipe. Pieces of a plastic picture frame. Bits and pieces I carried up the ladder and set aside, returning with shovel to fill bucket again with pure, smooth gravy and dumplings.

I might add some fragrance into the telling, but in fact I don’t recall much smell at all—at least not after getting started. As if a lone tree were to fall in the forest, and land smack across my nose, there would be no smell. I suppose I also did a lot of mouth breathing.

You might wonder why I went on doing this, gradually emptying the pit, knowing in my guts that an entirely new tank was the only plausible remedy. I have asked myself.

One answer is, now I know for sure I have been baptized. Bathed in the blood of the lamb, as it were. Initiated into fundamental truths about the carbon cycle, about peristalsis and metabolism. The medusa face of organic life.

But it was only a baptism after all. Less pleasant work is still necessary. Some people bathe in the stuff daily (a hereditary caste of sewer cleaners in Kolkata, for instance). I hear the corpse business is grimmer still. As humanity is dispensable, so humility is indispensable. But even so.

Another answer: We really needed a sewer of some kind to get us and ours through until the spring. We needed an indoor commode and an occasional shower. From a certain point of view, at this point the system was at least halfway fixed: The toilet did flush more freely now that it poured out of a blackish pipe and through the fresh air into a very well-ventilated tank.

Over the next few days we spanned the pit with two-by-fours. We found tin sheets to fit over these, weighted them down with a few rocks to secure them from the coming windstorms, and carried on. Fortunately it was the back yard and not facing the road. Anyway the county real estate market has stunk in recent years, especially in late winter.

Some weeks later, Alman returned with his backhoe to smooth down the last of the debris. He tumbled the cinderblock monstrosity down into its own hollow and buried it in a hash of old clay and a dump truck’s worth of fill soil. As Alman moved the earth around he turned up a big orange-handled hammer. I keep it for an amulet.

Eventually, in the spring when our thin pasture was dappled with patches of thick green growth, a third kind of professional arrived on the scene. Burly men in hardhats installed a solid cement tank and buried long rows of new, roomy infiltrators. It was a top grade system, fit for the 20^th century, just in time to see it end.

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[1] Known in waste management circles as a leech field, the name recalling macabre medieval medical procedures.