Chapter 14

Kingston 76

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Chapter 14

When Timothy rolled up to the FotoMat, he was no longer distracted by thoughts of secret bathrooms.

“These photos are incredibly important,” he said to the gal in the blue and yellow smock.

“I understand,” she said.

That is, she understood that all photos were incredibly important. Or at least that all customers thought that they were. She did not, of course, understand that, as far as Timothy was concerned, the ecosystem of Kingston hung in the balance.

“Did you say last time I could get doubles?” he asked her.

“Decided you’d like to share?”

“I might need back ups.”

“Always a good idea,” she agreed.

She took the film cartridge from him with all the seriousness befitting a hand-off as important as this one.

“Last name was Miller?” she asked.

“Yes, how did you remember?”

“You’re a memorable customer.”

Timothy tried to read her expression, wondering if she were some sort of IPM spy. Though it was odd that someone should find him memorable, he decided she most likely was not a spy. But if you wanted to spy on people in general, the FotoMat would probably be an excellent place to start.

“Do you need my fifty cents off coupon now?” he asked her

“No, you can give that to me when you pick up your prints.”

“Okay then.”

“See you in two days.”

#  #  #

The photos, along with the water test results, were the single most important pieces of evidence on which Timothy and Charles would prosecute their case, but to seal the deal they needed to find some concrete information connecting the chemicals found in the brook with what was being produced at the IPM plant.

The Kingston Area Library on Broadway seemed a good place to start.

Broadway was another one of those streets along which Timothy had been driven countless times in his mom’s car, but this was the first bicycle exploration. It felt more city-like, with countless lunch counters, appliance stores, garages, and four lanes of traffic. He and Charles thought it safest to pedal slowly along the sidewalk rather than mix it up with passing vehicles.

Heading into midtown, they passed a new cast of characters, different from the ones Timothy was familiar with uptown. There was a cigar-chomping man wearing a fedora. A woman carrying an umbrella to keep the sun off her face, even though it wasn’t a particularly hot day.

There also seemed to be more black people in this neighborhood. Just ahead, three black kids in particular appeared to fan out on purpose, to make it harder for Timothy and Charles to get passed. To Timothy, they looked kind of tough.

“It’s okay, I know these guys,” Charles said, “I go to school with them.”

When they came up against the blockade, Charles and Timothy had to stop.

“What’s up guys?” Charles said with a smile.

The three kids, who were all about Charles’ age, looked incredulously at Charles and the little white kid on the banana saddle bicycle he was hanging out with.

“What’s up...Oreo,” the biggest kid said, which made all three of them start busting up with laughter.

The three boys, still laughing, stepped aside to let Charles and Timothy proceed. After they’d passed, the boys called out “Oreo!” again and continued laughing their way up Broadway.

They’d been riding single file, but Timothy rolled up parallel to Charles so he could talk with him.

“Why’d they call you that?” he asked.

“Never mind,” Charles said, seemingly taking it in stride. “I’ve been called worse than that, I can assure you.”

“But what does Oreo mean?”

“Chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside. I’ll explain later,” Charles said, he pulled ahead and left it at that.

About a block later, Charles looked behind and turned around when he realized Timothy had stopped for some reason.

Timothy was sitting there on his bicycle, staring at a building.

“This is the place,” he said.

“What place?”

“The place that Ken got beat up.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Charles said, seeing the buzzing neon Oriole Tavern sign in the darkened front window.

Timothy had had a vague idea that the bar was somewhere along Broadway, but this was the first time he’d come face-to-face with the place.

It was still afternoon, but the door was wide open for business, and the smell of alcohol was radiating out into the street. There were already people in there drinking.

“C’mon,” Charles said, breaking Timothy’s distant gaze, “we gotta keep moving if we’re gonna get to the library on time.”

In addition to their stated goal, there was a lot more to look at. On the other side of the train underpass was what had once been the grand municipal center of the city, now fading fast since attention was shifting to the suburbs.

The old post office had been knocked down when they’d built a new one, but the old bus station remained, sitting empty since a new one had been constructed uptown. Even the once-stately City Hall was boarded up, its offices relocated to a more modern building.

There was one old municipal building that had successfully found a second life and appeared to be well-maintained. Charles stopped his bike in front of the old armory to pat the newly placed bronze sign that read:

Lt. Charles Lambeau Neighborhood Youth Center

“That’s my dad,” he said proudly, spending a dreamy moment to look upward as if his dad were looking down on him right then and there, perhaps equally proud that his son was already following in his footsteps.

“You wanna go in?” Timothy asked.

“That’s okay, we’ll go in some other time,” Charles said, then his tone became cautionary. “Now look, we’re coming up on the High School...when we ride past, don’t stop, just keep going, okay?”

“How come?”

“Just do it.”

Kingston High School took up an entire city block and looked like a public high school right out of the movies. To Charles, this place was as big and intimidating as Bailey Jr. High School was to Timothy.

Running the length of the property, dividing the high school’s sprawling front lawn from the city sidewalk, was The Wall, a notorious smoking hangout for generations. Timothy and Charles soon found themselves running a gauntlet of secondhand smoke, and various configurations of indolent high schoolers, spreading out across the sidewalk.

The same smoke that was repellent to Charles was strangely enticing to Timothy. He unconsciously slowed to a stop in front of a particularly intriguing circle of glassy-eyed teens who all seemed to be sharing the same lumpy-looking cigarette. It smelled like a skunk.

“You want a hit?” one of them asked Timothy, a comment which caused the one currently smoking to burst out coughing and laughing at the same time, blowing an overwhelming puff of heady smoke directly into Timothy’s face.

“Come on,” Charles said, doubling back to pull Timothy by the shirt sleeve to keep him moving.

When finally they reached the end of The Wall, they emerged as if from the mists, having finally arrived at their destination.

#  #  #

The Kingston Library was actually two libraries.

The children’s library was in an old Victorian mansion that’d been donated to the city. Timothy had been taken there for many a story hour by his mom earlier in childhood. Charles had been taken there a lot by his own mother, too, but neither of them had really been inside the other building much.

The Carnegie Library, for adults, stood next door. It maintained a classic look, even if a bit worn around the edges. It was this library building that might have what they were looking for, if only they could find it. They chained their bikes up and went inside.

Timothy, a bit woozy from whatever that guy had exhaled into his face, took a moment to get his bearings.

He was surprised to find it pretty much empty. He thought all libraries had child-friendly, colorful posters saying things like, “READ!” but this was quite the opposite, it was basically colorless and dimly lit. It had a morgue-like quiet about it beyond the absence of voices, like the stacks were filled with dead bodies instead of books.

Heading toward the reference desk in the back, they passed five times as many card catalogues as were in Timothy’s school library. This was the Big League.

“The Children’s Library is next door,” the librarian said to them, barely looking up.

“We’re not looking for the Children’s Library, ma’am,” Charles said. “We need the Library Library.”

Timothy snickered slightly, something about the way Charles said Library Library was funny. The librarian, meanwhile, was not amused. Unlike Mrs. Stein at Timothy’s school, this librarian was not much interested in helping two kids who, she assumed, were just messing around.

“May I ask what it is you’re looking for?”

“We’d like some information about water pollution,” Charles said.

“Water pollution...” she repeated, her voice trailing off, like the unexpected seriousness of their query was echoing around her head, looking for a place to land. Slowly, she was roused into action.

She came out from behind her desk and led them over to the periodicals.

“We just started getting a magazine called Ecology Now. I suggest you start here.”

She took the current issue along with a single back issue, laid them out on a reading desk for them, and returned to her librarian duties.

Charles and Timothy took one magazine each and began pouring over them.

Well, Charles was pouring over his. Timothy was more like zoning out looking at beautiful nature photos from national parks. Nice colors, he thought. Then he remembered that this was not what he was looking for, and kept turning pages.

Soon, he came to pictures that were not as pretty. Pictures of erosion, forest fires and... a polluted beach with some kind of sludge all over it. Looked promising. Timothy began to read that article in particular. And then, he found something.

“Look here, look here!” he said to Charles excitedly.

“Shhhh,” the librarian scolded from her desk, even though there still wasn’t anyone in the library except for them.

“Whaddah you got?” Charles whispered.

Timothy pointed to a line in the article and quietly read aloud:

“The Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits the discharging of pollutants into US waters without an NPDES permit.”

“What’s an NPDES permit?” Charles said.

“I don’t know,” Timothy said, “but it’s about water pollution!”

They continued to read through the article together. They learned that NPDES stood for National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. To their great surprise, they also learned that polluting the water wasn’t necessarily illegal.

“Wait a minute,” Charles said incredulously, “so all IPM had to do was get one of these permits and then they can just dump shit into the water and there’s nothing you can do about it?”

Timothy scanned ahead and pointed to another sentence.

“Right here, it says: If a facility in your area has applied to get an NPDES permit, that company by law must provide notice in the legal section of a major local newspaper. Why don’t we check the legal section?”

This was all unbelievable, but at least it gave them a starting point for further inquiry. Carrying the magazine with them, they returned to the reference desk.

“Ma’am, how do we check the legal section of the Daily Freeman?” Charles asked respectfully.

“We keep hardcopies of the Freeman on file for one year, before that you’d have to look through the microfiche. Do you know which date you’re looking for?”

“Uh, not really.”

“Well, we don’t categorize the legal section by subject, only by date. You just have to go through all the newspapers one at a time.”

“ALL the newspapers?”

This would obviously take forever. But when the librarian saw the boys’ faces falling at the impossibility of the task before them, she began to soften. She was pretty convinced by now they weren’t here to fool around, even if they didn’t know what they were doing.

“May I ask specifically what you are looking for?”

Charles looked at Timothy for permission to proceed, Timothy nodded, so Charles spoke carefully, trying not to give too much away.

“Well, let’s just say we read that this Clean Water Act requires local...companies...to make certain announcements in the local paper,” Charles said.

“If they’re applying for a permit to dump stuff in the water,” Timothy filled in.

“I see,” said the librarian. “Give me a second.”

Behind the desk were all sorts of official-looking books on a big shelf, books that were so important they didn’t even usually let normal people look at them. She took one particularly heavy book off the shelf and began to flip through it purposefully, using her index finger to scan the fine print.

“Okay,” she said, “the Clean Water Act took effect on October 18th, 1972...so I would suggest using that date as a starting point and going from there.”

She went over to special cabinets that looked like the card catalogs but with wider drawers. Producing a small canister containing a spool of film, she led them over to an odd viewing machine.

“Do you know how to use this?” she asked while threading the film for them.

The machine appeared to be some sort of slide projector with a viewing screen, pretty cool because you got to advance the film using hand cranks, but it looked like it could only display one page at a time.

Left to begin their search, Timothy and Charles quickly figured out that you didn’t have to read the whole paper, you could scroll quickly to the legal section on any particular day. The downside was that the print on a single legal page was so small, with language so alien to them, it still seemed like it would take a million years, even with a logical starting date.

With the afternoon ticking away, the level of frustration went up a notch with each fruitless attempt at reading another daily legal section. How many old papers would they have to scroll through like this?

But, it turned out, the librarian’s guess was right on target. There, on October 25th, just seven days after the law took effect, they came upon a small notice:

Pursuant to US Code 1251, International Photocopy Machines hereby gives notice of application for NPDES permit regarding the hydraulic discharge of production related byproducts.

The language was so fuzzy it almost didn’t make sense, but this appeared to be it, hiding in plain sight. This was the moment IPM whispered to the world they planned to dump something into the water. Or maybe that they already had.

“Can we get a copy of this page?” Charles asked the librarian.

“It will be 25 cents,” the librarian cautioned. Twenty five cents was five times the price of a normal copy at the library, and two and a half times the price of a candy bar.

“We’ll pay it.”

The librarian had to press a few buttons, it was a little more complicated than running a standard copy machine, but in a few moments, on shiny paper, a copy of the legal section came curling out of the back of the microfiche machine.

The librarian looked at the copy before handing it to them. Based on their earlier questions, she took an educated guess.

“Is this the legal notice you were looking for?” she asked, pointing at IPM’s listing.

“Yes ma’am,” Charles said hesitantly.

“This is very interesting...I had no idea...how did you think to look for this?”

“We’re doing a little research project,” Timothy offered.

“Well, this is very good work you’re doing, boys,” she said. “What’s your next step?”

“I guess, to find out whether they got the permit or not?” Charles speculated.

“Yes, that would be good to know, wouldn’t it.”

Timothy and Charles said nothing further at first. Every bit of progress, it seemed, led to another potential dead end.

“Do you know how to find out?” Timothy finally asked.

The librarian tapped the eraser of the pencil she was holding against her thin lips.

“Give me a minute,” she said

The boys followed her back to the research desk, where she was looking at the big book again.

“This is a summary of the US Code which we keep on file,” she explained. “It doesn’t go too deeply into specifics, but it does say that under the Clean Water Act the federal government maintains compliance history available to the general public...let me check one other place...”

She retrieved yet another formidable-looking book.

“This is a directory of federal phone numbers,” she said. “And...you’re in luck, there’s a hotline for questions about NPDES permits...”

She copied the number onto a scrap of paper and slid it across the counter. The boys stood looking at the number with its DC area code as if it were in cuneiform.

“Would you like me to try calling the hotline for you?” the librarian offered.

Charles weighed the risk of saying too much against the merits of having a professional-sounding adult offering to make an important phone call on their behalf.

“This is a highly sensitive subject,” he said.

“You can count on my discretion, I assure you.”

Charles again looked to Timothy, who was obviously also not feeling equipped to make a consequential phone call to the nation’s capital himself.

“We’d appreciate that, ma’am,” Charles said.

The librarian dialed the number.

“Hello? Yes, this is Phyllis Ackerman at the Kingston Area Library in Kingston, New York? I have a question about an NPDES request made by International Photocopy Machines here in Kingston... Yes, the date would’ve been October 25, 1972... Yes, I can hold...”

While whoever was on the other end of the line was finding the particular file in question, the librarian expertly cradled the receiver between ear and raised shoulder while taking the moment to continue doing whatever work needed doing on her desk.

“Yes?” she said, when the DC person began speaking again. “Okay...I see...oh, that’s very interesting...”

The librarian was jotting down notes as fast as she could.

“Yes...yes, thank you very much, I would like a printed copy, can you please send it to...”

She turned to Charles and Timothy, holding her hand over the receiver.

“Is there an address you’d like the information mailed to?” she asked them.

Charles leaned forward and told her his name and address, line by line, which she in turn relayed to the person in Washington.

“You have that?” the librarian confirmed, then closed with, “thank you so much, yes, you’ve been most helpful.”

After hanging up the telephone, she turned to Charles and Timothy, a fully changed personality, having herself been educated in the process of helping them.

“So, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act,” she said, enthusiastically, “you’ll be receiving a copy of IPM’s NPDES request, along with a detailed description of why the federal government rejected their request.”

“They rejected it?” Charles said with surprise.

“They did. It seems IPM applied for a permit to dump production-related byproducts directly into the Esopus Creek, and was denied because the chemicals included benzene and toluene, which are known carcinogens.”

This was amazing to both Charles and Timothy, an unexpected view into a world where huge entities run by adults seemed to crash into each other with full force.

“May we please have that piece of paper?” Charles asked.

“Yes, of course.”

The librarian paper-clipped the notes to the copy of the legal section and passed it across the desk to them.

“Good luck with your project, boys,” she added. “I’m sure a lot of people will be very interested to learn what you find...”

#  #  #

Bounding down the steps of the library into the late afternoon sun, there was a sense of triumph in their detective work, even if their findings looked more and more grim.

“So, IPM knew this stuff was bad, and they wanted to dump it anyway,” Charles said.

“And when they couldn’t dump it directly, they found another way to dump it anyway,” Timothy said.

“I think the time has come to pull our report together, you want me to come by your house tomorrow?”

“It’s still under construction.”

“Man, you sure have a lot of construction going on at your house...okay, come up to mine.”

Their bikes unlocked, they were just beginning to peddle their way up Broadway when a cop approached them. Timothy froze, thinking this was connected to their investigation. Obviously, the cops had been spying on them all along. Now that the case was coming together, they were going to come down on them.

“Hey,” the cop said, to Charles in particular, “where’d you get that bike?”

Charles looked surprised, but remained respectful and succinct in his response.

“It was a present from my mother.”

“Pretty nice present, who’s your mother?”

“Mrs. Charles Lambeau,” Charles said.

The cop did a double take.

“Oh, sorry Charley, my mistake, I didn’t recognize you.”

“Quite alright, Mr. McGrath,” Charles replied, indicating he had recognized the officer all along, even though the officer hadn’t recognized him.

“What are you doing in this neighborhood anyway?”

“We were doing research at the library.”

“Oh, good for you...can I give you boys a lift home in the squad car?”

“We can make it just fine on our own, thank you.”

“Okay...be safe.”

“You too.”

Charles and Timothy watched the cop get in his cruiser.

“You know him?” Timothy asked.

“I know most of the cops in this town,” Charles said dryly, watching the cruiser drive off.

For the second time today, Timothy watched Charles remaining perfectly composed in the face of unfortunate dealings with other people, but he knew Charles well enough by now to sense this last exchange had rattled him. Maybe his lower lip was wavering, just a bit.

“You okay Charles?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Charles said. “Let’s just go home.”

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