The Killing Moon: A Novel

Maddox went to Ripsbaugh in the back hallway. Ripsbaugh wore a sweat-darkened T-shirt, overwashed shorts, and his usual boots with the peeling leather collars and worn-down toes. He sat before the "video diagnostics system" contraption Maddox had helped him wheel in. The unit's motor hummed as a mechanized spindle payed out red cable with a thinner silver wire spiraled around its length. The camera snake-fed into the open toilet in the corner of the bare bathroom, disappearing into a liver-colored puddle at the mouth of the bowl at a rate of about one inch per second. The procedure was eerily medical in appearance. A three-by-three screen on the console played the camera view creeping through a pipe of cloudy water glowing night-vision green, an odometer-like counter marking off the distance.

"How far's it go?" asked Maddox.

"Twelve hundred feet," said Ripsbaugh, sitting back in an unsteady chair pulled from the kitchen, its spindles broken underneath. "I get a fourth of my regular excavation fee for twenty minutes of sitting and watching TV."

The house as a whole had a trapped odor, its floors sticky like the floors of an animal cage. Having talked his way in here with Ripsbaugh, only to be frustrated by Wanda's absence, Maddox leaned against the wall to wait, trying to come up with some conversation. "So what's the worst thing anyone's flushed?"

"The worst?" said Ripsbaugh. "I don't know. You hear about wedding rings, guys having to go into the tanks and get them. Feminine products, you know, those things, they swell up with water five times their size. What messes up tanks most is coffee grounds and bleach. Coffee grounds because they clog up your outlet pipes. But bleach, and all these antibacterial soaps they make now? Kills off the bacteria in the tank. It's the bacteria that does all the work in there, eating solids and breaking them down. People so busy chasing bacteria out of their house, meanwhile this tank of waste is swelling up underground, about to back up on them."

"Bleach is bad, huh?"

"When my father ran the company, he would pump out a residential tank once every five or ten years. You could go that long. Not anymore. You one-ply or two?"

"I don't know. Whatever's cheapest."

"One-ply is the way to go. Ladies like the softer two-ply, but it breaks down slow, scums up the top of the tank. Flush down that three-ply they make now, or a baby wipe, or one of them quilted paper towels? Might as well pull off your shirt and throw it in there too. None of it's going anywhere until I come by to suck it out."

The motor whined and the console clicked. The feeding stopped. Ripsbaugh eyed the screen, toggled the joystick controls.

"Yep," he said. "We got a blockage. Right at the inlet. Something's snagged there." He tried to prod at it with the scope, to no avail. He patted his knees and stood. "Have to crack her open outside."

Maddox stopped in the kitchen, the linoleum crackling under his boots. Prescription bottles and dirty dishes and soft packs of GPC cigarettes. Losing lottery scratch tickets facedown in the trash. A still life in crumb and stain. He could feel it here, he could almost smell it: the malaise, this enfeebling despair that radiated like a contagion throughout Black Falls. The breakdown of law and order was, in a sense, a reflection of this mental breakdown.

Outside, beyond a tattered blue tarpaulin covering last winter's unused firewood, Ripsbaugh held the head of a wide green hose unwound off his whirring Cold River Septic truck, the thing twitching as it sucked from a hole in the yard.

The stink was rude, richly awful, just shy of disgusting. Closer, Maddox saw a half-moon slab of concrete overturned next to Ripsbaugh's trusty shovel, revealing a crescent hole smiling out of the earth like a dark mouth, wide enough to swallow a child.

"Thousand-gallon tank," Ripsbaugh said. "That's small potatoes. I remember yours, when I did the Title Five inspection on your mother's house?" Prior to the sale of any property in Massachusetts, the state environmental code required that the septic system be inspected and certified. "That was an old six-by-six vault. Way over capacity for the house size."

Ripsbaugh pulled up the dripping hose, offering Maddox a glimpse below. A muddy white inlet PVC pipe came from the house, jutting into the tank in a modified T. Below it lay a solid coat of thick, white-gray fluff.

"That mess on the top there, that's the paper, sink food, detergents. Below that, all wastewater. People think their septic tank is full of shit, but it's not. Waste dissolves pretty quickly. 'Effluent' is the term."

This was by far the most he had ever heard Ripsbaugh speak at one time. But everybody in this world is an expert on something. Maddox looked down at the meringue of undissolved waste shimmying on the surface. "Effluent, huh?"