He cut me off; I'd showed that I had some taste in hardware, that I had some self-respect. He gave me directions.

Then, what the hell, he gave me a ride to the damn place. Dropped me off in the parking lot. Drove me in his Cadillac Seville with the Masonic calipers welded to the trunk lid. This guy was a goddamn former executive. With an obvious grudge.

"You know Red?" I said on the way over.

Dave Hagenauer (according to the junk mail on his dashboard) laughed and thwacked his maroon naugahyde steering wheel. "Red Grooten? I sure as hell do. How the hell do you know Red?"

"Old fishing buddies?" I asked, ignoring the question.

"Oh, hunting, fishing, you name it. We been going out for a long time. Course the most we do now is a little fishing, you know, plunking off a boat."

"Not in the North Branch I hope."

He whistled silently and glinted his eyes at me, Aqua-Velva blue. "Oh, no. I've known about that place for a long time. Shit no."

By that time we were at the store. "Stay out of trouble!" he said, and he was still laughing when I slammed the door.

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. I strike up conversations with the oldest people who work there, we talk about machine vs. carriage bolts and whether to use a compression or a flare fitting. If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything and they ask a lot of stupid questions in the process. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.

So in the first couple of minutes I had to blow off two zesty young clerks. It's easy for me now, I just mumble about something very technical, using terms they don't understand. Pretending to know what I mean, they direct me off toward another part of the store. Young clerks like to use a zone coverage, whereas the oldtimers prefer a loose man-to-man, so you can wander and think, pick up an armload of items, frown, turn around, put them all back and start over again.

I did a lot of that. After half an hour, an old clerk orbited by, just to be courteous, to establish that I wasn't a shoplifter. "Anything I can help with?" he asked understandingly.

"It's a long, long story," I said, and that put him at ease. He went back to coffee and inventory and I took another swing down the plumbing aisle, visions of theta-holes dancing in my head.

What we had here was your basic hard-soft dilemma. I needed something soft that would form itself to the gentle curve of the pipe and make a toxic-waste-tight seal. But it had to have enough backbone that the pressure wouldn't destroy it. Two laps around the Best Hardware Store in Blue Kills had demonstrated that no single object would do the trick. Now I was trying to break it down, one problem at a time.

First, the soft part. And there it was: ring-shaped, four inches across, rubber. Attractively blister-packed and hanging there like fruit on a tree.

"How many of these toilet gaskets you have in stock?" I shouted. The young clerks froze in dismay and the old clerk took it right in stride,

"How many toilets you got?" he called.

"A hundred and ten."

"Wow!" piped a younger clerk, "Must be some house!"

"I'm a plumber missionary," I explained, wandering toward the front of the store. "Going down to..." almost said Nicaragua, but caught myself "... Guatemala next week. Figure the only way to stop the spread of disease down there is put in modern plumbing facilities. So I need a whole shitload of those things."

Of course they didn't believe me, but they didn't need to.

"Joe, go see how many," said the boss. Giggling nervously, Joe headed for the basement. I turned around before they could bother me with questions and moved on to Phase II: something hard and round that could hold the pressure, hold those toilet gaskets against the side of the big pipe. Some kind of disk. God help us if we had to cut a hundred disks out of plywood. I could see us up all night on the deck of the Blowfish, running out of saber-saw blades. Somewhere in this great store there had to be a lot of hard round cheap things.

To summarize: they were having a sale on salad bowl sets in the house wares department. Cheap plastic. A big bowl, serving implements, and half a dozen small bowls nested inside. I borrowed a small bowl from the display set and carried it over to plumbing, where I could hold it up against the toilet gaskets: a perfect match.

Now I just needed something that would hold the salad bowls with their rims pressed against the gaskets pressed against the pipe. All along I'd known that the crossbar running across each hole could serve as an anchor. In the back they had yards and yards of threaded steel rod, which would do just fine. Cut it into five-inch chunks, use a vise to bend a hook into one end, hook it over the crossbar, run it through a hole in the center of the bowl and use a wingnut to hold the bowl down. It'd take some work, but that's what nitrous oxide was for.

I bought a hundred and ten toilet gaskets, nineteen salad bowl sets, fifteen three-foot-long threaded quarter-inch rods, a hundred and fifty wingnuts (we were sure to drop some), an extra vise, a chunk of lead pipe (for leverage when bending hooks into the rods), four hacksaws, some files, some pipe cement, and a couple of spare 5/16-inch drills for drilling through the bottoms of the bowls. Paid in cash and persuaded them to deliver it to the public dock at Blue Kills Beach at the close of the business day. Then I walked out into the bright Jersey sunlight, a free man. It was well past noon and time for a burger.

This place was a little out of the way, as good stores usually are, so I found a phone and dialed the number of the phone in our Omni.

All I could hear was Joan Jett, very loud, singing a song about driving around in New Jersey with the radio on. This was hastily turned down, then I heard the phone shuffling around in someone's hand, the roar of the road coming through the tinfoil walls of that little crackerbox and the coyote howl of the engine, doing at least five thousand RPM and approaching the redline.

"Shift!" I screamed, "Shift!"

"Shit!" Debbie answered. The phone dropped from her shoulder and bounced off something, probably the handbrake, then got crushed against the seat as she rammed the tranny into a higher gear. The engine calmed down. "Where the fuck is the horn," Debbie said dimly, then found it and described someone as a "rich bastard." Then, cut off in traffic, she had to downshift. I rummaged in my pocket for more change; this might take a while.

"Such a fucking right-handed car!" Debbie said. "The shift lever, the stereo, now the phone. What's the problem with the horn?"

"The whole middle part of the steering wheel is the horn button," I said.

"Oh, S.T. Stress. I love it. I adore stress."

"How'd it go?"

"Real fine. They gave up on the Kryptonites. Tried to send some boats up the channel to get us from that direction, but Jim blocked the deep part of the river with the Blowfish and they skragged one of their propellers on an old oil drum. One of theirs, probably."

"Wonderful. Very mediapathic."

"Didn't find any deformed birds but we got some trout with scuzz on their bodies. What did you find?"

"Toxic Disneyland. Want to come pick me up?"

I stayed on the phone and guided her on a hunt-and-miss expedition through the metropolitan area; did not hang up until the bumper of the Omni was in contact with my knees.

The grille was a crust of former insects, and waves of heat issued from the louver on the hood. As I checked the oil, she emerged to hover and squint, skeptically, at the engine.