Eleven dollars a drum to dispose of it properly. Nothing at all to back the truck down the access road after dark and let the culvert have it. A man has quotas. The quarterly review is a real thing that happens to real people.
Forty drums went in across one wet spring. Nobody signed for anything. The ledger recorded a saving of four hundred and forty dollars, which was noted approvingly at the time and initialled by two departments.
What hauled itself up out of the manhole eighteen months later had been several other things first, and it holds the grievance in every one of the mouths it has since developed. It boils where the streetlight touches it. It leaves prints that go on glowing after it has moved along.
Four hundred and forty dollars. Somebody is going to be asked about that.
