The polluted state of White River

The polluted state of White River is not merely scenery in the novel: it is an ongoing public consequence of overflowing sewers and a stalled infrastructure project associated with Pickett Engineering and a criminal investigation. The river’s contrast between wildlife and sewage makes environmental damage tangible, while the unfinished work intended to protect it becomes part of the mystery surrounding Russell Pickett, Sr. and a difficult choice about whether to tell the police what has been found.

River and Everyday Experience

Years before the main events, Aza Holmes and her mother sometimes paddled down White River, past Davis Pickett’s house to the park behind the art museum. They would beach their canoe, walk around, and paddle home against the slow current. By the time Aza and Daisy Ramirez return to the river, she has not been there in years. The remembered canoe outings give the water a personal history, but the river she describes is no longer separable from the city’s waste.

White River remains beautiful in the abstract, with blue herons, geese, and deer. Its actual water, however, smells of human sewage. Aza distinguishes between smelling like sewage and smelling of it: when rain overwhelms the sewers, Central Indiana’s collective waste is dumped directly into the river. The distinction makes pollution more than a disagreeable odor; it names the material cause and a recurring process. Aza’s blunt estimate to Daisy that the river is about half urine, with the other half being the better part, gives the same condition a teenager’s darkly comic force.

Infrastructure and Alleged Corruption

The pollution is tied to a long-delayed effort to change how the city handles sewage. Fifteen years earlier, the government set aside money for more sewage-retention pools and an expanded tunnel system beneath downtown, intended to divert Pogue’s Run. The projected result was that, within a decade, rain would no longer send sewage into White River. Pickett Engineering received the first contract, but failed to complete the work and went far over budget; the government then withdrew the contract and reopened the project to bids.

Despite its earlier failure, Pickett Engineering won the replacement contract. Aza understands this outcome in the context of allegations that the company bribed state officials. The criminal investigation concerned suspected payments in exchange for public contracts, including the work meant to improve the sewer-overflow system. The company had settled lawsuits, but the investigation continued; two executives had been arrested and were believed to be cooperating with police. Russell Pickett, Sr. had not yet been charged when a newspaper editorial, published three days before his disappearance, argued that the authorities already had enough evidence to indict him. The proposed remedy for the river thus sits alongside allegations that the contracting process itself was compromised.

The Unfinished Tunnel

The infrastructure project becomes physically immediate when Aza and Daisy visit the Pogue’s Run tunnel. They enter a wide concrete basin and follow directions to walk about two hundred yards before taking a left toward a gallery. The creek runs beside their path, while an overturned shopping cart is caught near the culvert entrance. Inside, sewage and the sickly-sweet smell of rot envelop them and do not fade as they walk. The tunnel’s scale and concrete surfaces make visible the ambitious engineering scheme; the trickle of water and persistent odor register the unfinished project’s continuing presence in the landscape.

At the tunnel, Daisy wonders whether the work will ever be completed. Aza says she hopes the place will still be accessible in ten or twenty years, even as she recognizes the need for clean water. Her wish is not an endorsement of sewage pollution so much as an attachment to a particular place: she imagines returning to the unfinished tunnel instead of attending a high-school reunion. Daisy answers with a pointed irony, thanking Russell Pickett, Sr. for the corruption and incompetence that leave the view available. Their exchange holds two consequences together: the tunnel offers a memorable place to return to, but its appeal depends on a project that has failed to deliver its intended environmental repair.

The River, the Search, and the Estate

The tunnel also connects the pollution plot to the search for Russell Pickett, Sr. Aza and Daisy decide to tell Davis Pickett what they know but not the police. Aza fears that if the police find his father dead in the tunnel, Davis and his brother Noah Pickett could lose their home: under the will as the characters understand it, the estate would benefit Tua, Russell Pickett, Sr.’s pet tuatara. The polluted infrastructure is therefore bound to a family’s precarious circumstances and to the legal consequences of establishing whether the missing man is dead.

A month later, a television report says that a body found in an offshoot of the Pogue’s Run tunnel is believed to be Russell Pickett, Sr. The report says he may have died of exposure within a few days of disappearing and that police found the body after an anonymous tip; it also makes clear that the identification has not been confirmed. The novel does not present the pollution as the cause of his disappearance or death. Instead, the location of the body brings the neglected tunnel, the unresolved search, and the compromised public project into the same frame. White River’s contamination persists beyond any single investigation: it is an accumulating consequence of repeated overflow, unfinished construction, and decisions made far from the water but experienced beside it.