Coconut Diesel

The truck passed close enough to knock me back a step. Its exhaust smelled wrong. Tropical. Like suntan lotion. I coughed, then grinned. No ordinary rig burned coconut diesel; only one man mixed that recipe, and he taught me how to light my first Bunsen burner.

I stood on the shoulder of Highway 50. The heat came off the asphalt in waves. It cooked the rubber of my boots. My cardboard sign lay in the gravel. It said CARSON CITY in black marker. The truck was a silver Kenworth. It hit the base of the grade and the engine pitch dropped. The gears ground. It slowed to a crawl.

The scent hung heavy in the dry air. Sweet oil. Toasted meat of the fruit. It did not belong here among the sagebrush and the dead tire treads. It belonged in a garage in Palo Alto. It belonged to a Saturday morning twelve years ago.

I remembered the safety goggles sliding down my nose. My father, Marc, held the beaker. He poured the transesterified oil into the small engine on the workbench. It coughed once and then hummed. He looked at me and grinned. He had grease on his cheek.

“Smell that, Kaia?” he had asked. “That is the future.”

Now Marc Dunn was the CEO of SunCore. He wore Italian wool. He signed permits to drill in the Arctic. I was twenty-three and I had not spoken to him in three years. I spent my days chaining myself to fences and my nights sleeping in a van. I was going to Carson City to scream his name into a megaphone until he couldn’t ignore the damage he caused.

But the truck smelled like the future he promised before he sold it.

I looked at the taillights. The truck moved slower than a man could run. The incline was steep.

I grabbed the strap of my pack. I did not think. I ran.

The gravel crunched under my boots. The dust coated my teeth. My lungs burned from the altitude and the heat. I reached the back of the cab. The chrome ladder reflected the sun. I grabbed the cold metal. I swung my weight up. The driveshaft spun below me in the dark gap between the truck and the trailer.

I found the handle of the sleeper door. It turned. I slipped inside and pulled the door shut.

The noise of the highway dropped to a dull roar. The air inside was cool. I crouched in the darkness behind the driver’s seat. A heavy curtain separated the sleeper berth from the cab. I heard the driver humming along to the radio. It was a country song about rain.

I sat on the floor. My heart pounding in my chest. I pulled my phone from my pocket. The screen lit up my face. I opened the camera app.

“I am inside the belly of the beast,” I whispered to the lens. “Heading to the rally. SunCore thinks they own the road. Tomorrow we expose them.”

I stopped the recording. I put the phone away. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. A bunk bed took up most of the space. A mini-fridge sat bolted to the floor. Next to it was a steel jerry-can.

I reached out. The metal was smooth. A label on the side read: C-Diesel. Batch 23.

I unscrewed the cap. The smell filled the small space instantly. It was thicker here. It smelled like the garage. It smelled like betrayal.

Marc was moving experimental fuel. He was running it in his own fleet while telling the shareholders that oil was king. The anger rose in my chest. It felt hot and sharp. I tightened the cap. I would find out where this truck was going. I would find out why my father was playing games with the planet.

The truck jerked and the air brakes hissed. We stopped. The silence in the cab was sudden. I held my breath. The curtain slid back on plastic runners.

Light flooded the sleeper berth. The driver stood there. He was a heavy man with gray stubble and a cap that said Vegas. He held a tire iron in his right hand. He did not raise it. He looked at me, and then he looked at the jerry can.

“You’re Marc’s girl,” he said. It was not a question.

I stood up. My knees popped. “You are hauling illegal fuel.”

He set the tire iron on the driver’s seat. “I haul what the man pays me to haul.”

He reached into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He pulled out a cream-colored envelope. A grease stain darkened one corner. He held it out.

“He said to give this to you if fate put you in my cab,” the driver said. “I guess this is fate.”

I took the envelope. My name was written on the front in blue ink. Kaia. The letters were jagged. My father’s hand shook when he wrote. It always had.

I tore the paper open. A single index card sat inside.

If you are reading this, follow the smell. I am done apologizing in silence.

That was all. No plea. No excuse.

The driver watched me. “We are ten miles out. You stay back here, or you get out.”

I looked at the card. I could post the photo of the fuel now. I could upload the location and destroy him before I arrived. But the smell of coconut was in my nose. It was the smell of the garage and the Bunsen burner. It was the smell of the only truth he ever told me.

“Drive,” I said.

Night fell over the desert. The truck downshifted. We rolled toward the SunCore refinery. The floodlights on the distillation towers rose against the black sky. Steam vented from the pipes. The complex looked like a steel skeleton.

The truck stopped at the weigh station. The driver leaned out the window to speak to the guard. He pointed at the manifest.

I slipped out the passenger door. I dropped to the asphalt. I crawled under the chassis. The smell of oil and dust was thick here. I waited for the guard to laugh.

The truck engine roared. The wheels turned. I rolled toward the darkness of the perimeter fence.

I ran to a side gate near the drainage culvert. I dug into my pack and found a plastic badge. It was six years old. It had a picture of a teenager with braces. Visitor — Family.

I held it to the black square of the reader. The light blinked red. I waited. The light turned green. The lock clicked.

He had not scrubbed me from the system.

I pushed the gate open and stepped through. The refinery was a maze of pipes and steel stairs. The noise was loud. Pumps thumped in the darkness. Compressors whined.

I followed the scent. It cut through the sulfur and the crude. It led away from the main cracking towers. It pulled me toward a corrugated metal shed at the edge of the lot. The sign above the door said Maintenance.

The windows were painted black. I tried the handle. It turned.

I stepped inside.

It was not a maintenance shed.

Stainless steel tanks stood in rows. They gleamed under the overhead fluorescent lights. Sacks of copra sat on wooden pallets. A forklift parked near a vat. The air was heavy with the sweetness of heated oil.

I walked to the nearest vat. A label stuck to the side with masking tape.

Project Banyan — Confidential.

This was not a science experiment. This was a factory.

Footsteps clanged on the metal grating above. I turned. A man walked down the steel stairs. He wore blue coveralls stained with black grease. He held a rag in one hand. He stopped on the bottom step and looked at me.

It was Marc.

He did not look like a CEO. His face was thin. The skin under his eyes was loose. He wiped his hands on the rag. He did not smile.

“You found it,” he said.

“I found a factory,” I said. My voice echoed off the tanks. “You are still drilling oil. You just added air freshener to the fumes.”

He walked to a workbench. He picked up a schematic. He laid it flat. “Look at the flow rate. Look at the carbon capture.”

I walked over. The paper showed a transesterification process. It used waste coconut oil and existing pipeline infrastructure.

“Who owns this?” I asked.

“A non-profit called FreeFuel,” he said. “Registered in Delaware. I transferred the patent yesterday.”

He tapped the paper. “SunCore paid for the research. They think it is a proprietary additive to make diesel burn cleaner. They think they will charge a premium for it.”

He looked at the tanks. The pumps hummed.

“Tomorrow morning, I will upload the formula to the public domain,” he said. “It works in any diesel engine. No modification needed. If everyone has the recipe, SunCore loses the monopoly. Their stock drops. The board fires me.”

I stared at him. He was destroying his own company. He was bankrupting his legacy.

“Why?” I asked.

He looked at his boots. “Three years ago. You gave a speech in Seattle. You said if the old men won’t change, we should burn their legacy down.”

He looked up. His eyes were red. “I listened.”

The anger in my chest went cold. I looked at his hands. They were rough. His fingernails were black with carbon. He had not been in a boardroom. He had been here. He had been building this while I shouted at gates.

I swallowed. The taste of sunscreen was gone. There was only the smell of the fuel.

“I wanted you to stop drilling,” I said.

“I am stopping,” he said like a man stating a fact. “But first I had to build something to replace it.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. “The data is here. I need to get it to the stage.”

He held it out. His hand was steady.

I looked at the drive. Then I looked at him. He was not the enemy. He was the lab partner I had lost.

“We go together,” I said. “I will introduce you.”

He nodded once. He put the rag on the bench.

“Then we should go,” he said. “The truck leaves in ten minutes.”

—

The sun rose over Carson City. It bleached the concrete of the plaza white. Three thousand people stood in the square. They held signs made of cardboard and bedsheets. A giant puppet of a wind turbine swayed in the morning breeze. The air was cold, but under the smell of pine and coffee, a faint scent of coconut drifted from the east. The refinery was burning off the last batch. They were trying to erase the evidence, but the wind carried it to us.

We climbed the wooden stairs to the stage. The plywood creaked. The microphone stand was cold in my hand. I tapped the mesh. The sound thumped across the plaza. The crowd turned. They saw the logo on Marc’s coveralls. A murmur ran through them.

“Revolutions do not always start with a match,” I said. My voice echoed off the state capitol building. “Sometimes they start with a recipe.”

I stepped back. Marc stepped forward. He did not look at the crowd. He looked at the camera on the tripod. The red light blinked.

“The process is simple,” Marc said. “You take the oil. You heat it to sixty degrees Celsius. You add methanol.”

The crowd went silent. They did not cheer. They listened.

Movement rippled near the back of the square. Men in black suits pushed through the protestors. They wore earpieces. Uniformed police walked behind them. They moved fast.

Marc saw them. He spoke faster. “The ratio is ten to one. The catalyst is potassium hydroxide. You mix for one hour.”

The men reached the barricade. They flashed badges at the volunteers. They vaulted the rail.

“You let the glycerin settle,” Marc shouted. “You drain it. You wash the remaining ester with water.”

The security chief hit the stairs. His boots hammered on the wood. Two police officers followed. They grabbed Marc by the shoulders. The microphone screeched.

“Marc Dunn,” the chief said. “You are under arrest for theft of intellectual property and corporate sabotage.”

Marc did not fight. He went limp. He turned his head to me. The officers pulled his arms behind his back. The handcuffs clicked.

He looked at me. His eyes were clear.

“They can jail me,” he whispered. “Not an idea.”

I grabbed the phone from the tripod. I shoved it toward him.

“Finish it!” I yelled.

The guard dragged him back. Marc twisted his neck.

“Dry it!” he roared. “Filter it at five microns! It runs in anything! It belongs to you!”

They dragged him down the stairs. The feed on the screen showed his boots dragging in the dust. The comments on the side of the screen scrolled so fast they were a blur. The view count hit fifty thousand. Then a hundred thousand.

I looked at the thumb drive in my hand. I plugged it into the laptop connected to the stage speakers. I hit Upload.

The file bar filled. Green. Done.

The crowd erupted. It was not a cheer. It was a roar.

—

I sat on the hood of a police cruiser. The metal was warm from the engine. The siren lights were off. The street outside the county jail was blocked by people. Generators hummed on the sidewalk. Floodlights pointed at the second-floor windows of the brick building.

The air smelled of pepper spray and coconut.

Someone had poured the trial fuel into the generators. The exhaust drifted over the police line. It mixed with the sweat of the crowd.

I looked at my phone. The hashtag #CoconutDiesel was trending worldwide. People were posting pictures of their garages. They were posting pictures of blenders and heating elements. A mechanic in Detroit live-streamed his first batch. A farmer in France poured it into his tractor.

The door of the jail opened. A lawyer in a gray suit walked out. He looked tired. He saw me and shook his head. They would not let him out tonight. The bail was set too high. The charges were too many.

I looked up at the window. A shadow stood behind the bars. The floodlight cast his silhouette against the back wall of the cell. He was standing still.

I smiled. The tears were cold on my cheeks. I wiped them with my sleeve.

“Happy now, Dad,” I whispered. “The whole world smells like us.”

The wind picked up. It blew the scent of the exhaust down the street. It smelled like a vacation that never happened and a revolution that just did. It was the smell of a promise kept.