Robbie Jones lives on a hill in a low-rent neigh-borhood in a small east Tennessee city with his wife and teenage son. Robbie hurts his back fixing his truck and can no longer work as a sheetrock installer. With the help of his new California hippie/poet neighbor, he manages to get a job as a forklift operator in the warehouse of the city's new plastic boat plant. He begins to suspect that his inhumanly creepy bosses are dumping toxic industrial waste from the plant into the quarry lake on the other side of his hill. The neighbor prods him to confront this suspicion and together they work through a variety of schemes to expose the crime without exposing Robbie, finally settling on one that goes terribly wrong in the hair-raising finale.