Читать книгу Stony Mesa Sagas - Chip Ward - Страница 18

Chapter 11

The headquarters of the Sea Ledges Tar Sands Alliance was in chaos. Reporters called every other minute and nothing they were told satisfied them. The resisters who were bailed out of jail just days before coalesced back at the Sea Ledges hub. The storage shed where they had planned their civil disobedience was easily swamped by the influx of members, allies, and reporters wanting answers in the aftermath of the attack on the mining site. A member of the Alliance, an elderly woman named Brenda, stepped up and offered an empty apartment she owned in a duplex near the bus station and the crowd migrated there.

Brenda Savitt was the widow of a downwinder, the name given to those hapless misinformed citizens who lived too near to an atomic test site, or the betrayed soldiers and sailors who were guinea pigs at the advent of the nuclear age, or the naïve uranium miners and weapons makers who were unwittingly exposed, or . . . well, it was eventually clear that most Americans were downwind in that era but some more so than others. Brenda was a child then. She remembered playing in a storm of hot ash after one atomic bomb test. Nobody told her that leaping and twirling through the whirlwind was dangerous. Her future husband, Dwayne, was a boy herding sheep with his dad. They saw the mushroom cloud way in the distance and felt a blast of hot wind minutes later. He remembered how the sheep lost their wool in patches and a lamb that was born later that year had two heads and its heart outside its chest.

Like so many others caught downwind, cancer followed. During her husband’s long-suffering years of cancer and a grim menu of other chronic illnesses, he was transformed from the Marlboro Man, that iconic cowboy with a cigarette, into a frail and helpless wreck breathing through tubes and eating whatever they put into his arm. Brenda Savitt’s assumptions about how the world worked and who is right and who is wrong underwent a slow tectonic shift. She learned the hard way that humans embody their environments. Blood, bone, teeth, brain, skin, thyroid, lung, ovaries, testicles, pancreas, stomach, liver, and kidneys translate the physical realm into the health and daily experiences of the body’s sole occupant, who is not shielded from reckless and unchecked behavior. Brenda had a visceral understanding of what she called ecological citizenship.

The scene at the new apartment headquarters could have been mistaken for a nail-chewing convention. The Alliance’s designated and most effective spokesperson was missing. Worse, she was missing with that new guy, Happy Hippie or whatever he calls himself, who was the one person most of them thought was capable of sabotage. What does she see in him? they asked each other. Sure he was handsome and buff and, yes, he could be very funny but he had this reckless and dangerous air about him. Most of the Sea Ledges protestors had thought long and hard about their commitment to keep tar sands in the ground. They had read and researched, debated and discussed their way to that bold act of disobedience. They had the feeling that Hoppy took a shorter route. As Luna herself described him, “He is more animal than academic. We need both kinds.”

If only Luna were here. Where was she? They milled around the room and bumped into one another as they stared down at phone screens and tablets, their thumbs twitching frantically, brows bent downward, lips pursed. She was simply out of range and unable to communicate, they reassured each other, but why? One scenario was an accident while hiking. She was last seen with that reckless Hoppy. Maybe they fell and needed help. Or maybe that old truck of hers broke down. And everyone wondered, though nobody would say it aloud, maybe she is with him and they did it.

“No, we didn’t do it. No, we don’t know who did it.” They said it over and over but nobody believed them. The press was relentless. The Sea Ledges protest generated some media attention but they struggled to get noticed. The sabotage of the mining site, however, set off a feeding frenzy they couldn’t tame.

The Alliance’s pro-bono lawyer was distraught. Tony Baciagalupe had volunteered to represent the members who chose civil disobedience but sabotage was more than he signed up for. He sat on the arm of a blue velvet sofa and addressed those who gathered to hear how this might affect their own cases.

“Look,” he said, “I’m two years out of law school and I need clients. Do you know how hard it is to get clients in this county with my last name? If I get associated with that kind of vandalism I’m going to be one lonely lawyer. I got a wife, a baby on the way, and a hundred grand in tuition debt. I don’t do sabotage for free and you don’t have any money.”

They had a court hearing in less than two weeks and if Tony abandoned them they would be at the mercy of the prosecutor who looked at them during the arraignment like a lion regards fresh meat. Tony was right, the group could barely muster the change for the banner they held at the protest. A paid lawyer was out of the question.

If Tony was distraught, the Boon County prosecuting attorney was ecstatic. Lawton Hatch could barely suppress his glee at the news of the monkeywrenching at the Drexxel strip mine. It would be easy enough to fix the blame on the ones already arrested at the demonstration and call it good. The publicity in the case could establish his career.

He’d had a setback a year ago when some dumb-ass gearheads got drunk and carved the outline of a large penis on an ancient Indian petroglyph panel. Unfortunately, one of the four-wheeling idiots was Lawton’s cousin. They were spotted doing the deed by a forest service ranger who was eye-glassing three teenage girls skinny-dipping in a hot spring just a hundred yards away from the vandalized panel. When the girls dressed, the ranger walked back to his truck and called for backup. Three hours later when the motor-heads passed out while cooking bratwursts over a campfire, rangers moved in and surrounded them. One of the boys had fallen asleep with his right foot too close to the campfire and his boot had caught on fire. He was driven to the local clinic and treated for third-degree burns.

Lawton Hatch let those vandals plea bargain and they got off with light fines and community service. Several of the recent move-ins from the Stony Mesa retirement community objected and wrote scathing letters in the local paper, even papered the state capitol with complaints. They accused Lawton of giving the defendants preferable treatment because one of them was his cousin. He replied that half the county was related one way or the other and that was just the way it is in Boon County. He reminded his critics that he’d been tough on a niece cranked up on meth who was caught stealing packages off porch steps over the holidays, but the damage to his reputation was already done. He reasoned that a big win over that bunch of tree-hugging weirdos could erase the damage. Your average voter, he thought, had the attention span of a gerbil and the memory of a melon.

Maybe he could launch a political career right after he sent them all away to prison. He imagined bumper stickers: Lawton Hatch is tough on crime. He wondered if maybe he could run for the state legislature. If you were careful, you could make a lot of money as a state legislator. People would come to you for favors and do favors in return. That’s how it went: pay for play. Everybody knows that. He’d always wanted a sleek sports car—a babe magnet, though he was married and had six kids under the age of eight. He closed his eyes and could almost smell the leather upholstery and a slim whiff of perfume.

Lucas Hozho, a Navajo kid who had been arrested at the protest, knew they were all in deep trouble. Nobody else stepped forward to substitute for Luna as spokesperson so Lucas volunteered. He was calm, and the others decided that they should not appear strident. His face was almost cherubic. Lucas had watched a lot of TV while growing up on a remote part of the reservation. They owned a satellite dish and he and his siblings were transfixed by a faraway world that did not resemble their own. There were cars instead of sheep, skyscrapers instead of adobe huts, noise instead of silence, and very little hint of a sky anywhere on the TV shows. Outside their humble hogan, the sky was everywhere. “Where is the moon?” Lucas’s baby sister once asked while staring at the flickering screen. “They hide it behind bright lights and pollution,” Lucas told her. His answer baffled her and she was sorry for the moon that it gave its beautiful light to people who were so rude and thankless.

Lucas studied white people on TV. He knew that car and furniture salesmen in the ads he saw raised their eyebrows as high as they could to look open and innocent. That might also make their credibility suspect since most people understood that’s how they lie. But if you furrowed your brow downward you came across as too serious, even scary. There was a middle way for white people’s eyebrows that conveyed non-threatening credibility and as he faced the local TV reporters and their cameras, he would try to find that sweet spot. “Don’t worry,” Brenda Savitt reassured him. “You look like you are incapable of telling a lie. You’ll do well, trust yourself.”

The Alliance was a difficult group to coordinate under ideal circumstances and this was far from that. Many of the members were anarchic by nature. And bright white people, Lucas knew, often held several opinions at once and were prone to explain them all in great detail. It took someone of Luna’s charisma to corral them. They needed a plan. If only they knew if she was on her way. Lucas reassured their nervous lawyer and sounded an upbeat note.

“Hang in there, Tony. I know Luna like a sister. She would never abandon us. I am sure there’s an explanation and she is on her way here right now.”

But she wasn’t on her way there. She was too busy running for her life.