Freedom

  “No.”

  “Are you ashamed of the stuff we said on the phone? Is that what this is?”

  “No.”

  “I actually am, a little bit. Some of it was pretty sick. I’m not sure I need to do that anymore.”

  “You were the one who started it!”

  “I know. I know, I know. But you can’t blame me for everything. You can only blame me for half of it.”

  As if to acknowledge the truth of this, he ran to where she was sitting on the sofa and knelt down at her feet, bowing his head and resting his hands on her legs. Up close to her jeans like this, her best tight jeans, he thought of the long hours she’d sat on a Greyhound bus while he was watching second-rate college bowl games and talking on the phone with friends. He was in trouble, he was falling into some unanticipated fissure in the ordinary world, and he couldn’t bear to look up at her face. She rested her hands on his head and offered no resistance when, by and by, he pushed forward and pressed his face into her denim-sheathed zipper. “It’s OK,” she knew to say, stroking his hair. “It’s going to be OK, baby. Everything’s going to be OK.”

  In his gratitude, he peeled down her jeans and rested his closed eyes against her underpants, and then these, too, he pulled down so he could press his shaved lip and chin into her scratchy hair, which he noticed that she’d trimmed for him. He could feel one of the cats clambering onto his feet, seeking attention. Pussy, pussy.

  “I just want to stay here for about three hours,” he said, breathing her smell.

  “You can stay there all night,” she said. “I have no plans.”

  But then his telephone rang in his pants pocket. Taking it out to shut it off, he saw his old St. Paul number and felt like smashing the phone in his anger at his mother. He spread Connie’s legs and attacked her with his tongue, delving and delving, trying to fill himself with her.

  The third and most alarming of her disclosures came during a postcoital interlude at some later evening hour. Hitherto absent neighbors were tromping on the floor above the bed; the cats were yowling bitterly outside the door. Connie was telling him about the SAT, which he’d forgotten she was even going to take, and about her surprise at how much easier the real questions had been than the practice questions in her study books. She was feeling emboldened to apply to schools within a few hours of Charlottesville, including Morton College, which wanted midwestern students for geographical diversity and which she now thought she could get into.

  This seemed all wrong to Joey. “I thought you were going to go to the U.,” he said.

  “I still might,” she said. “But then I started thinking how much nicer it would be to be closer to you, so we could see each other on weekends. I mean, assuming everything goes well and we still want to. Don’t you think that would be nice?”

  Joey untangled his legs from hers, trying to get some clarity. “Definitely maybe,” he said. “But, you know, private schools are incredibly expensive.”

  This was true, Connie said. But Morton offered financial aid, and she’d spoken to Carol about her educational trust fund, and Carol had admitted that there was still a lot of money in it.

  “Like how much?” Joey said.

  “Like a lot. Like seventy-five thousand. It might be enough for three years if I get financial aid. And then there’s the twelve thousand that I’ve saved, and I can work summers.”

  “That’s great,” Joey compelled himself to say.

  “I was just going to wait until I turned twenty-one, and take the cash. But then I thought about what you said, and I saw you were right about getting a good education.”

  “If you went to the U., though,” Joey said, “you could get an education and still have the cash when you were done.”

  Upstairs, a television began to bark, and the tromping continued.

  “It sounds like you don’t want me near you,” Connie said neutrally, without reproach, just stating a fact.

  “No, no,” he said. “Not at all. That might potentially be great. I’m just thinking practically.”

  “I already can’t stand being in that house. And then Carol’s going to have her babies, and it’s going to get even worse. I can’t be there anymore.”

  Not for the first time, he experienced an obscure resentment of her father. The man had been dead for a number of years now, and Connie had never had a relationship with him and rarely even alluded to his existence, but to Joey this had somehow made him even more of a male rival. He was the man who’d been there first. He’d abandoned his daughter and paid off Carol with a low-rent house, but his money had continued to flow and pay for Connie’s Catholic schooling. He was a presence in her life that had nothing to do with Joey, and though Joey ought to have been glad that she had other resources besides himself—that he didn’t have total responsibility for her—he kept succumbing to moral disapproval of the father, who seemed to Joey the source of all that was amoral in Connie herself, her strange indifference to rules and conventions, her boundless capacity for idolatrous love, her irresistible intensity. And now, on top of all that, Joey resented the father for making her far better off financially than he himself was. That she didn’t care about money even one percent as much as he did only made it worse.

  “Do something new to me,” she said into his ear.

  “That TV is really bothering me.”

  “Do the thing we talked about, baby. We can both listen to the same music. I want to feel you in my ass.”

  He forgot about the TV, the blood in his head drowned it out as he did what she had asked for. After the new threshold had been crossed, its resistances negotiated, its distinctive satisfactions noted, he went and washed himself in Abigail’s bathroom and fed the cats and lingered in the living room, feeling the need to establish some distance, however feebly and belatedly. He roused his computer from its sleep, but there was only one new e-mail. It was from an unfamiliar address at duke.edu and had the subject header in town? Not until he’d opened it and begun reading did he fully comprehend that it had come from Jenna. Had been typed, character by character, by Jenna’s privileged fingers.

  hello mr bergland. jonathan tells me you’re in the big city, as am i. who knew how many football games there are to watch and how much money young bankers bet on them? not i, said the fly. you may still be doing christmas-y things like your blond protestant progenitors, but nick says to come over if you have questions about wall st, he’s willing to answer them. i suggest you act now while his generous mood (and vacation!) lasts. apparently even goldman shuts down this time of year, who knew. your friend, jenna.

  He read the message five times before it began to lose its savor. It seemed to him as clean and fresh as he was feeling dirty and red-eyed. Jenna was being either exceptionally thoughtful or, if she was trying to rub his nose in her tightness with Nick, exceptionally mean. Either way, he could see that he’d succeeded in making an impression on her.

  Pot smoke came slipping from the bedroom, followed by Connie, as nude and light-footed as the cats. Joey closed the computer and took a hit from the joint that she held up to his face, and then another hit, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another.

  THE NICE MAN’S ANGER

  Late on a dismal afternoon in March, in cold and greasy drizzle, Walter rode with his assistant, Lalitha, up from Charleston into the mountains of southern West Virginia. Although Lalitha was a fast and somewhat reckless driver, Walter had come to prefer the anxiety of being her passenger to the judgmental anger that consumed him when he was at the wheel—the seemingly inescapable sense that, of all the drivers on the road, only he was traveling at exactly the right speed, only he was striking an appropriate balance between too punctiliously obeying traffic rules and too dangerously flouting them. In the last two years, he’d spent a lot of angry hours on the roads of West Virginia, tailgating the idiotic slowpokes and then slowing down himself to punish the rude tailgaters, ruthlessly defending the inner lane of interstates from assholes trying to pass h
im on the right, passing on the right himself when some fool or cellphone yakker or sanctimonious speed-limit enforcer clogged the inner lane, obsessively profiling and psychoanalyzing the drivers who refused to use their turn signals (almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity, the compromised state of which was already manifest in the compensatory gigantism of their pickups and SUVs), experiencing murderous hatred of the lane-violating coal-truck drivers who caused fatal accidents literally once a week in West Virginia, impotently blaming the corrupt state legislators who refused to lower the coal-truck weight limit below 110,000 pounds despite bounteous evidence of the havoc they wreaked, muttering “Unbelievable! Unbelievable!” when a driver ahead of him braked for a green light and then accelerated through yellow and left him stranded at red, boiling while he waited a full minute at intersections with no cross traffic visible for miles, and painfully swallowing, for Lalitha’s sake, the invective he yearned to vent when stymied by a driver refusing to make a legal right turn on red: “Hello? Get a clue? The world consists of more than just you! Other people have reality! Learn to drive! Hello!” Better the adrenaline rush of Lalitha’s flooring the gas to pass uphill-struggling trucks than the stress on his cerebral arteries of taking the wheel himself and remaining stuck behind those trucks. This way, he could look out at the gray matchstick Appalachian woods and the mining-ravaged ridges and direct his anger at problems more worthy of it.

  Lalitha was in buoyant spirits as they sailed in their rental car up the big fifteen-mile grade on I-64, a phenomenally expensive piece of federal pork brought home by Senator Byrd. “I am so ready to celebrate,” she said. “Will you take me celebrating tonight?”

  “We’ll see if there’s a decent restaurant in Beckley,” Walter said, “although I’m afraid it’s not likely.”

  “Let’s get drunk! We can go to the best place in town and have martinis.”

  “Absolutely. I will buy you one giant-assed martini. More than one, if you want.”

  “No but you, too, though,” she said. “Just once. Make one exception, for the occasion.”

  “I think a martini might honestly kill me at this point in my life.”

  “One light beer, then. I’ll have three martinis, and you can carry me to my room.”

  Walter didn’t like it when she said things like this. She didn’t know what she was saying, she was just a high-spirited young woman—just, actually, the brightest ray of light in his entire life these days—and didn’t see that physical contact between employer and employee shouldn’t be a joking matter.

  “Three martinis would certainly give new meaning to the word ‘headache ball’ tomorrow morning,” he said in lame reference to the demolition they were driving up to Wyoming County to witness.

  “When was the last time you had a drink?” Lalitha said.

  “Never. I’ve never had a drink.”

  “Not even in high school?”

  “Never.”

  “Walter, that’s incredible! You have to try it! It’s so fun to drink sometimes. One beer won’t make you an alcoholic.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, wondering, as he spoke, if this was true. His father and his older brother, who together had been the bane of his youth, were alcoholics, and his wife, who was fast becoming the bane of his middle age, had alcoholic proclivities. He’d always understood his own strict sobriety in terms of opposition to them—first, of wanting to be as unlike his dad and brother as possible, and then later of wanting to be as unfailingly kind to Patty as she, drunk, could be unkind to him. It was one of the ways that he and Patty had learned to get along: he always sober, she sometimes drunk, neither of them ever suggesting that the other change.

  “What are you worried about, then?” Lalitha said.

  “I guess I’m worried about changing something that’s worked perfectly well for me for forty-seven years. If it’s not broke, why fix it?”

  “Because it’s fun!” She jerked the wheel of the rental car to pass a semi wallowing in its own spray. “I’m going to order you a beer and make you take at least one sip to celebrate.”

  The northern hardwood forest south of Charleston was even now, on the eve of the equinox, a dour tapestry of grays and blacks. In another week or two, warm air from the south would arrive to green these woods, and a month after that those songbirds hardy enough to migrate from the tropics would fill them with their song, but gray winter seemed to Walter the northern forest’s true native state. Summer merely an accident of grace that annually befell it.

  In Charleston, earlier in the day, he and Lalitha and their local attorneys had formally presented the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s industry partners, Nardone and Blasco, with the documents they needed to commence demolition of Forster Hollow and open up fourteen thousand acres of future warbler preserve for mountaintop removal. Representatives of Nardone and Blasco had then signed the towers of paper that Trust attorneys had been preparing for the last two years, officially committing the coal companies to a package of reclamation agreements and rights transfers that, taken together, would ensure that the mined-out land remain forever “wild.” Vin Haven, the Trust’s board chairman, had been “present” via teleconferencing and later called Walter directly on his cell to congratulate him. But Walter was feeling the opposite of celebratory. He’d finally succeeded in enabling the obliteration of dozens of sweet wooded hilltops and scores of miles of clear-running, biotically rich Class III, IV, and V streams. To achieve even this, Vin Haven had had to sell off $20 million in mineral rights, elsewhere in the state, to gas drillers poised to rape the land, and then hand over the proceeds to further parties whom Walter didn’t like. And all for what? For an endangered-species “strong-hold” that you could cover with a postage stamp on a road-atlas map of West Virginia.

  Walter felt, himself, in his anger and disappointment with the world, like the gray northern woods. And Lalitha, who’d been born in the warmth of southern Asia, was the sunny person who brought a momentary kind of summer to his soul. The only thing he felt like celebrating tonight was that, having “succeeded” in West Virginia, they could now plunge forward with their overpopulation initiative. But he was mindful of his assistant’s youth and hated to dampen her spirits.

  “All right,” he said. “I will try a beer, once. In your honor.”

  “No, Walter, in your honor. This was all your doing.”

  He shook his head, knowing she was specifically wrong about this. Without her warmth and charm and courage, the entire deal with Nardone and Blasco would probably have fallen through. It was true that he’d supplied the big ideas; but big ideas were all he seemed to have. Lalitha was in every other way the driver now. She was wearing a nylon shell, its thrown-back hood a basket filled with her lustrous black hair, over the pin-striped suit she’d put on for that morning’s formalities. Her hands were at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel, her wrists bare, her silver bracelets fallen down beneath the cuffs of her shell. Myriad were the things that Walter hated about modernity in general and car culture in particular, but the confidence of young women drivers, the autonomy they’d achieved in the last hundred years, was not among them. Gender equality, as expressed in the pressure of Lalitha’s neat foot on the gas pedal, made him glad to be alive in the twenty-first century.

  The most difficult problem he’d had to solve for the Trust had been what to do with the two hundred or so families, most of them very poor, who owned houses or trailers on small or smallish parcels of land within the Warbler Park’s proposed boundaries. Some of the men still worked in the coal industry, either underground or as drivers, but most were out of a job and passed their time with guns and internal-combustion engines, supplementing their families’ diets with game shot deeper in the hills and carried out on ATVs. Walter had moved quickly to buy out as many families as possible before the Trust attracted publicity; he’d paid as little as $250 an acre for certain hillside tracts. But when his attempt
s to woo the local environmentalist community backfired, and a scarily motivated activist named Jocelyn Zorn began to campaign against the Trust, there were still more than a hundred families holding out, most of them in the valley of Nine Mile Creek, which led up to Forster Hollow.

  Excepting the problem of Forster Hollow, Vin Haven had found the perfect sixty-five thousand acres for the core reserve. The surface rights of ninety-eight percent of it were in the hands of just three corporations, two of them faceless and economically rational holding companies, the third wholly owned by a family named Forster which had fled the state more than a century ago and was now comfortably dissipating itself in coastal affluence. All three companies were managing the land for certified forestry and had no reason not to sell it to the Trust at a fair market rate. There was also, near the center of Haven’s Hundred, an enormous, vaguely hourglass-shaped collection of very rich coal seams. Until now, nobody had mined these fourteen thousand acres, because Wyoming County was so remote and so hilly, even for West Virginia. One bad, narrow road, useless for coal trucks, wound up into the hills along Nine Mile Creek; at the top of the valley, situated near the hourglass’s pinch point, was Forster Hollow and the clan and friends of Coyle Mathis.

  Over the years, Nardone and Blasco had each tried and failed to deal with Mathis, earning his abiding animosity for their trouble. Indeed, a major piece of bait that Vin Haven had offered the coal companies, during the initial negotiations, was a promise to rid them of the problem of Coyle. “It’s part of the magic synergy we got going here,” Haven had told Walter. “We’re a fresh player that Mathis’s got no reason to hold a grudge against. Nardone in particular I bargained way down on the reclamation front by promising to take Mathis off its hands. A little bit of goodwill I found lying by the side of the road, simply by virtue of me not being Nardone, turns out to be worth a couple million.”

  If only!

  Coyle Mathis embodied the pure negative spirit of backcountry West Virginia. He was consistent in disliking absolutely everybody. Being the enemy of Mathis’s enemy only made you another of his enemies. Big Coal, the United Mine Workers, environmentalists, all forms of government, black people, meddling white Yankees: he hated all equally. His philosophy of life was Back the fuck off or live to regret it. Six generations of surly Mathises had been buried on the steep creek-side hill that would be among the first sites blasted when the coal companies came in. (Nobody had warned Walter about the cemetery problem in West Virginia when he took the job with the Trust, but he’d sure found out about it in a hurry.)