Freedom

  Knowing a thing or two about omnidirectional anger himself, Walter might still have managed to bring Mathis around if the man hadn’t reminded him so much of his own father. His stubborn, self-destructive spite. Walter had prepared a fine package of attractive offers by the time he and Lalitha, after receiving no response to their numerous friendly letters, had driven the dusty road up the Nine Mile valley, uninvited, on a hot bright morning in July. He was willing to give the Mathises and their neighbors as much as $1,200 an acre, plus free land in a reasonably nice hollow on the southern margin of the preserve, plus relocation costs, plus state-of-the-art exhumation and reburial of all Mathis bones. But Coyle Mathis didn’t even wait to hear the details. He said, “No, N-O,” and added that he intended to be buried in the family cemetery and no man was going to stop him. And suddenly Walter was sixteen again and dizzy with anger. Anger not only with Mathis, for his lack of manners and good sense, but also, paradoxically, with Vin Haven, for pitting him against a man whose economic irrationality he at some level recognized and admired. “I’m sorry,” he said as he stood profusely sweating on a rutted track, in hot sunshine, by the side of a junk-strewn yard that Mathis had pointedly not invited him to enter, “but that is just stupid.”

  Lalitha, beside him, holding a briefcase full of documents that they’d imagined Mathis might actually sign, cleared her throat in explosive regret for this deplorable word.

  Mathis, who was a lean and surprisingly handsome man in his late fifties, directed a delighted smile up at the green, insect-buzzing heights that surrounded them. One of his dogs, a whiskery mutt with a demented physiognomy, began to growl. “Stupid!” Mathis said. “That’s a funny word to be using, mister. You almost done made my day there. Not every day I get called stupid. You might say people around here know better’n that.”

  “Look, I’m sure you’re a very smart man,” Walter said. “I was referring to—”

  “I reckon I’m smart enough to count to ten,” Mathis said. “How about you, sir? You look like you got some education. You know how to count to ten?”

  “I, in fact, know how to count to twelve hundred,” Walter said, “and I know how to multiply that by four hundred and eighty, and how to add two hundred thousand to the product. And if you would just take one minute to listen—”

  “My question,” Mathis said, “is can you do it backwards? Here, I’ll get you started. Ten, nine . . .”

  “Look, I’m very sorry I used the word stupid. The sun’s a little bright out here. I didn’t mean—”

  “Eight, seven . . .”

  “Maybe we’ll come back another time,” Lalitha said. “We can leave you some materials that you can read at your leisure.”

  “Oh, y’all reckon I can read, do you?” Mathis was beaming at them. All three of his dogs were growling now. “I believe I’m at six. Or was it five? Stupid old me, I done forgot already.”

  “Look,” Walter said, “I sincerely apologize if I—”

  “Four three two!”

  The dogs, themselves apparently rather intelligent, advanced with flattened ears.

  “We’ll come back,” Walter said, hastily retreating with Lalitha.

  “I’ll shoot your car if you do!” Mathis called after them merrily.

  All the way back down the terrible road to the state highway, Walter loudly cursed his own stupidity and his inability to control his anger, while Lalitha, ordinarily a font of praise and reassurance, sat pensively in the passenger seat, brooding about what to do next. It was not an over-statement to say that, without Mathis’s cooperation, all the other work they’d done to secure Haven’s Hundred would be for naught. At the bottom of the dusty valley, Lalitha delivered her assessment: “He needs to be treated like an important man.”

  “He’s a two-bit sociopath,” Walter said.

  “Be that as it may,” she said—and she had a particularly charming Indian way of pronouncing this favorite phrase of hers, a clipped lilt of practicality that Walter never tired of hearing—“we’re going to need to flatter his sense of importance. He needs to be the savior, not the sellout.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately, a sellout is the only thing we’re asking him to be.”

  “Maybe if I went back up and talked to some of the women.”

  “It’s a fucking patriarchy up here,” Walter said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “No, Walter, the women are very strong. Why don’t you let me talk to some of them?”

  “This is a nightmare. A nightmare.”

  “Be that as it may,” Lalitha said again, “I wonder if I should stay behind and try to talk to people.”

  “He’s already said no to the offer. Categorically.”

  “We’ll need a better offer, then. You’ll have to talk to Mr. Haven about a better offer. Go back to Washington and talk to him. It’s probably just as well if you don’t go back up the hollow. But maybe I won’t seem so threatening by myself.”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “I’m not afraid of dogs. He’d set the dogs on you, but not on me, I don’t think.”

  “This is just hopeless.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Lalitha said.

  Leaving aside her sheer bravery, as an unaccompanied dark-skinned woman, slight of build and alluring of feature, in returning to a poor-white place where she’d already been threatened with physical harm, Walter was struck, in the months that followed, by the fact that it was she, the suburban daughter of an electrical engineer, and not he, the small-town son of an angry drunk, who’d effected the miracle in Forster Hollow. Not only did Walter lack the common touch; his entire personality had been formed in opposition to the backcountry he’d come from. Mathis, with his poor-white unreason and resentments, had offended Walter’s very being: had blinded him with rage. Whereas Lalitha, having no experience with the likes of Mathis, had been able to go back with an open mind and a sympathetic heart. She’d approached the proud country poor the way she drove a car, as if no harm could possibly come to a person of such cheer and goodwill; and the proud country poor had granted her the respect they’d withheld from angry Walter. Her success made him feel inferior and unworthy of her admiration, and thus all the more grateful to her. Which then led him to a more general enthusiasm about young people and their capacity to do good in the world. And also—though he resisted conscious countenancing of it—to loving her far more than was advisable.

  Based on the intelligence Lalitha gathered in her return to Forster Hollow, Walter and Vin Haven had crafted a new and outrageously expensive offer for its inhabitants. Simply offering them more cash, Lalitha said, wasn’t going to do the trick. For Mathis to save face, he needed to be the Moses who led his people to a new promised land. Unfortunately, as far as Walter could tell, the people of Forster Hollow had negligible skills beyond hunting, engine repair, vegetable growing, herb gathering, and welfare-check cashing. Vin Haven nevertheless obligingly made inquiries within his wide circle of business friends and returned to Walter with one interesting possibility: body armor.

  Until he’d flown to Houston and met Haven, in the summer of 2001, Walter had been unfamiliar with the concept of good Texans, the national news being so dominated by bad ones. Haven owned a large ranch in the Hill Country and an even larger one south of Corpus Christi, both of them lovingly managed to provide habitat for game birds. Haven was the Texan sort of nature lover who happily blasted cinnamon teal out of the sky but also spent hours raptly monitoring, via closed-circuit spycam, the development of baby barn owls in a nest box on his property, and could expertly rhapsodize about the scaling patterns on a winter-plumage Baird’s sandpiper. He was a short, gruff, bullet-headed man, and Walter had liked him from the first minute of his initial interview. “A hundred-million-dollar ante for one passerine species,” Walter had said. “That’s an interesting allocation.”

  Haven had tilted his bullet head to one side. “You got a problem with it?”

  “Not necessarily. But given that the bird’s not e
ven federally listed yet, I’m curious what your thinking is.”

  “My thinking is, it’s my hundred million, I can spend it whatever way I like.”

  “Good point.”

  “The best science we got on the cerulean warbler shows populations declining at three percent a year for the last forty years. Just because it hasn’t passed the threshold of federally threatened, you can still plot that line straight down toward zero. That’s where it’s going: to zero.”

  “Right. And yet—”

  “And yet there’s other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about ’em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird’s life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?”

  “Thankfully not a choice that anybody’s being asked to make.”

  “In a sense, that’s right,” Haven said. “But in a bigger sense, it’s a choice that everybody’s making. I got a call from the director of National Audubon back in February, right after the inauguration. The man’s named Martin Jay, if that ain’t the damndest thing. Talk about the right name for the job. Martin Jay is wondering if I might arrange him a little meeting with Karl Rove at the White House. He says one hour is all he needs to persuade Karl Rove that making conservation a priority is a political winner for the new administration. So I say to him, I think I can get you an hour with Rove, but here’s what you got to do for me first. You got to get a reputable independent pollster to do a survey of how important a priority the environment is for swing voters. If you can show Karl Rove some good-looking numbers, he’s gonna be all ears. And Martin Jay falls all over himself saying thank you, thank you, fabuloso, consider it done. And I say to Martin Jay, there’s just one little thing, though: before you commission that survey and let Rove see it, you might want to have a pretty good idea what the results are going to be. That was six months ago. I never heard from him again.”

  “You and I see very much eye to eye on the politics of this,” Walter said.

  “Kiki and I are working a little bit on Laura, whenever we can,” Haven said. “Might be more promise in that direction.”

  “That’s great, that’s incredible.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. I sometimes think W.’s more married to Rove than to Laura. Not that you heard that from me.”

  “But so why the cerulean warbler?”

  “I like the bird. It’s a pretty little bird. Weighs less than the first joint of my thumb and flies all the way to South America and back every year. That’s a beautiful thing right there. One man, one species. Isn’t that enough? If we could just round up six hundred and twenty other men, we’d have every North American breeder covered. If you were lucky enough to get the robin, you wouldn’t even have to spend one penny to preserve it. Me, though, I like a challenge. And Appalachian coal country’s one hell of a challenge. That’s just something you’re going to have to accept if you’re going to run this outfit for me. You got to have an open mind about mountaintop-removal mining.”

  In his forty years in the oil-and-gas business, running a company called Pelican Oil, Vin Haven had developed relationships with pretty much everyone worth knowing in Texas, from Ken Lay and Rusty Rose to Ann Richards and Father Tom Pincelli, the “birding priest” of the lower Rio Grande. He was especially tight with the people at LBI, the oilfield-services giant which, like its archrival Halliburton, had expanded into one of the country’s leading defense contractors under the administrations of Reagan and the elder Bush. It was LBI to which Haven turned for a solution to the problem of Coyle Mathis. Unlike Halliburton, whose former CEO was now running the nation, LBI was still scrambling for inside access to the new administration and thus particularly disposed to do a favor for a close personal friend of George and Laura.

  An LBI subsidiary, ArDee Enterprises, had recently won a big contract to supply the high-grade body armor that American forces, as improvised explosive devices began exploding in every corner of Iraq, had belatedly discovered themselves in sore need of. West Virginia, which had cheap labor and a lax regulatory environment, and which had unexpectedly provided Bush-Cheney with their margin of victory in 2000—choosing the Republican candidate for the first time since the Nixon landslide of 1972—was viewed very favorably in the circles Vin Haven ran in. ArDee Enterprises was hastily constructing a body-armor plant in Whitman County, and Haven, catching ArDee before hiring for the factory had commenced, was able to secure a guarantee of 120 permanent jobs for the people of Forster Hollow in exchange for a package of concessions so generous that ArDee would be getting their labor practically for free. Haven promised Coyle Mathis, by way of Lalitha, to pay for free high-quality housing and job training for him and the other Forster Hollow families, and further sweetened the deal with a lump-sum payment to ArDee large enough to fund the workers’ health insurance and retirement plans for the next twenty years. As for job security, it was enough to point to the declarations, issued by various members of the Bush administration, that America would be defending itself in the Middle East for generations to come. There was no foreseeable end to the war on terror and, ergo, no end to the demand for body armor.

  Walter, who had a low opinion of the Bush-Cheney venture in Iraq and an even lower opinion of the moral hygiene of defense contractors, was uneasy about working with LBI and providing further ammunition for the lefty environmentalists who opposed him in West Virginia. But Lalitha was intensely enthusiastic. “It’s perfect,” she told Walter. “This way, we can be more than a model of science-based reclamation. We can also be a model of compassionate relocation and retraining of people displaced by endangered-species conservation.”

  “Kind of shitty luck, of course, for the people who sold out early,” Walter said.

  “If they’re still struggling, we can offer them jobs, too.”

  “For an additional however many million.”

  “And the fact that it’s patriotic is also perfect!” Lalitha said. “The people will be doing something to help their country in time of war.”

  “These people don’t strike me as losing a lot of sleep over helping their country.”

  “No, Walter, you’re wrong about that. Luanne Coffey has two sons in Iraq. She hates the government for not doing more to protect them. She and I actually talked about that. She hates the government, but she hates the terrorists even more. This is perfect.”

  And so, in December, Vin Haven flew into Charleston in his jet and personally accompanied Lalitha to Forster Hollow while Walter stayed simmering, with his anger and humiliation, in a motel room in Beckley. It had been no surprise to hear from Lalitha that Coyle Mathis was still given to lengthily riffing on what an arrogant, prissy-ass fool her boss was. She’d played the role of good cop to the hilt; and Vin Haven, who did have the common touch (as evidenced by his friendship with George W.), was apparently reasonably well tolerated in Forster Hollow as well. While a small band of protesters from outside the Nine Mile valley, led by nutcase Jocelyn Zorn, marched with placards (don’t trust the trust) outside the tiny elementary school where the meeting was held, all eighty families from the hollow signed away their rights and accepted, on the spot, eighty whopping certified checks drawn on the Trust’s account in Washington.

  And now, ninety days later, Forster Hollow was a ghost hamlet owned by the Trust and available for demolition at 6 a.m. tomorrow. Walter had seen no reason to attend the first morning of demolition, and had seen several reasons not to, but Lalitha was thrilled by the imminent removal of the last permanent structures in the Warbler Park. He’d lured her, in hiring her, with the vision of a hundred square miles entirely free of human taint, and she’d bought the vision big-time. Since she was the one who’d brought the vision to the brink of realization, he couldn’t very well deny her the satisfaction of going to Forster Hollow. He wanted to give her every little thing he could, since he couldn’t give her his love
. He indulged her the way he’d often been tempted to indulge Jessica but had mostly refrained from, for the sake of good parenting.

  Lalitha was hunched forward with anticipation as she drove the rental car into Beckley, where rain was falling more heavily.

  “That road’s going to be a mess tomorrow,” Walter said, looking out at the rain and noting, with displeasure, the elderly sourness in his voice.

  “We’ll get up at four and take it slow,” Lalitha said.

  “Ha, that’ll be a first. Have I ever seen you take a road slow?”

  “I’m very excited, Walter!”

  “I shouldn’t even be here,” he said sourly. “I should be doing that press conference tomorrow morning.”

  “Cynthia says Mondays are better for the news cycle,” Lalitha said, referring to their press person, whose job, until now, had consisted mainly of avoiding contact with the press.

  “I don’t know which I’m dreading more,” Walter said. “That nobody will show up, or that we’ll have a room full of reporters.”

  “Oh, we definitely want the room full. This is really amazing news, if you explain it right.”

  “All I know is I’m dreading it.”

  Staying in hotels with Lalitha had become perhaps the hardest single part of their working relationship. In Washington, where she lived upstairs from him, she at least was on a different floor, and Patty was around to generally disturb the picture. At the Days Inn in Beckley, they fitted identical keycards into identical doors, fifteen feet from each other, and entered rooms whose identical profound drabness only a torrid illicit liaison could have overcome. Walter couldn’t avoid thinking about how alone Lalitha was in her identical room. Part of his feeling of inferiority consisted of straightforward envy—envy of her youth; envy of her innocent idealism; envy of the simplicity of her situation, as compared to the impossibility of his—and it seemed to him that her room, though outwardly identical, was the room of fullness, the room of beautiful and allowable yearning, while his was the room of emptiness and sterile prohibition. He turned on CNN, for the blare of it, and watched a report on the latest carnage in Iraq while he undressed for a lonely shower.