Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  “Under Blackwood Forest,” she declared.

  “Goddamn right. State will give its blessing soon. I been waiting forty-nine years for this sweet revenge. Those protestors haven’t a clue.”

  So he had been listening to her last night.

  “Revenge?” she asked.

  “None of your concern.” Beneath his captain’s hat, his face reddened, setting off alarms. He had scant regard for social graces.

  For reasons she could not fathom, like butter on a tropical breakfast table, he just as abruptly softened. “Ah well, it’s ancient history,” he said. “A family, the Barstows, who owned that land back then, well, they had a daughter. Name of Belinda. She was the sweetest little thing you ever saw; two years behind me in school. I wanted that gal, I tell you, but I never. I never …” He stared out to sea, clenched tight his jaw, allowed his mind to drift back to New Barnstable, Ohio in 1964.

  “She wrongly accused you?”

  “Not her. 'Twas her father, Melvin Barstow. The bastard. She was pregnant, that’s for sure, but 'twarn’t mine. I had no idea somebody was pokin' her. Whole family rejected me, including her brother Malcolm, who was my best buddy. Ruined me in New Barnstable. I left for GUO and told ‘em to expect payback. Guess what? It’s now.”

  “But the university owns Blackwood Forest and the Barstow farm now.”

  “Don’t matter none. They never took me seriously neither.”

  “What happened to Belinda?”

  “Belinda? Oh, Belinda. Had a shotgun weddin' to that fucker, Kenny Caldwell. Lost the baby. Served her right. Miscarriage. She 'n Kenny got divorced, in seventy-six. She died. 2010, I think.”

  After more lounging on the beach, they climbed back aboard the yacht and, by a different route, returned to the villa. They agreed to meet for dinner at seven and retired to their separate quarters. During dinner, Morse conveyed clearly that he was ready for playtime.

  It was then her worst fears came to pass. Having served dessert, Josephine and Jacinta departed. Without pleasantries, he took her by the arm to the master suite at the opposite end of the house from hers. He ripped off her clothes, and threw her toward the bed. She rolled onto the floor and scrambled to readiness: a crouch, her coiled-spring judo imagination focusing on her opponent’s weakness — his gimpy left arm and hand. In haste, she slightly misjudged his approach, slipped on a throw rug, and, in the next instant, was beneath him. Should anyone have been within earshot of the villa, they would have heard primal female screams, a male in rut, panting “ … B'linda … B'linda!” In horror, they would have hailed the Virgin Islands Police Department. And had the police arrived, they would have found a whimpering, bleeding, badly bruised, semi-conscious woman, unable to speak. They would have concluded that hers was an attack so brutal that rape could provide but partial explanation. Her attacker was a psychopath.

  But there was no call for help.

  Morse left her on the floor and swaggered half-nude to the kitchen. From a shelf, he grabbed his Jack Daniels and took a long pull from the bottle. He sat, dazed, sexually satiated and limp, with no more than a tenuous hold on reality.

  She regained consciousness. Driven to escape, she crawled instinctively toward the patio door. Everything burned; she felt abdominal pain; abrasions on her back and thighs, her head throbbing from a swollen mass above her occipital ridge, her vision blurred. She rose. Walking with great difficulty, she could not sustain a straight path. She remembered the servants’ gate, a way to the road, away from this madman. She fell. She lay immobile on the grass. She opened her eyes. Someone was there, at her side. A girl. Who? The girl spoke words she could not comprehend. The girl helped Adrienne to her feet. The girl abruptly disappeared. Had she been hallucinating? Stunned and confused, she stooped, threw up her dinner. Wiping her nose and mouth with the back of her hand, she rose again and wobbled across the lawn. Blackness.

  Morse rose from the breakfast bar, steadied himself, grasping a chair against his dizziness, the bourbon pulsating his heart. After some moments, he hobbled toward his bedroom, spasms of coughing wracking his chest. Her scattered clothes surrounded smudges on the tile and a pool of blood. He noticed a blood trail out the door, across the patio. He followed it to the edge, lost it in the darkness. Something caused him to stop and be still. From the direction of the bay, he heard wailing: a heart-stopping scream that, cascading like falling water, descended toward the sea. Then, silence.

  He slumped onto the grass, hugging his knees, blubbering and dreadful. The absolute insularity and stillness accentuated the horror of his deed. There had been deaths in his mines, of course. Coal mining is a risky occupation. And his first wife had an awful demise to cancer. But not since that night of filial combat in a pitch-black workshop, when his lower left arm and hand had been crushed by the blow of a mattock; when enraged, his arm dangling helplessly, he drove his head and shoulder into his own father — the one who abused him early and often — when the man dropped the mattock, fell back, and cracked his skull on a steel bench. Not since then had he been so hideously the arbiter of death. He sat paralyzed with fear, wracked with self-loathing, emotions rarely experienced since that night almost fifty years earlier.

  Hours later, the sky filled with towering dark clouds, thunder in the distance and a hint of dawn in the east, without gazing seaward for even a moment, he sauntered back to the villa.

  18

  Stefan gathered his notes and books. Today was the half-way point in the semester. His students (including me) had been coalescing into a lively set of learners with a poignancy that delighted him, so he claimed. For this class, he had directed us to read two articles critical of panarchy’s apparent failure to take account of ‘agency’, the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices. We were also assigned the autobiography of Lois Gibbs, the courageous housewife from Love Canal, New York who altered the course of the environmental movement in the 1980s. He asked us: Can individuals acting alone or collectively derail the progression of panarchy in ways that might postpone or totally avoid sending a vaster social-ecologic system over the cliff? In other words, can panarchy’s progression be impacted by dedicated people like ourselves or even by resource managers?

  “Good morning all.” Stefan said as he projected two quotes:

  He asked an Ecuadorian student named Mikaela to read aloud the first quote and wondered whether she remembered the passage. She replied, “Yes, and this is one more reason why this class is making me anxious about my future.”

  Stefan merely nodded. He then asked Samantha to read aloud the second quote. After she finished, Stefan asked whether anyone could identify the author.

  “My memory may not serve me,” began Astrid, “but in a course on social change last year, I remember reading about a certain American anthropologist — a woman who long ago studied people in the South Pacific. She may have written or spoken these words. I believe her name was Mead and you see this quote all over the place. My professor told us that there is disagreement about whether those are actually her words.”

  “You got it, Astrid. Yes, her name is Margaret Mead.”

  “A little background,” Stefan continued. “Margaret Mead was born in 1901 and died in 1978. And whether the words are hers matters little because of her indelible impact as a brilliant anthropologist who tried to understand families and the human life cycle in a time when there were few women in her field, let alone of such brilliance and international repute. The words in this quote have animated social and environmental activists for more than two generations because at some level they are authentic. But how true are they? Do you believe Mead or Nickleby? That will be the nub of our class today.”

  “I’ll roll with Margaret,” asserted Nick.

  “I would have expected no less,” replied Stefan. “Alright, with these quotes in mind, let’s open with some conversation about the protest on campus a couple of days ago. What motivated it? Who are the small group of thoughtful committed citizens involved he
re? Is there a chance they may change the world? I am interested in whether you are persuaded that such resistance movements have worth, whether they could alter the progression of history in this region or beyond, and whether they have anything to do with panarchy.”

  “Stefan, you may be aware that some in this room were there,” Sean said. “Perhaps they prefer anonymity.”

  “Alright, let’s keep the conversation abstract.”

  “Okay, good,” Nick jumped in. “The small group of hopefully thoughtful and committed students emerged from the combination of two student organizations focused on the post-carbon world and climate change. They took action on the day the university’s energy plan was released.”

  “To which they objected?” Stefan asked.

  “Damn straight,” replied Nick.

  “Why?”

  Sean raised his hand. Stefan nodded his way. “Well, I attended the energy plan press conference,” Sean said calmly. “GUO’s stepwise progression toward green sources goes across a bridge of, first, for up to five years, coal, then natural gas for about two decades.” He paused, studying his clasped hands. He looked up straight at Stefan. “Now, can you believe this, Stefan? When I asked the president whether this scenario would be fueled by natural gas from under Blackwood Forest, his handler cut me off. So, what are we students supposed to think? It’s obvious to us that southern Ohio is poised to become a sacrifice zone, including this pristine forest, to supply GUO with gas. What we activists want is for the university to flip to green energy now and to leave the shale oil and gas in the ground where it will never add to the atmospheric load of greenhouse gases.”

  “Is that feasible?” Stefan asked.

  “Yes,” cut in Katherine, perhaps too ardently. “It is exactly what Ohio’s flagship university is proposing.”

  “And what of the nature of the protest on campus? Was it a productive way of making your points? Could it alter the progression of panarchy?”

  Nick was back. “I cannot speak for the others but if the purpose of the rally was to raise awareness of the connection between the energy plan and Blackwood Forest’s future, I believe it achieved its purpose. More than a hundred protestors participated and thousands looked at videos online and on television.”

  “What about panarchy?” asked Stefan.

  “Whether activists can stall panarchy’s dictates is another question. I am not sure about that,” Nick admitted. “Yet, I still do want to hang with Mead’s optimism. I mean, our big brains ought to be capable of pulling us back from Late-K. Right?”

  Em, Sean, and Katherine uttered agreement. The rest of us looked on expectantly as if our participation in the discussion would be next. I myself was skeptical about stemming panarchy’s relentless tide.

  “Equivocating,” observed Stefan whose eyes kept drifting toward the open door. “Excuse me a moment,” he said as he walked out of the room. Soon Stefan and a short, leather-skinned, bearded man came into the room. This was my first look at a man I would come to know and still do find awesome. To me, the nineteen-year-old, he looked like he could be seventy. He walked with a curiously swaying gait. His bleary eyes hinted of stone. He was dressed in worn canvas overalls, an olive camouflage jacket, scuffed boots, a black beret. A long gray pony tail hung half-way down his back. He gazed at us nervously, forced a smile that revealed a missing tooth. Stefan drew up two chairs and sat at the front of the room with his guest.

  “Okay guys, this is Rutherford Bosworth Hays. He is a veteran of the American war in Vietnam. Following two tours in Vietnam, he became a nationally famous anti-war activist. For the past thirty years, he has been farming in Grieg County, south of here.”

  The man mumbled, “Shit, I’m only thirty-nine. Musta started digging the ground as a toddler.”

  A few laughed cautiously. I wanted to giggle more.

  Stefan motored on. “Yeah, that figures. Anyway, for a long time, Mr. Hays has made his life in southern Ohio as a farmer. I met him at the Farmers Market and I am grateful he agreed to join us. He asks us to refer to him as ‘Boss’.”

  Some of my classmates who seemed reticent in the earlier discussion sprung to life as Boss recounted his experience in Vietnam and the antiwar movement that forced the U.S. to pull out of the war. José asked whether this level of activism could possibly happen again since there’s no longer a draft in the U.S. Julianna wanted to know if Boss felt as impassioned about current issues as he had in his antiwar days. Lucia, the Mexican American, hinting at her burning issue, asked whether he believed individuals in America today could possibly take on powerful institutions like the U.S. Immigration Services and the Border Patrol. Melissa, our gallant older single mom, wondered what Boss would advise student activists to do about the current threats to Blackwood Forest. Astrid asked whether he thought we could save the forest.

  Boss answered these questions with deliberation, adding salty commentary that connected his era with ours.

  In speaking about the war, the way he told it was, “Okay, this was the war of yer grandparents’ time, right? Let’s not demean any of yer grandfathers who may have gone to war, those of you who are Americans, but let’s also face facts and call that war a defeat. And I would add,” he said with deadly calm, “and pardon my language here, without the millions of students on the streets and on college campuses, without John Kerry and other vets protesting, there was no fucking way the tide would have turned and the decision made to pull out in 1975. And, believe me, resisting this war was almost as dangerous as dodging friendly fire in the mountains of 'Nam. The FBI wanted my ass and they made that perfectly clear several times. I spent some nights in the slam. This was after I nearly lost my life in the jungle for this freaking police state.”

  “What was yer other question?”

  José reminded him. “Could a war protest with millions and millions on the streets happen these days?”

  “Not likely,” Boss replied. “First, wars these days are different with fewer boots on the ground. Also, there’s wars out there most of us haven’t got a clue about. We’ve got at least three like that going now — in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. Then, as you say, what’s yer name? Ah, José. No draft, as you said, no self-interest among testosterone-poisoned young bucks like yourself. Let me tell ya, going to war was a frightening thing for us and rightly so. It took one gawdawful toll: more than 50,000 of my generation died fighting a fucking futile war. Sorry, again. My woman’s always harping on my foul language. Can’t help myself. Grew up on a pig farm north of Delaware, Ohio. Pigs usually don’t wince at cuss words. Not like my woman. By the way, my home was just a few miles from the place where our nineteenth president grew up. Rutherford B. Hays. Not remotely related. We were the white trash Hayses. But my parents admired the man and named me after him, somewhat.”

  “Wahl, back to you, José. War is hell. I experienced war not once, but twice, as Stefan mentioned, and it busted my butt for life. Look, since I got back, I’ve not seen one child killed by gunfire. That’s good, right? But every time I’m with a child, I fear for his life and like a madman I begin to conduct surveillance of the perimeter lookin' fur a nest of snipers. Shit!”

  Boss stood up abruptly and stretched his five-five frame, his head juddering nervously. He returned to his seat and paused. He blinked and shrugged and said so softly you almost had to read his lips. “I have the blood of kids on my hands.” As he said this, he opened his ill-proportioned gnarly hands and wiped an errant drop of salt water from his left eye. Without warning, at the top of his lungs, he screamed, “Killing children! What greater atrocity can you think of?”

  The class acted as though someone had machine-gunned the room. Shock waves from Boss’ lamentation reverberated — a searing, flesh eating eternity. I looked over to see Boss’ hands trembling. José was dumfounded. Stefan’s face turned grim; he was speechless. After a few more moments of breathless silence, Boss regained composure and without apology sat down and resumed his responses to questions.

 
When asked about his current passions, he said, “Okay, my friend — was it Julie?”

  “Julianna,” she corrected.

  “Yep, Julianna, I do. It’s savin' the planet. Yeah, sweetheart, by all means, my cause now is Mother Earth.”

  When Astrid asked what kind of things Boss had done for the environment in southern Ohio, he replied, “Well, darlin', the details … well, prob'ly I can’t talk about 'em here. Let’s just say, I and some like-minded folks have, from time to time, pulled off a few rural beautification projects. Mostly at night. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Astrid’s eyes lit up.

  Julianna seemed perplexed. She offered a tepid, “Wow,” and added, “My generation’s activism, like on Wall Street, was right out there in the obviousphere. Maybe we’re scared of the dark.”

  When Boss responded to Lucia’s question about bigger institutions like the Border Patrol, shaking his head, he said, “Confronting the gum'ment is a damn sight riskier now than in the seventies, my dear. The NSA snoops on all of us; FBI's behind every bush; surveillance cameras everywhere. But darlin', listen here! Hispanics on the streets scare the bejesus out o' ol' white men in politics because they deeply threaten their power. Some poet once wrote that ‘habit rules the unreflecting herd’. Lemme tell you, those ol' white guys have gotten into some bad habits they will one day regret. Señoritas and señora will have the last laugh.”