by Paula Boyd
“Tiger and Company.”
“Yes,” she said, settling back in her seat. “I got a little curious. I mean, they just sort of appeared out of the blue, the bunch of them loaded up in two vans with camper trailers, which was kind of odd since that was the very thing we were trying to stop. Of course, having one at the rally was kind of handy.” She paused briefly to breathe, or maybe remind herself what she didn’t want to tell. “Anyway, they were saying they were here to stop the park, which was certainly what I wanted to do, as did anybody with a lick of sense, so I talked to them. They took to me right off, but there was just something fishy about the whole deal. So I took it upon myself to see what they were up to. They had Colorado license plates on their vans and said they were from Boulder. Well, with Sarah living in the very same place and all, I called and had her do some checking up on them.”
Keep in mind that from where I live, I can be where Sarah lives in Boulder almost as quickly as I can be in downtown Denver. And, let’s not forget that I am a reporter of sorts. Not that it mattered, of course. She wouldn’t have called me if I was on the same block until it was absolutely the last possible option or she was in jail. And even then, she hadn’t called me. Jerry had. “Oh, I understand, Mother. Why on earth would you call a professional journalist who does research for a living when you can have a busy college student without a clue handle it? Makes perfect sense to me.”
“See there. That hateful attitude is exactly why I didn’t ask you to do anything and why I don’t tell you things. The entire park would have been built before you quit telling me why I didn’t need to know what I wanted to know, and I darned well knew I wanted to know it. Besides that, you’d have probably scared them off before they did me any good at all.”
Ah, they might smell fishy, but they were potential worker bees and she wasn’t going to take any chances of me messing up her plans with little details like facts. The bullet-induced scar in my shoulder began to twitch again. So did the muscle between my eye and cheekbone. “Do continue.”
“Well,” she said, oblivious to anything outside her own head, “it turns out that AAC just has a post office box up in Colorado. They have a phone number, but you can only leave a message. They don’t answer the phone. Ever. Even the phones they used to call back show up blocked, cell phones too, and they won’t give you their numbers. Got real snooty about it with me. Said it was for safety.” She harrumphed and crossed her arms. “I didn’t think it was very safe for me not being able to get hold of them if we were going to work together. Know-it-alls, all of them. And it doesn’t seem to me any of it was very safe for Tiger either, now was it?”
“Apparently not.”
I hadn’t actually tried to contact any environmental subversives lately, but you wouldn’t really expect them to be listed in the phone book or have an office on Main Street. Then again, you never know. These are strange times. “Okay, A-A-C. Your buddy group is called Ack?”
“Now that’s just ridiculous. Who in the world would call their group Ack? It’s said exactly like it looks, A-A-C. All Animals Count.”
Nothing my mother was involved in of late was exactly as it looked. And while I’d originally thought Lucille might have been set up by the AAC, I now wasn’t so sure who was using whom. Mother Shrewdness is not dumb, and we have established her talents at manipulation and even blackmail, although she is prickly about such things being pointed out. “So, Sarah didn’t find out anything else about them?”
Lucille shook her head. “No, just that they champion causes for animals and somehow they’d heard about the horny toads and the campers, and wanted to be involved.”
“I see,” I said, although I didn’t. I couldn’t cite statistics on it, but I had to wonder how many horny toads were even left in the state since the ants from Hell arrived and began their unhindered carnage. I’d guess that the lizards had a way better chance at dodging travel trailers than fire ant swarms. “Okay, clear something up for me here. Is this a private park or one that will be owned by the city or county or other government group?”
Lucille shook her head, looking genuinely confused. “I really don’t know, Jolene, I really don’t. It seems like they make it sound one way or the other, depending on what they’re trying to get away with. I thought the city of Kickapoo was involved somehow for a while, but now I just don’t know. None of it makes good sense.”
“Neither does Sarah coming down here if she’d already found out all she could in Boulder.”
Lucille fiddled with her seat belt then inspected her nails again. “Mostly, we just wanted to visit. It had been way too long since we’d spent any time together at all.”
“Uh huh. Which is why you put her in a motel in Redwater Falls. Togetherness. And why she wasn’t really staying there and you pretend you don’t know where she was staying. More togetherness and visiting opportunities.”
“Well, now, that was just what we needed to do under the circumstances. You make it out like there was some big conspiracy plan.”
“Because there was. There is. And the sooner you fess up about it the better because this room you so generously provided to her—or somebody—is now a crime scene, remember?”
She frowned for a minute, opened her mouth to defend herself then began to nod enthusiastically. “Well, you know, that’s exactly right. I have just had enough of all this myself. And you are right. It was a conspiracy. A conspiracy to steal my house!” She metaphorically jumped up on her high horse, leaping over all the details she didn’t want to address. Technically, she just sat up straighter in the seat and wagged her finger. “Did you know what that little weasel Damon Saide said to me when he showed up on my doorstep?”
I presumed she meant the first time, not the time she shot at him. But it could have been both times, or every time, for all I knew.
“The lying little turd told me he was stealing my house for the good of the community and it was my civic duty to let him. Said he could get my house one way or another anyway. You just wouldn’t believe the things he was saying, trying to scare me into giving in, treating me like I was senile.” Lucille had worked herself up into a good little fit of indignant outrage. “Thought he could run roughshod right over me and then have me tell him thank you for it.” Lucille looked like she could bite the heads off rats and never blink. “Well, I guess he found out otherwise.”
To say the least.
She had deftly avoided my question, of course, and I was neither shocked nor dismayed nor even peeved at this point. What I was, however, was seeing things with a different light. Imminent Domain. Thanks to a whole bunch of new—and not well-publicized—laws, it was now easier than ever for the government to take away the rights of private citizens. Actually, they’d already taken plenty, just not many people had noticed. I sure didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but these days, pretty much any government entity could indeed take property for whatever reason it deemed to be for the good of the community, even for private development. People were fighting it all around the country, but most folks were oblivious to the issue.
Actually, people were happily oblivious to a lot of significant issues. As long as they could refinance their mortgages, put gas in their cars and keep American Idol coming in on the TV they really didn’t care to know the truth about a lot of things, such as UFOs, weather manipulation, injected RFID chips, three spontaneously collapsing buildings in New York City and two more wars for profit. Willful ignorance is the biggest conspiracy of all. But I digress. “Did you ever tell me who this Saide guy worked for? Was it the city?”
“I don’t know who put the little twerp up to his dirty work and I do not care. He’s an idiot and I threw his stupid little card right back in his stupid little face. He’s got to be in cahoots with somebody. He’s sure not smart enough to think very big on his own.” Lucille glared out the window, tapping her foot as flat land and mesquite trees whizzed past. “For all I know, the little weasel just wanted to steal my house first and then resell it t
o the park people so he could make himself a big fat profit. Houses like mine are going for big money these days, what with all the Redwater people trying to get into the Kickapoo School District.”
I suppose now would be the appropriate time to point out that the “rush” to the land of superior educational opportunities in Kickapoo simply meant that by moving the family to the small town ten or fifteen miles away, their kid could actually get issued a jersey on a football team. In big city Redwater high schools, there were no average white guy slots. It was nothing new. The same thing had been going on when I was a teenager. To be fair, though, there were at least twice as many kids in the latest graduating class than there had been in mine twenty-five years ago. Still, it had not created a wild upward spiral in housing prices. Reality aside, we still had a guy who wanted my mother’s house, and was willing to threaten her and dodge bullets to get it. We also had a missing ranch owner who’d apparently been threatened too and was selling his land because of it.
I’d done a few articles on legitimate park development projects and conservation easement purchases several years ago and had a fair knowledge of the major groups funding such things. I didn’t know how the new imminent domain rules had changed that process, but middlemen had been used to purchase property for government purposes. If the park project were a city deal, they’d get what they wanted. But why not just take it rather than send a go-between to try to buy it? Getting shot by Lucille was one good reason.
“Something about this has bothered me from the beginning,” I said. “Actually a lot of things have. For one, what makes this couple thousand acres of mesquites and old salts flats more special than those on the other side of the highway, or on the other side of that? That one spot isn’t the only place where you can stand in hundred-and-twenty-degree heat and watch mesquite thorns grow.”
“Your hateful attitude about your home place is just uncalled for. I didn’t rear you like that, and it just makes me spitting mad to hear you condemning things around here. I don’t see why it’s so hard for you to believe that people are just dying to turn my life upside down to suit their own purposes. I suppose you just don’t give a hoot if my life gets ruined.”
Melodramatics aside, I did understand her distress, and shared it even. But it didn’t get me any closer to the why of it all. I’d admit that there were plenty of RV pads plopped in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do except park, plug in, sleep and dump the waste tank. Every space was filled on a lot of them, too, so what did I know? “You are absolutely right, Mother. It’s a perfectly wonderful place for an RV Park—flat, easy highway access, and the bluff where the Little house is located adds historic and visual interest. That part is unique and that must be the draw.”
“Well, it may very well be, but it doesn’t mean I have to go along with it. I do not have to agree to anything I don’t want to.”
A strange—or maybe not so strange—thought finally made its way to the foreground. I’ve been around enough to know that cutting a good ol’ boy deal at taxpayer expense was not a new thing. Maybe that’s all that was going on here. If so, wouldn’t Bob Little have to be in on it? None of it explained why they had to have Mother’s house too though. Maybe the park was a cover for something and they didn’t want Lucille watching what they were doing. Not that great motivation-wise, but a possibility. This was Texas after all. And somebody was out there with equipment and a drill rig for some reason. “I saw the pump jacks were going again behind the fence. Maybe this whole thing really is about oil.”
“Those oil wells have never quit pumping since we’ve lived here,” Lucille said. “They’re not big producers, just real steady.”
“Lucky for Bob Little, I guess. But if that’s true, why sell the land for a park and have to give up your steady producers? Does he retain mineral rights? Will the pumps keep pumping with the park there? Why drill for more if you’re selling?”
“Well, I don’t know about any of that, Jolene. I don’t meddle in other people’s business. But I do know that Bobby isn’t hurting for money. He still has some part in that plastic company over on the north side of Redwater that he started about the time you were born. Some big outfit from Pennsylvania’s been trying to buy him out though.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “Does he still work at it?”
“No, he hired good people to do that long ago. He goes in every now and then, and he studies the books, but he doesn’t have to do anything.” Lucille turned and stared out the window. “Not like when he started it. He was there day and night then.”
“That’s never good on a family.”
“Didn’t have one,” she said absently. “His wife had just died.”
“Oh.”
After a few seconds she turned back around and shook her finger at me. “You just don’t know what all he’s been through. They tricked him like they tried to trick me, only worse. He won’t talk about it much, thinks he’s protecting me, but that’s what’s going on.”
She’d apparently moved back to the drama at the ranch but I was still visiting the plastic factory. I remembered hearing something about a parts company back when. Twenty-five years ago there weren’t many big factory type places around and a bunch of the guys and a few girls went to work there right out of high school, assembly line work, as best I could recall. It was good money, twice what they could make anywhere else. “I sure never knew that Bob Little owned that big plastics factory. The main building was blue metal as I recall, kind of northwest of Redwater, right? What was the name of that place?”
“Oh, it’s one of those funny foreign words that the college kids use funny symbols for on their tee shirts.” Lucille’s brow wrinkled as she thought on it. “Kind of like Ortega, you know, like that Mexican man who used to work for Jimmie Sue’s dad back when he had that track for training race horses.”
“Neither the race horses, Jimmie Sue nor the worker to whose name she was slandering had any relevance to the actual topic of interest so I ignored the attempted rabbit trail. “You mean Omega.”
“Yes, that was it. See it did sound like Ortega. Just an ‘m’ instead of the ‘rt.’ Omega Plastics. That’s what it was called.”
I knew it hadn’t been called Little Plastic Parts Company. That, I would have remembered. “You know, I find it very interesting that Rancher Bob, our missing in action owner of the would-be park land, is also a manufacturing mogul. Between the oil and cows and plastic parts, the guy’s got to be loaded with money. Maybe somebody kidnapped him or killed him for it. Wouldn’t be the first time that sort of thing happened.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She snatched her purse and settled it in her lap.” It’s just about that stupid park, that’s all.”
“It’s also about a dead man, the missing man and my daughter’s circumstantial ties to both.”
“Well, don’t you go jumping to any conclusions.” She clutched her purse tightly and fiddled with the handles, twisting the straps this way and that. “You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do.”
And that, I feared, was the most truthful thing she’d said all day.
Chapter
Nine
By the time we finally reached Bowman City, I had ferreted out a boatload of pointless trivia and one possibly important fact. Namely that Tiger, along with his ever-present sidekick and supporting female flower team, had nearly gotten into a fistfight with Saide at the courthouse rally. I couldn’t imagine the little guy that had hidden behind the Korean import doing much physical sparring, but Lucille had assured me he was “red as a beet” and shaking his “gnarly little fist” at Tiger, who, she pointed out, could have broken that “spindly little white neck of his like a chicken bone” if he’d had a mind to. He’d apparently planned to do exactly that until somehow things started exploding and paint started flying.
I made a mental sigh. I couldn’t even replay Lucille’s tales without them being one long string of run-on thoughts. Anyway, if nothing else, it was probably worth knowing th
at Tiger’s “hippie goons” looked ready to “peench” the weasel’s little head off. Pushing aside the vernacular and imagery from Mother’s theatrical ruminations, I took a good look at the town square in front of us.
The courtyard of the Bowman County building was trampled down in large round spots, like inept aliens had missed the cornfield and settled on the courthouse lawn instead. Spatters of fluorescent green and pink paint dotted the crushed grass and three black sooty spots lined the sidewalk. Not major league damage, but more than just a minor irritation too. As we walked to the door, I couldn’t help but wonder how much reclamation work had to be done to get it back to even this condition.
Inside the hallowed courthouse halls we didn’t exactly find a “field of dreams” either. In fact, we racked up two strikes right off the bat without even trying. The “no Jerry” was an obvious and didn’t count. But since we needed inside information from pliable sources, the “no Leroy” and “no Fritz” most assuredly did. The fact that there was another Harper on duty did not up batting average even a little. It did, however, upset my stomach.
The first thing you noticed about Larry Harper was the wad of tobacco hanging down from his lip. Yes, down from beneath his upper lip. The black-brown blob that perched atop his front teeth caused his upper lip to puff out until it almost touched his nose. It was not pretty. He also had a more traditional wad in his left cheek, which made him look like a lopsided pocket gopher. I couldn’t begin to guess how much nicotine was coursing through his veins. The best we could hope for was that it was enough for him to connect the dots in his inherently deficient and seriously addicted brain.
Lucille had different concerns. “Don’t you even think about spitting in front of me, Lawrence Harper,” she said, skipping past the usual introductory pleasantries to avoid as much grossness as possible. “I’ve told your father just what I think about that nasty business of yours. If he’d been the one to walk in here instead of me, well, I think you know just what that would mean.”