by Jung Yun
39
By now, it feels like she’s driven the same two highways over and over again, so the unfamiliar county road provides some much-needed visual respite from Avery’s long commercial sprawl. Miles and miles of farmland stretch out before her, interrupted by the occasional three- or four-stoplight town before returning to farmland again. The quiet scenery is just what she needs after hours of back-to-back interviews. It’s that time of the year when the fields are dense and saturated with color, reminding her that the old sayings and songs she learned as a child still hold remarkably true. The corn is nearing “knee-high by the fourth of July,” and the wheat that has yet to be harvested does appear almost amber in the afternoon light.
Along this new expanse of road, signage welcomes Elinor to towns so small and unmemorable, she’s not sure if she’s ever passed through before. Most of them have been named after men. There’s Dean, followed by Ryan, Victor, Elroy, Lucas, an outlier named Laverne, and finally, Heath, where Louise Eddy lives. It was surprising, how easy she was to track down. For someone in her seventies, she has an unusually large digital footprint. Although Mrs. Eddy’s phone number is unlisted, her address came up in multiple court records because of the lawsuits she filed against EnerGia, starting in 2008. Two years ago, she was arrested for threatening oil workers on her property with an unloaded weapon, a charge that prosecutors dropped due to Mrs. Eddy’s age and declining health, as well as the influx of more serious cases in the area since the start of the boom. The year before that, she allegedly made a bomb threat to EnerGia’s parent company in Texas, a charge that the court dismissed due to insufficient evidence.
Whatever hesitation Elinor feels about paying an unannounced, unsolicited visit to Heath is mitigated by Mrs. Eddy’s past willingness to talk with seemingly anyone on the record. The list of articles her name appears in is even longer than the list of court records. Dozens of marginally reputable publications with smaller circulations than the Standard have quoted her about all the things that Mrs. Mueller mentioned in her interview: well water that tastes like kerosene, freshly washed hair snapping off by the fistful, showers and baths capable of making eyes sting and open wounds burn. Upon first read, Mrs. Eddy’s quotes sounded cantankerous, sometimes even unhinged. But Elinor decides to make the trip anyway, aware that people have long been conditioned to confuse women’s anger with instability.
After driving past the five or six businesses that make up Heath’s town center, she keeps a lookout for Mrs. Eddy’s farm. The GPS doesn’t work here, so she glances at the directions in her notebook, worried she might miss the address and not notice, something that’s actually very hard to do. Every time a property approaches, she can see it coming from miles away thanks to the presence of trees. There are hardly any on the horizon except for the telltale copses planted to shield people’s houses from the wind. The Eddy farm announces itself with an arrangement of tall cypresses that look like closed beach umbrellas standing up in the sand. Four wells and several tanks hover in the distance, exactly as Mrs. Mueller described. Elinor turns onto the private road, her car jerking and rumbling over the loose gravel, making a terrible noise that signals her presence before she even arrives. She keeps her eyes glued to the road, crawling along at barely ten miles an hour to avoid the occasional pothole as big as a tire. It’s not a particularly long driveway, but its state of near disrepair makes it feel endless. She’s relieved to finally come to a stop in front of a modest two-story farmhouse, all white peeling paint and gray rotting wood. Behind it are several outbuildings in similar condition, including a barn that appears to be leaning dangerously on its foundation.
Her brother-in-law was fond of saying that real farmers didn’t have time to make things look pretty. According to Tom, if given the choice between painting a fence or fixing a broken post, fixing always won out. While she understands the value of function over appearance in a place that demands almost nonstop labor, she thinks the Eddy farm looks more abandoned than poorly maintained. There aren’t any cars parked near the house or tractors out in the field. No sounds of people or machinery either. And there’s a wild, soon-to-be overgrown quality to the place, with weeds crawling up the sides of buildings, spiraling around drainpipes and antennae and wires. Three of the five stairs leading up to the front porch are broken, worn straight through the middle of the treads. Elinor doesn’t dare put her full weight on the ones that remain, so she hoists herself up with the help of the railing, getting a splinter wedged into her palm for the effort.
Elinor knocks on the door, but already, her hopes are less than what they were. Thick layers of dust coat every surface, untouched for some time. The only prints she sees on the floorboards besides her own are from a family of possums or raccoons or some other animal with paws that look like greedy little hands. She sucks out the splinter with her teeth and then gives the doorknob a tentative jiggle, not sure what she’d do if it were actually unlocked, which it isn’t. Elinor knocks again, rattling the rickety metal screen, which has been patched and repatched with yellowing pieces of tape.
“Hello?” she shouts, shielding her eyes from the sun as she tries to look inside. All she can make out is a dark kaleidoscope of shapes in the leaded glass window.
The porch wraps around the house, so she follows it to the back and walks toward the barn, crossing paths with two skinny white cats. They study her for a second, their faces mean and angular with hunger, before they prowl off into the high grass.
“Hello?” she repeats, hearing only bugs, birds, and wind.
As she nears the barn, she gets a better view of the wells behind the property, their slow-moving heads all working in unison. It hardly seems fair that the wells are here, but Mrs. Eddy isn’t. This used to be a home once. Someone’s children, perhaps Mrs. Eddy’s grandchildren, played on this land not that long ago. She can see the evidence of them everywhere. The tree house in the backyard, complete with its tire swing; the deflated beach ball in the yard; the sandbox that the feral cats are surely using as a litter box now. She wonders when Mrs. Eddy moved away and whether she attempted to sell the property or simply packed up what she could and left.
After peeking her head in the barn and finding it empty—the final sign she needed to confirm that no one lives or works here anymore—she gets in her car and heads back toward the main road, pausing at the end of the driveway. In her rearview mirror, she looks at the house one last time and notices a flag in the top floor window, possibly an attic window. It’s an American flag, hanging upside down like the one at Mrs. Mueller’s. Seeing it displayed this way once felt like a fluke, just the work of an addled, sleep-deprived old woman not paying attention to how she was doing things. Seeing the same display twice feels like it has more meaning than she understands. Even though she’s never met Mrs. Eddy, she doesn’t think she or Mrs. Mueller are the kind of people who would ever intentionally disrespect a flag. Midwesterners, farmers, people of an older generation—rightly or wrongly, she throws them all into a group that values its symbolism too much.
She’s so startled by the sight of the flag in her rearview that she doesn’t notice the dust cloud at first. It’s coming from the driveway diagonally across the road, accompanied by a buzz that sounds like a swarm of insects growing louder and closer. An old man in a golf cart stops at the end of his driveway and climbs out as the dust settles. His movements are as slow as his stomach is big, spilling out over a tightly cinched belt. He’s about to reach into his mailbox when he notices Elinor sitting in her car, so he lowers his sunglasses and waves. Apparently, her waving back is all the invitation he needs to hike up his pants and start walking toward her.
“You lost or something?” he shouts. He doesn’t look left or right before crossing the road, as if he knows no one is coming.
His unhurried pace allows her to study him. He’s wearing a short-sleeved undershirt that used to be white and jeans that have gone soft at the knees. Perched high on the bridge of his nose are amber-tinted sunglasses, the kind s
he used to see on late-night TV in the eighties when she wasn’t supposed to be awake.
“No, not lost. I was looking for Mrs. Eddy. I assume she doesn’t live here anymore?”
“What business do you have with Louise?”
It’s an odd, off-putting way to respond to a question, but something about his tone gives her pause. He’s not being unfriendly, not exactly. He sounds more concerned.
“I’m writing an article about the oil boom. A woman I interviewed, she suggested that I talk to Mrs. Eddy while I was out here.”
The man smiles. “Oh, I don’t really think you’d want to do that.”
Elinor isn’t sure what confuses her more. His smile or his suggestion. “Well, I came from Avery just to talk to her. You know what traffic is like over there these days.” She makes out the slightest bob of his head in agreement. “How long ago did she move?”
“Around the holidays. Her kids had to put her in assisted living.”
Was this the reason why Mrs. Mueller sounded so amused when she mentioned her? Because Elinor would drive all this way for nothing? It’s hardly funny though. The more likely scenario is that Mrs. Mueller didn’t know her friend had moved. She wanted the two of them to meet for some reason.
“Are you still in touch with Mrs. Eddy? Would you be able to pass on a message to her?”
“Sorry, no. I don’t have her new contact information.”
“Well, what about her family, then? Could you reach out to one of her kids?”
The man looks around. Not a single car has driven by since he crossed the road. Still, he surveys the area as if he fears being overheard.
“Louise and her family can be—unpleasant,” he says, although it’s obvious that “unpleasant” isn’t really the word he wants to use. “I don’t think you’d particularly enjoy talking to her.”
“But she doesn’t seem to mind the publicity. And I write for a magazine with a really large readership, much larger than any of the other publications she’s spoken to.”
The man frowns. “No. You’re not hearing me, miss. I don’t think you—you—would enjoy talking to her.”
All those years her family lived on the base, being stared at and slighted by their neighbors, they still knew better than to talk badly about people with strangers. They could never be certain who was friendly with whom, or who enjoyed gossip and stirring up trouble. The man appears to be doing the same thing, holding back an opinion that he actually wants to share. Elinor wonders if the concern she heard in his voice earlier was for Mrs. Eddy or for her.
“Did you know her well?” she asks.
“As well as I wanted to.” He catches himself at the tail end of his sentence. It looks like he wishes he hadn’t said it. He crosses his arms over his chest, resting them on his stomach. Hidden in the wiry white hair on his forearms, she can make out a faded tattoo, probably decades old. It’s an anchor with a banner. The words on the banner are illegible, but she’s almost certain it’s a US Navy tattoo. Judging from the man’s age, she’d guess that he probably served in Vietnam.
“Tell me about the flag,” she says.
“What?”
“You were navy, right?” She motions toward his arm. “My father was air force. The flag in Mrs. Eddy’s window is hanging upside down. I think we both know it’s not supposed to be like that.”
The man shakes his head. “No. No, it’s not.” He turns and glances at his house, as if he’s hoping his wife will shout his name to come take a call, eat his lunch, help her with the groceries. Anything to get out of this conversation. “Some people…” he begins hesitantly, “well, some people say that hanging the flag that way is a distress signal.”
“Who was causing Mrs. Eddy distress? EnerGia? Or just the oil companies in general?”
“Them, I suppose,” he says, kicking rock after rock into the grass. “But I think she was more distressed by people who look like you.”
40
You’d get a kick out of talking to her, I bet.
You’d get a kick out of talking to her, I bet.
You’d get a kick out of talking to her, I bet.
The librarian is explaining something about the Wi-Fi in the building, how it cuts in and out due to overuse. Elinor has been trying her best to listen, but all she can hear is Mrs. Mueller’s voice, encouraging her to seek out a woman who once waved a shotgun at a work crew on her property. She assumed Mrs. Eddy had snapped because she was angry about the terms of her deal with EnerGia, which encroached upon her land and her living. But what if she was reacting to an entirely different sense of encroachment? What if the thing she couldn’t tolerate was the color of the crew members’ skin? Harry Bergum said there was a contingent of old-timers around Avery who felt that a certain “element” was taking over the area, a term she’d only heard white people use, usually in a whisper, to describe anyone who wasn’t. Is it possible that Mrs. Mueller’s reaction when she first met Elinor was more than just innocent, ignorant surprise about the mismatch between her Scandinavian name and her Asian face? Did she tell Elinor to seek out her friend because Mrs. Eddy was someone she’d enjoy talking to, or because she was amused by the thought of setting up a confrontation?
The moment she keeps revisiting is the one in which Mrs. Mueller grabbed her arm and said she needed help. How desperate she was, and then she suddenly wasn’t. The look in her eyes when she realized what she was doing and pushed her away—Elinor assumed it was regret for showing weakness in front of a stranger. But maybe the disgust she observed in her expression wasn’t about that at all.
“If you have your own laptop and all you need is Wi-Fi access, your best bet is upstairs,” the librarian says.
“I’m sorry—what?” Elinor was thinking about the reunion photo hanging above the Muellers’ mantel, the one in which everyone was smiling and dressed up in patriotic red, white, and blue. Was Mrs. Mueller the outlier in this family, with her upside-down flag and her sense of distress about the world closing in? Or was she the norm? Is this what people were alluding to when they kept referring to her and her nephew as “quiet” or “strange”—all the words Elinor recalls being used to describe them, possibly as a replacement for the words that no one was willing to say. “What’s my best bet again?”
“Your best bet for finding an empty seat is upstairs. The children’s area doesn’t get much traffic anymore.”
“Kids don’t come to the library in Avery?”
The librarian casts a quick glance around the room. “Well, we’re serving a pretty different clientele these days.”
The main floor is crowded with roughnecks. Nearly every chair is occupied by someone staring at his phone, and there’s a line wrapped around several stanchions to get a twenty-minute time slot on one of three ancient-looking computers.
“Is it always this busy here?”
“If you’re new in town and need free Internet access to look for a job, it’s either us or the Job Bank. Other places, they’ll usually make you buy something. And some businesses are just shutting off their public Wi-Fi altogether.”
Elinor has several hours to kill before her police ride-along. After her visit to the Eddy farm, she decided to do research at the library, assuming the building would be mostly empty on a nice summer day, but the second floor is nearly as crowded as the first. The only free carrels she can find are near the children’s area, where there’s a man crashed out on a large beanbag shaped like a teddy bear.
The Wi-Fi is achingly slow, prone to stalling and taking up to a minute to load a single page of text. What Elinor eventually learns about upside-down flags confuses her more than it clarifies. The range of possible meanings is too wide and varied to know what’s common. At its most innocuous, it was just like Mrs. Eddy’s neighbor said. A distress call, used in cases of grave danger to life or property. But over the years, people began to widen their interpretations of what constituted danger and distress, co-opting the same symbol to signify very different things. Anarchists who disa
vowed the government’s right to interfere in their affairs used it. Antiwar activists who claimed that the Bush administration had manufactured evidence about weapons of mass destruction used it. Tea Party members who wanted to protest the Obama administration’s health care and trade policies used it. Elinor wonders if Mrs. Mueller and Mrs. Eddy hung their flags upside down because they believed their towns, and perhaps America at large, were being overrun by “nonwhite interests,” a practice gaining in popularity among some white separatists. But this isn’t the type of thing she can just wonder; she has to know.
She returns to her notes and recordings, looking for clues she can’t define. She plays back her interviews, reads and rereads her transcripts, picks up on small details that she didn’t notice before. The bitterness in Mrs. Mueller’s voice when she described EnerGia’s contracts as “sneaky little Jew agreements.” The way Richard wrote “something going on with them” in the notes from his first phone interview with her. The undercurrent of worry when Harry Bergum said he didn’t want to be part of a big-city hit job, followed by his comment that Mrs. Mueller and her husband got mixed up in something they didn’t understand. She assumed he’d been talking about the oil. Now she isn’t sure.
The details she has records of are unsettling, but no more so than the details she simply can’t forget. The two old Daves using racial epithets in the Donut Hut every day, according to Tyler. Ned’s resentment toward Harry’s young Mexican employee. Mrs. Mueller’s prodding insistence on knowing where Elinor’s parents were from, followed by her rejection of the idea that her Korean mother was American. In between these interactions were too many others to count in which people looked over their shoulders in empty alleys, empty fields, worried that someone might overhear them talking about subjects they shouldn’t.