“You mean the store owners can tell you what stories to run?”
“Harry, no newspaper can afford to offend its advertisers. You can do it occasionally, up to a point. But you can’t do it very often. And you certainly can’t take a stand directly opposite to what they think are their best interests. That’s just the way it is.”
“Isn’t polluting against the law? Aren’t the councilmen supposed to stop it if they know somebody’s doing it?”
He thought about that for a minute. “Of course, there are state and federal laws of various kinds, pretty strict ones too. But it wouldn’t be up to the councilmen to do anything unless there were anti-pollution laws on the town books. It wouldn’t be their jurisdiction.” He thought some more. “I don’t know whether Timber Falls has an antipollution ordinance or not.”
“But if it did, the councilmen would have to enforce it, right?”
He thought about it. Then he said, “Harry, if you want to make a crusade of this, that’s up to you. But I’m warning you, if you do, your dad will never get another day’s work in Timber Falls, and nobody around here will ever speak to you again. I’m serious. And it might be a lot worse than that. A fellow who thinks he’ll be out of work, and likely to lose a home that he’s spent twenty years working for, will do almost anything to stop it.”
TWELVE
Three days later Dad drove into the yard at supper time with a brand-new Ford ton-and-a-half truck. Mom saw it through the window and said, “Here comes Dad with the new truck.”
“New truck?” I said. “Dad bought a new truck?” “He worked out a deal with the man.” We ran out into the backyard. Dad was standing next to it with his hand on the door panel, kind of patting it. It was a beauty—maroon, and it had a winch on the front. Everything on it shone like jewels. Dad just stood next to it patting it and grinning. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen him smile that much. “How do you like it?” he said. “It’s a beauty, Dad,” I said.
“Look inside, Harry,” he said, smiling some more. “It’s got everything—AM and FM, CB, the works.” I looked inside. It had that new-car smell, the seats were shiny and clean, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on anything. It was something all right. “Now, I want you to keep it clean, Harry,” he said. “That’s your job. And if you do it right, I’ll teach you how to drive it.”
It was the binoculars all over again—beautiful as could be but with a kind of rotten odor to it, so that I was drawn to it and driven away from it at the same time. For, of course, he’d bought it with his bribe money from Herbst. I didn’t know whether Herbst had given him enough money to buy the whole thing. Probably not; probably he’d given him part of it, and Dad would pay the rest on time. It didn’t matter. To get that beautiful new truck he’d ruined my plan for getting something done about the pollution in the Timber River. He’d sold me out. And I resolved right then and there that I wasn’t going to keep the truck clean. I wasn’t going to lay a finger on it. He could do it himself.
Of course, he wanted to take us for a drive. I didn’t want to go, but there wasn’t any way I could say no. We got in. There was plenty of room for the three of us in the cab. “It’s a lot better than the old truck, Harry,” Dad said. “You won’t have to ride in the back when we go someplace.” He’d already forgotten about Helen. Then he began telling me about clutching and shifting and the rest of that. I knew a lot about that already anyway.
I thought about it later when I was sitting on the back steps watching the stars wink on one by one. I didn’t want to be any part of the truck, or Dad, or anything. I didn’t want to learn to drive on it, and I didn’t want Dad to teach me to drive. I didn’t want him to do anything for me. Not that he’d ever done very much. He’d taken me up into the mountains a couple of times and stolen me a pair of binoculars. But now I didn’t want him to do anything for me at all. If he was to offer me a hundred bucks out of his bribe money, I wouldn’t take it. I didn’t want any part of it.
What made me the maddest about it was his interfering in the whole carpet factory thing. It wasn’t any of his business. He had no right to do it. He had no right to interfere. Sitting there on the back steps, I stopped watching the stars come out, and began to get mad. I wished there was something I could do about it. So what if everybody in Timber Falls was sore at me. Nobody there liked me anyway. So what if Dad wouldn’t be able to get any more jobs around there. Why did I care about that? It could all go to pieces as far as I was concerned. I’d just as soon see everything go to pieces anyway.
I wondered if there was anything I could do about it. I wondered if there was any way to get the town councilmen to do something. The newspaper editor had said that if there was some law on the books of the town, they might have to do something. At least that’s what I thought he said. I sat there trying to remember. It seemed right to me. If there was a law, they’d have to do something about it.
Suppose there was a law—would I really be able to do anything about it? Would I really want to do anything about it? If I made a lot of trouble over it, would everybody in town stop giving Dad work? They might, I figured. What would happen then? Dad would give me a real beating, that was for sure. What else? I didn’t know.
But at least I could find out about it. I could find out whether there were any laws on the books about polluting. So the next day after school I went to the old redbrick town hall, with a pen and my assignment notebook. The town hall had been built in 1890 when there had been a lot of logging in the area and the town was richer. You could tell when it had been built, because the date was carved into a slab of stone over the door. I hadn’t been in the town hall very often. I’d gone in there that time our social studies class had studied the town, and I’d been there a couple of times when Dad had business there. I couldn’t remember what. The place had a musty smell. The floors had got dirt ground into them that you’d never get out, and the radiators were old and banged and whistled.
I went in and stood in the hall looking around. I saw doors with little signs above them which stuck out into the hall: ASSESSOR, ZONING COMMISSION, TOWN COUNCILMEN. Finally I saw the town clerk’s office. The door was open and I went in. There wasn’t much to it: just a room with a couple of women sitting behind desks, a table with a few books lying on it, some filing cabinets, a picture of George Washington and a big map of the town hanging on the wall. One of the women was young and had blond hair. The other was older and fat; she had a big dish of candy on her desk. “Yes?” the blond one said.
“I’m doing a school project,” I said. “I have to find out what laws the town has on pollution.”
“Pollution?”
“Air pollution and so forth,” I said, to throw them off.
“Pollution,” the fat woman said. “Are they going to start up again?” She took a candy out of the bowl and unwrapped it. “Want one, Jeanette?” she said to the blonde.
“I better start watching my weight,” the blonde said. “I won’t be able to get into my new dress.” She looked back at me. “What do you want to know, exactly?”
“The pollution laws,” I said. “What the pollution laws are.”
“It’s a school report?” she said.
The fat woman put the candy into her mouth. “Some of these teachers ought to learn to keep their noses out of things.”
“Who’s your teacher?” the blond woman said.
I was getting myself into trouble, because if they checked up they’d find out I was lying. I began to feel a little sweaty. “Mrs. Heinz.”
“It isn’t a very popular subject in Timber Falls,” the younger woman said.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I just have to find out if the town has any laws about it.”
The blond woman sighed, got up, and went over to one of the filing cabinets. She opened a drawer and took out a big loose-leaf notebook filled with photocopies. “Here’s the town code,” she said. “Be careful with it. Sit over at that table and see if you can find what you want.�
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So I did. The town code was pretty confusing.
There was a table of contents in the front, but it didn’t say anything about pollution or the environment. I tried a couple of other topics that seemed like they might be right, like water, rivers, and air; but they weren’t. Finally I just gave up and began going through it one page at a time, scanning each page in hopes of hitting what I was looking for. It was pretty boring, and when I’d spent an hour and had only got a quarter of the way through the loose-leaf pages, I got discouraged and was ready to give up.
But I made myself keep going by telling myself that if I didn’t find anything in another half an hour, I could quit, and about fifteen minutes later I found something. It said: ‘Town Ordinance #3762 Enacted February 17, 1969, in Respect to the Quality of the Environment.” The ordinance was about a page long, and I read it all the way through. It was pretty hard for me to understand. Some of it I couldn’t figure out at all—I just didn’t know what some of the words meant. But the basic idea was clear enough: Nobody was supposed to dump anything in any of the rivers or creeks around town. You weren’t supposed to throw in even a cigarette butt or pieces of bread for the geese when they came through in spring and fall. You could fish, you could swim, and you could have a boat on the rivers, although most of them were too small or had too many rapids for boats. But you couldn’t dump anything in.
So the laws were there all right. And the next question in my mind was whether the town councilmen had to enforce the laws. Could they ignore laws if they chose? That was the next thing I had to find out.
I copied out of the town code book the parts about throwing stuff in the rivers, then I gave the book back to the blond woman. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she said.
“I think so,” I said.
“People ought to watch where they put their noses,” the fat woman said.
I blushed a little, and went outside to think about it. Who would know if the town councilmen had to enforce the pollution laws? The newspaper editor would know. I figured he was probably busy and wouldn’t want to be bothered by me, but it was worth trying anyway. So I went down Main Street and out the side road to the newspaper office. When I walked in, the editor was standing in the front room. His pipe was in his mouth, and he was putting on his jacket. “You’re back again,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said, to be polite. “I wanted to ask you something.”
He frowned and looked at his wristwatch. “I’ve only got a minute,” he said.
“It won’t take long,” I said.
He nodded toward the open door to his back office. “Okay, come on in.”
I followed him in. He sat down at his desk with his jacket on, and I stood in front of the desk. “I looked up the town code,” I said.
“Oh?” he said.
“There’s a law all right,” I said. I showed him what I’d written in my notebook.
He took the notebook, read it over, and handed it back to me. “So you’re going to do something about it after all?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m thinking about it.”
“I’ll say this,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of guts.”
When he said that, the funniest feeling swept over me. I didn’t understand it. I felt sort of warm and dazed. For a minute I forgot what I was going to say, what I was doing there, why I had come. I stood there feeling that feeling.
“So what did you want to ask me?” he said.
I remembered where I was. “Well, the thing is, do the town councilmen have to enforce the law, or can they decide which laws they want to enforce?”
“Oh, no, they have to enforce the laws,” he said.
“Why haven’t they, then?”
“Well, for one thing, that law was passed a long time ago. They probably don’t even know it’s on the books. But more important, they know the people of this town would run them out of office if they tried to enforce it.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed it at me. “Harry, I admire your attitude,” he said. Once again that funny feeling rolled over me. “But you’re going to get yourself into an awful lot of trouble if you go on with this. And you’re not going to do the town any good.”
“Maybe Herbst is just bluffing,” I said. “Maybe he won’t really close the factory if they have to put in pollution controls.”
He stood up. “You might be right,” he said. “But nobody around here wants to take the chance.” He looked at his watch again. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and gestured toward the door. I went out, and he came along behind me. When we were outside on the street, he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t want to say this inside in front of the others. Do you realize that Herbst gave your Dad five thousand dollars to make you keep quiet?”
Five thousand. The truck probably cost around fifteen thousand. I was surprised he knew about it. “I know,” I said. “Dad bought a new truck.”
“Your dad wanted Herbst to give him a truck. They settled on five thousand dollars. What’s he going to say when he finds out you’re not shutting up?”
He certainly knew a lot about everything. It was beginning to sound like a bunch of them were getting together on it. “He’d give me an awful beating if he found out,” I said.
He looked at me. “Don’t you think that’s a pretty good reason to drop it? Your dad has his faults, but he’s always kept a roof over your head and food on your plate. He won’t be able to do that anymore if you go on with this.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask, but I couldn’t help myself: “How come you know so much about it?”
“Harry, I’ve been editing this paper for over twenty years. I know things about Timber Falls you wouldn’t believe. That’s the business I’m in. After you’d been into the office the last time, I called Herbst. I wanted to find out what he was doing. I wanted to know what was going on just in case there was a story in it after all. I don’t want to be scooped by some other newspaper in my own town. I try to keep on top of things. That’s my job after all.” He looked at his watch again. “I really have to go. I’ll just say once again, you don’t know what kind of mess this could blow up into. I think you ought to drop it.”
I looked at him. “I don’t know,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re a gutsy kid all right.” Then he turned and walked away, and I stood there with that feeling running over me again. It was a feeling I’d never had before. Then suddenly I got what it was: It was the first time in my whole life that I remembered anybody saying anything nice to me, outside of the family. I’d never had anybody admire me before.
I started to walk on home feeling kind of funny and surprised. My thoughts flashed here and there without much sense to them. The funny thing was, with the editor saying all those good things about me—that I was gutsy and he admired my attitude and all that—I wasn’t so sore about the whole thing anymore. Maybe I was doing wrong to keep on with it. Maybe it wasn’t right; maybe it was the wrong thing to do. Maybe I ought to just drop the whole thing.
Suddenly I realized that it was getting on toward supper time. I started to walk faster. But just then Dad came along in the new truck and picked me up. My good mood went away. I just didn’t like being with him.
He was monitoring the CB. Some guy was talking about an accident over on the state highway. “Harry, I took the truck up the old tote road this afternoon. It just waltzed up that steep hill in third, just waltzed up it. Maybe over the weekend I’ll start teaching you how to drive it.”
He was pretty cheerful about that truck all right, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything to him. So I sat there quiet.
“Cat got your tongue?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just tired is all.”
“You getting enough sleep?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m just tired.” Luckily we got to the house just then, and I could stop talking to him. We pulled into the driveway, and we hadn’t even gotten out of t
he truck when Mom came running out of the house. It startled me because Mom didn’t usually come running anyplace like that. “Frank,” she cried. “Frank. The police called. They arrested Helen.”
We jumped out of the truck. “Arrested?” Dad said. “Where is she?”
“In New York. They found her in New York. She’s in jail. My poor baby.” She began to cry.
“Stop wailing, Doris,” Dad said. “What did they get her for?”
Tears were running down Mom’s cheeks. “Drugs,” she said. “They say she was selling drugs. And prostitution.”
THIRTEEN
Dad got back into the truck and drove into town to talk to the police, and I sat there with Mom, saying things like maybe it wasn’t true, maybe they’d got her mixed up with somebody else. It didn’t make her feel any better. Of course, I knew it was all true. But I couldn’t say that to Mom.
Finally Dad got back with the story. Helen had got picked up for prostitution, along with the women she was living with. When they searched her purse, they found a lot of cocaine in it. At first she wouldn’t tell them where she came from or anything, but then they said they would send her away for a couple of years, so she told them who she was. She was over sixteen and they could charge her, but they were willing to send her home in the custody of her parents if she’d go. The New York cops called our cops, and they worked it out so that Dad could drive down to New York and get her. So he fixed himself a thermos of coffee and set off to drive to New York. It would take him maybe six hours to get there and six hours to get back.
It was terrible. Now it was going to go all over town that Helen was a prostitute. Nobody in Timber Falls would ever talk to her again. Not even Charlie Fritz. And nobody would talk to me either. As far as us ever getting over being trash around there, that was finished. I could become a general in the air force and I’d still be trash so far as Timber Falls was concerned. Before we’d been no-good; now we would be nothing at all. I wondered if the storekeepers would even let us in their stores anymore. I wondered if they would serve us.
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