“Such as?” she asked.
Alex would have continued even without the prompt. He was on a roll, now, with an indulgent audience. “Such as, permafrost holds in methane, which is a greenhouse gas probably more destructive than carbon dioxide. When it melts, it releases the methane, warming the planet more, melting yet more permafrost. At higher elevations, permafrost helps contribute to healthy forests. When the permafrost goes and the temperatures warm, trees are dry and stressed. Drying trees essentially call out to the beetles, saying ‘eat me!’ Around the world, tundra fires are increasing, releasing ever more greenhouse gases. In the Arctic, ice sheets are thinning and shrinking. That has a double-pronged effect. The Arctic icepack works as a natural cooler for the northern hemisphere, so melting ice contributes to warming that way. And white ice reflects heat back into the atmosphere, while dark water draws it in, just like a white car stays cooler than a black one in summer. A shrinking icepack means less white ice and more dark water, exacerbating the effects. And subsea permafrost is starting to melt, releasing yet more methane. The whole thing is a natural feedback loop that has the potential to make things a lot hotter, a lot faster, than earlier models predicted.”
“Thank you for the lecture, Al Gore,” Robbie said with a mischievous grin.
“Whatever you might think about Al Gore, on this one he’s got, like ninety-seven percent of the world’s climate scientists on his side. Really, the only ones who aren’t on board are the ones employed by oil companies, and their whole goal is to muddy the water, to make it appear that the science isn’t in. But it is.” He indicated the dead, red pines. “It’s right in front of you.”
She studied the trees, nodding her head slightly. “You said you’re not a scientist.”
“I’m not. I’ve read a lot about it, and I understand some of what I’ve read. I’ve also talked to people in the field. You’d be surprised at the access money buys you. Or maybe you wouldn’t.”
“So you’re just a rich guy who’s interested in it? What’s that word? A dill…”
“Dilettante,” he confirmed. He had stopped by one of the trees and started working on a core sample, glad it gave him something else to focus on. “And thanks. But yeah, I guess that basically sums it up. I’m an interested amateur, and I’m trying to affect the conversation by making a movie.”
“Where’d your money come from?”
He acted like he didn’t hear the question. He liked Robbie, liked her a lot. She didn’t seem antagonistic toward the idea of climate change, though she wasn’t ready to embrace it. She was not highly educated, but she was smart and well-spoken, and very capable in her chosen field.
Which was, he reflected, more than he could say for himself.
* * *
Bored, tired of waiting for Alex to get back, Peter and Ellen had gone into town—what there was of it—to explore the shops. It turned out there were not many, and the ones they found were far from exciting. They were strolling through a place called Earl’s Emporium, about which they had shared a good laugh before going in. The storefront of the grand-sounding store was maybe thirty-six feet across, and it had a depth of a couple of hundred feet at the most. “I’d expect an emporium to have five floors, at least,” Peter said as they entered. “Plus an annex or two. This looks more like the Feed ‘N’ Seed.”
Ellen laughed. “What’s that?”
“Something I just made up. But don’t be surprised if we find it on the next block.”
“If there is another block.”
Part of what he liked about Ellen was her willingness to go along wherever his own inherent wackiness might lead. He was prone to flights of imagination, to free-associating his way through life, except when he was working. Cinema, he took seriously. Sex, too. And good pot, when he could get it.
Everything else? Better when viewed through skewed lenses, he thought. One of these days he would shoot the world’s most perfect porn film while high, and then he could retire, having achieved the pinnacle of all his interests at once. Retire, or die. Until then, having someone like Ellen along for the ride helped keep life endurable.
They passed through a display of kitchenware, plates and glasses and cheap pots and pans, and suddenly found themselves surrounded by maternity clothes. Beyond that there appeared to be a toy section. On the next aisle to the left, Peter saw sporting goods: basketballs and hoops, ice skates, golf clubs, and more. “This place really does have everything,” he said. “If by everything, you mean anything made in China and sold over here at cheap enough prices to drive American manufacturers out of business.”
“I guess it serves the needs of the town pretty well, though,” Ellen countered. “I mean, where else are you going to get baby formula and lumberjack shirts and Bic pens? There’s probably no Walmart for a hundred miles.”
“Thank God for small favors. This is just the sort of place they love to target and destroy.”
Peter was actually trying on one of the aforementioned lumberjack shirts—red and blue and yellow plaid flannel—when he overheard another customer mention wolves. The word spurred a thought he’d had earlier, but hadn’t brought up to Ellen yet. “That’s really what our movie should be about,” he said.
She was looking through an assortment of T-shirts with bad cartoon art on them. “What?”
“The wolves,” he said. “Or rather, the reaction of the townspeople to them.
“What’s that got to do with dead trees?” Ellen asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. But how boring are a bunch of beetles? Wolves are elemental, primal. Nature’s perfect hunting machines versus human beings with the technology to destroy them, once and for all. But will the wolves stand for it? And will the humans marshal the resources necessary to pull it off? Will they cower in fear as the wolves take them apart, one by one? Or will they reach some sort of mutual accommodation, each species allowing the other a place on Earth?”
He tore off the flannel shirt and tossed it onto the floor beneath the rack it had been hanging on. Job security for someone, he figured: cleaning up after he and Ellen visited a store. She was still pawing through the T-shirts, so he reached around with his right hand and grabbed her right breast, using his left to cup her ass. She giggled and squirmed a little, pressing her behind more firmly into his grasp.
They had made it another aisle over, a wonderland of tacky colored baskets and displays of plastic flowers, when he overheard more of the conversation that had sent him off on the wolf tangent.
“…ask me, they ought to slaughter every one of ‘em,” a man was saying. He was white, middle-aged, with a pasty face, short brown hair, and a bulging gut overhanging the waistband of his khaki pants. The same description also applied to his companion, a woman who could only have been his wife, except that her hair was a little longer and artificially blond, and her pants were sea green. Peter thought she had probably been a real beauty, thirty years or so earlier. “Liberals keep stoppin’ people from driving them into extinction,” the man continued, “they’ll just keep comin’ back. Some things don’t deserve to live, and wolves is one of ‘em.”
Peter exploded. “See?” he said loudly. “This is what I’m talking about! The minute there’s a potential conflict, the response is not, ‘what can we do to ameliorate or mitigate this?’ It’s, ‘what can we fucking kill?’”
“I wasn’t talking to you, pal,” the man said. “I never seen you before in my life.”
“Which means what, that I’m not allowed to express an opinion?”
“Means I sure as hell don’t care what your opinion is.”
“Peter,” Ellen said, tugging at his sleeve. “Let’s go.”
He ignored her and raised his voice even more. “Maybe if you were exposed to a few more opinions, you’d make more sense! You want to drive a major mammalian predator into extinction? Do you have any idea, the remotest clue, what that would do to the ecological balance?”
“Come on, Titus,” the man’s wife pleaded
. “He isn’t worth it.”
But Titus paid his wife no more attention that Peter had Ellen. “Right now the only thing I want to see extinct is you!” he blustered. “My Winchester’s out in the truck, too.”
“That’s perfect! Got a problem? Shoot something! Difference of opinion? There’s a bullet for that! Jesus Christ, your kind makes me sick!” He was pushing too far, but the regulator that most people had in their heads that kept them from going over the line had never been entirely functional in his case. He turned to the man’s wife, who regarded him as one might a mentally defective pet that had just pissed all over an expensive rug, and held his thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “I bet Titus has a tiny little dick, doesn’t he? That’s the only thing that could explain him. He’s got to be a blowhard to compensate for not being able to pleasure you.”
By now, store employees were rushing toward them. The wife’s face had gone crimson, while Titus was eggplant-colored. His mouth had disappeared, his hands balled into fists. With one of the store employees screaming his name, Titus punched Peter in the solar plexus. The blow was surprisingly solid, considering that Titus looked like he might last have been in good physical condition around the time of the Reagan presidency.
Still, all it did was send Peter further over the edge. He gave Titus an open-handed shove in the chest, which sent the man reeling into a display of baskets. Titus fell to the ground, baskets raining down around him.
His wife let out a piercing screech. A trio of employees—one elderly man, one middle-aged woman in a red apron, and one young man, a stockboy, Peter guessed—surrounded Titus. The two men started trying to help him up while the woman stormed toward Peter, rage darkening her face. “How dare you?” she cried. “How dare you? Shame on you!”
“Lady, he started it,” Peter said. But he wasn’t sure if that was the case. Titus had thrown the first punch, but Peter could have let him express his opinion, instead of getting in his face. Maybe he hadn’t been asking for a fight, but surely his actions had led inexorably in that direction.
“Mr. Johnston must be twice your age!”
“Then he should be old enough to know better,” Peter said.
“Peter, apologize to the nice man,” Ellen said. “And then let’s get out of here.”
“Don’t think that either of you are going anywhere, young lady,” the woman said. “I’ve already called the police.”
“Oh, fuck me,” Ellen said.
“Don’t make it worse,” the woman said. “You stay right here and keep your filthy mouth closed.”
“Fine,” Peter said. “Whatever. Just—he did start it. That’s all I’m saying. He started it.”
19
Dr. Norman Steinhilber’s office had always fascinated Reverend Gil Calderon. It was not a big room, but it was jammed with more stuff than any three antique stores. And it wasn’t always the same. Gil had seen old books—ancient ones, practically, seemingly turning to dust right there on the shelves—on one visit, then the next time those books were gone, but there were others, massive volumes of the paintings in the Louvre, maybe, or the castles of the Rhine valley. Once he had seen a plastic toy of Magilla Gorilla, a character from an old cartoon show. But the next time he had been there, in the spot where the toy had been was a complete set of surgical implements from the Civil War. On yet another occasion, Norman had shown him a tiny oil painting, maybe three or four inches square, that he swore had been painted by Rembrandt.
This time, he sat in his usual chair across from Norman’s big desk, but it seemed that all the lights in the office had been dimmed. There was a cone of light in which he could see; around the edges, though, everything was dark, blurred. Indistinct. His world had become indistinct.
“I won’t lie to you, Gil, I’m concerned,” the doctor said. “The glaucoma has worsened since the last time. You really need to see a vision specialist, down in the city.”
“I’ll drive right down there,” Gil said with a bitter laugh.
“Okay, not the best idea. But surely you’ve got somebody who would do it. You’d want to plan to spend the night there, but I’m sure Silver Gap can get by without you for thirty-six hours or so.”
“I know that,” Gil said. “It’s not just that. It’s…I’m just so tired of it. Of everything.”
Norman heaved a great sigh. “Living with illness isn’t easy. Ever. And living with a significant loss of something so basic as sight, such a huge way of how we perceive the world, is especially traumatic. On the bright side, if you get it properly treated, your vision can stabilize. It doesn’t have to keep getting worse. But that will require treatment that I can’t give you here.”
“I know, Norman.”
“And there are tools you can use, as well. Magnifiers, adaptive appliances with extra-large readouts. Hell, you can use simple paint to create contrast around things like light switches and doorways, to help you cope.”
“My congregation will love that.”
“Gil, they love you. You’re the reason they attend the church. They’ll be fine with anything you have to do to function. Don’t worry about that.”
“Thanks, Norman,” Gil said. He appreciated the reassurance, though he already knew it was true.
He came to the doctor for sound advice and friendship, as much as for medical reasons. He already knew there was nothing Steinhilber could do about his vision, which was getting worse all the time. He had really come hoping that the opportunity would arise to discuss another concern—less medical than psychological—but one that was just as grave. If not more so.
He was convinced—had been for some time—that he was a sex addict. The problem wasn’t that his flock didn’t love him, but that some of them loved him too much, and enabled his addiction.
He had grown up in the Catholic Church, but had left it because he couldn’t stand the enforced celibacy. Nobody expected him to be celibate now, not at the nondenominational Church in the Woods. But they expected him to leave the married women alone, and the young ones, the teens. They expected him not to spend hours every night surfing porn websites when he should have been ministering to the sick and writing sermons.
He had hoped that moving to a small town would limit his opportunities, help him keep his urges under control. But it hadn’t. The women and girls he was with all seemed more than happy to keep his secret, even when they learned that they were not the only ones. He’d had sex with at least a dozen of his congregants. And he wanted more.
He believed that as his vision worsened, his other appetites grew stronger.
Stronger, and more extreme. Harder to resist.
He couldn’t bring himself to say it, though. Norman would understand, would offer sage counsel.
But that counsel would be to knock it off, to get a grip on his sick self-indulgence.
He’d already heard that advice. He’d been giving it to himself for years. He had never heeded it, and he wasn’t about to start now.
Twenty-eight years, he had made a living by arguing that God made man in His image and gave humanity free will, so people could choose to turn to Him. Now he was a slave to his own lizard brain, shackled by his lusts. A walking, breathing lie.
“There something else, Gil?” Norman asked.
“No. No, I think that does it. Thanks for your help.”
“I mean it, Reverend. There are some great eye guys in Denver. I can refer you.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Norman. Thanks again.”
Gil got to his feet, unsteady at first—surprising how much vision impacted balance—then lasered in on the door. He didn’t run into anything on the way there, which he counted as a small blessing. He sent a silent prayer toward the heavens, and negotiated the hallway to the front door, and then out to his car.
* * *
On the way back to town, Alex and Robbie had come within cell phone range, and he’d had three messages from Ellen telling him that Peter had been arrested. They had gone directly to the jail, and Rob
bie waited while he handled the logistics. They were on their way to the Jeep when someone called his name.
At the second “Mr. Converse!” he turned around. The jail was actually three cells in the basement of the Town Hall building, with a separate entrance at the back of the building. There was also a back door up six wide steps, and the police chief was standing at the top of those stairs, the door slowly swinging closed behind him. Alex remembered that his name was Deeds. The chief was burning a stare into him, his hands on his hips, star on his deep chest. His mustache twitched a little. Alex got the sense of a man who commanded others not through ability and experience so much as force of will, as if Chief Deeds, having decided he should be the police chief, or having been appointed to that job, had figured out that he needed to project power. It didn’t seem to rest all that naturally in him, though, and Alex got the sense that he was eternally struggling with it, quashing weakness and mining himself for strength.
“Yes?” Alex said.
Having been acknowledged, Deeds started down the stairs. Softly, Alex said, “Get in the Jeep,” and he started toward the staircase. He would meet the chief halfway and see what the man wanted.
“Heard you bailed your friend out.”
“He’s my employee,” Alex corrected. “I don’t know that I’d call him my friend.”
“That’s even better,” Deeds said. “We can’t always control our friends, right?”
“Or our employees, apparently.”
“I guess so.”
“Look, I’m sorry for any trouble he caused. I’ll cover any damages. But I don’t own the guy, okay? He works for me, but he’s his own man.”
Deeds ran a finger across his mustache, smoothing it down. “I understand that. And I understand that you’re a wealthy man. Lots of money buys lots of influence in some places. Back in Los Angeles, I expect you can pay your way out of all kinds of trouble.”
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