by Mike Bond
“Weird fucking world,” she says.
I said nothing, unable to disagree.
“I wasn’t going to tell you, but the Legislative hearing today was so awful, so fraudulent…” She shook her head that quick way she has, one of the billion reasons I love her. “You got your plate full already.”
“I’m doing fine,” I said, as if that could make it true.
“The Legislators just sat there, clearly bored by us citizens who’d come from all over the state, driven many hours on icy roads, taken time off work, just to ask for a little protection from this industrial nightmare happening to Maine.”
“Which Legislators?”
“The Energy and Utilities Committee. Taking testimony on two bills that could protect just a little bit of Maine – a state and national park – from wind development, and they were just going through the motions, were going to vote NO no matter how many people were begging them to pass it, no matter how disastrous it is –”
I’d promised myself not to care about this anymore. “Follow the money.”
“They even admit they passed the Wind Bill without any of them even reading it… None of them knows anything about electricity generation or the outdoors, none of them gives a damn.” She was getting next to tears which meant then she’d get even madder and at that point it would be good for me to get out of the way. “They’re so corrupt they don’t even try,” she added, “they don’t even try to look democratic anymore.”
It made my heart hurt, this devastation of Maine, and I hated all the quislings who were hustling it. “Everyone knows the Maine Legislature’s crooked. What we didn’t know is how crooked they are.” I poured us both a tidbit more. “So the question is, given the shortness of life and the multiplicity of its joys and dangers, what to do about this?”
“One of Committee members sat there checking her phone the whole time, not even noticing the people testifying, never took a note, paid no attention at all. Then she takes out a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and starts munching, even though the rules are no food in Committee chambers… She’s the one who when asked how she was going to vote on a wind-related bill said, ‘Wait, I have to call my wind lobbyist to find out…”
“So,” I repeated, “you’ve got a crooked Legislature and fake enviro groups hustling money from the wind industry that’s hustling billions from the taxpayer. And you can’t get the news out because public radio and most other media’s bought and paid for by the wind industry, who are making so much taxpayer money they can throw it at everyone, buy the entire state government if need be… and most of the state’s newspapers are owned by a politician who takes major donations from the wind industry…”
Dry oak crackled comfortably in the woodstove and threw tongues of orange light across the scarred linoleum. The air tasted of oak smoke, steaks and fries on the stove, the hint of lime at the bottom of a glass, the memory of everyone who’d lived here. The life of someone who visited once for an hour back in 1782 and sat in this kitchen with his beaver hat on his knees. The loves, transgressions, sorrows and joys of nearly two hundred and fifty years. This kitchen now full of warm peace, two people who care about each other talking over the immutability of fate, the ancient human war with evil.
“Whores,” Lexie says. “Whores, cutthroats and priests. When you look at history, they’re who always run things. And the tragedy’s how many beautiful places, people and other creatures they destroy.”
“I take exception to blaming whores,” I said equably.
“Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with being a whore. What politicians do wrong is pretending they’re not. And while a whore actually gives you something for your money, a politician takes your money and screws you in a different way.”
“So on every level,” I add, “we should free ourselves from their control.”
“They’ll keep screwing us. Strip mines, wind farms, toxic spills, wars, corporate-funded elections, pesticides, recessions, clearcuts, bailouts, trade agreements, you name it. They have all the money and power and we can’t stop them.” She cocked her head. “So what then?”
“I’ve been thinking maybe the dark side of the moon.”
She reached her glass across for more gin. “It’s either that or revolution.”
Drowning in Mysteries
THE RED-LETTERED ENVELOPE in the mail inside Abigail’s door was driving me nuts. So just after midnight I drove to Hallowell and parked three blocks from her house.
A few dim streetlights shuddered in the icy wind. Bare-limbed tree shadows danced over the glassy streets. My boots crunched in the crust that blew away in chunks. There were upstairs lights in a couple windows; everywhere near Abigail’s was dark.
Her façade of tall windows and pale siding towered over Larch Street like a haunted house, tethered to the corner between a wider street of rambling ancient homes and a narrower steep street coming up from the River that was probably in 1830 the path my ancestor took leading the cow to pasture on the ridge.
One option was to go up to the front door, smash a corner of the leaded stained glass window, reach inside to turn the handle, grab the mail and leave. Sure I’d be more visible, but who’d be looking at this time of the frigid night? But I was damned if I was going to break that beautiful glass.
Instead I wandered up the steep side street past Abigail’s driveway and barn, just like any Hallowell resident on a normal one a.m. stroll at twenty below plus wind chill.
Beyond Abigail’s driveway and barn a twelve-foot spruce hedge separated her place from the uphill neighbor. I slid through it along the back of the barn to the rear of her house. There was a small lawn deep in snow, then four steps up to the back door landing.
The top half of the back door had small panes. Regular glass.
Behind me and to my right was the back of the big square house where the woman with the round pink face, curlers and plaited pink bathrobe had seen me one of the first nights I was checking Abigail’s. But no lights were on there so I figured she was asleep.
I crouched in the lee of the hedge and waited twenty minutes to ensure no one had seen me and called the police. A cruiser would have been here in ten minutes, so if by twenty they hadn’t rolled by, chances were they didn’t know. And it was a lot easier to get away when you still outside, or to explain loitering rather than breaking and entering.
I crossed the back lawn, crackling the hardened snow and frozen grass, almost slipped on the steps, and with a gloved fist popped the bottom right-hand pane, shards tinkling on the floor inside.
Reaching through the broken pane I opened the door from inside and waited in the living room watching another twenty minutes to see if the cops arrived. If they did I still had time to get out the back and into the hedge and hopefully away.
I couldn’t just grab the mail and run, because then the cops would notice the next time they checked, that someone had been there. But since the mail hadn’t been touched, were they even checking the place?
With a shielded penlight I flipped through the mail. Mostly utility bills, bank and credit card statements, free newspapers, shopping coupons and ads – a diagnosis of America. Two handwritten letters.
But no big envelope with red magic marker saying READ THIS NOW.
Couldn’t be. I’d seen it.
Three times I checked that pile of mail. It wasn’t there.
I could have cried. I could have choked. I was going crazy.
Despondently I left and drove back to Lexie’s farm and rolled into the bunk at 02:20, exhausted and wondering at my sanity.
So of course Mitchell called.
SHE’S TOTALLY BENT,” Mitchell yells as if we’re talking into tin cans with six thousand miles of string between us, “that Representative you asked about – Deborah Johnson?”
“You know what time it is?” I grumped.
“You were awake.”
“It’s only, what…” I tried to subtract five hours from 02:30, “like ten-thirty at night your time?”
“Nine-thirty-two, sweetheart. Do your math.”
“Mitchell, I’ll call you at four am Hawaii time, wake you up for a change.”
“She’s the one you said calls her wind lobbyist to find out how to vote? The one who was a checkout clerk at Walmart before she became a Legislator? Well, right away I hit pay dirt. It was easy – these Legislators are security slobs. She and her husband – he runs a Burger King franchise, they have three bank accounts. Twenty-four grand in savings, a $10K money market and a checking account that that’s nineteen thousand in the red, almost maxed out on cash advances.”
“Sounds like the all-American family,” I yawned, trying to wake up.
“Her election committee, however…” He said nothing, drawing it out. “They have seven accounts with varying balances, total about a half million, more than enough to get her reelected. But I wandered around inside one of these accounts and found it transfers twenty-five grand a month in “loan payments” from the campaign to a bank in Cleveland that takes a two hundred dollar hit and sends it to a bank in Miami. But that bank isn’t really in Miami, it’s in the Turks and Caicos. And from there things start to really go downhill…”
“Meaning?”
“Maybe it’s the Caribbean weather, it’s too warm…”
“Huh?”
“Has to be some reason there’s so much corruption in the Caribbean…”
“Mitchell –”
“So anyway the Turks and Caicos bank doesn’t really exist, it just forwards wires. So this twenty-five grand is off to Luxembourg and from there I hit a wall. But I’ve hit the same wall before, when we were tracking wires out of Saudi and guess where they were going?”
“Pakistan?” This was based on my previous experiences with al Qaeda and the wind industry.
“No, you idiot. First Prudential Investment Bank of Boston.”
“But you can’t track it –”
“So what I’m doing next is having a look at First Prudential. And see if anyone or anything else looks familiar. It’s the whole Demo leadership… looks like there are payoffs from the wind developers to over half the Legislature–”
“It’s the endless question, Mitchell: what do we do about all this?”
“We do like Afghanistan: We take them down. One at a time.”
I was so tired I didn’t want to take anybody down. “Have a look at Maine Audubon’s website. It’s supposedly an organization of thousands of Maine bird lovers, but half its top contributors are wind industry. It testifies in legislative hearings and public meetings that wind projects don’t really hurt birds, when ornithologists everywhere are saying wind projects will drive more bird species to extinction than climate change.”
“Maybe more money’s changing hands than shows up on some of these organizations’ books. I’ll look at the finances of top directors and board members, see what connections we find.”
I had a sudden burst of almost hope. That we might get to the bottom of this. And save Maine.
Or would it would be like Jane once said, “If you love Maine, in five years don’t come back. What it’s going to look like then will make you sick.”
But all this was totally out of my element. If I hadn’t had Mitchell to help me in Hawaii with the Wind Mafia I’d be in prison now. Which meant I wouldn’t have come to Maine, and wouldn’t now be getting framed for whatever has happened to Abigail.
“When I think about it,” I says, “If Abigail does show up alive I wouldn’t put it past these cops to kill her and pin it on me.”
“Wow,” Mitchell said. “That’s how bad they want you?”
“Yeah. That’s how bad.”
“A fucking mystery, all this.”
I WAS DROWNING in mysteries. Next morning sitting in the creaky wooden rocker by the bunkhouse woodstove I tried to get them straight in my head. As in any military scenario it helps to separate unknowns into categories then seek links between them:
1. Abigail
• Can I still save her?
• If she’s dead – I could barely think this – who did it?
• What was in that letter with red magic marker? Who took it?
• Why did she vanish when I asked her about testifying for Bucky?
• Her affair with Bucky – he says there was no sex, she says there was?
• What did she really feel about her husband Ronnie Dalt’s death?
• Did she know who killed him?
• This made no sense but I had to add it: Did she kill him?
2. Ronnie Dalt’s murder
• Who killed him? Why?
• Had he really stopped selling out to the Wind Mafia?
• Who set Bucky up for the murder?
• Why has Bucky stopped talking to me?
3. The shot-out turbines
• Who took Bucky’s .308 that he hid after shooting out the first three?
• Who shot at me when I was up on the ridge looking for it? Titus McKee?
• Who shot out the latest four?
• Do any of those bullets match the ones I dug out of the tree?
4. Mitchell’s discoveries
• Why be surprised? Hasn’t everyone seen House of Cards?
• It is however destroying Maine. How can we stop it?
5. The cops are targeting me. Who told them to?
6. Don and Viv’s tragedy
• Who would risk killing people just to get rid of the signed agreements?
• What was in those agreements that made them so important?
• Or, a scary thought: did they do this just to implicate me?
• Why – what danger was I to them?
• Why did WindPower LLC’s lawyer Cruella want me off the site?
7. Me
• Am I totally crazy to be helping the guy who jailed me then stole my woman, just because he once saved my life?
• Why am I in trouble in frozen Maine instead of surfing in Hawaii?
• I want to see Pa one last time. What will happen if I leave Maine?
• If, tragically, Abigail is dead, how can I avoid a murder rap?
• How can I get to Tahiti in eighteen days?
Other than these I had few questions. I’d have liked to know the origin of the universe and what it was like to be a tyrannosaur. But I was so damn worn out I hardly cared.
I’m good in combat because instinct takes over. Instinct and thousands of hours of training. But figuring my way out of this spider’s web wasn’t instinct. I had to pick it apart skein at a time. And for this I had no training.
Plus I’m not unduly bright. And lazy too. Not a good combination.
MEANWHILE THE FIRE’S crackling contentedly in the woodstove, Lobo’s snoring on my bed (the turbines aren’t running), and I am suddenly overcome with that primal joy of being warm and safe in the middle of a blizzard. How lovely to stretch out under the rough blankets smelling of horse sweat, dog and woodsmoke. Once you don’t give a damn how dirty things are, I realized happily, how easy life becomes. Then of course I remembered how fleeting this was, that I was safe in the moment only.
Wood warms you three times, they say: when you cut it down, when you split it and when you burn it. But sadly now in Maine wind projects are driving the price of electricity so high that everyone’s burning wood to stay warm, and the roads are clogged with logging trucks while the forests are bared and of course the CO2 goes through the roof.
I was trying not to dwell on Don and Viv. They’d been wholehearted, warm people, still in love after all these years. People who loved their country and their neighbors and tried to do good by both.
I’ve seen so much death, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, but I never can steel myself against it. The extinction of a human life – or an elephant, wolf or chickadee for that matter – is such a sorrowful loss, that in a sense I realize all my battles have been against death.
Not that we can win, of course. But even when we’re getting beat up we have to fight back.
And now I was caught up in Don’s and Viv’s deaths. And directly in Abigail’s disappearance. And the cops wanted me for both.
“WE WANT TO SEE YOU.” It was C. Hart, the paunchy Augusta cop, on the phone. “Nine a.m. tomorrow.”
“You have news of Abigail?”
“We’ll tell you. Just be here.”
“Tell me now!” I yelled, but he’d shut down.
So I called Erica and actually got her on her cell. “I can’t be there,” she says. “I’ve got meetings all morning.”
“You’ve always got meetings. You don’t have a life.”
“You’re always in trouble. You don’t have a life either.”
I didn’t tell her about breaking into Abigail’s. “So what should I do?”
“Say nothing.”
Sitting there in the woodstove’s all-embracing warmth, thinking of Erica, the cops, Abigail and her dead husband, I suddenly understood how it all might have happened.
Abigail’s husband Ronnie had supposedly been killed because he was turning against the wind industry. Abigail worked for Senator Coleman, one of the Legislature’s most powerful Dems, who had a big investments in industrial wind and received lots of tasty under-the-table handouts, legal contributions and other dreck.
Had Abigail finally convinced Ronnie how corrupt the whole wind scam was – is that why he turned against it, if he did indeed turn against it? Had she shown him proof – bank records, under-the-table contributions, sealed agreements, other political-corporate deals? If so, either the wind company or the Senator or some wind construction company would have wanted him silenced. Wanted them both silenced.
Had them both silenced.
Mildred might know.
THIS TIME WE MET at a coffee shop near the Capitol. She was on her way home and kept looking out the window at the new-falling snow. I told her what I’d been thinking, that maybe the political side killed Abigail’s husband, not the industrial wind side. “But only,” I said, “if he had something on them.”