by Mike Bond
RE: TAKING OVER MAINE
DATE: January 23, 2015
We have a serious problem with Governor LePage. Despite our intense efforts to defeat him, he beat our Democratic candidate, and he’s opposed to wind power. As well, we lost the Democratic majority in the Maine Senate so we don’t have a rubber stamp there any longer. So we must HUSTLE every contract we can get before the Governor can stop us. As usual, no need to worry about wind speeds, local opposition, scenic beauty, tourism, birds or bats or other crap – none of it matters. We still have the Dems tied up so tight that if we hustle we can build TEN THOUSAND TURBINES in Maine in ten years! And make a HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS!
So PLS read the following carefully (if you don’t I’ll fire you!)
Your Best Boss and Best Friend (until I’m not).
WINDPOWER, LLC
MO for Maine
1. We’re stuck with this Governor. He’s fought us on higher electric rates, floating turbines, new transmission lines, generally been a stick in our wheels. His appointees are even trying to make us do environmental studies, and it’s going to get worse.
2. We must keep the Legislature sweet. The Dems still control the House, and they’ve been our lapdog for years, let’s keep them there. Any incumbent on our side who raises his rate we pay him or her, no questions asked. As long as they’re not going down in the next election.
3. But also check out new candidates. We’re grooming a few now – the enviro look, patriotism, hard work, you know the image (the button-down plaid shirt, jeans and work boots is always a winner). But if you see a new candidate who might play for our team let me know ASAP.
4. Keep working the enviros. We’re getting them at slave wages. They send out millions of emails and go to hearings and knock on doors and do half our work for us. Overall we’ve paid less than a million to all the Maine enviros during the whole of last year – you can’t beat that for ROI.
5. Run enough ads in the papers to keep them on our side. A newspaper rarely bites the hand that feeds it. Particularly when it’s starving. And people believe the damn ads. Go figure.
6. Plus we own the big southern Maine papers. So check them every day and make sure they keep singing our song.
7. And we own Maine Public Radio, they run our ads and pro-wind talk. But we’re increasing their funding too, just to be sure. And we’ll be running more on private stations too, they’re so cheap.
8. And we own the birders. They support turbines that kill millions of birds. Go figure.
9. Keep up the pressure nationally. As long as Obama’s in the White House we can stick taxpayers for billions in turbines as fast as we can build them.
10. Don’t be afraid to spend money to get us into the end zone. Each turbine built is a gold mine for our company. We’ll make billions, so share generously with our friends, and anyone you can impress. It would be a shame to lose the whole deal because we didn’t spend a few million more (it’s not even our money, remember?).
The saddest thing, I realized, turning from that screen, was that it didn’t surprise me.
“Don’t let it get to you,” Mitchell said. “Some day we’ll reveal all this.”
“It’ll be too late.”
“Yeah,” he grimaced. “Seems for Maine it’s maybe already too late.”
AT 11:00 NEXT MORNING I reached Waipio Valley, all the way wondering is Pa still alive, will he know me, should I help him paddle out to sea?
Along the King’s Path I couldn’t help but remember how I’d felt the last time being there, still hoping he could beat death, what he’d told me of the woman he’d loved in Hué and how she’d died under American bombs, of the crippled girl whose throat he’d cut and how once that happened he could never go back to who he’d been, never expect a woman he loved to live.
And it occurred to me that the girl I’d shot in Afghanistan was the same thing, even though she’d been burned alive and begged to die, even so I was marked for life and never could be with a woman I loved – like what had happened with Lexie… Like my brief interlude with Abigail, and now she was absent and probably dead.
Things you don’t want to think about. But if you want epiphany, I realized, they’re the other side of the coin.
When I got to Pa’s place he wasn’t there.
The Great Blue
IRAN DOWN the path till it burst open onto the wide black beach, and there he was sitting under a coconut palm, his canoe on the sand beside him.
“Hey,” he tried to give me a big smile. “You came.”
I sat beside him, out of breath. “Said I would.”
“It’s time.”
I felt all hollow inside, as if anything I said or wanted would be wrong. “How the fuck you get this canoe down here?”
“Ambrosio.” His neighbor Ambrosio was the kind of guy you could depend on when you needed to die. For a while Pa said nothing more, his dim eyes on the surf, the seabirds pecking at the foam, the black beach in which the tumbling white cumulus and blue sky were perfectly reflected. “You’re not,” he said finally, “going out with me.”
“Just a couple miles, Pa. I’ll borrow a canoe from Ambrosio.”
“Nope.” He coughed. “Don’t make me talk.”
We sat for a while, my brain and heart in torment, he watching the surf. “You have to push me out… too high.”
By this he meant the breakers were too tall for him to get the canoe through, they’d swamp him. I tried to imagine what it would be like, out on the ocean in its usual eight-foot swell, him in that little canoe.
“Fuckin sharks,” he said, as if reading my mind.
“You should die on land, Pa.” It hurt so bad to even say it. “Let us bury you.”
“I’m a fuckin Seal,” he coughed. “Seals die in the water.”
“Not if they have a choice.”
“Shut the fuck up. Don’t argue me.”
I smiled and squeezed his forearm, shocked anew how skinny and weak it felt.
For a while we didn’t speak. The waves rolled steadily in and toppled on the sand, throwing up foam and mist, sliding up the beach and hissing back, steady as a beating heart.
“Come all the way from Japan,” he said. “Those waves.”
“Which way would you go?”
He snickered. “Go west, young man.”
“You should go back, die in your own home.” How hard it is, I thought again, to talk of death to someone who’s dying.
But Pa wasn’t one to mince words, or kid himself. “I got maybe a day,” he said. “Maybe two.”
“Shit, Pa,” I joked, “you’re gonna live forever.”
He smiled spit-flecked lips, his haggard face already half a skull. “I love you, son. I’ve always loved you with all my heart.” He took a breath. “For who you are, not just because you’re my son.” He laid a spindly hand on my arm. “Time to go.”
He pushed himself to his feet, rocking there on feeble legs, bent over his canoe. “Help me. Drag this.”
Stored inside the canoe were ten bottles of water, four bottles of cane liquor, a plastic baggie with morphine pills, six joints and waterproof matches, two cans of salted peanuts, a plastic yogurt container for bailing, two jars of peanut butter, two cans of Spam and two of baked beans, four papayas, a handful of passion fruit, a rain poncho and a fishing pole. “Where the fuck you going, Pa?” I said. “Alaska?”
He pushed weakly at the canoe. “Too cold up there.” The canoe slid a few inches. “For Chrissake help me.”
With my heart screaming I pulled his canoe down the soft wet sand to the water’s edge. He climbed inside and grabbed the paddle. “Give me a push.”
I leaned down to hug him. “I love you Pa.”
“I know you do for Chrissake. Push me out.”
I stripped and waded into the surf, tugged the canoe free and swam it ahead of me out through the roaring waves. It took a little water but broke through, riding triumphantly over the crests, his paddle flashing as it rose and fell against t
he swell.
When he was maybe fifty yards out he turned and waved, a last skeletal glance against the midday sun, and slowly, slowly the canoe drifted away, the paddle flashing, into the western ocean from which our Hawaiian ancestors a thousand years ago had come.
I swam ashore and sat on the beach too numb to think, almost not breathing, my heart empty of everything but sorrow. He turned into a spot and vanished, and I watched after him long after he’d disappeared.
Night had fallen. I rose, my body sore and cold, dressed and walked back up the King’s Path to the empty house and sat on the porch trying to understand. Kept seeing him out there under the endless blanket of the stars, the night waves rushing past, alone and free.
I didn’t give a damn about myself or what might happen to me in Maine. I wanted to be out there with Pa.
98 HOURS after leaving Lexie’s I was back, having landed in Montreal at 21:00. It was too cold and dark to travel, so Pierre Van Brughe stayed at the Best Western for $85 US, then by bus and hitchhiking reached Coburn Gore, took a quick hop across the border and a few bus rides and hitches and now I was sitting in Lexie’s warm kitchen with Lobo’s muzzle on my knee and it seemed I’d never left. Except that Pa was out on the Pacific somewhere, or dead, and that was a hole that could never be filled.
“Things have been busy while you were gone,” Lexie said, turning from the counter where she was mixing oatmeal chocolate chip cookies to take tomorrow to her students. “The Maine Supreme Court approved WindPower’s destruction of Passadumkeag Mountain over the lawsuits of all the folks who live near it –”
“I don’t want to hear.” Passadumkeag is one of eastern America’s most magnificent mountains, a long soaring backbone of trees and granite, and it was impossible that anyone would harm it. But it was true, I realized, what Doris McKee had told me before I left: What people want doesn’t matter any more.
“Hilarious that Maine Audubon is supporting WindPower even though Passadumkeag is a major flyway… they got more money from WindPower – shows right up on their website…”
It occurred to me that soon they’d be selling little plastic birds, made of course in China, that you could put out on your bird feeder since all the real birds were being shredded by the wind turbines, and they’d still be taking money from industrial wind.
It was hard not to think of all the magnificent people who have loved and protected Maine – Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt, Margaret Chase Smith, Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Sarah Orne Jewett whose Country of the Pointed Firs is one of America’s 19th Century masterpieces, Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped deliver America from slavery, E.B. White, Stephen King, Kenneth Roberts, Nelson Rockefeller, who gave so much of his inheritance to Maine, Joshua Chamberlain, the man who saved the Union at Gettysburg…
What would they say, what would they feel, when they saw the wind turbines everywhere desecrating their sacred Maine for no reason except making millions for these execrable investment banks, their hired politicos, lawyers, contractors and other thieves – what would they say?
Percival Baxter, that unruly old man who gave Maine its greatest treasure, Katahdin and all the lands around this magnificent mountain, the first place the sun hits the United States. Gave it to the people of Maine To be forever wild. What would he say, to the hundreds of howling turbines being built around Maine’s most sacred mountain?
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Ellen Chase, Rockwell Kent, Robert Coffin, Mary McCarthy, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Beston, Booth Tarkington, May Sarton… the list goes on and on… what would they say to this desecration of Maine?
“How’s Bucky?” I said to change the subject.
“Saw him yesterday… He’s losing hope.” She sat at the table, mixing bowl on her knees. “So am I.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Sometimes it seems we just can’t beat them. On any level.”
I told her about what Mitchell had found in the Wind-Power emails, the one from their CEO telling his “team” they could build ten thousand turbines in Maine and make billions if they could only get Governor LePage out of the way.
There was no point in martinis or further talk. We ate a silent dinner and I went to bed early, thinking of Pa out on the endless sea – or was he dead already?
Lobo climbed on my bed, snuffling her wet snout against my neck and wriggling tighter into the covers. Then came a thunderous thump at the door; not daring to ignore it I opened and in stalked Max, who sniffed my boots and leaped onto the bed, turned around three times and settled down by my pillow. And soon it seemed the world could not be totally hopeless when you had a dog and cat to share life with.
HIGHWAY TO HELL was screaming in my ear. I glanced around; the room was dawn-gray. I found my phone. “Damn it,” I muttered, half-asleep. “Can’t you wait till tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Erica, not pleased. “If that’s how you feel–”
“I thought it was Mitchell.” I rubbed my face trying to wake up. “Lovely to hear your voice.”
She sounded sleepy too. “I set my phone to message me every time Abigail shows up on a police wire.”
“Oh Jesus.” May she not be dead.
“Police have her. In Ellsworth.”
“She’s okay?”
“I wouldn’t say she’s okay. They holding her on Murder One.”
The Fix is In
“MURDER ONE?” I half-yelled at Erica, trying to wake up. “What the Hell? Why?’
“For killing Ronnie Dalt.”
Abigail was alive! I felt a soaring joy, a crazy need to see her. “Killed her husband? That’s nuts.”
“I don’t make the rules, sweetie,” Erica said. “Just circumvent them.”
Could Abigail have killed her husband? No, she wouldn’t murder anyone. Or would she? Then I had the sudden realization that if she was alive I could no longer be charged with killing her.
“I’m going back to sleep,” Erica said. “Just wanted you to know.”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” I added, but she was gone.
Abigail was alive! I had to see her, couldn’t sleep, got up and stumbled around the bunkhouse stubbing my toe on the woodstove while Lobo watched me with that curiosity dogs exhibit about people: what you’re doing is stupid, but then again you’re only human.
But I was still the only suspect in Don’s and Viv’s sad end. And for shooting out Titus’s turbines. Each meant serious time. And Cruella from WindPower LLC still wanted to sue me. Go ahead, I told her. You’ll get an ancient Karmann Ghia, a few surfboards and trophies, and a couple of well-used wetsuits.
And Pa was still out there on the ocean maybe. Or worse.
Abigail had said she didn’t like her husband, but she was far too smart and empathetic in her own sarcastic way to ever hurt anyone.
Or so it seemed.
Now Bucky would be free. The cops couldn’t accuse two people of the same crime.
Not unless, I realized, they’d done it together.
“AMAZING,” was all Mitchell could say. “All this time, when you were begging them to do something, they were already looking for her. For murder.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Anyway I’ve been thinking this out in a wider dimension… All these communities getting hit with wind projects are suing, trying to stop them. So if they succeed, guess what?”
“The fucking towers don’t go up.”
“Which can become precedent – ask your friend Erica– and put the whole scam at risk.” He waited. “So in goes the fix.”
“Fix?”
“The Maine Supreme Court. The fix is in. Came down from the White House: Crush these anti wind appeals and lawsuits. This is a national security issue. Wind power is an essential segment of our new energy matrix, and its opponents are funded by the Koch Brothers and other far-right oil groups. Throw out or deny all anti-wind suits.”
“Nah, can’t be. These judges are sworn to be independent.”
/> “I have it.”
“Have what?”
“A call from Shannon O’Lear on the White House staff to Judge Drury on the Maine Supreme Court. The whole conversation. She called every judge the same afternoon.”
Perhaps it should have made me happy to realize that here was another crooked level we could reveal, but all I felt was sorrow.
BY 11:30 Abigail’s in Augusta jail and I’m on the other side of the glass.
“What the fuck,” I say, “is this all about?”
She looks at me hard. “I didn’t like him any more but I would never have hurt him in any way.”
I had the same rush of awareness I’d had with Bucky when he’d told me the same thing barely a month ago in Warren State Prison. “I believe you.”
She nodded as if she expected this. It made me feel closer, trust her even more. I went back to my earlier thought process. “Who wants to pin it on you?”
She shrugged. “Whoever did it?”
“Or whoever wanted to stop you before you blew the whistle –”
“Maybe,” she nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”
“So that would be our perps –”
“WindPower LLC…” She gave me a half-smile. “I can kill their projects. I can invalidate them. And half the Demo leadership.” She glanced up at the ceiling looking for the pickup. “I shouldn’t be saying all this.”
“Everyone at your office is delighted… We were all afraid you were dead.”
She looked down, nodded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know… what to do.”
“Mildred cried when I called her. But they can’t understand the murder rap.”
“I can.”
“I talked to a lawyer in Portland. She’s seeing if she can get you out.”
“On what?”
“She’s pushing personal recognizance but thinks they’ll want two hundred grand.”
“I can do that.” She leaned forward. “The insurance. From Ronnie’s death.”
It took me a minute to digest this. “Okay. I’ll tell her.”
“I want to get out.” She looked into my eyes. “I want to be with you.”