Chapter Six
Alex woke up again at six.
He had an internal alarm that worked as well as any store-bought clock he’d ever had. He wasn’t sure when he had fallen asleep again—he was still at the edge of the bed, his legs dangling off—but obviously he had. When he’d turned in, there still hadn’t been any hot water in the joint, but the owner must have got the water heater going because when Alex tried the shower, he only had to wait a couple of minutes before the bathroom filled with steam. While he was out to dinner with Peter and Ellen, someone had come in, made the bed and left towels and soap.
Although he traveled with his own soap, shampoo, and conditioner, he used the motel’s because he wanted whoever had left them to notice that he had noticed. Alex Converse might have been the heir to the Converse Coal fortune, but he tried to remember that not everyone had been born rich, and that even hotel housekeepers—which he doubted this place had, at the moment—deserved respect and needed to feel appreciated.
His family business had been responsible for terrible environmental degradation, for clogging rivers with sediment from mountaintop removal, for clear-cutting forests, for pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Alex couldn’t make it never have happened. He couldn’t even shut down the company, because stockholders controlled it now, and he had only a minority interest.
Instead, he did everything he could to counteract the destruction that had made him rich. The Alex Converse Foundation funded groups fighting climate change and other environmental battles and supported political candidates who shared those goals. Those were baby steps, though. You helped elect someone and then maybe that person voted the way you wanted, and maybe they didn’t. You worked for months or years to get a bill inching through a state legislature, or Congress, only to see it fail or be watered down so much that it lost its teeth. Alex tried to be patient, but sometimes he felt like a feather in a tornado, trying to make headway but forever blown in circles by forces far more powerful than he could ever be.
Finally, the idea for the film had come to him. He had never made a movie, but he understood the persuasive powers of moving images. He was no celebrity, no Al Gore or Michael Moore—his name was known mostly to the fundraisers for the groups he supported—but he had done a lot of research on climate change, and he thought he had an approach that would attract some notice. Plus, he could afford to market the hell out of it.
Only a couple of decades ago, in the wake of Gore’s movie, people had believed in climate change—what had once been known as “global warming.” Since then, though, the deniers had made headway, thanks to phony interest groups backed by oil companies—and, he knew, other big energy industry companies, including Converse Coal—buying off scientists who helped spread the lie that climate change was nothing but a liberal hoax.
The evidence, in fact, was all around. Here in the Rocky Mountains, glaciers were melting, and bark beetle devastation had come about when winters ceased being cold enough to kill off the beetles every year. Elsewhere, there were disappearing wetlands and prolonged drought, powerful storms and warming oceans and calving of the Antarctic ice shelf and enough other symptoms to convince any, he thought, but the willfully blind.
When he got out of the shower, he dressed quickly and walked down to bang on the door of the cabin that Peter and Ellen shared. She answered, already dressed, and told him they were up and getting ready. Surprised, but pleased, Alex left them to it and walked back to his cabin.
A few minutes after seven, he parked the Lexus in the lot behind the big brick Town Hall building, where a crowd of about fifty had gathered. Many, as he had expected, carried rifles or shotguns, and more than a few had handguns on their hips. Someone had set up a table with two coffee urns, hot water, teabags, and several steel trays of doughnuts. Alex recognized the woman who had been running the restaurant last night, the Cup & Cow, standing behind the food table.
Alex, used to the temperate southern California clime, had outfitted himself in a Mountain Hardwear Sub Zero SL jacket, North Face Outbound pants, and fur-lined leather gloves. His boots were from Asolo, and by themselves had probably cost more than most of these people had spent on everything they wore. He saw plenty of flannel, denim, and down.
The vast majority of the people were white, but there were a handful of Latinos and a couple of black men. The guy Peter had pissed off at the restaurant was there, talking to an enormously fat man who didn’t look much older than fifteen but who almost certainly was. A double-barreled shotgun looked like a child’s toy in his hands. A couple of feet from them stood a pair of hard-looking, rawboned women with short, steely hair and masculine clothes.
“Guess we found the dyke contingent,” Peter said with a snicker.
Alex hadn’t slept well enough to put up with Peter’s shit. That, or he needed caffeine even more than he wanted to admit. “Try not to offend anyone for at least an hour, Peter. Try really hard.”
Alex was overdressed, considering that the autumn had not yet turned really cold, even at this elevation. And he was overdoing it with his pricey new duds, compared to the lived-in clothing of the locals. Peter and Ellen hadn’t gone so whole hog on the outdoor gear; both dressed as if they were out for a stroll on the Santa Monica Promenade. Peter was unshaven, with fair whiskers stubbling his cheeks, and grouchy.
They were helping themselves to coffee and doughnuts when a stocky man with short dark hair clapped his hands together a couple of times. His mustache was a stiff, mostly black thatch riding his lip. He wore a dark blue coat with a gold star on the chest, and a tan cowboy hat. The crowd quieted and directed their attention toward him.
“Thanks for coming out today, folks,” he said. “Looks like I know most of you, but there are a couple newcomers here, and we appreciate you taking part in this effort, too. For anybody who don’t know me, I’m Chief Deeds.”
He ticked his head toward two officers standing at his left, a tall black man with a mustache rivaling his own, and a shorter, skinny white guy whose prominent nose and receding chin gave him an unfortunate rodent-like appearance. “These here are officers Jones and Honeycutt, for those that don’t know them,” the chief continued. “We’re here to track down Mike Hackett. I got some pictures here that his wife Marie gave me, for anyone don’t remember what Mike looks like. I figure he’s fixed most of your trucks, one time or another, and you’ll recall the smile on his face when he took your money.”
There was general laughter in the crowd. Alex felt like a stranger crashing a family reunion. He was pretty sure that he, Peter, and Ellen were the only outsiders, the ones for whom Chief Deeds had intended his introductions.
“I should also thank John Fredericks of Fredericks Mining for buying the coffee and doughnuts. Where are you, John?”
A burly, bearded man in a plaid hunting coat and cap raised one hand. “Right here, Morris!”
“Well, thanks a lot, John. We appreciate it and I know the mayor’s wife appreciates the extra business.”
“Maybe she can mention that to him next tax season,” John Fredericks said, drawing another laugh from the crowd.
The chief continued with an overview of the basic strategy. His officers had located Hackett’s truck, so the search party would convoy over to where it had been parked, and fan out from there. Everybody would stay no more than five or six feet from the people on either side of them, because any farther and somebody lying on the ground, maybe hurt and needing help, could be missed. Where terrain demanded it, they would adjust, but that was the plan.
As people flocked toward their trucks and Jeeps, Alex headed for one of the big urns. A slender blonde woman in a puffy down vest, snug jeans, and calf-high boots was moving in the same direction, so Alex stopped short and gestured her in. “Ladies first,” he said. “I guess standard city manners apply here in the mountains, right?”
She shot him a frown. “We’re not barbarians.” With that, she filled her Styrofoam cup and walked away, not once looking back at him.
Blew that one, he thought.
He hadn’t noticed until she’d glared at him how pretty she was, her features cleanly carved, a light spray of freckles gracing the curve of her nose, her green eyes direct and sparkling in the soft morning light. The frown had accentuated the bulge of her plump lower lip. Shoulder-length hair framed her face, bangs cutting a straight line across her forehead.
Alex had been married once; married too young, really. He had always seen himself as a married man, a family man, since his early teens, and Steph had played into that self-image. She had seemed perfect in every way: smart, beautiful, able to tell a joke or take one with equal ease. She hadn’t come from money but she wasn’t freaked out by his, or particularly interested in it. She was a seeker, as Alex had been at that point in his life. A seeker after truth, after beauty, after the answers to every question that life put before her, and they had decided to search together. They married after a seven-month courtship, and two years after that she got pregnant. Alex was only twenty-three, Steph a year older.
Eleanor was four months old when she died. SIDS, the coroner said, adding that it was an imprecise diagnosis, a name applied to various conditions that were only barely understood.
Steph went three weeks later, jumping off a high cliff onto jagged boulders. Police found her body hours later, after the seagulls and crabs had been at it.
To say that Alex was devastated would have been to vastly underestimate his condition. He barely existed in the world of the living for the next year. The foundation limped along, someone coming to his house with a stack of checks for him to sign every week or two. On the few occasions he tried to go out, he found himself breaking down at unexpected times, like once when he went into a movie men’s room and saw the pull-down baby changing platform there. He wandered through the rooms of the big house he had talked Steph into letting him buy, convinced they would raise a whole brood of kids there. He still talked to her, sometimes, hoping she would answer, but she never did.
Only one of the dead—the many, many dead, in Alex’s world—ever spoke to him. And Flannery didn’t answer questions, simply demanded blind trust and faithful obedience.
Gradually, Alex was drawn back into the world. The foundation needed his attention. The planet wasn’t fixing itself, and every year that slipped by was one year closer to the irreversible tipping point. He immersed himself in research, letting facts and figures and hard data substitute for human interaction. But his path led toward humans, after all.
Now he found himself surrounded by ghosts and dreamers. Only the dreamers spoke to him, when the voices he longed to hear were those of the ghosts.
Since resurfacing, he had suffered through a few couplings that almost deserved to be called relationships, all of which had ultimately ended for one reason or another—usually because of him, because of the unfinished business he carried inside himself like a separate organ: one heart too many. Interspersed were a handful of LA-style flings, a woman encountered at a party who would go home with him or simply go down on him in her car, a minor celebrity who let herself be seen at trendy spots around town with him to help establish her liberal bona fides. Lately he had been so focused on the documentary project that he had let his personal life slide. He hadn’t expected to meet someone here; the possibility had not even occurred to him until he saw that woman, the line of her neck and the natural pink blush of her cheeks and the swell of her breasts, and then it had hit him like a baseball bat to the solar plexus.
And he had, in turn, swung the bat into any chance of them connecting, smashing it to hopeless shards.
Now that he knew it wasn’t happening, he could concentrate on the task at hand. He carried his cup back to the Lexus, where Ellen and Peter waited. Ellen raised her cup to him, steam issuing from a slit in the plastic lid. “This shit is probably straight-up poison, huh?” she asked.
For the most part, Alex limited his activism to carbon issues and climate change, but within his sphere of acquaintances there were always people happy to point out the many ways in which human beings were killing one another and the planet. “You mean the coffee? It could be. But if you mean the Styrofoam, then yes, absolutely. Styrofoam is loaded with styrene, which is toxic as hell. And the heat in the coffee is probably breaking it down so it can enter our bloodstreams faster.”
“Great,” Peter said. “Yet another way to fucking die.”
“There’s no shortage,” Alex pointed out. “Some are just quicker than others.” They got into the SUV and joined the line of vehicles heading into the higher country. The ride took about twenty-five minutes, through ponderosa pine forest. The higher they went, the more denuded the trees, their needles brown and orange or their limbs completely bare. Once the trees gave up, high winds could knock them over; stumps jutted into the air and in places, tall trunks were scattered like toothpicks shaken from a box.
Vehicles were filling in the empty spaces around a red and white Ford pickup that Chief Deeds had parked his department Tahoe beside. Alex pulled off the road at the first wide spot he found, and they climbed out again.
“Isn’t that your new girlfriend?” Peter pointed to the blonde Alex had spoken to. She was exiting a red Jeep about twenty feet away. She didn’t glance in their direction, for which Alex was grateful.
“Let’s go,” he said. “And let’s try not to call undue attention to ourselves.” He meant attention from that specific woman, who he hoped would forget he had ever opened his mouth. But it would be a good policy overall, too. If they were seen helping the community, and had a few pleasant, non-humiliating interactions with the locals, that would serve their ends. It would be even better if one of them turned out to be a hero, rescuing Mike Hackett from a bear or something.
That was highly unlikely, Alex knew. But he hoped at least they could get through the day without making any more enemies.