Heat and Light (22 page)

Are there other men who talk this much?

“I was surprised to see her,” says Rena. “Her husband was one of the neighbors bugging us to sign a lease. Are you going to eat that?” She takes the last slice of pizza. “We were the last holdouts on the Dutch Road. We pissed off a lot of people. And it was all for nothing, because they're drilling anyway. We're surrounded. It's happening so fast.”

Why don't you mind your own business.

“That's no accident,” says Trexler. “That's exactly what the industry wants. The faster they drill, the less oversight they have to contend with. The DEP is pathetically understaffed, and the people they have aren't very good. The gas companies can afford to hire the best and brightest. Some of my most talented students have gone over to the dark side. There was one girl in particular—” His voice trails off. For the first time, he seems at a loss for words.

“What happened to her?” Rena says.

“Last I heard she was a consultant. They're all consultants. The dirty truth is, there would be no fracking if scientists didn't cooperate. They need geologists to tell them where to drill.” He pushes away his plate. “Enough about that. I'm starting to depress myself. Tell me about your farm. You grew up there?”

“Mack did. It's been in their family for six generations. I'd hate to be the ones to drop the ball.”

“Mack is your husband?”

She hesitates only a second. “Yes.”

The lie she can never take back. And yet it seems, in that moment, that
husband
is as good a word as any. The English language has no actual word for what Mack is to her.

“That's too bad.” Trexler gives her his slow smile. “Sorry. Did I say that out loud?”

How everything can change in an instant.

He reaches across the table, briefly touches her hand. “I'm making you uncomfortable.”

“No. Well, a little, but that's okay.”

She is sorry when he takes his hand away.

It's been a long time, years, since she felt drawn to a man, which makes things simpler. By the time they're Rena's age, Bakerton men are physically unappealing; and motherhood has made it difficult—impossible, really—to be attracted to a boy. But Lorne Trexler is her own age, older maybe, and still handsome. He moves like a young man—lean, impatient, with conspicuous grace.

“Sorry. I'm acting like a teenager. You were saying.” Again the slow smile. “Something about a farm?”

Once, years ago, Ronny Zimmerman had asked her:
Have you always been gay?
It was at the time—and would be now—an unanswerable question. The truth is both simpler and stranger: she has never been attracted to another woman. Never been attracted to a woman at all, unless you count Mack, and Rena doesn't. Mack is a man to her, and a man to herself.

When Calvin was small she tried to explain it:
Sometimes you just meet a person.
She has only one way of loving. Before Mack, she'd loved men—had loved Freddy Weems—in exactly the same way.

“Yeah, the farm. It's kind of a high-wire act,” she says, recovering herself. “We've had a few close calls. There was one bad year, back in the nineties. Calf scours. Not while we're eating,” she says, seeing his frown. “Going organic saved us. Though I don't see how we can keep it up, if our cows are grazing in a gas patch.”

“I won't let that happen.”

There is a silence.

“Organic or not, it's a hard life, and we're not getting any younger.” Rena chews thoughtfully. The cold pizza is a little greasy, the cheese gone waxy. “I mean, what happens when there are no more Mackeys? We're the end of the line.”

Trexler grins. “That seems like poor planning on your part. I thought all you farmers had a dozen kids.”

“I have a son,” Rena says, “from a prior relationship. But Calvin isn't cut out for farming.” The words come haltingly. She's out of the habit of talking about him. She and Mack avoid the subject, which is fraught with unspeakable truths.

That Mack will never forgive him.

That Rena will never stop.

“Is he in school?” Trexler asks.

“He dropped out.”
Of high school,
she does not add. Her face is hot with shame.

“Well, not everybody has to go to college.”

“I didn't,” she admits, “and I've always regretted it. Nursing school isn't the same.”

She is talking too much.

“Calvin was a bright kid. He loved to read and draw. I wanted him to go.” Having said his name, she can't seem to stop saying it. It's as though she's conducting a séance, conjuring forth an earlier Calvin, the small boy who needed her, the brooding teenager full of potential. Calling him back from the beyond.

“He didn't want to?”

“No. And maybe he was right. Even with an education, there's nothing around here for young people to do. No, thank you.” A hand over her glass to keep him from refilling it. “When I was a kid it was different. My dad worked at Baker Twelve—a huge mine, eight hundred jobs, all union. Now there's only strip mining. Part-time, no benefits. And you have maybe five guys on a crew.”

Because he asks, she talks about Calvin's father. “I met him at the Firemen's Festival. That's a big deal around here. I was sixteen. He was twenty-three, and he had ID. I needed someone to buy me a beer.”

Trexler grins. “That's when the magic happened.”

“He was a volunteer fireman. He had a car and a mustache.”

“Marriages have been founded on less. Not good marriages. What kind of car?”

“Even back then I couldn't have told you. It was the fact that he had one. The adultness.”

“Plus the mustache,” says Trexler.

“See, you do understand.”

She could talk to him all night.

“And then what? He courted you. Took you dancing.”

“He took me to watch him shoot bottles at the dump.”

“To impress you,” says Trexler.

“He was a pretty good shot.”

The pleasures of confession, a memory from childhood: the all-knowing priest behind the curtain, absolving her of all she is and all she's done. Face-to-face with a near stranger, Rena tells a story she hasn't told in years. Halfway through her senior year in high school, she outgrew her school uniform and found an old one in her sister's closet, her sister who wore a size ten.

“I knew a girl who'd done it, but she was bigger to begin with. I couldn't really hide it. I don't think I fooled anyone.” She changes her mind and refills her glass. “I wore a maternity dress to graduation. I sat in the audience with my mother, because they wouldn't let me graduate. They wouldn't even read my name. I got my diploma in the mail.”

Trexler's jaw drops open in cartoon amazement. “They wouldn't
let
you? I'm pretty sure that's illegal.”

“For a public school, maybe. This was Our Mother of Sorrows.”

“It was called that.”

“For good reason. The sorriest part was making me sit through the ceremony. I was required to go. A parent today wouldn't tolerate that,” she points out. “A parent today would raise holy hell.”

“Yours didn't?”

“Are you kidding? My mother felt sorry for me, but basically she agreed with them. Because, you know, I'd brought it on myself.”

“So you went to graduation undercover,” says Trexler. “In plain clothes, as they used to say. Do cops still wear plain clothes?”

“Because how would it look, six pregnant girls waddling across the stage, getting their diplomas from Our Mother of Sorrows?”

“Six?”

“In a class of two hundred. Which, as a percentage, averages out to not good. Actually, there should have been eight. The other two dropped out before graduation.”

“This was what year?”

“Seventy-five.”

“So you had options.”

It's true, of course: she could have borrowed the money from someone, begged a ride to Altoona to catch the bus to Pittsburgh. She hadn't even considered it. To her young self, abortion had been unthinkable in the most literal way. Her mind couldn't hold such a thought.

“Did I? It didn't seem that way.”

Her mother would never have forgiven her, her mother who wore, on the collar of her winter coat, an embroidered rose the size of a quarter. The roses were sold in the church vestibule, a fund-raiser for the Legion of Mary. Each January they hired a bus to Washington to join in the March for Life.

“What about the fireman?” says Trexler. “The fireman is strangely absent from this story.”

“We were supposed to get married. It didn't work out.”

(The time he locked her in the apartment until her face healed.)

“But he was happy about the baby?”

“Sure. He liked to brag how I got pregnant the first time we did it. It wasn't true, but it was a good story.”

It's still a good story. The story is in the editing, in what you don't say: that Rena's pregnant body made Freddy inexplicably angry. That he made her do things she no longer wanted to do, and perhaps never had. He liked to screw in public places—in the woods, behind the ball field. He liked it precisely because Rena hated it. Her misery excited him—her mortification and discomfort, her terror of being caught.

He made her talk to him.
Say it. Say, I am a filthy little whore.

Rena said,
I am a filthy little whore.

Saying the words was like giving him permission: she was already so dirty she couldn't be made dirtier, so whatever he did to her was her own fault. Of course, she has never told anyone this.

In her second trimester he broke her nose.

“Anyways, it turned out all right,” she adds—as she is supposed to, as she must, and in a way it's true. She loves Calvin more than
her own life. Her decision was not unselfish; she had chosen the lesser anguish. Understanding, even then, that regret was inevitable; that either way, a life would be lost.

There's more, much more, she could say. How Freddy, dead twenty-three years, still appears in her dreams; how Mack seemed, for a minute, the answer to a riddle: Rena needed protection. Any man strong enough to protect her was not to be trusted. Mack, Rena, and Freddy. It's startling, now, to think how young they all were.

Behind her the barman begins stacking chairs on tables.

“I think he's trying to tell us something,” Trexler says.

The parking lot is empty except for her truck and his Prius. A sultry summer night, redolent of cut grass, humid from the afternoon's rain. He walks her to her car, his hand at her back. She is aware of his parameters, the dimensions of his body. He is shorter than Mack, his shoulders narrower. Rena's eyes are level with his chin.

“Thanks for coming all the way out here,” she says, to fill the silence. “I don't know how to thank you.”

Trexler stares over her shoulder. “My God, will you look at that?”

“They're lightning bugs.” It's not the sort of thing she expects a grown man to notice. Long ago, when Calvin was small, he'd amused himself for hours trying to catch them in jelly jars.

“I know what they are. I've just never seen quite so many. You could light a small city. Listen,” he says. “Is that water?”

“Carbon Creek runs out this way.”

How it happens isn't entirely clear, but a moment later they are crossing the parking lot, walking hand in hand into the woods.

The ground is a little muddy. Rena steps carefully, worried about her shoes. A breeze kicks up, rattling the wet leaves. A shower of cold raindrops shocks her arms and neck.

Trexler charges across a rusted footbridge, nearly hidden among
the trees. Twenty feet down, at the foot of a steep embankment, Carbon Creek roars like a rushing river, echoing through the concrete pipe that carries it beneath the road.

They stand in the middle of the bridge. Night sounds: frogs, crickets, a lone car rolling down Number Six Road. The forest is alive with random pinpricks of light.

“Astounding,” says Trexler. “But I guess you see this all the time.”

A mosquito whines near her ear.

“Yes and no,” she says, slapping it away. “You kind of stop looking.” She drives down Number Six Road every day, and never once has she noticed this footbridge. It's the fundamental problem of a life lived in one place: sooner or later, everything becomes invisible.

The sky flickers with electrical misfires.

T
he criminal, the terrorist, the predator, gravitates naturally to the dark.

Eighty yards north of the Amway store, just behind the tree line, Chief Carnicella crouches low. Over his camo pants and jacket, he wears a Defender IV Tyvek security vest and a Gen II Night Vision Monocular, helmet-mounted. His patrol rifle lies at his side.

The ability to see in the dark delivers a superhuman-like feeling of invincibility.

The Amway parking lot is dimly lit, a single bulb trained in exactly the wrong direction, illuminating a giant Dumpster near the back door. Twenty yards away, two fertilizer tanks hold enough anhydrous ammonia to make a mountain of methamphetamine, enough to get all of Bakerton high and keep it that way for a month.

The tanks sit in darkness, unlabeled; but the meth heads aren't fooled. Last week he found the smaller tank fitted with a black hose and tape. Someone, between the hours of 6:00
P.M
. and midnight, had siphoned off five gallons. If he'd arrived just a few hours earlier, an arrest might have been made.

The meth heads are smarter than he once gave them credit for. The chief's approach, at first, was sloppy: he kept watch from the comfort of his vehicle. Now he parks unobtrusively a quarter mile down the road. He is careful to vary the time and day; his current domestic situation affords him ultimate flexibility. If he were still
married, overnight stakeouts would be impossible. Terri had never taken his career seriously.

The Defender vest is a little tight.

The stakeouts haven't, so far, yielded any actual arrests. Still, it's a better use of his time than staring at the TV in his empty trailer. This was his thinking when he canceled the satellite dish. Without the dish he gets two and a half channels, so TV no longer tempts him. After supper he plays the radio and pedals his old Exercycle and studies catalogs.

Technology that used to be available only to the military is now within the grasp of law enforcement, or any non-felonious U.S. citizen!

The money he saved on the dish went toward a Gen II NVD—a clear improvement over his old gear, a clunky Starlight Scope, Vietnam era, that Cob Krug had sold him for cheap. He paid for the Gen II himself, two grand out of his own pocket. The town has no budget for NVDs, no budget for anything. The budget barely covers the chief's paltry salary and the part-time secretary he shares with the Sewer Authority.

In bigger towns there is money for enforcement. In Allegheny County two deputies caught a thief a quarter mile from a feed store, with a scuba tank full of anhydrous. The arrest made the local news, the deputies—kids really, half the chief's age—interviewed by a sexy blond reporter. Watching, the chief was filled with longing, frustration, anger, and resolve.

The meth heads—the chief knows this—are better equipped than he is. In addition to the scuba tank, the Allegheny deputies confiscated a police scanner from the vehicle. Their perps wore camo and NVDs—not a crappy Gen II like the chief's, but the NightSniper 900 thermal sight.

Thermal technology is the wave of the future! End your dependence on available light.

The NightSniper detects body heat—any living thing, a person or animal, will show up as a ghostly silhouette, glowing white. With the
NightSniper you can see in absolute darkness. You can see through rain, snow, fog, and smoke. Its color display shows differences in temperature, useful for distinguishing a concealed weapon. The 900—top of the NightSniper line—can even detect residual heat: the tracks left when a gun dealer in the basement of a Best Western walks across a carpet, or a strung-out meth head sprints across a cornfield with a three-gallon jug in his hand.

You are the Predator! Project your will to the 1,000-yard range.

Last spring, at a gun show in Pittsburgh, he had held one in his hands. The dealer led him into a darkened room in the hotel basement, which had been set aside for showing NVDs. With the NightSniper, in pitch darkness, a subject's facial features can be distinguished at a hundred yards. Small differences in body heat are apparent. If the subject is sweating or feverish or stoked on methamphetamine, the NightSniper will know.

A weapon-mounted NightSniper runs fifteen thousand dollars, half the chief's annual pay.

He settles in for the night. The rain stopped hours ago, but the ground is still damp. Even with the army blanket spread out beneath him, his ass feels clammy, his legs numb with cold.

During a stakeout the mind wanders.

The chief imagines himself in another time, another country—smoking Vietcong in the jungle of the Mekong Delta, as his older brother had done.

He imagines himself in the old life, with all its comforts: the split-level residence bought and paid for, the two-car garage, the water bed Terri hated but, when she kicked him out, refused to surrender. A few days later he drove past the residence. Thursday morning, trash day. His deflated water bed sat at the curb.

No question, it was a low point: the chief kicked out of his residence, sitting on the divorce papers but not signing, Terri nagging him via text message and e-mail, his wife having embraced
the twenty-first century, a brave new era for nagging. Their entire married life she'd issued a steady stream of instructions, what to eat and wear and how to spend his free time, the never-ending series of projects around the residence. It was a reality of his life, a fact like weather—until, abruptly, the nagging stopped. The silence was disorienting, like driving over a hill and losing your radio station completely. An annoying station, talk radio, with a host who bugged the shit out of you; but at least it kept your mind occupied. Cursing the voice on the radio, you stopped noticing the endless miles of highway, the soul-crushing void.

He still has trouble deciding what to eat and wear.

He should have taken the water bed.

Now, by every measure, things are looking up. A year ago, every dime he earned went straight to Penn State so that his son could flunk out of mechanical engineering, then business administration, then the university as a whole. Now, the flunking completed, Jason assembles hoagies at a Subway sandwich shop—a job which, if not lucrative, is at least free.

So the chief has a little more pocket money. He has his stakeouts. He has twice fucked the part-time secretary he shares with the Sewer Authority.

She is a likable woman, kindhearted.
What happened?
she once asked him.
With you and Terri. After twenty-some years, what could go wrong?

She got tired of being married, is what happened,
the chief said.

What also happened: so slowly he didn't notice, Terri lost a hundred pounds. Over the years she'd tried many diets, none of which lasted. But this time she followed exercise videos in the basement. She portioned out her cereal with a measuring cup. She went—and possibly still goes—to weekly meetings of overweight women, where she stood on a scale and was scolded if she'd gained and applauded if she'd lost.

An even hundred. The chief doesn't mention this to the part-time secretary, who is moderately overweight. Not as big as Terri at her largest, but quite a bit bigger than Terri is now.

The truth is that her weight never bothered him. After a while he simply hadn't seen it, the way he'd stopped hearing her nag. What mattered was she was there when he got home at night.

He closes his eyes for just a moment, or so it seems. When he wakes he is disoriented, hugging the army blanket around him, so cold he is perspiring. The Defender vest is cutting off his airflow. An eerie sound in the distance, the fluty note of an owl. Glancing at his watch, he is shocked to see that two hours have passed.

With a feeling of foreboding he approaches the tank. Fresh tracks in the mud, the grass trampled. He stops short.

The tank has been mended with black electrical tape.