Presumption of Guilt

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am asked on occasion why I write. The answers are many and varied, but among the most compelling is that I get to interview and collaborate with generous, intelligent, and knowledgeable people—who no doubt later read these books and shake their heads about how little of what they imparted ended up in the following pages. Nevertheless, I thank them all—and all who've come before—while taking full responsibility for any errors or omissions that might strike your eye as you read on.

 

PART ONE

 

CHAPTER ONE

1970

Tony Farnum waited until he saw Barry's face in the driver's-side mirror before motioning him to back up, looking over his shoulder to make sure the concrete mixer's rear wheels didn't hit the staked wooden form bordering the pour site. Satisfied, he held up both hands to a chorus of squealing brakes and a whoosh of compressed air. Barry swung out of the cab, strolled back, extracting a pack of cigarettes, and threw a wheel chock under one of the back tires with practiced ease.

He offered the pack to Farnum, who shook his head. “Too hot,” he said. “And I wanna get this load going. Told my old lady I'd take her out tonight.”

“Friday night on the town,” Barry intoned. “‘Summer in the City.'”

Farnum shook his head. “Brattleboro? That's a bar town, not a city. They should call it Dodge and have done with it. We're going to Keene.”

Barry raised his eyebrows. “Works for me. You're the flatlander. Bright lights're like oxygen to you.”

“Spare me,” Farnum said, removing his hard hat, sweeping his hair back, and refitting the rubber band he used to keep his ponytail in place. He jerked his head toward the gigantic construction site across the driveway from their small warehouse project. “We probably got fifteen hundred people working this job. How many you guess are local woodchucks like you?”

Barry shrugged, not willing to argue. He didn't know it for a fact, but he figured this nuclear plant project was maybe the biggest construction job the state had ever seen. One thing was guaranteed: Brattleboro had lost the majority of its available workforce to it. Every carpenter, electrician, contractor, plumber, ditchdigger, and shit shoveler within a hundred miles had found a way to dip into the till down here.

Sign of the times, the way he saw it, and like the song said, the times were a-changin'. Barry left Farnum to his grousing and his dreams of a heavy date, to return to the truck's cab and enjoy his smoke. From Vietnam and the riots to landing on the moon a year ago, the 1960s were going to be a decade people would remember for a long time.

And that meant not just “away,” as many Vermonters called the world beyond their borders. The Green Mountain State had changed radically, switching from a hundred-year-old, rock-ribbed Republican bastion in 1962 to the thing in flux it was now, just eight years later. This plant they were working on was just another example, as far as Barry was concerned.

Farnum adjusted the truck's offload chute to hover above the rebar latticework inside the wooden skirting. The warehouse slab was 150 feet by 40, which they'd opted to pour in sections. The main construction site wasn't messing with ten-yard wheeled mixers for its needs, of course. By the time this project was done, they'd have a zillion tons of reinforced concrete in place. But this was a side project—a two-man job with little to no supervision. Custom made for a single truck.

He reached up, switched the drum's auger from charge to discharge, and began slinging a river of gray slurry off the end of the chute, back and forth over his target area.

Until Barry half fell out of the cab, yelling,
“Fire.”

Farnum threw the flow arrester and stepped back to see what Barry was pointing at. Rising beyond the front of the cab, a thick black vertical cloud of smoke was mushrooming toward the blue sky.

“Far out,” he said, and jogged after Barry to see what was up. The Vermont Yankee plant wasn't near being operational yet—much less producing radiation—but that didn't mean that the word “nuclear” wasn't thick in the air. Vernon, the plant's tiny host town, was undergoing a bipolar crisis, reveling in the millions of dollars being spent in its midst, while downplaying the predictions of the nuclear disaster being forecast by the raggedy protesters who gathered weekly by the front gate.

It wasn't a reach for Barry and Tony to imagine something dire in the sight of a dark column of smoke stabbing the construction site's heart like an accusing black finger from above. They were children of World War II, brought up in the dawning light of the Atomic Age, complete with spy trials, missile gaps, bomb shelters, and monster movies like
Godzilla
. Vermont Yankee's anticipated use of nuclear fission ran hand in hand with the latter's ominous reputation.

“What d'ya see?” Farnum asked, catching up.

Barry looked back at him, surprised. “I thought you were pouring.”

“I shut it off. It'll keep a few minutes.”

“It looks like it's in the parking lot,” Barry reported, rounding the corner of the metal-clad turbine building.

“Oh, man. Say it ain't a red Chevy truck.”

They stopped side by side at the edge of the dirt parking lot. “Nope,” Barry announced unnecessarily.

Before them, surrounded by a small tribe of men, most of them empty-handed, was a tired-looking van spewing fire from under its hood. One person was trying to pour water on the blaze with a garden hose.

“That's not gonna do much good,” Farnum judged.

A bullhorn announcement from behind them urged everyone to stay back and return to work, and advised that the fire department was on its way. As if on cue, an anemic wailing could be heard far in the distance, growing louder.

“I better get back,” Farnum said, his interest waning.

Barry kept him company, lighting up another cigarette. As they cleared the front of the mixer, he said, “I thought you said you turned it off.”

“Fuck,” Tony swore, and ran to the chute controls. “I did.” The discharge wasn't fully open, but Barry was right—a thin trickle of concrete had deposited a significant lavalike mound within the form. Fortunately, it hadn't spread above grade. Farnum only had to even it out, and all would be well—especially after the subsequent screeding and floating took place.

No one would be the wiser.

PRESENT DAY

Nelson Smith laid down his jackhammer, shifted his ear protectors to the top of his helmet, and settled down beside the now quiet compressor, propping his back against one of its tires. He adjusted the earbuds he wore virtually all the time, and then rethought the gesture—removing them instead—and reached into his shirt pocket to kill his iPod.

The silence almost startled him. Usually, the outside world was kept at bay in preference to music or phone usage or podcasts, virtually all of it piped into him via the earbuds.

But sometimes, rarely, he yielded to his rural heritage and the early influence of his grandfather and father, both of whom used to take him into the woods to tap trees, gather cordwood, or hunt. Those moments of stillness remained fond memories, especially now that he no longer lived at home—the quiet conversations, the creaking of heavy branches overhead, the sound of distant wildlife, most of which the older men could identify from long experience.

Nelson looked around as he opened his lunch box and extracted his thermos and sandwich. He was hardly in the woods now, although at the moment, it was almost as quiet. Even more so.

He was sitting on the edge of a large, flat, exposed building slab, opposite the largest concrete cube he'd ever seen. He'd worked at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant for four years now, doing whatever grunt work needed to be done, from digging ditches to shoveling snow, gravel, dirt, and rubble—like today—to anything else the foreman asked of him. It paid okay, filled the day, kept him outside, and mostly allowed him to work alone.

Especially lately. The plant, after forty years, had been decommissioned. From a high of maybe six hundred employees, they were functioning with a skeleton crew. It made him think of an aircraft carrier that he'd once visited in New York, as a kid. Now a museum, the ship was moored by the dock, still floating as designed, but almost totally empty near closing time. Nelson had wandered its length and depths, less impressed by the function of its varied nooks and crannies and more overwhelmed by the enormity of its stillness.

Like this place, right now. Once humming with activity, and a monument to pure energy, it had become a huge receptacle for a slowly dying radioactive heart—a comatose patient with no expiration date.

He shifted slightly against the tire. It was officially spring, after what his old man had termed an “old-fashioned winter”—cold, snowy, and hard on the bones. It wasn't quite T-shirt weather, but getting close. The Connecticut River, a few hundred yards away, hidden by the embankment bordering the plant, was fat and swirling with melted ice from the north. The near monochromatic world of a frozen New England was by now lightly tinted with the coming green of renewed vegetation. Nelson had heard that the Inuits used a hundred names for snow. Too bad we had only the one word, “green,” for vegetation, he thought, given the varieties of green he could see from where he was sitting—in the trees and grass and hills beyond the razor-wired borders of the plant's periphery.