Turkey Ranch Road Rage (27 page)

Now, I could jump to conclusions and assume that he took my clothes to purposely keep me trapped in the hotel room naked, which was a distinct possibility. Or, I could assume that he kindly and thoughtfully took my clothes to have them cleaned. Or both.

At the moment, the why of it didn’t much matter. The fact was that I had nothing to wear. And since I couldn’t walk down the hall naked or in a bath towel, I called the front desk to see about the possibilities of having a robe sent up. Amazingly, within minutes, a robe was on its way to my door. It would have to do for now, and if my laundry didn’t make a timely return, I’d have to figure out how to get something delivered from the mall somehow.

Within ten minutes, I was swaddled in a thick white terry cloth robe and my little toes were tucked into my sandals. I had a package of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine in one hand and a glass of water in the other. Yes, water. After last night’s gassing, just the thought of a sickly sweet Dr Pepper made my stomach roll. I wolfed down a few crackers on the elevator then washed them down as I searched for the hotel’s business center. The gold wall plates with the arrows helped considerably.

The room was fairly large—and thankfully unoccupied—with a worktable, a fax machine and a desk with a newer looking computer. A laminated sheet that said “Internet Use Instructions and Agreement” was taped to the desk, advising me that, basically, if I touched the keyboard I agreed to everything on it. Computer use was free, but printouts, copies and faxes required a credit card. I hadn’t brought one of those with me, so the hotel pen and note pad were just going to have to do. I did have a couple of dollars just in case. I also had a long list of topics to research and decided that starting with the simplest seemed wise.

From the beginning, the whole park thing had seemed ridiculous. It wasn’t public land, yet there was an implied link with the city of Redwater Falls as well as Kickapoo. I’d start with the official city websites then move on to AAC, Damon Saide, hepato-whatever cancer, then find Kickapoo on GoogleEarth and eventually check the online records at Bowman County. I also needed at least do a quick search on Gilbert Moore, Commissioner Fletcher and Barnett Shale. I wanted time to research everything thoroughly, but I didn’t have it. I’d spend two hours and stop, get some real food.

The City of Redwater website was easy to find but there was nothing at all about the park on it. Nothing. A search for Parks for Progress came up with something in New Jersey and it wasn’t even a good match. I did, however, get a hit on AAC immediately. Nice website, official-looking. Someone had done a decent job, in a template sort of way. It got less impressive when you started following up the “events” that AAC had supposedly engineered. Either they never happened at all or they were actually pulled off by a different group, and AAC had simply stolen the photos and stories from other websites. And, of course, there were no faces or names on the AAC site to incriminate anyone. And no, I didn’t get very far on the owner of the domain name either. Registered to a reseller.

For the kind of group it was, AAC could be considered legit even if the success stories were bogus or stolen. But it made me wonder if the people in town saying they were with AAC really were. And furthermore, there wasn’t even a blip in the national news archives about any of this. Contrary to what my mother and a deceitful sheriff would have liked me to believe, this was very much a local story. It was at least an eight on the Kickapoo absurdity scale, but it was not national news.

Damon Saide didn’t register on any of the people finders or search engines. An alternative spelling picked up a quote that said, “the bitch must die,” which was kind of creepy, but thankfully not relevant. I figured the name was bogus anyway. Just like Tiger and Bobcat and the flower girls that hung around with them. I ran out of tails to chase, and wound up with more questions than when I started.

I couldn’t spend a lot of time on any of it, so I hurriedly put in Gilbert Moore and drilling. I got a Yellow Pages listing, but nothing more. Then, I remembered Barnett Shale, which was easy to remember since it was such an odd name. I hit the search button.

“What the hell,” I muttered, looking at the top search listings. Barnett Shale wasn’t a who, it was a what, a very big what. It was a natural gas field in North Central Texas. I read quickly and made notes on location, depths and the whys and wherefores of it all. Like many activities in the petroleum industry, what had been previously unprofitable was now wildly lucrative. That didn’t automatically mean that oil and or gas was being harvested behind Mother’s house, but it didn’t mean they weren’t either. From what I could tell, Kickapoo would be on the far northwest edge of the known field, which made it iffy, but not impossible. I started to click another link to try to figure out how iffy, but realized that I could get lost in researching that and get nothing else done. For now, all I needed was an overview, and I definitely had that. So, I refocused back on the park with new eyes.

There were a few local news stories on the park, the protest, county truck vandalism and the feed store incident, but even the local media had lost interest and column inches without any meat behind the hype. There was nothing significant about the Barnett Shale play, as they called it, just a general mention. There were, however, letters to the editor from my mother. I only found two, which was two too many. She had made exaggerated accusations and vague threats with a lot of rambling and very little detail. Why the newspaper had published such nonsense was beyond me. Quite a few readers wrote in with the same concerns and—I’m only guessing here—that Kimberlee had to spend some time in the Bridal and Fashion department, or maybe the obits, as penance for letting the drivel get printed in not only the editorials, but for referencing it her “news” stories. You had to give her credit though, Mother did give entertaining quotes.

The computer’s clock told me I’d burned about forty minutes, which was great, considering what I’d found, but the hard stuff was still ahead.

I don’t like to visit medical sites—physically or in cyberspace—because I am suspicious of the medical community in general. There are a lot of reasons for it, which would take a couple of days to relate, but mostly it’s because they approach things from the wrong angle—an unnatural one. They’ll either drug it or cut it, and that’s if you survive their toxic tests. Seriously, it wasn’t the cancer that killed my favorite aunt. It was the biopsy they did “just to be sure” she had it. Apparently the fact that she’d been a smoker and lived with one for forty years, had a mass the size of a grapefruit in her chest and was coughing up lung tissue just wasn’t convincing enough. Nope, a biopsy was essential as was apparently the collapsed lung and other resulting complications that killed her. I really wish I were making that up, I really do.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to have good and important medical care available and a lot of lives are saved by some really dedicated people. But in every day doctoring, it seems that either people pick a pill off a TV ad that they think will magically fix their lives or some drug rep pitches the latest “approved” pill for the same reason. Big Pharma knows Americans want quick fixes and they’ve dreamed up a pill for just about everything, creating conditions and disorders as needed to help everybody feel better about the scam. There are exceptions to this, of course, but there are no exceptions to the fact that the unhindered power of the pharmaceutical companies in this country scares the living crap out of me.

Stopping myself from riding that train of thought any longer and wasting any more time on things I had no control over, I went directly to the American Cancer Society site. Hepatocellular carcinoma popped right up, and I found out in a hurry that primary adult liver cancer is rare, but that the hepatocellular variety accounted for 75% of the rarities. Smoking and drinking were big contributors, as was Hepatitis B and C. Tiger was a good contender in all three categories, although at a distance he hadn’t looked yellow that I could recall. Also on the list of risk factors were heredity, aflatoxins, arsenic in drinking water and chemical exposure, specifically vinyl chloride from plastics manufacturing and thorium dioxide from x-ray testing. The conditions and symptoms sounded horrible, and killing himself to stop the pain of it all was a highly credible option. However, none of it explained why he’d chosen to spend the last days of his life in Redwater Falls, Texas. I had money left from my vending machine purchases so I fed a dollar bill into the printer/copier and printed out the info.

My next stop on the web was GoogleEarth, which was thankfully already available on the hotel’s computer, and in no time I was zooming in on Kickapoo, Texas. As the satellite homed in on mother’s address, a wide expanse of mottled white with splotches of green around the perimeter flashed on the screen. When the image stopped on Lucille’s house, I immediately scrolled east to see what I’d just gotten a glimpse of.

“What the hell,” I muttered yet again as the area came into focus. Several huge areas of whitish dirt splayed across the screen. Red dirt that was pockmarked with small areas of sparse vegetation filled in around the bare white stuff. “Is that what drilling and oil wells do or are they mining something?” I muttered to myself.

Moving back to the west, the aerial view showed a meandering strip of mesquite brush, which you could see from Lucille’s kitchen window. It concealed her view from all but the tops of the pump jacks when they bobbed up. The relatively small area between the oil well and the storage tanks that I remembered, the salt flats, had somehow morphed into sprawling white areas of nothing, with multi-colored mounds of dirt dotted and patches of mesquites. There were several other huge bare areas as well that I didn’t remember at all. I sure wished I had an aerial view from the sixties when I used to play back there. I wonder if it looked the same then. I made myself a note to look up where I could get historical aerials. I put another dollar in the machine and printed, zooming in and out to get the best possible views. The image pixilated and blurred when I got very close in, but I did what I could.

I never made it to the virtual courthouse, if indeed Bowman County had one, because I’d started to feel shaky. I wasn’t sure if it was from lack of food, lack of sleep or the very real feeling that what I had just found in my view from space was bad.

I managed to get back to the room and order food, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d found. Technically speaking, it really wasn’t much of anything. I’d learned a few things about cancer and chemicals that might or might not be relevant to anything, and I’d educated myself about Barnett Shale. Damon Saide, Gilbert Moore and AAC were pretty much a bust, but the satellite imagery I’d stumbled on was anything but. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I laid out the aerial photos on the table and tried to think of all the possible reasons the land looked as it did. One possibility was a toxic waste dump, but I had no basis for it. It all could be perfectly normal. The ground may have simply been cleared for campsites. That they would have scenic views of the pump jacks and storage tanks could be the whole idea. People paid good money to go experience ranch life by shoveling manure and castrating calves, so it wasn’t a stretch that they’d pay to pretend they had their own real live oil well out the front door of the travel trailer. The gift shop would be filled with souvenir pump jacks and mini bottles of crude. Black gold. Texas Tea. It was one of those ideas that sounded so stupid it just might work.

But again, why the strong-arm tactics for Mother? Why kidnap me? Why not say these things up front and get community support? Why not mitigate the horny toad issue with protected habit and viewing areas for tourists? “Good questions, Jolene. Really good questions.”

I just had no good answers.

A call to room service got a veggie omelet headed my way, and gave me a few minutes to think. I sat in the room’s wingback chair and propped my feet on the ottoman, sipping on a cup of hot Earl Grey tea that I’d made in the room’s coffee pot. My beloved staple of liquid tar still held no appeal whatsoever and I wondered if I’d ever be able to drink it again. Or maybe it was just the overall bad feeling I had that was making me ill. I sipped a little more tea then let my mind wander where it wanted to.

Apparently it wandered to sleep because the next thing I knew I was jerking and jumping awake, with some semi-awareness of a knock on the door. It took a couple more seconds of re-orientation and another knock to figure out that there really was someone at the door. The re-engaging brain cells screamed “food” so I hurried over, flipped back the security latches, and swung the door open wide for delivery of my breakfast.

Jerry, not room service, stood in the doorway, holding his room key as if he’d just swiped it in the reader. At his feet were a pile of shopping sacks. He put the card in his pocket, picked up the sacks and eyed my robe. “I didn’t expect you to be up yet.”

“Me either,” I said, closing the door behind him. “I like your shirt and jeans.”

“Didn’t want to take the time to go home,” he said, tossing the sacks on the bed. “Where’d you get the robe?”

“Room service.” Another knock. “More room service. Food this time.” I smiled. “I could get used to this.”

Jerry went to the door and got the tray for me then carried it over and set it on the table in the corner. “If you want to just make a snack of that I’ll take you out somewhere.”

I am generally always ready to go out to eat, but I had Jerry alone with no one to bother us and I liked that a lot. “How about we share it and just spend some time here?”