Chaingang

“It's real good, Royce, but do you think people will do anything after they read it and see the pictures of the chemicals? Remember, this project has already made a lot of money for the town. They say old Gabe Augustine and his family are millionaires now from the concrete they've poured. And it's brought a lot of jobs just in construction work. What about all the money that they say will be coming into the area in tourism? Won't people around here just figure the chemicals deal is some kind of smear campaign, and choose to ignore it?"

“Maybe.” He shrugged.

“And if they did get up in arms about it and called Marty Kerns, imagine what would come of it. He'd give them some soft soap and pat them on the head, and that would be that. What can we realistically hope to accomplish? I'm not putting down the idea, I'm just asking."

“I don't know, hon. You may be right. But it's our shot—the way I see it. And it might even give us a bit of protection. You, anyway. Perhaps they'd realize it would make them look bad if anything were to happen to the person who accused them of being drug manufacturers. Also—I know sometimes you can have a lot of heat and no light, but maybe this will produce a little light along with the heat. Maybe some newspaper will get interested, or one of the TV channels, and—who knows—somebody who sees the leaflet might have some clout with a U.S. senator or the governor or—” He didn't really believe what he was saying. “Let's sleep on it,” he finally said, and collapsed into his sleeping bag in front of the fire.

“There's one thing in our favor,” he said, yawning. “Waterton! We're in a town where they actually report UFO sightings. There's people here buy those papers at the supermarket and will swear to you that Elvis is still alive. There's been how many Bigfoot sightings recently? I mean, we are talking Small Town America, right?"

“You'd better believe it,” Mary said. “Woman's place is in the home, and we pay wages to prove it."

“Exactly."

“The ERA wasn't even a rumor here."

“So you take my point. This is Redneckville. Hayseed, U.S.A. An NRA stronghold. Used to be a Klan stronghold not so long ago. If you ain't white and Christian, you know—like the song says, red, white, and Pabst Blue Ribbon—we don't want you. That's Waterton. Maybe the people around here won't be too thrilled about Japs buying up three hundred acres for their underground drug lab.” She ignored his heavy-handed irony.

“But you don't know that the Japanese are behind Ecoworld."

“You don't know they aren't, do you?” She just laughed in response. “The point is—whoever's behind it, Colombians, Little Green Saucer People, or—God forbid—the damn Democrats—they ain't one of us."

Mary smiled when she heard him lightly snore. He was so tired, but he'd done his best. She'd have to watch him when they had the handbill printed in the morning, she thought, or he'd have them out at the Ecoworld dump site searching for “Made in Japan” on the chemical containers.

Mary tried to go to sleep, but she was wide-eyed. There were feelings inside her that were growing stronger by the day, part of what she thought of as her “dark side.” She felt them coming to the surface.

The thoughts she was thinking were forbidden thoughts, and that made them all the more exciting. It was almost a turn-on to be near this man for whom she had such steamy feelings, like a kind of taboo sex act. He wanted her. She knew that. This was not the time or the place, of course. And that made it even more taboo, and even more of a turn-on.

She tried to isolate the title of a faintly recalled book or dimly recollected film in which the couple had just returned from a funeral, and there's a hot, raunchy bedroom scene. What was it that was so strong and undeniable that linked the death, or the metaphorical loss of someone close to you, with the act of making life?

The dark side of death-and-sex lust was yet another area Mary would have identified as thoroughly alien to her, yet here it was, running its fingers up and down her nude flesh, trying hard to get her attention, and succeeding in a big way.

Royce Hawthorne stirred, bones cracking, from the sleeping bag on the hard floor of the Perkins vacation abode. He'd “painted the ceiling” twice—once in his sleep, and again since first awakening—mulling over the many facets of the day ahead. He'd been up since before dawn, and was now readying Mary for the rigors of the morning.

“I've decided I definitely should not sign the thing,” he said. “It'd only give Kerns or the sheriff something to use to counter the statements we put forth in the circular. They could say—a known drug guy blah blah was part of it. It wouldn't stick as a charge, but the point is, it would take away from the impact of our documentation. Agree?"