He locked his car and strode toward the building’s entrance, aware that dozens of eyes must be watching him through that looming wall of tinted glass. He straightened his back and put a little bounce in his stride. He’d almost made it to the revolving doors when he became aware of an unusual glimmering down by the lake, not unlike the burst of distant flashcubes. He wheeled and stared across the vast waterfront plaza. But everything seemed quiet down there, the forty acres of water perfectly still. Just a trick of the rising sun, he figured.
There were more people than usual milling about in the lobby, forming taut conversational clusters that fell silent as he passed. Sidelong glances were cast his way. On the elevator two engineers bailed out before Swope could start a conversation. By the time he reached the top floor he sensed corporate dread all around him—the quickly shut doors, the averted eyes, the hands cupped over receivers. Which meant that news of the fight must have already traveled through the building. Phones would be ringing in Chicago. Swope slalomed through the secretarial bullpen and joined the corridor leading to his own office. Color photos of earth-moving equipment decorated its paneled walls. Evelyn looked up from her desk as he entered his suite, her grey eyes perched on the twin horizons of her bifocals. After a nodded hello Swope picked up the stack of mail and began to flip through it. Most of the two dozen letters were emblazoned with the pompous calligraphy of law firms.
“Did Sheriff Chones call?” he asked.
“No. But your wife did.”
“And?” Swope asked as he continued to check the mail.
“She wants to know what kind of beer you want for your party.”
“Löwenbräu. Of course. Call her back for me, will you?”
Evelyn, long used to running marital interference for her boss, nodded once.
“But first get Chones on the horn. And track down Earl Wooten. See if he can swing by some time this morning.”
“Um, Mr. Swope …”
Swope stopped shuffling and looked at his secretary. He recognized that tone.
“Have you seen the lake?”
“What do you mean?”
“This morning. Did you see it?”
That strange glimmering played through his mind.
“No.”
“I think you should take a look.”
He continued to stare at her, awaiting further explanation. But she’d already picked up the phone. Though he hated Evelyn’s menopausal moods, he also knew that there was nothing he could do about them. He entered his own office, tossing the mail on his desk and then taking up a position in front of the long northern wall of tinted Thermopane. His first thought—that the damaged pier had finally slipped into its sinkhole—proved wrong. Everything seemed normal enough. The plaza directly below him glistened like arctic ice in the summer sun, its fountains and arches intact, the Gravity Tree unbroken and graffiti free. The shoreline townhouses and parkland were serene; the pavilion and the Cross Keys Inn the same as ever. He was just about to buzz Evelyn and ask her what the hell she was talking about when he saw it again, that glimmering in the water, like fireflies on an August dusk. It took a moment to figure out what he was seeing. And when he did his heart sank even further than it had when he beheld the ruined silo. This was definitely turning out to be a shit day.
The fish were dying. All of them, from the look of it. Every last one. The suppliers had spoken of an attrition rate of 5 percent. But this was no 5 percent. Nor was it 50 percent. As far as Swope could tell, the entire generation had been wiped out. Three measly days after arriving in a convoy of gleaming steel tankers from the Pennsylvania hatchery. They were supposed to be easily catchable species, custom bred for novice fishermen. Crappie and carp, catfish and gar. He’d watched from this very spot as they’d been siphoned like slurry into the brown water, where they were supposed to feed and fuck and do whatever else it was fish did while awaiting the baited hooks of happy citizens.
But not die. That was the one thing the hatchery’s men had assured him wouldn’t happen. They’d made their final tests two weeks ago, absurdly serious geeks in lab coats and waders who’d measured the lake’s alkali and acid levels, analyzed algae and fungus. The results were favorable. The bottom had sealed; the water was rich with microorganisms and flora. After a year’s evolution, the lake was ready for life. Not the goldfish and newts and june bugs that had been here since the first, the Darwinian vagabonds that would pop up in a toilet if it went unflushed long enough. But a serious marine society that would turn what had recently been an empty ditch into a pulsating ecosystem.
Or so they said. Now, just seventy-two hours after the tankers had pulled away, the lake’s entire surface was sparkling with brilliant extinction. Clusters of dead fish had formed near the creosote pilings of the boardwalk and piers, looking putrid and flyblown even from this distance. Unfamiliar birds had begun to congregate, big-winged scavengers already swooping at the surface. People were gathering as well, milling about the plaza to gawk at the spectacle.
Swope walked back to his desk and hit the buzzer next to his phone. It didn’t take Evelyn long to answer.
“Any luck with Wooten?” he asked.
“He’ll be out in Juniper Bend all morning. He can meet you some time after noon.”
“How about Chones?”
“He’ll be calling just as soon as he gets in.”
Two more commas in an already overpunctuated day.
“Well, get me the goddamned hatchery, then.”
Somebody had to catch some shit for this.
Swope spent the rest of the morning on the phone. The people at the hatchery tried to maintain that some rogue pollutant must have made its way into the water. Swope suggested they back that theory up with immediate data or else they’d have a date with the Cannon County magistrate. Next came a testy conversation with Sheriff Chones. Normally an ally, he was clearly angry that his men once again had to deal with Newton’s growing problems.
“Five arrests?” Swope hazarded after the usual persiflage.
“Misdemeanor public disorders. We cited and released four of them. The fifth gave us a bit of lip so we’re going to hold him ’til that mouthpiece Spivey wakes up.”
“I understand they were all black.”
There was a pause. On the end of the line Swope could hear a squelched radio.
“Yeah, I guess they are,” the sheriff said eventually.
“How do you think that came about?”
“Well, Austin, I guess it happened like this—somebody called us to the scene of a fight in your city and when we arrived we arrested the guys doing the fighting.”
“Who happened to be black.”
“Black people have been known to mix it up. Ever hear that one?”
Swope controlled his temper.
“All right, Sheriff,” he said, his voice suddenly thick with conciliation. “Personally, I couldn’t care less if they were green. But Chicago, you know.”
Chones took the bait. His tone drifted from annoyance to exasperation.
“Austin, I got to tell you—this whole situation could be avoided if you’d let me take some preemptive steps down there.”
“I understand, Ralph. Just give me until the end of the summer. Things will change then. For both of us.”
“Summers can get pretty damned long, case you haven’t noticed.”
The press began to call after that. As Swope feared, they were more aggressive than ever, no doubt because they’d swallowed Vine’s optimism whole in the early days, printing unchallenged his assertions that the city’s design would provide a remedy for the social chaos gripping the nation. Put people in cages and they’ll act like animals, he’d said time and again. Put them in communities and they’ll act like human beings. Hard-bitten editors, desperate for something to counter the riots and assassinations and wars filling their pages, had lapped it up. Vine’s idealism was so convincing that they’d even turned a blind eye to some of Swope’s more questionable land acquisitions. Now,
fearing they’d been had, they seemed almost glad that there was trouble. Though Swope held them off the best he could, he knew tomorrow’s papers would make bad reading.
Finally, at high noon, came the dreaded call from Chicago—Gus Savage, EarthWorks managing director, firmly in control of the company since Barnaby’s second stroke. An ambitious former New Frontiersman who’d been head-hunted from Bechtel, he didn’t have the same regard for Newton’s chief counsel as the company’s founder.
“Austin, what the hell’s going on? The press office just received a call from the Post asking if they would like to comment on last night’s riot in Newton. Imagine our surprise.”
“First of all, Gus, there was no riot. It was a scuffle at the teen center. A few chairs were broken. That was all.”
“I’m hearing about arrests.”
“Five.”
“Word is they were all black.”
Swope paused, his silence a yes.
“Jesus.”
“Misdemeanor public order beefs. Nobody’s going to prison.”
“As if that’s the point.”
“Look, I really think we’re in danger of blowing this thing out of proportion.”
Swope regretted the words the moment he spoke them.
“Austin, I don’t think you have to explain the proportions of the situation to me. We currently have over eighteen hundred unsold units in the outer villages. And a lot more acreage waiting for the tractors to roll. Bad press is disastrous to us, even if you and I can convince one another that it is inaccurate or unfair. You know how far our necks are stuck out, PR-wise. We’re selling a concept, not just land. Now, the role I see for you in all this is stopping that negative coverage from happening. And I seriously doubt that telling people they’re blowing things out of proportion is going to get the sort of results EarthWorks wants.”
Swope was tempted to tell him he’d recently proposed measures that would have prevented the fracas, only to have them shot down by Savage’s office. But there was no reason to start an argument he could only lose.
“Well, it looks like we’re going to have to close the center for several weeks, anyway,” he said.
There was a staticky silence.
“That bad?”
“Yeah. Water.”
“Has Wooten looked at it?”
“Not yet.”
“All right. Report back to me once he does. And Austin …”
There was a long silence before Swope gave in.
“Yes?”
“Just so we’re clear. There’s been no final decision made on the manager’s job. Not yet.”
And then, without another word, Savage hung up. Swope held the phone in front of him for a long while, as if he’d forgotten what it was. It wasn’t until the beeping began that he slotted it back into its nest. Savage’s parting comment howled through his mind. His heart began to pound and a cold film of sweat materialized on his skin. He couldn’t believe the man had just threatened his job. The decision had already been made. Five years ago, when Barnaby hired him. Swope was to be the city’s first manager. It was a done deal. They’d shaken on it. To deny him the title now would be criminal.
Savage couldn’t mean it.
Swope instructed Evelyn to hold all calls, then walked over to the center of the office, stopping at the edge of the Newton scale model. It was time to cool down. Take a minute and pull out of the nosedive he’d been in ever since that dawn call. He looked down at the model, taking comfort from its pristine, unchanging spread. Built by a team of Austrian artisans, it was the size of a regulation billiards table, covered with miniature houses and cars and people who, if you used a magnifying glass—and Swope had—had individual faces with distinct expressions. Everything in Vine’s plan was here. The veinwork of bike paths and the village centers with their sawtooth roofs. The mall, the pavilion, the low-flung industrial parks on the city’s outskirts—everything. Swope’s own woody neighborhood of Mystic Hills. Even the carbuncular complexes of subsidized housing. At the exact center of it all stood the lake’s simulacrum, its water-colored surface brilliant and unclouded, suggesting depths as infinite and mysterious as a Scottish loch.
He’d first seen the model in Barnaby’s office in Chicago, back in late ′67, when EarthWorks had flown him out for the big interview. Until then, he’d never really believed that the city would be anything more than a glorified subdivision. But on that day, as Barnaby spoke to him without interruption for over an hour, Swope’s hard-won D.C. cynicism had crumbled like poorly mixed cement. Although he knew that Vine had given up a lucrative practice as one of the nation’s most sought-after commercial architects to concentrate on the project, he had no idea how passionately the man believed in his new city. Newton would be no ordinary conurbation, Vine explained in a voice hushed by the weight of absolute conviction, no random collection of streets and houses and lives. This was going to be the place he’d been dreaming about ever since he came to Chicago in the early 1920s to serve as an apprentice architect at Louis Sullivan’s old firm. The place where people would finally start living like they could. Look, he said, passing a conjurer’s hand through the air above the model. No overhead power lines or billboards or factories to blot out the sky. With the exception of a single central building, nothing would rise above the trees. And Newton’s citizens would work where they lived, in landscaped business parks that housed new industries like telecommunications and computers. They would shop in nearby village centers and worship under the discreetly steepled roofs of interfaith centers. Children would play in tot lots constructed of recycled tires and chipped wood, where every fall would be muffled, every knee remain unscraped. Most important, the city would contain a careful mix of middle-class and subsidized housing. People of different races and backgrounds would live together here. There would be no ghettos of poverty or privilege. And when Newton was done, Vine said with a matter-of-factness that sent a thrilled pulse along Swope’s spine, they would build a dozen more cities. In the lowlands of North Carolina. Outside Dayton. Orange County. East of Augusta. North of Phoenix once the Salt River Project kicked in. All of them based on this perfect design.
By the time he’d finished Swope knew that he had to take this job. This was the future for him and his wife and his young son. Not in Washington or New York, but here, with this tall, straight-backed preacher’s son from Nicodemus, Kansas, who believed he could create the perfect city with a T square and a pencil. Though a born doubter, Swope had been overwhelmed by the sheer, insane ambition of it all, the idea that Vine had built a model and now planned to make the world fit it. And when a hardworking black contractor named Earl Wooten arrived from St. Louis a few days later to take up the post of general foreman, Swope could see he felt the same way, both of them believing that this was where all their toil and achievement had been leading—to this office and this man and his city.
They spent hours gathered around the model during that first heady year, Vine pointing out details with a long index finger as Swope and Wooten listened, hanging on his every word, both amazed at how the answers to their questions seemed to rise straight up out of the design. Some nights they were so intent that they forgot to eat or call home or even go to bed. Swope remembered one of these sessions in particular, during their first August together. The Democratic National Convention had come to Chicago, though none of them paid it much attention—it was a crucial phase for Newton, with digging just begun on the first parcels of land. Gradually, however, a gathering wail of sirens penetrated the meeting in Vine’s seventy-eighth-floor office, an incessant howl that seemed to come from every direction. Wooten, dressed in his customary outfit of pressed khaki pants and matching work shirt, strolled to the window to see what all the fuss was about.
“What is it?” Swope asked.
Wooten shrugged. He couldn’t see.
“I’ll tell you exactly what it is,” Vine said finally, his eyes never leaving the spread of blueprints in front of him. “It’s the past.”
It took Swope and Wooten a moment to understand. When they did, they shared a smile. And then they returned to work, oblivious now to the sirens outside.
Those had been the best days for Swope. The Acquisition Phase. When life was simple. There was only one thing to do and he did it better than anyone else: buy land. The forty-four acres where Newton Plaza and its attendant lake now stood had been the first parcel. He’d coaxed it away from a bankrupt dairy farmer named Husted, who gladly signed over the deed when Swope offered to pick up his note. After that came the remaining 13,981 acres of contiguous soil, snapped up for prices that were a fraction of the going rate. God, what a time that had been. Traveling from farmhouse to farmhouse, sitting in those kitchens redolent of tired dirt, old Formica and yellowed wallpaper, he’d moved even the most intransigent of sellers. Most had been easy—the land was over-farmed, the market depressed. People couldn’t wait to get their checks and hit Fort Lauderdale. And those who didn’t want to sell were readily leveraged out by the pictures Swope painted of all those new houses and all those busy roads and—most decisively—all those poor blacks moving out from the Gomorrahs the locals referred to as Ballimore and Warshington. For those final few lacking the imagination to be scared off, Swope invoked liens and forgotten rights-of-way. It didn’t matter that he occasionally had to play a bit rough. This was the future. Sacrifices would have to be made. And they were. Starting just a few days before they killed Martin, he was able to wrap up his program by the time Buzz and Neil took their lunar stroll.
It was only then that things got complicated. In the intervening years Swope had to sweat every last legal detail involved in filling fourteen thousand empty acres with houses and schools and stores, with sewers and electricity and water. And with people—black and white, middle class and poor. Former hippies and hard-charging young bureaucrats; benumbed Vietnam vets and homebody engineers. It had been Swope who’d fought the zoning battles with the county and the road wars with the state; Swope who’d wheedled policing agreements out of Chones and low tax rates from the county commissioners. Four solid years spent doing what it took to make the model in front of him come to life. Drawing up leases with over six hundred separate businesses. Suing deadbeat suppliers and shoddy subcontractors. Getting social services in nearby cities and rural counties to round up enough poor folk to fill the HUD projects. He’d done it all. And now, come Labor Day, he would be the city’s first manager. A three-year posting after which he would be a shoe-in for Congress in the newly configured Cannon County seat, kicking the hell out of the old-school Democrat who now slumbered his way back into office every two years with reshoveled New Deal horseshit. And after that, who knew? Senate. Governor. Or maybe even the big one, when a desolated party came looking for a savior.
The New City Page 2
