Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  She shot up and ran around the corner of the stack row. And plowed right into Sheldon Stover. “You flaming idiot!” she screamed, heedless of library etiquette. “You scared the bejesus out of me! What in the holy hell are you doing skulking around here?”

  Sheldon, as was his wont, sighed. “I’d hoped not to introduce this disturbance into my methodology, but I suppose, as a subject, you have the right to know,” he said. “I’m doing a brief experimental ethnography for Marsh’s project, and I’ve been observing you. See, by taking this book off the shelf”—he selected a thick red-bound volume—“I had a clear view of you sitting there, working.”

  Sally leaned over and peered through the opening to see the desk where she’d been sitting. “You’ve been lying on the floor here spying on me? For your experimental ethnography? I don’t get this, Sheldon. Why me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked.

  She had to think about that. “I sincerely hope not,” she told him. “Let’s assume there’s a reason besides the fact that you’re a potentially homicidal Peeping Tom.”

  Sheldon chuckled. “Not at all. I guess I’ll have to explain. You see, my job is to theorize the endless signature of human presence on that apparently wild tract of land that Marsh Carhart is evaluating, up there in the mountains. Now, I’m no historian . . .” he admitted.

  “That much I’ve figured out,” Sally said.

  “So I don’t pretend to concern myself with the kinds of matters that must be well detailed in written documents,” he continued without acknowledging her interruption. “What I contribute to Marsh’s project is a kind of provisional cut at representing the perpetuity of human engagement with this so-called wild place.”

  Sally grabbed the red book and shoved it back onto the shelf. “I still don’t get this. I haven’t even been there. Why are you frigging stalking me?”

  “I’m not! Pay attention here, Sally. I’m merely following a thread. Yesterday your boyfriend, with whom you appear to have something of an intellectual as well as a sexual partnership—”

  “Sheldon!” she screamed again.

  “It’s just sex then? I doubt that. In any case, Marsh and I encountered this boyfriend at the site yesterday, obviously engaged in his own brand of scientistic observation.”

  “Scientistic?” asked Sally.

  “As in, ‘the kind of thing scientists do.’ ”

  “Don’t you mean scientific?”

  “No. That has too much of the ring of empiricism,” he said.

  “Oh.” How in hell could you take this guy seriously?

  “As I was saying, we walked the property with your friend. His interest in the place put him in the category of a subject for my study. Being a scientist, he is presumably following up his observations from yesterday with more research of the sort that people in his field regard as useful. In other words, he’s carrying the consequences of his presence yesterday in the mountains into other times and places, performing activities related to and impinging upon the Happy Jack location. It’s called time-space distanciation.”

  “Oh yeah? Gosh, Hawk calls it ‘going around looking stuff up.’ ”

  But Sheldon, on a roll, missed the mockery in her tone. “I had planned, today, to discreetly follow him and see where his work led. But when I went to your house this morning, his truck was already gone. I decided I’d head back home, but then I happened to see you through the window of the Wrangler café. I believe in pursuing spontaneous contingencies, and it seemed to me at that moment that by following you, I was merely tracking the chaotic web of human relations that spins out of any place. And I was right. Why else would you be sitting here reading books about the history of the very area in question?”

  Her bad luck. Hawk had left early for Cheyenne, so Sheldon had tailed her. Was every jerk in town following her around? The image of being snagged on some strand of a web that both Sheldon Stover and Bone Bandy, and God knew who else, were creeping along didn’t improve her mood. She ignored his question and looked him right in the eye. “I want you to listen to me very carefully. I do not give my consent to be a subject in your experimental ethnography. Should you choose, in any way, to represent me, I will haul you in front of the Supreme Research Ethics Court, or whatever agency handles these things, and by the time I’m done with you, they’ll be talking about your case the same way they talk about those psychologists who give people electric shocks for the hell of it.”

  Now it was Sally on a roll. “You are to go away this instant, and stop following me, and don’t even think about bugging Hawk.” She could just imagine Mr. More-Than-Sex-Partner’s hilarity at the prospect, but she thought another threat might be useful. “If he catches you, I promise, Hawk will turn you into dog food. Furthermore, you are to move out of Edna McCaffrey’s house today. I don’t give a damn where you go. I don’t care if you have to drive to South Dakota to find a motel room. This is it, Sheldon. Capisce?”

  “I do have a contract for this project, Sally.” Sheldon sniffed. “It’s unfortunate that you’re taking a hostile attitude here, but I’ve got a professional reputation to maintain.”

  She couldn’t help it; she laughed. “Then go follow Dwayne, or Nattie, or your buddy Marsh Carhart. They’re the ones putting the human impact on the place. Just do me a favor, and get out of my sight and get out of Edna’s house!”

  Sheldon was crushed. “I’m sorry you feel this way,” he said, turning to walk toward the stairs. “I’d thought you might comprehend.”

  Now he had her feeling guilty. “Hold on,” she called. “Look, I know you think you’ve got a job to do, and God knows, Sheldon, I don’t want to get in the way of you actually doing some work. Did your fellowship check arrive?”

  Hangdog look. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.” He brightened. “I’m not too worried. My prospects are good.”

  God took care of babies and guys like Sheldon Stover. “Okay. But please, just try to look at it from my point of view. I’m having a tough week, and I don’t need you popping up like the White Rabbit.”

  “All right,” he said, shoulders slumping, turning once again toward the stairs. Then he looked back over his shoulder. “Could I ask just one favor?”

  No, she thought. “What?” she said.

  “Can I just stay at Edna’s for tonight? I really need to finish this report. I promise I’ll pack up and leave first thing tomorrow morning.”

  What could she say?

  And so Sheldon went away, presumably back to Edna’s to raid the larder, assault the plumbing, and write his bullshit report. Satisfied, now, that she was really alone, Sally spent another hour reading and making notes, and then packed up her pads and pens to move on to the archives. She knew, now, what she was looking for.

  The memoir had offered up the first clue: the railroad had hired a bunch of people to work in the Laramies during World War II, doing a number of things, including producing the wood ties that went between the steel rails. The tie plant would have had to be close to wood, water, and the railroad itself. As long as Sally had been in Wyoming, there hadn’t been any kind of industrial production facilities operating in the Laramies, so the plant must have closed down sometime between the war and the early eighties. Could the ruins Hawk had found be the remains of the tie plant? Why had it closed?

  Two hours later, with the help of an archivist who knew the railroad collections cold and dearly loved his job, Sally had what Sheldon Stover would have called “provisional cuts” at some answers, and as usual, more questions. She couldn’t wait to compare notes, tonight at dinner, with the man she had learned to adore for his really big . . . brain.

  Chapter 20

  Into the Pit

  Sometimes, living in Laramie made Sally feel like she was in the middle of an old movie. Just now the feature film seemed to be Paint Your Wagon. People were working, chattering, flirting, enjoying themselves, getting into the swing of the community activity. Of course, there were some signs that these were no longer the days w
hen a smooth-faced Clint Eastwood could be found warbling onscreen. Fatigue-clad lesbians with shaved heads mingled with rodeo cowboys in Grateful Dead T-shirts, sorority girls with pierced navels, senior citizens wearing Birkenstocks. In the flatbed of the tractor-trailer, Brit, Herman Schwink, and an assortment of young people were building some kind of elaborate structure out of chicken wire, plywood, and two-by-fours. Paint, Magic Markers, paper, wood, and sheets lay everywhere. Maude, dressed in her usual faded jeans and sloganeering T-shirt, was supervising a couple dozen men, women, and children in the art of sign painting, nodding her approval as each sign was finished, stapled to wooden stakes, and stacked against the wall. Delice dashed in and out the back door of the café, shouting encouragement, and even bringing out a cooler full of cold soda and bottled water.

  “Delice giving out free drinks?” said Sally. “There’s one for the history books.”

  “Yeah,” Brit agreed, jumping down from the truck bed, “and it’s, like, not for the glory. We already put the Wrangler on our banner thanking our sponsors and volunteers, for letting us use the parking lot.”

  As Brit bent over the cooler to inspect the beverage selection, Sally watched Herman’s eyes zero in on the back pockets of Brit’s little cutoffs, then travel down her legs and all the way back up. Sally thought she might have heard him whimper. When Brit pulled out two Dr Peppers and took one over to him, you could practically see the twittering lovebirds circling his head. That boy had it bad.

  “Hey Brit,” Sally whispered, after Herman had gone back to work. “Do you think you could see if your buddy Herman can find out if his little brother knows more about Monette than he’s been admitting so far?”

  “Why?” Brit asked.

  “It seems Monette and young Adolph had some kind of thing going.”

  “Gag me,” said Brit.

  “Fine,” said Sally, “but could you get Herman to lean on Adolph a little?”

  Brit put a hand on her hip. “I think,” she said, “that I could get Herman to lean on a prickly pear cactus if I asked nicely.” And then she too went back to work.

  Sally walked over to check out the signs. They varied from the spunky and unobjectionable (“Wyoming Women Rule”) to the straightforwardly memorial (Mary Langham painting one that said “Remember Monette”) to the in-your-face feminist (“WIMMIN-POWER!!!”) to the marginally commercial (“Wyoming Women Thank Wal-Mart”—presumably Maude’s gesture). Coalition politics, Laramie style, although Sally noticed that Maude did remind some of the volunteers to stay on message (“Sorry, Sukie, I know we’re all here to protest a killing, but I think you’d better save ‘Abortion Is Murder’ for another time”).

  “Looks like you don’t really need me,” Sally told Maude. “You got a great turnout.”

  Maude pulled a bandana from her pocket and wiped her face. “They’ve done a good job. We’ll probably have forty or fifty people marching all told, and that thing on the float sure is big, anyhow.”

  “What is it supposed to be?” Sally asked.

  “Don’t know. Brit and her friends are in charge. They’ve been looking at a drawing and making modifications in the structure, but they’re keeping it a secret from us old people.”

  Sally squinted up. “It doesn’t look like anything in particular at this point.”

  “They’re not done. They said they wouldn’t put the finishing touches on until tomorrow, when they cover the whole thing in wadded-up crepe paper. I figure, if they want to treat this like they’re building the home-coming float, that’s okay. I trust Brit’s taste.”

  “No one,” Sally told Maude, “has a more finely tuned sense of the tacky than Brit. It’ll be fine.”

  “Speaking of fine,” Maude said, drinking from a water bottle, “are you? You never returned my call. And you’d better tell me the truth about what’s been going on, because I’ll find out one way or another. For instance, I already know that you and Hawk found Monette. Now tell me about what happened at your house Tuesday night.”

  Sally didn’t ask how she knew. It didn’t really matter. This was Laramie, and sooner or later, anyone who put her mind to finding out anything, would. “A little vandalism. Forget about it.”

  “Not a chance,” Maude replied. “And that business about you fainting at the rodeo? Rumor has it you’re hypoglycemic.”

  “That’s right,” said Sally. “The doctors are prescribing one of your oatmeal raisin cookies every two hours. Better start baking, Maude.”

  “You worry me, Sally.” Maude frowned.

  “My blood sugar’s fine,” Sally tried.

  Maude gave her the steely glare. “Is there any chance that break-in had anything to do with Monette’s murder?”

  “Maude!” Sally said, then lowered her voice. “Why don’t you just take out a full-page ad in the Boomerang?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t the time. But I just want you to know I’m on to you. And you surely understand how things are around here—I’m generally among the first to know what’s going on, and I’m never the last. Let me know if you need my help with anything. Anything,” she said.

  The second “anything” presumably meant that Sally should make sure to contact Maude if anybody needed intimidating. Maude actually was pretty good at that. She never flaunted her money, but Maude made it a point of womanly honor to use her height, fitness, stubbornness, and firearms ownership when the occasion suited.

  “Come to think of it,” Sally said, “maybe you could help me with a different matter. What do you know about an old tie plant up in the Laramies?”

  Maude poured some water on her bandana, then tied it around her neck. “It wasn’t a very big operation. I’m not sure when they opened it up, but it closed down in the mid-sixties sometime. You know, when they finished the interstate, the railroads lost a lot of business and they started cutting back. One more Wyoming boom busting, I guess,” Maude said, and then squinted at Sally. “My brother worked there a few summers. Why do you ask?”

  “Just doing some research for a friend,” Sally answered.

  “Yeah, I bet,” Maude said suspiciously. “You do a lot of this sort of friendly research?”

  “I do all kinds of research, as you know,” Sally said genially. “So was your brother a railroad guy?”

  “Nope. He just worked up there as a summer job. Sometimes he did construction, but the tie plant paid more. Put him through the engineering program at UW. He was a lifer at IBM—retired five years ago.”

  “Any chance I could call him up and ask him a few questions?” Sally said.

  “No. He died October before last. Lung cancer,” Maude answered flatly.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” Sally said.

  “So am I. You’d think a brilliant scientist would have had a few brains. But he was a two-pack-a-day man for damn near fifty years.” Her gaze sharpened. “You know, I’ve wondered sometimes about that tie plant job. From what I’ve read, those kinds of places are just chock-full of toxic chemicals. I wonder how many of the other workers have turned up with cancer?”

  Sally should have known better than to raise the subject with Maude Stark, a woman whose bleeding heart often bled green. So devoted to the earth was Maude that she lived off the power grid, generating power from a small wind farm, and often modestly boasting that her solar panels collected enough energy to heat her own house and half of West Laramie. From the moment Sally had first learned about the tie plant, she’d had her own thoughts about pollution problems. Naturally, Maude would make the connection.

  But she wasn’t about to let Maude stare her down. Sally went for nonchalance. “I haven’t really thought about it. I was just doing some reading, and happened to run across a mention of the plant. I’d never heard about it, that’s all.”

  “With you, ‘that’ is never all. Why in the world are you researching the Happy Jack tie plant?” Maude thought a minute. “It can’t be connected to Monette— too far from the Devil’s Playground. This wouldn’t have anythi
ng to do with that Wood’s Hole land deal, would it? Is that why Hawk was hanging around Molly Wood at the memorial?”

  “Damn it, Maude, would you give it a rest?” Sally sputtered.

  “Don’t ever try to bamboozle a nosy old lady,” Maude said.

  “If you were just a nosy old lady, you’d be a lot easier to bamboozle. But for the time being, I’d appreciate your backing off. I swear I don’t know a bloody thing about any pollution from that plant. If I learn something, I’ll let you know.”

  That much was true. The papers Sally had seen referred only to the period during which the plant had been in operation, from 1942, when it opened as a temporary facility meeting the war emergency, to 1963, by which time production had fallen way off, and the place shut down. For something that had turned trees into industrial equipment for a good twenty-one years, it hadn’t left much of a paper trail, at least in the documents Sally had seen. Mostly she’d found ledger sheets with columns of figures, showing board feet of timber ripped from the forest and prices and profits and overall outputs. There had been letters between the plant superintendent and railroad executives, talking about production quotas and employee turnover, now and again mentioning the odd accident where somebody sawed off a finger, or dropped a log on somebody else. But those were, in the parlance of industrial safety, operator errors, not environmental hazards. So Sally hadn’t learned what she’d hoped. Maybe Hawk had found more in state records.