“So what are you going to do?”
“I sold it to the Press-Tribune,” I said. “It’s not as much money, but it’s an in there. The editor, Mark Harrington, said it could lead to more work.”
“Not a total loss,” Abby grinned at me. Grin at me, and the world is mine, Abigail.
Ethan walked in from the living room, an indication that there was a commercial in tonight’s broadcast of Rugrats. Ignoring our conversation entirely, or the idea that we might be having one, he used his time efficiently. “Dad, why don’t other kids like me?” he asked.
Abby did her best not to look startled, but realizing he’d asked me, she got up from the table and went to talk to Leah in the living room. The coward.
I could have denied that the other kids didn’t like Ethan, but he is very smart, and would have seen through me. “People are put off by what they don’t understand, Ethan,” I told him.
“They don’t understand me?” He was baffled enough to sit down at the table, but I think better on my feet, so I stood up.
“Do you think you act like everybody else?” I asked.
“No, but I think they’re the ones acting strange,” Ethan answered after a second.
I smiled. “You’re probably right,” I said. “But the fact is, they act like most people, and they’re going to think it’s odd when you don’t.”
“Is there something wrong with me?” He didn’t sound concerned, just interested.
“No. You’re fine. But we’ll talk to some doctors, maybe, and see what we can find out. It doesn’t mean you’re sick. It means your brain works differently. Maybe you have to learn things differently. But you’re really smart, and you can do it.”
“Can I learn to get the other kids to like me?” he asked.
Kids. Love them, and they’ll tear your heart out. “I’ll bet you can,” I managed.
Ethan stood up. “Okay.” And he went back inside to see what Tommy and Chuckie were up to now.
Abby walked back in, and assessed my face. “Wow,” she said. “You okay?”
“I think so. But I feel bad. I never found out about the water gun.” And I told her about today’s conversation with Bill McCawley, and with two other parents I’d called late in the afternoon, who shared his feelings pretty closely.
Abby sat down and her lovely face was dedicated to thought. “What’s funny,” she said finally, “is that everybody seems to think it’s okay for kids to have water guns.”
“Why is that funny? What’s a little water gun going to do ...”
“You’re missing the point. You’ve been trying to find out who broke the rule.”
“Right. To save Ethan a suspension.”
Abby nodded. “Maybe our problem is with the rule, not the rule-breaker.”
It took a second to set in. “You mean because just a few parents care about the water gun rule ...”
“Exactly. The majority thinks it’s stupid.”
I walked over and kissed her seriously, and not for the usual reasons. “You’re exactly right,” I said. “It’s time for a little civil disobedience.” And I spent the next ninety minutes on the phone, distributing water guns to children through their parents.
The protest worked exceptionally well, although Ms. Mignano was a little nonplused when she summoned me to her office the next day. “Every child in the first grade except two showed up in school with a water gun today, Mr. Tucker,” she said. “Why do I think this might have something to do with you?”
I did my best to appear wide eyed. “I thought you were calling me because Ethan was one of the children with the water guns,” I said. In fact, the other parents had suggested leaving Ethan out of our protest effort, but he had insisted on violating the rule, appalled at the idea that he’d appear “different.” “I figured he’d be suspended. And I thought we had agreed you’d call me Aaron.”
“We can’t suspend the entire first grade,” Ms. Mignano countered. “Which you and the other parents counted on, didn’t you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “But it is a silly rule.”
“It’s going to be re-examined when Mr. Breen comes back next week,” she said. “Now, take your son’s blue water gun and go home, Aaron. Ethan’s off the hook; he can come to school as usual next week.”
Since Carole Drabek had been the only parent I’d called who had been against the Water Gun Gambit, I decided to drop by her house after school that day, and I brought Ethan and Leah with me, mostly because there wasn’t anyone else to watch them this time of day. Carole opened the door with a wary smile.
“I just wanted to apologize,” I said after she let us in, and Ethan ran off to see what Danny was up to. Leah stood next to me, and attached herself to my right leg. “I know you weren’t crazy about the idea of the water guns, but—”
“You had to do what you thought was right,” she said, smiling. “I know how it feels to want to help your child.”
She ushered me into the kitchen, where she was cooking dinner. It was hard walking with a two-year-old girl on my leg, but I managed.
Carole stuffed something into the oven, then gestured toward glass doors opening onto the rear deck. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “Jake’s out there, and maybe Leah would like to play with him.”
We walked out, to where Jake, Carole’s three year old, was walking around the backyard, eschewing millions’ worth of toys, swings, and other amusements left around the yard in favor of a two-foot branch that had fallen off the oak tree. He was using it as a walking stick.
Leah, of course, refused to budge off my leg.
“I hope Ethan didn’t bring a toy gun here today,” Carole said. “We still insist on no violent toys, you know.”
“Oh, no,” I told her. “We respect your right to have things the way you want them in your house.”
“Just not in my school?” Carole said. The smile didn’t dim.
“It’s a democracy,” I tried. “Majority rules, up to a point.”
Carole nodded. “I understand that. And I’m okay with it. But not for Danny and Jake ...”
There was a shout from upstairs. “Mom!” a voice yelled. “Ethan scraped his knee on the rug!”
I was about to head for the stairs. Leah, thrilled with the thought of some action after all this grownup talk, forgot to be bashful and ran toward Danny’s voice. Carole looked at me.
“It’s just a scrape,” she said. “I’ll take care of it; I know where the washcloth and the Band-aids are. Do me a favor, keep an eye on Jake, would you?” And without waiting to see if I agreed, she headed inside.
I couldn’t hear Ethan crying or shouting, so my guess was he was more embarrassed than hurt. I decided, for once, to let someone besides Abby or me help him. I’d have to get used to that, I supposed.
I sat back on a deck chair and watched Jake for a minute, reveling in my lack of responsibility. All I had to do was watch.
Jake and his walking stick were involved in some great inner drama, as he was talking to himself and wandering around the yard. Finally, he noticed me on the deck, and walked toward me, an expression on his face that was serious, and dedicated.
I smiled, and stood up. Show him you’re friendly, and the child won’t be afraid of you.
Jake stopped about fifteen feet from where I stood, and raised the walking stick parallel to the ground. He pointed it at me.
“Bang,” he said.
Copyright © 2010 Jeffrey Cohen
Previous Article Next Article
Previous Article Next Article
Fiction
WATTS IN THE WIND
DOC FINCH
Art by Edward Kinsella III
“Here we harvest the wind’s free bounty,” said Leo Albertson, the manager of the Lamancha Wind Ranch. “If only it didn’t cost so much for the tools to reap it.”
He waved at the window, beyond which stood a forest of white steel pillars, each supporting a whirling three-bladed fan. Beyo
nd them and downwind stood taller, larger fans spinning slower, catching and stripping breezes that escaped the first line of energy gatherers.
I quit trying to count spinning fans and just watched them. They all seemed to be turning. They stretched in staggered rows to the horizon, rising up from the flat, bunchgrass-covered plateau. The multiple ravines and arroyos in the surface left by eleven thousand years of short but savage summer rains wound through the rows.
I’m Vlad Hammersmith, owner and sole operative for Enertricity Resolvers, LLC, a company that redefines its goals for almost every job it does. This job had been described as “a lot of problems in my power company.” I wondered how many problems he had.
“One hundred and thirty-six,” said Albertson. “That’s how many one and a half megawatt turbines—the ones up front—we have. The big new ones are a little over eight megawatts each and there are fifty of them. We’ve been feeding better than four hundred gigawatt-hours a year into the grid for three years now.
“It should be more power,” Albertson continued, smoothing back his retreating hairline. “But we’ve got these things going wrong, and our security people are stumped, and more important, so is our public relations department.”
“Equipment or people problems?” I asked.
“People, I guess. It isn’t like there’s that much equipment failure.”
“Staff, customers, or neighbors?”
“Oh, not customers—we seldom even see them. Could be staff, or even neighbors, though we’ve certainly not given them a cause to hate us.”
“Is it just mischief, or annoyed people, or organized sabotage?”
“It doesn’t look organized—mostly it’s just little things. Sand in a generator gearbox, something stuck to a turbine blade that unbalances it, a grounded transmission line, things one or two people could do quickly, but still cost us generating capacity for a day or a week or a month. That adds up.”
“Ever catch anybody?”
“Maybe. The other day we had an oil spill—”
“Oil spill? I thought you bragged about no ecological risk in using wind power.”
“Transformers. We gotta have them to raise the voltage on what the wind generators make so it can feed into the power grid. Grid runs at 345,000 volts; the generators a lot less. Got to have oil to cool and insulate the transformers. Anyway, our maintenance man was headed out there, and arrived about the time the overheat alarm went off. Found a couple hundred gallons of oil soaked into the caliche. A temp worker must have left the sample valve open. He swore he didn’t but he had oil all over his coveralls. I fired him.”
“How about sand in the gearbox—how’d anyone get to that? It’s up on top in the cabin opposite the blades, right?”
“Yeah, in the nacelle. Someone bashed the lock off the door to one of the shorter towers, climbed up two hundred ten feet, dumped sand—no shortage of that—into the gearbox and a week or two later it died of erosion.”
“You said ‘shorter towers.’ No one has tampered with the eight-megawatt towers?”
“Not yet. For one thing, they don’t have a gearbox. The generator is connected directly to the blades. And also, they’d have to climb nearly six hundred feet to get to the nacelle on one of those.”
I grinned. “Not all monkey-wrenchers are lazy.”
“There’re still monkey-wrenchers around?”
“They’re not just guys who drove nails into trees in front of a logging crew; they’re anybody, usually one or two, that are trying to shut down an operation they think is threatening them, or the ecosystem, or a protected animal, or sometimes just because it’s blocking their view. Yeah, they’re still around.”
“Hell, how do you stop that?” Albertson said.
“Tighten security, make some arrests, change their minds about the threat.”
Albertson waved at his big window again. “Security? I got wind turbines on over fifteen thousand acres, full of little ravines and dry canyons. No fences.”
“Fences would help. Some.”
Albertson shook his head. “New Mexico has an open-range law. Cows can graze damn near any place they want. Some of those places are out here on the wind ranch.”
I looked at the multitude of fans again. “How many security people you have?”
“Twelve—and yes, I know it’s nowhere enough. Had an expert from the government come in first time I complained about the open-range law; he told me to hire about thirty-five or forty security people.”
“You throw him out?”
“No. But I don’t complain to the government anymore.”
The door opened and the secretary I had seen at the desk outside stuck her head in. “Mr. Albertson, Rodney Barr is here for the ten o’clock meeting. Shall I ask him to wait?”
“No, have him come on in, we’re about to break here ... Mr. Hammersmith wanted to take a tour of the site, right?”
“It’s Vlad, and yes.”
Rodney Barr was a slender man with a small potbelly who walked with a slight stoop. He wore rimless glasses perched on a longish, pointed nose. With his head lowered slightly and his halting stride, he reminded me of a sandpiper looking for lunch on a beach.
“Rodney runs the competition. He has the South Wind Natural Gas Power Plant over near Santa Rosa.” Albertson chuckled lightly. “Actually, we work together: I provide the base-load power, and Rodney takes care of the peaking power, when it’s needed. Both feeding the same grid.”
“Howdy. You one of those wind engineers?” Mr. Barr bobbed his head forward and back.
“Rodney, this is Vlad Hammersmith. He’s here to—”
“Actually, I came out to see if I could offer Mr. Albertson some pointers on increasing plant efficiency.” There was no point in telling anyone I was there to look for saboteurs.
“Ah, that’s good. We could all use some more efficiency in our operations,” said Rodney. He turned to Albertson. “All I needed to do today is to pass on something I got from the grid dispatcher this morning. Two of the regional nuclear plants are shutting down for scheduled maintenance a month early. Do you need my assistance in the changeover? Do you need me to pick up the extra power generation? We want to keep them thinking of eastern New Mexico as Old Reliable, eh?”
“A month earlier? No, I think we have that in hand, no problem, but thanks for remembering to mention it.” Albertson made a note on his desk calendar and smiled at Rodney. “I’ll buy you lunch next time I’m up in Santa Rosa.”
“Thanks. Look forward to it. Nice meetin’ you, Mr. Vlad.”
Rodney turned and shuffle-stepped toward the door. When he paused to pick up a paper clip from the floor, I had a sudden feeling that he had found lunch, and fought to keep the grin off my face.
I pointed my pickup down the nearest gravel path—it was too narrow to be a road—and headed for the fan forest. As I drove slowly along I looked carefully at the shorter towers. They were round steel towers, riveted and welded into a single piece. Each had a metal door, set into the tower, which resembled the watertight door on a ship. There was a handle on the door and a keypad on the tower. Other than that and a set of identifying numbers they were featureless. The power cables for each tower were apparently routed underground, which made the whole scene very neat, almost surrealistic—white tapering columns rising from a concrete pad with no wires, no litter, and no landscaping. There was only the thin bunchgrass whipping endlessly in the wind and the three-armed rotors ceaselessly turning to engage the eye.
In the middle of the shorter forest, I stopped the pickup and turned off the engine. I opened the door and stepped out to listen.
There was little to hear. There was a low growl coming from high up—the step-up gearbox to get the proper voltage and frequency? There was a light sound, a vibration in the air, of hundreds of vanes sweeping their endless arcs. I thought of swords swinging without impact. There were irregular squeaks and rattles from the machinery as it adjusted itself slightly to track the wind and to adjust th
e rotors to compensate as the wind varied in speed and direction. I could hear the nacelle far above move on its track every so often to adjust for larger wind direction changes.
Below that was a very low frequency rumble, almost a humming, a sound that couldn’t be pinpointed. Woven into it all was the constant murmur of the wind across the New Mexico plains. There was also a flickering of the light as hundreds of blades shadowed and bounced the sunlight about; I found it more annoying than the sounds.
Where the transition from short towers to tall towers came, I found the ragpicker. Off to my left, I noticed the motion of her skirt whipping in the wind, so I stopped and took a long look. A woman was walking under one of the large towers. She wore a long skirt and a shawl against the wind and moved forward slowly, bent toward the ground. She was dragging a large black garbage bag, into which she occasionally put something picked from the ground.
I got back in the truck and circled around to come up alongside of where she was walking. As I idled along at a walking pace, she continued her work, ignoring me. Finally I pulled forward a little, stopped the truck, and stepped out and stood in her path. She stopped when she reached me and looked up, then stood erect.
“You going to run me off again?” she said. She seemed much younger this close up. And prettier, I thought. Her hair was red and unconfined, and it swirled around her head in the ground winds making their way through the towers. Her eyes were green, and not friendly. Standing erect, she was taller and stood like an athlete, ready to run, jump, or kick me square in the crotch if I moved wrong.
“No, I didn’t come out to run anyone off. Should I?”
“You could run the bastards off that are killing the birds and bats.”
Uh-oh.
“I’m Vlad. Is there some other way I can help you?”
“And I’m Erin. Erin Algood, president of the Fort Sumner Birdwatching and Protection Group. I’m also the maiden lady who teaches high school biology and physics in Santa Rosa. Or, in the summer, I’m the woman who goes down to Baja California and classifies birds. You want to help pick up the birds and bats slaughtered by these killing fans?”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 22
