Call Me Joe (21 page)

All eight flashed a definite thumbs up. Jack looked at each of them and smiled.

"Starting next week," he smiled, "everyone here gets a 15% raise. Thanks."

He flashed me an index finger and ducked into Steptoe's office. Aaron and I went outside and waited by the Cherokee.

"Jesus," Aaron chuckled. "People think I'm mean. I just smack people around. He picks the meat off their bones."

"I haven't seen him do that a whole lot," I replied. "Just the one other time with Steptoe. What freaks me out is that he makes these huge money deals like you and I blow our noses. We couldn't get a motel room, so he bought the motel."

"So I heard," Aaron murmured. "Was he really some sorta stud football star?"

"Yep," I smiled. "First team all-American twice. Best arm I ever saw. I watched him go 22 for 25 against U.S.C. and the three incompletions were drops."

"Always wanted to do that," Aaron sighed. "Coach wanted me to come out, but …"

"That when your mama left?" I asked.

"Yeah," he smiled, thinly. "Won't let you play if you're not in school."

"That's bothering you, isn't it?" I probed, "not graduating high school."

"Fuck yes, it bothers me," Weber snapped. "People look at me, and think 'big, dumb hayseed.' I hate that. First off, I'm not dumb, and the hayseed part …"

He looked even more downtrodden, in that moment, than he had when I braced him back at his trailer. He was right, of course. That's exactly what I thought when I first encountered him.

I grew up with some advantages:  two parents, big extended family, stable home, friends, a premium placed on education and manners, always enough to eat. When I was younger, I'd been stunned to find so many people who had almost none of those. Today, the lack of those things is the norm.

In my bleeding-heart liberal soul lurks the irrational compulsion to do something about it. The plans range from the concrete and valuable—my monthly teaching at the Seattle Boys & Girls Clubs and yearly checks to same—to half-baked and wildly impractical, like my nebulous plan to found a theatre company that would raise money for displaced families.

I've never bought into the idea that we should each help one kid and that the cumulative effect would solve the problem instantly. It's a great idea and I have no doubt that it would work. The catch is that few of us would actually get off the couch long enough to do it. The picture of me as one of the valiant few who would does nothing except create an almost panicky guilt about the thousands of other kids besides the one I might try to help.

We card-carrying B.H. libs do better throwing money at problems and organizing hand-wringing cocktail parties than we do one-on-one solutions. Though I constantly poke fun at it, I really am a staunch liberal. I'm confused, then, by the fact that most people who call themselves liberals today make me want to grab them by their pasty, pencil-necks and choke them 'til the piss leaks out their ears. They may be my ideological brothers and sisters but those infrequent times when I find myself in rooms full of chardonnay-swilling, bean-dip slurping guys wearing fisherman's knit cardigans and socks with their Birkenstocks, carrying Indian print man-bags festooned with buttons decrying issues that died out 20 years ago, my impulse is to whip out the Desert Eagle, march them all off to a sports bar, and make them eat beer brats while watching football.  People to whom I've admitted this see it as a startling lack of sensitivity and tolerance. Can't imagine why.

"Well …" Aaron continued, "I guess I am a hayseed but … it wasn't my choice, y'know?"

"It will take you all of two seconds to stop being a hayseed, Aaron," I sighed. "Just decide to stop acting like one. Stop picking fights in bars. Stop scowling at everybody you meet who isn't a good-looking woman. Stop hanging out with those two assholes, who are hayseeds, right down to their bones. Yeah, everybody you hang with is gonna talk about you like a dog. But you're probably not losing all that much. Most of all, just stop thinking that way. Stop separating the world into us versus them. Be you."

"I'm not sure I know what that is," he almost whispered.

"It's not that mysterious," I insisted. "Before you go anywhere, do anything, buy anything, hang with anybody, make any major decisions, just think about it. Ask yourself if you're about to decide based on what you'd really want or just because you've always done things that way, or worse, because you think that's what people expect."

"Look," he fumed. "Jesus! I'm … I'm the tough guy, the dangerous guy. If I'm not that, anymore, y'know … what am I?"

"Aaron," I groaned, "you're making this harder than it needs to be. Do you want to be a dangerous guy? Is that what you want to be?"

"Not especially," he sighed.

"Nobody but you can figure out what else you could be," I continued. "That's scary but the upside is that you can be nearly anything you want. I think concert pianist and British Prime Minister might be out, but you might still be an astronaut, if you want."

"Damnit," he sighed. "I was leaning toward concert pianist."

"I don't think the piano's going to fit into your trailer," I smiled. "Just think about it, Aaron. If you can come up with what you want, I'll help any way I can."

He looked at me curiously, suspicion lurking in his eyes.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. "Feeling guilty, are ya?"

"Yeah," I said, turning to face him squarely. "I feel guilty that I chose to slap the crap outta you twice because I was annoyed and too fucking lazy to bother looking beyond your bluster and see what's there. And I suspect, Aaron, that there may be quite a lot to you, if you choose to let it out. The waste of potential, to me, is a lot more of an insult than somebody getting up in my face."

"We're big, powerful guys, Aaron," I said quietly. "So is Jack, in a different way. I think any sort of power carries responsibility. That's why I'm offering to help you climb out of Kettle Falls, Washington."

"Gee," he chuckled, "you could have just said all that instead of beating the shit out of me."

"That's what I feel guilty about," I smiled. "So … how 'bout it? You up for big changes? Won't be easy and not always fun, but I bet something better comes out of it."

"Dude," he murmured. "At this point I'm up for anything that gets me off the treadmill."

Jack came bouncing out of the lodge, a faint smile stuck on his face. Evidently, he knew what I was thinking, so he carefully checked out everything in the vicinity, rather than make eye contact with me.

"You kept him on, didn't you?" I sighed. "You got the warm fuzzies from that thumbs-up crap, went all gooshy, and kept that empty shirt in place."

"Well," Jack grinned sheepishly, "I don't remember who said this but there is no greater zeal than that of the newly converted. I'm not kidding myself—he's still a P.P.V. guy, but he's awfully pissed at Anthony Pembroke for playing him. He is not wild about the little missus, either."

We climbed into the Jeep and buckled in.

"Also," Jack smiled, "people who live in glass houses …"

"Aaron's 19 and has plenty of time and potential," I pointed out.

"Steptoe never tried to rearrange my face," Jack shot back.

"You two just go ahead and talk about me like I'm not here. I don't mind," Aaron chuckled.

"Since we're dealing in clichés," I replied, "how 'bout 'old dogs, new tricks'?"

"Hey," Jack grinned. "Mind your own penance, okay?"

"Maybe I'm actually not here," Aaron mused. "Maybe I dreamed all this."

"Jesus," Jack groaned. "Now I'm feeling sorry for you."

I fished the fax out of my pocket and passed it to Jack. He grunted in surprise as he read the heading and then was quiet for a few minutes as I navigated Route 20 back toward Kettle Falls.

"Well, well," Jack finally said softly. "Where was this?"

"Smack in the middle of Steptoe's desk pad," I answered. "Three sets of that fax, collated. I saw the heading and kyped it. What does it say?"

"It’s a warning to Steptoe, security, and site maintenance about possible terrorism directed at staff or facilities.  It spells out what happened to Percy Kensington and about the e-mail they received. The e-mail said that Kensington was shot as a message to stop P.P.V. from carrying on with this project and implied that there'd be more deaths if they don't."

"Jesus," I murmured, stunned, "A guy in London was shot to stop this development? Hardly anybody knew about this place before your press release. There hasn't been time to mount any organized thing like an assassination."

"Hardly anybody knew about it here," Jack replied. "It's been in the British press for months."

"Huh?" I blurted. "You're just telling me this, now?"

"Didn't seem important," Jack shrugged.

"Jack," I said in exasperation, "does the word 'Internet' mean anything to you?"

"It's on the 'net," Jack conceded. "You can Nexis Lexis stuff on it and even get a few Google hits but you'd have to search very specifically. Obviously, not many people have."

"Well, one did, and it was exactly the wrong one," I breathed.

"There's more," he sighed, “Says here that P.P.V. is planning to secure the services of a prominent Seattle investigator to handle their own search for possible local connections. Guess who they name?

"You're kidding," I groaned.

"Says so right here," Jack pointed out. "So there goes your theory that Kensington had nothing to do with Mountain Empire."

"I'm not real smart," I sighed, "but I can lift heavy things."

Aaron chuckled and rolled the window down.

"I'm gonna get a t-shirt with that on it," he muttered.

We rode in silence for a minute, assimilating the fax.

I had been so certain of Percy Kensington's death being an unrelated event that it was hard to think outside that neat little box. A company that harvests trees all over the world and sells the paper at premium prices would, after all, have trodden upon a few toes along the way. That alone created a hundred scenarios, let alone figuring in business rivals, personal enemies, and plain random chance. The e-mail changed all that … if it wasn't an artful feint.

"Pardon me for butting in here," Aaron began.

"By all means," I groaned. "It ain't like my brain's giving off smoke, at the moment."

"Well, I just think the e-mail's a little far-fetched if it isn't for real," he said slowly. "I mean, there are people who didn't want this place built, to begin with. And I'm not just talkin' about the local cranks, either."

"I never heard anything like that," Jack sniffed.

"Of course you didn't," Aaron laughed. "You've been here a couple of days, now. How many people have rushed over to spill their guts to you?"

"Well," Jack drawled, "there are always crackpots anywhere you build. You can't listen to every petty little complaint that …"

"Now, see? Right there is why people like us don't talk to people like you. Why don't you try defining 'petty little complaint'."

"I don't see any point in …" Jack began.

"Jack," I interjected, "why don't you answer that, okay?"

He looked at me hard for a moment and then sighed and sat back in his seat.

"Okay," he said slowly. "A petty complaint would be somebody bitching about an occasional traffic problem, their view changing, big trucks on the highway, strangers coming to town, not being served as fast in restaurants because business increases. Not to mention the whole litany of moaning about environmental problems that we've already had to prove won't happen!"