“I don’t believe this,” she snapped. “Even now? That lodge is a win-win, and you’re trying to link it to what you guys did? Disgusting! Why don’t you admit there was a government testing program that went wrong! All this bullshit! Phony hand-wringing. A cover-up was what it was!”
She stormed out. I watched her on CNN that evening, fulminating, her angry face superimposed over a background shot of a herd of caribou, Live from Alaska. Her fury seemed magnified, and her British accent gave weight and heft to the accusations spewing from her lovely mouth.
“The North Slope is an American Serengeti,” she said. “One of the last unspoiled spots on Earth. We intend to keep it that way.”
Eddie sat beside me. “Fiery in bed, I bet,” he said with amusement.
“If she’d shut up.”
“Hey, you’re back,” exclaimed Eddie.
I wasn’t back. It was wishful thinking. She’d given me an idea, though. I picked up the phone, called Valley Girl.
“It’s three A.M. in Washington?” she moaned, even her complaints phrased as questions. “I’m sleeping?”
“Perfect time to go to work,” I said.
TWENTY-FIVE
It took a while. But I found him.
Crises bloom and get replaced in Washington. What seems crucial one day is history the next. Who planned the shooting of John F. Kennedy? Did Franklin Roosevelt have advance warning that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor? Did George W. Bush lie to America when he sent troops into Iraq, saying that country hid weapons of mass destruction? Was the quarantine of Barrow a military cover-up, or not?
After the hearings, the talking-head speculations and accusations, after my secret testimony in closed hearings before Congressional subcommittees on terrorism and biowarfare, the admiral let me retire early.
Joe Rush, ex-colonel, at the rural post office, collecting a pension check.
They say you can’t go home again, but, as is often the case, they are misinformed. You can always go home again. Or rather, what is home is inside you, what you carry from childhood. It gets buried during the rest of your time on Earth, but it never completely goes away.
Smith Falls didn’t look much different than I’d left it. The hamlet still ran for three hundred yards along a Berkshire river. The church remained the anchor of town. The mechanics and home repair guys still gathered for crisp bacon, fried eggs, and strong opinions at the general store at 6 A.M., where the Berkshire Eagle carried the news, not the Washington Post. Most of them didn’t know who I was. Then word got around, from a clerk at the store.
There was satellite TV in town now, and the kids going past on the school bus were hooked to iPhones, or sending text messages. I stayed away from it, and long-distance calls for the most part. At least personal ones.
I found a small house on a dirt road, a thirty-year-old A-frame built originally for a New York lawyer, and after three decades of life the shabby construction needed upkeep, which gave me something to do. There was a big bedroom downstairs and a small one in the loft up top for an office. The house had propane heat and a woodstove for backup. I was pretty good with the chainsaw. The pile of ash logs grew higher as more trees outside fell sick. Up here, it’s the vegetation suffering from fatal disease.
I could not see the nearest neighbor, or rather, it seemed to be a clubfooted, ill-tempered moose that, at 5 A.M. some mornings, limped past, and continued out of view, munching leaves, as if punching a clock.
Most mornings I woke at 4:30 and, in darkness, did the painful exercises I’d learned in physical therapy. Walking was an education. The nature of balance had changed. But soon I was doing a mile a day, then three, and then I ramped it up, walked faster, started running, started running hills, running trails. The toe loss was a stare gatherer at the town beach.
Not that I cared.
The front stairs needed a new buttress. A century-old pine tree out back leaned dangerously toward the house and had to come down. I stripped off weathered, ant-eaten siding, plugged a gap by the chimney where rainwater was getting past flashing, stripped off the old and put in the new. That’s not hard if you’re dealing with something inanimate, like a house.
Word got around town that Joe Rush was back, and some of my old classmates dropped in: fatter, older, redder, but awkwardly, if temporarily, welcome.
We reminisced. Would I stay? Did I remember our fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Wilberforce, and the way she wore glasses around her neck on a red string? Did I remember the time that we climbed into the condemned Brady Textile Mill grounds, got sick-drunk on scotch, almost got caught by the Lee cops? Did I remember diving competitions on summer nights at the old granite quarry in Becket?
A world without the admiral, Eddie, and terrorists. A world in which microbes gave you a flu, at worst. They didn’t threaten to wipe out a town.
Late at night, I searched.
I sat in the second-floor study, computer glow on my face, and followed the progress of the Barrow eco lodge, on Tilda’s Swann’s “Save the North Slope” blog. I took phone calls from Valley Girl, who was working for me off the clock. I think the admiral knew she was doing this, and let it go. He’s that way.
Eddie called once a week, checking in, giving me space. Galli called once a month. He was waiting for me to get bored, or anxious, or just to miss Washington. He was hoping I would come back. Forget it.
It was a bad Christmas, very cold for Massachusetts, not so cold for the North Slope. I heard from Calvin, who had tracked me down, and wanted to know how I was doing. He must have told the others. Next I heard from Bruce, the McDougals, Merlin, and Deb Lillienthal. Their e-mails were casual and caring, filling me in on their lives, sometimes shyly mentioning Karen, wondering if I’d be in Barrow next summer season, doing more research.
Oh, just checking in, Joe.
On New Year’s Day I phoned Dr. Liz Willoughby, head of the department of sciences at Prezant College, New Jersey, at home. She seemed subdued and said that the FBI had stopped coming around, asking about the Harmons. She said their project had been taken over by an ex-grad student, now an assistant professor. She missed the Harmons, and had not gotten over their loss.
I let her think that I was still actively involved in the investigation, and asked if the ex-grad student would be going out to the lakes again this coming summer and following up, as Ted Harmon would have done?
“Not on lake nine. Dr. Untermeyer will be doing the other lakes. But nine is off limits now.”
“Why is that?”
“There was trouble getting permission from the new owners, that hotel going up, up there.”
I leaned forward. “The eco lodge?”
“Hotel. Eco lodge. Whatever. They were rude, Craig told me. They said no research of any kind will be permitted on the property. They turned down Dr. Untermeyer, even after he offered to stay at the lodge and pay full rate.” She paused protectively. “Dr. Untermeyer’s grant wouldn’t allow that. But he has family money. He would have supplemented the grant with that.”
I listened, sipping coffee, watching a deer wandering around the side of my screened-in porch. It looked how I felt. Lost.
She said, “Craig told them he’d be quiet. All he wanted was to row a boat out and use a net to take samples. No machines. No loud noises. He even offered to give lectures to guests for free, about the Arctic.”
“But they didn’t want lectures, did they?”
“No.”