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  “Why, thank you.” I flapped my eyelids at him.

  “—to this one-horse town.”

  “I guess that makes me the horse?”

  He shook his head at me, smiling in a brand-new adult kind of way. Who was this stranger, anyway? This guy who only barely resembled Lew Riss, and who now didn’t sound like Lew at all?

  “You’re being silly, but I’m serious, Jenny.”

  No way, I thought, but I didn’t say it, though he must have detected the skepticism in my eyes, because he laughed and said, “No. Really. The only other reason I’m here is that I hear you’re thinking of messing with God’s Highway.”

  This time, my blink was visible.

  “How do you know that?” I asked him. “And what’s it to you?”

  “It was in the paper, wasn’t it?” he said, explaining nothing, really, for how did he happen to come across last night’s Port Frederick Times? And then he very clearly answered my second question: “I’m the national director of First Things First.”

  I felt every muscle in my own body tighten at the sound of those three words, and Lew felt it under his hand, because he got a quizzical look on his face.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “A couple of years. Is something the matter with that?”

  “What happened to journalism, Lew?”

  He squeezed my shoulder, then removed his hand and put it on the back of the love seat. “What I discovered about myself is that I’m an activist, not an observer.” Suddenly, the old wired, intense Lew was back, and I realized with a jolt that it made a weird and perfect sense that he would end up as the head of one of the only truly militant conservation groups in the world. Dismissiveiy, as if he hadn’t devoted years of his life to it, he said, “Journalism is for people who don’t want to get involved, they’re not supposed to have opinions, they’re supposed to be blank slates on which they write down other people’s views of the world.”

  A harsh judgment, but then Lew had never been what you would call wishy-washy in his opinions. Drugs were good. Sex was good. Laws were a pain in the ass, and cops were fascist assholes. Those were four of the opinions he used to hold. He looked as if he had changed his mind about the first one, not about the second one, and that he’d found a new and dangerous way to express the last two.

  First Things First was into staging courtroom scenes straight out of the sixties’ peace trials … and torching lumberyards to stop deforestation … and splashing blood on women wearing fur coats. And there were rumors of other, even more violent methods, approaching true guerrilla warfare, complete with guns and spies. Twelve years before, they’d descended on the little communities involved in the nature trail like dozens of Che Guevaras in dozens of little Havanas. They’d escalated, intimidated, threatened, coerced. Picketed, blockaded, organized, inspired. And won. I had always felt that if FTF had been opposed to abortion, there would have been more dead doctors.

  I was beginning to listen to Lew with some dread, thinking: I don’t want to fight you, and I don’t want you—with your concrete opinions, your inflated view of yourself, and your plastic morality, no matter how sporadically charming you may be—picketing across any line from me. The Lew Riss who would have done anything for a story was not my opponent of choice. Especially not in this new incarnation as a full-grown, purposeful adult male with the physical power to match his considerable mental strengths.

  And with the terrorist civilian-soldiers of FTF behind him.

  He was still carrying on about the evils of journalism. “It’s a crappy way to live. It’s like being the wrapper instead of the bread. It’s safe, you know?” He put infinite scorn into those words. “Oh, yeah, you can get yourself killed reporting on wars and shit, but you’re still not the one who’s doing the thing that’s getting done. You’re just looking at what all the real guys are doing. You’re the film, instead of the event. Well, I got fucking tired of being film. I wanted to be the event. I wanted to do, instead of just report on what other people do. And besides …”

  His grin had shades of the old Lew in it.

  So did his language.

  “I was never going to win that Pulitzer, Cain, and I know it and you know it. I’m not that good a reporter. Hell, I hate facts.” He laughed. “It’s goddamned petty, the way editors insist on them.” He grinned at me again. “And balance. Screw balance. A balanced viewpoint? That’s for people who live on balance beams, not me. And, besides, I’m such a competitive son of a bitch, after I had figured out all of that about myself, I just lost interest If I can’t be top dog, then I’m getting out of the ring.”

  “So what are you competing for now, Lew?”

  “The life of the planet, Cain. Oxygen to breathe, water to drink, food you can eat without dying of cancer, petty goddamn stuff like that.”

  He was wry, cynical, hard.

  Also arrogant and just ever so slightly insulting.

  I chose not to feel insulted.

  “Why’d you pick the environment to act on?”

  “Because I want to serve nature. Fuck the arts. Fuck medicine. Fuck housing. Fuck business. We don’t get the luxury of playing with any of those baubles if we can’t breathe, or drink, or eat.”

  “First Things First.”

  “Fuckin’ A. It’s about priorities, Cain.”

  “Your language hasn’t improved any, Lew.”

  “Like I said, it’s about priorities, baby. I’ll clean up my language when you clean up the air and the rivers and the ocean and the land. They were here first.”

  “Me, personally, Lewis?”

  “Your own patch of Mother Earth, yeah, that’s how it works.”

  “What about my patch of it? The Port Frederick patch of God’s Highway? What’s your interest in it?”

  “We want it pristine. We want it perfect. We want people like you to leave it the fuck alone.”

  “It’s just a hiking trail, Lewis!”

  “It’s nature, baby. That comes first, always.”

  “They’re not separate.”

  “What’s not?”

  “People and the environment.”

  “Let’s forget the semantics, Cain.”

  “You’re relegating people to the category of semantics? Excuse me? People are part of the environment, Lewis, we’re not separate from it, and we never have been since we got here. Trying to separate nature from humanity by assigning more importance to either one of them is just nineteenth-century wrong-headed romanticism. Lewis, even quantum theory says that—we’re all trading molecules, us and the trees. What’s the matter with you, do you hate your own species? Maybe you could take a lesson from nature on that … you ever hear of a tree that hated other trees?”

  “People!” He snorted. “People fuck.”

  I wondered what had gone wrong with him to skew him into misanthropy. Or was this only Lewis being melodramatic, for the side of the issue on which his bread was currently buttered?

  “Only the lucky ones,” I retorted, and smiled at him.

  He didn’t smile back at me, as he once might have done.

  “Lewis, remember what you used to say to me? Loosen up, Cain, you’d say. Well … loosen up, Lew!”

  “You cannot alter one twig of God’s Highway unless we approve it.”

  “Tell me, please, that you’re kidding.”

  “Lives are at stake, Cain.”

  “Well, of course, that’s why we’re looking at whether or not to alter that trail crossing.”

  “No, I mean birds, insects, flora, fauna.”

  “How about the mammals called people, Lew? Listen, I know your group, you First Things Firsters. I know how much trouble you love to cause, I remember. And I also know that you, personally, may as well have invented Situational Ethics. You make up rules to suit yourself. So I suppose you are perfectly suited to First Things First. Well, I will tell you what rule you may follow in this situation, Lew … you may advise us, if you wish. In fact, that would be fine, assuming you have th
e expertise to do it. But you may not dictate what we do.”

  “We can make things very hot for you, Jenny.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “Lew? You make it sound as if the fate of the world is at stake here. It’s just a trail crossing, where a little girl and a father were struck and killed by cars. We may be able to fix it with a few well-placed signs, nobody knows yet. But it’s nothing major, Lew, the environment is not riding on it.”

  “When a butterfly flaps its wings in Russia, the air moves in Mexico,” he said, quoting quantum physics right back at me. He suddenly stood, leaving me staring up at him. “You can’t touch the trail without our approval, Jenny. There are certain types of trees we won’t allow you to touch. There is certain foliage you may not touch, either, and if there are any endangered species in the way—their nests, for instance—you’ll back off. I’ll be sticking around, me and a few of my guys, to make sure you do it right.”

  I stood up, too, hanging on to my fury by a wisp of self-control.

  “I don’t believe this! Lew, it’s me! Jenny! We talk to each other, we don’t threaten … and just what are you threatening … if we don’t do things your way?”

  “Bad publicity could kill your festival. There are crowds we can get here on a few hour’s notice. For demonstrations. Strikes. Protests.”

  What did he mean, kill the festival?

  “We want to know what you plan to do, Cain. Then we’ll tell you if it passes muster with us. If it doesn’t, we start gathering our troops. If you don’t tell us your plans, we’ll do the same.”

  So they could put their terrorist tactics into action in order to scare New England clean away from Port Frederick and our festival.

  “When was it that you went crazy, Lew?” I inquired bitterly.

  He raised his hands and tried to cup my face, but I knocked his hands away, angrily. He shrugged again and grinned the old Lew grin at me. But this time, I didn’t fall into it. This time, I merely stared at him.

  “I was just going to kiss you good-bye, Jenny,” he said. “I wasn’t going to rip your head off.”

  “Will you be at a hotel?”

  He looked offended at the very idea. “I live outside, Jenny. In nature. On the move. I don’t observe anymore, remember? I act.”

  Yeah, you act like an ass.

  Lewis saw himself to the door. Through the front window, I saw a beige van pull up out front and the side door slide open for him. Before he climbed in, I counted five people in the van—a woman driving, a man in the passenger’s seat, and three other men in back where Lewis went. They all wore khaki shorts and tops, like Lew, and they all looked terrifyingly healthy and strong and young. There could have been others, but the door slid shut too fast for me to see them. Before she pulled away, the woman who was driving looked up at Judy’s House, seeming to stare right into my eyes.

  “Good grief, it’s just a nature trail!” I said out loud when they were gone. “One little trail crossing! Strictly small-time. Strictly small town. Why does it matter to any of you what we do?”

  Why did it matter to Pete Falwell, for that matter?

  Or to anybody, except one grieving widow, and her sympathetic new friend, and an unknown, but grieving mother of a little girl? And me. Suddenly, it mattered to me, although possibly for the wrong reasons. Threaten me, would they? Tell me what to do and how to do it?

  “Like hell!”

  “What, Jenny?”

  It was our Post Haste delivery woman, Cleo, standing in the doorway of my office with an invoice on a brown clipboard for me to sign.

  Hope surged. It overpowered the fury I had been feeling, much like a larger wave overtaking a smaller one.

  “Is that it, Cleo? Portsmouth?”

  But she shook her head, making my rotten morning complete.

  Oh, what a beautiful day, my foot.

  10

  BECAUSE OF THE NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL, INDIGNATION REIGNED AT Judy’s House that day. The general view among my festival volunteers seemed to be, “Those dirty rats. How could they?”

  But there was another attitude lurking in the house, and radiating throughout Port Frederick. I was dismayed to sense it just beneath the fury: doubt. I saw it in glances that slid away from mine, and in the too-swift smiles, and I heard it in the quiet conversations that abruptly ceased when I appeared. I heard it in voices on the phone, as well. Or, thought I did. A hesitation. A stutter over my name. An embarrassed, over-hearty edge to “hello,” and a note of relief in the sound of “good-bye.”

  So they’d accomplished it, Pete and the paper and Ardie and their gang: They’d slipped a wedge of real worry into the final days of preparation. They’d undermined people’s faith in us—in me. I began to feel as if I were standing on an earthen bridge with the weather threatening rain, which could erode the whole structure and tumble me into the river below.

  The whole thing could collapse.

  I fought it the only way I could for the remainder of the day: with hard work. But when Cleo showed up at 3:30 with our final delivery for the day, and there wasn’t any insurance approval, I nearly lost it. For a humiliating moment, I was sure I was either going to cry in front of her and my volunteers, or else throw up on her sturdy brown shoes.

  I was staring at the floor, fighting for inner control, when I heard Cleo say, “Do you want to know?”

  I blinked a couple of times, then looked up. I didn’t understand what she meant, but before I could even form the question, she added, “If you’re going to get the insurance?”

  The question—or rather, the answer—seemed so obvious that I just stared at her.

  “I mean, right now, do you want to get an answer about whether or not it’s going to come through in time for the festival?”

  “Well, sure.” I smiled. “Got a crystal ball?”

  The deliverywoman put her right hand to her neck and took hold of a thin silvery chain that was nearly hidden by her shirt. She tugged up from inside her clothes a long silver … something … and held it toward me.

  “Sort of,” she said. “Crystal, anyway.”

  The object at the end of her chain looked like a small wand. It was about three inches long, with a crown of amethyst at the top and a faceted crystal attached to the bottom.

  “May I?” I asked, and when she nodded, I peered closer. “What’s that shape in the middle, Cleo?”

  “An Egyptian ankh,” she said, “the cross of life. It’s kind of a charm representing both the male and female. When the Christians adopted the cross, they removed the feminine part, which is this oval on top.” She touched the oval above the crossbar of the little silver cross. “It was probably a goddess symbol way back when, and then it came to represent the sacred marriage of the god and goddess.” She grinned, ruefully. “Then they took us off of it.”

  Cleo peered back at me, quizzically. “Haven’t you ever seen a pendulum before, Jenny?”

  “I guess maybe not.”

  She unclasped it, then, and dangled it in the air between us.

  “It’s a kind of oracle, but it can only reply to questions that can be answered yes or no. If it moves back and forth, that’s a yes. Side to side is a no. If it goes in circles, that means it can’t—or won’t—give you an answer at this time.”

  Cleo indicated that I should take it from her.

  Not wanting to seem rude, I did. The weight of the pretty crystal and silver wand now dangled lightly from my own right hand. My skepticism must have shown in my eyes, because Cleo laughed and said, “It’s only your own involuntary muscles that work it, Jenny. I’m not saying it’s some disincarnate spirit, or anything.” She chuckled. “It’s a path into your own subconscious, that’s all. It’s a way to find out what you really want, or what you really think, deep down.” She raised her right eyebrow. “And sometimes it’s a way to access information you don’t know you know.”

  “The future, you mean?”

  I couldn’t tell from her attitude if she was serious.

&
nbsp; Cleo shrugged her strong shoulders. “Even science says it’s all happening now. The past, the present, the future.”

  I smiled at her. “The Eternal Now, I presume?”

  Her grin broadened. “Yeah. That’s the one. Go ahead, Jenny, ask it something!”

  I could tell I wasn’t going to get out of this, at least not without looking like a prissy little spoilsport. So, hoping nobody came downstairs and saw me doing it, I held the wand in front of me, dangling it from the chain while trying to paralyze my arm movements.

  “No, no, not like that, Jen. Go sit down at your desk and prop your elbow up. You want to feel as sure as you can that you’re not moving it on purpose.”

  Once propped, under Cleo’s guidance, I still felt supremely silly.

  “Do I ask it out loud?” I inquired.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, Pendulum,” I intoned, with mock sobriety, “tell me if we will get our insurance approval in time for the festival!”

  Nothing happened.

  And then the damned thing began to swing to and fro, and then to swing harder, higher, in each direction. Away from me, toward me. Away from me, toward me. I felt a real tug on the fingers that held the chain, and I would have sworn to a judge that I wasn’t the one who was moving it.

  Despite myself, I felt enormous, happy relief.

  “Yes!” shouted Cleo. “Hot damn!”

  I dropped her necklace onto my desktop.

  “How’d it feel to you, Jenny?”

  “Strong,” I admitted. “I have no idea how that happened. I really concentrated on holding still, Cleo. I guess involuntary muscle movement has to be the answer, doesn’t it? But what does that mean, except that I really want this to happen? I already knew that.”

  “Sometimes people think they want something, but their unconscious sabotages them.”

  I looked at her youthful, tanned face, her halo of brown hair, and I noticed for the first time the intelligence and sensitivity in her gray eyes. This was a most remarkable and interesting delivery person.

  “Now you know you don’t have to worry about that,” she added. “But don’t deny the possibility that it also means you really don’t have anything to worry about, and the insurance really will come through.”