Heat and Light (21 page)

“Thibodeaux?”

“I hear he got a thousand an acre.”

They eye each other in silent calculation. Neither will ask the question neither wants to answer.
How much did you get?
The truth is unspeakable: an inbred hillbilly like Randy Thibodeaux held out for a thousand dollars an acre. Rich Devlin had settled for twenty-five.

“We need to have you over for a barbecue,” Wally says through a mouthful of hamburger. “The kids can swim in the pool.”

“Sure. That sounds great.” Rich lowers his voice. “You haven't had any problems with your water, have you?”

Wally stiffens. “There's nothing wrong with it. Hell, we swim in it all the time.”

“Not now,” Rich says. “I'm sure it's fine now. But how about back when they drilled you? Shelby thinks ours has a weird smell.”

“I wouldn't worry too much,” says Wally, licking ketchup off his fingers. “I was a kid when your pap dug that well. Prolly time for a new one.”

“Maybe so,” Rich says.

Down the bar, Gia reaches into Darren's shirt pocket and takes out a pack of cigarettes. She leans close and whispers in his ear, something that makes him laugh, then heads out the back door. A moment later the skinhead goes out the front. Darren seems not to notice. He is bent over the register, still wearing a moronic grin.

Rich gets to his feet. “I've got to get going. I'm babysitting tonight.” He nods toward the door. “Darren, man. You know that guy?”

Darren looks up. “What guy?”

“Gia's boyfriend.”

“They're just friends,” Darren says.

Rich thinks of the night he surprised them in the parking lot, Gia popping out from beneath the guy's dashboard, squinting in the headlights. He's replayed the memory so often it's a little threadbare.

“Just friends. Says who?”

“Says Gia.”

Rich eyes him with pity. His little brother is no match for the Gia Bernardis of the world. In her practiced hands he is helpless as a child.

Darren leans in confidentially. “So what's this about your water? Sorry. I couldn't help overhearing.” The raised eyebrow, the smug half-smile. Again Rich wants to pop him one.

“My water is fine,” he says.

“That's good. Though I should probably tell you, there have been documented cases of contamination . . .”

Rich stares at a point across the room as, in Persian or Arabic, his brother talks and talks. A moment later Gia returns through the front door. The skinhead, a few paces behind her, heads directly for the john.

“There are people out west who can set their tap water on fire,” says Darren. “I'm dead serious.”

Gia slips behind the bar, tugging at her skirt.

Be careful, man,
Rich would say to anyone but Darren. But his brother, as always, has all the answers. He deserves whatever he gets.

T
hey meet in the basement of the Bakerton Public Library. The small room is crowded, loud with chatter. Neighbors call greetings to one another. They eat Rena's oatmeal cookies and drink coffee from styrofoam cups.

You could come with me,
she'd told Mack, knowing it would never happen; knowing better than anyone Mack's horror of attracting attention, her outsize fear of crowds. Fifty years old, and self-conscious as a teenager. In any social situation, Mack froze like a deer.

At five after seven Rena takes the podium. Lorne Trexler stands slightly behind her, waiting to be introduced. On tiptoe, she speaks into the microphone. “Thanks for coming, everyone.” Her knees are actually shaking.

“Speak up, honey,” someone yells.

Rena checks the microphone and sees that it isn't turned on. She turns it on.

“That's better. Now can everyone hear me?” There is a chorus of no's from the back of the room. She leans closer to the microphone, which makes a humming noise. “The purpose of this meeting is to talk about our experiences with gas drilling, positive and negative.”

From the back of the room, a hoot.

“Okay, not so much positive. If they were positive, you probably wouldn't be here.” She is making a mess of this; she is.

Lorne Trexler reaches around her to adjust the microphone. “Relax,” he whispers. “They're just your neighbors.”

It's exactly the right thing to say. Rena picks out a janitor from the hospital, her second-grade teacher, Peachy Rouse from down the hill.

“Anyways, you didn't come to hear me,” she says, more calmly. “Dr. Trexler is a geologist with a special interest in the Marcellus Shale. He is co-chairman of the Geology Department at Stirling College and a founding member of the Keystone Waterways Coalition. He's here to talk to us about what they're doing to our land, and what we can do about it.”

She takes a seat in the first row as Trexler adjusts the microphone. A lock of hair falls over his brow.

Lorne Trexler is obsessed—this is clear from the start—with water. “Fracking isn't good for our land. It isn't good—you already know this—for our quality of life. But what it does to our water is truly criminal. So let's start there.”

Pennsylvania, he explains, has water everywhere, eighty thousand miles of streams and rivers. “We have so much water that we take it for granted. Out west—they've fracked the hell out of Colorado and Wyoming—folks pay attention to water, because they have to. You mess with their water, and people get mad.” He is an effortless talker, relaxed and charming. He talks the way sprinters run and dancers dance, an elite athlete. He talks as though he was born to talk.

At the back of the room, the door swings open. “Come on in,” he calls. “We're just getting started.”

Heads turn as the latecomer, Shelby Devlin, creeps in on tiptoe, blushing violently.
Sorry,
she mouths. She is dressed for business: high heels, a skirt and jacket. The rest of the crowd wears gender-neutral shorts and T-shirts, blue jeans, flannel shirts.

“Welcome. We're glad to see you. Somebody find her a seat.”

Arvis Kipler slips out the back door and returns with a folding chair.

Unfazed by the interruption, Trexler explains the process of hydraulic fracturing, a million gallons of water pumped into the ground at unimaginably high pressure—“enough to peel the paint off a car”—to break up the underground rock.

“Also—and this is important—fracking fluid isn't just water. It's mixed with sand and whatever chemical cocktail they think is going to work. Which chemicals exactly, we have no idea, because the gas companies won't tell us. Rena, is there something you want to say about that?”

It is, of course, the entire reason she organized the meeting. She gets to her feet, her stomach churning.

“We had a situation recently, in the Emergency Room at Miners'. Some fluid was spilled at a drill site, and a worker came into the ER covered head to toe in the stuff. He's fine, thank goodness, but the nurse who treated him ended up in Intensive Care.” The grim details of the story—Steph Mulraney's spiking fever, her sudden contractions—she doesn't go into. She doesn't need to. All of Bakerton already knows. “We tried to find out what exactly she was exposed to, but the companies wouldn't tell us anything. They acted like it was none of our business.”

She takes her seat.

“The industry claims these are trade secrets, like the recipe for Coca-Cola,” Trexler continues. “They say it will destroy their competitive advantage, if they tell us what kind of poison they're pumping into our land. Of course, if you're a first responder, you're expected to treat their injured workers, no questions asked, anytime there's an accident. Which—trust me—happens
all the time.
”

He talks about the problem of flowback, the uncountable gallons of wastewater hauled—in immense tanker trucks marked
PRODUCED WATER
—to ordinary sewage treatment plants. “Sewage
treatment plants use disinfectants to kill bacteria. The disinfectants react with bromides in the frackwater and give you brominated trihalomethanes, which are known carcinogens. You know what that means, right? They cause cancer. And they're in your rivers and streams.”

There is a murmur at the back of the room.

“You think I'm kidding? A few years ago there was a big discharge into the Monongahela. That's where half of Pittsburgh gets its drinking water.”

“That's
legal
?” says Rena—forgetting, for the moment, that an audience is present. It's as if Lorne Trexler is speaking to her alone.

And, for a moment, he does: “Rena, I'm glad you asked. In 2005, Congress approved something called the Halliburton Loophole. Anybody recognize that name? Halliburton?” He smiles grimly.

“Anyway. The bill exempts fracking fluid from the Clean Water Act. This is the shell game they're playing. You've seen those billboards, right?
Clean Energy for America's Future
?
The industry wants you to believe that natural gas is better for the environment than coal or oil. And it is, on paper. But when you factor in all the emissions from thousands of truck trips, the methane that's vented or lost from gas lines—”

He goes on this way for nearly an hour. At first Rena takes diligent notes: names of congressmen, senators, pieces of legislation. After a while she simply watches Lorne Trexler, his floppy hair and lively dark eyes, his wrists turning in the cuffs of his denim shirt. She has never heard a man talk so much. Terseness, in Bakerton, is a masculine virtue. The local men—farmers, ex-miners—seem congenitally silent, and Mack is no different. Rena has taken to playing the radio at suppertime—
Open Mike,
the local call-in show—just to hear another voice.

In this way and others, Mack is entirely too much like a man.

“Questions?” says Trexler. Immediately a dozen hands shoot into the air. “One at a time. Everyone will get a chance to speak.”

The complaints are many and elaborate, though most are not actually environmental. Crowding is discussed, lines at the gas pumps, the shortage of downtown parking spaces. The massive tanker that ran out of gas on Drake Highway, tying up traffic for hours. The smaller truck, hauling produced water, that ran over the Marstellars' dog.

A man gets to his feet—Davis Eickmeier, who runs Dickey's Dairy. “What I want to know is, what are them explosions I'm hearing? Out Deer Run somewheres. Scaring the hell out of my cows.”

The same had happened at Friend-Lea Acres. For a full week the milking schedule was disrupted. Mack came back from the barn swearing like a soldier.

“That's seismic testing. They bore holes in the ground and blast them with dynamite to figure out where the deposits are.” Trexler points to another raised hand, and Rena remembers that he is a teacher.

“My back yard looks like the Grand Canyon,” says Arvis Kipler. “They must of carted away a couple tons of dirt. I was down Johnstown visiting my daughter. I come back and half the yard is gone.”

“Nice, right?” Trexler nods energetically. “And it's all perfectly legal. If you signed a lease and didn't read the fine print, the company might have the right to build roads and pipelines on your property, or take water from your pond or inject wastewater into your well. They don't even have to tell you they're doing it. And, of course, they won't be paying you anything extra.” He points to someone at the back of the room.

Shelby Devlin gets to her feet. “I have a question.” A quaver in her voice; she seems ready to cry or faint.

“Speak up,” a man yells from across the room.

“Sorry. I'm a little nervous.” She takes a deep breath. “What you said about the water. Ever since they drilled us, ours has a funny smell. My husband says it's nothing, but I'm worried about my little girl.”

“What's the matter with her?” Trexler says.

“Her stomach, mostly. I thought it was food allergies, but her doctor says no.” Shelby rattles off a list of symptoms, relaxing visibly, relieved to be on familiar ground. “I've tried everything. Ask Rena. The doctors and nurses are sick of seeing us.”

Chicken Little,
Rena thinks.
The sky is falling.
Steph had laughed about it on her last day in the ER.

“Stomach issues aren't typical. But let me do some research.” Trexler scribbles on a notepad. “What about breathing problems? That's usually what we see in cases of methane contamination.”

“She has asthma,” Shelby says.

Trexler's face lights. “There's a known connection between asthma and methane migration.” His enthusiasm is unsettling. Rena thinks of Steph, still out on sick leave, the lost baby girl she'd already named.

“I knew it!” Shelby says.

“This is potentially helpful. Risks to human health. The DEP pays attention to that kind of thing.” More scribbling. “Come talk to me after the meeting. We have a lot of work to do.”

After three full hours the meeting adjourns. Rena and Trexler perch on the table at the front of the room, watching the crowd file out.

“I'm sorry to keep you so late,” say Rena. “I wasn't expecting so many questions. The whole laundry list of complaints. The Marstellars' dog.”

“Jesus, the dog! It's like a country-western song gone bad.”

“It's my fault. Those stupid flyers! I was asking for it.”

“Don't be sorry. People need to hear each other's experiences. It's the first step in organizing any kind of collective action. People need to understand that they're not alone.” He gives her shoulder a squeeze. “You did a great thing tonight.”

Is he flirting with her? She has no recollection of how men flirt.

“I wish I could clone you. I'd send a Rena Koval to every gas patch town in Pennsylvania.”

Of course he's flirting with her. Rena feels a slight buzzing in her ears. She can still feel his hand on her shoulder. It's disappointing when Shelby Devlin approaches, and also a relief.

“Here's the lady of the hour. Have a seat,” says Trexler, pulling up a chair. “Thanks for speaking up.”

“I wasn't going to, but Rena's my neighbor.” Shelby is flushed, her eyes very bright. “She already knows Olivia, so, you know, that made it easier.”

“How is she feeling?” says Rena. “Is the Reglan helping?”

“Hard to say.” Shelby leans forward in her chair. “Every once in a while she has a good day, but then something makes her sick. I can't figure it out.”

“We need to get your water tested.” Trexler takes, from his back pocket, a worn business card. “These guys are trustworthy. They're based in Pittsburgh, but they might be willing to come out here. If not, let me know and we'll figure out Plan B.” He scrawls a number on the back of the card. “That's my cell. Any problems, give me a call.”

“Can't I just call Rena?”

“Sure, if that's easier.” Trexler barely pauses for a breath. “In the meantime, we need to get Olivia in front of a doctor.” He writes another number on the card. “This is my friend Ravi Ghosh at Pitt. Environmental medicine is his specialty. Tell him I sent you.”

“Pittsburgh?”
Shelby looks horrified. “How am I going to get her to
Pittsburgh
?”

“It's not Afghanistan.”

“I can drive you,” Rena says.

“You'd do that?” Shelby's fervor is nearly comical, her outsize gratitude, as though Rena has offered an organ for transplant.

“Sure,” Rena says.

Shelby gets to her feet. “Okay, then. I need to get going. Rich is babysitting. He's probably wondering what happened to me.”

RENA AND TREXLER SIT IN A CORNER BOOTH
at the Pick and Shovel, the dining room closed now, the lights dim. On the table between them is what's left of their dinner—a single slice of pizza, a half-empty pitcher of beer. Hank Williams on the jukebox:
Why don't you mind your own business.
Hank the gaunt cowboy who was never young and never got old, who died drunk at twenty-nine but hasn't stopped singing, preserved like a scarab in his premature middle age.

“This place is great.” Trexler eyes the junk hanging on the wall—miners' helmets and headlamps from different eras, tin lunch buckets, actual pickaxes and shovels.

“It's been here forever. My whole life, anyway. I guess you don't get this kind of thing in the city.”

“Stirling is a pretty small town.”

“I thought you lived in Pittsburgh.”

“Not officially. But when I'm not teaching, I get the hell out of Stirling. This summer I'm basically living out of my car.” His knee bounces under the table. He's the sort of person who can't sit still. “I go where I'm needed. All over the state, communities are organizing. What you did tonight, that kind of grassroots effort, is going to turn the tide. Shelby Devlin is a godsend. The DEP doesn't care about our rivers, but even those idiots can't ignore a sick kid.”