Heat and Light (26 page)

“Soon. I need to send one more e-mail.” Rena's eyes dart back toward the screen.

Restless.

Upstairs, the sheets are still warm. Mack settles into her spot with a series of deliberate adjustments, like a dog bedding down.

What would Pop do?

She recalls a story he used to tell, the one time in his life he had a little extra money. During the war, long before his daughter was born, young Pete Mackey had dug the coal out of his back forty and sold it on the QT. Men came after dark and hauled it away by the truckload, town people who'd used up their ration stamps and run short on house coal. It was a lucrative side business for a farmer—a
country bank,
Pop called it. All the neighbors knew what he was up to. Those who could, did the same.

Mack sees, now, that Carl Neugebauer was right: Pop would have signed a gas lease. He was the sort of person who did what he had to do.

She flops onto her stomach and places the pillow over her head.

Her sleeplessness is a recent development. For most of her life she has drifted off effortlessly, her limbs heavy with the good tiredness of a full day of farm chores. Her insomnia started a week ago, the night of Rena's meeting. After Rena left for the library, Mack fell asleep in front of the TV. At 11:00
P.M.
she startled awake. The house was dark and silent. Rena had not come home.

Mack was surprised but not worried, until she saw the Friend-Lea delivery van still parked in the driveway. Rena had taken the pickup—prone, lately, to overheating. When Rena didn't answer her phone, Mack pulled on boots and set out driving. She flicked on her high beams and drove slowly, keeping an eye out for the truck. She drove the entire length of Number Six Road, past the library—closed now, its windows dark—and all the way into town, where she made a U-turn in the empty street.

No Rena.

Had she'd taken the shortcut home? Number Six Road crossed under Drake Highway and had, until recently, been the fastest route from town to farm. Now, with new detours every week, the shortcut was no longer quite so short.

Mack took it anyway. The road ran alongside Carbon Creek for several miles, then crossed over. At the crossing sat the Pick and
Shovel, a dark little roadhouse where she and Pop had sometimes drunk a beer, on a Sunday afternoon when the Steelers were playing. The Pick and Shovel was winding down for the night. A handful of cars were left in the parking lot.

Including Rena's truck.

Was she dreaming? Mack waited for the distant alarm clock, Rena shooing her out of bed.

She pulled over to the side of the road. From the shoulder she had a clear view of both the parking lot and the bar's front entrance. She cut the engine and waited—for what, she wasn't sure. One by one, cars and pickup trucks clattered out of the parking lot, until only three were left. One was an old Corvette, famous around town, the prized possession of a local mechanic. Parked on either side of it were Rena's pickup and a red Toyota Prius.

Wide awake, her mind blank, Mack waited and waited, until finally the door opened. She saw them in silhouette, a middle-aged couple crossing the parking lot. The man—not tall, notably skinny—walked close behind Rena, steering her by the elbow, in the way men were allowed to do.

They looked like a couple because they were a man and a woman.

Mack was not allowed to walk with Rena in this way.

She watched them cross the parking lot and pause next to the truck. Then a remarkable thing happened. The man took Rena's hand and led her into the woods.

Mack gets out of bed. In the bathroom she swallows one of Rena's sleeping pills—prescribed years ago, during Calvin's trial. The first and last time Rena took one, she slept for sixteen hours; but on Mack, who is twice her weight, the pills have little effect. Maybe, after sitting in the medicine chest for four years, the pills have lost their potency, because Mack still has trouble sleeping.

She does, however, have a lot of nutty dreams.

She dreams of swimming with Lindy Najarian, her college roommate, in what might or might not be Garman Lake, Lindy in
a normal bathing suit, Mack in her boots and overalls, as though she'd rushed into the water to save a drowning swimmer. They are playing a game where Mack is chasing Lindy. The object of this game—what exactly will happen when Lindy is caught—is thrillingly unclear. Lindy darts through the water, quick as a minnow, and Mack feels her own disadvantage, her heavy boots filling with water. Then Lindy dives beneath the surface. Bubbles surround her: miraculously, she is able to breathe underwater. Mack follows, holding her breath until she can hold it no longer.

She wakes gasping.

The next day, after Rena leaves for the hospital, Mack stations herself in front of the computer, something she rarely does. Rena had left the machine running. Mack reads:

Lampyridae
is a family of insects in the order
Coleoptera
. They are winged beetles, commonly called
fireflies
or lightning bugs for their conspicuous crepuscular use of
bioluminescence
to attract mates or prey.

Lying awake wondering what Rena was doing at the computer, Mack couldn't have imagined she was reading about fireflies.

She opens a new window and types into the search field:
Lindy
Najarian
. How many can there possibly be?

She'd been the team's star distance runner, Mack's training partner. Mack's roommate, best friend, and drinking buddy, until the Friday they stumbled home, very late, from a bar downtown. Drunk, Mack reached for Lindy in the way she'd always wanted to, and Lindy pulled away and called her terrible things that weren't all true but mostly were. The next night, a Saturday, Mack came home to find their bedroom door locked and bolted. Laughter behind it, murmuring voices. When she knocked, no one opened the door.

The boy wasn't important. She knew it even at the time, through
her dumb hurt and mortification and rage. Lindy had chosen him almost randomly. She was simply making a point.

In B Quad lounge Mack waited. When the boy stumbled out of the room at 5:00
A.M.,
she followed him across the quad and up the hill.

He would have been fine if he hadn't taken the shortcut.

Shadowing him up the hill, Mack thought of hunting with her dad, the silent dawn forest, the damp mudsmell, the night sky gradually bluing. Her mind was curiously empty. Her pop's favorite hunting dog was a bluetick coonhound named King. What was King thinking on those cold mornings as he nosed through the underbrush? Nothing. He was simply doing what he did.

The shortcut snaked around the library, unlit, the path worn by a thousand pairs of sneakers.

Unlit.

The boy was down in an instant, stunned and silent. A second later Mack was on him, his long narrow body pinioned between her thighs. Like Lindy he was a distance runner, greyhound-thin, aerodynamic. No match for a shot-putter who threw fifty-six feet.

For the rest of her life the sound would haunt her, the peculiar cracking. Making popcorn or chopping firewood, she'd recall the sensation: the smooth motion of her champion shoulder, the boy's ribs snapping like twigs.

In the shadows behind the library he looked slender as a girl.

Dawn was breaking as she returned to B Quad. Lindy had already left for the gym. Her bed had been stripped, the sheets stuffed into the hamper so Mack could see the naked mattress, a spiteful reminder of what had transpired the night before. Mack filled her gym bag with a few clothes and trudged across campus, stopping briefly at the athletic building to leave a note under Coach's door. Her last night in State College, she slept in the Greyhound station, waiting for the only bus to Bakerton. The next morning she
bought a copy of the local paper and saw a small item at the bottom of page 2. A Penn State student had been attacked behind the library by an unidentified assailant.

An unidentified assailant.

In his place she'd have lied about it, too. Mack, too, would have found it humiliating to have her clock cleaned by a girl.

Her search for Lindy yields a single result, a blog called Marathon Moms. Lindy Najarian-Holtzmann is something called a contributing editor.

We are a community of moms committed to active parenting, sunscreen, good nutrition and achieving our personal best.

Mack scrolls through the site. One user, WatertownMom, posts almost daily: family photos, times and distances, inspirational mottoes accompanied by sunsets. Clicking through these posts, Mack finds at last, a photo of WatertownMom in a singlet and running shorts. Blond now, her face leathery, she is still tiny. Still unmistakably Lindy. Her body hasn't changed in thirty years.

In the search field Mack types
Lorne Trexler
.

Immediately, the search returns hundreds of results. Mack is stunned. A search for anyone she knows—herself, Rena, anybody in Bakerton—would come up empty, or nearly so. She understands, then, that Lorne Trexler is in a different category of person, a man of consequence in the world.

She clicks on the first link, the home page of the Stirling College Geology Department.
Dr. Trexler's teaching and research interests include aquatic ecology, watershed assessment and management, operational models for grassroots community organizing, resource management, and public policy.

Mack studies the photo on the screen. He's older than she expected, shaggy-haired, gaunt in the face. Is this what Rena finds attractive, this aging hippie? A skinny little guy, badly in need of a haircut? It seems improbable. But Mack is no judge of male horseflesh.

The second search result links to
Time
magazine.

A CONFLICT OF INTEREST?

           
To the Editor:

                  
“The Big Frack” raises compelling questions about the proper relationship of the Academy to industry. Dr. Amy Rubin, the geologist quoted in the piece, is in fact a paid consultant to Darco Energy, a gas and oil conglomerate that has—coincidentally?—endowed a new geology facility at the SUNY campus where Dr. Rubin was recently granted tenure. Such fiduciary relationships have calamitous effects on the integrity of scientific inquiry. Dr. Rubin's corporate underwriters have a direct financial stake in the outcome of her research. When a scientist accepts money from industry, it's reasonable to ask what industry expects in return.

                  
Lorne Trexler, Chair

                  
Department of Geology

                  
Stirling College, Stirling, PA

Links and more links. The home page of the Keystone Waterways Coalition. Lorne Trexler at community meetings, antifracking rallies, a fund-raiser for something called the Planet Fund. Lorne Trexler in a jacket and tie, testifying before the Pennsylvania State House.

A man of consequence in the world.

T
he bus rolls eastward on the highway, long and white, the words
STIRLING COLLEGE
emblazoned in green on both sides. Lorne Trexler stands in the aisle, talking and gesticulating, in violation of posted safety rules. Early spring by the calendar, though winter hangs on in the patchy snow with its gritty inclusions, the salt scrim dusting the pavement, the tin bucket sky.

These weekly lab trips are the cornerstone of Earth Science.
ATTENDANCE MANDATORY, NO EXCUSES
is printed in boldface on the syllabus. Still, his students try. Family emergencies, mononucleosis, dead grandmother, the usual euphemisms for
hangover
and
laziness
and
still drunk from the night before.
Classic excuses, time tested. In their feints and dodges—in all things—they are traditionalists.

Stirling is a safety school, a respectable fallback for the duller offspring of wealthy parents—children of privilege, raised on television.

Their excuses are hallowed, archetypal, handed down through the semesters like the myths of a primitive tribe.

Trexler makes his way down the aisle to see who's awake. Honestly, it's hard to tell. The students are barely sentient, flipping through magazines or nodding to whatever commercial tripe is streaming through their headphones.

The lab trips are tied, thematically, to the earth science syllabus—sites chosen for reasons never precisely articulated, though the stu
dents sense, vaguely, that Trexler is making a point. On lab trips he climbs hills and shimmies up ladders and, once, scaled a security fence at a co-generation plant. Amy Rubin's camera caught him in midstride, one worn boot wedged into the chain-link, the sternly worded sign—
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
—half obscured by his denim thigh. When she gave him a copy, he taped it to his office door, a fact noticed and commented upon.

Not magazines, Trexler notes. Several of the students—more than a handful—are reading catalogs.

Amy Rubin and her friends have commandeered the back of the bus. Caroline Minturn is a willowy blonde from Greenwich, Connecticut, the outlier. Suki Lee and Amy are small brunettes.

“Look who's coming this way,” says Suki. Earth science had been her idea, a lazy way around the science requirement. To Amy, the daughter of a theoretical physicist, it was a radical notion.
That counts as science?

They watch Professor Trexler make his way down the center aisle, loose and nimble, grasping each seat with a rhythmic motion, hand over hand. Aside from his long hair, it is his most notable quality: his obvious pleasure in the movement of his body, his kinetic and masculine grace.

They are best friends—three versions of the same girl, in the eyes of Stirling College: a pretty girl too busy for study, a party girl much in demand. Because it's a Friday, they wear blue jerseys printed with Greek letters. To the casual observer their differences are not apparent: Suki's years at American schools in Paris and Tokyo, the lonely daughter of diplomats; Amy the late-life child of scholarly parents, dour Russian émigrés mistrustful of pleasure. Suki and Amy, roommates, have concealed these histories even from each other. It took a third party to cement their friendship, a third girl to envy and adore. Caroline is normality perfected, her sunny childhood a thing to be coveted, the summer camps and licentious boarding schools, the horses and tennis and recreational drugs. Amy and Suki copy
her style and manners, borrow liberally from her vast collection of sweaters. Caroline is the antidote to their own dubious pasts, their weird foreign families, their hidden, shameful strangeness.

“I'll bet you anything he sits next to Amy,” Caroline says.

Trexler despairs of these students, he weeps for them—at once spoiled and neglected, raised on TV so bad he can't believe it exists, even worse than the dreck he watched as a child: the broad comedies and sentimental morality plays; the old cowboys, heroes of genocide, trapped in the terrible immortality of eternal syndication in spectral monochrome. Today's television is at once emptier and more malignant. There are many shows—an entire genre of TV drama—concerned mainly with real estate. The characters, ruthless tycoons and their conniving offspring, are incidental. The true protagonists are the vast and ostentatious houses of the rich, a crass American fantasy of elegance.

All of America is watching, even the young.

At their age, Lorne Trexler did not watch television. He was on fire then, a crusader against injustice—a long-haired jagoff farting opinion and argument, in the eyes of his father. His mother was more oblique, wondering aloud why Lorne sided, always, with the downtrodden, the dusky-skinned reliefers who lived off the system. In their convictions his parents never wavered: stalwart, incurious, impervious to doubt.

His parents, if they were still alive, might enjoy
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,
a show that people actually watch.

At the back of the bus the girls giggle and whisper.

“Is this where the cool kids sit?” Trexler nudges Amy's foot with his. “What news from Greece?”

Amy flushes. He never misses an opportunity to rib her about Theta: the hokey rituals, the lame community service projects in which she has failed, so far, to participate.
I don't do any of that,
she says, knowing it's a weak defense. That she's never mentored a low-income child or tutored illiterate adults, that her “service” has been
limited to a single afternoon picking up litter along the highway, makes herself and Theta seem even more pathetic.

“What are you reading?” he asks, just to bust her chops. He sees something in this girl, a quickness, a flicker of deeper intelligence she seems determined to hide. A mirage, probably. He's been wrong before.

He takes the catalog from her hands. “Explain something to me. Are you actually planning to
buy
these”—he squints at the page—“extraordinarily tight hundred-dollar blue jeans with the corporate logo on the right butt cheek?”

“No,” she says. “I mean, probably not.”

“So this is just your reading material. This is
entertainment.
” He explains with weary patience the slim but vital difference between a catalog and a magazine, which at least hides the ads between celebrity interviews and gossip columns. A catalog makes no secret of its purpose. The difference (he thinks but doesn't say) between a stripper and a whore.

“Slide over, Rubin. There's something I want you to see.”

He sits beside her, adopting her own crouched posture, his body blocking her off from her friends, and points to the four towers in the distance, bell-shaped and glowing white. “There it is. Scene of the crime. It was supposed to be a miracle. Power too cheap to meter.”

He doesn't wear a wedding ring.

“That's it?” she says. “It's still running?”

“Amazingly, yes. Half of it, anyway. That's Unit One in the foreground. Unit Two is where it happened.”

“Can we go see it?”

His jaw drops open. “You're kidding, right? Seventy-five kids in their prime reproductive years? You'll take your fucked-up sperm and eggs back to campus and screw like bunnies. You'll pass along mutations science has never seen.”

Amy slides lower in the seat.

“Did I embarrass you? Sorry,” he says, briefly touching her leg.

He doesn't wear a wedding ring but is known to be married. Once Amy saw him walking in town with his wife. Mrs. Trexler was tall and skeletally thin, with a long equine face. She wore her hair in the unfortunate Dorothy Hamill cut, popular ten years ago.

“So it's still—contaminated? Even ten years later?”

“
Rubin.
” He sounds truly angry. “The half-life of plutonium two-three-nine is
twenty-four thousand years.
”

Shame floods her, the visceral memory of past disgraces. In junior high she herself had attempted the Dorothy Hamill cut, a style ill-suited to curly-headed Jewish children. Her face fills with blood. “Sorry. I'm a moron.”

“You're not,” he says, more gently. “So don't act like one. The point is, ten years—nine, actually—is nothing. In geologic terms, it happened a minute ago.”

“But don't they have to clean it up?”

“Can't be done. Not really. Though they're putting on a good show. Guys in hazmat suits making six bucks an hour. Nonunion, of course.” Organized labor is one of his favorite topics: the air traffic controllers, President Reagan's shameless union-busting. “Those poor bastards have no idea what they're handling.”

“That's legal?” Amy is sometimes skeptical of his pronouncements, but ill-equipped to argue. Always he seems in possession of inside information, a complex understanding of the world she will never have.

“Oh, sure. Some lawyer hands the guy a list of radioactive compounds he's never heard of, and he signs a piece of paper that indemnifies the company against any wrongdoing. Ten years from now, when he's got leukemia or thyroid cancer, a secretary pulls that waiver out of a file cabinet. Presto. No lawsuit.”

“I was a kid when it happened,” says Amy. “I remember my parents talking about it. I didn't understand anything.”

“Nobody did. Half the core melted, and there wasn't even an
evacuation. People down the street were out mowing their lawns. Finally the governor told them to close their windows. Like that was going to make a difference.” Trexler shifts in his seat. “It was my last semester at Rutgers. My buddy had a van, so a bunch of us drove up to demonstrate.”

Amy listens, enraptured. She has never been to a protest of any kind, a notion she associates with hippie times. In that moment she feels keenly her own misfortune, the injustice of having been born so late, when all the world's problems are already solved.

“It was pandemonium. Protestors from all over, kids mostly. The locals hated us. You believe that? There was a hydrogen bubble in the reactor that could have exploded. These people are living next door to a potential nuclear meltdown, and they're pissed at
us
for disrupting their lives.” He shakes his head, still incredulous. “Fucking sheep. We stayed a couple days, then drove into the city for the benefit concert. Ended up panhandling in Times Square, begging for gas money back to school. Worth it, though, to see Carly Simon. Ever heard of her, Rubin?”

Amy rolls her eyes. “Please. I know who Carly Simon is.” It is nearly true. She knows there was a Carly and a Carole, a Joni and a Janis. In her mind they are all the same woman, earnest, woolly-haired.

“Good times, Rubin. You'd have loved it. All evidence to the contrary, I think you have a hippie soul.” He gets to his feet.

“Wait. I need you to sign something.” Amy fumbles in her backpack and hands him the triplicate form—
INTENT TO PURSUE MAJOR COURSE OF STUDY
. Her heart races pleasantly.

“Seriously, Rubin? Geology?”

From across the aisle comes a squelched giggle, Caroline or Suki.

“What was your old major?”

“Undeclared,” Amy says.

“You know what this means, right? You're mine now.” He signs with a flourish. “See you at field camp.”

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF ASTONISHMENTS,
plural and various—the end of one thing (the classroom with its endless note-taking, its accumulation of unconnected facts) and the beginning of multiple others. A summer of extraordinary events, rare conspiracies of altitude and weather; of totemic apparitions beginning with the land itself, the West in all its sprawling actuality, its arid strangeness: the undulating anticline, the reddish moonscapes spiked with sage. For Amy Rubin—apartment raised, congenitally asthmatic—it was like tumbling through a portal. She was reduced, daily, to a state of dumb marvel, as though she'd spotted a dodo back from extinction, a creature modern humans weren't meant to see.

They came from the cities and comfortable suburbs, Rochester and Philadelphia and Montclair, New Jersey; Long Island and Westchester and Dutchess County, New York. At the baggage claim in Denver they eyed one another warily, four girls and twenty-six boys in laundered blue jeans and fresh T-shirts. (They wouldn't be this clean again in weeks.) There were a few loud reunions, kids from the sponsoring institution, a large SUNY campus. The rest, like Amy, came from liberal arts colleges with tiny departments and no field programs of their own.

She stood a little distance from the conveyor belt, her duffel bags piled at her feet. The group did not interest her, the gum-chewing undergraduates in college sweatshirts. They were not the reason she'd come.

“Amy, right?” said Dave or Mike or some other male syllable, a guy she recalled vaguely from a mineralogy class at Stirling. His face she barely remembered, but his body was familiar—well formed in the way of short men, long waisted, square in the shoulders. She had always recognized men by their outlines.

“I thought that was you. I didn't know you were a geo major.” He studied her like some rare specimen. Tim was his name, the male syllable.

“Amy Rubin!”

She turned to see Lorne Trexler coming toward her—unshaven, radiantly sunburned. Under the airport lights his face was the color of canned ham. His eyes looked pale as litchi nuts, luminous—the enraptured gaze of a pilgrim back from the hajj.

It's you,
she was about to say when he spoke.

“Don't tell me that's all yours.” He pointed to her luggage—contemptuously, as though she'd messed on the floor. “We said two small packs. That's three, and they're huge.”

“But one is a tent,” she protested, feigning innocence. In truth she had overpacked knowingly, willfully disregarding the rules.

“A tent counts as one bag. We explained this. The other one is for your clothes.”

“For five
weeks
? That's impossible.” Impossible, too, to explain the battles she'd already won, the hundred small victories that allowed her to leave the apartment with
only
three monstrously large duffel bags. Her mother hovering as she packed, sneaking in contraband when Amy's back was turned: extra socks and underwear, eardrops and eyedrops, a small pharmacopoeia of ointments and pills.