A DOUBLESIDED SMALL TOWN CASE OF POETIC JUSTICE

After his talk with Van Zee, the publisher-editor of the Daily, Richard wanted to walk for a while instead of driving home.  The sun slanted over the buildings across the street into his eyes, and he turned away.  It was only a few blocks to the lower end of Main Street where the Depot was, the old train station that was now a bar and grille, so he decided to walk up there and have a beer and see who was hanging around, for that was a favorite watering hole in town among the people he counted as his friends.  It was a brave thing for him to do, considering his state of mind, but he felt he had to confront them sooner or later and give them a chance, once they were face to face, to either hear what he had to say or turn their backs on him, and thus enable him to find out who mattered and who didn’t.  On the way, he passed the Cactus Bar on the corner of Main and 1st.  The Cactus was notorious in town for the violent behavior of its clientele.  Here, truck drivers and road crews, small-time farmers, mechanics, factory workers, and the town’s general population of riffraff gathered and drank and fought, sometimes over girls, sometimes over sports, but mostly over nothing they could remember when they sobered up, played the lotto machines, and raised hell to let off steam and sweeten the spleen of life’s pent-up frustrations. 

     It was a big mistake for Richard, who never was particularly guarded in his everyday life.  He felt at home almost everywhere he went because everyone knew him, and, as a consequence, he just assumed they would feel the same sense of good will towards him that he instinctively felt towards those he met every day.  It never occurred to him others might intend him harm, especially out of a feeling of ill will.  And this was the case even now--after he had been so blackened by Hamaker that he had become an object of public derision, had lost his livelihood and was wandering the streets, a married man with three sons, broke and unemployed.  But Truman Dawson, a blond, burly, heavy-armed driver for the cheese factory, was just getting out of the cab of his pickup as Richard was passing.  He was wearing blue jeans and a tee-shirt and a light denim jacket with its sleeves cut off.

     Richard nodded to him as he walked by.  A moment afterward he felt a grip on his upper arm.  In the instant he felt the pressure, he was spun around by a shove on his opposite shoulder, and he was face to face with Truman, who had a hard and nasty look about him.  Truman had high cheek bones and blue eyes and a short straight nose, and when he narrowed those eyes in his usual fighting demeanor, he looked mean and cruel.  

     “Hello, Truman,” Richard said, looking into his face and feeling no fear as of yet.  But Truman was not a verbal man, and not being able to say what he wanted, he grabbed Richard again by the upper arm and began to drag him into the Cactus. 

     “What, what’re you doing, Trum--” he muttered, as he was dragged practically off his feet. 

     Truman shoved the door open and pushed Richard in before him, then continued to push him up to the bar.  With each shove he went flying forward, his head jerking back and his arms flailing.  It was dark inside, compared to out, and Richard’s eyes went black for the first couple of seconds.  It was then that he felt his first pump of fear and, his hair rising on the back of his neck, began to struggle against Truman’s grip. 

     “This here’s Richard Gough,” Truman said to the bartender and to those seated at the bar, “the guy who tried to shut down the cheese factory.  Wha’d’ya say we buy him a beer?  Hey?  Let’em know we appreciate’m!  Then I say we kick his ass.”

     “Let him go,” the bartender said.  “He don’t belong in here.  What the hell you doin’, Truman?  You want to get that man killed?”

     “You know who he is?” Truman insisted.  “He deserves it.”

     “We know who he is.  Get him out of here, Truman,” the bartender insisted, pushing up against the back of the bar, and staring Truman down, “or I’m callin’ the cops, right now.”  And he made a motion to go to the phone hanging on the wall at the end of the bar. 

     Truman let go of Richard’s arm, but as he did so he spun him around again so that they were facing each other.  Truman’s mean expression softened, but just as Richard made a motion to step around him and make his way to the door, Truman let fly his hand and caught Richard in the face with a stinging slap.  For an instant Richard was frozen, his ears ringing and his mind gone light and numb.  He felt the breeze of the fan behind the bar blow cool beer-scented air across his back, and for a moment he wondered where he was.  When he came to his senses, he looked into Truman’s face and saw he was smiling. Truman was apparently content with the slap, for he made no further motions toward Richard but just stood smiling at him.  Richard stepped around him then and, reaching the door, felt nauseous and pushed his way out onto the sidewalk.  The late afternoon sunlight came flooding down on him, making him feel like a worm or a snake that has just crawled from its dark and secret hole.

     The slap did something to Richard, it took something from him he never thought he had, something he never thought, therefore, he could lose.  He stumbled out onto the sidewalk, his ears still ringing, his eyes now unused to the light.  He shielded these with the palm of his hand as he looked up and down the sidewalk, hoping no one was coming. He barely was able to stand for the weakness he felt in his knees.  Confused, still stunned, for a moment he didn’t know where he was.  Then he remembered where he had left his car, but for an instant he didn’t know how to get there. 

     As he walked, he recovered from his fright and got his legs under him.  He felt the slap and its stinging and saw again the smile on Truman Dawson’s face.  That  slap--a slap in the face from someone like Truman Dawson! a crude man for whom right and wrong could only be understood in the starkest of contrasts, who slapped him in a fit of righteous anger, giving Richard only what he thought was his due!  Richard felt so profoundly wronged and so hopelessly lost as he walked back to his car that he could not go home--the only place that came to him to go, since, in the depths of his humiliation, he had completely forgotten he was on his way to the Depot.

     Everything was muddled.  He felt a new and unfamiliar aversion to his home, which he vaguely associated with this humiliation.  Home was a place he couldn’t go to anymore, he thought, for he no longer belonged there, he no longer belonged anywhere.  He felt adrift, shamed, and despised--all of which feelings he had never known and which now left him confused and distraught.  He didn’t know what to do or where to go, except that he couldn’t go home and face his children or his wife.  The slap snapped the cords that bound him to them, in every imaginable way, and made him realize he was a pariah in his home town.

* * *

Richard stood beside the creek, holding his nose, looking at the white corrupting mass of whey spread the length of the creekbed for nearly a quarter of a mile.  The site was only five miles from the eastern edge of town and wound through the river basin’s hills and gullies, its deeply cleft banks looking like the humps of huge buffalo sleeping on their knees, the creekbed snaking back and forth under a scraggly cottonwood here and there and small clumps of scrub cedar.  Fortunately, in the summer heat, the stream of waste dried up before it reached the river, and the quarter-mile stretch Richard was walking was far enough away from any farmstead and road that its fearsome stink troubled no one--for the present, anyway.

     Richard was not an environmental scientist, nor was he particularly passionate about environmentalism, though he understood the efforts of the city’s public works department to control run-off from the surrounding farms to protect the little lake that provided the city’s water.  The dried-up stream of whey from the cheese factory that he was now holding his nose from was south of the lake and didn’t endanger it in any way.

     But Richard was a member of the town council, recently elected to his second two-year term.  He was also a member of the board of trustees of the local college and earned his livelihood as an independent financial counselor and estate planner, managing IRAs and selling a full range of insurance products.  He was a Rotarian, served on the local Industrial Development Board, and volunteered his time and services to local charities--running the United Way for several years, fund raising for the Adjustment Training Center and for a local home for troubled girls.  He knew everybody of importance in the town and was respected by many of the town’s leaders, among whose ranks he liked to think he was listed in the minds of the people he cared about. 

     As he stood on the banks of the creek--the Dry Run as people called it--sweating from the long walk along the trail made by the trucks that carried in and dumped the whey, he knew trouble was looming.  A college student had found out about the factory’s dumping and wrote an irate article for the college’s newspaper, which, though it was not circulated in town, was sent to all board members.  Word was getting out, and he feared that consequences were inevitably going to flow from it.  As he surveyed the white reeking film of lumpy curd and whey, he knew his life was going to change.  He didn’t know how.  But he knew he was challenged by this dumping.  It wasn’t only  a matter of personal pride and of face, of ego.  For he had already had a run-in with John Hamaker, the factory’s owner-operator.  It was also a matter of conscience, of doing the right thing, for the waste threatened the river, and its cleanup-- especially if the dumping continued--would be a tremendous cost to the town, which was hitting some economic lows just then.

     When Hamaker got the big government contract to provide cheese for the military, he doubled the size of his operation, and the city didn’t have the facilities to deal with his waste.  The council deliberated on whether it should invest in the town’s waste treatment facility to accommodate his needs and decided it would if he contributed to the costs.  But he refused, arguing that he was a major employer in the town and the town owed it to him to expand its waste treatment. 

     Richard was asked to speak to him privately and try to work out a deal, for the town couldn’t raise taxes, having just survived a major uprising over the new mil levy for the high school, nor could it float a bond issue to pay for upgrading the plant, since it had just raised a bond issue to rebuild the town’s aging elementary schools.  The town had a bed and booze tax which it used to make improvements in its infrastructure, but this tax needed to be supplemented, since most of the resources it provided were already dedicated to parks and recreation. 

     Richard tried to reason with Hamaker, under the fluorescent lights in his office above the factory floor, showing him how both he and the town would profit by sharing the costs.  Richard tried to explain how a wise investment of capital could earn enough to meet his obligation without consuming his principal, for, unlike the city’s, his costs could be spread over several years.  But Hamaker, a fat, forceful, balding man with a red face and huge hands, responded by pounding his fist on his desk and threatening to move his factory out of town, for there were any number of towns in the area that would be glad to have a business employing a hundred and twenty people.  He physically threw Richard out of his office, cursing him and threatening to dump his waste in the Dry Run until the town could take it. 

     Hamaker was forcing a vicious dilemma upon the town, because if the dumping continued much longer, the town would end up with such a massive clean-up job that its costs might exceed the costs of upgrading the facility, which it lacked the resources to do, anyway.  Hamaker had as a bludgeon in this power struggle the fact that he could transfer his government contract to a dummy corporation he had already set up, and then declare bankruptcy, leaving the town liable for the cleanup of his waste.

     Richard was outraged by Hamaker’s strategies, but he was also confused and perplexed.  He couldn’t understand the man, for it seemed as if dollars and sense had parted company with him.  It was more than money.  There was something irrational and unsettling about Hamaker, and it frightened Richard when he thought about him.  Hamaker wanted his way--Richard could understand that.  But it was more than that.  It was getting his way and humiliating the council that mattered, even at the risk of sinking the town financially.  And in the meantime, there was this growing mess, this stench, which creeped closer to the river every day. 

     At thirty-five, Richard was a thin quiet man unused to making hard decisions.  Until now, his life had a serenity and evenness that only success in a small midwestern city made possible.  The pace and greed of modern life hardly touched him.  He was always in control of the daily round of day to day existence.  His three sons were good students and well mannered for their young ages, his wife was attractive and happy with home life, spending her time with her boys and their activities and in providing the atmosphere of contentment and ease for her husband and his circle of friends and acquaintances.  She could be elegant when that was called for and down to earth and neighborly at a Sunday picnic in the park.  Nothing in his daily life or in his character and personality prepared Richard for what was coming.

     The quarter mile looked and smelled to him for all the world like the road to hell, and as he gasped and turned his head to the breeze and gulped in air, he resolved to do something about it.  He had brought with him one of those yellow cardboard film-and-camera contraptions, the kind that are so small they can fit in a shirt pocket.  He had used it two days before when he snapped pictures of a tanker truck dumping its load of whey, and he now took it out and began snapping pictures of the creekbed.  He thought of two things he might do to break the stalemate between Hamaker and the city, but he was fearful that either one of them might make him an enemy among the other members of the council and the town’s businessmen and political leaders. But he had no choice.  No one else would act, and officially the town couldn’t act, for no option was possible.  But to do what he planned would be regarded as betrayal.  

     He could go directly to the EPA with his photos and request an on-site visit.  This plan had the advantage of involving the federal government, which very likely would assist the town in cleaning up the site; but it had negatives, too.  It might lead to substantial penalties to Hamaker, perhaps even to the loss of his lucrative contract.  Richard didn’t want to ruin Hamaker, for in doing that he would be harming not only Hamaker’s employees but the city as well. 

     The other possibility was to write an article to accompany the photographs and send them off to the town’s newspaper.  This approach had the advantage of keeping the whole thing local while applying pressure on Hamaker to make a deal.  The only negatives to this plan were that Hamaker might not be moved, indeed, might become even more intransigent and contemptuous, or that Ryan Van Zee, the publisher-editor of the Daily, might not print the article for fear of bringing Hamaker’s wrath down upon himself.  This latter was a very real possibility, for Van Zee depended for his existence on local businessmen, a tightly knit clique who relentlessly pursued their own self interest, and what he, Richard, had tried to do would undoubtedly get around, and he would have made his enemies without having gotten any nearer to solving the problem. 

     Richard finally turned and began climbing back to the top of the hump-like mounds through which the Dry Run coursed its way to the river.  At the top, where the tanker trucks dropped their long hoses to pump out the whey, he turned and took a last look and a final photo.  The stench was like a massive physical presence, sickening him, and overhead crows soared, leaving him with a feeling of foreboding as he trudged off.

* * *

A few minutes after Richard walked away from the Cactus, uncertain on his feet like someone tripping home after a few too many, a young stout man with short curly blond hair stepped through the door of the bar onto the sidewalk.  He looked up the block, shading his eyes from the slanting sun, just as Richard had done.  He looked in the other direction, too, then turned the corner.  But no one was to be seen.  This was the young man who wrote the article about the dumping for the college newspaper.  He had learned about the dumping in the Cactus, overhearing Truman talk about it with several other Hamaker drivers.  Truman and the others talked about the stench and how they couldn’t wait to roll out of there when they were done pumping out their tankers.  Curious, he listened long enough to learn the location, then took a drive out there to see for himself.

     He took the dumping as a mere act of industrial callousness towards the environment, knowing nothing at the time of Hamaker’s use of it to blackmail the town council.  When he read Richard’s article in the local newspaper, he was dismayed, having gotten his first real-life lesson in the nastiness and complexity of human nature.  His assumptions about the dumping were all wrong.  There was so much more going on that he felt like a kid involved in adult affairs.

     He had no idea yet of the unraveling of Richard’s life after Hamaker’s vengeful efforts to destroy him.  The fact that the town’s people turned against Richard, that Hamaker could blame him for the dumping and get away with it, was beyond his calculation.  After witnessing that slap in the face, he wanted to write a follow-up article for The Plainsman, detailing the impact of Richard’s exposé, and to write, as well, a kind of profile of Richard as a local hero.  To this end he decided to seek Richard out and ask for an interview.  Having lost him for the moment, though, he returned to his old Bronco and drove to a gas station phone booth where he looked up Richard’s address.  Since it was getting late, he decided to just go there and see if Richard went home. 

     When he found the house, he saw a Chrysler minivan on the driveway.  “Hmm,” he noted, “not a Mercedes or an Infinity,” already thinking about his article.  He parked along the curb in front of the house, walked up and rang the bell.  Shoving his hands in his pockets, he waited for some time.  When no one came, he rang again, opened the storm door, and knocked a couple of times.  “Someone must be home,” he thought, looking at the minivan.  When no one answered, he walked round back. 

     There was a large deck overlooking a carefully groomed lawn with large hydrangea bushes in full bloom along its borders.  These were interspersed with rounded golden spireas and maples and blue cedars, and in front of them, making a kind of garden walk, there were flower beds filled with petunias, zinnias, and geraniums, and, in one corner, a good distance away, shaded by the large overhanging limbs of an ancient ash, a sloping stone wall with a fountain spilling water into a basin, where numerous bird feeders were set on poles.  The place seemed eerily quiet and deserted.  He walked up onto the deck and knocked on the back door.

      He heard movement inside, then, and peeked in through the door window.  He could see a woman, who apparently had been sitting at the kitchen table, move toward the door.  When she opened it, he could see she had been crying, for her eyes were blurry and her mascara was smeared.  She was dressed up, still, as though she had just come from work or from some town function, and she was very good looking. 

     “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, “I came to speak with your husband.  But I’ll come back another time.”

     She just stood in the door, not saying anything, not even, particularly, looking at him.  So he added, “Is something wrong, ma’am?  Do you need help?  My name is Andy Larson, and I’m a student at the college.  I wanted to interview your husband about that dumping by the cheese factory.  Do you need help?” he added again, concerned about the way she looked and feeling very queer standing in front of her the way he was.

     “Just leave my husband alone,” she shouted at the mention of him.  “Haven’t you all done enough?  Get out of here and leave him alone!” she shouted as she slammed the door. 

     But Andy, for reasons he couldn’t have explained to himself, feeling the queerness even more strongly, opened the door and let himself in.  Kris had her back to him at first and turned in surprise when she realized he came in.  She screamed at him to get out of her house, and when he didn’t she lunged at him, but he hollered, “Wait, wait, don’t,” and caught her wrist as she swung.  She then broke down, pulling her arm free, and, sobbing, turned to the table and sat down.

     “What is it?” Andy said.  “What’s wrong?”

     “Who the hell are you and what do you care?” she said.

     “I told you, I’m a journalism major.  I came because I want to write a story about your husband’s exposing of the dumping by the cheese factory.”

     “Well, my husband didn’t expose a damn thing.  All he did was ruin himself and his family.”

     Then, calming down, she told him in response to his questions all that had happened in the last eight weeks.  It made such a story that it filled him with dread, and he began to feel that he was really out of his depth.  But he could see that Mrs. Gough felt the same way.  And, he suspected, recalling the incident in the bar, so did her husband. 

     “Where is Richard, now?” he asked.

     “I have no idea.  I left him here earlier this afternoon.  I’d been trying to get him to go out, to do something, to fight the petition. . .”

     “What petition?  What does that mean?” he interrupted, curious, taking notes.

     “Someone’s been circulating a petition through the ward to have Richard removed from the council.  And he doesn’t do anything about it.  He just sits at home.  I tried to make him go out and talk to people.  But he wouldn’t.  So I left, myself.  I went door to door through the ward, trying to get people to understand what he really did.”

     “How did that work?” he asked, “Did you bring anyone around?”

     “Oh, they were all polite and listened to what I said, but I could see that it didn’t make any difference.  Someone must have called Hamaker after I visited, because he came driving up Foster as I was leaving one neighborhood, and he pulled me over and came to my car and got in.  You know what he did?  He actually threatened me!”  She said this with a tremor in her voice and her hands shaking, obviously frightened and almost beside herself, as Hamaker no doubt intended. 

     “He said if I didn’t stop smearing him--that’s what he said, smearing, as though telling what Richard really tried to do was smearing him--he’d have his lawyers after me, and I would see what it was like to get sued and lose everything I own.”

     “Why, that bastard,” Andy said.  And then, after a pause, “But it doesn’t make sense.  His going after you, I mean.  I bet he’s not so sure of himself.  Why would he chase after you like that?  Hmm.  There’s something more, something you and Richard don’t know about.  I bet there is.”

     He didn’t tell her about Truman and the Cactus Bar, but as he thought of it, he started to wonder what might have become of Richard.  He asked Mrs. Gough if she had any idea where he might go, and she said she couldn’t imagine where he’d be right now.  He should be thinking of the boys, she said, since, ordinarily, they’d be home now, and they’d all be waiting supper for him.  It was getting late, and Kris was now starting to wonder and to worry.

     “Who might he go visit?” Andy asked.

     “Right now?  No one.  Our friends have ceased to be our friends.  If nothing else comes of this disaster, I’m beginning to think it was worth it to find that out.”

     “What about his family?  Don’t they live in town?”

     “Yes, of course.  But the boys are there.  If he went there, I’m sure he or they would have called.”

     “Call them, just to be sure.”

     Kris called her mother-in-law, who said the boys were fine and that they hadn’t heard from Richard.

     “What now?” she said, implicitly taking direction from Andy, feeling grateful he was there.

     “I’ll take a ride around town,” he said, “and look into the bars and places he might go to keep up his spirits.  It’ll only take an hour or so.  I’ll come back whether or not I see him or get word of him.  Meantime, maybe you should have your supper, and call around to anyone you can think of that Richard might have gone to.”

     It was near midnight, and they had been sitting together for several hours.  It was long since they had exhausted all ideas for finding Richard.  It was starting to look serious now, but Andy had still not told Kris about the Cactus Bar, for he feared the image of her husband being manhandled and slapped would be too much for her.  He thought of one more place they might look.

     “Do you want to take a ride out to the dumping site?  There’s a chance, maybe one in a million, that he’s out there, sitting in his car.”

     “Do you think so?” she said, a sudden dawning coming over her, her face falling, turning pale, and a frightened look filling her eyes.  He understood immediately what she thought. 

     “Let’s go,” he said.  “Just to make sure.”

     The way she looked when he had mentioned the dumping site gave him a thrill of fear, too, so when they got out onto Highway 16, he floored the Bronco.  When they reached the gate in the barbed wire fence where the trucks muscled their way off the road, he turned into the pasture toward the creek.  He flicked his lights off when he neared it and came bouncing to a stop.  In the moonlight they could see well enough that there was no car anywhere along the creek bed or in it.  They could see nearly as far as where the creek joined the river, and he rolled the old Bronco all that way, back and forth, several times.  They were relieved, finally, to see no sign of Richard, but they were also completely lost as to what to do next.

* * *

Sweating profusely from the walk back to his car, Richard put the camera in his shirt pocket and threw on the air conditioner, then patted his face with his folded handkerchief, thinking, as he slipped the car in gear and slowly rolled it across the pasture to the road, that of his two options, one might ruin Hamaker, but both were dangerous to himself. “There’s no good end to this,” he thought, and felt a wave of resentment come over him.  But what nagged at him was the worst-case scenario of the first option--if he called in the EPA, he might be responsible for a hundred and twenty jobs lost and all the dislocations that meant for the families as well as the city, whose tax base was already eroding, dwindling from the succession of hot, dry summers that had been putting one farmer after another out of business and causing the town to lose population.  A hundred and twenty families were economically significant in their small city, and that significance was magnified by the recent drought. 

     Hamaker knew all this and counted on it to force the city to do his bidding.  It was hard for Richard to accept a sacrificial role when he thought about Hamaker.  For Hamaker covered all his bases.  If Richard went to Van Zee with his article, and Van Zee refused to publish, Hamaker would eat him alive.  It would be, he thought, a small price to pay if his sacrifice brought about some accommodation and got the city out from under Hamaker’s hammer.  But the likelihood of that happening was small.  He suspected that he would only blacken himself in town and that after a few months of cold shoulders, he would end up leaving.

     “All right,” he said to himself, “it’s not like I have no chance at all.  Van Zee might come through, he might, he just might publish, and the fallout might just bring Hamaker around.”

     He concentrated on his driving, getting back onto the road, and then accelerating to Highway 16.  He crossed the bridge over the river, and looked down at its brown, nearly still water, and at the cottonwoods densely packed along its banks.  Downriver a few miles there was a heron nursery.  He had taken his sons through it on their canoe one Saturday morning when the young herons were fledging and the adults were still feeding them.  It was a wonderful experience for the boys.  They had got on the river early, just before sunrise, and had silently slipped downstream, seeing along the way raccoons and deer and ducks and many species of birds, all of which the boys knew from their Peterson’s.  What would happen to it all if that rotting whey got into the river?  As he entered the four-way-stop intersection that marked the eastern side of town on Highway 16, he had made up his mind.

     Before going home he took the little pocket camera to Harold’s, who promised to have the film done early the next day.  His wife, looking cool and cheerful in light blue shorts and a blue and white collared blouse, was surprised to see him home so early, with his shirt drenched in perspiration and looking glum.

     “What’s the matter?” she asked, “What have you been doing?  You’re all perspired.”

     “I took a walk, that’s all,” he said.  “Where are the boys?”

     “They’re at the pool.  I took them about an hour ago.  If you change, you can go get them.  I told them to be ready to leave by four.”

     It was half past three, uncommonly early for him to come home, and Kris was curious.  She persisted, asking again why he was home, and he responded vaguely, saying that he wanted to change and that he had to go out again and couldn’t get the boys.  He looked at her, then, and wondered how she would react to what he planned to do.

     “How will she weather this?” he thought.  He hadn’t considered what effect his decision would have on his marriage.  He and Kris were happy.  But the marriage had never really been tested.  How would she cope with the flight of his best clients if that should happen?  With her friends turning their backs on her?  If his plan backfired, how would she cope with their having to leave town because the people with whom they felt so secure had ostracized them?  Would she turn from him, too?  He looked at her, and her concern was apparent, for like most people who have lived together for a long time--they were married ten years now--he saw that she could tell by the expression on his face, and probably by his body movements, that something was troubling him.  Was she as solid as he imagined her to be? 

     He could just let things go on as they were, for her sake, and the boys’.  The city might get dumped on and fall into a fiscal crisis, Hamaker would go the way he plots and schemes, and everybody would cope.  Why should he do anything about it?  Nobody else is doing anything.  They are all afraid.  Hamaker’s government contract is worth five million a year for ten years.  Nobody in town has ever dreamed of doing that kind of business.  The mere thought of it intimidates them.  They’re all hoping Hamaker will come round in the end and get generous, as they would themselves, being normal people, or that someone else will come through with a way to finance the expansion of the waste treatment facility.  Nobody is even thinking of challenging Hamaker.  That’s the last thing on anybody’s mind.  Why should he?  Everything could and should stay the way it is for him. 

     But, No!  It’s not a personal thing.  What Hamaker is doing amounts to thuggery.  If he succeeds, what’s next?  And then there are the herons.  There’s the river.  No one, even Hamaker, should take them lightly.  Downstream are other communities as well, people who have a right to clean water.  If the whey should reach the river, what then?  All those who could have stopped it by standing up to Hamaker would have that on their consciences. 

     Kris had noticed his detachment, his air of thinking something through, as he looked at her.  She felt she was under scrutiny and wondered what it was all about.  Suddenly, on impulse, she walked up close to him and put her hand on his chest and said, “Richy, whatever’s on your mind, you can trust me.  If you want to tell me about it, fine.  If not, fine.  But the way you’re looking at me!  Like you doubt me, or something.  Is that what you’re doing?”

     “I don’t doubt you, Kris.  But something is afoot, and I have a very strong feeling that it’s going to affect us.  I can’t talk to you about it, not right now.  But I have to change and talk to someone else.

     “You’re so mysterious!  How can I live through the day without knowing?” she said, laughing.

     “I hope you’re right,” he said, smiling.  “I love you.  I really do.”

     He went upstairs, then, changed and came down, kissed Kris on her cheek and left.  And then she looked glum, watching him get in the car on the driveway and back out.  He was not a particularly demonstrative person.  He seldom told her he loved her, and he never kissed her on the cheek when leaving the house.  But now he not only said he loved her, he said that he “really” did, like he was thinking about it, like maybe he wasn’t sure.   She frowned.  It was awfully hot outside.  She’d have to leave in a few minutes herself to get the boys.  She wondered what was afoot, as he said, but then, shrugging off the sense of foreboding, went into the kitchen and made a quart of orange juice for the boys and set out a plate of crackers and cheese.

     Meanwhile, Richard had gone to the Daily.  He told Van Zee about Hamaker and the dumping and about the council’s decision and indecision, and what it all meant as far as the city was concerned, and what the crunch was likely to mean in dollars and cents for everyone when it came.  Van Zee leaned back and put his hands behind his head and whistled.

     “Didn’t you get a Plainsman?” Richard asked.

     “You mean the college newspaper?” Van Zee replied.

     “Yes, I’m surprised the students didn’t send you a copy.  They should have, since the recent issue just had a story on the dumping.  Why in the world didn’t they?”

     “I don’t know.  They use our press to print their paper.  I had a copy of it in my hands the other day and looked it over.  I don’t read the thing because nothing in it is relevant.  What is usually gets to us first anyway.  Maybe they thought I already saw it.”

     Van Zee seemed to be interested, and Richard began to relax, sensing that the publisher-editor began to sniff a story. 

     “Ryan, I want to write an editorial about what’s going on.  You’ve had council members in the past write articles about important issues facing the town.  This one is as important as it gets.  If I write it, will you publish it?”

     Van Zee considered the question a long time, avoiding Richard’s eyes, tapping his right hand on his stretched-out leg, and finally swiveled his chair and rose.  He was agitated.  Working, as he did, through very late night hours, Van Zee never dressed formally on the job.  He wore jeans and a light green polo shirt with a pocket which bulged with a pack of cigarettes.  He took one out and lit it. 

     “You and I have never been friends,” he said, pacing the floor behind his desk, “though we’ve known each other most of our lives.  We move in very different circles.  Yet you come here and ask if I want to commit economic suicide, just so, like it was nothing that mattered much.” 

     “I was afraid you’d think that.  For a moment, I thought. . .I thought you’d sensed the importance of this.  What’s that old line?  ‘A newspaper is the conscience of the community?’  Remember when you made that speech...”

     “Cut the crap, Richard.  I’m as concerned about you as about myself.  It’s not just Hamaker, it’s all of them, even the mayor.”  He flicked his ashes on the floor and walked to the file cabinet across from his desk and leaned on it.            “Publishing that story would set them against us,” he said, flicking his ashes again.  He was acting nervously, and Richard could see it.  “Things would never be the same,” he continued, walking across the room to an arm chair and sitting on its stuffed arm, “even if we managed to hang on to our careers.  And it would be social suicide for you, as well,” he said, with a push of his finger at Richard.  “Does your wife know that?”

     “We haven’t talked about it yet.  I’m trying to keep her out of it, since she socializes with so many of the wives, even Hamaker’s wife,” Richard said, feeling a bit traitorous as he thought about it.

     “Why the hell did you come to me anyway?” Van Zee burst out, clearly angry.  “You could have gone to the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls.  They’d have jumped on the story.  In fact, you don’t even have to write it.  Just tell Dana Johnson what’s going on, he hates this town.  He’ll come with his nails and cross beams.  Trust him.”

     “I came,” Richard said, emboldened by Van Zee’s outburst, “because I wanted your help.”  He looked up at Van Zee standing behind his desk and said, “I don’t hate this town, and I don’t want to ruin it.  That’s the whole point.  I sure as hell don’t want anybody crucified.”

     “Then we’ll leave Dana out of it,” Van Zee said.  “But that means trouble for you,” and as he gestured at Richard, he sat down again at his desk.  Richard had been following him round and round the office from his seat, his head turning this way and that.  Now the two men looked at each other across the desk.

     “Look,” Richard said, “I think my plan will work.  What’s going on can’t be stopped by the EPA without punishing a lot of innocent people, like I said before.  If the story makes the Argus, it’ll go national, and we’ll have the EPA here for sure.  But your newspaper, Ryan,” and here he paused to let the point grow by his slowness, “your paper carries weight in town, you see, just because it is a paper.  It can create shame where bureaucrats only create delay.  And it’s local--as hard as you’ve tried to change that--it’s still exclusively our newspaper.  Will you use that influence?  Publish my article, with the pictures?  I can have them here tomorrow.”  He was counting on Harold to have the photos done.

     Van Zee wouldn’t commit to publishing, but he didn’t refuse, either.  He complained that Richard was saddling him with too heavy a set of alternatives.  He hated such dilemmas.  Damn and damn, he said, over and over.  Richard said he would deliver the article and the pictures the next day, and Van Zee could decide after looking them over whether he wanted to publish them.  Richard felt very good about Van Zee, for he could see he was wrestling with his conscience, and that was a sign he had one.  When a newspaper man’s instincts for the story clashed with his sense of danger, which of them won out? he wondered. 

     Richard also felt sure Van Zee would not betray him.  And that certainty came as a kind of moral empowerment, girding him, as it were, for battle.  He could find allies.  He had taken the first step, and he felt heady with success, and, most importantly, he was unafraid.  He trusted Van Zee.  He left his office determined to write an exposé, leaving nothing out, naming names, laying blame, and carefully and completely delineating the costs of Hamaker’s dumping to everyone in town--every householder paying property taxes, consumer paying sales taxes, apartment dweller coping with rising rents, and retiree living in the town’s three senior citizen complexes. 

     Three days later the story appeared, with two photos-- and not as an editorial!  It was on page one above the fold, under the headline, “Dumping Threatens Town,” with the first photo in the center of the story carrying the cutline, “A quarter mile of reeking whey approaches the river.”  The reaction was bewildering.  Van Zee himself wrote an editorial assuring his readers that the problem would be speedily resolved and nothing much would come of it, thereby placating the moneyed powers who advertised in his paper and who looked after one another’s interests. 

     But Hamaker did not suspend the dumping; instead, he used the alarm the story spread to put even more pressure on the town to expand its waste treatment facility, and he quickly exploited that alarm for his own purposes against Richard by following Richard’s article with one of his own the next day.  In this article he made himself out to be a struggling victim of abusive power, explaining how he was fighting to keep his factory operating and his workers employed.  He was, after all, only a small-time businessman responsible for the wellbeing of a hundred and twenty families, struggling against the odds and victimized by a hostile and powerful individual on the town council who was using his influence to destroy him.  He all but accused this powerful individual of deliberately refusing for base personal reasons to help keep his operation going.

     Richard suddenly found himself the target of the town’s ire, inevitably identified as the “hostile power” on the town council who was trying to ruin Hamaker.  He soon began receiving hate mail from workers who feared the closing of the factory, and he had more than one threatening phone call from local dairy farmers who depended on the cheese factory to market their milk, for Hamaker ran his own tanker trucks, which saved them during the downturn and kept them from going out of business.  The whole network of Hamaker’s people, in fact, were up in arms, their anger and fears, aroused by Hamaker, being directed day after day at Richard, some of it spontaneous, no doubt, but much of it coordinated by Hamaker himself.  And people all over town blamed him for the dumping!  The town council met without him the next week, and in his district, someone began circulating a petition to have him removed--put up to it, no doubt, by Hamaker himself. 

     The storm had barely settled when Richard found himself losing his business, so that his daily routine at the office had become a nightmare of loss and loneliness.  When his phone rang, it was always a client seeking to abandon him.  Soon, not only had new business cease to come in, but he had lost most of his existing accounts--the active ones, that is, on which he relied for his monthly income.  Richard sat in his living room, glum and idle. 

     Kris had been out and had only just returned.  She still had to keep the boys occupied until school started and had just delivered them to their church camp on the lake, where they would spend the afternoon in organized activities.  She came in and sat heavily on the chair opposite her husband. 

     “Why don’t you just stay in your office, put in an appearance of working normally, anyway.  This hanging around is going to make things worse,” she said.

     “I just can’t,” he complained morosely, leaning back and closing his eyes.

     “What are you going to do?  You can’t sit here every day.  You’ve got to do something.”

     “Every account I had that paid reasonable income is gone.  There’s nothing but nickels and dimes left.  We’ve got to live now on commissions, almost all of them from IRAs that pay once a year.  We’re going to be broke in six months,” and as he said this he got up and went into the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator door, grabbed the cold water jug and poured himself a glass.

     The day after Hamaker’s article, it all began, slowly at first, among clients he didn’t know long or well, but soon his best people whom he had been serving for years began deserting him.  Richard got phone calls and visits from them, all of them apologetic, concerned about their own financial futures, and, distrusting him, wanting to transfer their accounts to other financial counselors--Piper Jaffrey picking up many of them, with Commercial Bank and Cor Trust profiting as well.  It was a full scale hemorrhage that didn’t stop until nothing was left.

     “Couldn’t you see what was going to happen?” Kris said as she came into the kitchen.  “Why didn’t you talk this over with me?  Prepare me for it?”

     “And what would you have said,” Richard responded testily, “don’t do it?  That’s fine in hindsight.  Nobody on the council had the spine to do anything about Hamaker.  They were letting the city drift into a disaster.  I did what I had to do,” he said defensively.

     “You ruined us, that’s what you did,” she said,  breaking into tears.  “At the lake, everybody was looking at me, shaking their heads, like they were pitying me.  Some of the mothers came to Marcel and little Richard and Loren and took them away like they were orphans, with such exaggerated sympathy I wanted to die.  I was mortified, Richard.  And I can’t live like this.  What are we going to do?  What are we going to do?” she repeated, in a tone expressing misery, something neither of them had known before. 

     “Well,” he said, “I need time to think.”

     “You should be fighting back, that’s what you should be doing,” she said, working herself up.  “Go around the neighborhoods and fight that petition.  Explain to people what was really going on.  Door to door.  They’ll listen.  They will, everybody knows you, and if you get face to face with them, they’ll listen and believe.  Hamaker is a bully, just like you said, a thug.  That’ll show in time.  But you have to hang on.”

     “There’s nothing to hang on to.  The ledge we built our lives on has crumbled and we’ve fallen, and that’s it.  It’s over.”

     “So what are we supposed to do now, Richard?  Drop dead?  We have three boys who still have to grow up, we can’t drop dead.”  She stormed out of the kitchen and went into the bedroom. 

     He heard her in there slamming the dresser drawers and the closet door, wondering what she was doing.  When she came out, she was in a light summery dress with white low-healed pumps, a simple gold strand necklace, and tiny gold drop earrings. 

     “Where are you going?” he asked, curious and disconcerted.

     “I’m going to knock on doors.  If you can’t talk for yourself, I’m going to talk for you.”  And she left with a stiff-backed sense of pride. 

     He stood there looking at the door she had just closed behind her.  He felt chagrined, and all his energy drained from him and he collapsed in the chair.  Why couldn’t he do what she was doing?  But he couldn’t.  He couldn’t face people, not just yet.  The storm of public outrage directed against him had panicked him at first and then depressed him, leaving him unnerved and unmanned.  Maybe in a little while.  He felt too defeated now.  Let that feeling pass and maybe then he’d be able to defend himself.  But the idea of Kris knocking on doors, defending her husband, however much it was a sign of her devotion, was also a humiliation he never dreamed could happen.

     He needed someone to talk to, someone who understood what was going on and why he did what he did.  The other five members of the council all knew, of course.  But none of them would be seen with him now, spineless as they were.  And the mayor, he always favored the interests of business in any dispute or issue that divided the council.  Under other circumstances, Hamaker’s demands would automatically have been met; the mayor would have seen to that.  But the raising of new taxes right now was politically impossible.  So the mayor just laid low, keeping out of it.  The people Richard thought of as friends had all abandoned him.  Either they believed Hamaker or they felt the social pressure too keenly to sympathize with him or let themselves be seen in his company. 

     Richard thought of Van Zee.  He’d done the right thing.  And he couldn’t be blamed for covering himself by his editorial, though Richard did feel that if Van Zee had supported him, Hamaker would never have gotten away with reversing the blame.  Van Zee didn’t support him, but he didn’t go against him either, and he did keep many of the vile letters to the editor out of the paper, knowing that they were either written by Hamaker or for him by his employees.  What makes people like Hamaker tick?  That’s what he wanted to talk about.  And how do you fight them?  He felt helpless, and right now he felt unhealthily self-pitying.  He got up and left for the Daily.

     When he entered Van Zee’s office, he stood meekly waiting for him to get off the phone.  Then he sat down.  Van Zee looked sheepish, for it was the first time he had seen Richard since he published the article. 

     “How are you?” Van Zee asked, taking out a cigarette and offering one to Richard.  Richard passed and said things were not good.  “I hate to say I warned you, and all that,” Van Zee said.  “What’re you going to do now?  I’ve heard about your clients abandoning you.  Too bad.  People ought to have the sense to see through that Hamaker.”

     “Can’t blame them.  I rushed in too fast.  Never imagined such an outcome.  I thought I’d be putting pressure on him, not undoing myself.  I expected Hamaker to go after me behind the scenes, to be more subtle, really, you know, maybe get his associates--they are the wealthiest, and, you know, the most influential people in town--to spread rumors about me, tarnish my reputation.  I thought I could survive that.”

     Van Zee pushed his chair from the desk and leaned back.  “Yea, Hamaker undid you, all right.  Neat as neat.  You didn’t really expect him to be gentle, did you?”

     But Richard continued with his thought, “I do an awful lot in this town, or I’ve done a lot.  People know me, or at least I thought they did.  But that outcry, it was like I’m a stranger here.  I can’t believe I left myself open to the charge of trying to destroy him.  A hostile and powerful influence!  Me!  God, how he turned everything around.  I deliberately tried not to destroy him.”

     “I know.  I can’t help you, though,” Van Zee commiserated, waving a reporter away who had come to the door.  “If I tried, I’d be just where you are.  You can move on.  But I can’t pick up this newspaper and move it.  It takes years, a lifetime, to build a newspaper.  I put a lot of years, most of my life, in fact, into this paper.” 

     “I didn’t come to blame you or to ask for help.  I was sitting around, thinking, How does one deal with a Hamaker?  People like him mystify me.”

     “People like him are not mysterious at all.  Just the opposite.  Once you know them you know everything about them, because they’re predictable.”

     “Why did he have to force the town to expand its facility and raise taxes to pay for it, something he damn well knew we couldn’t do, when we could have done it together, with no inconveniences to anybody?”

     “Because he’s a powerful man, now more powerful than ever, and what the hell does power mean if not forcing people to do what they don’t want to?”

     “That’s all?  Just that?  Seems hardly worth it.”

     “Yes, to you.  But your being trashed is directly a measure of Hamaker’s power.  People will genuflect when they see him now.  That’s what he wants.”

     “It still doesn’t seem worth it.”

     “But the city is expanding its treatment facility, even now as we speak.  That’s power.”

     “You’re right.  But Parks and Rec is shut down.  No new taxes, the mayor said.  So that means no swimming pools next year, no art lessons, no soccer, no baseball, no lake activities, nothing.  That’s what the people are going to pay so Hamaker can have his way--that’s w-h-e-y.”

     “You mean have his cake and eat it, too?”

     “What else is power for, right?”

     “I wonder,” Van Zee said.  “People really don’t understand that, you know.  Right now, all those summer activities are in full swing.  You know, the mayor was vague about Parks and Rec, and the councilmen aren’t saying anything.  That’s a story I should be pursuing.  But if I did that now, I’d lose my advertising overnight, and within a week I’d have to shut the paper down.”

     “Why?  Would everybody who advertises pull out?  Why would they do that?”

     “Most everybody would.  Only the small and one-time advertisers would come in.  Why?  Look, I have only five bread and butter accounts--the three supermarkets and the two department stores.  All of them are owned or run by friends of Hamaker.  They are the elite, you know that.  They’re clubbish.  None of them would tolerate a newspaper that might investigate their own doings.  They want to feel safe.  If I deliberately went after that story instead of just reporting it when it came out, they’d think me out of line and shut me down, that fast,” he said, snapping his fingers. 

     Richard was depressed by the conversation.  The idea that the Dry Run was being polluted and the river risked and the whole city was being deprived of its Park and Rec programs so that Hamaker could feel powerful set him in a black mood.  Although none of it was mystifying to Van Zee, to Richard it all seemed bewildering and irrational, like something from the twilight zone. 

     For a while he sat silent, watching Van Zee smoke, feeling like it was his life going up in the curling gray clouds above their heads.  Van Zee had a terrible life, he realized, navigating that narrow terrain between submissiveness to the powers that fed him and his duty as a newspaperman.  He appreciated him now.  Admired him, in fact.  He was more mature than Richard, and his working now as usual, untroubled by the publication of the article, was a sign of that.  Well, Van Zee survived.  He helped Richard, he did the right thing and managed to survive.  He was an able player in the game of life.  Richard, by contrast, was a failure, naive, trusting, expecting the best from people, and incompetent to deal with it when that didn’t happen.  He was tested and he failed, he had to admit it; and he thought of Kris who was knocking on doors, trying to save him by talking to the people in their own neighborhood.  There wasn’t much to save.  What now?  He said good-bye to Van Zee and walked out into the late afternoon streets, the slanting sun hitting his eyes, causing him to shade them with his hand as he looked up the block and then turned away.

* * *

Andy rolled the Bronco across the pasture back toward Highway 16, silent as the roughness of the ground rocked him and Mrs. Gough back and forth and pitched them forward, so that she had to steady herself by leaning on the dashboard.  On their way back to town, Andy couldn’t hold it in any longer and told her about the Cactus Bar.  She needed to know, he felt, if they were going to find Richard.  She listened to his description silently and said nothing afterward.

     “Any idea where he might have gone when he left the bar?” he said.  They were nearing the four-way stop on the edge of town, and in the lighted intersection he saw her staring ahead, her hands now limp in her lap.

     “Any idea?” he said again, patting the back of her left hand, “try to think.”

     “I would go home, if it were me,” she said, finally.      He looked at her, but it was too dark now to see more than her silhouette, and he couldn’t tell what state she was in.  She spoke matter-of-factly, but he sensed something wrong, like she was biting her lips, holding herself in.  He felt sorry and didn’t know what to say, so he just let it drop. 

     But she continued, after a while, and said, “I don’t know.  I feel like I don’t know him.  I can’t think where he might have gone.”

     “Well, listen, Mrs. Gough, I’m going to take you home.  I’ll look in on you tomorrow, or later today,” he said, realizing that it was long after midnight.  “Maybe you’ll hear from him during the day sometime, or maybe he’ll just show up.  But I’ll come by.  I’ll call first.”

     She didn’t respond.  He felt guilty about telling her, but it had to be done.  How the hell is she going to sleep tonight? he thought.  He dropped her off at the curb in front of her house, and she got out without saying anything.  He watched her open the front door, and when she was inside, he left for campus.  Damn, he thought, where did Richard go?  He must really be down if he walked out on his wife and kids, just like that.  He hoped, as he parked the Bronco in front of his dorm, that’s all it was, walking out and nothing worse.  Summer classes were over and fall classes wouldn’t begin for two weeks yet, so he had time to get involved if he wanted to, get more involved than he already was in the Gough’s affairs. 

     Once in his room, he felt weary and drained, and wished he were home, and couldn’t get Mrs. Gough out of his mind, for he thought she was beautiful.  He pitied her and knew she was alone in that house, and he wanted to dream of her as he crawled into bed.  Instead, he recalled everything he knew about Hamaker and the dumping, about Richard, and about what he himself had witnessed, at the creek and in the bar.  And when he fell asleep, he didn’t dream at all.  The next day, Richard did not show up, nor did he the day after, nor the day after that.

* * *

     “But why do you want to transfer your account?”  Richard was recalling his conversations with his clients as he drove east on Interstate 90.  “You don’t believe that stuff Hamaker said in the Daily, do you?”  And the inevitable answer, always polite, said in a tone of mild chastisement, like a parent teaching a child right from wrong, “Oh, I don’t want to go into that, Richard.  That’s not for me to say, you know.”  But that was actually the very thing driving their behavior.  Such polite moralistic evasiveness was also typical of the way people here avoided conflict and unpleasantness of all sorts.  They had made up their minds, or had been prompted to make them up by God knows who acting under Hamaker’s influence, and that was that. 

     As he drove, he thought and felt mostly from within the hot humiliation shot into him by Truman’s slap.  He felt resentment and second thoughts of all kinds, he felt a desire to revenge himself, he felt martyred for the public good and abandoned by his closest friends, he felt unworthy, he felt all sorts of conflicting and fleeting emotions which were tangling themselves up with his thoughts and making him less and less conscious of his present intentions, so that they had driven him virtually mad.

     It had gotten dark.  Richard had been driving now for several hours, and he had not yet asked himself where he was going.  Every town he passed he wondered about, whether it had its version of Hamaker, whether every town had its Hamaker, whether the Hamakers were as common and as natural as frogs.  Every pond has its big frog, he thought.  The thing is to compete for that status.  He should have, he should have.  That was his greatest regret--not calling in the EPA and sinking that son-of-a-bitch right from the start.  That’s what Hamaker himself would have done, except that he would have secretly invested in the factory so as to take it away from its owner.  He should have done that!  He should be the owner right now of that factory and its government contract.  And on and on.  Richard was insane.

     But inside his madness the worm of sanity had already begun to gnaw its way out.  Richard was essentially a good man, and his decency was a product of life-long habits and a will sharpened by self-scrutiny and careful choice.  He drove on and on until his mind settled and cleared.  He had crossed Minnesota and was nearing Madison, Wisconsin, when he finally came to his senses enough to wonder where he was.  As his wife and Andy were sitting in the Bronco beside the Dry Run Creek wondering what to do next, he realized how his defeat and humiliation had driven him from everything he loved and desired.  He pulled off the Interstate, calm and in possession, called home and got no answer.  Strangely, this didn’t bother him.  Rather, it increased his resolve.  He knew what he was going to do.  He turned around and drove home.

     It was after nine in the morning when he got back to town.  He didn’t feel tired or hungry.  He was determined, singlemindedly so, to confront Hamaker.  But not yet, not in his present condition.  The house was quiet, so he looked in on the boys and found they weren’t home, then he saw Kris asleep.  He went to his study and gathered the photos of the creek and copied his Hamaker files from his computer onto a disk which he carried out with him.  Then he went to Sioux Falls and paid a visit to Dana Johnson.  After hearing the story, Dana was eager to help, and, together, they got what he needed.  He felt bolstered by Dana’s encouragement and expertise.  He returned home very early on the fourth day after his disappearance, well provisioned for his confrontation.  And for this, he wanted to be clean shaven, showered, and appropriately dressed--in his best suit and most expensive tie--cologned, and carrying his briefcase.  When he let himself into the house, he found Kris asleep, as before, so he quietly assembled his wardrobe, carrying everything to the downstairs bathroom, where he showered, shaved, and dressed and left without waking her. 

     Hamaker was in his office as usual when Richard arrived.  His office was located above the factory floor on the east side of the building.  There was a row of offices there, one of which, Hamaker’s, had a glass wall through which the factory’s daily operations could be observed.  It was through this that Hamaker saw Richard enter and walk across the floor to the stairs.  His immediate response was, “What the hell is he doing here?” and then he frowned and worry lines appeared in his forehead. 

     The two men could not be more different.  Hamaker was fat and balding, had a thick neck and red face which seemed to be the product of a constant boiling of temperament, and wore suit trousers held up by suspenders and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up over his hairy arms.  The very tip of a white handkerchief stuck up from his back right-hand pocket.  The most notable feature of the man was his tie, though, which was always two or three inches too short and whose bottom point sat folded on his rounded belly.  He had a loud gravelly voice and huge hands.  He could be, and often was with people he could cower, a physically intimidating person.  He was, also, however, a miser, and would make every attempt to squeeze a dollar into two.  He paid good wages to his employees, that can be said of him, but he expected them to devote their lives to him in return.  He would tolerate no excuses for a failure to work, so that his employees often had to put their own and their families’ interests second to their boss’, and this he felt was his right. 

     Richard was, by contrast, slender, full-haired, soft-spoken, and mild-mannered.  Impeccably dressed, carrying his briefcase, he seemed the very image of cool, rational corporate America, except that, at thirty-five, he was young, younger by some twenty years than Hamaker. 

     Hamaker watched him climb the stairs.  His expression was the very image of a question mark on a human face.  When Richard entered, he faced him and stood with his large hands folded into fists and resting on his hips.

     “What the hell do you want?” Hamaker growled.

     Richard kept his cool and smiled and said, “I came to tell you I’ve resigned from the council so I can fight you without that hanging round my neck,” and as he said the words “fight you,” he raised the briefcase and patted it.  Hamaker had taken him and his gesture in, then just looked at Richard and guffawed.

     “I have no obligations to the town, now, and after you blackened me and drove away my business, I have nothing to lose.  As a man preparing to leave, I have no interests in this town’s well-being.  That’s your doing, Hamaker.  You left one thing out of your calculations.  If you take everything from a man, he’s got nothing left to protect, so he’s free to do what’s necessary.”

     “You’ve got a wife, man, and children.  Don’t be a fool.  You have a lot left to lose.  So, underestimate me at your own risk,” he said threateningly. 

     “Oh, I’m not underestimating.  You’re the one whose doing that.  As for my wife and children, I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.  You don’t really want to threaten them.  You’re not that crude.  Though you can be sure I’ll keep them out of your reach.  I came to tell you to expect a visit from the EPA.  I’ve been in touch.  I’ve also notified the Department of Defense Procurement Office of your dumping of waste while fulfilling your contract for them.  They were very interested to hear of it.  The cat’s out of the bag now.  I also have IRS records,” he said, patting his briefcase again, “and these are particularly interesting.  I’m sure, together with the EPA’s findings, these will make for a comfortably long stay in a federal prison.”  It was a bluff, but Richard could see that Hamaker was worried by the deepening creases in his forehead and by his unaccustomed silence.

     Hamaker’s fists had begun to open and close, and Richard could see that he was holding himself back, but that an explosion was imminent.  Hamaker’s face had gotten fiery. But instead of exploding into rage, he stood staring, open mouthed.  Richard was afraid he would drop dead from a heart attack.  To head that off and defuse the tension, Richard walked further into the office and put his briefcase onto Hamaker’s desk.  Then he told Hamaker to sit while taking a seat himself.  He neatly crossed his legs and sat back.

     Hamaker sat and said, in his gravelly voice, “I have nothing to fear from all that.  The EPA can’t do a thing.  I had sent some people from the public works department to look at the Dry Run before I started dumping.  What the hell could I do?” he shouted, banging a fist on the desk.  “There was no other way to keep operating.  Damn you, Gough,” he said, banging his fist again, “you’re a pain in the ass.  And as for the IRS, so what, the most they could do if they find anything wrong is fine me.  So what.”

     “So why are you sitting here listening to me?” Richard said, confident that he was winning the upper hand, for Hamaker was uncharacteristically docile when he should be cursing him and throwing him out.  “I’ll tell you why, Hamaker.  It’s because you know as well as I do that regardless of who went to look at the Dry Run, your dumping is illegal, and that could well cost you your fifty-million- dollar contract.  It might even, all by itself, be enough to put you in prison.”  Richard was speaking matter-of-factly, not threateningly, so that the calm rationality he appeared to project subdued Hamaker.  “But not paying income taxes, Hamaker, is one thing, and tax evasion is another.”  Richard was shooting wildly with this accusation, but his mention of tax records seemed to be the thing that most frightened Hamaker.  So, opening his briefcase and taking out a folder with photocopies of Hamaker’s tax statements, he exploited that fear and lied for all he was worth.

     “Hamaker,” Richard said after a pause, during which the two men stared at each other, “I’m going to leave you with the task of restoring my reputation and rebuilding my former clients’ confidence in me.  How you do that is your problem.  In this folder are IRS statements for you personally and the factory going back ten years.  I’ve been busy these last few  weeks.  But listen here, Hamaker, I haven’t called the EPA yet, though everything is set--photos of your tankers dumping, dates, estimates of quantities, affidavits from your drivers of orders from you to dump, everything.  It’s all there sitting with Dana Johnson at the Argus Leader, who is just waiting for a signal from me to go public with it.  And all that same documentation is waiting to go out to the DOD.  We understand each other, now, right?  It’s up to you to save yourself.  I’ll be in my office, waiting to hear from my clients.”

     He got up, then, with just a hint of a smile on his lips, trying to keep his composure.  Hamaker was dead silent and his redness paled.  At the mention of Dana Johnson, his bravado collapsed, and he became tame.  Richard thought that what he had done was only what Hamaker would have done if their positions were reversed, only Hamaker would have been vicious in his demands, squeezing the life out of him.  He wasn’t asking for much, only to get back what Hamaker had wrongfully taken.  He patted him on the back, wished him success in his new endeavors, took his briefcase, and left.

     “Why didn’t I do this from the start?” he thought, as he walked out of the factory heading for home.  Hamaker had all the liabilities and really couldn’t stand an investigation.  He was the weak one.  He got his way by daring and by force of personality, which was unscrupulous.  “How easily people are herded by the Hamakers!” he thought.  He was unaccustomed to manipulating people, and he vowed as he drove home that he would never do it again and that he would never reveal to anyone what he had done.  Threatening and forcing!  It left a bad taste in his mouth.  He got no pleasure from seeing Hamaker’s worry lines deepen and his face redden and then go pale.  He felt a little sickened by it.  “It was a small sin,” he said out loud.  But he felt relieved, and he knew that Hamaker would strive mightily to “save himself.”  Within a few weeks he expected to be managing not only Hamaker’s own investment portfolio, but all those Hamaker could convince to switch or to switch back.  “Was that justice?” he thought, or was it just another instance of folly, of how men sink to the lowest level--a kind of irresistible force that works blindly to undo us, a centripetal force that throws us all together and spins us around until we lose our illusions?

     “Well, I intend to keep my illusions,” he said out loud, feeling a kind of victory over himself.  He smiled at that, smiled in the rear-view mirror so he could see himself.

     And Hamaker had a lot coming to him, yet.  Next year, when the people find out that their parks and recreation programs have all been canceled due to the city’s use of the bed and booze tax to pay for Hamaker’s waste treatment, they will begin to understand what it had cost them to believe in him.  Things won’t go well for him, then.  But by then he expected to have his own reputation back, and afterwards, people. . . .  “Well,” he thought, “hell, I’m not going to play that game.”

     When he entered his house, he saw Kris in a robe standing in the kitchen pouring herself some coffee.  “I’m home!” he shouted, sounding cheerful.  When she saw him all dressed up, her face got wide-eyed with wonder.