Until, six months ago, it did.
—
Wyatt Gallagher’s three hundred acres are enclosed entirely by a sagging post-and-beam fence. The drought’s been bad here; the green has gone brown, and dust obscures my windshield. As I turn up the gravel drive, several chained-up hound dogs bark in the distance. I knew the CEAW was renting out temporary space for the legal team, but I had no idea we’d be moving onto Gallagher’s farm—not that it’s surprising, given that Gallagher is the one who first complained about the reservoir.
Considering Gallagher doesn’t have a cell phone, not to mention the spotty Wi-Fi, it’s a miracle the complaint ever made it past town lines.
When I first saw the post, I immediately recalled the minutes from the most recent town hall meeting to read Gallagher’s complaint in detail. It wasn’t just Gallagher: a few other families stood up with him and expressed concern about the water. Poring over the minutes, I felt like Alice down her rabbit hole: I tumbled suddenly into old complaints, buried reports from dozens of Barrens residents, all these old issues and complaints neatly spiraled up and bound to Gallagher’s rage. I made four pages of handwritten notes just by reviewing the minutes.
And for the first time in a decade, for the first time in my whole life, maybe, I felt as if the whole world had settled down. I felt as if everything had quieted to whisper the small promise of an answer.
I put Gallagher in contact with the Indiana chapter of CEAW. There are procedures, protocols, paths meant to take us out of the entanglement of our fears and suspicions. But the Indiana team, still dealing with a tie-up in state legislation about a clean energy bill that should have been passed two years ago, leaned on us for support.
So here I am.
I pull into the grass alongside a newly painted barn, identifiable as our headquarters only by Joseph Carter’s beat-up Camaro with the ubiquitous COEXIST bumper sticker. There are a few other cars I recognize and some I don’t—Estelle Barry, one of the senior partners, told us we’d be getting some interns from Loyola.
I stuff the empty water bottle into two old gas station coffee cups and toss them on the floor of the passenger seat.
“Williams. You’re late,” Joe greets me as I enter the giant, airy barn, where the team has set up folding tables, filing cabinets, and a mess of computers cabled to a single power strip. The floor is a tangle of wires and dirt, warped floorboards, and cheap by-the-foot carpet.
“It’s 9:02, dude.”
Joe and I were hired at the same time in the Illinois office. He’s pretty much my best friend, though I’d chew off my hand before I ever admitted that to his face. We were greenies together. We’ve spent countless nights eating Chinese takeout under the glow of shitty fluorescents, hollow-eyed with exhaustion. We celebrated our first three Christmases as lawyers together. I always had a feeling that, like me, Joe wasn’t close to his family; I remember being stunned and a little jealous when he announced last year that he was taking time off for a family vacation in Florida.
“I like that morning, tousled look. It works on you.” Joe leads me to a long folding table set up in the back of the barn. “Brings me right back to law school.”
“Brings you right back to last weekend,” I say, and Joe makes a who, me? expression. Joe picks up boyfriends the way corners gather dust. It just happens. “You’re in a good mood.”
“Maybe the country air agrees with me,” he says, stretching his arms out as if he’s never seen so much open space before. I wonder why the hell he’s so peppy this early, after a long drive from Indianapolis. Joe refuses to sleep in one of Barrens’s few motels or rentals, claiming that a gay black man belongs in Barrens, Indiana, like a dildo belongs on a dinner table. Instead, he’s chosen to commute.
“Maybe the water does,” I say, which makes him laugh. He’s not the only one buzzing on something more than caffeine. It’s that new-job, new-team energy. These pimply law students still believe we’re going to change the world, one oil spill, one contaminated reservoir, one gas pipeline leak at a time.
“Hey guys,” Joe speaks up. “This is Abby Williams in the flesh. She’s the one who’s been cluttering your inbox for the past two weeks.”
The research team is a modest one: a first-year associate and a few wide-eyed volunteer law students. I swear one of the girls looks as if she’s still in high school. That’s CEAW—law on a shoestring budget. Fighting the good fight is always underpaid.
“I believe the correct term is prepping,” I tell Joe.
He ignores that. “Abby,” he says to the rest of the group, “as you all know, is the other lead on the team besides me. But really she’s the reason we’re here, so when you hate your life in a few days, blame her.” He bats his eyelashes at me when I pull a face.
I can match the team to the little thumbnail images I got from Estelle Barry when she was staffing us. There’s Raj, the first-year associate, fresh out of Harvard. And, already, I’ve given out nicknames to the interns: Flora, a perky California girl in a floral top; Portland, a bearded hipster with a flannel too tailored to be truly authentic. Interns are like one-night stands. You can pretend to listen to a name or two, but the outcome never justifies the effort.
Flora leaps to her feet. Wants to prove she did her homework. “So far we’ve gathered all the town hall meeting notes from the past five years, before they went digital,” she says. “Several families started complaining as early as, um…” She glances down at her notes, and her face darkens. “As early as three years ago.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “We’ll be revisiting those complaints, one by one,” she adds, before sitting back down.
“What about now? Who else do we have besides Gallagher?” Gallagher is one of the largest landowners in or around Barrens—his farm’s been here since long before my time—and he uses the reservoir for irrigation. According to the notes Joe sent, he’s had to rely on it more than ever during the past two years’ drought. When he lost whole fields of corn and soybeans, he began to suspect something was wrong with the water—a suspicion borne out by several neighbors’ complaints of funny odors from the pipes, of skin inflammations and headaches.
“A half dozen people have signed the complaint he brought to the town. A family called Dawes and a Stephen Iocco seem like our best bets.”
“A half dozen complaints? We’ll be laughed out of the judge’s chambers.” Joe is underexaggerating. We’ll be kicked out.
Flora looks uncomfortable. “Optimal’s the biggest employer in Barrens,” she says. “It’s hard to sway people.”
“It’s a company town,” I say, and think uneasily about what Misha said—you’re on opposite sides now. I fear most people in Barrens will be on the other side. “That’s going to be our biggest obstacle.”
Everyone nods, but the whole team has the slick look of a city—or at least suburbia—about them, and can’t possibly understand.
When I was growing up, the morning air was coated in a film of plastic ash; we breathed in Optimal chemicals every time we inhaled, and the chemical smog turned the sun into different shades of pink and orange. Our ears rang with the constant din of Optimal construction: new scaffolds, new warehouses, new storage hangars, new smokestacks. I ate my lunch in a newly added school library built by an Optimal donation and rode home on a bus purchased by Optimal, with parts made by Optimal, and went to Optimal-sponsored dances, bake sales, and cookouts. My dad was right: there was someone bigger than us, someone watching us, someone who even made the colors in the sky and textured the air we were breathing. I remember as a kid when the skeleton of the production plant went up. I used to sneak around the reservoir to play on the construction site and write my name in the rusty ooze along the drainpipes, when the house was full of the smell of sick and seemed as if it might fold in on me.