Freedom [153]
“You and I see very much eye to eye on the politics of this,” Walter said.
“Kiki and I are working a little bit on Laura, whenever we can,” Haven said. “Might be more promise in that direction.”
“That’s great, that’s incredible.”
“Don’t hold your breath. I sometimes think W.’s more married to Rove than to Laura. Not that you heard that from me.”
“But so why the cerulean warbler?”
“I like the bird. It’s a pretty little bird. Weighs less than the first joint of my thumb and flies all the way to South America and back every year. That’s a beautiful thing right there. One man, one species. Isn’t that enough? If we could just round up six hundred and twenty other men, we’d have every North American breeder covered. If you were lucky enough to get the robin, you wouldn’t even have to spend one penny to preserve it. Me, though, I like a challenge. And Appalachian coal country’s one hell of a challenge. That’s just something you’re going to have to accept if you’re going to run this outfit for me. You got to have an open mind about mountaintop-removal mining.”
In his forty years in the oil-and-gas business, running a company called Pelican Oil, Vin Haven had developed relationships with pretty much everyone worth knowing in Texas, from Ken Lay and Rusty Rose to Ann Richards and Father Tom Pincelli, the “birding priest” of the lower Rio Grande. He was especially tight with the people at LBI, the oilfield-services giant which, like its archrival Halliburton, had expanded into one of the country’s leading defense contractors under the administrations of Reagan and the elder Bush. It was LBI to which Haven turned for a solution to the problem of Coyle Mathis. Unlike Halliburton, whose former CEO was now running the nation, LBI was still scrambling for inside access to the new administration and thus particularly disposed to do a favor for a close personal friend of George and Laura.
An LBI subsidiary, ArDee Enterprises, had recently won a big contract to supply the high-grade body armor that American forces, as improvised explosive devices began exploding in every corner of Iraq, had belatedly discovered themselves in sore need of. West Virginia, which had cheap labor and a lax regulatory environment, and which had unexpectedly provided Bush-Cheney with their margin of victory in 2000—choosing the Republican candidate for the first time since the Nixon landslide of 1972—was viewed very favorably in the circles Vin Haven ran in. ArDee Enterprises was hastily constructing a body-armor plant in Whitman County, and Haven, catching ArDee before hiring for the factory had commenced, was able to secure a guarantee of 120 permanent jobs for the people of Forster Hollow in exchange for a package of concessions so generous that ArDee would be getting their labor practically for free. Haven promised Coyle Mathis, by way of Lalitha, to pay for free high-quality housing and job training for him and the other Forster Hollow families, and further sweetened the deal with a lump-sum payment to ArDee large enough to fund the workers’ health insurance and retirement plans for the next twenty years. As for job security, it was enough to point to the declarations, issued by various members of the Bush administration, that America would be defending itself in the Middle East for generations to come. There was no foreseeable end to the war on terror and, ergo, no end to the demand for body armor.
Walter, who had a low opinion of the Bush-Cheney venture in Iraq and an even lower opinion of the moral hygiene of defense contractors, was uneasy about working with LBI and providing further ammunition for the lefty environmentalists who opposed him in West Virginia. But Lalitha was intensely enthusiastic. “It’s perfect,” she told Walter. “This way, we can be more than a model of science-based