Freedom [175]
“I’m afraid that’s not authorized,” the manager said.
“Fuck the authorization!” Walter said. “We need to get through here! I own this fucking land! Do you understand that? I own everything you can see here.”
“How you likin’ it?” the oldest woman said to him. “Doesn’t feel so good now, does it? Being on the wrong side of the fence.”
“You’re more than free to walk in, sir,” the manager said, “although it’s a pretty far piece. I reckon you’re looking at two hours with all the mud.”
“Just lend me the truck, OK? I will indemnify you, or you can say I stole it, or whatever you like. Just lend me the fucking truck.”
Walter felt Lalitha’s hand on his arm. “Walter? Let’s go sit in the car for a minute.” She turned to the women. “We’re very much on your side, and we appreciate your coming out to show your concern for this wonderful forest, which we’re very dedicated to preserving.”
“Interesting way you got of going about that,” the oldest woman said.
As Lalitha led Walter back down toward the rental car, they could hear heavy equipment coming rumbling up the road behind it. The rumble became a roar which then resolved itself into a pair of giant, road-wide backhoes with mud-caked tractors. The driver of the front one left the engine coughing out fumes while he hopped down for a word with Walter.
“Sir, you’re going to have to move your vehicle up ahead to where we can pass it.”
“Does it look like I can do that?” he said wildly. “Is that what it fucking looks like to you?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. But we can’t be backing up. Be near a mile back down to a turnout.”
Before Walter could get even angrier, Lalitha took him by both arms and peered up fervently into his face. “You have to let me handle this. You’re too upset now.”
“I’m upset for good reason!”
“Walter. Sit in the car. Now.”
He did as he was told. He sat for more than an hour, fiddling with his non-receiving BlackBerry and listening to the mindless waste of fossil fuels as the backhoe behind him idled. When the driver finally thought to turn it off, he heard a chorus of engines from farther back—another four or five heavy trucks and earthmovers were backed up now. Somebody needed to summon the state police to deal with Zorn and her zealots. In the meantime, incredibly, in deepest Wyoming County, he was stopped dead in traffic. Lalitha was running up and down the road, conferring with the various parties, doing her best to spread goodwill. To pass the time, Walter did mental tallies of what had gone wrong in the world in the hours since he’d awakened in the Days Inn. Net population gain: 60,000. New acres of American sprawl: 1,000. Birds killed by domestic and feral cats in the United States: 500,000. Barrels of oil burned worldwide: 12,000,000. Metric tons of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere: 11,000,000. Sharks murdered for their fins and left floating finless in the water: 150,000 . . . The tallies, which he recalculated as the hour grew even later, brought him a strange spiteful satisfaction. There are days so bad that only their worsening, only a descent into an outright orgy of badness, can redeem them.
It was getting on toward nine o’clock when Lalitha returned to him. One of the drivers, she said, had found a spot two hundred yards back down the road where a passenger car could pull off and let the big equipment pass. The rearmost driver was going to back his truck all the way down to the highway and phone for the police.
“Do you want to try to walk up to Forster Hollow?” Walter said.
“No,” Lalitha said, “I want us to leave immediately. Jocelyn has a camera. We don’t want to be photographed anywhere near a police action.”
There ensued half an hour of grinding gears and squawking brakes and black bursts of diesel smoke, followed by a