Freedom [245]
Walter then left a message on Jessica’s cell phone, as he’d done twice a day since the fateful Sunday, without yet hearing back from her. “Jessica, listen,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to your mother, but whatever she’s saying to you, you need to call me back and listen to what I have to say. All right? Please call me back. There are very much two sides to this story, and I think you need to hear both of them.” It would have been useful to be able to add that there was nothing between him and his assistant, but, in fact, his hands and face and nose were so impregnated with the smell of her vagina that it persisted faintly even after showering.
He was compromised and losing on every front. A further bad blow landed on the second Sunday of his freedom, in the form of a long front-page story in the Times by Dan Caperville: “Coal-Friendly Land Trust Destroys Mountains to Save Them.” The story wasn’t greatly inaccurate factually, but the Times was clearly not beguiled by Walter’s contrarian view of MTR mining. The South American unit of the Warbler Park wasn’t even mentioned in the article, and Walter’s best talking points—new paradigm, green economy, science-based reclamation—were buried near the bottom, well below Jocelyn Zorn’s description of him shouting “I own this [expletive] land!” and Coyle Mathis’s recollection, “He called me stupid to my face.” The article’s take-away, besides the fact that Walter was an extremely disagreeable person, was that the Cerulean Mountain Trust was in bed with the coal industry and the defense contractor LBI, was allowing large-scale MTR on its supposedly pristine reserve, was hated by local environmentalists, had displaced salt-of-the-earth country people from their ancestral homes, and had been founded and funded by a publicity-shy energy mogul, Vincent Haven, who, with the connivance of the Bush administration, was destroying other parts of West Virginia by drilling gas wells.
“Not so bad, not so bad,” Vin Haven said when Walter called him at his home in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “We got our Warbler Park, nobody can take that away from us. You and your girl did good. As for the rest of it, you can see why I’ve never bothered talking to the press. It’s all downside and no upside.”
“I talked to Caperville for two hours,” Walter said. “I really thought he was with me on the main points.”
“Well, and your points are in there,” Vin said. “Albeit not too conspicuously. But don’t you worry about it.”
“I am worried about it! I mean, yes, we got the park, which is great for the warbler. But the whole thing’s supposed to be a model. This thing reads like a model of how not to do things.”
“It’ll blow over. Once we get the coal out and start reclaiming, people will see you were right. This Caperville fella will be writing obits by then.”
“But that’s going to be years!”
“You got other plans? Is that what this is about? You worried about your résumé?”
“No, Vin, I’m just frustrated with the media. The birds don’t count for anything, it’s all about the human interest.”
“And that’s the way it’ll stay until the birds control the media,” Vin said. “Am I going to see you in Whitmanville next month? I told Jim Elder I’d make an appearance at the armor-plant opening, provided I don’t have to pose for any pictures. I could pick you up in the jet on the way there.”
“Thanks, we’ll fly commercial,” Walter said. “Save some fuel.”
“Try to remember I make a living selling fuel.”
“Right, ha ha, good point.”
It was nice to have Vin’s fatherly approval, but it would have been nicer had Vin been seeming less dubious as a father. The worst thing about the Times piece—leaving aside the shame of looking like an asshole in a publication read and trusted by everyone Walter knew—was his fear that the Times was, in fact, right about the Cerulean Mountain Trust. He’d dreaded being slaughtered in the media, and now that he was being slaughtered he had to attend more seriously to his reasons for dreading it.
“I heard you doing that interview,” Lalitha said. “You nailed it. The only reason the