Freedom [250]
“I think dinner’s going to be the better meal,” Vin said. “Got to hope so, after what we saw for lunch.”
Inside the plant were pleasant strong smells of paint, plastics, and new machinery. Walter noted the absence of windows, the reliance on electric lighting. Folding chairs and a podium had been set up against a backdrop of towering shrink-wrapped oblongs of raw material. A hundred or so West Virginians were milling about, among them Coyle Mathis, who was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and even baggier jeans that looked so new he might have bought them at Walmart on his way over. Two local TV crews had cameras trained on the podium and the banner that hung above it: JOBS + NATIONAL SECURITY = JOB SECURITY.
Vin Haven (“You can Nexis me all night without finding one direct quote from my forty-seven years in business”) sat down directly behind the cameras, while Walter took from Lalitha a copy of the speech that he’d written and she’d vetted, and joined the other suits—Jim Elder, senior vice president at LBI, and Roy Dennett, CEO of his eponymous subsidiary—in the chairs behind the podium. In the front row of the audience, with his arms crossed high on his chest, was Coyle Mathis. Walter hadn’t seen him since their ill-fated encounter in Mathis’s front yard (which was now a barren field of rubble). He was staring at Walter with a look that reminded Walter, again, of his father. The look of a man attempting to preempt, with the ferocity of his contempt, any possibility of his own embarrassment or of Walter’s pity for him. It made Walter sad for him. While Jim Elder, at the mike, commenced praising our brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Walter gave Mathis a meek smile, to show that he was sad for him, sad for both of them. But Mathis’s expression didn’t change, and he didn’t stop staring.
“I think we have a few remarks now from the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Jim Elder said, “which is responsible for bringing all these wonderful, sustainable jobs to Whitmanville and the local economy. Please join me in welcoming Walter Berglund, executive director of the Trust. Walter?”
His sadness for Mathis had become a more general sadness, a world sadness, a life sadness. As he stood at the podium, he sought out Vin Haven and Lalitha, who were sitting together, and gave them each a small smile of regret and apology. Then he bent himself to the mike.
“Thank you,” he said. “Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It’s a long way from Forster Hollow, isn’t it?”
Aside from low-level systems hum, there was no sound but the echoing of his amplified voice. He glanced quickly at Mathis, whose expression remained fixed in contempt.
“So, yes, welcome,” he said. “Welcome to the middle class! That’s what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don’t like me. And I don’t like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn’t like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And now you’re middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it’s a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It’s the mainstay of economies all around the globe!”
He could see Lalitha whispering to Vin.
“And now that you’ve got these jobs at this body-armor plant,” he continued, “you’re going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they’re not turned on! But that’s OK, because that’s why we threw you out of your homes in the first place, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one