“That’s what your dad was telling me.”
Bradley said, “We’re hoping to raise awareness of some of the long-term consequences of carbon dioxide mining and other extractive industries on things like air quality and groundwater. Issues that impact not just the ranchers and farmers in the area, but also the sportsmen. The hunters and anglers.”
Colt glanced down at his camouflage shirtfront.
“I don’t know if you appreciate this,” Bradley continued, “but as pressure mounts to open up wild places to the fossil fuel industry, the conservation and outdoor recreation communities are finding common cause. If you have friends or coworkers in the area who hunt or fish, they might want to know what Addie and I are up to.”
“Oh, I guarantee I got coworkers who’d like to know what you’re up to.”
“Great. Where do you work?”
“Pleasant View. For Archer-Mason Industries.”
Bradley’s smile remained in its place. “I see. As a roughneck?”
“Motorman. Going on three years now. A year in Aneth before that.”
“Drilling for oil on the Navajo reservation?”
“That’s right.”
“Well then. Common cause may prove uncommonly difficult.”
“Oh, we got a thing or two in common.” Colt redirected his smile at Addie. “It’s just that bankrupting my hometown ain’t one of ’em.”
“That’s not what Bradley—”
“Don’t think I’m unaware of the short-term stimulus oil and gas provides to rural communities like this,” Bradley said. “I get it. But the resource is finite don’t forget, and fickle, and even a modest drop in oil prices will stop a play like Archer-Mason’s dead in its tracks.”
“Exactly. Carpe diem, that’s my motto.”
“And what are you left with then? Formerly pristine wilderness scarred by roads and well pads. Methane and fracking fluid leaching into your groundwater. Not to mention the public health bill that local taxpayers will be footing long after the Archer-Masons of the world have pulled up stakes.”
“Look at the bright side. If it wasn’t for the likes of me, smart guys like you’d have nothing to consult about. And then Addie here would have no reason to helicopter in and honor us with her presence.”
“There’s no need to be rude,” she told him.
Colt scuffed at the floor with his boot. “You’re right, there was no call for that. I genuinely am sorry. But hey! Maybe Bradley’ll let me make it up to him. I don’t suppose you’re a deer hunter? The reason I ask is we’re already two weeks into rifle season and I ain’t been out but the one time.”
“I’m sure Bradley doesn’t want—”
“I’m sure Bradley can decide for himself what he wants. Ain’t that right, Bradley? You talk about your pristine wilderness, but have you actually seen it? Around here I mean? Heck, I’ll show you some places that’ll make your head explode. So what do you say? Get the lay of the land? Observe the locals in their native habitat?”
“Something to think about, certainly.”
“There you go. Something to think about.”
He clapped the older man’s arm.
“And as for you,” he told Addie as he backed toward the door, “I hope I’ll see you around somewhere. Decker and Dixon! We could get together and consult.”
8
The graveyard sat on a flat-topped rise overlooking the horse pasture from which Feather and Lightning looked on as, a hundred feet above them, a score of black-clad mourners had gathered in a semi-circle. At the center of their hushed assembly lay the oblong grave that Jess, ignoring Logan’s entreaties, had spent the better part of the past three days stubbornly digging.
The closed walnut casket rested on a canvas tarp. Standing over it, his eyes downcast and his Bible open to Romans, was the ramrod figure of Edmund John O’Connell, rector of the Episcopal Church of St. Barnabas. Several of the mourners had their own Bibles open, paging with mottled hands clutching handkerchiefs or tissues or delicate glass-bead rosaries.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” the priest began. “Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”
To Bradley, it was a timely question indeed. Stated differently, what more would it take for modern man—for humans alive in a twenty-first century of space probes and nanobots, gene sequencing and artificial intelligence—to cast aside the Bronze Age tethers of ignorance and superstition?
In the year 1800, the world’s human population was fewer than one billion. By 1960 it was still only three billion. Today it was approaching eight billion, and growing exponentially. Billions upon billions more people—nearly a quarter-million per day—needing potable water and arable soil even as the fact of their very existence served to deplete both. It was, in short, a relentlessly vicious cycle that even the greatest fool or fanatic had to know was no longer remotely sustainable.
So where did the world’s major religious denominations stand on what, in any rational universe, would be the moral issue of our time? An issue that presaged war and famine, mass migration and genocide—calamities, in other words, of truly biblical proportion? All preached the importance of procreation, that’s where, and the largest and most influential of all—Roman Catholicism—forbade contraception entirely.
So go ahead, be fruitful and multiply. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to exercise dominion over the earth and all its creatures. Like cattle, for instance. Never mind that it took three thousand liters of water to produce a single hamburger, or that the United States alone ate over fourteen billion hamburgers a year.
That would be forty-two trillion liters of water per year. Just for hamburgers. Just in the US of A.
And never mind the four liters of water it took to make a one-liter plastic bottle, part of the 320 million metric tons of plastics produced in the world each year. Or the fact that, since the invention of polypropylene in the mid-1950s, every single molecule of the stuff ever created is still in existence, floating around somewhere, mostly in our garbage-strewn oceans.
These were the thoughts that haunted Bradley Sommers on a daily basis; the dark ruminations that kept him awake each night. His university tenure, his academic writings, his speaking and consulting engagements—these weren’t just jobs to Bradley, they were his mission. He’d often imagined himself a herald; an envoy from a dystopian future sent back in time to awaken a bovine populace lulled into drooling obeisance by Fox News and Facebook, Xbox and Netflix—by the bread and circuses of a capitalist-consumer culture intent on devouring the very planet over which it sought hegemony.
“Amen,” the priest intoned, closing his Bible.
Amen, Bradley agreed.
By some rehearsed prearrangement six men, Logan among them, surrounded the casket and lifted it by the tarp on which it lay and carried it to the foot of the grave. There, after some awkward jockeying, they managed to slide their heavy burden into the pit. Jess moved from where he’d been standing beside the priest and took hold of the shovel jutting from the mounded earth nearby. He stepped into a heaping scoop and pivoted and dumped the reddish clay soil onto the casket where it landed with a hollow thud.
One scoop, purely ceremonial. He replaced the shovel and dusted his hands and started back to the house.
Elderly wives leaned on the arms of their rickety husbands as all the mourners followed, murmuring quietly and stepping reverently around the other headstones so as not to disturb the eternal rest