Си Бокс - Dark Sky

By his very nature, Joe was nonpolitical. He’d done his best over the years to avoid trips to the capital city and especially during the short sessions of the legislature when nothing ever seemed to happen. He had no doubt that he’d taken the right path, especially now when the finances of the state were in a tailspin and all the committee hearings and general sessions seemed filled with anger and acrimony.

Joe thought that Allen had aged in the past three years. The governor’s once-broad shoulders had slumped and his salt-and-pepper mane was thinning and turning snow-white. His movie-star good looks—which he’d once parlayed into a few scenes in a soft-porn pseudo-western feature called Bunk House that no one had known about until his #MeToo scandal broke—were filling out and softening. Jowls like the beard of a tom turkey hung down from his jawline and jiggled when he talked.

“If you’ve been paying any attention,” Allen said to both Joe and Ewig, “you’ll know that we’re facing more budget cuts. No one is safe, including your agency.”

“I’m aware of the situation, Governor,” Ewig said. Unlike Joe, the director was duty-bound to testify during the legislature and defend the department’s budget. Joe didn’t envy him.

Wyoming was unique because its financial health was determined almost solely by the boom-and-bust mineral industries and the taxes they paid on extraction. Citizens paid very little. There was no income tax, and property taxes were some of the lowest in the nation. When coal was booming—as it had been in previous years—the state was flush with cash. That was no longer the case, and lawmakers were trying to figure out how to deal with the downturn.

It wasn’t going well.

The legislature was dominated by Republicans, and there were good ones and bad ones, as well as ideological factions that might as well comprise different parties altogether. Groups of legislators could best be defined, according to some, by how loudly they said no to any new ideas. The mayor of Saddlestring had put it best to Joe—the one thing the Wyoming legislature specialized in was inertia.

“I plan to run again next year and I need a win,” Governor Allen declared to Joe more than to Ewig. “You need to help me get it.”

Joe shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“Coal’s dying, oil prices are low, no one wants new taxes, and the Cowboy Congress isn’t going to help me at all,” Allen said. “As we’ve seen, they’ll do absolutely nothing to diversify our economy or bring in new revenue. They’ll just sit around blowing hot air while I twist in the wind so they can make the case for a new governor next year. They’ll point at me and say, ‘The state went to shit with him in office.’ That’s their brilliant strategy.”

Ewig took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Joe guessed he’d endured Allen’s rants before. Joe tried to keep his own face blank while he listened. A new governor, he thought, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

“All of our revenue streams are tied to dying concerns,” Allen said. “The legislature prefers to rub its hands and gnash its teeth while watching them die. They’re all hoping against hope for something good to happen, like a war in the Middle East that would raise the price of a barrel of our oil.”

Joe tried not to react to that.

Allen spun in his chair and pointed to a large map of the United States. “Either that,” he said, jabbing his finger at the states of Washington, Oregon, and California, “or we need the West Coast to break off and fall into the ocean and drown all of those lefty politicians who won’t let us export our coal to Asia. The Chi-Coms want to buy our coal. We want to sell it to them, but we need a seaport to do it. The environmental wackos on the West Coast won’t let us. We’re between a rock and a hard place, gentlemen.”

He turned back around. “Have either of you ever heard of Steven Price?”

Both Joe and Ewig shook their heads.

“Have you ever heard of Aloft, Inc.? Or a social media site called ConFab?”

“ConFab sounds familiar,” Joe said. “I think my youngest daughter uses it.”

“Your youngest daughter and tens of millions of other people,” Allen said. “It’s the fastest-growing social media platform in Silicon Valley.”

“It’s a mystery to me,” Ewig confessed. “I don’t even do Facebook.”

“Another reason we’re in trouble,” Allen said with derision. “My state directors are wallowing around in the twentieth century while the rest of the world passes us by.”

It was an unnecessary insult, Joe thought. Rick Ewig was a former game warden and had proved himself to be a very competent director of the agency. Allen’s reputation for disparaging his own people was being demonstrated right before Joe’s eyes.

“Steve Price was a billionaire before he was thirty,” Allen said. “That was before he invented ConFab. Now he’s a multibillionaire—one of the wealthiest men in America. And it’s all happened really fast.”

“Okay,” Joe said. He couldn’t tell where the conversation was leading.

“My people have learned a little about Steve Price,” Allen said. “He’s absolutely brilliant, but he’s a nerd. He’s a unique talent and he’s very quirky, like a lot of those tech moguls. He eats weird, drives weird cars, has weird friends, and he believes in all kinds of new age voodoo crap. But one thing very interesting about Price is that he’s into self-improvement. He’s pledged to himself to try to learn everything he can about everything. He wants to be the wisest human being on earth, and he thinks he can get there by devoting himself to learning new things.

“Every year,” Allen continued, “Price focuses on something he knows absolutely nothing about and he tries to master it before he can move on. One year he spent learning Mandarin Chinese until he could speak it fluently. Another year he decided to seek out and eat every kind of pepper grown anywhere in the world. He doesn’t ever want to die, so he poured millions into research two years ago and learned everything there is to know about extending the aging process. He spent an entire year walking door-to-door in Iowa, talking to farmers so he could get a better understanding of ‘how Middle Americans think,’ as he put it.

“Do you want to know what his newest thing is?” Allen asked.

He answered his own question before either Ewig or Joe could guess.

“Steve Price is spending the year producing all of his own food. He’s got his own garden, his own cows and goats, and even a brewery and distillery. When I say ‘producing,’ I mean he does everything himself. He dug up the dirt, planted seeds, watered and weeded, and harvested his own personal crop. When he wants protein, he kills one of his herd and butchers the meat himself. He’s vowed to consume nothing this year unless he produced it himself.”

“That’s kind of admirable,” Joe said.

“Crazy, is what it is,” Allen said. “But he’s a billionaire, so who can argue? Anyway, to complete his journey, he wants to hunt and kill a big-game animal with his own hands. He wants to process the meat and eat it. He wants to get his hands dirty and really understand the relationship between wild animals and human beings who kill and eat them. So when Price’s people reached out to us about setting up the perfect big-game hunting experience, I came up with a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself. And that, gentlemen, is where you come in.”

Governor Allen pointed directly at Joe. “More specifically, Pickett, that’s where you come in.”

To which Joe responded, “Why me?”

Allen deflected Joe’s question with a wave of his hand and continued on.