Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Oh, y’all reckon I can read, do you?” Mathis was beaming at them. All three of his dogs were growling now. “I believe I’m at six. Or was it five? Stupid old me, I done forgot already.”

“Look,” Walter said, “I sincerely apologize if I—”

“Four three two!”

The dogs, themselves apparently rather intelligent, advanced with flattened ears.

“We’ll come back,” Walter said, hastily retreating with Lalitha.

“I’ll shoot your car if you do!” Mathis called after them merrily.

All the way back down the terrible road to the state highway, Walter loudly cursed his own stupidity and his inability to control his anger, while Lalitha, ordinarily a font of praise and reassurance, sat pensively in the passenger seat, brooding about what to do next. It was not an over-statement to say that, without Mathis’s cooperation, all the other work they’d done to secure Haven’s Hundred would be for naught. At the bottom of the dusty valley, Lalitha delivered her assessment: “He needs to be treated like an important man.”

“He’s a two-bit sociopath,” Walter said.

“Be that as it may,” she said—and she had a particularly charming Indian way of pronouncing this favorite phrase of hers, a clipped lilt of practicality that Walter never tired of hearing—“we’re going to need to flatter his sense of importance. He needs to be the savior, not the sellout.”

“Yeah, unfortunately, a sellout is the only thing we’re asking him to be.”

“Maybe if I went back up and talked to some of the women.”

“It’s a fucking patriarchy up here,” Walter said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“No, Walter, the women are very strong. Why don’t you let me talk to some of them?”

“This is a nightmare. A nightmare .”

“Be that as it may,” Lalitha said again, “I wonder if I should stay behind and try to talk to people.”

“He’s already said no to the offer. Categorically.”

“We’ll need a better offer, then. You’ll have to talk to Mr. Haven about a better offer. Go back to Washington and talk to him. It’s probably just as well if you don’t go back up the hollow. But maybe I won’t seem so threatening by myself.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“I’m not afraid of dogs. He’d set the dogs on you, but not on me, I don’t think.”

“This is just hopeless.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Lalitha said.

Leaving aside her sheer bravery, as an unaccompanied dark-skinned woman, slight of build and alluring of feature, in returning to a poor-white place where she’d already been threatened with physical harm, Walter was struck, in the months that followed, by the fact that it was she, the suburban daughter of an electrical engineer, and not he, the small-town son of an angry drunk, who’d effected the miracle in Forster Hollow. Not only did Walter lack the common touch; his entire personality had been formed in opposition to the backcountry he’d come from. Mathis, with his poor-white unreason and resentments, had offended Walter’s very being: had blinded him with rage. Whereas Lalitha, having no experience with the likes of Mathis, had been able to go back with an open mind and a sympathetic heart. She’d approached the proud country poor the way she drove a car, as if no harm could possibly come to a person of such cheer and goodwill; and the proud country poor had granted her the respect they’d withheld from angry Walter. Her success made him feel inferior and unworthy of her admiration, and thus all the more grateful to her. Which then led him to a more general enthusiasm about young people and their capacity to do good in the world. And also—though he resisted conscious countenancing of it—to loving her far more than was advisable.

Based on the intelligence Lalitha gathered in her return to Forster Hollow, Walter and Vin Haven had crafted a new and outrageously expensive offer for its inhabitants. Simply offering them more cash, Lalitha said, wasn’t going to do the trick. For Mathis to save face, he needed to be the Moses who led his people to a new promised land. Unfortunately, as far as Walter could tell, the people of Forster Hollow had negligible skills beyond hunting, engine repair, vegetable growing, herb gathering, and welfare-check cashing. Vin Haven nevertheless obligingly made inquiries within his wide circle of business friends and returned to Walter with one interesting possibility: body armor.

Until he’d flown to Houston and met Haven, in the summer of 2001, Walter had been unfamiliar with the concept of good Texans, the national news being so dominated by bad ones. Haven owned a large ranch in the Hill Country and an even larger one south of Corpus Christi, both of them lovingly managed to provide habitat for game birds. Haven was the Texan sort of nature lover who happily blasted cinnamon teal out of the sky but also spent hours raptly monitoring, via closed-circuit spycam, the development of baby barn owls in a nest box on his property, and could expertly rhapsodize about the scaling patterns on a winter-plumage Baird’s sandpiper. He was a short, gruff, bullet-headed man, and Walter had liked him from the first minute of his initial interview. “A hundred-million-dollar ante for one passerine species,” Walter had said. “That’s an interesting allocation.”

Haven had tilted his bullet head to one side. “You got a problem with it?”

“Not necessarily. But given that the bird’s not even federally listed yet, I’m curious what your thinking is.”

“My thinking is, it’s my hundred million, I can spend it whatever way I like.”

“Good point.”

“The best science we got on the cerulean warbler shows populations declining at three percent a year for the last forty years. Just because it hasn’t passed the threshold of federally threatened, you can still plot that line straight down toward zero. That’s where it’s going: to zero.”

“Right. And yet—”

“And yet there’s other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about ’em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird’s life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?”

“Thankfully not a choice that anybody’s being asked to make.”

“In a sense, that’s right,” Haven said. “But in a bigger sense, it’s a choice that everybody’s making. I got a call from the director of National Audubon back in February, right after the inauguration. The man’s named Martin Jay, if that ain’t the damndest thing. Talk about the right name for the job. Martin Jay is wondering if I might arrange him a little meeting with Karl Rove at the White House. He says one hour is all he needs to persuade Karl Rove that making conservation a priority is a political winner for the new administration. So I say to him, I think I can get you an hour with Rove, but here’s what you got to do for me first. You got to get a reputable independent pollster to do a survey of how important a priority the environment is for swing voters. If you can show Karl Rove some good-looking numbers, he’s gonna be all ears. And Martin Jay falls all over himself saying thank you, thank you, fabuloso, consider it done. And I say to Martin Jay, there’s just one little thing, though: before you commission that survey and let Rove see it, you might want to have a pretty good idea what the results are going to be. That was six months ago. I never heard from him again.”

“You and I see very much eye to eye on the politics of this,” Walter said.

“Kiki and I are working a little bit on Laura, whenever we can,” Haven said. “Might be more promise in that direction.”