Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Jesse had cultivated the corn once in June, but the soil was so dry that it had lifted off in waves. In the first few days after he did it, he’d thought he might have gotten control of the weeds, but they came up again, flourishing. There was a part of him that expected this to be his worst crop ever. Everyone at the café was complaining about the glyphosate, which had, apparently, given up the ghost at last, overwhelmed by Darwinian selection. And the Monsanto reps were nowhere to be seen, had nothing to suggest. Jen said that they would be too busy offshoring their money to address customer concerns. Jesse got into his truck every morning and drove around Denby and Usherton, even down toward Grinnell and past Ames to Boone, just looking at fields. Some were better, some were worse. He did not feel singled out, but he did feel his scientific certainties dissipating. He almost never opened the computer, not even to read e-mails from Felicity about record droughts in France, tornadoes in Ontario, the collapse of the oil business in North Dakota, locusts in Minneapolis paving the airport runways so that planes were grounded. As always, Felicity communicated these events with a kind of upbeat fascination (lots of exclamation points!!!!!!) that did not seem to indicate fear. She communicated about Ezra Newmark in the same way — no passion, no pain, only detached enjoyment. His mother had hair to the back of her knees! She owned a yarn shop in Delhi, New York, that was mostly mail-order!!!! She had knitted a lace bedspread on size 1 needles! Queensize!!!! Ezra was surprisingly well endowed for a man of his stature!!!! Jesse and Jen got a good laugh out of this one — it was the oversharing they had always expected from Felicity, the girl whose great-aunt gave her a picture book about the nature of reproduction when she was five.

Felicity was fine, Guthrie was fine (or, at least, Jesse and Jen agreed to always say this), Perky was home from Syria, working at Fort Bragg. He was a major now. No one knew what he did, but he was successful at whatever it was. Jesse knew, even though he and Jen never talked about it, that this was all that mattered. Once you were in your sixties, your own fate was unimportant.

He stepped onto the back porch, slipped off his boots, and checked the thermometer. Ninety-eight degrees, nothing to remark upon anymore. It was almost lunchtime, and there would be pork loin from the night before in the refrigerator, but he wasn’t hungry yet. He went into his office, opened a drawer, and checked the available balance on his Citicard—$5,987.23. Then he opened the computer, went to the Weather Underground, and checked the national temperature map. All red, just a little orangey-yellow in Maine, the Upper Peninsula, and around Bellingham, Washington. Then he looked at Vancouver — beautiful there, yellow shading to green. The towns in British Columbia had amusing names: Chilliwack, Coquitlam, Squamish. He clicked on Orbitz. There were, in fact, flights from Des Moines to Dallas to Vancouver, daily flights, as if people made that trip all the time. He booked flights for two and a nice hotel for a week, reserved a car, put it on the credit card with fifteen hundred to spare. He had to get away from the weeds and the dust. It felt just then like a matter of life and death. He rummaged around in the desk for their passports, which Felicity had made them apply for in 2009. They had never used them.

The weather was ideal in Vancouver, no fires this year, seventy-five during the day, and congenially sunny, about sixty at night, but they only enjoyed it for one day. Maybe if Jesse had told Felicity where they were going for their little vacation, she would have warned them, but maybe not. There was nothing in the paper the morning of the riots but a notice that there would be a peaceful protest against the Chintar Pipeline beginning that afternoon at one in Jonathan Rogers Park, proceeding from there to City Hall, and then to a “Rock the People” concert put on by local bands in Douglas Park. There was no sign of trouble in the morning. Jesse went out onto the balcony of their room with his cup of coffee. They would go to Granville Island for lunch — there was some kind of famous crafts market there — then come back and watch the rally, then go to the concert. Nothing bad ever happened in Canada; well, maybe in Quebec, but not in Vancouver. Well, maybe about ice hockey. Something bad had happened about ice hockey in 2011. After only one day, it was the best vacation they had ever taken. It made Jesse want to go into the heirloom-tomato business.

When all the people first started running toward them as they were walking down Cambie Street toward the concert venue, Jesse’s first thought was “bomb”—that was probably everyone’s first thought after the Boston Marathon bombing. There had been no explosion, not even a popping sound. But people were terrified — Jesse could see it in their faces and the handbags and cell phones they dropped as they ran. Rubes that they were, he and Jen kept standing, staring, holding hands. Then they saw the bodies on the ground, at least five of them, and the line of police in helmets, their weapons raised, marching toward them, stepping over the bodies and the signs the protesters had been carrying vowing resistance against the Harper government. Felicity would have told them that Harper had vowed to get the Chintar Pipeline built no matter what was going on in the oil market, that he had pushed through laws that outlawed protest and imposed draconian punishments on any sort of “insurgent and unauthorized references to so-called climate change.” Planes, especially private planes, could not even fly over or near the tar sands, and all analyses of effluents or river or lake pollution were designated as Top Secret; leaking any findings was punishable by years in prison. Felicity did tell them these things when they finally got home. But first, before that could happen, they were taken into custody, handcuffed with painfully tight yellow textile handcuffs, and pushed into the back of a van, where there were at least twelve other people, some of them bleeding. By nightfall, but not before, they were in separate jail cells in separate wings of the Vancouver police station. Late that night, Jesse was ordered over and over to reveal who was behind the protest and who was funding “his” campaign to undermine Canadian national security. Whenever Jesse said that he was just a tourist, he had a farm in Iowa, his hotel was in that neighborhood, his inquisitors laughed. They demanded to see his passport, but they had taken his wallet, and his passport was back in the safe in his hotel. They said, “Why should we believe you, mister?” He held out his hands — knobby, rough, years of grime under his fingernails. They kept Jen for the night, him for two nights, but they lost interest in him — he thought they only kept him for the second night because they had forgotten all about him.

When they got out, they still had three days left. They walked around the city, recognizing its beauty, but in a state of shock. It was as hard to get up and out in the morning as it was to stay in bed, snuggled under the covers. Jesse had never been so simultaneously reluctant to move and restless. They flew home. When they got into their car at the airport in Des Moines, the thermometer registered 105 degrees.

When the call came, three days after they got back (still sweaty hot at midnight, only nine p.m. West Coast time, though), what Annie said seemed like garble to him. Even as he turned over and repeated it to Jen, he didn’t understand what he was saying.

“She’s dead.”

“Who?”

“My mom.”

Jen sat up, threw off the sheet. “Oh my God!”

“Annie was locking the car, and lost sight of her, and when she went out onto the beach, Mom had disappeared.”