Jane Smiley - Golden Age

The paragraph about the case against Michael Langdon, of Chemosh Securities, was at the bottom of the business page: the SEC and the attorney general’s office had dropped the case, declined to prosecute, no explanation; however, a fine had been levied, amount not stated. Congressman Langdon not mentioned, which was a relief. The fellow who sat in his seat now, a Republican, had squeaked through the 2010 election by two percentage points, surprising both Vito Lopez and himself. He was Jewish, he was unarmed, he didn’t mind Obama — the Tea Party target was already painted on the middle of his forehead. You could tell this by the fact that Cantor still didn’t know his name, though as minority whip it was Cantor’s job to annoy everyone on his side of the aisle. After reading about Michael, he went on to “Sons of Divorce Fare Worse Than Daughters.” This was an article that he couldn’t bear reading, but did read, curling his toes in his slippers the whole time, and wondering if Leo was really going to fare worse than Chance, something unjust in any conceivable universe. He picked up his landline and dialed Leo’s number. Leo’s voicemail came on: “ ’Sup?” Richie said, “Hope you’re good, son. Call me.” He sounded as awkward as he possibly could. Had he or Michael ever disdained their father? They wouldn’t have dared, and that wasn’t a good thing, Richie thought. He realized that some kind of anger at Michael was kicking in. He must have deposited his anger with the SEC, and now he was getting it back with interest.

He closed his MacBook Air — lightweight, perfect for him — and looked out the window. It wasn’t snowing yet, but it was getting ready to, which meant that Jessica might, indeed, be able to use her much-beloved snowshoes to get home from work that evening, and also that he could make his favorite soup for dinner, potato and leek, the very first recipe in the Julia Child cookbook, and the only one he had tried. There had been lots of snow this month already, though more to the north, of course, than around D.C. Just two weeks before, he had used the big storm as an excuse to dig out his mother in Far Hills — not that she had wanted to be dug out, but it had been something to do, and a reason to give the car and himself some exercise. She had not let him touch the snow on the front porch or the steps; she would go out through the back door if she had to, but having the Hut buried in still-frozen whiteness was a pleasure for her. He had tapped on her propane tank. No echo. It made him feel competent to listen, and then to look at the gauge—40 percent.

He had asked nothing about whether she had been deposed, what she had said. He assumed then that Michael had given her some of the money back, if he had some to give. Now he assumed that Michael had not repaid anything. His mother did not want Michael to be made an example of. If there were other examples, yes, but no one, no one had been prosecuted for anything, not Angelo Mozilo, not Lloyd Blankfein, not Richard Fuld. Why should Michael be the only one? Talking to her about this could raise several sibling issues that he had to discuss with Jessica. He could imagine that his mother preferred Michael. Was the fact that she didn’t want him to go to jail evidence of that preference? How often should he fantasize about whether she might want Richie to go to jail had he committed what is normally considered a felony? Jessica would make him walk around the neighborhood until he stopped thinking these thoughts and agreed that he could not experience the feelings his mother had for himself or his brother, and so he could not judge those feelings. Jessica would say that, on statistical grounds, the number of parents who wanted their children to go to jail was far outpaced by the number of those who did not. That’s what Richie loved about Jessica: she was sane, and she recognized sanity when it presented itself. He did not go for a walk, but continued to stew.

—

IT WAS EARLY — before nine — and Jesse was walking the farthest field, up by the Maze, the house where his parents had lived for a while, which was now boarded up. It could be torn down — it was a peculiar house — but it was as sturdy as possible, and Jesse sometimes wondered if he could sell it on the Internet as an antique and have it trucked away. He was carrying his moisture gauges, but he wasn’t using them; the years had passed, and he had gotten like his dad, good at instinctive measurement. Sometimes he tested himself, and he was always very close. He walked up the hill behind the house, his own little piece of unplanted prairie, and looked north. The Missouri River floods were two hundred miles away and heading for Kansas; there was no reason for them to spook Jesse, but they did, which was what made him believe that the tornado season had set him up.

Guthrie didn’t seem suitably nervous — he showed up one day, as thrilled as he could be with the video he and another employee at the hotel had taken of a tornado touching down just before dusk. For Jesse, it was like looking into the eyes of the demon. But it was reassuring, too, the way the sunlight shone below the clouds, and the thin, brilliant ribbon reached down and down, ever so slowly, as if seeking something. At the last moment, a complementary shaft, also narrow, stretched upward, and the two touched. The sound track was the siren, beginning late, fading away early, reminding Jesse that you had to keep your eyes open, there was never enough warning.

He had been raised on tales of snow and wind and drought and swamplike planting conditions. Farmers always wrested the harvest from challenging weather — that was their variety of heroism, to hear them tell it at the Denby Café. But all he had to do was read the words “rising waters” and he got jumpy. And Guthrie looked worse (Jen agreed); all they’d heard from Perky since Christmas was that his best buddy’s dog had been killed by an IED, and the soldier himself had suffered a brain injury. That was two down of the four he and his Dutch shepherd, Laredo, had been deployed with. He got e-mails from Felicity, but they weren’t good news about herself or her friends, they were about things like a group of farmers in New York State somewhere suing Monsanto pre-emptively, claiming that Roundup Ready pollination of their cornfields constituted genetic contamination of their crops. She sent updates about the Indian cotton farmers’ suicide epidemic — lower yields, higher debt. Or pictures of grotesque birth defects from Argentina, where the glyphosate was sprayed from airplanes. Yes, Jesse was using lots more glyphosate than he had back in the early nineties, and, yes, the weeds were not dying with the regularity they once did. Did she think him a sucker? A criminal? She never seemed to wonder how he would react to these repudiations of his lifework. Did she mean this personally, or was she more like a satellite dish, simply taking in the word “glyphosate” and sending it on? Jen thought it was funny. And, in the end, was he too far down the road to rethink his business model? Bill Cassidy swore that eating Roundup Ready corn had made his hogs infertile — they only gave birth to sacks of water, not piglets. And what about that epidemic at the hog facility, piglets dying in the thousands, no apparent cause, and (they said at the Denby Café) their carcasses being tossed in a pit beside the river? Russ Pinckard said he’d heard that NPPC was going to get $436,000 from the government to clean that mess up. Bill got a little red in the face and said, “Yeah, they should pay me to go organic, but they’re always whining that they haven’t got the dough.” Every time the phone rang, or his e-mail program beeped, Jesse winced, and so it was moderately better to be out in the soggy fields than in the house. Floods weren’t the only rising waters; dams and towers of sandbags weren’t the only protections that could be breached.