“Sorry,” Stenko moaned. But he wasn’t. Ten minutes before, he’d turned to Walter and told him to get the hell out of there. The rancher had asked about his truck. Stenko had said, “Run, you idiot, before my son comes back and puts a bullet in your head.”
Reluctantly, Walter had gotten out and done a stiff-legged jog in the general direction of the interstate highway.
“He’s going to talk,” Robert said. “I was going to make sure he kept quiet.”
“He overpowered me,” Stenko lied. “He’s a strong old fart.”
“Christ, is there anything you can do right?”
Stenko thought: The role reversal is now complete.
He said, “Guess not.”
“SO THE TOUGH THING for me,” Robert said, starting the motor and backing out of the gravel parking lot, “has been to reconcile myself to the fact that once again you’re not going to come through for me. I have to wrap my mind around the fact that all the money is out of reach and we can’t use it to save the planet your generation trashed and left us with. You’d think after thirty years of living around you, I’d be used to crushing disappointment, right? But damn if I still don’t keep coming. This time, you really had me for a while. But in the end, well, in the end it’s like it always has been. A big fat zero.”
“You’ve got some cash,” Stenko said, his voice thin. “And we did some things.”
Robert swung out on the dark road. A passing streetlight reflected blue on his bare teeth. “Yeah, we did some things. But in the end, Dad, it was just jerking off. There were no bold strokes. No real blows were struck. Christ, you ended up with a bigger footprint than when we started.”
“That’s because you were keeping track. You saw it as a way to get all my money,” Stenko said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth.
“That’s right,” Robert said. “Blame me. Blame your son. Just like always. Blame your kids while you make the world a worse place to live.”
Stenko reached over and put his hand on Robert’s shoulder. He said, “I don’t want to argue anymore, son. I don’t. You can say whatever you want. I’ll take it. I don’t have the strength to fight.”
Robert shook his hand off and it dropped to the seat. He drove silently, pouting. Robert was always the angriest when Stenko said something true about him. But now was not the time to remind Robert of that.
Stenko said, “The fight went out of me when April died in that crash back there. That poor girl. I had my chance with her, to do something good. And look what happened.”
Robert snorted, said, “Her again. You’re just like you were about Carmen. Have you ever thought about maybe using some of those feelings toward the kid you have who’s still alive? The real son? Not the dead daughter or fake daughter?”
“Really, son. I don’t want to fight.”
More pouting.
Changing the subject, Stenko said, “What was that thing you were twirling when you came out of the bar?”
“Oh this?” Robert said, handing it over, his smile returning. “This little old thing?”
Stenko took it. It was a large laminated card strung from a lanyard. He pulled it close to his eyes. There was a photo on it, a magnetic strip on the back, and a name: LUCY ANNETTE TUREK.
“Who is Lucy Turek?” Stenko asked.
“She’s my new girlfriend,” Robert said.
“That was quick.”
“Dad, if you haven’t noticed, I’m a pretty good catch.”
Stenko bit his tongue. Then: “What does she have to do with this last act you mentioned?”
Robert cleared town and turned onto a service road that went north. Old cottonwoods laced their branches over the top of the road and formed a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a faint glow of light.
Robert said, “Here’s what I was thinking. That big coal-fired power plant must have a lot of local employees. It turns out they have three hundred workers, and it made sense to me that a few of them would be in the bar closest to the plant. Damned if I wasn’t right.
“So I sit at the bar and start talking to a pretty one next to me. That’s her keycard you hold in your hand: Lucy Turek. I start asking her about what it’s like to work at the power plant, what she does, blah-blah-blah. Like I’m interested in getting a job there myself or something. She answers every question. Finally, when she begins to trust me because she wants me to take her home, I ask her how much access she has to the plant. That really gets her going, because she tells me how she’s got a senior clearance that can get her into the control room and she can even take the security elevators to the top of the boilers, which apparently is some kind of big deal. I get her to explain to me how the power plant works, and she goes on and on and I keep buying her drinks. I don’t really care how it works. I know what it does: it consumes tons of fossil fuel and churns out tons of carbon into the atmosphere that will eventually heat up our planet and kill us all.”
Stenko looked from the key card to Robert and back. The glow at the end of the tree tunnel was getting brighter.
Robert said, “So I ask her, kind of playful, how she’d get back at the company if they fired her for no good reason. Lucy is kind of feisty and I’m sure she’d be a little tiger in the sack, so I knew if they fired her, she wouldn’t take it lying down. So she tells me about these gigantic boilers they have. Five-thousand-ton hanging boilers made up of miles of superheated tubing that rise over three stories tall. That’s where they heat the water to drive the turbines or some kind of shit like that. Anyway, Lucy said the boilers have to run on negative pressure. That didn’t make any sense to me either, but I kept pressing. Finally, she got to the point. If the doors to the hanging boilers are opened and the pressure escapes-the boilers fail. That shuts down the plant in a serious way. Millions of people would lose all their power, and the company would lose millions of dollars while all the repairs were made. It might take down the entire power grid. It could take them days or weeks to get the thing running again. That’s how she said she’d get back at them-in the wallet.”
Stenko nodded.
Robert gestured toward the trees through the windshield. “And for however long it took, the planet would get a break. Carbon wouldn’t be pouring up through the stacks. The offset would be tons and tons of carbon not going into the atmosphere.”
Stenko said, “Lucy told you a lot.”
“As I said, she likes me. She’s my new girlfriend, even though I’ll probably never see her again.”
“And she gave you her key card?” Stenko asked.
“Well, not exactly,” Robert said, not looking over. “I followed her into the restroom and hit her head against the wall and took the lanyard from around her neck.”