Charles Sheehan-Miles

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Republic: Chapter Six

Republic

Charles Sheehan-Miles

Chapter Six

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Chapter Six
June 7


The key was stiff in the lock: it hadn’t been opened in nearly three years. Finally, the bolt drew back, and Murphy opened the door to the shop and stepped inside, the real estate agent behind him.

“Sorry about the dust,” he said. “I haven’t been in here in a long time.”

Inside, Martha’s florist shop was largely empty. Display tables had been cleared of flowers three years ago, and everything lay under a quarter-inch of dust.

The agent looked around, leaving footprints as she walked to the back. Murphy stood at the door and watched her explore, strangely unwilling to go any further. He owned the building outright, had been unwilling to sell it after Martha died. Before her death, she’d had a thriving business here.

The agent said, “Everything seems to be in good shape. You’ll need to have it cleaned and repainted, and I’ll need to get an inspector in here to make sure nothing’s been chewing on the wiring. Has the power been turned off? The water?”

“That’s right. You can take care of the painting and whatnot. I can’t spend much time here.”

She nodded. “I understand. You know, it’s really too bad you didn’t sell it last year, when we talked. I could have easily gotten you four hundred thousand, then. Now, it won’t be so easy. Not unless those union folks manage to get the plant back open somehow.”

“Is it that bad?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Worst it’s ever been, at least since I’ve been selling in the county. Lot’s of houses on the market, and no one buying. I think we can probably get a hundred, maybe a hundred-fifty thousand for the shop. I wouldn’t recommend listing it for any more than that, not if you want to it to sell this year.”

The statement hit him like a blow. One hundred thousand dollars. He’d finally received the paperwork from Saturn for continuing Kenny’s health insurance. That would run him over five thousand a month alone. His VA disability check was less than ten percent of that, and unemployment, when it started, wouldn’t make much of a dent either. He’d run through a hundred thousand pretty quickly, especially if there was another trip to the hospital.

No choice. “Do what you need to do. I’m going to need every cent I can put my hands on.”

The agent left soon afterward, leaving him to think about the town meeting to be held tonight, wishing he could be two places at once. The crowd that had been talking about purchasing the plant was meeting at the high school gym, but he’d be in Washington by then, preparing to testify in front of a Congressional committee at the request of his daughter. He must be getting old. It was too much change, too fast.

Too fast. He looked around the shop where Martha had made her life and fought to hold back tears.


***



Karen Greenfield arrived twenty minutes early, but still ended up parked almost a quarter mile away from the high school, on the shoulder of the road behind a long line of vehicles. Cars and trucks jammed the parking lot and the shoulders of the road for a fair distance.

After she parked and began walking up the crowded street, two unfamiliar men in grey suits caught her attention. Both carried digital cameras and walked from vehicle to vehicle, taking photographs of the license plates. Karen stared in disbelief as the couple walking ahead of her noticed the two men and crossed the street to avoid encountering them. She stood watching the men as they went from car to car. Who the hell were they? Corporate security? Some kind of paid informants? With a burst of anger, she walked toward them.

The short one, no older than twenty-five, looked up at her approach with a frown. He tapped his partner’s shoulder and pointed, just before she reached them.

“Excuse me. What are you doing?” Karen demanded.

The older one, a balding man with a bushy mustache, said, “I think you need to mind your own business, lady. This ain’t it.”

“All right,” she said. She opened her purse and both men straightened. One of them slipped his hand into his jacket. She tensed; she hadn’t thought corporate security would be armed. She took out her phone and dialed 911.

“Hey, lady. What are you doing?”

“I think you need to mind your own business.”

Two rings, then she heard, “Jefferson County Emergency.”

“Hi, I’m calling from outside Highview High school, on Route 340. I’m on my way to the town meeting here, and there are two suspicious men walking from car to car with cameras. I think they may be trying to steal something.”

“Hey, lady, you can’t do that,” the younger one said, his face red.

The older one shook his head, then took a wallet-sized folder out of his coat pocket, opened it, and held it out to her. She glanced at the folder, and felt her frown deepen. Department of Homeland Security.

“We’ll send a patrol car out there,” the dispatcher said on the phone. “Can I have your name please?”

Should she tell the dispatcher she’d made a mistake? No. Better have the cops come; these guys might not be legitimate anyway. She gave the information to the dispatcher as the older of the two agents stood, arms crossed over his chest, looking at her with lips curled up in amusement.

After she disconnected and put her phone back in her purse, the older of the two agents said, “You didn’t want to do that. We’re not people you want to piss off.”

“Is that so? Well, maybe I’m not a person to piss off, either. You want my license plate number? Since when did coming to a town meeting become suspicious behavior?”

“Look, lady, as a matter of fact we’re on the trail of a suspected terrorist. You are in our way, and I suggest you move on and mind your own business.”

The younger one wrote in his notebook, then looked up at her. “You told the dispatcher your name was Karen Greenfield? Is that spelled how it sounds? We’ll need it for our report.”

“Yeah, it is. G-R-E-E-N-F-I-E-L-D. I’m in the phonebook. How do I spell your name?”

A sardonic smile on his face, the older one handed her a business card. Lawrence Harris, it said. Special Agent. She put the card in her pocket, and, with exaggerated motion, walked around the men and continued toward the high school.

She walked into a wall of sound when she entered the gym. It looked like two thousand people were jammed into the room, employees at the plant and their families. She climbed to the top of one of the bleachers, sat down and started shaking. Who the hell did those guys think they were? Why would the DHS be interested in a town meeting?

Below, she saw something more chilling. Two more men dressed in dark suits, taking photographs of the crowd. The men and women nearest them recoiled, dread and anger on their faces.

Too bad Murphy wasn’t here. She’d met him for lunch earlier that day, and they had discussed the upcoming meeting, but he was driving to Washington tonight. In the morning, he would be testifying before a Congressional hearing. We need him here, she thought. She thought of him as a father, certainly more of a father than her drunk of a real father had ever been. He’d be furious to know there were federal agents stalking around taking pictures of everyone, making notes on who attended a town meeting in a small town in West Virginia.

What were they doing here anyway? Terrorist, hell. She knew what it was. Saturn’s CEO, Nelson Barclay, was a high-dollar campaign contributor for the President. He’d probably picked up the phone and called someone at DHS to suggest that the people whose livelihoods he’d stolen were potential terrorists. Bastards.

The meeting started late. About fifteen minutes after her arrival, three vaguely familiar men walked to the stage at the front of the gym. A podium stood at the head of the room. One of the men spoke into the microphone.

“Testing.” The noise of the crowd abated somewhat, and he spoke again. “Okay everyone, let’s go ahead and get this show on the road. Most of you know me, but for the federal agents in the room, I’ll introduce myself.” The room erupted in laughter, and one of the agents flushed red. “I’m Tim Wagner, and I’ve worked at the Saturn plant since the day it opened just after the turn of the century. In the last couple weeks, I’ve been working with a number of the other folks here in the room to put together a union, so we can deal with the plant collectively and maybe get ourselves out of the situation we’re in.”

“Let me tell you the way I see it. Highview is a small town. Our population at the last census came in at just under six thousand people. The single biggest employer in town is Saturn: eight hundred people, not to mention all of the businesses supported by the plant. Folks, this is a full-fledged disaster. If we don’t come up with a way to respond, we can just forget about our homes. Highview will be a ghost town in six months. If you got equity in your house, forget about it. Who’s going to buy your house if there’re no jobs here?”

The crowd roiled. Karen had been thinking the same thing for some time, but it was clear from the reaction that not everyone in the crowd had been.

“Now, a few of us got together right after the plant shut down, and we worked with an attorney, who put together the legal documents for us to put together a company. And we got agreement from the Bank of Jefferson County to provide us with a loan to buy the plant outright. The bank sure sees the value in operating it independently. Here’s what we were thinking. The plant is profitable. Let’s buy it from Saturn, license their chip designs and operate it as our own company. We can diversify as we go along. We could be independent, run our own company. We don’t need any outside company to come in and run things for us. So, we put together a proposal and last week we drove down to Virginia to meet with Mr. Nelson Barclay. Do you know what he said? Do you know what he told us when we made our good faith offer?”

Someone in the crowd shouted, “What did he tell you, Tim?”

“I’ll tell you what he told us. He told us he could make more from the plant by selling it as scrap metal, and he planned to auction everything off. He’d rather scrap it than risk having us do better without him. He said he wouldn’t sell it at any price. He’d rather kill our town than give us a chance to move forward.”

The noise level in the room rose as the crowd shouted. Loud catcalls rose from the back of the room.

“That’s not the worst part, folks. The son of bitch—excuse my French—had the gall to tell me he might have been more considerate of our needs if we’d listened when the company endorsed President Price during the elections, since our precinct voted almost seventy percent for Senator Wilson. So I ask you, Highview, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

A man she’d never seen before, about halfway toward the back of the room, stood up and shouted, “I’ll tell you what we can do, Tim!”

That was staged, she thought. The man who had stood and spoke sat conveniently next to the aisle, and the reply was too polished to be anything other than rehearsed.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, folks,” he shouted as he walked forward. “We’ll just have to convince Mr. Nelson so-high-and-mighty Barclay we mean business. We’ll tell him it’s better for him to work with us than work against us.”

He reached the stage, took the microphone from Wagner and spoke. She got her first good look as he reached the stage. An older man, possibly in his fifties, in jeans and a flannel shirt. He had mud on his boots, and his graying hair was cropped close.

“Folks, most of you know me. My name is Dale Whitt. My father lived in Highview, and my grandfather lived in Highview. My great-grandfather lived down in Logan County, and moved up here after the Army shot him. See, back in 1921 my great-grandfather was crippled courtesy of a gunshot from the United States Army, when the coal workers in southern West Virginia saw fit to ask for better working conditions. Instead of living in a dump and dying down in those mines, they wanted to earn a decent wage. And you know what happened? The coal companies sent in their own private armies, backed up by the good old US of A.

“This is my town, not Nelson Barclay’s. This is your town. Not Saturn Microsystems’s. My family paid in blood for the right to live and prosper here. So did yours. Are you going to let some outsider from pointy-headed Vienna, Virginia tell you your livelihood is worth more as scrap metal? Or are you going to stand up for yourselves?”

A roar rose from the crowd. Some yelled and waved their fists.

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. Tomorrow morning, you’re going to show up for work. You’re going to break the locks off the gate, march in there, and start making chips. And they aren’t going to turn you out until you get a fair deal.”

The crowd went wild with shouting, excitement, and the bleachers under her feet shook as the men and women around her pounded their feet. The enthusiasm swept over Karen. Why should these people who had put their entire lives into this company—into this town—give up everything because the company wanted to save a little more money and pay a bigger dividend?

Whitt spoke again. “See, unlike a hundred years ago, we’ll have the press on our side. We’ll have the whole country watching when you go back into that plant. They won’t be able to send in a private Army to take us out. They won’t be able to send in thugs to shoot at working folks. They’ll have to let you do your jobs in peace, so we can make our own way. Our own way! Do you hear me, Highview?”

Shouts came from the crowd in response.

“Are you going to take back your jobs, Highview? Are you going to take control of your destiny?”

The crowd went wild with excitement.

“That’s right, we will do it. And we will win, because right is on our side. We will win, because we are the sons of liberty. We will win because God is on the side of the meek and the poor!”

The room broke up into loud cheers and applause, and everyone stood. For almost five minutes no one could hear a word Whitt shouted over the noise of the crowd. Karen stood and shouted with the rest of them. Whitt made sense, damn it. Why should one person be able to make a decision that ruined hundreds of families’ lives? Why should one person be able to determine the fate of an entire town?

Then she glanced back toward the doors, where four men in dark suits and ties stood, each of them with a camera. They stood there, the only people in the room not clapping.

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