Chapter 4 #2
"I decided I wouldn't play their game. It was rigged. So I scrimped and saved and borrowed until I had enough to install the solar system at my home. My bonds to the grid had been severed."
"How did Foster react?"
"Poorly, I imagine. I didn't care. Harlan had no more control over me. 'The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.' Shakespeare wrote that. Measure for Measure. Foster doesn't break laws. He wakes them up and points them at people who can't fight back."
"But Abner fought back and won," I said. "That's one hell of a story."
Richard was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its rapid-fire quality.
"Abner, what can you tell me about Thomas's power being cut?"
"Same attack used against me. Foster got the county to cut Thomas's power using a code complaint. The county did the rest. Same playbook. Different target."
"And the propane?" Richard asked me. "You mentioned it in your email."
"Local dealer canceled my delivery after scheduling it. I had to find one in Forks who would sell to me at a $440 markup. I can't prove Harlan's behind it, but the pattern speaks for itself."
Richard turned back to Abner. "Has he done anything like that to you? Cut off supplies, services?"
"He can't. I don't use services. I generate my own power, draw my own water, grow and hunt much of my own food. That's why the code violations are his only weapon against me. He can't cut what I am not connected to."
"Smart."
"Not smart, just necessary. A man who depends on the grid depends on whoever controls the grid."
Richard clicked his pen and set it on the notebook. He looked at Abner for a long moment.
"Abner, I need to ask you something, and I want you to know it comes from a place of respect. You mentioned you're a disabled veteran. That the burn pit exposure caused lung damage. Is that something you'd be willing to have on the record?"
Abner held the coffee mug in both hands and stared into it.
"On the record?"
"Yes."
"That a county in the state of Washington is using code enforcement to harass a disabled veteran who served twenty-two years and came home with lungs full of poison?"
"Yes."
Abner looked at me. I didn't say anything. It wasn't my call.
"Put it on the record."
Richard picked up his pen. "Thank you."
They talked for another twenty minutes. Richard asked about Liberty, and Abner gave him the broad strokes without detail. Homeschooled. Raised on the land. Capable beyond her years.
Richard asked about the pension, and Abner told him the amount, which was less than I expected. Richard asked about the goats, and for the first time something close to warmth crossed Abner's face as he described renting them out to clear brush for neighbors.
When it was done, Richard turned off the recorder and put away his notebook. He stood and faced Abner.
"I want you to know that this story matters to me. Not just as a career piece, but as a story about a man who served his country and got kicked in the teeth for it. I'm sorry that happened to you."
"I don't need sympathy, son. I need someone to write it down where people can read it."
"I will."
They shook hands. Abner's grip swallowed Richard's. The young journalist walked down the steps to his Prius, tossed his messenger bag through the passenger window, and turned back.
"Thomas, I'll be in touch. Abner, thank you. Seriously. This is a wowser of a story."
He got in the car and backed out carefully, the Prius whining over the gravel. We watched him disappear down the drive.
Abner and I stood on the porch in the silence that followed. He finished his coffee and set the mug on the railing.
"Young," I said. "Very young."
"You don't think he can do it?"
I leaned against the post and crossed my arms. I took a moment to collect my thoughts before speaking, a habit of Abner's I was trying to emulate.
"I think he's smart. I think he did his homework.
I also think he drinks too many energy drinks and uses the word 'wowser' in professional conversation.
He's twenty-three years old, Abner. Fresh out of college.
He covers school board meetings for the Bremerton Times.
Harlan Foster has been running this county for three decades. "
Abner pulled a wooden match from his shirt pocket and struck it on the railing. He lit nothing with it. Just watched it burn down to his fingers, then dropped it.
"In Iraq, I had this gawky kid on my team," he said quietly. "Name was Briggs. Twenty years old. Weighed maybe one-forty soaking wet. Wore glasses thicker than Richard's. Couldn't do ten pushups without wheezing. The infantry guys called him Professor because he read history books in his tent."
Abner stared at the treeline, his eyes lost in memory.
"Briggs ran a power line across one hundred meters of open ground while a sniper worked the rooftop a few blocks away. Didn't stop. Didn't flinch. Finished the splice, powered up the tactical operations center, walked back in, and asked if anybody had seen his book. He'd left it in the latrine."
I looked at Abner. His blue eyes held mine without blinking.
"The men who surprise you are never the ones who look the part, Thomas. It is the unlikely ones who have not found their ceiling yet. They don't know what they can't do, so they go ahead and do it."
"You think Richard is one of those guys?"
"I think he came out here on his own time, in his own car, with notes he'd already spent hours writing. I think he asked careful questions and listened to the answers. I think he looked me in the eye when I told him about my lungs and didn't flinch. That's not nothing."
"That's not nothing," I agreed.
"I don't trust reporters," Abner said. "I don't trust institutions. But I trust a man who does his work. That young man did his work before he ever set foot on this porch."
I nodded slowly. The morning sun had climbed above the tree line and the porch was warm now.
"I hope you're right about him."
"'The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.' Henry the Sixth, Part Three." Abner picked up his empty mug and handed it to me. "The boy's got teeth. Let him use them."