“There’s no fuckin’ way uranium’s coming back,” Oak Winger argued, his voice rising.
“You can’t just lock up natural resources,” Art Fisher countered sharply.
Tom listened from his usual post at the Maverick counter, where he was eating dinner. The special was pot roast and mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and steamed carrots.
“It costs more to clean up after the uranium is mined than you make mining it, which doesn’t make any economic sense,” Winger continued. “It ruins the land forever.”
“That’s bull,” Fisher said. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The places we mined around here were hot before we mined them. That’s how we found them in the first place, with a Geiger counter. And those places where we found carnotite are not as hot now after we mined them out and cleaned them up as they were when we found them in the first place. We miners cleaned up after nature!”
“Radium’s not a mining town any more and it’s never going to be a mining town again. There’s a bunch of us who live here for other reasons and we don’t want to see mining come back.”
“Now you boys keep it nice,” Sally Morgan called out. “We all like a good debate, but hold down the cussing. This is a family joint. And no fistfights, neither.”
The argument felt to Tom like a return to normalcy after the unwelcome drama of the previous few days and weeks, normalcy he had helped bring about by reporting that the Whispering Jim might soon reopen. The pros and cons of mining could incite strong feelings in the West End but it was still a safer subject for Tom to investigate than the question of what happened to Ray Walker.
“Where do you stand on mining coming back?” Tom asked Sally, who was resting on her elbows near him.
“I was here when there was mining and I’ve been here since it stopped,” she shrugged. “Miners are good folk, I’ll say that much.”
Tom paid his bill and stepped out into the chilly night. Clouds tumbled overhead and a few flakes of snow blew past. He inhaled deeply and was braced by the freezing air that hit his lungs. Back when the town was booming and the mill was crushing and processing tons of uranium ore every hour, 24 hours a day, 364 days a year, a deep breath of air would have been contaminated by radioactive dust. It wasn’t enough to cause immediate radiation sickness and cancer would have been far off in the future. Tom had been told that the constant thump of the mill never annoyed, and did not suggest to the populace at the time that they might become ill in the future, but instead was a source of comfort. It meant that people were working, making good money. After the thumping of the mill finally ceased, tens of millions of dollars were spent by the federal government to “reclaim” mined lands in and near Radium, removing and burying toxic mine and mill tailings, and even the structures, equipment and tools that were rendered radioactive over the years, work that was still not complete. Presumably, under new rules, the government would ensure that new mining would not leave similar waste in need of costly removal.
Lost in his thoughts, Tom realized only later that there was a figure loitering in the shadows. But he had not registered any threat. He had crossed that highway so many times, so routinely, that he did it unconsciously. The sharp blow to his back dropped him to the ground hard, knocking the wind out of him. Gasping for air he rolled over onto his back and his attacker pinned him down with a heavy knee to his chest.
The man who had punched him leaned in so close that Tom’s first impression of him was that he reeked of beer. Then, almost instantly, he recognized him: his assailant was the same man, in his early twenties, with greasy long blond hair, hollow cheeks and pale blue eyes, who was behind the wheel of the pickup that had almost run him off the road as he fled the scene of his encounter with Brubaker.
“You’re a nosey guy, aren’t you newsman?” the man sneered, an intentional declaration that Tom was not the victim of a random crime.
“Who are you?” Tom gasped.
“That don’t matter,” he said. “The important thing is, you’ve been warned. Stop messing with other peoples’ shit, bro, or you’re gonna get hurt. Hurt bad.”
The man stood and coolly surveyed the mess he had made of Tom, as if to calculate whether he’d done just the right amount of damage to effectively deliver the message. Apparently not quite: He gave Tom a poke in the side of his ribcage with the steel-reinforced toe of his boot, taking aim, followed by a precise, sharp kick. Then he melted back into the darkness.
After he was able to breathe again, Tom felt almost comfortable lying there on the street in front of his modest business in the center of Radium, gazing up at the stormy night sky. The slightest movement hurt but the pain was not easy to locate, he hurt everywhere, so he lay as still as he could. He wondered if he’d been so badly injured that he would soon find himself on a stretcher in an ambulance on his way to the clinic or whether he was just momentarily stunned and would be able to pull himself together. In either case he felt a kind of peace, even a sense of relief that the attack had been endured and the injury sustained, and that he had survived it. His assailant could have as easily killed him, but chose not to.
Why?
If it had been a warm summer night, Tom might have lain there until dawn. Instead, growing cold, he hauled himself painfully inside. He pulled off his clothes and examined himself. He was developing an ugly bruise where he’d been kicked, probably had a broken a rib or two, but other than that his injuries looked superficial, a scrape on his hand and on his chin, where he’d broken his fall to the street. He took an Advil and lay down on his bed.
Tom had been warned, but warned about what? And by whom?
What chilled him most is that there were too many possibilities. Was he assaulted by a friend of Brubaker’s? He knew his assailant was in the vicinity when Brubaker died, and might even have found his still-warm corpse, and made the connection to Tom. The warning was explicitly to stop nosing around, so did that imply a connection to Ray Walker’s disappearance? Was it something to do with DeRichter and uranium mining? Or meth? Or was it something altogether different, a story he had written or had published whose importance he didn’t even recognize?
At that moment, Tom acutely felt his own lack of courage. He resolved to never ask another challenging question or take anyone’s confession. He took the violent warning he had been administered to heart and interpreted it in the broadest possible way. He felt a powerful nostalgia for the simple security that came from publishing the Radium school lunch menu, the obituaries of old-timers, and the routine news that came out of Radium Town Board meetings.
He could envision no easy path back to the familiar and secure detachment of an experienced reporter, one who, having been bitten once too often, should have known better than to get personally involved in a story he was covering. But he vowed that if he found the way back to the comfort zone of professional cynicism, if he could somehow turn back the clock, he would never again put himself in the painful position he found himself in now.