So Much Pretty (11 page)

When the job came up in Haeden, close to Appalachia and less than a day’s drive from New York City, I was thrilled. I was sure I would meet a lot of simple salt-of-the-earth people and that they just needed someone to put all the facts together before they said no to being buried in garbage.

I didn’t know until I had been there six months that they were also being buried in shit, and drinking it and eating it. And that the only investigation into the health effects of the industrial dairy was being carried out by Scoop, who had a mysterious method for fact-checking called “he gave me his
word.” After explaining, he would fix me with an indignant look. “Places like this, a man’s word is still worth something,” he told me.

My methods of reporting were different. You do not find things out by “believing.” Digging is the main method. I began filing Freedom of Information requests immediately, interviewing chemists and toxics geographers from across the state. I amassed files and photographs and research, wrote article proposals and pitches for every major publication in the country, then waited. I wrote only a few pieces for the
Free Press
. Covered a handful of town meetings about the smell and the waste dumping and what might happen to the drinking water. Sometimes people would talk about how the animals were treated, but for the most part, people accepted the Haytes and talked about how they provided for the community. For a while it appeared Gene Piper might become a galvanizing force among townspeople, the voice of reason and good health for all, but his outsider status, his quick, articulate way at meetings, sank any real influence he could have had before it even began. The stories did not spark the kind of response I’d seen in Cleveland. So I saved the majority of my research for other publications. And as you know, that big-picture story never saw the light of day.

For the
Free Press
, I wrote about Alice Piper’s accomplishments, about town meetings and school board meetings and local women’s groups, about pancake breakfasts, local elections, church trips to Mexico, and watercolor exhibits at the one-room library in the center of town. I did feel sometimes that in little places like Haeden, it meant something when someone gave you their word. And I did feel that there were salt-of-the-earth people waiting for someone to put the facts together so they could do the right thing, but maybe they were too tired to follow through. And that the builders who asked me out, and who I rejected, and the ladies my age pushing strollers or talking to one another at the Savers Club, were okay, were doing what
I couldn’t really abide by, which was just to live, not dig, not achieve, but live.

This is a heartbreak I do not like to admit to. That there were times I wanted something they had. And I was caught off guard by the shock of learning what it takes for regular people to be at peace in their homes, in their communities. I was thrown, entirely thrown, by the price of their quiet lives, their contentment.

Audio File: Dino, Alex, 4/16/09
Stacy Flynn, Haeden
Free Press

Alex Dino. April 16, 2009.

Like I was saying, if anyone knew it was going to happen, it was Theo Bailey. We interviewed that smart-ass little fuck and I nearly lost it. Parents too busy up at the college and letting that psycho Ross Miller half raise the boy. I nearly fucking lost it.

This did not happen without planning. She’s a planner. And she’s a studier, she’s a leader. This shit isn’t like workplace violence—it usually involves more than one person. And I swear to you, that other person was Theo. This is entirely on background. What I’ve said and what I’m going to say. And don’t even think of fucking around with it. You’re in no position.

We don’t yet know what we’re looking at. Typically, when you see things like this, there are a limited number of causes. We’ve got about twenty or thirty recent examples involving boys or groups of boys, but this is different.

We don’t know much. We know she wasn’t using drugs, not even prescription drugs, wasn’t diagnosed with depression or anything, no recent concussion or anything like that. She didn’t have a computer at home, no cell phone, which of course is weird enough, but . . . So no electronic information or correspondence or websites she went to, no blog. No Facebook. If there was more than one letter back and forth between her and that stupid little fuck, we haven’t found all the rest yet. But I am sure they exist.

There’s this idea that these kids are kids who are bullied, have bad social relationships and stuff like that, but honestly? Nothing actually connects these kids. Some have good social skills, good grades, family’s got money. They’re white. Some are bullied or picked on or come from tough home situations. Usually, this stuff doesn’t happen
in the city at all. It happens in rural or suburban areas, for the most part, which is why I don’t understand why we can’t get funding to do something about this problem. We used to have a school resource officer stationed here from the state police, but the funding got cut. Christ, we can’t get funds for shit. It’s like we don’t even exist.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know where half the ideas about teen crime come from, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Dumb petty-theft stuff, fighting and drinking, you might find in the less advantaged adolescents. But the
real
crime. The hard drugs, the drug dealing, the
real
theft, that’s not coming from the wrong side of the tracks. That’s a surprise, right?

Well, it’s like this information they just handed out to us. We got these stats on incarceration last week says that white kids are seven times more likely to use cocaine than black kids, and you think, Oh,
it’s ’cause the blacks use crack
, right? Wrong. Our kids are
eight
times more likely to use crack. Our twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds sell
more
drugs. So you know, a lot of folks around here, they think that crime and drugs is a black thing, but guess again. Then there’s violent crime. White kids are
twice
as likely to own a gun than black kids. This is why
we
need more funding. This is why we need someone right in there, instead of giving all the money to the black schools and the schools in the inner city so the fucking niggers, pardon my French, can waste it. Yeah, they do, they just waste it. You think those black schools don’t get money? They get more than we do for all the special ed and the whatchafuckingcallit cultural programs and shit. They just pour money into those schools, and they don’t need it. And we sure as hell don’t get anything in return out of those people, know what I’m saying?

Listen, we’re looking at something here that’s more like Timothy McVeigh. This situation sure seems like terrorism to me. Tell me how it isn’t terrorism. It’s just like President Bush said—this was like an attack on
our way of life
. We really need to figure out if there is some, some ideological base to these things—maybe there is to all of them—and I’m telling you, in the case of Piper, there sure as hell was.

We start out looking at motivations, maybe she was involved with one of those boys, got her heart broke. Well, that is just not the case. I can tell you this. We may be uncovering something a hell of a lot deeper.

The things those parents believe in are beyond the pale. It’s not just some hippie stuff, the town’s half run by those types anyway, but the Pipers, I don’t know
what
you call them. They were like a cult. The three of them. Some kind of mind cult. Them and their friends. Environmentalists. I can show you documents we took from that house you wouldn’t believe. Those smiling parents and that pretty little girl with all her awards, they associated with people, believed in things, that would curl your hair. You think environmentalists are harmless, but they’re not. They’re not tracked by the FBI for being harmless.

We know what they read in that home. We have boxes full of that shit. We know where they came from, what they’d been doing. But we don’t know what she was thinking. We have one love letter and school papers. No journals, no home movies, no statement. Nothing. She’s like a goddamn ghost. Going to have to try to trace it all backwards through the parents. And I know that punk-ass Bailey kid in his little blue blazer knows exactly what happened.

Claire

HAEDEN, NY, 2000

T
HE HAEDEN VOLUNTEER
Fire Department was a vast metal pole barn on Route 34. It housed one fire engine; a gray tiled hall for dances, first-aid training, and speaking events; and a paneled lounge with low brown carpeting, a sectional couch, and a coffee table.

The VFD was a nice hangout, furnished and maintained by gifts and county money. The firemen didn’t live there, but they did play poker there a few times a month with a couple of emergency medical technicians, and there were emergency pony bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the refrigerator. They also barbecued chickens in the parking lot and held pancake breakfasts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Easter.

The VFD was making Gene’s point about something. It was a living example of mutual aid and solidarity. Right there in the middle of nowhere. He convinced Connie to make a two-thousand-dollar donation to the place last year just by talking about it.

Gene loved the fire department in a way Claire thought was sweet and a little stupid. “I’m not all about pretending to be one of the boys in a place like this,” she said.

Gene grinned at her. “Of course you are, baby.”

She shrugged. “You know you’re grasping at straws trying to make a neglected construction of corrugated sheet metal into some kind of community of unwitting first responders.”

But the fire department was pretty nice, she had to admit. It was the one place in town that felt slightly familiar. She had taken Alice there to get first-aid training from a guy named Tom Cutting,
who could easily be confused for an anarchist if he didn’t love his ridiculous uniform so much. Cutting reminded her of Con when he was young, and she thought he might be good bait to get Micky to move back to the States and onto the land they now all owned together.

“You guys suck!” Claire told her on the phone the other day. “It’s so pretty here, girl. And you! You just travel around and know your place is here, unoccupied by you.”

“Connie and I are planning on having the field torn down to put up a metropolis,” Michelle said. “That’s why it’s taking us so long, all the planning . . . Plus, if you didn’t remember, Con and I have not lived together for the last seven years.”

“Right—it’s a very good time for you both to come visit. You can see your godchild.”

“How’s it going with the house and everything? Are you doing okay there?”

“I don’t really get out much,” Claire said. “I spend a lot of time with Ross. We’ll be putting the garden in soon, which is always a lot of fun. We’re planting soybeans this year. But mostly we’re kinda broke. I doubt I’d get out much even if we weren’t. Socially, nothing’s changed. I don’t really know how to describe the people here.”

“Hicks?” said Michelle.

“C’mon, Micky.”

“Aggressively hetero-normative? What did you used to say about those girls from upstate in our clinical?”

Claire laughed. “Oh, Jesus. No, it’s somehow weirder than that. Like . . . that shit you said about paying attention to the obvious.”

“George Orwell said that.”

“Well, whatever. The obvious is all you get here. Try talking about anything else, and . . . I don’t know. Whatever. Gene is pretty happy doing things at home, for the most part.”

“What a surprise,” Michelle said.

“It’s hard. It’s hard to go into Alice’s school. You know, it’s a little country school, and she’s happy there. She has a sweet group of friends.”

“So why is it hard?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s really nothing. It’s the moms, I guess. But the kids are sweet as hell, so they can’t be all that bad. Most of our friends here are like Ross’s age, they don’t have kids in school. We see them like once a week at most.” Claire could hear the crackling sound of the poor connection between them and pressed the phone harder against her ear. “I mean, this is what it is: The other day a woman wanted to talk to me about driving kids around, you know, what kind of car she had, something about shopping somewhere in a store in the mall. Like for twenty fucking minutes. Almost half an hour of saying a thing and then another thing. It’s not like that’s horrible on its own, it’s just that there
is
nothing else. You could have five or six conversations like that back to back. Every day. There’s no mass transit at all. You can’t take the train somewhere else, or get some pad thai, or see anyone who looks different at all. A person comes up and just describes the things that are around in the lightest possible way, states various observable facts. The whole social context is missing. I hate to say this, ’cause it’s my fault for not staying more mentally active on my own, but I haven’t laughed out loud—you know, just felt myself laugh really hard—in a long time.”

As Claire said it, she felt she was going to start crying. She was embarrassed she’d complained about it, about missing food and subways, especially to Micky, with the work she did, and when she finally said, “It’s no big deal,” her voice was hoarse.

In that moment Claire wished Michelle and Con were there or that she was in New York or Africa. Anywhere else. She could feel that woman’s eyes on her, and the passive, trapped, haughty way she had spoken about routine things. A list of possessions.
In that moment Claire doubted playing the MC5 was going to cut it anymore. It was just one more thing that made her different.

At least today was one of the most exciting days in Haeden—Mother’s Day. Kind of like the town’s version of the West Village Halloween parade, she had joked.

Gene and Tom Cutting and several other men were dressed in flowered aprons. This was supposed to be funny, and many residents commented on it while they watched the men flip pancakes and fry bacon. Some of the men acted like drag queens, which actually was funny but not for the reasons they thought it was.