Breaking Point

night. We’ve got plenty of guns in the house, and that was the first time I ever gathered them all up and hid them in the basement. Not that I thought he’d grab one and go after those women—I thought he might do something to himself. I wanted him to scream and yell and cuss out those women and the EPA, but he just sat there and stared. I didn’t want him to let his emotions get bottled up that way, but that’s how he is.”
    Joe asked, “Did Butch do anything with the lot? Did he blade the dirt back?”
    “No,” Pam said sadly. “He just walked away that afternoon and never went back. And the next day he went to work like nothing had happened.”
    Marybeth shook her head.
    “I’m not like Butch, though,” Pam said. “And the next day I was on the phone to this Naous, leaving messages every hour. Either she didn’t want to talk with me or she was out of the office. I called all week. Finally, on that Friday, she called me back at four-fifty p.m. and made it a point to tell me she only had ten minutes to talk.”
    “What was she like?” Marybeth asked.
    “She just sounded annoyed but tried to act like she wasn’t,” Pam said. “Like I was really imposing on her valuable time. I think if I hadn’t hounded her, she might not have
ever
called me back.”
    She took a breath. “At first,” Pam continued, “the way she explained things to me made me think Butch might have misunderstood her. She said we could clear everything up by getting what she called an after-the-fact permit once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did a study and said our lot wasn’t a wetlands. That sounded stupid to me, because no one else had to get an after-the-fact permit, but I wrote it down and thought we shouldn’t have any trouble getting one, since anyone can see there isn’t any water on our property.
    “When I asked her where we go to get the study started, she tells me it can’t happen until we request one and the process could take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars—and it’s still not a guarantee that the EPA will agree with it.”
    “You’re kidding,” Joe said, amazed and growing angrier as she went on.
    “I wish I was,” Pam said. “She said that even if a study said it
wasn’t
a wetlands, we’d then have to apply to the EPA for something called a wetlands development permit and have it approved or rejected. See, if it was approved, we could start building, and if it was rejected we could have our day in court to try and prove them wrong. I asked how long that takes, and she said
years
. Plus, we’d have to pay application fees and lawyers’ fees and that could amount to a quarter of a million dollars, she guessed. And if the wetlands development permit was rejected, all we could do then was sue the EPA in federal court, and that would take hundreds of thousands more and even more years.”
    “They’ve got you coming and going,” Joe said.
    “Right,” Pam said, sitting back and draining her drink. “It’s me and Butch going up against a federal agency with dozens of government lawyers paid by my tax money. They’ve got all the time and money in the world, and none of them are risking their personal bank account or livelihood like we are. And in the meanwhile, even if we started going through the process and applying for after-the-fact permits, we’d still be racking up fines of seventy thousand dollars a day. So as I was talking to this woman, I was getting more and more upset until I was crying. I might have said some things to her I shouldn’t. In fact, I know I did.”
    Joe was confused. He said, “I still don’t get it. A person gives you a business card and the fines start automatically that day? With nothing in writing at all?”
    Pam said, “I begged her to send me something. I sent certified letters to her office begging for some kind of documentation of what they were doing to us and why. But she ignored me, and no one in that office would talk to me on the phone. After a couple of months, I just stopped calling.”
    Joe asked, “Did you try to get in touch with any of her higher-ups?”
    “I sent letters and emails but never got a reply.”
    “Does the name Juan Julio Batista mean anything to you?”
    “Sure,” Pam said. “He’s the big boss. I found his name in a directory, but I couldn’t get past his secretary when I called, and he never replied to my emails.”
    “What about Heinz Underwood?”
    “Never heard of him.”
    Joe said, “How was Butch