The Whore's Child

need to realize,” he says, “that no place is safe. That mill gets repeated a thousand times over.”
    So much for interrupting Gene’s focus. I’m scanning the deserted beach for signs of Portia, but there aren’t any. With the sun almost resting on the water, I can’t be sure, but I think I see a solitary swimmer a hundred yards or so down the beach. I’m about to suggest that we head off in this direction when he says, “We could shut it down, the two of us.”
    I blink at this. Gene is watching the waves break, and for a brief moment I wonder what he’s proposing.
    â€œThe city editor would be behind us,” he assures me.
    It dawns on me that Gene’s talking about the mill, and with this realization come two others—that he’s crazy and that his lunacy has stirred something in my settled heart, something that could make a lie of my present life. Or if not a lie, one of Gene’s famous stages. This moment might, if I so chose, mark the end of my domestic stage. My children are grown and I could leave the rest of this existence—my wife, this house—and complete the circle by returning home with my old friend to wage that final, unwinnable battle with the past.
    Gene’s looking at me keenly, as if reading my mind. “We could do it,” he says, then adds, after a pause, “Maybe we’re the only ones who could.”
    And I do know what he’s thinking. The last time I was home, the shabby little downtown bookstore had a huge display of our books, Gene’s and mine, in the window. These days, if I was recognized on the street there, it would be due to my vague resemblance to the man on the book jackets, with so many books given as Christmas presents, as reminders that the mill isn’t the whole story. That a town this size could produce not one but two authors, however modest in their accomplishments, is a matter of civic pride.
    â€œWhat makes you think they’ll do things the way they used to?” I ask, trying to sound objective. “What about the environmental regulations?”
    Gene snorted. “Dumping was never
legal.
”
    â€œStill.”
    â€œThey’re getting bold again. Think about it. Republicans running everything. They think they have a mandate. It’s okay to poison people again.”
    We have come a fair distance along the beach. I turn to make sure Portia hasn’t materialized behind us, but see there’s only our footprints.
    Then Gene says the wrong thing, as he always does, eventually. “It’ll give you a chance to square things with your old man.”
    What this is about, I realize, is not
my
father but his own. This public act would be Gene’s final repudiation of the company man. Back when we were in grad school together, testing the possibilities and rewards of literature and activism, he asked me late one night after we’d drunk too much bourbon and smoked too much dope, “How can you sit here with me?” When I confessed to not having a clue why I shouldn’t, he said, “You’re telling me it doesn’t bother you that my old man poisoned yours?” My response—“Not a bit, Gene”—had been the wrong one, and not just because he’d misunderstood my flip drunken tone. By denying that he shouldered any inherited guilt, I’d refused him the possibility of expiation. By giving me a chance to “square things” he now means for me to show the bastards that the world has changed and they don’t have the power anymore. We’d make my father’s eternal rest easier, and show Gene’s that in the end he’d backed a loser.
    The problem here is that what I left unresolved with my father is not what Gene imagines. He’d been diagnosed during the early years of Vietnam, and when I drove home from college to see him, I had expressed my view that what was happening to him had been happening for years to the entire nation, which had been force-fed moral poison that was now proving fatal. It was autumn and as we took a slow walk I talked constantly until we ended up down by the stream where we leaned on the iron railing, my father staring down into the swirling eddies of the black water beneath us while I looked off through the bare trees at the dark, satanic mill, thinking more about William Blake than about my dying father. “Well,” he finally said, “it’s true they