FICTION Against a Sea of Troubles R.T. Smith THE FIRST THING ELON LEFT in the lumber stacker's seat was an old Bible open to a fierce passage in Revelations circled in red with a grease pencil. Since the evangelist types always came out in force this close to Easter, the operator, Garth Boone, and his cohorts didn't give it much thought, and he pitched the book into some trashwood before he cranked up the logger's cherry picker and started stacking the beamwood on a flatbed. Elon's second message was a Reebok box containing a long strip of bag paper bearing the words THIS IS NOT A RATTLESNAKE BUT IT WANTS TO BE. Garth showed it to Billy Priester, who phoned the boss on his cell. They'd been worried about tree hugger activists since the development was approved by the county, but this was not the form they had expected protest to take. Mr. Touissant advised Billy not to get his skivvies in a wad but to keep a weather eye out just the same. Touissant was a natural-born coonass, his men thought, no matter how shinyhis blue suit, so he still had the Gulfjargon and a fair amount of fight in him. He was already rich, as even his foreman said, and getting filthier by the hour with no reservations. Philippe Touissant, or Smiley, as the papers said he liked to call himself, had been in the Blue Ridge exactly six years and had made a killing buying up farms and lumbering before he slashed the land into acre lots and threw up summer home bungalows. His workers didn't much cotton to him, buthe had a way with the paper-pushers and votechokers . No complaint anybody could write to the local paper's letter column could so much as slow him down, as his crews cut roads and gouged out roughing stations for processing the towering hardwoods they dropped. The county commissioners couldn't stop him, and the board of supervisors wouldn't. Touissant's—Smiley's—trademark seemed to be the alarming, high-pitched crack of live trunks, followed by the thrash through understory trees not ripe for harvest. From Barn Mountain to Sweet Berry Valley, from Walker's Run to Timber Ridge longtime residents had wakened to the artillery volleys of falling trees and known whose wallet was filling, and the sight of his bright new Humvee cruising the back roads brought out curses all around. 42 When Garth couldn't turn the motor over on a Monday, he ran through his troubleshoot list, backtracking both the electricals and the fuel flow, until he noticed a foreign grit and thickness in the line, then checked the diesel tank, which he found clotted with honey, and that brought out Touissant in the silver Hummer and Sheriff Lowery in a chocolate-colored cruiser. Touissant emerged from his sparkling vehicle wearing a white cowboy Stetson, which made Garth and Billy have to hide their snickers, but they knew these weird raider visitations were turning into serious business. Just before dark, snow flurries scattered their flakes through the limbs of the Judas tree, where red buds looked like lipstick rubbed on, but badly, like a girl learning. Elon was reading a detective novel by the window and listening to the silence in the wake of the day's timbering noise. The sky was mostly cleared up by midnight, and Elon stood in the yard relieving himself, staring at the full moon. That bullet must have flown hot and fast, he thought, cause it cut through everything the sky could offer and scorched a silver hole. It was the pistol in his denim pocket that made his thoughts head down that particular path. "Alva," he had said over the chicken pie the daybefore, "it all hurts so bad. I know it's just self-pity, but it feels like great grief, and I don't see how much longer I can bear it. The noise, the evil of it all. No man has the right to do this." She looked down at the steaming food on her fork. "Yesterday they was shaking the ground so...