An Evening with Ed Rockland
A professor protests an oil baron on campus. Who wins?
This short story was inspired, in part, by Russo’s Straight Man, so it seems fitting to share it alongside my review of Lucky Hank. But it is also drawn largely from real events. I’m grateful to Christine Stewart-Nuñez for first publishing the piece under a different title in Oakwood.
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A deep clear lake. That’s all Johnson ever wanted to be. But it was hard to be that guy with his face planted on the sidewalk, hands wrenched up behind his back. It was early February, still the dead of winter in Iowa, and the cement chilled his chest. His neck cramped as he arched away from the ground. A knot of onlookers gathered outside the conference center at Vult College, students and faculty lingering out of curiosity or support, who knew. A paunchy officer stood nearby, his radio crackling in its holster.
Johnson turned away from the crowd and lowered the other cheek to the ground, his face burning even in the cold. Claudia was expecting him at home any minute. He remembered how she had bent over the quilt she was stitching from old corduroy as he left, the way she often drew away from him when she was afraid. He hadn’t meant to get arrested. It wasn’t part of the plan.
The deputy loomed out of the dark, the street light gleaming on his shaved head. “On your feet, sir,” he said, the way a sergeant might say shitbird. Johnson could smell the sour coffee on the officer’s breath. It was snowing now, a mesmeric cascade from the night sky into the red and blue strobe flashing on the sidewalk. Johnson struggled up and walked to the squad car, his overcoat open, stocking cap askew. He lowered his head as he felt the deputy's glove on his neck.
The door slammed shut, the warning lights clicked off, and the crowd began to disperse. One lingered. Dean Bradshaw stood with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his pea coat. He was a tall man with the black beard of a coal miner. Johnson could not read his expression in the shadows, but he met Bradshaw’s gaze through the frosty window as the deputy fired the ignition and pulled away.
They had been friends once, before Bradshaw applied for dean, when he still taught botany and field biology. Bradshaw kept bees on a little acreage south of town, where he also tended a patch of restored prairie that he burned every spring and fall. He'd grown up in the Kentucky Appalachians, and his roots in the coal mines went back three generations, back to Harlan County.
Johnson was raised in a logging town in western Oregon where he saw college students chaining themselves to trees. They were just rich kids to him then. They couldn’t see the families fed by the timber economy, the men in their forties, fifties, sixties — Johnson’s uncles, and now his cousins — who saw no future for themselves without chainsaws, grapple loaders, and the lumber mill. All these years later, protests still seemed petty to Johnson, small outbursts of angst that missed the point. He and Bradshaw had often spoken of it, and they agreed that the real beef was with the logging companies, not the sawyers, just as the quarrel over a war was never with the soldiers, but with the leaders who sent them.
The trouble started in September when an email from the dean’s office announced a special event with Ed Rockland, an oil baron from North Dakota. Rockland was to visit Vult College to celebrate Entrepreneurship Week in February, accompanied by college alumna and Trustee, Sandra Simon. Simon had risen from slopping hogs in northern Iowa as a child to national acclaim as the anchor of Plymouth Rock, an evening news program that leaned right of center. She had the kind of face people trusted, soft at the edges and dimpled. Simon had featured Rockland’s story in several segments on Plymouth Rock, chronicling his roots as the son of a Baptist minister and cotton farmer in Arkansas, where he learned the doggedness and faith that lifted his oil company from a single tanker truck, which he bought at age twenty, to a fifty billion-dollar powerhouse. “I aim to live to be a hunnerd,” Rockland said in one interview, “And I mean to have a hunnerd billion by then.” Rockland’s visit was to culminate in a fireside chat with Simon, and all Vult faculty were encouraged to require their students to attend.
Johnson laughed aloud when he read the message. He was sitting on an exercise ball at his desk holding his breath and drawing his shoulders back until his spine cracked, and he couldn’t help himself. Before long it will be Rockland College, he thought, and we will be required to hang a photograph of the Dear Leader in our offices. That sobered him up a bit. Vult College was founded by the Dutch Reformed Church, but had come to be known for its environmental studies program, which Johnson chaired. He had led the campaign to fund the Martin Center, the first platinum-certified building in the state, featuring a green roof, solar panels, and cabinets made of recycled paper currency and banana peels. When the college leveled a rental property, Johnson lobbied to expand the college garden. He now supervised student volunteers that delivered three thousand pounds of produce to the cafeteria each year. Fundraising was underway to finance another first for Iowa: a kitchen classroom that produced more energy than it consumed. Johnson had met with architects to design it, and he worked the phone bank of donors most evenings.
Johnson had long dreamed of a place to break bread made of wheat grown on site. A crucible for folk arts like canning, cheese making, beekeeping. It would be a real step forward. But there was also a new engineering program in the works, and the thought of a Rockland Scholarship or a Rockland Laboratory was too real to laugh away. It would be the death of environmental studies at Vult, that was sure. Whatever survived would then bow at the altar of engineering, which meant bowing at the altar of oil, and Johnson would be damned if came to that. He read the email again. The air in his office grew humid. Sweat broke out in pinpricks all over his face.