Tilting at Windmills
Prairie Death Tales: V2: The Salt Fork Murders — Chapter 3
Zaanzibar Murphy first encountered George Salt in the Reading Room of the Chisholm University Library in Dine City. It was a meeting Murphy later described — in an uncharacteristically rapturous outburst — as “serendipitous, fortuitous … An utterly auspicious, ‘God’s in his Heaven’ kind of moment.”
The moment in question happened when Murphy chanced to look over the shoulder of an engineering student who was reading an 1890 edition of Scientific American with pictures of a complete early wind power system. Within minutes Salt and Murphy were talking excitedly, breaking the peace in the quiet library.
“Look at this! Can you believe it?” George Salt exclaimed. “A full century ago some guy in Ohio designed and installed a complete wind energy system in his own home: storage batteries in the basement! Supplied all his own electricity! Designed it all himself!”
“You mean, he didn’t take any electricity at all from the grid?” Zaanzibar asked in a cautious tone.
“Grid? What grid? His was the first house to have electricity in the whole of Cleveland! … What was his name? Here it is: Charles Brush. He lived on Euclid Avenue, wherever that may be. He managed to … ”
“But what was so special about that?” Zaanzibar interrupted. “Windmills have been around forever. I was just reading the novel Don Quixote, first published hundreds of years ago. It’s full of windmills! Actually, I think they go back thousands of years.”
“No, no! You’re missing the point! We’re talking wind turbines not windmills. Charles Brush developed an entire wind turbine system for generating electricity. Before that, windmills, like those all over Oklahoma, were just used for pumping up water and milling grain, and such.”
“Brush must have had support from a major company to do all that.”
“No big companies! No government support! Supplied all his own electricity for his house and his workshop till he died in 1929, forty years later! Big companies aren’t the solution; they’re the problem.”
“Incredible,” said Zaanzibar. “Why have governments dragged their feet on this issue all these years? Can this still be done a hundred years later?”
“You bet, Zaanzibar, absolutely! Much easier now than it was then. Putting together wind, solar, and if locally possible, rivers and even small streams can do it. And then storage batteries are the key if you want to be self-sufficient. Brush devised his own.”
“Shoosh, you two,” said the smiling librarian. “Take it around the corner to the Mojo Coffee Shop.”
Within a month after graduation, George Salt was working for Zaanzibar, not as a member of the Compound, but as a trusted contractor whose job it was to make the People of the Word entirely self sufficient in energy.
As Zaanzibar approached, George Salt was sitting in the shade of the metal structure which housed the shafts and gears leading down from the wind turbine overhead and up from the water turbine suspended in the empty bed of the diversion channel, below.
“Well, basically, it’s suction that’s the problem,” he explained to Murphy, concerning his fears about the mechanism. “Now, either one of these, your wind generator or your water turbine, alone, creates a real strong suction. Problem is, if you had ’em both running at one time, see, the suction would be so strong it’d just about pull anything in here right down through the shaft. I mean, tools, tool boxes, anything wasn’t nailed down.
“What’s the solution, then?” Murphy inquired.
“Two things,” he said. “One, put some vents in the shed walls to relieve the air pressure, and two, you need some kind of safety lock.”
“Then, make it so.” Murphy said with a smile. He occasionally enjoyed using Jean-Luc Picard’s famous Star Trek phrase.
Without a pause, Salt continued, “I assume that, as usual, you would like to hear the theoretical principles that underlie the practical work.” Though young, Salt was no amateur. After all, he graduated at the top of his class at Chisholm.
Again Zaanzibar smiled. No doubt the next two minutes would be time well spent.
“I was talking earlier about ‘suction’ though suction is not really a physical concept. You should think of suction simply as the force that a partial vacuum exerts. When the pressure . . . a seal is created . . . the higher pressure … ”
For the briefest moment, Zaanzibar Murphy experienced — most unusually for him — a lapse of concentration. For some reason his mind filled with the image of his beloved Jade, her perfect lips glistened by her tongue, creating a seal . . .
“. . . creating an imbalance with the ambient air pressure, resulting in suction” concluded George.
At this point Murphy thanked Salt elaborately, even with some passion, for his time, then left to inspect the vegetable gardens on his own. George Salt watched him walk away.
Funny man, George thought. Strange man.
After his usual lunch of fresh fruit, seeds, nuts, yogurt and the foreign papers, Zaanzibar retired to his office for his private work session. Under no circumstances was he to be interrupted for the next two hours, for any reason. None of the staff knew exactly what he did during this time of day.
He took his seat in the thickly upholstered chair of soft leather, and swiveled around to face the window. Just outside stood a mature dogwood tree, rife with spectacular white blossoms. A pair of red house finches hopped about engagingly in its upper branches.
Now, he thought. Now I will allow myself to think about Jade.
They had met in Seattle in the early seventies. She was the most stunningly beautiful woman he’d ever seen, just nineteen, hardly more than a girl. She had been struggling to gain a foothold as artist, actress, model, while trying to sell her rather amateurish paintings in Pioneer Square.
He dazzled her with an odd combination of promised foreign, exotic travel and lifestyle and old-fashioned premarital chastity. When he offered her a sizable diamond and proposed by moonlight on a chartered yacht off Duwamish Head, her acceptance was a foregone conclusion. They were married in the fall of seventy-eight.
Theirs was a modern, open relationship, with not the slightest hint of possessiveness or jealousy. At first she seemed happy. They had lived for awhile in London, then for a time in Madrid. They returned to America after a long stay in Osaka; Jade was homesick, restless. Eventually, she grew bored and spoke resentfully of giving up her career for no good reason. She wanted to work. She wanted the simple life.
She wanted to see her family in Dine City.
And so they arrived in Oklahoma where she had grown up — Jade Jones, daughter of a black Baptist Missionary preacher and niece of two more. Her large, devout, happy family still lived on a dirt street in South Dine. They had been pleasant enough to Murphy but a little wary of him. Especially after he stumbled across the Salt Fork property, bought it on sight and began planning his astonishing social experiment there. He saw very little of them. As time went on, Jade saw less of them, too.
He helped her set up her own business — the Peruvian textiles which had just arrived were hers. She began importing marvelous crafts from Latin America: woolen blankets from Guanajuato, intricate basketry from the Tarahumara tribes, stunning Incan rugs from the Andes.
She had built the whole enterprise with enormous energy and very little assistance from Zaanzibar. She’d put together a network of dealers and buyers stretching from Mexico to Peru, several of whom Murphy cultivated and turned to his own use. Assiduously marketing her wares at trade shows in Kansas City, St. Louis, Dallas or Tulsa, she had acquired several good client shops throughout the area. When the southwestern decorating craze arrived, she was perfectly positioned to take advantage of it. Sales soared, and customers began trekking to her Oklahoma warehouse seeking out fine native arts and decor.
Three years ago something changed. Her behavior became erratic. She returned from business trips looking as though she’d been on a binge. She ate less, and her sleep patterns altered radically. Occasionally, she said very spiteful things to him.
Murphy had been patient. He had at first suspected some neurological trauma, and had gently tried to steer her to the Scott White Clinic for diagnostic testing. She would have nothing of the sort. When the extra attention he tried to show her only increased her irritability, he backed off, giving her even freer control over her own affairs and business. He tried everything.
He had been naive.
The answer, when it came, was painfully obvious: cocaine. She had found among her southern contacts a safe and reliable source of high-grade coke, and had been having large quantities shipped to her inside pottery or wood-carvings from Columbia or Ecuador. And she was using it — steadily and heavily.
Murphy had nothing against drugs, theoretically at least. He believed any technique for increasing or enhancing pleasure might be valid, but he did not use them, himself. The human body, his body, he liked to explain, if perfectly tuned and prepared, is capable of experiencing unlimited jolts of pure pleasure, including those which are reproduced artificially by drugs.
“You’re a hedonist,” Jade had said.
“A sensualist,” he’d told her. “There is a difference.”
Murphy had acted, quickly and ruthlessly, shutting down her entire import operation, closing all lines of communication between her and her suppliers. Jade was furious. She had screamed at him and stormed out of the compound, going to stay, he’d assumed, with her family in Dine City. Then, he learned that they hadn’t seen her in some time. The family knew nothing of her whereabouts except the rumors that she was living with the biker Stephen Carter. When he dies in a spectacular road crash, Murphy had found Jade much chastened and desiring to return to the fold. And now after spending six months in rehab at Murphy’s insistence, Jade was back. But could he ever again trust her?
There was one other aspect of this situation that particularly troubled Murphy. Subsequent to cutting off her pipeline for cocaine, he had learned from an informant in Bogota that one last shipment — two kilograms of uncut flake — had been sent. The informant, with whom both Murphy and Jade had been dealing, though on entirely different matters, thought that the coke had gotten through to Oklahoma, but he wasn’t sure when, where or how.
Murphy knew that he must find that package keep it from Jade’s hands at any cost. No one else at the compound knew these things. He could not possibly entrust this task to anyone else. He alone could save her.
If you would like to read more about Jade Murphy’s affair with the biker Stephen Carter, you can find it in this excerpt from Vol. 1 of Prairie Death Tales.
Prairie Death Tales is a compendium of fictitious crime narratives, long and short, written by Courtland Wade, a collaboration between Court Atchinson and Wade Chambers.
“Smart, darkly comic, edgy, (*****) stories of life, love and violent death in the not entirely fictional Dine City, Oklahoma. Set in the 80’s and 90’s, the plot line might today be described as ‘gender fluid’”.
Don’t miss Chapter 4 of the Salt Fork Murders.
If the locale and some of the characters interest you, you might like having a go at the first volume of Prairie Death Tales:
