Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  “Well, shit.” Dan gave a somber shake of his head. “Evan and the nerds’ll figure it out. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before Justin lets this place go belly-up.”

  “He swears he’s done putting money in,” Laz reminded. “Doesn’t want to . . . How’s he put it? Taint the experiment by influxin’ new cash.”

  “Influxin’.”

  Dan spit again. This time, Laz matched him spit for spit, as Laz often did. The two of them watched Evan continue his bird-sex dance for a time. It didn’t appear that his attempts to control this unexpected herd of prospective residents was going particularly well.

  “He sure can move when he wants to,” Laz said.

  Down the hill, Evan dropped his clipboard and practically fell to his knees in his frantic efforts to pick it up. Where’s Nora? Dan thought. She could calm this crowd down. Or Justin could deliver calm, for that matter. Wait. Right. Justin had flown to New York City to put out some kind of fire. A private fire. And he’d made the flight on his private jet. As long as he lived, Dan Pastor would never understand Justin Wolfe, even if he would respect him above all others until the day he died.

  “I ever tell you about when Justin bought this place from me?” Dan asked.

  Laz cocked his considerable chin in Dan’s direction, suggesting at least passive interest in the story.

  “I was up to my eyeballs in debt,” Dan said. “This farm just meant so much to me that I took out loan after loan to stay competitive with all the consolidated farms.” He puffed out his faux-denim-clad chest. “This farm here used to be one of the biggest players in the state. But I tell you, Big Ag owns too much. We couldn’t compete.”

  “Hell, how could you? You ever see one of those big combines they run out there?”

  Dan pursed his lips and spit. He’d seen them. “You get that thresher going again, by the way?”

  Laz groaned. “Don’t ask.”

  “Anyway, there was a time that this place was the very picture of the American dream. But we were too underwater on our loans to continue, and too deep in debt to expect to make anything on the sale.”

  By now, Evan had managed to fail at ushering the thirty-plus new arrivals into the machine shed in any semblance of an orderly fashion. The poor kid was standing outside the barn’s open door, clutching the clipboard between his thighs so he could wipe the sweat from his brow with his forearm. From this distance, there was no way to tell exactly how he was taking this influx of new residents. Different types of anxiety would all look the same at two hundred paces, Dan supposed. Anyway, he would find out soon enough.

  “Right when everything was looking rock bottom,” he said out of the side of his mouth to Laz, “lo and behold, I get this call from the bank. Or at least they claimed to be from my bank. Turned out to be some kind of shady mortgage company. Wanted to offer me a reverse mortgage. Said it would solve all my problems. I could break even selling the land to a conglomerate, then make off with the funds from the reverse mortgage on my house. Said I’d be able to retire comfortably and still own my own home. Wouldn’t be able to work the land anymore, but at least I could look out over what I used to own.” He forced a smile. “Small part of the American dream, right?”

  “Hell, I’d’ve taken it,” Laz said. “What stopped you?”

  “I’d like to say it was research. Wish I could tell you I looked into reverse mortgages and realized they’re a scam. But the truth is that Justin swooped in and saved me before I could make the dumbest decision of my life.”

  “What’s so dumb about it? Sounds like free money.”

  “I was just selling all the equity in my house. I’d’ve made myself into a renter in my own home.” He looked down at his dirt-caked boots. “So why not just sell the house and move somewhere else? Home values are a whole lot higher than they used to be. I’d’ve never been able to afford anything even halfway decent.

  “That’s the truth about the American dream, Laz. The dream’s really just for bankers. Everyone needs a mortgage to own their home, and then, at the end of their lives, most of us need a bank to bail us out by loaning us money that’s already ours.”

  “So Justin’s offer to buy you out saved you from winding up homeless like me?” Laz asked with a wink.

  “No winks necessary, friend. You’re absolutely right. So I owe him my life. My livelihood, anyway. Sure, I don’t get to call the shots around here anymore—not completely, anyway. And sure, I don’t exactly agree with Justin politically. But I know a good idea when I see one, and I tell you what, I’m gonna fight to make it work until I can’t stand no more.”

  “Hard to imagine you unable to stand,” Laz said. He failed to notice the darkness this brought to Dan’s expression. “You’re solid as a goddamn tree. I hope I’m just like you when I get to be your age.”

  In an effort to ease the tension in his heart, Dan deflected. “Quit trying to butter me up. The cows still need their evening milking, and you ain’t getting out of it that easy.”

  As the new arrivals started filing out, one by one, each of them with a shiny new wristband, Laz whistled.

  “How the hell we gonna house all these people? We’re full up to the brim as it is.”

  As if in response, the first few people to exit the machine shed began helping a well-dressed man Dan didn’t recognize unload what looked like giant stacks of canvas from a U-Haul attached to the rear bus. Dan furrowed his brow at this until the little group started removing poles from the same space.

  “Tents, I guess,” Laz said, simultaneously reaching the same conclusion.

  Dan grunted. “Guess we’d better go help.” He started down the hill, and Laz followed alongside.

  “I ever tell you what convinced me that Justin wasn’t out of his damn mind?” Dan asked.

  “You mean you’re convinced of that now?” Laz quipped.

  “It was his point about housing. That was my first question for him, how the hell we would house all these people. He said that we would have to build barracks—lower-cost housing.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Yeah, but what convinced me that Justin was different from most nitwit liberals is why he wanted to do barracks. It wasn’t a socialism thing. Wasn’t about making sure everyone was treated equally and all had their fair share. It wasn’t even about cramming as many people as possible into the smallest spaces possible. It was about trying to create a housing economy exactly the opposite of the one that almost put me into a reverse mortgage.”

  “How do you mean?”

  They were halfway down the hill now, and Dan couldn’t deny that his joints were achier than they’d ever been, and how his breath had grown short already. Nora, with her tendency to hover as a caregiver, would want to know about this as soon as her father could tell her. But Dan didn’t want to worry her. What were a few aching joints and shallow lungs anyway? Nothing to get all bent out of shape about. Not like his hands had started to go yet. He could live without full function of a lot of things, but his hands? That would be the end of it. Of everything, really.

  “Justin wanted barracks as the starter houses—lower-cost housing,” he said, having to take his time because of the breathing problem. “Because it creates a trickle-up housing market. In the real world, houses have always been built for the rich. This has been going on long enough by now that the old, rundown houses wind up trickling down to the poor. Poor people live in the houses and neighborhoods that aren’t suitable for the wealthy anymore.

  “But here’s the thing.” Dan stopped, in part to punctuate his point and in part to catch his breath. “There are a hell of a lot more poor people than rich people in the real world. Always been that way. So when you have lots of people trying to buy or rent a smaller amount of housing, there’s not enough to go around and the cost of living goes up.”

  “So starting with the poor-people housing and then building new and better places for those of us who make better livings will change all that?” Laz asked.

  “Pa
rtly. The other part is how we pay to construct the housing. The rent Evan collects goes to pay those who build and maintain the structures. Savings from that rent goes to build more housing that produces more rent. Meantime, the builders around here get low-interest loans to build the basic housing and higher-interest loans to build the more expensive, standalone places like the one you live in. All of this ensures that housing trickles up on this Farm.”

  “Huh.”

  They continued on before Laz came to it.

  “Gonna need to build a hell of a lot of basic housing for this new lot.”

  “You got that right.”

  Maybe there was something about watching all this activity, but Dan was suddenly struck with a notion that hadn’t occurred to him before: this farm he used to own had never been stronger. More than that, as much pride as he’d always held as a farmer, his own life had never felt quite as meaningful as it did now. He’d spent a lifetime tilling the land and providing food for his neighbors. But now he was doing something truly noble—helping poor people from all over the country to bring meaning into their own lives. As a beautiful side benefit, the whole thing would serve as something of a spit-in-the-eye situation for the rich and powerful who’d always looked down their noses at Dan’s operation.

  Before Justin’s experiment came to town, Dan had run a farm flailing to remain in the black. He’d run a drowning David while Big Agriculture Goliath chuckled at his misfortune from the sunny safety of the beach. Before, Dan had hoped the produce he sold would make a high enough return on the commodities market. Now, these brilliant hobo-entrepreneurs were setting up at farmers markets and the Circus, selling directly to consumers and getting somewhere between three and ten times the price for eggs, corn, milk, honey, and everything else that used to hold bare-bones value whenever Dan tried to sell it.

  Hell, even if these thirty-five new people wound up eating half the crops they could produce, this farm would still be significantly more profitable than it had ever been before. Of course it also helped that Farm Bucks made the labor so cheap, but in truth, nobody much cared about the labor cost side of things anymore anyway. It wasn’t an employer/laborer scenario any longer. They were all in this together. Even Laz, a guy that Dan, in his younger years, would’ve treated like a foreman to order around, took more pride in the harvest and those who worked on it than Dan could ever remember taking himself. Even the folks who cleaned Dan’s farmhouse every day, did his laundry, and made his bed did so not only for money, but because they felt a sense of ownership in how this Farm operated.

  And Dan still got a kick out of how he received these services for almost no cost. Back before this experiment started, he couldn’t have afforded housekeeping services in his wildest dreams. Nora had been the only one around to lend him a hand after a hard day in the fields. And she’d been planning on leaving for culinary school. God only knows how Dan would’ve managed his household after she left.

  Nora. Poor girl. She had the biggest heart Dan had ever seen, and his illness had broken it entirely. Give her credit, though. She was tough enough to hide it.

  By now, Dan had managed to ride his aching legs all the way down to the tent-pitching operation, Laz in tow. Now he stood face-to-face with the well-dressed stranger who’d bused all these new people in. Dan was sure he had never met this man before, but something about him seemed familiar. He was rich-guy handsome, his expensive skin-care routine as evident as his fresh manicure. Save for sunscreen, Dan had never slathered a single lotion on his face, and he wouldn’t even know where to go to get a manicure, but he was no dummy. This guy was stupidly rich, and this was probably the first time he’d ever set foot on a proper farm.

  “Nice place you got here,” the man said, parting his lips to reveal a smile prettied up by the white, pearly perfection of outrageously expensive tooth implants. “Sure am glad I could help.”

  “How exactly you helping?” Laz asked, taking the words right out of Dan’s mouth.

  “I saw the piece on 60 Minutes, and it inspired me so much that I decided I just had to get in my helicopter and come pitch in immediately. But then, I docked my yacht in Miami, where I met these fine folks.” He gestured all around him at the thirty-plus people milling about, poking at their watches and generally looking confused and put upon. “Since I was already heading up here, and since I have the means to rent some buses, I figured . . .”

  “You figured you’d introduce thirty-some new people into the Farm all at once,” Dan said skeptically.

  “See? I’m helping. Now you have more people.”

  His expensive smile seemed genuine enough, even if the sight of it made Dan want to do some punching. “What’s your name, stranger?” he asked.

  The man extended a hand that, in spite of all the heat and grime of the day, was as clean and smooth as polished stone. “Elliot Larson. Pleased to meet you.”

  Chapter 12 Your People, My People

  The idea that immigrants are stealing people’s jobs only makes sense in a world where there is limited work. But if you look around, there is plenty that needs fixing. It’s not immigrants who determine the number of available jobs and how much the jobs pay; that’s what the banking system does.

  —Justin Wolfe

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Evan said. “We’re grateful to have you here.”

  Evan couldn’t be sure why he said that, because it wasn’t true. This Farm needed a billionaire volunteer who’d made his fortune on automation almost as much as it needed a plague of locusts.

  “Happy to contribute,” Larson said. “And let me tell you, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at farming. I have some ideas about how we can make the harvest basically run itself.”

  David gave a bemused little grin at this. Laz, meanwhile, looked sweaty and faint. So did Dan, for that matter, who was fanning himself as he sat on the tailgate of the U-Haul.

  “You just brought us thirty-six new people,” Evan said. “With all respect, the last thing we need is a solution that will make their labor contributions unnecessary.”

  Larson’s shrug-off expression was effortlessly smooth. “You let me know when you change your mind. Everyone loves a good robot.”

  “Whoa, I’ve heard that one before,” came the voice.

  Evan slumped. At a moment when he was trying to stand up and assert his status in the face of a billionaire who really kind of intimidated him—and at a moment when he found himself surrounded by thirty-six extremely confused new residents who had spent the long drive up from Miami getting promised God knows what by Larson—the last thing he needed was for Nora to show up and demonstrate her considerably stronger spine.

  Larson sucked in an audible wheeze of delight. “Nora Pastor. If truth be told, I had forgotten about you.”

  Nora chuffed. And Evan could guess why. There was absolutely no way Elliot Larson had forgotten about her. Who could possibly? Especially when the two of them had reportedly once shared an intimate moment—a moment Nora had assured Evan repeatedly that she had immediately regretted.

  “Can’t help but wonder about your timing, El,” Nora said, her use of a pet name landing like a roundhouse to Evan’s spleen. “Justin makes a very public emergency flight back to New York, and now here you are, busing in all these people we can’t support.”

  Larson didn’t hesitate. “Everything I’ve seen and read says you can support them. You’ve got a billionaire backing this place. I can’t imagine a community better supported by its government.”

  A sudden frustration swept through Evan White. “That’s such a huge misconception that I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Both Larson and Nora turned their gazes on him, his startled and hers deliciously impressed about how Evan did in fact have a spine.

  “Were you even listening to me at Jekyll Island?” Evan continued hotly.

  “I do admit to some drifting here and there, whenever you got into the weeds.” Larson gave an oily smile to Nora, who rolled her eyes.


  “And you watched 60 Minutes, I trust.”

  Larson shrugged. “Why I’m here. Was just telling your farmer over there that I was so inspired I just had to help.”

  “Well then you should know that this has nothing to do with Justin’s money, or anything resembling government help.”

  “You mean you’re not just running some giant welfare scheme? This isn’t a socialist state, here to coddle all these downtrodden souls? Because that’s what I’ve been telling everyone in the van—”

  “If you’re going to stay, I’ll ask you to stop being purposely obtuse.”

  Now Larson looked offended. Nora, meanwhile, shifted her expression to one that Evan, in all his sexual inexperience, still wasn’t entirely familiar with. Later, he would learn that this expression was called seduced.

  “Yes, we’re giving these people money in the form of direct deposits,” Evan said. “But it’s not welfare or socialism. It’s a matter of giving people the means to manage their own lives.”

  “But don’t you have to tell them where to go and what to do for a living?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Larson visibly deflated. “I guess I had this all wrong then.”

  “This Farm empowers people with the promise of money—both the guaranteed money they receive and any money they wish to earn by creating their own work and businesses. In this way, it’s absolutely a capitalist society. It’s self-organizing. And your implication about government control? It’s far less necessary than in the real world. That’s one of the principles of an advanced economy. People need money; they don’t need governmental aid. Once you get the government out of the business of helping people, then the government can be half the size. People start taking care of themselves, and meanwhile, the government starts running on a surplus. And suddenly, it can actually pay its bills.”

  “Amen to that,” Dan chimed in from the truck.