Cloning Galinda Read online

  Cloning

  Galinda

  A Novel

  JAN SMOLDERS

  CLONING GALINDA

  A NOVEL

  Copyright © 2017 Jan Smolders.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2194-7 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2195-4 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017907714

  iUniverse rev. date: 05/15/2017

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgements

  For their contribution to this manuscript, I express my gratitude to my spouse, Lut; my daughter, Helena, and her husband, Peter Fellows; my sons, Willem and Tom; Krista Hill of L. Talbott Editorial, Matt Schwartz and Jeff Stewart.

  Chapter 1

  7:30 p.m.

  Friday, February 17, 2012

  The City of Noredge, Ohio

  “I don’t buy it,” Mary Jenkins muttered quietly to Joe, her hand covering her right cheek. She had been standing with him at a community meeting for the last twenty minutes, nervously shifting her weight back and forth. Arms firmly crossed, lips pursed, she listened and frowned. “Those suits are too smooth—feel too superior—the mayor and the ministers already in their pockets.”

  “Shh!” Joe whispered, hands behind back, chest protruding, a hint of a kind smile.

  “Not on my land! Jenkins land. Over my dead body.”

  He sighed audibly. “Quiet.” He threw quick glances left and right.

  Mary nodded.

  The “suits” were three officials of the Doornaert Oil and Gas Company headquartered in nearby Canton, Ohio. One had said he was a lawyer, and his two companions spoke polished marketing and vague public relations lingo. It had rubbed Mary the wrong way from the moment they’d uttered their first words.

  This was serious business, a community matter, the issue of bringing fracking, hydraulic fracturing, to the fourteen thousand citizens of Noredge. The elderly, bald Mayor Sanders, all of his two hundred pounds on his short-ish frame, had opened the meeting. “Community Outreach,” the announcement had said.

  Mary knew a thing or two about fracking. Amidst kids’ soccer games and homework, the kitchen, house cleaning and her fifth-grade teaching job at the Deep Creek Public School on Main Street she had read up for more than a year on the good and bad of the oil and gas industry’s recent technology. She knew the history of a good number of fracking wells in Ohio—and that more than one hundred of them were being drilled every day in the USA.

  In her mid-thirties, divorced for five years, Mary lived with her boys Andy and Jimmy, ages nine and six, and her “refrigerator” boyfriend, Joe. She and Joe had been together for eighteen months. He worked for Doornaert, employed there since 2009. When she first met Joe Bertolo she had fallen head over heels in love with the uncomplicated, former high school linebacker. His straightforward talk, his voice, his rugged looks, his folksy humor—she adored all of it. But she had raised her eyebrows when he explained that he hauled “dirty water” from Doornaert wells in the region to special injection wells near Youngstown. Every day, with his huge tanker trailer. He was specialized in this work, which was, he said, much more complicated and important than he described it. He argued with conviction that he was involved in a business—fracking—that did a lot of good, but also had some problems. “Me, I don’t do any harm. I clean up. I help Doornaert be a good citizen. The company has a good reputation.” His face had radiated pride and Mary was shocked when he went on to reveal his weekly pay was fifteen hundred dollars.

  The Doornaert marketing man stood at the end of the oval table, its fifteen seats filled by elderly folks and persons of authority; he looked too refined and sounded too cocky for Mary’s taste. But his story apparently impressed the standing crowd of about sixty that had filled to capacity the Noredge Chamber of Commerce’s conference room.

  The place was spartanly decorated, with just a black and white historic picture of downtown, a framed photo of the then youthful mayor and one wide, aging bookcase sporting, besides books, a flat TV screen and piles of magazines. The heating was overdoing it. The coffee- and teapots on the table had their screw stoppers removed, signaling to the empty cups spread out over the table that they were all done for the day.

  The company’s pitch, complete with a flashy, six-minute video and patriotic music, had seemed overwhelming for many of the folks in the room. Noredge would take “the Great Leap Forward.” The Doornaert folks hadn’t credited Mao Tse-tung. Shock and awe, Mary thought, a little disdain slipping in.

  “Utica!” the Doornaert man shouted, hands up high. “Let that Utica shale under your land work for you! Make Noredge rich!”

  “That shale, the ‘source rock,’ sits a few thousand feet under your city,” the lawyer added, his tone overly friendly. “Its oil and gas have been waiting there for us for more than four hundred million years. Haven’t we tested their patience long enough?” He welcomed nods and shouts with open hands. “A good leasing fee can mean three thousand per acre or more, depending, of course, on your location and topography. That’s money in the bank. And if we can get a well or wells drilled and working on your property, you’re also looking at a minimum, mi-ni-mum, of twenty thousand dollars in royalties, per well, per well, over a period of a few years.”

  “Wow! Guaranteed?” a woman asked, sounding skeptical over the soft murmur that floated through the room.

  The law
yer nodded. “These are ballpark figures, of course, ma’am. I can’t guarantee you that the sun will come up tomorrow, but it would be a pretty good bet, right? Nothing’s guaranteed in life, but we’re not kidding. This is real. And once the well’s done producing we’ll lock it all up with cement and you’ll have your acres back unscathed.” He paused. His big smile mixed confidence and condescension.

  The woman turned to the man standing next to her, wide-eyed with both disbelief and enthusiasm.

  The murmur got louder.

  The PR man added suggestively, “And how would you like to pay two bucks at the pump? For Premium?”

  “Yeah! We won’t have to import dirty oil from dictators! We’re paying the tyrants and ayatollahs through the nose!” a young adult hollered. “USA! USA!”

  Some chimed in. “USA! USA!”

  “Quiet!” It was Phil Jones, the stocky nonagenarian in the room.

  Joe smiled at Mary.

  “How about all those accidents? That gas in the water in Pennsylvania?” The gray-haired lady’s question was barely audible.

  “The gas? The gas! Yes. Of course! The gas and all these accidents on TV! How about them?” the lawyer repeated loudly, sounding pleased with the question.

  “That faked tone,” Mary whispered.

  “Just listen.” Joe sounded a bit irritated.

  The PR man coughed and took a few seconds to formulate his answer. “Well, ma’am, like everything else in life fracking isn’t perfect all the time. But it’s damn…it’s pretty close. And we’re getting better every day. We all love clean water and air, and we’ll do our damndest, uh…our very best to keep it all clean. We Doornaert people breathe and drink too, you know.”

  For the past three or four years Mary had paid her seventy-dollar dues to the Sierra Club and devoured their literature. The Doornaert people were speaking the truth, more or less, as far as she could tell. Bloggers’ gossip and YouTube often blew accidents, failures and misery out of proportion.

  It had taken Mary many hours of late-night browsing fueled by gallons of black coffee to learn some of the intricacies of the rather new technology known as “hydraulic fracturing.” It introduced “horizontal drilling.” Vertical drilling still came first, down to the shale rock, a mile or more below the surface, but at that point it gradually went horizontal. The pipe then ran horizontally more than half a mile far inside the shale rock. One well pad could be used to drill several horizontal wells. A cement coating was always forced into the gaps left between soil and both vertical and horizontal pipes. That process was called “cementing.”

  Various fracking companies produced excellent videos about the technology. They showed how, once all pipes were in place and cemented, a number of small holes were shot through the horizontal pipe walls and cement over their entire length. In a next step the drillers pumped a secret mixture of water, sand and chemicals through the holes into the surrounding shale rock under extremely high pressure—so high that it created cracks in the rock. This was “hydraulically fracturing,” or “fracking.” Oil and methane, natural gas, thus got freed from the rock and flowed through the holes into the horizontal pipes and up to the surface through the vertical pipe.

  Applying the new technology, the drillers captured oil and gas in greater quantities from far larger areas than was possible with vertical drilling only.

  From the back of the room Mary heard a voice. “France is going to ban fracking!”

  “Oh, really?” The marketing man’s surprise was clearly feigned. He sounded amused. “You all heard that? France? The French? Our ‘friends?’” He rolled his eyes and snickered. “That must mean that fracking is a good thing, right? France? Freedom fries anybody?” His subtle finger movements invited applause.

  It came. Even Mayor Sanders, seated at the table, seemed to smile knowingly, both from his portrait on the wall and in person. It was difficult to tell whether the latter was clapping his hands or folding them.

  Mary noticed who applauded the hardest. One of them was the Methodist minister, Reverend Douglas. He stood up and, waving his Bible, declared, “Here’s what God wants, Genesis one verse twenty-six. He said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” He looked up. “Good enough for me. And I have another—”

  “So do I!” The Catholic priest, Father Bianchi, smiled confidently as he interrupted his fellow pastor and unfolded a sheet of paper.

  Pockets of conversation took a few moments to die out. The father waited.

  “No offense, Reverend, but it doesn’t look so clear cut to me. Just read Leviticus, Jeremiah, Revelation, and the terrible judgment in Isaiah: ‘They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’” He slid his hand in his coat pocket. “I’ve printed some out—”

  “I hadn’t finished, Father,” Reverend Douglas retorted. “I have Genesis—”

  “I guess it’s all a matter of interpretation.” Mayor Sanders’s tone was appeasing.

  Joe gently elbowed Mary and whispered, “That Isaiah must have been quite a tree-hugger.”

  The woman in front of them shot them an indignant look. Joe put up his palms and gave her a smile.

  Mary chuckled but showed her rascal a frown. She wanted to say, “Yep, Isaiah, prophet and Sierra Club founder,” but she bit her tongue.

  “The European Union will soon issue its general approval of fracking, with conditions which, honestly, we should welcome,” the lawyer went on, making it sound like the conclusion of his presentation. He pointed at a hand that had been raised. “Let’s answer some more questions, address your concerns. I’ve seen some on your faces.”

  A long back-and-forth ensued. Many of the queries resembled those of politicians who make statements to show off their “deep” knowledge, or that of their staff. Some of the attendees even forgot to finish with a question.

  Concerns crowded the room. Thousands of tons of sand, chemicals with secret names and millions of gallons of water would have to be supplied, day in, day out; noise and traffic might grow out of proportion; fumes would foul the air; dangerous explosions, prostitution and other problems would follow.

  On the other hand, many workers would find new jobs paying twelve hundred to two thousand dollars a week. New businesses would pop up.

  A boom, good and bad.

  Joanie, a mother of five, drove home her worries. “Sir, my apologies, but what if I wake up one morning, check the weather from my kitchen and see a bunch of service vehicles in my neighbor’s backyard, a hundred feet away from my window? What about that, sir?”

  The lawyer shook his head and put up his hand. “Won’t happen, ma’am. I swear.”

  “On paper?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And on the honor of my company. The State prohibits drilling within one hundred fifty feet from a dwelling. And what’s more, you may know we’re a family-owned business, from Canton. Jules Doornaert, our founder and owner, is a first-generation pioneer who takes care of his people and their community. He values humans and humanity. Listen carefully: we will discuss well ahead of time placement of any rig with the owner who signed the lease, and we’ll be very conscious of our impact on people’s lives and the environment.”

  “Sure?” Joanie leaned her head.

  “I know it’s asking a lot to take a lawyer at his word, but you can believe me. Mr. Doornaert is a neighbor. I’m a neighbor. A close one. And we do want to make many of you richer and happier, including the city, the community.”

  “And Doornaert,” Mary muttered.

  “Good, sir.” Joanie wrinkled her graying brow. “But what if Mr. Doornaert dies? Or sells the company? Will the next—”

  “Mr. Doornaer
t’s not going to sell, ma’am, and he’s in excellent health. So are, I’m sure, his finances. And he has two very capable sons.”

  A few slow nods and headshakes, along with eye-rolls in the crowd.

  “Next question?”

  Mary looked at her watch. “The sitter, Joe. We must go. We’re late already.”

  On their way back to Mary’s single-story house on Maple Road, Mary looked straight ahead and murmured, her voice monotone, “Doornaert has two sons. Do-nothings, losers on drugs.”

  Joe’s head veered to the right. “Hmm. Why didn’t you say that?”

  “I thought I’d better keep my mouth shut. The rumor mill already whispers that I’m a Sierra person—a Sierra plant.”

  “You ain’t.”

  “Right. But I do pay my fee and go to their website for information. I have to.”

  Joe remained silent for a while as he nervously tapped the steering wheel. Then he sought Mary’s hand and squeezed it. “If you lease and they drill on your acres, it’ll pay your mortgage for how many years?” His tone was pleading.

  “Could be many. A big ‘could,’ though. For starters, the lease must be negotiated.” She was skeptical and abhorred any kind of haggling.

  “Of course. So what? Come on! It’s cash in hand.”

  “You want it to ruin our place, our life?” Mary felt weak and scared.

  “Doornaert’s honest. The company treats me fairly. Those folks seemed sincere. ‘Neighbors,’ they said. And twenty grand per well. Maybe thirty.”

  “That’s what they tell folks.”

  “If you sign the lease and they decide not to drill on your acres, you wouldn’t have any problem: no drilling, no harm. And you’d have the fees in your pocket.”

  “Joe….” He knows better. “No harm?” She raised her voice as he made the left turn onto Maple Road. “You know damn well they might drill on Harriet’s acres, feet away from us! We’d have to ‘savor’ her mess, whether I sign or not. We must keep fracking out of Noredge! Nobody should sign.”