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people, there’s no ‘just’ in there, honey. If you think money can buy you what you want, what you need…if you think money can transform you into someone else, then—”
    “Dell, remember—just a few weeks ago?—that old man was walking by himself near the jetty on the other side of the bridge? And that gang of…I don’t even know what to call them, but they beat him to death. Four of them, and what did they get? Seventy dollars and some change. How could that be worth a man’s life?”
    “You’ve been reading those press releases again.”
    “What is
that
supposed to mean?”
    “Isn’t that what it said in the papers? That the prosecutor said they killed an old man for a lousy seventy dollars?”
    “So?”
    “So they didn’t kill him for seventy dollars, honey. They killed him because they’ve got lizard brains. When they threatened him, maybe the old man still wouldn’t give them his money. So they figured he must have a
lot
of money to stand up to the four of them. Or maybe they just beat him to death for the fun of it, and the money was just a bonus.”
    “To you, there’s no difference? I mean, whether they were just stupid robbers or blood-thirsty savages?”
    “I wasn’t there, little girl. But it sure didn’t make any difference to the old man.”
    —
    T he next few days were quiet.
    Early summer. Hummingbirds fighting over a fuchsia bush,jays screaming at the chipmunks digging up acorns they’d stashed. Rascal patrolling, keeping the whole place a cat-free zone.
    But that wasn’t his job; it was just something he wanted to do. When Dolly was outside, humming a Piaf tune to herself as she groomed one of the lily hybrids she was trying to develop, Rascal went into a different mode.
    Guard.
    No barking, no threatening. If you walked back there and surprised Dolly, you wouldn’t be walking out. Rascal was a self-launching torpedo in a tiny ocean he could navigate blind. And if you dove in, you were dead in the water.
    Everything as it should be.
    Peaceful. Precious. Protected.
    —
    T hen a coalition of environmentalists showed up.
    I don’t mean they were outsiders. This town is home to dozens of Green Groups, each of them aimed at a different target. Lumber mills, toxic waste, endangered species…
    Some of them were always “calling for” something. Boycotts were a favorite: eggs had to come from free-range chickens, beef from cattle that hadn’t been dosed with antibiotics, salmon mustn’t have been “ranched.” Some also went international: whaling, dolphin capture, global warming…a long list.
    “Green” had religious status, but some of its splinter groups were so small they only had one member. I know this because of a letter the newspaper printed. The writer proclaimed he’d “be well within my rights” if he were to go ahead with a lawsuit he was “contemplating.” His next-door neighbor actually
smoked
in his own backyard! So, every time the wind shifted,the letter writer was exposed to secondhand smoke against his will.
    I don’t know if he expected some enviro-posse to form or what, but responders either took his letter as some kind of spoof or loudly distanced
their
group from him.
    Me, I didn’t think this nasty little man cared about anything but his “rights.” Deep-rooted entitlement was like any other infection, except for one thing: whoever caught it didn’t want it cured, he wanted it spread.
    Normally, for the actual groups to join forces on
anything
was unheard of, but now they’d united for the common cause of blocking this logging road the government wanted to build.
    It wasn’t the road itself they had banded together to fight, it was the route that had been picked for it—a jagged Z-line through a few hundred acres of land nobody wanted. Nothing grew there except for some scrubby bush and stunted trees. No river, no lake, no access to the bayfront. Any road cut through there probably wouldn’t even displace a raccoon. But it was