Durango by Gary Hart

edgy. Sam, things aren’t good around here these days, he said. He waved in the general direction of the town and beyond. It doesn’t seem like Durango these days. The atmosphere is not good.
    Right enough on that, Leonard, Maynard said. My family’s been here well over fifty years and I’ve never seen this place in such an uproar. The longer this project stays unresolved, the more this community becomes a political war zone. We’ve got neighbors who’ve lived next door to each other for decades and now won’t speak to each other.
    Cloud said, I ran into Sheriff Ramsay the other day. He was making his weekly cruise through the reservation, and he stopped in to our council offices. He was pretty casual about it, but he made it clear that there are one or two hotheads that might want to make trouble. He asked the tribal law enforcement team to be on the lookout.
    This isn’t like Durango, Sam Maynard said. We’ve had our politics and our campaigns and our debates about this and that. But we’re going to have to either build this project or kill it and move on. Otherwise, it’s a sore that could become some kind of cancer pretty quick.
    What have you heard from the feds? Cloud asked.
    Since you and I were back in Washington a couple of months ago, Maynard said, I’ve kept in touch with the staffs of our congressmen and senators and, though they’re committed to helping us, it’s a struggle to get the construction money. All they can talk about back there is balancing the budget.
    Cloud said, But they’ve got to understand this project’s important. We can’t get anything done without it.
    Understood, Maynard said. But you’ve got five hundred other people in the Congress who’ve got some federal project they think is as important as ours. I made your point to Senator Thornton’s staff guy and he said, Listen, we can get votes for Animas–La Plata, but you know what that means? It means Thornton has to vote for projects in every state those votes come from—and there goes your balanced federal budget.
    So what you’re saying is, we’re stuck, Cloud said. To get the fed’s dollars, our congressional folks have to trade votes, and next election time they get crucified for running up spending.
    Sam Maynard nodded. Politically, that’s the way it works. But I’ll keep in touch with them, and maybe they’ll figure something out. In the meantime, though, when any of the congressmen come down here, they get an earful from the project opponents. So they’re trapped in the local politics. They support the project and half of southwestern Colorado is angry. They oppose the project and the other half of southwestern Colorado is angry.
    That’s why we pay them the big bucks, Sam, Cloud said and then laughed wryly.
    19.
    Mrs. Farnsworth had always had great admiration for Daniel Sheridan but could not claim a close friendship. She had come to believe some years after Sheridan left office that he had been treated unfairly, both by the press and by some elements of the community. As to her own paper, the Herald, she and her husband had struggled to treat him fairly during that period when the controversy was treated in the statewide Denver papers as a scandal and a sensation. On more than one occasion, she had gone back through all the Herald stories from the time and was struck by a realization. Except for his brief announcement of his resignation—with great regret—from the county commission, Sheridan had never made a comment or submitted to an interview. He had refused to speak in his own defense.
    Mrs. Farnsworth spent time considering this. Why had he not? Why not approach the Farnsworths for an open-ended discussion of the matter and get his story on the record? His silence had been assumed, especially in an age of ego and self-advancement, as a tacit admission of guilt—if not of corruption, then of