This morning, when I took a swivel-seat across the plastic table from Linda Lyle’s easy smile — which is anything but plastic, itself — at the McDonald’s on the outer loop highway outside Tyler, she reached for my hand and gave it a familiar, grandmotherly squeeze. Her warm welcome belied the dark impetus for our meeting: The worried, rambling voicemail she left me about Carron Nielsberg “screwing with” her neighbors at the Treetops Trailer Community. “They’re running some kind of tests on our people out here,” she said in her message. “And it don’t look legitimate to me.”
Fine, I said — happy to have her only daughter back home, especially since it means she’s got someone to share a pot of real coffee with after my stepdad switched to decaf last year.
But first: the small-town pleasantries.
“How’s your mama, Minne?”
“I heard he was having some issues,” Lyle said. “I hope he’s doing better.”
I suspected Lyle did not hope that — she and my Daddy Deke have never liked each other — and said so.
“I do, though! For your mama’s sake,” she said, winking.
After a download of Lyle’s own dramas — her son is getting married, and it’s turned into a battle of wills over the guest list — she reached into the quilted Vera Bradley bag at her side and pulled out a creased flyer, sliding it across the table so I could get a closer look.
In all-caps, the black-and-white page screamed an invitation to the “HEALTHY 4 USA MEDICAL FAIR” the top, under the words “EARN FAST CASH!!”
“You say the words ‘fast cash’ to anybody in my neck of the woods, and they come a-running,” Lyle said, tapping the paper. Her “neck of the woods” is Treetops, for which Lyle serves as a kind of unofficial mayor, having lived there for nearly 40 years. She owns a half-dozen lots in the neighborhood, and was described in the local paper a few years back as the “angel landlady” of Gallum County for her policy of waiving rents every December. To say that she’s plugged into the local goings-on would be an understatement of epic proportion.
Lyle’s family has lived in Turner Falls for generations. Her “Mamaw Lyle” and later, her own mother, worked as “helpers” for a series of white families in Turner Falls and the surrounding areas while she was growing up, and the Lyle men managed the laundry at Turner Meats, which was for most of the 20th century the primary chicken and pork supplier for East Texas and Louisiana.
Lyle got her biology degree from Prairie View A&M, making her the first person in her family to graduate from college. Today, she works as a home health nurse and also volunteers as one, often for Treetoppers who can’t afford a trip to the clinic or who aren’t mobile enough to get out of their homes to see a doctor.
After this summer’s devastating Independence Day storms, Lyle opened her home to neighbors as an emergency shelter for those injured in the fallout. A couple of folks are still staying with her while they wait on repairs to their trailers. Now, they’re all navigating the growing sprawl of Carron Nielsberg’s latest venture, RevTech, which has established what Lyle said looks like a semi-permanent footprint in the neighborhood.
“It wasn’t like that computer man rolled into town and I just said, ‘Come on in,’” said Lyle. “Maybe I did fall off the turnip truck yesterday, but I know enough to recognize when something sounds too good to be true.”
Lyle said she first heard of RevTech a couple of days before July 4th, when Treetoppers found flyers for the “HEALTHY 4 USA” event in their mailboxes. The flyer promised “fireworks to follow” an event offering $500 and free tests for a variety of conditions ranging from “cholesterale” (sic) to diabetes, mental health, and — the thing that really “whipped [her] neck around” — something called “mortal events.”
“Like I said, maybe I’m fresh from the turnip truck. But what in all get-out is a mortal event?” And, more troubling to Lyle: “What won’t folks out here do for $500? That ain’t fair pay for a health test or research trial, if that’s even what this is. That’s bribery.”
On the afternoon of the 4th, Lyle said, three white vans pulled into Treetops and a handful of folks wearing scrubs unloaded, setting up a mobile clinic-type station at the community pool. For a couple of hours, it looked to Lyle like a pretty standard medical operation — Treetoppers signed medical releases, gave nurses their health histories, and had their blood pressure taken. Lyle didn’t participate — she’s unusual among Treetoppers, in that she gets good insurance through work and likes her doctor. And, she said, something felt off with the sudden arrival of the strangers in the tent, anyway. But many of her neighbors went ahead with the program and even had blood drawn, she said. Those folks got seen by a young man in a white coat who introduced himself as “Dr. Mike,” who Lyle estimated spent about a half-hour inside a white tent with each patient.
Until the storm hit.
“That wind came up out of nowhere,” remembered Lyle. “We hustled into the pool house, which is damn near — excuse my language — the only real permanent structure out there.”
The tornado touched down practically in Lyle’s backyard, and ripped the roof off of the pool house where the Treetoppers had taken shelter. Lyle said she “shuddered” to think what would have happened if they hadn’t gotten her neighbors into the pool house in time. Because what did happen in the pool house was bad enough.
According to Lyle, another longtime Treetops resident — I’m withholding his name for now, for reasons that will become clear enough — took a foot-long length of rebar to the back of his skull when the pool house roof peeled off, knocking him out cold with the rod protruding from his neck. She and the RevTech folks managed to stabilize him, but in Lyle’s professional opinion, “it didn’t look good.” So bad, in fact, that Lyle “was wondering did I need to get on the phone to his kids.”
The RevTech folks told Lyle they could handle her neighbor’s injury, and carted the man into “Dr. Mike’s” tent. Lyle moved on to treating other neighbors for minor cuts and bruises.
“Those RevTech folks never came back out of that tent,” said Lyle. “Not even to check on anybody else. Not a single solitary person.” She said she spent most of the evening trying to get through to Gallum County’s jammed 911 dispatch on behalf of Treetoppers who she thought needed more serious examinations and seemingly weren’t going to get it from the mysterious medical professionals on site. She returned to her own trailer around 1 a.m., with lights in the RevTech tent still “blaring.”
The next morning, Lyle put on a pair of fresh scrubs and returned to the pool area. What she saw there “just about gave [her] a cardiac event of [her] own.”
It was her neighbor — the man whose neck had been impaled hours before by the pool house rebar — sipping his usual morning can of Lone Star. When she asked him if he was okay — in fact, how he was okay — she said her neighbor told her he’d been given some kind of treatment that felt “like coon piss on a live wire.”
“But he was sitting there happy as a damn clam — I am sorry for cursing — drinking his beer,” Lyle said. “Showed me his neck, too. Just a little bitty scrape there to the right of his C1, C2. I ain’t seen anything like it in 67 years on this planet.”
Lyle said her neighbor then offered her two things: a beer (which she declined), and a pamphlet, which she accepted. “He had a whole stack of these things, said he swiped ‘em off a table inside that tent.”
When Lyle read the contents, she asked her neighbor how many more he had — and if she could take several. He said he was happy to oblige; he thought she might be able to show them to somebody in her “nurse work” who could decipher them.
With this, Lyle reached back into her bag and pulled out a handful of glossy blue-and-white documents, placing them over the creased flyer on the table between us.
I told Lyle to hang on a second while I ran out to the truck. When I came back, I added my own pamphlet to the pile — one of the same pamphlets Carron Nielsberg gave me two weeks ago when he introduced me to the man claiming to be deceased President Rudy Ruiz.
The pamphlets are identical. And they also explain why Linda Lyle said she decided to give me a call about her RevTech concerns: my Forbes cover profile of Nielsberg figures prominently on a back fold.
“I thought to myself, ‘No way Minne Rebuke is in league with these clowns,’” said Lyle. “But there’s your name, right there, plain as day.”
Lyle said she worried over her neighbor and the flyer — and my name on it — for weeks, until word got around about my bizarre meeting with Nielsberg and, supposedly, President Ruiz. When she found my newsletter, she said, she realized she was right — no way I was part of this. “I know you didn’t fall off that turnip truck, Minne. This is disturbing. No other word for it. Disturbing.”
I don’t know, I told her. Because I sure did get into a van with Carron Nielsberg and listen while he and the most recognizable pastor in the whole country tried to convince me they’d resurrected a dead president. That’s more like falling into a turnip truck, at least when supposedly reversible “mortal events” are involved.
I asked Lyle if she’d put me in touch with her neighbor — the guy whose injury should have put him in the ground, not at the pool with a beer at 7 a.m. She said she’d do me one better — she’d get me into Treetops, past the RevTech fences, and sit me in front of the miracle man himself.
She did indeed deliver on that promise. But all I can say right now is that the turnip truck, as it were, is carrying of a hell of a lot more than root vegetables.
What else I’m reading right now:
“Why ‘pro-life’ Texas is arguing in court that a fetus has no rights” (MSNBC)
“I’m 45, a billionaire, obsessed with staying young — and hard to date” (NY Post)
“Pastor Demolishes a Barbie House With Baseball Bat for Some Ungodly Reason” (Daily Beast)
“Judge halts “religious-liberty training” order as Southwest argues it’s unconstitutional” (Law Dork)
“How to prepare for Hurricane Hilary, the first tropical storm to hit L.A. in 94 years” (Los Angeles Times)
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