John Gilstrap - At all costs

Who was this man anyway? The father he’d known these thirteen years never would have tolerated this kind of verbal assault-he’d have smacked his kid into next month. That his dad tolerated it now pissed Travis off even more. He wanted a fight, dammit-a knock-down, drag-out brawl where he’d get to take his best shot.

The enormity of it all was beyond his comprehension.

“You know, they taught it to us in school,” Travis said at last, his voice becoming unsteady. “They call it the Newark Incident. The worst chemical disaster in history.” He winced suddenly as his voice cracked, and he pressed his hands against the sides of his head as if to keep it from exploding. “Jesus, Dad! I mean, this is like the Holocaust or the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre! I mean… God, it’s got a name!”

Jake stood, too, and grasped his son’s shoulders. Travis shook himself free and backed further away. “I told you the story yesterday,” Jake said as reasonably as he knew how, “and every word I said was true. All your mom and I did was run.”

“But you lied!”

“Look at me, Trav,” Jake said softly.

Travis didn’t want eye contact. That’s how his dad always won their fights. Still, the pull of his old man’s gaze drew Travis’s eyes right where Jake wanted them.

“You’re right, son. I did lie. I lied to anyone and everyone I’ve met in the past fourteen years. Including you. There’s no excuse for doing what I’ve done, but even if I had it all to do over again, I still can’t think of how I would have done things differently. I’m sorry.” He cupped his son’s chin in the palm of his hand and smiled. No matter how hard an exterior the boy showed to his friends and his classmates, Jake had always been able to look straight through to his soul. “But you must believe that I’m not lying now.”

Travis shook himself away. “Then why don’t you just go to the police? Right now. Just tell them what you told me, and we’ll get it all fixed.” He was crying openly now, and as soon as he realized it, he turned quickly away, to face the woods.

Jake tried to hug him one more time but with no success. “It’s just not that simple, Trav. It’s been too long now. Whoever organized all of this had a plan. And it was a very good one. By surviving, your mother and I set ourselves up to take the fall. The person who did this, he wanted us to look guilty, and by running away, we ended up doing our very best to help him out.”

“Why us? What did we do?”

Jake sighed and stepped closer. God, it hurt him to say this. “It’s not about all of us. It’s about your mom and me. You’re part of it only because you’re a part of us.”

Travis sat heavily at the base of a healthy oak, his back turned. He hugged his shins and buried his face against his knees as he fought to regain control. It was like someone had put a time bomb in the middle of his life, and now the alarm was ringing. Somehow he’d always believed that as he got older, he’d stop being just a trailer park kid; that life would somehow become fair. Now, as he fought back tears, he realized that fairness wasn’t part of life’s package.

Jake’s heart withered under the strain of his son’s sadness. His feelings of utter helplessness. He’d visited that place in his own soul many, many times.

Back in the early days, while they were learning to become invisible, Jake had dedicated hundreds of hours to mentally re-creating the events of that August afternoon in Newark. He knew, firsthand, that the “why me” puzzle could drive a person over the edge if dwelled on too long.

Whoever the architect of the “Newark Incident” was, and whatever his reasons, he could have killed the Enviro-Kleen workers anywhere, just as he could have blown up the magazine and its contents anytime. For some reason, the killings and the explosion had to happen together, of that Jake was sure. And it had to happen in such a way that somebody would get punished.

Inevitably, his thoughts always came around to the body that Adam Pomeroy had found just before the shooting started. That had to be it. The way Jake figured it, the asshole who put all of this together did it as part of an elaborate plan to hide a corpse. After all, what better place to put it than among a bunch of other corpses? Maybe the guy even knew that the fires and contamination would force the government to seal everything off and entomb the evidence forever.

Fourteen years ago Jake had tormented himself trying to solve the riddle of why Mr. X didn’t just move the damn body and bury it elsewhere, but Carolyn eventually came up with a plausible theory: The EPA shutdown had caught Mr. X by surprise. Once the site was discovered and shut down, it was too late to go back in without being detected.

Over time, Jake and Carolyn had spun countless twists on every possible detail, but they always came back to that body. They’d even fantasized once about sneaking back inside and collecting the evidence that would prove their innocence, but the risks of getting caught or being poisoned by residual chemicals always seemed to outweigh the slim chance of finding the exculpatory evidence they sought. At best, it would have been a shot in the dark. And a dangerous one at that.

Now, as he watched his son fight off panic, the details of that long-forgotten pipe dream began to leak back into his consciousness.

You’re crazy, he told himself. A thousand things have changed since then.

But a million others hadn’t. If he’d read the newspaper articles correctly, and if the media reported the facts accurately, nothing in that magazine had changed since the day they’d escaped with their lives. Everything should have remained untouched.

It can work…

He shook his head, trying to knock the craziness out of his brain, but the flame of hope burned brighter the more he thought about it. Sure, there were risks. And they’d have to step into the open for a while, but by God, it could work!

And what did they have to lose? This was no life! What had he been thinking? The tragic flaw of their escape plan, he saw now, had always been that it stopped with the escape. The rest had been too unpredictable. What kind of future was there for them, huddled in some shithole of a trailer, living in fear of the moment when the lovebirds might return with more condoms? Once recognized, what would the Donovan family do then? How would they keep the lovebirds quiet? Kill them? Not hardly.

At least this new plan offered a glimmer of salvation. And if he and Carolyn died in the process, then at least their son would grow old knowing his parents had done their best to redeem themselves.

Sometimes honor lay more in the fight itself than in the outcome.

Even as he recognized the absurdity of the notion, Jake felt strangely energized, as if, in the space of a few seconds, years had dropped from his age. This could work!

“So is this it?” Travis asked, his back still turned. His voice sounded cloudy. “We just run forever?”

Jake took a seat on the ground next to his son. “Funny you should ask…”

For the first time in four decades, Clayton Albricht seriously considered just staying in bed. The press had been assembling on his front lawn all night, as he worked feverishly with his staff to figure out a way to control the damage.

He cringed as he heard the clip on the morning news of his press secretary telling the assembled reporters, “The senator vehemently and categorically denies that he has ever engaged in homosexual or pedophilic activities…”

Christ, even the denial was damning.

No one could prove, of course, that Frankel had anything to do with this, so it was out of the question even to suggest such a thing. That left Albricht with lame, paranoic claims of unidentified conspiracies to defame him. Every excuse he offered sounded comically defensive.