Innocence Ends

by Robinson, Nikolas P.

  Only Gale, fond as he is of his diseases, would send anything through the postal service with that sort of red flag emblazoned on it. It was no surprise that the smaller envelope had been contained within the larger, yellow one. He debates on waiting for Mariah to get back, but that will be easily half an hour that he doesn’t want to wait. He weighs the pros and cons and ultimately impatience wins the day.

  Attempting to open the missive with as much care as he can manage, Hewitt slowly works a letter opener shaped like dagger beneath the wax, doing his best not to break the seal so much as separate it from the envelope itself.

  On black card stock with metallic red lettering is an invitation to an address in Idaho, a town Hewitt’s never heard of which comes as no real surprise, he’s never heard of much regarding Idaho. It takes him a little while, zooming in and out for orientation, to pinpoint where the destination address is in relation to anything else.

  According to Google Maps, as best he can tell, the place is an hour and a half Northeast of Spokane, WA. Some nondescript town nestled somewhere in the Western reaches of the Rocky Mountains.

  Hewitt spends the next half an hour crawling down a rabbit hole, a propensity for which he’s never quite able to curb. He spends that time researching the destination online through numerous resources out of an obsessive quirk of his personality. There is nothing in his research, as disappointing as he finds that to be, that would explain why Gale would be there or why he would be inviting anyone else to join him.

  The phone call later that evening from Mariah confirms for Hewitt that he wasn’t the only one Gale had reached out to. She’d received a similar letter and gotten distracted while attempting to get ready to return to his place. They chat about it for a short while, Hewitt filling her in on what he’s managed to learn about the little town. They spend a while attempting to figure out what this little mystery might be before they wind up being forced to call Gale and give up on sorting it out for themselves. He waits for Mariah to get to his house before making the call, wanting to be sure she can hear both sides of the conversation over the speaker.

  An email comes in from Kateb, who informs Hewitt that both he and Miles had received similar invitations wherever they are at this time. The email from Kateb isn’t forthcoming in offering up any details concerning where in the world those two might be. Hewitt has learned not to be particularly disappointed when that sort of information isn’t provided. Usually, it meant that they were in one war zone or another, Miles deep in the shit and Kateb assigned as a civilian monitor of some kind, writing up reports for the Department of Defense and making money on the side as a journalist for whatever news outlet wanted his copy. Down the road, inevitably, his friends would track down a story with Kateb’s byline in some publication or another and they’d obtain some insight as to where their friends had been and what they’d been doing.

  Now that both Miles and Kateb had gone freelance, the secrecy was worse than it had ever been when the two of them had been enlisted. NDAs were more binding than actual military security clearance where private contractors were concerned. The legal repercussions for violation were more frightening than they had been while the two had been operating directly for Uncle Sam.

  Gale had managed to time things perfectly, or he capitalized on his various contacts established during long years of working for the CDC and WHO in order to guarantee that the deliveries would be made simultaneously.

  Hewitt takes it upon himself to contact Abraham, who, after sorting through the pile of that morning’s mail, confirms that the same invitation had arrived at his home.

  That covered all of them.

  There was no way for Hewitt to know who else might have received one of the invitations, as no one knew what outside relationships Gale had going on or what ancillary contacts he might have through the work he notoriously played close to the chest.

  All any of them could know for sure was that the core group of friends had all been delivered these same messages on the same day.

  Mariah finally shows up and Hewitt dials the number. Gale’s phone rings through to voicemail, “Hey, it’s Hewitt. We got the invites you sent. Give me a call back when you get the chance.”

  There isn’t anything more for him to say and he always hated leaving messages in the first place.

  Especially with Gale, leaving messages has always been a 50/50 sort of thing as far as whether he even listens to them. Neither of them expects any sort of immediate response, so they go about the rest of the evening as they would have without the mysterious deliveries.

  It is almost a week later when Gale finally returns the call, informing Hewitt that his wasn’t the only message left that night. Both Abraham and Mariah had also called to find out what the whole thing was all about.

  They spend no more than twenty minutes on the phone with one another, neither of them particularly caring for small talk or phone calls as a rule. Cliff Notes versions of their lives since the funeral are exchanged, snapshot glimpses into each other’s goings-on. Almost five years of elapsed life condensed into the Christmas letter broad strokes by both of them. Gale tells him about the home he’s had built in the mountains and, though he’s been there for years, he wants everyone to visit and spend a week with him. He assures Hewitt there’s plenty of room for them all and that he picked the date to celebrate life during the anniversary of their good friend’s death.

  Gale releases the call after informing Hewitt that he’ll be calling everyone else as well.

  4

  Miles couldn’t wait to getaway. He wanted to separate himself from the hometown and his family. He was enlisted with the Army before he’d even graduated, and that following summer he went away for basic training.

  He thrived in the military, the routine and discipline being precisely the things he was looking for by signing on in the first place. He’d always been the most physical and athletic of his group of friends and he quickly displayed promise in this new environment.

  From infantry, he moved on to jump school for airborne certification.

  Without much of a family and with a single-minded focus, he dedicated himself to the service, never caring where they sent him or for how long. Miles wasn’t one for sightseeing, so the new locations didn’t matter much to him except for how those locales would impact combat strategies and logistics.

  As more widespread information became available with respect to the autism spectrum, his friends would look back on a life spent close to Miles and they would sometimes tease him about how he fell somewhere on the spectrum. To his credit, he never got angry about it and he was self-aware enough to suspect that they might actually be right.

  Once Miles was set on a path, he could continue without distraction as long as it took for him to arrive at its end.

  The closest he ever got to being distracted during his deployments were those occasions when Kateb met him in Afghanistan. Kateb’s Iranian descent and fluency in multiple Arabic dialects guaranteed he was the best fit for his publisher to send to the Middle East. It helped that he was comfortable in combat scenarios and had gone through four years of military service of his own, albeit with the Navy rather than the Army.

  While Kateb had only gone into the service for the promised educational benefits, Miles was there to make a career of it, and he was driven to stand out as the best.

  Miles was solidly on track for 11 long years, until he was 29.

  It was just five months shy of his 12th anniversary with the Army when an insurgent’s round penetrated a weak spot in his body armor and punctured his left lung, only an inch away from his heart. An inch was a world of difference when it came to the difference between life and death, but it may as well have meant death for Miles.

  Multiple surgeries and some rehabilitation later, he was honorably discharged for medical reasons. Miles was hurting more from the discharge than from the remaining effects of the bullet and his injury. His planned future was cut short only halfway through the duration he p
lanned to remain in the service. While the recovery was long and painful, but ultimately successful, the thought of returning to the civilian world was more painful, by far.

  Only two months out of rehabilitation with a clean bill of health, Miles was applying to fill a vacancy with one of the numerous private military contractors that had emerged in post-9/11 America. His background check and security clearances weren’t any cause for concern.

  Miles hit the ground running, deployments of six months or longer, with no more than a month in between. He would have stayed in the field for longer stretches if the company would have let him. The money was much better than the service had ever been, and the firearms permit he obtained allowed him to purchase items the average citizen never could. As an avid collector, Miles was like a child provided with a blank check made out to Willy Wonka.

  During the infrequent times when he caught up with his friends, they were about evenly split between being impressed and mortified by the arsenal Miles had spent his spare time collecting. Mariah was the one most impressed with it. An avid hunter and a bit of a gun nut herself, she felt more envy than anything else on those rare occasions when she could join Miles at the range. Of course, and he would never admit it to his friends, part of the reason he collected the items he did was just to fuck with them.

  5

  “Off the beaten path, my ass,” Hewitt says as he looks around with his eyes blinking away sleep, taking in the scenery devoid of apparent human presence aside from the road on which they are driving and a faint remnant of airline contrails in the sky just above the horizon. “This place is beyond secluded, isolated doesn’t even come close to describing what we’re seeing here folks.”

  “No shit,” Kateb agrees, “How did he even find this place? And what the fuck would’ve possessed him to buy a home here?”

  “You don’t suppose he became some sort of racist over the years, do you?” Mariah asks, a grin subtly appearing at the corners of her lips as she glances sideways at Kateb.

  Hewitt smirks, taking the ball and running with it, “There’s always that talk about bigots forming little communities over here in Idaho. I remember hearing about one of those asshole cops who beat that King guy down in L.A. moving up here after the trial.”

  Kateb begins to laugh, the absurdity of the discussion altogether too humorous for him to retain a straight face. “No fucking way. Gale is way too caught up in his own shit, that crazy little world of his own to ever subscribe to that sort of thing.”

  Hewitt continues gazing out the window, blinking sleep from his eyes.

  It’s a beautiful area, he realizes, now that he’s taking in the surroundings.

  He would never have expected to see anything this magnificent when thinking about Idaho before today. He can see why Gale would have chosen to live here; he has always been the most appreciative of the natural world and the beauty of the world we live in. Gale was the only one of the friends who never cared for hunting.

  Hewitt had always assumed some pretty negative things about Idaho, usually relating to the dirt farming racists he’d joked about, transplants from California where too many minorities had put down roots. Instead, he was taken aback by the mountains and verdant growth of all sorts. It isn’t at all what he expected, it’s almost magical.

  As they weave through mountain valleys he stares through the passenger side window, the trees so much larger than what he’s used to seeing. The mountains themselves make him feel insignificant and small; he loves it.

  He can only imagine how lovely it’s going to be if the light drizzle turns into a proper thunderstorm as the weather reports suggest.

  The drive takes longer than they thought it would, but none of them seem to mind.

  Hewitt isn’t alone in feeling a sense of awe at just how magnificent the surroundings are, they’re all strangers to the area.

  Coming to see Gale is turning out to be an excellent vacation and it was only just starting. As they round a final bend to bring the town into view, Hewitt smiles.

  This is going to be a beautiful week.

  The low-hanging clouds obscuring the tops of the mountains all around the tiny valley where the town is nestled add a sense of mystery to the place. It is like something out of a movie, looking at it from above as they descend.

  The town is quaint, timeless in a sense, with modernity seemingly melded with a world a hundred years in the past, perhaps more. From the distance, Hewitt could take it all in with one glance and it’s fantastic.

  They cross a simple wooden bridge over a stream with the pretense of being a creek, and it certainly doesn’t seem to qualify as the river it’s labeled as being. The road threads its way through a largely untouched span of the forest, blocking the view of the town as they approach. The car feels enclosed by the trees around it, similar to what Hewitt’s seen in the New Jersey pine barrens, yet somehow more overwhelming.

  They weave their way through the dense forest growth for longer than it seems like it should take before another wooden bridge crosses the same stream; and suddenly they are through as if the forest cleared itself away in response to the shared incredulity of the passengers.

  At street level the town appears to be more like a movie set, the dynamic driving the set builders being to design a place that could exist at any point in the past thirty years without giving itself away as being from any particular decade.

  6

  As buildings come and go, sliding past his window, Hewitt’s attention begins to drift away and it returns to a familiar memory that always seems to haunt him around this time of year.

  He recalls how six friends once stood in a rough semicircle, gazing down upon the simple box containing the still form of a seventh member of the gathering, a man they’d once known so well that he was almost family to each of them. The expression on the staring faces a confused mixture of love mingled with sadness as well as pity and regret.

  Besides the nearly identical expression shared between their faces, these six individuals appear to have almost nothing in common superficially. They do, however, share approximately the same unspoken thought, each of them wondering if this could have been avoided if only they had kept in better contact during the previous few years. Maybe they could have seen this coming, perhaps registering some warning signs that their intermittent conversations had allowed them to somehow overlook.

  As often happens, Hewitt’s memory of the afternoon flows into a sort of out-of-body perspective and he sees himself standing there, staring down into the hole in the earth that seems somehow ravenous to him, as if it calls for him, still starving for more.

  Miles a tall black man with a disciplined bearing stands close to Kateb, a shorter man of Middle Eastern descent. To Kateb’s left stands Gale, a pale, white man with glasses. Further left, Mariah, with her reddish-blonde hair pinned back in a tight bun stands hand-in-hand with Hewitt, a taller white man with long hair pulled loosely into a tail at the nape of his neck. To Hewitt’s left is Abraham, another white man, shorter, but stocky. Lowered slowly into the ground before them, their friend Tristan is being laid to rest.

  The service had been small and tasteful, he remembers. It was an intimate affair devoid of ostentatiousness or pointless ritual, with only close friends and family in attendance. The friends in attendance at the service hardly numbering more than the six watching Tristan being lowered into the ground. Their friend had never been particularly outgoing, and since childhood, he hadn’t made any new friends beyond the ones he already had growing up.

  Only these six people remained at the gravesite to accompany the workers, the rest of the attendees already cleared out and either going their separate ways or returning to the family home where a reception was being held.

  Only these six people watched as the gravediggers lowered the casket into the hungry earth and Tristan is settled into his final resting place, swallowed by darkness and soil.

  At least he’s at peace now.

  They all think similar th
oughts to that, none of them religious to the point they would suspect their friend purchased a ticket to Hell by taking his own life. He’s not suffering anymore, they believe, no matter whether that means he’s gone on to a better place or simply that he’s gone and with him went his pain.

  The six friends broke the semicircle and returned to their vehicles as the first dirt was dropped onto the casket. There was nothing more for them there. The reception awaited and they all dreaded attending but knew that it would be disrespectful and out of character for them to decline.

  The car hits a bump and Hewitt’s attention is returned to the present surroundings. Only a few seconds had passed while he was lost in recollections.

  7

  The directions to the house aren’t difficult to follow. With a population of fewer than 1,300 people, there isn’t an excess of streets to get lost while navigating. It’s certainly bigger and more spread out than Hewitt anticipated when reviewing the map view of the place, but 300 to 400 families take up some space in addition to the assortment of businesses, most of which seem to be confined to what looks like a fascinating, historical downtown. Hewitt knows Mariah will want to explore the neighborhood when time allows. The look in her eyes as they pass the worn stone storefronts and brick facades gives it all away.

  Exploring the local flavor has to wait though. The four of them have been cramped in the SUV for a long drive across the better part of the country, and between Miles and Kateb taking turns at the wheel, there have been far too few stops to stretch out and work out the kinks. Comfort was, as far and Mariah and Hewitt could tell, too much of a civilian concern for Miles, and Kateb falls right in line; this wasn’t to say that the SUV was uncomfortable at all, but no vehicle is meant to be a long-term residence. Getting out of the car is simply the oasis that Hewitt has found himself clinging to for what seems like hours since the last stop for fuel.