by C. J. Howell
After a time he came to a lone street lamp broadcasting from a telephone pole marking an intersection that no longer saw much use. He huddled directly under the light watching the sheets of rain from under the brim of his hood. Runoff from the road ran in rivulets and pooled at his feet. After several attempts he lit a GPC and hunched his back against the weather.
Headlights approached from the south, and he uncreaked his joints to get to his feet and shuffle onto the shoulder, his foot on the painted white line, thumb outstretched. A van passed him and then slowed and stopped on the shoulder. He froze for an instant and then grabbed his pack and hustled toward the red brake lights. He slowed as he came close, eying the satellite dish on top of the van. He walked up to the passenger side door, cataloging the name of some obscure telecom company he’d never heard of on the side.
The passenger side window lowered as he approached.
Hey buddy, where you heading?
Up the road, anywhere really to get out of this.
I hear that, get in.
Tom quickly flipped the poncho over his head and shook it out and then climbed in the passenger seat and set his pack at his feet with the balled up poncho. He slicked his hair back with his hands and wiped the water off his face.
Thanks for stopping.
Dark night, almost didn’t see ya.
The windshield wipers slapped against their moorings, leaving semi-circle arches of water in the field of vision. As the van sped up, the water arches streamed upward against gravity and blurred up and over the van. It was suddenly quiet in the van. Dark outside.
You coming off a job?
Yep, trying to keep people connected, you know how it is.
Do I?
The driver looked at him.
Well, thanks again for the ride.
Against company policy to pick up hitchhikers, but on a night like this, just seemed like the Christian thing to do.
Well, you are a good Christian then.
The man looked at him again.
Tom warmed his hands on air from the dashboard vents and nonchalantly looked back at the cargo hold of the van—rolls of fiber optic wire, heavy cable, satellite dishes, modems, receivers, and connectors of every kind. Coincidence that this was the ride he’d found? If it was against company policy to pick up hitchhikers, why had he stopped then, just this once, to pick him up? Another coincidence?
The reflective paint of a road sign suddenly illuminated white by the headlights read Klamath Falls, Oregon 12 miles. The road snaked through unbroken forest. No lights ahead or behind.
Not many folks out here to connect with all this stuff, I suspect.
Not many but they’re out here, just gotta know where to look.
Tom nodded. His right hand dug deep into his coat pocket, gripping his pocket knife.
Where you headed again?
North, Washington.
Seattle?
No, more like Spokane.
Ah, gotcha... long trip then.
Yep.
The man picked up his CB radio and mouthed something to a dispatcher. The other end crackled something unintelligible and then went dead. The van was again silent, except for the sound of the wind, which occasionally blew the van momentarily over the double yellow striped center line. The man flipped on AM talk radio. The stereo cast a florescent green light in the cab. The talk show host was energetically making an argument, but the words all seemed to have double meanings, as if he was speaking in code.
The van abruptly pulled off the road and stopped. He turned off the radio leaving just the sound of rain pounding on the roof.
Sorry to do this.
Tom’s fingers adroitly flipped open the blade of his pocket knife under his coat.
But I got to let you out. Headquarters just up the road, and like I said, I’m not supposed to have anyone riding in a company vehicle with me so I can’t let ’em see you.
No problem, bless you for the ride.
Godspeed. See you on the other side.
Tom smiled and gathered his pack and poncho and gently shut the door behind him. The van sped off leaving him again alone in the rain. He watched the van’s red taillights go up the road a quarter mile and then turn up a long driveway. Tom walked to the spot and saw that the driveway led to a small office building surrounded by a chain link fence. Half a dozen satellite dishes and antenna of various sizes were on the roof. A huge satellite dish with its needle pointing skyward was visible in back of the building. The whole installation was cut neatly out of the dense pine forest. From the lack of regrowth in the clearing, the construction looked to be recent.
Tom walked a few hundred yards up the road and then cut into the forest. He picked his way through the underbrush, ducking under low branches and climbing over long downed and decomposing trees. The ground became muddy and bog-like with mosquito-infested brackish water up to his ankles. He reached the tree line adjacent to the chain link fence alongside the building and hunkered down with his poncho covering him and his pack completely, the hood low over his face.
He waited for the office lights to go off in the building, leaving just the lobby lit and visible from the outside. He watched the last civilian vehicles, a Ford Taurus and an older Chevy Silverado, leave out of the parking lot and turn onto the highway. He ditched the poncho, took a plastic water bottle filled with kerosene out of his pack and scaled the fence, gaining the top in two moves and then dropping to the ground on the other side, landing in a crouch. Moving close to the ground he doused the kerosene on the massive satellite dish in back of the building and led a trail of kerosene to the front of the building. He smashed a front window with a rock, spread kerosene all through the lobby, making sure there was a connecting trail to the satellite out back, and tossed in a lit match. The fire gathered slowly, but by the time he reached the highway the entire building as well as the giant satellite dish were ablaze.
Chapter 32
An hour later he was picked up on the outskirts of Klamath Falls, Oregon. A Sheriff’s car lit him up and he turned to face it. He spent the night in county jail and was arraigned the next day. The digital surveillance feed from the security cameras was simultaneously beamed to an offsite private contractor and preserved even though the cameras themselves had melted in the blaze. There was unmistakable footage of him committing arson. The public defender had little to work with. Tom would not give his name, date of birth, occupation, place of residence, prior criminal record, or any identifying information. He did not speak at all. Because his fingerprints had been apparently sanded off, damaged to the point of uselessness for identification purposes, he was entered into the court’s docket as John Doe.
The trial took one day. He was convicted of first-degree arson and sentenced to one hundred and fourteen months in prison. After another three weeks in county he was transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon to serve out his sentence. He was a model prisoner, quiet and respectful, helpful to prison staff and friendly with his fellow inmates. But because he never expressed remorse for his crime or even revealed his true identity so they could make an assessment of his criminal proclivities and chance of recidivism, he received no credit for good time and had no chance for parole. He served every day of his sentence.
With roughly two thousand inmates in the facility, almost three were released a day. Warden Yates hardly attended all the discharges, but he made sure that he was there to say goodbye to Tom. Warden Yates had never had an inmate stay a John Doe for his entire sentence, at least not one as long as Tom’s, and the Warden had dropped in to visit with Tom over the years, finding him surprisingly pleasant and intelligent, well educated, he guessed. Over the last few years of Tom’s sentence they’d had occasion to chat every few months or so, discussing wide ranging topics from literature to law, military history to ecology, physics to philosophy. Everything except anything personal about either man. This was an unspoken ground rule. It made for relaxing conversation.
Because Tom s
erved his sentence in its entirety, there were no conditions to his release. No parole officer to appease, no piss tests, halfway houses, job interviews, counselors, or sheriff’s departments to check in with. He was free to leave the state, or the country if he chose.
The day before Tom’s release, Warden Yates did him a favor. For reasons the Warden couldn’t even guess at, Tom refused to accept the fourteen hundred and sixty-two dollars he’d earned working in the penitentiary garage for nine and a half years. Instead he asked for a bus ticket to Boulder City, Nevada, ten rolls of quarters, and for the rest of the money to go to the prison indigent fund. The Warden personally drove to the Greyhound station in Salem and bought him the ticket and then to his credit union for the quarters. He would have driven Tom to the bus station, but that would have crossed some line of professional responsibility that he wasn’t prepared to cross, someplace that if he went he wouldn’t know again where the boundary was, a line that once erased couldn’t be redrawn. So he just shook hands with Tom at the gate and wished him luck out in the world. Under an overcast sky Tom walked the eight miles into town on Oregon Route 22 to the bus station, the pack on his back, his donated windbreaker drawn tightly over his shoulders against the dampness, and emerged into the hundred degree Nevada sun two days later.
He walked across the street from the bus depot to a 7-ll and bought a pack of GPCs with some of the quarters. He packed the smokes against his knuckles, sat on an empty concrete parking space bumper and lit one up. His first cigarette in nearly a decade. He inhaled deeply and looked at the four-lane traffic on Canyon Boulevard speeding back and forth in both directions. Big cars mostly. Barren mountains in the distance. Cloudless blue sky. Billboards selling bankruptcy attorneys and bail bondsmen. He knocked the cherry off the half smoked cigarette and put the butt back in the pack. He went back inside the 7-11 and bought a gallon jug of water.
He walked Canyon Boulevard, strip malls and traffic lights, landscaped curb cuts with green grass smelling of fertilizer and spindly saplings propped up with wire, and empty dirt lots with realtor’s signs advertising prospects for development. At an army surplus store he bought fishing line, lures, weights, a bedroll with a foam sleeping pad, a tarp, a green plastic poncho, and a kerosene lantern. Further down the road he stopped at a dollar store and bought two boxes of Triscuits, a pocket knife with a can opener, and a dozen cans of tuna fish and an equal number of canned spam.
He found the onramp junction with US 93, the Great Basin Highway, and started walking toward the Hoover Dam. He did not attempt to hitchhike. He did not want to have to explain to someone why he wanted to be let out in the middle of nowhere. He walked a dozen miles through the early evening hours into darkness. He walked slowly. Head down, hands in pockets. Inconspicuous.
When he saw the distant glow of floodlights atop the dam, he left the highway walking straight into desert scrub and up a hillside where he settled in among the cockleburs and watched the traffic below steadily thin until daybreak. In the morning, when the sun had risen over the canyon rim, he continued up the hillside and, reaching the summit, appraised the jagged rock-faced mountains guarding the dam from this approach. Lacking the gear for a technical climb, or any rock climbing gear at all, he had to find a way around the worst of the rugged mountains. He descended a ravine and climbed up the other side to a ridgeline from where he could see Lake Mead. He walked toward the lake picking his way over and around windswept dunes and bunchgrass berms. When he reached the water he followed the shoreline until he was only a few hundred yards from the dam. Although the mountains on the Nevada side of the dam rose sharply, he found a level patch of ground in an elevated cove protected from the wind but safely above the waterline. He unstrapped his pack and set about clearing away a space for his bedroll by kicking away rocks and bramble deposited there when the rains washed down debris from the canyon above. He unfurled his newly purchased army green tarp and stretched it between two rock faces that met at a crease filled with sand, pebbles, and tiny cactus running up the mountain. He used this joint where the cliff faces met as an anchor for the tarp and made a shelter with an awning he could tie back in strong winds.
He finished as the sun was setting. That first night he did not make a fire. He ate a cold meal of canned tuna and Triscuits. There were stars but no moon and it was very dark. He lay down fully clothed on top of his bedroll under the tarp and went to sleep almost immediately. He woke up sometime later and saw only blackness. He stilled his breathing and listened for the world around him but heard only the gentle lapping of water on the rocks below. He slept a deep dreamless sleep. When he woke, the sun was high and the sky was a brilliant blue.
The day was hot, and he stripped off his windbreaker and long sleeved shirt leaving his prison pale skin exposed to the sun from the waist up. He rigged his fishing line with a lure and carefully picked his way down to the water and fished for a few hours with no success. He circled the shoreline back the way he came the day before and climbed on top the mountain he camped under until he overlooked the dam less than a quarter mile away.
He sat down on the coarse scoured earth on the barren mountaintop with his legs stretched out before him. The rocks, volcanic but brittled by time, had been crushed by the elements like desiccated coral underfoot. He watched the traffic creep across the dam. To his left he saw the mountains on the Arizona side of Lake Mead where he’d foraged in desperation all those years ago. He looked at his boots, one of the few items from his past they’d returned to him upon his release from prison. The sides blown out. The soles had come loose and clacked when he walked. He wondered how many miles those boots had crossed.
Tom was forty-nine years old. It had been almost fourteen years since the massacre at the hotel. Fourteen years since he’d last killed someone. The rot he feared back then had since metastasized. He’d lost roughly a tooth a year in prison, the state dentist pulling those teeth he suspected of harboring the seeds of infection. His mouth whistled when he inhaled. Preventive dentistry made sense. Tom bore the dentist no ill will. He appreciated and respected anyone associated with law enforcement. Everybody plays their part.
Toward sunset he crept back to the shoreline and fished until nightfall. Catching nothing, he felt his way back to his campsite in the darkness and fell asleep.
Chapter 33
Tom’s skin reddened and then browned. The lures were useless, at least in his hands, but he caught minnows in a low eddy with a homespun net and used them as bait and eventually caught some bluegills and sunfish. He picked clean the skin and filaments of meat and ate them raw and then crushed up the heads, tails and bones and mixed them with cactus meat, stripped yucca, and scavenged flowers and herbs and cooked them into something eatable. After a month the Triscuits were gone, but he still had half his store of canned tuna and spam. Each day he spent time on the hill overlooking the dam, watching for the signs.
The days shortened and the sun dulled its assault as the cool desert night sharpened its bite. Some mornings he would wake to a thin layer of frost over everything, and he would build a small fire and cook slices of spam, charring the sides black, to give him the strength for the chores of the day ahead, fishing, gathering wood, hauling water. He ate watching the water and the mountains beyond. From parts of his campsite he could see the dam, but as the days pressed on he usually looked out on the endless lake opening the canyon lands and stretching out of sight for a hundred miles.
One afternoon he was quite near the dam, almost right up against it down not far from where traffic passed, gathering dead muskrats and other unfortunate creatures that tended to get stuck in a grated off overflow pipe, when he heard the screeching of tires and then the telltale pregnant pause when everything could still turn out okay before the dull thud of heavy metal and plastic objects colliding. A second and third thud followed closely behind.
Tom immediately climbed out of the pipe and scurried up the embankment alongside the dam and emerged onto the road still holding a dead rat by its tail.
Although this could have been the terrorist attack he’d been waiting for, his quick reaction owed more to his instinct that there had been a bad car crash and someone might be hurt. Just after the road crossed onto the dam, at least three cars and a large refrigerated cargo truck were entwined at odd angles, and smoke was beginning to rise. He ran past the first two cars where the occupants were fighting through seat belts and deployed air bags to exit the vehicles to the third car, which was pinned to the thick steel side rail by the cargo truck. The car was kinked in the middle like a crushed beer can. On one end the driver appeared unconscious. In the back seat, separated from the front by the truck’s front grill and engine block, was a child’s car seat, and in it, a wide eyed little girl. Gasoline trickled out from the back end of the car and ran in a stream to Tom’s boots. A first responder appeared and dragged the woman out from the driver’s seat, but the back seat was completely pinched off and pinned against the retaining wall. Tom climbed on top of the wall, gripping the steel railing. He dropped the rat and it skittered along the dam to the water below. He shimmied along the railing until he could put one foot on the roof of the car. He reached through the shattered passenger side window, lacerating both his forearms, and unclicked the child safety restraints on the car seat. He used his fingers to pick out the remaining glass in the window, oblivious to the cuts on his fingertips, and pulled the girl out. He held her with one arm, her tiny waist snuggly in the crook of his elbow, while he pulled them along the railing with the other arm. Don’t look down, he said, but the girl wasn’t looking at anything.
More first responders arrived and took the girl from Tom and helped him back onto the road. The back of the car caught fire and people scrambled to the wreck with fire extinguishers as bystanders fled to safety. Tom followed the foot traffic off the dam. Ambulances, fire trucks, and all manner of police and rescue vehicles appeared and closed off the road. Tom stood in the back of a crowd of onlookers for a while and then started walking down the road. He hadn’t gone far when an EMT in a four by four pulled along side him.
