Second Chance (15 page)

He liked the sound. It was hotter, higher, more intense than before. Woody was surprised, thinking that the stability of his family would have made his music more mellow. But instead of softening his voice, his family life had seemed to
harshen
it. Funny how things changed.

And maybe tragic. What in God's name could this Pan have to do with what had happened that night a week ago? Or over twenty years ago, if you looked at it a certain way.

He got up and walked out onto the deck, where Tracy was sketching the shore. "Honey," he said, "what do you know about Pan?"

She turned and looked at him, and he caught his breath as the wind billowed her hair like a cape behind her. "Pan. He wasn't there . . . where you were before?" He shook his head. "God," she said, as if stunned by the knowledge. "He's been around for years. About the time we got married," she said, taking his hand, "he started with kidnappings and murders. You remember—" she began to say, then shook her head and smiled. "You may not. But around '72 or so he killed the wife of a guy who owned a paint company in Pittsburgh. The note on her body said it was because her husband was a polluter, and it was signed with a hoof print. So the press called him Pan, I guess because Pan was an earth spirit or something."

"And he killed Reagan."

She nodded. "That's what everybody thinks. Supposedly it was because Reagan messed up the Clean Air Act. There was a letter from him, he always sent letters to the papers.
Sends
letters, I should say. He's still out there."

"But he wasn't before, Tracy," Woody said softly, and the gentle squeeze of her hand told him that she grasped the implications.

"How could what happened to us have any bearing on Pan?"

"I don't know," he said. "But they say that even the smallest act can have great repercussions. Something must have happened that resulted from your and Dale's . . . survival." He thought for a moment. "If Keith had come back with us, I could almost believe that it was him."

"Keith? Keith Pan? He couldn't have, Woody."

"I don't know. He could be violent. At least he had the seeds of violence in him."

"A lot of that was talk."

"The bomb wasn't. And neither was . . ." He trailed off. "What?"

"Well
 
. . . you remember the ROTC jock who got beat up? I think Keith might have done it." He told her about the stockings and gloves he discovered, about the blood on Keith's sleeve.

"It doesn't matter," Tracy said. "Keith died a long time ago."

And Woody heard the door close again, very soft, but very clear.

~*~

That evening he looked under "Terrorism" in the Encyclopedia's most recent yearbook, and found that by 1992 the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of crimes apparently perpetrated by the individual called Pan numbered well over a hundred, from modest
monkeywrenching
to the most terrible mass murder and sabotage. Though there was not a single description on file, there were several names which Pan was thought to have used, but many of the bearers of those names had died in infancy, others had simply disappeared, and the rest could not be proven to have existed at all. When Woody closed the volume, he noticed his hands were trembling.

An hour later, Woody and Tracy tucked their children into bed, and Woody thought once again that his heart would burst with the love and gratitude he felt. He sat for a while with Tracy, watching
The Awful Truth
on cable, then excused himself, went down to the basement studio, and called Frank McDonald.

"Things have changed, Frank," he said.

"You're even more famous," Frank said, his tone guarded.

"That's not what I mean. You know about Pan? And Reagan?”

“Things haven't changed that much. Clinton's still the president."

"Don't fuck around, Frank. What did we do? Did we turn something loose here?"

"No, Woody. We didn't do a damn thing. I've almost convinced myself that our lives before all this happened were just a dream. Because this is reality now—the world where Tracy and Dale are alive."

"But Pan—"

"Yeah, I know about Pan, I know about him shooting Reagan. Hell, the first thing I did when I got home was start filling in, seeing if anything major was different." He laughed hollowly. "And there was. But what the hell can I do about it? You can't trace down cause and effect on something like this."

"Why not?" Woody said. "We're dealing with a small group of variables."

"Crap. You're gonna trace Tracy's every last move for the past twenty-some years? Or Dale's? I mean, maybe Tracy pulled her car in front of a complete stranger back in 1970, and that was the last straw. The guy said, 'Fuck this, I'm gonna become the world's greatest environmental terrorist.' And Pan was born."

"That's dumb."

"Sure, it's dumb, but no dumber than you thinking you can discover why Pan wasn't in our other life but is in this one.”

“What if it's Keith?"

There was silence on Frank's end for a long time. "Keith didn't get back."

"How do we know that?"

"Because he's dead."

"I didn't tell you this," Woody said, "but when I was waking up . . . when we came back . . . I thought I heard the door close."

"Oh. So Keith got back early and left?" Frank's voice was edged with sarcasm. "Woody, it's not possible. Keith's dead. In this world and the other one. Old newspapers, the documentation, he's dead, Woody. He blew himself up back in '69."

"I guess so."

"Well, know so. Don't think about all this shit, man. I know I didn't believe it at first, but I do now. And thinking about how it happened or what it might've done is gonna do nothing but fuck you up. And I speak as one who knows. I've been fucked up for days."

"You've been fucked up for years," Woody said.

Frank didn't laugh. "I mean it. You think about this thing too much, and it gets really weird and scary, Woody. So do what you told me—accept what's good about it and forget the rest. Leave it alone. Really. Just leave it the hell alone."

~*~

He tried. He tried to let it drift away, to lose himself in the alternate reality in which he now irretrievably lived, tried to adjust himself to a world in which things were different. His personal life could not have been better. The children were wonderful, bright, and loving, and Tracy was the wife and friend he had hoped, when he was young, that she would be.

So Woody immersed himself in his family and his music, trying to accept through indifference a world in which Walter Mondale had become president in 1984, only to be defeated in '88 by George Bush, who thus became the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutively. Such things, Woody told himself, did not affect him in major ways, and he wrote music that was different, but still his, planned his next album, readied himself for his approaching Japanese and European tours, tried to fill his mind with all these things so that Keith Aarons would find no room there.

And while Woody attempted to banish his dead friend from his mind, that friend, alive, healthy, and universally dangerous, drove into the east Texas town of Bone, looking for death on the wind, seeking the end of humanity, and the salvation of the earth.

Chapter 13

Keith
Aarons's
car, a 1976 Chevy, was as dusty and weathered and authentic-looking as his new, false identity. Creating identities and backgrounds was, along with assassination, demolition, and unauthorized computer entry, one of Keith's most well-honed skills. Since 1970 he had concocted over fifty of them. Today he was, and would be for several months to come, Peter Francis Sullivan, a man with a past so disturbed and brilliant that he trusted he would be irresistible to those who ran the lab.

Bone, Texas, did not look like the kind of place that housed the lab. In fact, Keith thought, it didn't even look like a place named Bone. Bone should have been situated on a barren strip of desert, with steer skulls next to the single dirt road in and out. But instead it nestled on the southeast edge of Davy Crockett National Forest like a patch of moss among stands of pine trees, actually green there under the summer Texas sun. Keith hadn't known there was anything green in Texas. But Bone was more reminiscent of the woods of his own western Pennsylvania than of the other times Keith had been in Texas.

The first had been in 1979, when he had flown into Corpus Christi to sabotage the
Tarbick
Oil Refinery after one of their tankers spilled 800,000 barrels of crude off the coast of South Carolina. The little he had seen of the land around the city had been sparse and hellish, and the other Texas cities he had done his work in had been little better, so Bone came as a pleasant surprise. The houses were clean and simple, the streets swept clear of debris. It appeared to be simply a well cared for company town.
Funny
, he thought,
how deceptive appearances could be
.

Was this little town the place
, he wondered,
from which the plague could spring, from which the microbes could come charging across the planet slaying all in their path, the microscopic army of Gaia, the earth, with him as commander?

He smiled at his delusions of grandeur. But perhaps they weren't delusions after all. Perhaps his fondest dream could be very real, and Bone, Texas had precisely what he sought.

He parked his car in the town square, bought a copy of
The Bone Courier
from a machine, and walked into Red's Tavern, where he sat at the bar and ordered a bottle of Lone Star. At that time of day there were only a few patrons, so the place was quiet except for a country song coming from the tinny speaker of the radio above the bar. Keith scanned the want ads of the eight page weekly, and stopped when he noticed the ad for the very tavern in which he sat.

He looked from the paper to the dour, paunchy man behind the bar. The man's doughy cheeks were peppered with freckles, and his hair, though nearly pure white, was still crowned with sandy patches. "You the owner?" Keith asked, a perfect east Texas twang falling softly in the dark room.

"Yep," said the man, pouring himself a shot of Old
Grandad
and downing it in one jerky motion.

"Still need a cook?"

"Uh-huh."

"What's the hours?"

"Five pee-
yem
to eleven,
ev'ry
night but Sunday. Pays fifty cents an hour over the minimum. You cook?"

"Short-order. '
Swhat
you need, right?"

Keith wasn't lying. He had learned to be an excellent short order cook as soon as he had realized that there was a shortage of them in nearly every town in the country.

"
Wanna
start tonight?"

So that easily Keith had a job. He gave Red Bates his false name and false social security number, both of which would, and would have to, stand up to far closer scrutiny than that given them by an aging, alcoholic bar owner.

Within the next hour Keith also had a home. Though Red recommended a boarding house two blocks away, Keith found an apartment for rent on the other side of town. There were too many people in a boarding house, and Keith required privacy.

That evening Keith began work at Red's Tavern. Red's refrigerator and kitchen were well stocked, and business was slow the first few hours, so by seven o'clock Keith had a large kettle of chili bubbling on the stove. Then the crowd hit. Keith fried burgers, made sandwiches, threw
french
fries into the deep fat fryer, then slid the plates through the opening where Mae and Sally, the two waitresses, grabbed them and whisked them away to the tables. The chili moved slowly at first, but as people tried a taste of their friends' bowls, more and more bowls went out, and by eleven, when the kitchen closed, the pot was empty.

It took Keith a half hour to clean up the kitchen, and at 11:30 he took off his apron, went out, and sat at the bar. A grinning Red set a Lone Star in front of him. "Nice job," the man said. "You're fast. And that chili was damn good."

A few murmurs of agreement came from the bar and the booths, and a blond young man sitting with two other men held up his beer bottle. "You bet it was," he said, "and when you finish that Lone Star, Cookie, I
wanta
buy you another one!"

Keith nodded agreeably, and raised his own bottle to acknowledge the offer. In five minutes he was sitting next to the young man, whose name was Bob Hastings. His two friends, Al Freeman and Ted Horst, had graying hair and wore rumpled white shirts and ties loosened at the neck. Keith noticed the bulge of pocket calculators in both men's shirt pockets. These older men were neither as friendly nor loquacious as Bob. Horst drank his beer seriously, while Freeman did so guiltily, looking around as if to apologize for every sip. He smiled more often than Horst, but Keith thought it looked as though it made his face hurt.

Bob Hastings made up for their sobriety. He grinned and joked and went on and on about the chili Keith had made. "Damn," he said, "these guys are good cooks, but they never made
nothin
' to touch your chili."

Keith raised an eyebrow. "You guys cook?"

Freeman cleared his throat. "Just in a manner of speaking. We, uh, work at Goncourt Labs."