Second Chance (17 page)

It was far from pleasant living among them, and one night, after making a score for the group's leader, four men ambushed him in an alley, took the drugs, and beat him. The pain in his stomach was terrible, and he went to the emergency ward at the nearest hospital, where he gave a false name. He was examined, told that there would be no permanent damage, and was urged to press charges. When the doctor left the room, Keith was right behind him, slipping out a door into the night.

He did not return to the empty factory, knowing that the best he could hope for was another severe beating for losing the heroin, and the worst his death. Instead he went to the freight yards and leapt into an empty reefer as a train crawled westward. He got off in Cleveland, forty-seven dollars and his new identity hidden in the lining of his jacket where his attackers had missed it.

The identity was far more valuable than the money. The commune had taught him how to become someone else. They had established a string of identities in order to procure more food stamps, and Keith had created his own, using twenty year old newspaper obituaries to find a person who died young enough to leave only a clean slate, on which Keith could write his own story.

He had used the commune's mail drop to write for a copy of the dead child's birth certificate, then made a false U.S. Steel photo I.D. card from one of the dozens of blanks an underground print shop had made up for the commune, along with blank utility letterhead bills. With those three items, Keith was able to acquire a social security card for Richard
Scalera
, who had died at the age of five in 1951. It was the first identity of many that Keith Aarons would assume.

Now, on a chilly December day, Keith Aarons checked into a transient hotel in Cleveland, where he was charged five dollars a day for a bed, and found a job as a dishwasher. After receiving his first paycheck, he moved into an efficiency apartment over a liquor store near Case Western Reserve. The rent was sixty-five dollars a month including utilities.

Once he was settled, the first thing Keith did was shave his beard and get his hair cut. Then he went to an optician and bought a pair of tortoiseshell frames with clear glass, telling the woman who fit him that he had to have some eye protection in his work. The minor changes worked wonders, and as he looked in the mirror, he knew that no one would ever recognize him as the bearded, long-haired freak from Iselin U. His sole attachment to his past was to order a subscription to the Ebensburg, Pa. weekly newspaper. His parents lived in
Colver
, a nearby town that survived by mining coal, and this way he thought he could keep track of them.

He kept his political involvement to a minimum, and joined no campus organizations. He did, however, hang around the Case Western student union, got into numerous conversations, and often bought books at a clone of Iselin's Alternative Book Store. It was in an issue of Ramparts that he read of the upcoming Earth Day. The articles interested him, and he bought several other books on ecology and the environment, and was shocked at what he read in them.

By April, when Earth Day was held in dozens of cities around the country, Keith went to the ceremonies at Case, listened to the speeches, and was stirred in a defense of the earth with a passion he had never felt when contemplating the injustices of Vietnam or ROTC on Iselin's campus. The thought germinated in his mind that politics were irrelevant in light of what
all
countries and parties were doing to the mother of them all. And now that Keith had no mother, Gaia, the earth, was becoming dearer to him.

In the weeks to come, he bought several used Sierra Club paperbacks, and spent a good part of his days burning the color and black and white images into his mind. Then, in June, he read in the Ebensburg paper that his father had died.

Even though his father had been disabled by black lung for the past four years, it came as a shock to Keith. The last time he had seen his father, the doctors had given up hope of a recovery, but had seen no reason why he should not enjoy twenty more years of life. And now he was dead, "after a long illness," and the only mention of his murderers was the phrase, "formerly employed at the Compton Mines."

For it was murder. Keith was sure of that. He had been devastated when his father began to cough up dark shards of lung, and the doctors had given their verdict. The settlement the company and the government had given him had been fair enough for a man who could no longer work. It paid off his disability fairly, his father had thought, and it was from those payments that Keith was able to go to college. But no amount of money was enough for a man's life.

The bastards
, Keith thought, reading the obituary over and over again, noticing that the date of the funeral was already past. All right then, if he had not been able to go, he would at least visit his father's grave. He would at least do that.

During the months in which he lived in Cleveland, Keith had procured an Ohio driver's license, and bought a 1959 Chevy, in which he drove to
Colver
on his next day off, a dark and gloomy Monday. He arrived at the cemetery at 11:00 in the morning. He wore a windbreaker, a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and a pair of sunglasses on the off chance that anyone who knew him might see him.

The cemetery was a mile outside of the little town, and bordered by trees on three sides. He drove past it, and took the first right, several hundred yards away, then parked and walked through the trees, entering the cemetery from the rear. He removed his cap and sunglasses, from respect and the darkness of the day.

The grave was where he had expected it to be, next to his paternal grandfather and grandmother, and Keith's older brother who had died in infancy. He had wondered if there was a stone for himself, and there was. It was small and flat, and bore his name, the year he was born, and the year he had supposedly died. Keith wondered what was buried under the thin grass.

His father's grave was bare earth, and a metal marker was stuck in the ground over it. Individual letters and numbers spelled his father's name and the years of birth and death. It said nothing, Keith thought, about the way he had given his life to the mines and the men who owned them, men who hadn't cared enough about their human livestock to give them respirators until it was too late, until the coal dust had settled forever in their weary lungs, to eat away the tissue, chew it up like mold on soggy bread, and steal their breath.

Keith ground his teeth at the thought, then looked up at the sky. Although it was darkened only by rain clouds, from which a thin drizzle fell, it seemed to Keith to be smudged by the hand of man, blackened with his fires and factories, alive with invisible death, death that would not be content with his father alone, but a death that lusted for all men, even its own greedy accomplices.

Then, as thunder began to roll, he knew his life's calling, knew why he had been spared the explosion, been given a new life, a life of which no one was aware, not even—

The sound of a car made him swing his head around. He had not heard it at first, lost in his own imaginings and the growl of the thunder, but now he saw an old black sedan pull off the road and onto the stones of the cemetery lane. For an instant the beam of its headlights swung across him, and he turned his back, not wanting to be seen, furious at having his epiphany interrupted. He started to walk quickly back into the trees, but the somehow familiar sound of the car's brake being set stopped him, and he knew that the black sedan was his father's car, and that only his mother could be driving it.

Although he knew he should run into the trees and not look back, he found himself turning, looking through the darkness of the day at the woman, old before her time, climbing slowly out of the car, looking at her with an uncovered head and a beardless face his mother would remember as that of her child. She carried a mass of daisies in her arms, and as she straightened several fell onto the stones.

Keith involuntarily stepped toward her, his only thought to help her pick them up, and she looked up at the movement and saw him. Her eyes went wide, and the rest of the flowers tumbled from her arms in a cascade of green and white. She followed them, softly slipping down like an empty dress that wind slides off a clothesline.

When he reached her side she was unconscious, her cheek abraded by the stones on which she had fallen. All thoughts of anonymity, invisibility, and the preservation of his false death had left him. He was only a son concerned for his mother, and he lifted her head from the stones, cradled it in his lap, and held it, knowing as he did that if she awoke and saw him again his mission was ended before it had even begun. No one must know he lived, especially not now, when his work was so brilliantly, startlingly defined.

So he kissed her on the forehead, rested his lips there for a long time, hoping that she would feel the impression of them when she awoke, and think that she had seen the ghost of her son, who had appeared to her as when she had loved him most, when he was young, clean-faced, and innocent, when he was still a boy, the ghost of her son, appearing to her at his father's grave, as if to say, my spirit's here too, at peace, and Dad and I will wait for you.

He waited until she began to stir, then set her head down gently, turned, and ran into the woods, where he hid behind trees and watched her as she slowly got to her feet, looked around, put a hand to her mouth, and cried for a long time. Then she gathered up the daisies that had fallen and put them on her husband's grave, where she knelt and prayed. Still crying, she returned to her car. When Keith walked back to his own car, his eyes were pouring tears that did not stop for a long time.

~*~

All the way back to Cleveland he thought about his mother's loneliness, his father's death, thought about the greed of the giant corporate machine that had hurled America into Vietnam to protect it not for democracy but for its own interests, thought about the industrialists who didn't care what they did to other people or to the earth they lived on as long as they made money from it, thought about the way the government was in the pocket of such vultures, pictured every businessman as corrupt and grasping, every factory as a source of poison.

It had to stop. And he could help stop it. He could do things that organizations could not. He laughed at the thought. What
could
they do? They were all nonviolent, and the only true revolutions came through the shedding of blood.

Well, if that was what it took, he could start it. He could take those who sinned against the earth, pass judgment on them, and see to it that his sentence was carried out. Judge, jury, and executioner, just like the action books he had read—Mike Hammer, James Bond, Nick Carter, and all the others.

Terror was the only way. The same tactics some of the blacks were using, and the Weathermen, and, going even farther back, the underground of World War II. Find the perpetrators, the ones who were getting away with it, paying little fines, and then . . . what?

Kidnap them and hold them for ransom, then give the money to environmental groups? No. Too dangerous. The exchange of money, the idea that you've been seen . . . all those things could get you caught. A prisoner is useless, and a martyr, though inspiring, isn't nearly as inspiring as a hero, a man who goes in, does the job, and walks out free and untouched, ready to strike again and again.

All right then, he thought, strike how? If kidnapping was too risky, then what?

Murder?

No.
Assassination
. Assassination was warranted. Assassination was murder in the name of a cause, and what greater cause could there be than the preservation of humanity?

It would take him many years to find a cause he felt was even greater than that.

For now, he would be a party unto himself, a movement of his own, a one-man radical organization on ecology. But he would not strike yet. Acting before he was both mentally and physically ready would be foolish. First he would learn the things he must know, learn about the earth and how it should be preserved, learn how to seek out the people most responsible for harming it, and, finally, learn how to kill.

For the next year, in three different cities and with as many different identities, he gathered knowledge with persistence and passion. He audited ecology and biochemistry courses at the University of Cincinnati, studied martial arts at storefront
dojos
, and took a hunter's training course outside of Detroit, where he joined a sportsmen's club and bought several rifles and handguns, which were among the few things he took with him when he returned to Pittsburgh to kidnap and kill Mrs. Thomas
Feeley
.

His first intention was to kill Mr.
Feeley
instead, for the CEO and owner of the paint company had approved the dumping of chemicals into the Monongahela River. The dumping had been discovered, and Mr.
Feeley's
company was fined $25,000, a sum which
Feeley
paid magnanimously, saying as he left the courthouse that it would have cost him twice that to have disposed of the chemicals legally. In this arrogant statement, environmentalists, and particularly Keith Aarons, saw a tacit promise to dump again, and continue doing so, until it became more economical to follow the letter of the law.

In an attempt to be scrupulously fair, Keith found out everything he could from public sources concerning Mr.
Feeley
and his company. But everything he read told him that his initial impression had been correct, that Thomas
Feeley
cared for no one and no thing that was not to the immediate financial benefit of Thomas
Feeley
and the company he owned. In other words, Thomas
Feeley
was a greedy slug who, in the name of profit, had declared war on the Earth. Mr.
Feeley
had not been dissuaded from his course by law or reason, so perhaps, Keith thought, he might be dissuaded from it by death.