by J. D. Barker
Part of me wanted to hate my father, and I suppose few would blame me if I did, but in my thirty plus years on the planet, I learned life is far too short and fragile to harbor hate in your heart. It eats at your soul, burns but doesn’t burn. I told myself he did what he felt was right at the time. Fault should not be found in a man protecting his family with the tools provided, only in those who did not try. My father tried. He risked retaliation from Charter every month he sent me money as a kid by way of Preacher.
My father invested his assets wisely, and on the day he died, his estate was worth nearly six million dollars. I donated all of it to Alzheimer’s research. I had no need for his money.
If my father’s death was due to the shot, we never found proof. To this day, Cammie and Preacher show no signs of illness. Stella and I watch closely whenever we’re together. I’m sure Darby does, too.
In the fall of 1999, about a year after the events at Carrie Furnace, I returned to college. I didn’t go back to Penn State. The memories were far too strong. Instead, I went to Carnegie Mellon and earned a degree in art. I learned to enjoy painting, drawing, and sketching again. I’ve had several small showings over the years, mostly friends and family, but nice, nonetheless. If you happen to find yourself in a doctor’s office or bank in the Pittsburgh area, take a look at the paintings on the wall—you may find one with J. Thatch scrawled in the bottom right. A couple others with Pip.
The day I received my diploma from Carnegie Mellon, Dewitt Matteo and Tess were in the audience. I’d be lying if I said Matteo wasn’t ecstatic. He said, although Auntie Jo’s instructions explicitly said I needed to attend Penn State, they did not say I needed to earn out my degree there. He felt this was enough of a loophole to unfreeze the hold on my trust and grant access to the funds she left for me. As executor of the trust, he did, and with nobody to contest, I became a wealthy man that year.
Part of the funds were used to buy a small farm up near Moraine State Park. We live there to this day.
“Can we go soon? I’m hungry.”
“Soon, Dalton. One more quick stop, okay?”
“Oh, all right.”
I picked the name Dalton because I knew how much it would irk his Uncle Preacher. To this day, he despised his real name.
I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. After the furnace in ’98, he stuck around for a few days. Then one morning, the Pontiac GTO was no longer outside and he was gone. No note, no forwarding address. He insisted he was a nomad and sitting still was not an option. He went back to that thing he did. If you had asked my kid-self if I would ever consider calling a hitman my friend, I probably would have said ‘absolutely,’ because what young boy doesn’t want a hitman as a friend? Preacher was and always will be considered a guardian angel in my mind. His wings might be dirty, but there was a good man in there. Every time I spotted a white SUV in my rearview, I took solace in the fact that there was also a black GTO out there somewhere, a balance in the universe.
“You fold the blanket, I’ll put away lunch and the radio.”
Dalton frowned up at me. “I don’t know why you bring that thing. It never works out here. Next year we should bring an iPod.”
I smiled but said nothing to this. I liked that old transistor radio.
Our things gathered, I reached out and took my son’s tiny little hand in mine. We walked to the east, past several mature oaks and a small reflecting pool, to a single grave under the shade of a willow. I pulled a rag from our picnic basket and wiped off the white marble. Then I replaced the flowers in the vase with the last rose we brought along, this one yellow.
“Who is Gerdy McCowen?” Dalton asked.
“Someone special.”
“Geez, you know lots of dead people.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at this. “Yeah, I suppose I do. Can you give me a second?”
“Will I get in trouble if I skip rocks on that pond?”
“I think you’ll be okay.”
When he was gone but still within eyeshot, I knelt down at Gerdy’s grave and closed my eyes.
“I like to think you’re with me every day. Whenever I feel the warmth of the sun, or hear someone laugh, I think of you. You were always the bright spot in one of the darkest chapters of my life, and I don’t think I would have made it out the other side if I hadn’t known you. I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you those first few years. I’ve got my head on straight now. I know what’s important. And you, Gerdy McCowen, will always be one of those important sparks in my life.” I paused for a second and looked back over one of the hills to my right. “I stopped by and said hi to Krendal and Lurline, too. I always pictured him running the cafeteria up there in heaven, with lines running out the door and around the next cloud.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
My eyes snapped open, and I spun around perhaps a little faster than I probably should have.
I found Detective Joy Fogel standing about half a dozen paces behind me.
“I’m sorry I startled you, Jack. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Still following me after twelve years, Detective? Maybe it’s time to give up the ghost.” I smiled. I knew she wasn’t following me, but it was always fun to take a jab at her.
“Just visiting a friend, saw you, and thought I’d say hello,” she said.
“Stack?”
She nodded.
Dalton was standing at the edge of the pond, his hand set to launch another rock across the surface. He eyed the detective suspiciously.
“It’s okay, Dalton. She’s a friend.”
“She looks like a cop.”
“Yeah, I suppose she does.”
He returned to the water.
I stood, brushed off the knees of my jeans, and went over to her.
She told me about Detective Terrance Stack years back, after the dust began to settle but hadn’t quite left the air yet. David and some of the people in white had left him tied up in one of his bedrooms. If not for his mailman, he might have died up there. The mailman knew Stack rarely left home, and when letters piled up for three days, he tried the front door, found it open, and took it upon himself to make sure everything was okay.
Everything was not okay.
Stack, still tied to a chair, was severely dehydrated, delusional, ranting about his dead partner Faustino Brier. He spent nearly a week in the hospital recuperating before being permitted back home again. He passed away six months after that. Fogel found him in his favorite chair, a beer in one hand and a cannon of a gun in the other, staring out his front window. Cause of death was ruled a stroke. The way Fogel told it, the man was waiting for death to come knocking at his door. Bored with retirement, more so after Charter fell.
The day Fogel located David’s old cell at the heart of Charter, she called in backup. She brought in the feds. They tore the place apart. Not before she was able to watch the first video tape, though. The one that showed David stepping out of his cell, entering that control room, and saying something like, “Which button activates the building’s intercom?” A man with only one remaining eye showed him, then: “Hello, everyone, my name is David Pickford. As of this moment, I’m in charge of all Charter activities. Please listen closely…” The same tape contained the deaths of the two men in the control room shortly after.
Fogel regretted calling in the feds. They hauled off nearly three tractor trailers filled with documentation, audio/visual evidence, and equipment, enough to build a thousand cases against the people in charge. Although those tractor trailers left Charter property for the Philly field office, they never arrived. When Fogel tried to obtain information on the case, she discovered there was no case. When she took it upon herself to visit the Charter building again, less than one week later, she found it completely deserted, scrubbed, and staged. Signage had been replaced with Marshal Field and Grain. The few scraps of paper littering the now bloodless hallways bore the same name. The entire complex looked like a farming supply company that had gon
e out of business several years earlier, a building yet to be repurposed.
If I hadn’t given her all the documentation my father stole from Charter, there might not have been any remaining proof of what they did. Once Stack recuperated, the two of them worked to piece together a complete narrative, and by the time they finished, they knew all about the shot, the adults who received it, the children they had, and how Charter either exploited or killed all those involved.
Fogel took down the Wall of Weird shortly after that. Publicly, she ceased all efforts to follow up on those cases, and the information was quickly forgotten as her coworkers attempted to keep up with their ever-expanding workload. When August 8 rolled around the following year, only a handful asked about it. By the following year, no one brought it up.
She never told me where she hid all the data. She only said it was someplace safe. Someplace she could get to it, if the need ever arose.
“He’s getting so big!” Fogel beamed, watching Dalton.
“Yeah, they do that,” I said. “How have you been?”
“Good.” She reached into her pocket and took out her badge. “I made lieutenant.”
“Congratulations. I’m happy for you.” The words didn’t come out with the cheer I had intended. I tried to make up for it with a wider smile. I probably just looked like a complete goof.
There was a silver flask in her hand. She caught me staring at it.
Fogel’s face flushed. “It’s whiskey. I pour it on his grave. A little old school, I know, but he was old school back when old schools had dirt floors.” She hesitated for a second, then held it out to me. “Want a taste?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t touched the stuff in twelve years.”
This seemed to surprise her. “Really? That’s fantastic. Good for you.”
Fogel stuffed the flask into her pocket and nodded her head back toward the main entrance. “I need to get going. It was nice seeing you again. We should try to get together at some point. Maybe grab dinner or something.”
“I’d like that.” We never would, though. I knew that.
I watched her walk away, disappear over the hill. Then I turned to Dalton. “Let’s go, buddy.”
He skipped one final rock, then took my hand.
We made our way up the hill at the back of the cemetery, past the mausoleums. When the bench came into view, my eyes fell on a little girl sitting there with long chestnut hair and the most beautiful dark eyes, a book in her lap. When she saw me, her eyes lit up. “Daddy!”
She jumped up and ran to me, wrapping both arms around my legs.
From the opposite side of the bench, her mother looked up at me, too.
She smiled.
Somehow, Stella became more beautiful with each passing day, and my heart never tired of quivering at the sight of her.
She too was reading a book. She turned it over and showed me the cover. “This is utterly fantastic!”
The title was Glimmer in the Devil’s Eye. The author was Darby Brotherton.
Darby never learned to speak, but she found her voice. At twenty years old, this was her second bestseller. Cammie had called us last week to tell us the news.
Stella walked over, her white sundress fluttering in the late summer breeze. The weather today couldn’t be more perfect.
She ruffled Dalton’s hair and kissed me, her lips electric against mine. “Did you boys have fun?”
“It was nice to see everyone. You?”
She knelt and stroked our daughter’s cheek. “Clara here read Charlotte’s Web for the umpteenth time, then set about to find a word in every spider web in those mausoleums over there.”
I smiled down at Clara. “And what did you find?”
“Pittsburgh spiders are dumb. They can’t spell.”
Neither of our children had demonstrated an ability, a gift, a curse, or anything out of the ordinary for a six-year-old girl or a seven-year-old boy, but I’d be lying if I said we didn’t watch for one every day. I think we both knew it was coming, probably sometime soon, and we’d be ready for it, whatever it was.
I took Stella’s hand and wrapped my fingers around hers. She didn’t wear gloves around us. There was no need.
That night.
The kiss.
The approaching train.
When our lips touched, I thought I would die. I expected to meet the same fate as Leo Signorelli and all the others who met Stella’s touch, her kiss. I figured I wouldn’t even feel the train when the impact finally came, I’d be gone that fast. I didn’t die, though. I felt no pain at all.
My gift, my curse, my condition, whatever the shot did to me… Dunk called me the boy who could not die. Whether just from luck or some odd manipulation of my DNA as a result of my parents receiving the shot, there was some truth to that. Through the course of my life, I should have died many times over, Charter’s attempts alone should have been enough, yet I hadn’t. I figured one day I probably would. Nobody lives forever, but I had no idea how my particular condition impacted those final laws of nature, the ones enforced on all living things.
Stella and I learned there was an odd byproduct to my particular gift, too. Her need, her hunger—she found the sustenance she required in my touch. The boy who could not die, could share. When August 8 of 1999 came around, she demonstrated no signs of her previous illness. The date came and went like any other, and each year passed much the same.
If she and I were a battery, one would be positive, the other negative, and combined we canceled out. We completed each other.
When I told Fogel I hadn’t had a drink in twelve years, that was true, too. I never craved alcohol when Stella was near. Since she and I were completely inseparable, that particular need never reappeared.
We married on August 8, 2000. The date held so much meaning for the two of us. There was never a consideration of another date, it had to be August 8. The day became one of celebration.
“What are you thinking about?” Stella asked, shielding her eyes from the unusually bright Pittsburgh sun.
“You,” I told her. “How much I love you.”
Stella smiled and kissed me again. “And I love you, too, Pip.”
“Yucky,” Dalton said, frowning.
Clara giggled.
“Aren’t you going to be late?” Stella said.
I looked down at my watch. Nearly five o’clock. “Crap.” I started back down the hill. “Meet at Mineo’s at seven?” I yelled back at them as I broke into a run.
“Say hello for us!” Stella shouted.
2
State Correctional Institution, known as Western Pen to the locals, is a medium security correctional facility operated by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Sitting on a little over twenty-one acres on the banks of the Ohio River, the prison was about five miles out of town. I got there in a record nineteen minutes.
I never did recover my old Jeep from the hospital parking lot in Minden, but I bought a shiny new Wrangler last year. With the exception of my driver’s license, I emptied my pockets in the car and left everything on the passenger seat. Experience taught me the security lines moved much faster when you traveled light. I removed my belt, too.
I crossed the parking lot and managed to get in line about a minute before the guards closed up the doors behind me. That meant I’d have about twenty minutes inside before visiting hours officially ended.
On the other side of security, I followed the green line on the floor to the visitation room—more of a hallway, really. Pay phones lined the wall on the left while small cubicles lined the right. I took an empty seat in the second to last space and waited.
Dunk hobbled in about a minute later on a plastic cane. It bent slightly under his weight. Because metal or wood could be fashioned into a weapon, only plastic canes were permitted. Dunk managed to break at least one each week, but the department of corrections seemed to have an endless supply. This particular cane was pink.
I picked up the telephone receiver and pre
ssed it to my ear, trying not to think about all the nastiness that probably came in contact with the plastic prior to me today.
Dunk dropped into the seat on his side of the thick glass and picked up the telephone receiver. “Tell me again, why did I turn myself in?”
“Because you’re a good guy at heart, and one day you’ll get out of here, completely rehabilitated, and you’ll open a taco stand down by the river and make something of yourself.”
“I’m not sure tacos have enough of a profit margin.”
With Dewitt Matteo at his side, Dunk turned himself in August 13, 1998, about one hour after the horrible events of that night came to an end. I actually tried to talk him out of it. Not because I didn’t think it was the right thing to do. I simply didn’t feel he was in the right state of mind to make such a decision. We didn’t find a single live person inside Carrie Furnace. Nearly his entire crew perished with David’s final command. If anyone survived, Stella’s implosion finished them off. Dunk was completely in shock. He was alone. He told me he had already been working with the feds to take down Rufus Stano. I had no idea. Stano was one of the few people Dunk answered to and considered a much bigger fish than even Duncan Bellino in the eyes of the authorities. Because of his cooperation, he received a shorter sentence. He had three years remaining but would be eligible for parole in another month.
“Stella and the kids say hello.”
“Hello back.”
A nasty bruise peppered the left side of Dunk’s jaw. When I asked him about it, he shrugged. “I wanted to watch The Big Bang Theory last night. I was in the minority. Happens.”
“One month to parole, buddy. Best to keep your head down.”
A guard leaned in from the hallway. “Five minutes!”
“Shit! Sorry, man, I got here late.”
Dunk shrugged, “One month to parole.” He moved the receiver to his other ear. “That reminds me, I had a weird visitor last week.”
“Who?”
“Willy Trudeau.”
“Willy?”
Dunk nodded. “He said he has a job for me when I get out.”