Left for Alive

by Tom Hogan

  “I know the type.”

  “Then times it by two. Past five years, I’ve never heard Josh volunteer a word about himself. You catch him at the right moment, he’ll answer a direct question, but that’s it. That first meeting would probably have been a polite one-beer conversation if he hadn’t been so fascinated with the van and how I’d modified it. Anyway, one thing led to another and he wound up inviting me back to his place for dinner.”

  Evening had fallen, bringing with it a harsh rain. Josh directed the van down the lumber road and out onto the highway. After less than a mile they turned onto a side road that climbed in switchbacks until it stopped before a gate. Josh slid out, undid the combination lock and chain, and waved the van through. Leaving the gate open, he climbed back in and nodded up the road.

  The van’s headlights bounced up an incline of rutted road that soon leveled onto a small plateau. The headlights swept over a series of small cabins—silhouetted against a hard wall of green-black forest—before coming to rest on an L-shaped log structure. Parked in front of the building was an ancient gray pickup.

  The entire camp was dark, except for a slight flicker of light coming from the far- right window. Josh slid out as the van came to a stop and disappeared into the building. He emerged a moment later, a large flashlight in his hand.

  He moved around to the driver’s side and opened the door. “Need any help?” He shined the light on the hydraulic lift.

  Ken waved him off. “That only works on concrete and flat ground.” Shutting the door, he swiveled in his seat until he faced backwards, then slid off the chair onto the floor. He scuttled across the floor on his knuckles, stopping before the door. Unlatching it, he pushed slightly, letting the door slide back on well-lubed rollers.

  His wheelchair was collapsed and stored on a complex of pegs attached to the back of the passenger seat. Ken lifted the chair out onto the driveway, then pushed down on the left arm until the chair opened and snapped into shape. Sliding a collapsible hook from its door setting, he tucked it around the left armrest to hold the chair steady. Then he hoisted himself off the floor and into the chair. Unhooking the armrest, he turned towards the cabin.

  Josh took the rear handles and guided him to the cabin’s stairs. Turning him around, he backed him up, a stair at a time, onto the porch, then turned so they were facing the front door. Josh stepped back into the darkened cabin. A moment later there was a small rush of light, then he was back in the doorway, a lantern in his hand. He stepped back and motioned him inside.

  The doorway opened onto a single, large L-shaped room, the short leg holding the kitchen. It was an industrial set-up, with yawning holes where appliances used to be. A round cherrywood table and four mismatched chairs populated the dining area, in back of which was an eight-foot pool table, its felt torn and faded. The far end of the room was dominated by a massive rock-lined fireplace, flanked by a couple of couches and wingback chairs.

  The air inside the room was thick with the rich, spicy smell of something that had been cooking a long time. He wheeled towards the kitchen to investigate, but the smell lessened. Turning back to the fireplace, he saw a large iron pot hung on two heavy hooks over a strong-coaled fire.

  As Ken settled next to the fire, Josh stepped out the back door. He returned a moment later with two beers, the cans dripping wet. Ken nodded his thanks and gestured towards the pot. “What is it?”

  “Lebanese stew. Lamb, eggplant, spices, simmer for three hours. Don’t look so impressed. It’s about all I know how to make. And until I get some electricity up here, it’s about all I can make.”

  “How many cabins? I saw five.”

  “Seven. Two tucked back into the woods.”

  “All yours?”

  He nodded. “Along with the land you’ve been camping on.”

  “So what did you guys talk about?”

  “Me. The trouble I was having deciding where to live and what to do with the rest of my legless life.”

  He shook his head. “I was still a bit fucked up. No clear idea what I was going to do. I had two notebooks filled with materials, stuff I’d sent away for while I was in the VA. The first one was all about where to live—notes on what towns are most wheelchair-accessible to which ones have the most snow—not good for cripples. The second was all about different career options—and that’s what got Josh going. I mentioned some of the things I was thinking about and boom—he’s got stats, starting salaries and required skills for almost every job I was considering. All without a single note.”

  “How’d he know all that?”

  “William told me later it came from all the research Josh’d put into finding jobs for the first group of cons up at Moetown. The guy was a walking encyclopedia.”

  The beer ran out shortly after midnight. An hour before, when Ken mentioned how much he’d liked what he’d seen of the area, Josh had gone down to one of the cabins, returning with three binders packed with lists of local employers, organized by industry.

  “This is good stuff, just what I’ve been looking for,” Ken said, leafing through the notebooks. “You got a little more time to talk about all this, if we get more beer?”

  “Got as much time as you want, but forget about the beer. The nearest liquor store is thirty-five miles one way, twenty the other.”

  “How about a bar, then?”

  “Same distance.” He nodded at Ken’s reaction. “Tell me about it. It’s the one thing about this area…”

  He stopped and looked over at Ken, who was smiling broadly.

  They spent the next four days with realtors. Their requirements were specific: it had to be close to, but not on, the highway; large enough to house both the bar and Ken; and it had to be within the purchase range of his disability checks. On the third afternoon the realtor showed them the old Barton lodge. Abandoned for the past five years, it wasn’t on the market, but the realtor tracked down the owners and a week later the lodge was Ken’s.

  He returned to Oregon to see his mother, close out his accounts and do the financing through a veterans’ association. Returning two weeks later, he found the parking area cleared and graded, a dozen cars parked in front of the lodge. Wheeling his way up a newly-installed ramp, he entered the bar area, where he found the drivers, none of whom he recognized, reshoring the foundation and renovating the plumbing.

  He finally found Josh under the house, where he and two other men were installing a new water heater. “Once the guys up here heard this was going to be a bar, they got motivated,” Josh said, easing his head and shoulders through the crawlspace and looking up at him. When Ken started to protest, Josh held up his hand. “Think of it as a barnraising. They’d do it whether you had legs or not.”

  The bar went its first year without a name. Ken focused on keeping the beer cold, and the atmosphere relaxed. The bar quickly became the center of the mountain community—a stopover on the way home and a gathering place on nights and weekends.

  Two weeks into its operation, Ken hired Tina to help behind the bar—weekends at first, then full-time. In September the state dropped its lawsuit against Josh and the camp officially changed hands. Over the next few months, in quick succession, Lucky, William and Clark were released and moved in.

  It was Tina’s cousin Peggy who wound up naming the bar and its owner. Visiting from St. Louis for two weeks, she was a nightly visitor to the bar. During that time she’d had to fend off numerous advances, Ken’s among them. But, as he confided to William one night, Peggy hadn’t experienced The Move yet.

  On Peggy’s last night, Ken turned the bar over to Tina early and wheeled himself over to Peggy’s table. He had saved some of his best stories—his boxing championships, the road back from the loss of his legs—for this night. “Something like that happens to you,” he said in a gentle voice, “it puts things in perspective. You spend a month not being able to move—I mean, at all—just gett
ing sponge baths and getting acquainted with what’s left of yourself, you learn to appreciate things, especially about touch and how special it can be.”

  He motioned casually at his chair. “When you see life from one of these things, you see things a little different. When you’re a cripple…”

  “Oh, Ken,” Peggy reached over and rested her hand atop his. “I don’t see you as a cripple. Not at all.”

  He twisted his hand slightly to get a better, warmer grip. “That’s sweet of you to say. But you and I both know that…”

  “I’m serious.” She took his face in her hands. “To me you’re just someone with a real bad limp. You know. A gimp.”

  He blinked twice and cocked his head. The soft smile still on her face, she tilted her head to match his. He started to say something then stopped. Before he could gather his thoughts, the bar behind exploded with laughter. He pulled hard on his right wheel, spinning to see Tina sitting with Josh and William.

  “She’s my cousin, Ken. I had to warn her.”

  He turned back to Peggy, who patted him on the cheek. “You’re good. If I hadn’t been warned, it probably would’ve worked.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  The next morning Ken and Peggy came down to find a large, beautifully painted sign leaning against the front porch. In cobalt blue paint against a cream background were the words: “The Gimp’s Place”. Josh and Clark hung the sign that afternoon.

  CHAPTER 7

  “You’re not hearing me, honey,” the first voice said. “You got bupkes. And I pay bupkes for bupkes.”

  The second voice sighed. “Save the Yiddish act, Miles. You’re Episcopalian. You’re not interested, fine. Kick it loose and I’ll shop it to a real pub.”

  “Pay me back my advance and you can shop it wherever the hell you want. I paid for Donna Fairchild, not a bunch of burned-out ex-cons.”

  There was a long pause, each one waiting the other out. “What’s wrong with you?” the second voice said finally. “This used to be the kind of story you got a woody over. It’s got murder, rape, celebrity, not to mention this guy Josh’s Robin Hood act. The only difference between this and one of those Dominick Dunne stories you love so much is it isn’t some European royal family or some fashion mogul. It’s real people.”

  “People that the public has never heard of and could give a shit about.”

  “They’ll care when they’re done reading about them. And you’ll either be the guy who found them or the one who passed on them.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s so fascinating about these guys? Other than they’re ex-cons?”

  “First off, they’re as far from ex-cons, personality-wise, as you can get. Put it this way: we’re in the airport waiting for our plane, doing some people watching. These guys are the last group we’d pick as cons.”

  “Which just makes us marks, right?”

  “Okay, point taken. But look at it through your reader’s eyes. You got William. A professor in for anti-government activities. Soft voice, nicest guy in the world. And Lucky. Looks like Tom Sawyer—you’re expecting the straw between his teeth—though from what I gather, he doesn’t have an honest bone in his body. And last, there’s Clark, who no one—even the other guys up at the camp—has ever heard say a word. He killed a man, but somehow everyone up on that mountain trusts him with everything from their houses to their kids.”

  “I’m not hearing anything about their leader, the guy you say the story hinges on. Why’s that?”

  “Josh. Because he won’t say word one to me. And no one else will, either. I’ve tried every angle—his links to Donna Fairchild, his role in the Vasquez murder, why the cops talk to him about every rape in the area. Nothing. Then I try the positive route—his Robin Hood activities, both with that camp and for the mountain community in general. Nothing. And not ‘nothing’, like there’s nothing there. ‘Nothing’, like, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll look elsewhere. Or move on.”

  There was a long pause. “One more week,” Miles said in a tired voice. “And, Carol—if you can’t tie this Josh to Fairchild more than you’ve got, either develop the rape angle or come home.”

  William reached over and turned off the tape recorder, then looked up at Lucky, Clark and The Gimp. “So much for our subtle attempts at dissuasion.”

  “How’d you get that, anyway?” The Gimp nodded at the tape recorder.

  “I saw Sammy the Ear last Saturday on Visitors Day,” Lucky said. “He put me on to a local who used to handle some of his business in this area.”

  “So how much does she know?” The Gimp asked.

  “It’s not what she knows,” William said. “It’s what she suspects.”

  “She won’t get anything from the prison. The cons are loyal to Josh and the officials are too embarrassed to talk.”

  “Don’t be so sure. She’s a dog with a bone.” William nodded at the tape recorder. “I don’t like where this is heading.”

  Six days later, the four men gathered in the bar’s billiards room after lunch. Lucky took the tape recorder out of his backpack and placed it on the table. Clark extracted the knife from the sheath on his boot and extracted a small block of wood from his coat pocket. He began to carve as Lucky punched the button and the voices drifted from the machine.

  Carol was summarizing her story for Eagleton, the magazine’s legal counsel. Her editor, Miles, was also on the phone. She started with the one-paragraph clip from June 1971 noting that Joshua Clements had joined the San Tomas prison staff in the new position of Director of Prisoner Relations. That before moving to San Tomas, Clements had pioneered and administered the award-winning work release program at Alameda County Jail.

  “I looked into that,” Carol said. “Great results, but county’s minor league. The state wanted to see if he could get the same results with the hard cases.”

  “There’s nothing there that worries me,” said the deeper voice. “Now, the rapes, that’s a different story. You need to be buttoned up there.”

  “Most of it’s public record. I mean, the guy essentially made rape into a cottage industry. Where do you think he got the money to buy that camp and half the mountain?”

  “We’ll need to contact at least some of the women. See if his role was what they said it was.”

  “I did that already. How he got them to trust him, that could be a story in itself.”

  There was the sound of shuffled papers. “Okay, let’s go over the Fairchild angle one last time.”

  There was the strike of a match and then the fiery intake. “Vasquez is assigned to the prison November of ’71. He’s killed in May of ’72. Records show that Fairchild visited him six times in that period. Two of those meetings were preceded by meetings with Josh Clements.”

  “That tracks. But Clements wasn’t working the night that Vasquez died.”

  “He wasn’t on duty. Whether he was there or not, I’m still looking into that.”

  “And after Vasquez was murdered, she visited the prison eight times as part of her investigation. Clements was on her list of scheduled interviews all eight times.”

  William turned off the tape recorder, then fast-forwarded it. As the tape whirred, he said, “She goes on about the trial for a bit, but we all know how that ended up.” He looked down at the whirling numbers, then jabbed the button. “And then there’s this.”

  “Yesterday I’m doing standard backtrack. I talked to a personnel clerk at the Alameda County prison, and she confirmed that Clements had worked there for two and a half years, the first as part of his UC Berkeley graduate program. So I contact Berkeley, said Josh was applying for a job and I needed his transcripts. They said fine, they’d send me grades and faculty notations for his graduate work. But—and this is where it gets interesting—when I ask for his previous academic records, the ones
before Berkeley, I get transferred to a supervisor. He stonewalls me with procedural bullshit for over two minutes, talking about a lack of ‘educational reciprocity’ with the other institution, crap like that. It probably wouldn’t have raised any flags if they hadn’t transferred me so quickly. So I hung up and called Stu.”

  “Stu in research?” Miles asked.

  “Uh-huh. It took him less than ten minutes to crack the UC system. Said it was one of the easier ones out there…”

  “And…”

  “And he told me that Josh Clements had a Federal clamp on his file.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You want to take that one, Eagleton?” Carol asked.

  “It means there is a Federal lock on his file. You see it for Witness Protection, for certain agency activity, both FBI and CIA. Whichever one you choose, it means your Mr. Clements has a history that someone wants to hide. And that, unless you’re eager to be prosecuted in Federal court, you let it stay hidden.”

  William turned the tape recorder off. “They’re funding her for another month. She’s supposed to check in every week.”

  “What’s all that stuff about the Feds?” The Gimp asked.

  Lucky and Clark looked at William, who raised his hands. “Look, just because Josh and I play chess and talk doesn’t make me his confessor. Our conversations are always about politics or literature, never personal.”

  He looked at Clark, whose hands were carving but whose eyes were on the tape recorder. “What do you think that clamp has to do with, Clark?”

  Clark pulled out his pad of paper from his overall pocket and wrote a single word. William looked at it and nodded. “I agree.”

  The Gimp looked down at the paper. “What’s Baltimore?”

  William shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know it isn’t good.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Carol ate that night in a budget restaurant near her motel. As she waited for a table, she wandered into the connected bar. There in the far corner booth sat two men in San Tomas guard uniforms. The one on the left worked in the warden’s office; the other one was new to her.