Motive ; One Last Day ; Going Viral

by Dustin Stevens

  “Good afternoon,” he began, leaning forward and lacing his fingers atop the desk. Giving only a quick glance to either side, he focused on the narrow sliver of space between Beckwith and Tarby, wanting to keep them both squarely in his view.

  With her mouth parted slightly, the usual bit of teeth peeking through, Beckwith looked exactly as she always did. Beside her, Tarby was a mirrored contrast in every way, fear clearly etched on her face, a healthy swath of guilt appearing to be present as well.

  Still dressed in the same slacks and coat as that morning, a couple of extra red lines crossed the whites of her eyes, as if tears were threatening to streak south at any moment.

  “I’m so sorry,” Tarby whispered, ignoring his greeting, bypassing offering one of her own. “I know I told your staff I was here this morning to speak about a state park, but-“

  Putting on the closest thing he could approximate to a grandfatherly smile, the gesture feeling odd given the myriad of feelings he felt inside, Ridge waved a hand, stopping her mid-sentence.

  “Ms. Tarby, I promise, you are not in any trouble. You had every right to come in here and ask what you did.”

  “And I’m also sorry I missed the first few calls,” Tarby continued, “I was touring the Holocaust Museum, and they made me turn off my phone-“

  “Ms. Tarby,” Ridge inserted a second time.

  “And I had no idea anybody would be filming us,” Tarby continued, the sheen of moisture that had been threatening finally breaking through and coating her eyes, more red tendrils permeating them.

  Again, Ridge raised a hand to stop her. “Please, you don’t need to apologize for anything.”

  Looking down to her lap, staring at the fingers laced tight atop her thighs, Tarby glanced up at him, more tears underscoring each eye.

  “I just...I didn’t know where else to go, who else to ask,” she said, her voice falling away to just barely audible. “These last eight months have been hell, and nobody will tell me anything.”

  Feeling the smile fall away from his face, his features harden, Ridge stared back at her. Leaning forward another inch, he attempted to impart the seriousness of the situation, the earnestness he felt about it.

  “What do you mean nobody will tell you anything?”

  Opening her mouth to speak, her left hand rising in tandem with it, her open palm twisting toward the ceiling, Tarby said, “I...I wish I had more to tell you.”

  Over the course of his lifetime, Jackson Ridge had spent just north of forty years involved with the military, first as a soldier, later as a congressman, at one point even as the Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the sum total of that time, he had heard a great many things before, some of them pushing well beyond the boundaries of logic.

  Still, this was a first.

  Casting a glance to Ellerbe, he said, “Can we please get Ms. Tarby some tissues?”

  Stopping mid-sentence on the note she was taking down, Ellerbe spun out from her chair, padding silently across the carpeted floor. Going straight for the round discussion table in the back half of the space, she grabbed up a box of Puffs in a patterned container and brought it over, setting the entire thing down in front of Tarby.

  “Thank you,” the woman managed to mumble, reaching forward and taking two from the top of it, immediately thrusting them to the bottom side of her nose.

  “Thank you, Marian,” Ridge echoed, waiting as his aide returned to her seat and Tarby took a moment to collect herself. “Start at the beginning.”

  Again, Tarby’s head went toward her lap, where it remained for several moments, long enough that her shoulders racked twice with silent sobs. On cue, the tissues came to her face, burying the red-tinged tip of her nose, nobody saying a word as she collected herself.

  Sitting and watching her do so, Ridge could not help but think of the situation he was now faced with, the meeting he was having a far cry from how he’d envisioned his final day playing out. On the surface, there was no rightly reason why he should be doing what he was doing.

  The woman had certainly pulled a fast one on him and his staff, using a bait-and-switch to gain access and pursue a personal narrative.

  To the media, any attempt to help her now would only play like pandering, a scrambling politician looking to cover up one last faux pas on his way out the door.

  To his colleagues, it would look like an abuse of power, him spending his final hours to try and gain answers for this woman.

  To the voters back home, it may even serve as a final validation of their decision in the fall, both his inability to respond to her initial response and his later attempt at recovery confirming everything they had come to loathe about his performance.

  Perhaps it was that very combination of things that had caused the situation to crawl into his core and take hold, refusing to relinquish its grip. There it had settled, and festered, starting the moment she asked the question, growing through his conversation with Macon, reaching a crescendo as he sat in the downstairs cafeteria, painfully aware of the stares cast his way.

  Maybe it was the look on the woman’s face sitting across from him, the anguish Clara Tarby felt obviously genuine, having stripped away any amount of humanity that she may have once possessed, leaving her exterior hollow, Ridge guessing her interior to be much the same.

  Not to be discounted was the fact that at least some small bit of his ego may be getting the better of him, wanting one last victory on his way out, wagging a middle finger at his doubters, letting them know that while they might have ultimately won, he tallied the last score in the contest.

  Regardless, each passing second only seemed to confirm what he was doing, naysayers be damned.

  “His name was Josh,” Tarby whispered, pulling Ridge from his thoughts, jerking him back into the moment. “He was twenty-one years old.”

  To either side, Ellerbe and Stroh again began jotting notes, the sound of their pens scribbling against paper just barely audible.

  “So, Corporal Joshua Tarby?” Ridge asked, piecing together what he knew of the rank structure, superimposing the average time it took to ascend the ladder.

  “That’s right,” Tarby replied, nodding slightly.

  “Maybe a year or so away from becoming a sergeant,” Ridge added, his voice only nominally louder than Tarby’s.

  “He was hoping to do so in eight months,” she responded, adding another nod.

  “Impressive. Sounds like he was a real self-starter.”

  “He was,” Tarby said, “always had been.”

  It was clear there was more she wanted to add, further details that would flesh out the story, though Ridge let it pass, content that everything would come out in due time.

  “Where was he assigned?” he asked instead.

  “Kabul,” Tarby replied, “or, well, just outside of it at a place called-“

  “Bagram,” Ridge finished. “Yes, I’m familiar with it. There’s an airfield there, serves as the drop point for most of the supplies in the region.”

  Her eyes parting wide, Tarby stared at him for a moment, a bit of surprise registering on her features. “Yes, that’s correct.”

  He wanted nothing more than to remind Tarby that she herself had pointed out that morning how he had voted to send troops into the region. To add that of everything he had done in his time in Congress, that decision was the largest he ever faced, he and Beckwith having pored over every facet of the situation before making a decision.

  Knowing he could say nothing of the sort, he again fell silent, waiting for Tarby to continue.

  “He had been in the country seventeen months,” she said, “almost done with his tour, less than a month from returning.”

  Again her bottom lip quivered, a single tear leaking out from the corner of her eye as she turned her head to look past Ridge, staring through one of the large windows framing his desk on either side.

  “His job was to serve as guard detail on those supply runs you mentioned. Three days a week, he wou
ld escort the caravan down into Kabul, stand by as they unloaded whatever they had, and then return.”

  Shifting to look back at Ridge, the emotion of a moment before passing, she continued, “I know it wasn’t one of the more glamorous jobs that are out there. Nobody’s going to be writing books or making movies about him the way they might a sniper or some hero deep in combat, but the dangers were real, and Josh took his job very seriously.”

  “I’m sure they were, and I have no doubt he did,” Ridge said.

  Much like her son, his time in Vietnam was spent performing tasks that would never usually come to mind when someone thought about life in the military.

  Didn’t make it any less vital to the overall operation, nor, as Clara Tarby had just mentioned, did it mean he was ever immune from peril.

  Seeming to gain resolve, Tarby said, “That fact was the reason they decided to shift from day to night runs. Word was they were starting to scale down in the region, meaning that a lot more stuff was beginning to move out than in.”

  Already knowing where it was going, piecing together what he could remember, adding to it the things Tarby mentioned, Ridge said, “Making them even more of a target.”

  The skin on either side of Tarby’s neck creased into a series of lines as she nodded emphatically, her chin nearly touching her chest before ascending back up.

  “Yeah,” she said, her faint voice barely matching the defiant look in her eyes, “and on April 14th, the convoy he was riding with was ambushed.”

  Despite knowing where the story was going, Ridge felt his eyes pinch close, a slight groan sliding from deep in his diaphragm.

  “Dammit,” he whispered, holding the pose a moment before slowly opening his eyes. “Dammit. I am so sorry, Ms. Tarby.”

  Moving right by the statement, Tarby said, “Less than a month from getting out.”

  Again she shifted her gaze to the window behind Ridge and added, “Took them more than twice that long to get him home to me. By that point, I had no choice but to have a closed casket ceremony, which was all I could afford.”

  Feeling his head twist from side to side, Ridge stared straight at Tarby, her words taking several moments to penetrate before taking hold.

  “All you could afford? Pardon my language, but why in the hell did you have to pay for it?”

  Chapter Eight

  Despite Tarby having left more than twenty minutes earlier - escorted by Ellerbe and Stroh both under instructions from Ridge to grab her things and bring her from the motel she was staying at in Silver Spring to the Hilton three blocks from the Capitol – there was still a clear and palpable current in the air, the office weighed down by the story she had just shared.

  The chairs that the three had been parked in were still sitting wide to either side of Beckwith, the woman positioned in her customary stance, the day planner on her lap, her lips parted the usual amount as she sat and waited.

  “Well now,” Ridge began, the two having reconvened after a short break, the hope being that it would have helped them return to neutral, but the reality being they felt just as they did moments before.

  “A grieving mother,” Beckwith replied. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “Me neither,” Ridge said, shaking his head softly, the fact that neither one of them had children having little bearing on what they’d just seen.

  Raw, unbridled, unadulterated, sorrow.

  “Anything in that story make sense to you?” Beckwith said, pulling Ridge’s gaze from the desktop back up to her, only his eyes shifting her way.

  A decent chunk of the time between meetings had been spent chewing on that same question. For the better part of an hour, he and his staff had sat in rapt silence and listened to the story of Joshua Tarby.

  His mother had been correct when she posited that guarding a supply line was one of the more unglamorous jobs on the military payroll. There weren’t any anecdotes of him being behind enemy lines, not a lot of pictures of the young man returning to base in grease paint after an evening of slipping through the shadows.

  Each day he did exactly what he was asked to, his role small and well-defined, making sure that other people in other places were able to keep doing the same with whatever they were tasked with.

  The only way an organism as large and multi-faceted as the army could ever hope to continue working as it should.

  Because of that, the lion’s share of their discussion had focused on what occurred after his time on the supply chain, his final day on earth being where the narrative truly seemed to shift, grabbing everybody’s attention and propelling them forward.

  Three different times Ridge had gone through the sequence, each pass using a different approach, to the point he realized it probably seemed he was badgering the poor woman, poking at her story as if checking it for veracity.

  “Yeah, the first five minutes or so,” Ridge said. “Young man, single parent home. Things are tight, enlists right out of high school.”

  “Good pay, come back and go to college,” Beckwith said, having heard the scripted lines from Ridge many times before.

  “See the world,” Ridge finished, waving a hand before him. “The whole thing, just as we’ve seen play out a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times before.”

  “But...” Beckwith prompted, nudging them forward, Ridge recognizing it instantly as her not wanting to go back down the same path again.

  “But then...then things started going sideways,” Ridge said. “What could a young man have done that night that managed to simultaneously get him killed and dishonorably discharged?”

  To that, Beckwith had no response, merely sitting and staring, waiting for him to continue.

  “And worse yet, no information at all to be relayed back to the family,” he added. “I mean, the poor woman just lost her son. Give her something.”

  This time a single arched eyebrow was Beckwith’s only answer, both knowing that was not how the army operated.

  Rarely did they even give the soldiers on the ground everything they needed at any particular moment, let alone fleshing out the stories for those back home after the fact.

  “Okay,” Beckwith said, clear that she was past the encounter with Tarby, was ready to begin working on the task at hand. “How do we go about this? Can we do this?”

  Pushing Clara Tarby from his mind, Ridge leaned back in his chair, the springs moaning slightly beneath his weight. “It has to start with his file.”

  “You don’t believe her story?” Beckwith asked.

  “It does seem pretty fantastical,” Ridge conceded, “but I do believe her, or at least believe that is what she was told, which is why we need to see exactly what happened to this young man.”

  Lifting her left wrist from the planner on her lap, the cuff of her suit coat pushed back just enough to reveal the face of her watch. “Can we get it in time?”

  “In time won’t be a problem,” Ridge said. “The files are all housed in Kansas City, which is central time, can be emailed or faxed at a moment’s notice.”

  “Meaning the can we part could be a bit trickier?” Beckwith asked.

  “Could be,” Ridge replied, “but I am still a ranking member of the committee, and that does come with some perks, as you might remember.”

  “I might,” Beckwith replied. “And after that?”

  “Depends on what the pages reveal,” Ridge said.

  Falling silent for a moment, he rocked himself back and forth a few inches at a time, trying to envision what the story might be, how things may play out over the remainder of the day.

  Just as fast he shook himself free of the notion, knowing it could be either a quick and glorious win or a total train wreck, the two outcomes both presenting with equal likelihood at the moment.

  A lifetime of history with the military told him the weight was probably shifted a little higher to the former than the latter, but that did little to change his approach.

  “We could end up ruffling a lot of feathers with thi
s,” Ridge said, his voice distant, thinking aloud.

  “I never thought otherwise, sir.”

  Chapter Nine

  Jackson Ridge was waiting for the call as the phone atop his desk burst to life, pushing a loud, shrill sound through his office. Leaning forward on an elbow, he snatched the polished black plastic up a moment after the ringer began, smashing it against his cheek.

  “Senator Jackson Ridge.”

  There was a clear edge to his voice as he said the three words, not bothering with a greeting of any sort, the man he knew to be on the other end having lost any right to such niceties during their previous conversation.

  Gaining access to military records was not an easy process, the sort of thing that was generally restricted to personnel only, usually requiring the authorization of someone pretty high in the pecking order.

  As a former chair and current member of the Armed Services Committee – even if only for another twenty-some hours, Ridge was one of the few civilians in the country that could access such things, though the person he was speaking to on the opposite end of the line seemed to think otherwise.

  “Good afternoon, Senator,” the man sputtered, making it clear that he was a little embarrassed by his previous actions, perhaps even a bit fearful for his position. “I am so, so sorry for our previous conversation. I meant no disrespect.”

  The first thing the man had said when Ridge had identified himself was to make a backhanded comment about how he was the Pope as much as Ridge was an actual United States Senator.

  How that could be interpreted as anything but disrespectful, Ridge had no idea.

  “The file,” Ridge said, in no mood to rehash their previous talk, even less to placate the man.

  If he had more time, or even more energy, he might take the opportunity to put the man in his place, giving him an undressing that wouldn’t soon be forgotten.

  As it stood, the only thing that mattered was Clara Tarby, figuring out what happened to her son, and being able to give her some small shred of relief.