Chet Williamson Second Chance (epub)

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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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