October 29, 2009, Art Revel, Part 2: On Isobel n what seemed like the blink of an eye it’s 2009, and forty-five I years have passed. Celia and I lived in Minnesota, near Duluth.
Our kids had all left home, and I retired from my career. We sold our home, bought a smaller townhome, west of Minneapolis, and began deciding which of our belongings to take with us to our retirement home.
Over the last forty-five years, each of the several times we had moved to a different house, some treasured things in my shoebox 271
didn’t make the cut, as I’d wonder why I had saved them for so long.
Two moves back, when Casey’s flight computer was the only thing left in my shoebox, I found the box holding my old AF uniforms, and placed his computer there.
During our last move, in 1998, while we’d been sorting through our things, my dear wife wondered aloud why I had continued to carry those musty old uniforms from house to house. So they went too. Casey’s computer went into a small box of books—most of them novels I had liked so much I thought I would read them again someday. While packing for this current move to our retirement townhouse, I decided it was time to turn the books loose too. I looked at them, one by one, and reluctantly dropped them into a give-away box. Casey’s flight computer remained, the only item in the box.
I picked it up and thought back to the era it represented. I took it out of the case and rotated the dials. I realized I had forgotten how to use it, but I thought it would come back to me. All I had to do was pose a hypothetical problem. As I rotated the dials, trying to remember how to use wind speed and direction to find true heading, I noticed the corner of a piece of paper emerge from behind the solid dial on the back.
That dial is dead flat, and very tight, not easy for anything to slide under it. Still, I thought, it might be possible, under the right circumstances, for the edge of a flying chart or some other paper to become lodged under the dial and torn off. It’s even possible it goes unnoticed for a long time, so long as no one turns that dial. I moved the dial back and forth a few times until the paper extended far enough that I could grasp it with my thumb and forefinger, and I pulled it out.
It was a scrap of notebook paper with one straight factory edge, and the other curved to match the circumference of the dial. It looked as though someone had slid the paper under the dial and then cut it off at the outer edge. I looked closely and saw a faint scar in the aluminum body, as could be made by a sharp knife, just at the outer edge of the dial.
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I turned the paper scrap over and nearly stopped breathing. I felt weak and fumbled behind me for a chair. I sat, then looked at the paper scrap again. It was still there. A message from Casey. It was delivered forty-five years late, thanks to my having ended my flying hobby, after giving Casey the impression I would not. He thought I would keep flying, that I would use his computer, that within a few weeks or a few months of receiving it, the paper scrap would pop out, and I would read his message to me. It was written in pencil, hurriedly:
Art—Cap Hardson set me up. C.
Celia came looking, how much later I don’t know, and found me still staring at the tiny piece of paper. I told her where and how I’d found it. Celia never knew Casey, of course, but she knew who he was and where he died. She studied his message, then pointed out that there appeared to be the suggestion of a letter N between the E and T of the word ‘set.’
“So, it could read, “sent me up,” she said.
“You might be right,” I said, after another look. “The meaning is nearly the same either way. What should I do, Cel?”
Without hesitation, she said I should try to find out what the message meant. “Maybe make that long overdue call to his family?”
“I can’t tell them about this. It seems cruel. Not until I know more about it myself.”
“Well then, you’ve found your first retirement project,” Cel said. “You’ve got access to Army records now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, and there’s the internet, a world unto itself.
One thing I know for sure: it’s waited 45 years. Another few weeks can’t make any difference. C’mon, I’ve got a few more boxes ready for you to carry down to the garage.”
I worked the scrap of paper back under the dial. Seemed the safest place for it. Casey’s flight computer went into my laptop case.
We finished our move to the compact little townhome and five weeks later we finished reorganizing the artifacts of our lives 273
around our new digs. On October 25, my trusty laptop was perched expectantly on my new desk, connected to cyberspace, awaiting my command.
One can now submit requests for military records through the FOIA online. Who’d-a thought? I sent off my query and was told to wait six weeks for my request to grind its way through the system.
While waiting for FOIA results, I began searching the internet for anything I could find about Casey. I only found one thing: vir-tualwall.org, an internet site created by volunteers whose mission it is to attach a service record to each of the names on the Vietnam Memorial Column in D.C., along with any known facts relating to the loss of each person.
“Very little is known about the circumstances of Warrant Officer Peterson’s death,” the website reported. It mentioned Casey’s Military Occupation Specialty was that of a cargo helicopter pilot, but that he’d been flying an O-1 spotter aircraft, along with another soldier, when both died in an accident. That was it. No indication of how or why the spotter went down.
I hoped for more info when I got the FOIA results in six weeks.
Turned out, I only had to wait three days.
“There’s a man in your backyard. Don’t be alarmed,” she said, from the other side of my screen door. “He came here to kill you, but he’s had a change of heart.”
“She” was the woman who rang our doorbell at 3:30 AM, on October 30, three days after I’d submitted my FOIA request. She was tall, slim, maybe 65 years old. Her long, black hair had gone mostly grey. She wore it in a braid that hung over the front of her right shoulder. I only stared at her. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“If you can see your patio from inside the house,” she said,
“you should be able to see him, seated at the table in an armchair.
If you want to look, I’ll wait here.”
This is what I get, I was thinking, for answering my door at 274
3:30 in the morning. Upon reflection, though, I guess there are worse things that could happen to an old man who opens his door to a stranger at 3:30 AM.
I realized I had yet to speak a word. I thought now might be a good time to do that, but of all the things I could think of to say, none seemed appropriate to this event. I left her standing at the door while I walked to the kitchen and turned the corner, where I could look across the dining room to the patio doors. There, indeed, was a man seated at my table, illuminated by lights activated by motion sensors. He sat unmoving, now. I saw him in profile. He had to be pushing 80, but looked scary, nonetheless.
Cel stumbled out of our bedroom just then, wanting to know what was going on. I pointed to the patio and said, “That man came here to kill me, but he’s reconsidered.”
She looked as perplexed as I should have expected. Rather than attempt any further explanation, I took her hand and led her back to our front door, wondering, too late to have mattered, if the woman at our front door might have a weapon. She must have read my mind. When I arrived back at the door, she said, “He had a gun. I hid it under a shrub behind me. When it’s light, call the police and say you found it. It likely has a history, so don’t touch it.
“My name is Bell Houston,” she said, when neither Cel nor I responded. “There’s a lot I need to tell you, and I’m under a timing constraint, so I have to tell you now. I know it’s a bit of an inconvenience, but I did save your life just now. You can thank me later.
For now, may I come in?”
I’ll skip the introductions, Bell’s obligatory approval of our home, and her suggestion that coffee would be appropriate. While Cel put on a pot, Bell disposed of the man in our backyard.
“I have abilities some might describe as paranormal. I’ve honed and perfected them for the last forty years, so I’m considerably more capable than the last time he and I met,” she said, indicating the man in our yard.
“He is quite evil. I think you made an FOIA request recently?
He bribed someone in the FOIA office to tip him off. He came here 275
to find out what you know about an incident that happened in Vietnam in the 60s. I pulled that much from his mind before I burned out most of his memory. I thought it would be easier for you to believe me if I left him there for you to see. He still knows where he parked his car, a few blocks away. I only have to get him started now, and then he’ll get on the interstate, head east, and drive until he runs out of gas. The police should take it from there. They’ll discover the aliases he’s lived under, and they’ll probably connect him to a few crimes. It may sound cruel, but my only other choice would have been to kill him, which would have left you with a body in your yard.”
I was still too overwhelmed to speak. “So, with your permission…?” she asked, when I didn’t respond.
“Permission?” I asked. My comprehension lagged a few sentences behind the dialog. She tossed her head slightly toward the man on my patio. “Oh, by all means,” I said.
Bell didn’t visibly do anything, just stepped closer to the patio doors and looked at the man for about twenty seconds. Then he stood, walked around the side of our house, down the driveway, out to the sidewalk, and was gone.
Over the next two hours, fortified with two pots of coffee and a poppy seed braid Cel had baked the day before, Bell told Cel and I a most amazing story. It had to be false, I kept thinking, except little bits and pieces kept popping up which I knew to be true.
It began when she discovered, at one year of age, that she already had a mission in life, though she wouldn’t know any details until just before her 20th birthday.
Her tale accounted for the time my friend Casey had spent in Dallas, that part of his life he couldn’t tell me about, but which he had promised to tell me about some day on a back porch, with a bucket of cold beers at our feet. If Casey had returned from Nam, he and I might well have had that conversation. I wondered if it would have been any easier for me to believe him then, than it was for me to believe Bell now.
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“I know how this sounds, believe me,” she said. “That’s one reason why I’ve never told anyone about it, except for my dad. Just listen to the rest. You’ll never get back to sleep tonight anyway.”
She sure was right about that.
The next part was the clincher.
Bell’s retelling of her emotional reconnection to Casey in the minutes before his death, even after all this time, was difficult for her. I don’t think she could have made it up. She zoned out, stared out at our now-dark patio, and told a tale so personal it could only have come from one who had experienced it firsthand. It had all three of us tearing up, but she forged ahead until it was all out of her. I don’t think she had intended to lay bare to the extent she did, and I realized how difficult it must have been to carry that around for so long with no one to tell who could believe her. Her spontane-ous coma sounded like the kindest thing anyone could have done for her, back then, and even that, she’d had to do to herself.
After a good cry, a long sisterly embrace between Cel and Bell, and bathroom breaks all around, we had all recovered our composure and we reassembled at the table for round two.
She skimmed over the next forty years: a dream career, a few relationships, but none ever reaching any level of commitment.
Commitment, she said, for her, revolved entirely around keeping her body and talents sound and fit, to be prepared for the incident she always knew would come. Probably the last one.
Five nights ago, a dream awakened her. It was short. A blizzard, white out conditions, bone-chilling cold, and being stalked by something, wolves perhaps. When the same dream happened on two more consecutive nights, she got out of bed and began preparing for a trip of unknown duration and distance. Over the next two days, she put her affairs in order, left her will, beneficiary forms, safety-deposit-box keys, and letters to her sisters, with her attorney. She packed three bags. Depending on how fast she needed to move, when the time came, she would take the small duffle bag, and if possible, one or both larger ones.
On the fifth night of the dream, she sat upright in bed and knew 277
where she was going, at least the first stop. She threw all three bags into her car, drove to the Atlanta airport and arrived in time to hop on the 10 A.M. jet to Minneapolis. There she rented a car and checked into a hotel near my neighborhood. Around midnight, she drove to my house in plenty of time to confront the man on my patio, whom she alternately called BB or Walker.
He never knew what hit him, according to Bell. Before she fried his circuits, she had sorted through the sewer of his memories. He and a Captain Hardson had conspired to kill Casey and Holling, because they threatened to turn BB in for dealing drugs. On the same day Casey and Holling died, BB’s base commander had him arrested, but only for dealing drugs. He did nine years in a military prison in the states. After leaving prison, BB had hunted and killed four soldiers who had testified against him. He looked for Hardson too, but he’d never been able to track him down. His paid informant in the FOIA office alerted him to the fact that I had inquired into the death of Casey Peterson. That was all it took to put me on BB’s shit list.
“How’d you know BB would come here?” Cel asked.
“I’d like to know myself, Celia,” Bell answered. “Sometimes I just know things. I think it’s a residual effect from the endowment I was given to perform the mission I told you about, back in 1963.
Here’s another example: Art, was your career connected to the Heaven project?”
“Only peripherally. At Midwest Energy, I tested some canned routines that deploy ME’s Heaven assets. Created some too.”
“Do you still have friends there?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Good friends, of whom you can ask favors?”
“Well, a few.”
“A really big favor, no questions asked?”
“Um, maybe one… Why?”
“Don’t know. Just part of that residual again. A feeling I’ll need a lot of help, soon.”
“But, why? You neutralized Walker. Hardson’s disappeared, 278
may even be dead. You’re finished, right?”
“There’s still my dream. I also have a sense of something more dangerous, more primal, than Walker. I got one lead out of his memory last night. Casey’s unit Commander, a guy named Brewster, is in a nursing home two hours from here. He’ll have the next piece of the puzzle for me, I think.”
“A blizzard and bone chilling cold? It’s October. I don’t know where you’d find those conditions this time of year, except…”
“I’ve learned not to dwell on the unknown. Wherever it is, it is.”
“That remote, no cell coverage. How will you call for help?”
“I bought the satellite uplink option. Just need your number.”
I gave it to her. Then I told her that if the story she’d told me was true, the nation, the world, owed her a debt so large that she should not be setting off with anything less than a full military es-cort. Knowing it paled compared to her needs, I offered to go with her to Brewster’s nursing home, hoping she’d say no. She did.
“I have to do this alone. I’m sure of that.”
Rising from her chair, and heading for the kitchen, Cel said,
“Well, the least we can do is send you off with a good breakfast.”
“I wouldn’t want to impose.’”
Cel stopped in her tracks, turned around, fists planted on her hips, and stared at Bell with a “you gotta be kidding,” expression.
“Oh, point taken,” Bell said. “Breakfast it is.”
“Good. I can do over easy, or over easy.”
We sent her off about 7 AM. I never saw her again, and other than a phone call and text message two days later, I don’t know what became of her. Knowing where the call came from though, and the request she’d made, I’d guess I won’t be hearing from her again.
I thought about contacting Casey’s family, but I couldn’t come up with a single piece of Bell’s story that I could tell them. I wrote it all down. Just gotta figure out whether to burn it or not.
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