Lunar Descent (5 page)

“Me?” Arnie completed. He shook his head. “Jeez, Les. I thought you knew me better than that.”

“That right? Well,
somebody
went to the Moon to fire Bo and those guys. Tell me it wasn't you.”

Arnie didn't say anything. Lester exhaled sharply. He looked down at his curled fists, discovered that he had pulped the cheese snack in his right hand without realizing it. He dropped the mess on the counter; later, he could stick it in the bird feeder by his house-trailer. Waste nothing: one of the few useful things he had learned on the Moon. “Why do you want me back up there, anyway?” he asked. “I wouldn't think Huntsville would want to send up a detox case. Aren't they afraid I'm going to start raiding the infirmary for pills again?”

Moss shook his head. “We checked you out. In fact, I stopped by the VA hospital in Manchester on the way up. No lapses, no busts, no lost weekends.” A canny smile touched his lips. “And the old Les Riddell wouldn't have turned down a morning beer. One little test on my part.”

“Thanks for invading my privacy. You're a real pal. You haven't answered my question, though.”

Arnie Moss hesitated, then stood up and sauntered toward the door. “It's getting a little stuffy in here. Let's take a walk around your campground and clear the air a bit, shall we?”

A thunderstorm swept over the mountains late that night, one of the wild, fast-moving boomers that blitz through the White Mountains in the early summer months like an ill-tempered giant throwing a tantrum. The storm awakened Lester; for a while he lay in his narrow bed, listening to the rain as it beat fiercely on the metal roof of his trailer. When the rain quit and he could no longer see the lightning flash though the fly-specked windows of his bedroom, he tried to go back to sleep, but found that his mind wouldn't quit working. After another restless twenty minutes he gave up; he shoved back the covers, sat up in bed, and reached for the lump of clothes on the floor.

The house-trailer was parked behind the camp store. Lester had turned out the store lights when he had locked up, but as usual he had left the sign switched on: a white-and-blue Pepsi sign on a post next to the road—
LESTER'S CAMPING, COLD BEER, ICE, GOOD FOOD
. The sign stayed on so that stranded motorists could find their way to the pay phone next to the front door, where they could call an all-night Shell station in North Conway for help if their cars broke down.

Standing out on the center line of Route 302 in the middle of the night, Lester guessed that his sign was the only light visible for at least ten miles. The last of his campground guests had tucked themselves into their tents, and not even the long-haul truckers were on this particular highway at this time of the night. He could hear the soft gurgle of the Saco River behind him; on the other side of the highway, Mt. Bemis loomed as an indistinct hump against the, dark sky. In the long, deep valley of Crawford Notch, the sole light came from a Pepsi sign, and the only thing that moved was himself.

The rain had brought out the crickets and bullfrogs; they chorused together, staccato chirps competing against sullen grumps, like nature's own jazz band working out a riff for only him to hear. Lester stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, closed, his eyes, arched his back, and let his head fall back on his neck. God, the air tasted sweet: cold, like an oxygen-nitrogen mix through a hardsuit helmet, yet scented with wet pine and wildflowers. It had taken a long time for late spring to come to northern New Hampshire; the warm months didn't last long up here, and like, all natives, Lester had learned to relish each moment. He took a long, grateful draw of the night air, then let it out as a steamy plume.

The wind picked up a little just then. Listening to its forceful
shush
as it moved down' the long, meandering canyon, he opened his eyes to gaze upwards. The rain clouds were moving away, ghostly blue-black forms racing across the pale moonlight. The clouds parted for a moment, exposing the cool distant beauty of the first-quarter moon: a toenail in the sky, shining down across two hundred and fifty thousand miles of space.

He knew it well. Even in those few instants, he could pick up the thin wedge of the highlands west of the Sea of Tranquillity.
I'm still here
, it said to Lester.
You can't get rid of me that easily, can you? We've left some things unsaid, you and I, and I don't accept collect calls. Come back, and we'll talk to the night together
.…

In another moment, the clouds had moved in front of the Moon again. Yet the pay phone was still ringing; the operator was demanding more money for an unfinished call.
Sure
, Lester thought,
you can hang up and walk away, sneering as the phone company gets stiffed for a few quarters
…
but don't you wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if AT&T has purchased your soul for eighty-five cents
?

Neck sore and aching, he looked back down at the gravel parking lot and the camp store. Hey, we've got four acres of mud here at Lester's, just the place to park the car and pitch the tent. We've got ice for your cold beer, and good food if you don't mind cellophane-wrapped sandwiches which were made three weeks ago in New Jersey. There's a shelf full of worthless ceramic bullshit, a charger for your car battery, which works some of the time, and a wooden outhouse which smells as if Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were the first ones to take a dump there. And if you put all this crap together and shut your eyes, you might even begin to imagine that you're having a real wilderness experience.…

Unless, of course, you've really been in the wilderness. Such as having walked on the Moon. Once you've been there, the frontier never lets you go. You'll never be the same again.

We need a ramrod up there
, Moss had said.
Someone with experience, because we don't have time to train a new general manager. Someone who can work with the guys who survived the purge, get 'em to toe the line and work like mules. I don't care what I said before, it's a job for a real son of a bitch, but it's gotta be one who can do it without himself getting chucked out the airlock. Not only that, but we're sending fifty-six new guys up there to replace the ones we pink-slipped. Some of 'em are fresh out of the simulators and don't know shit about what it's really like up there. You did the job before. You even did it well before you fucked up. I'm betting my own ass that you won't screw up. It's only for a year, for chrissakes. We'll even manage the campground for you while you're away and you can have it back when you return … we'll put it in the contract. So what do you say, Les
?

I should have told him to take a flying fuck, Lester thought. I should have kicked his conniving butt out into the highway, right in front of the next sixteen-wheeler highballing down from Maine. Jesus, I should have just said no to the bastard.…

He stood in the middle of his gravel lot and gazed at his store. At thirty-nine, he was no longer young, but he still had much of his youth. The years hadn't really touched him yet; there was only a little gray in his hair, and he had whittled away his beer gut when he had stopped drinking and drugging. But inside the store, he saw an old man hanging around the wood stove, sitting in a rocker beneath pictures of friends long since vanished, taken in a place a quarter of a million miles away and getting further every day. Old, gray, and bitter: hobbling out to stick a charge cable in someone else's fast car, selling Twinkies to runny-nosed kids, giving directions to Mt. Washington or the Old Man of the Mountains to another lost tourist. Dying in his trailer one day, alone and forgotten, his last chance to get back to the frontier a faded memory.

Lester stood on the highway for a long time. He finally took a deep breath of midnight mountain air, then slowly walked back to his trailer.

The business card was on top of the kitchen counter where he had dropped it, but Arnie had told him where he was staying in North Conway, so he didn't need to call Huntsville. Lester found the motel's number in the phone book; he called the front desk and asked the half-awake night clerk to connect him to Arnie Moss's room.

Moss had been dead asleep, but he had spent the evening in one of the tourist bars in town. Lester could tell by the boozy slur in Arnie's voice when he picked up the phone on the sixth ring.
'Lo
? he said.

“It's me, you disgusting drunk,” Lester said. “You want me?”

Wuhh
…
Lester? Hmmm … for the job? Yeah, uh-huh, yeah
…

“Okay, you got me. Be here at oh-eight hundred.”

Oh-eight … inna morning? Tomorrow
?

“No, Arnie. This morning. Today.”

Hey, um, Les, can't we make it a little …
?

“You said you wanted an s.o.b. for a GM, didn't you?” Surprisingly, it wasn't hard for Les to keep the smile out of his voice. “See you in a few hours. Hey, and try to act sober for a change.”

Then he hung up.

Profile of a Con Artist as a Young Man (Pressclips.1)

(
Excerpt from “The Search For Willard DeWitt” by G. Luis Ortega; feature article
, The Boston Globe Magazine,
September 16, 2024):

It took a long time for the authorities to catch up to Willard DeWitt; by the time they did, he was already plotting his escape.

In that sense, he was a master criminal; he had the ability to slip in and out of his carefully selected aliases as easily as a great actor can assume different roles for the stage. Indeed, one of his high school teachers in his hometown of Albany, New York, English instructor and theater coach Paul Caswell, recalls when he took the role of Sergeant Gregovich in a school production of
Teahouse of the August Moon
. “Will was a natural for the part,” Caswell says today. “Gregovich is a minor character in the play—he does little more than answer the phone and fall down drunk—but Will was able to make the role his own. In fact, he stole scenes from the leads. I would even say that he was a natural actor. He had the ability to make an audience
believe
in him.” Yet the next semester, when Caswell offered to cast DeWitt as Stanley, the lead male role in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, DeWitt turned down the role flat. “He didn't say so,” Caswell observes, “but I had the feeling that he thought theater was a waste of his talents.”

Willard DeWitt obviously
was
already finding other uses for his talents, ones that did not limit themselves to acting. By the time he was ten years old, he had learned how to use computers; his mother, Jean DeWitt, remembers her son spending his after-school hours on his father's home computer, conversing on several different networks. It wasn't until George DeWitt, a telemarketing manager for General Electric, ran across a handful of prototype computer games in his PC's hard drive—“beta test” games as yet unreleased to the public—that his parents found out what young Willard was doing: hacking his way into the mainframes of software manufacturers and downloading their experimental programs.

Willard was given a spanking for his thievery and the software companies declined to press charges, but that didn't deter him in the long run. When he was sixteen, Pinkerton Investigations caught him writing phony checks.
Creating
phony checks, actually. The teenager would take a part-time job at a local company long enough to get one paycheck—which he would never cash—then quit. With that check as a template, he would then use his dad's desktop publishing system to produce a handful of new checks indistinguishable from the original, all drawn to phony aliases for which he had also created fake ID's. He had managed to steal about $2,000 from several Albany businesses this way before a department store chain who had employed DeWitt as a stockboy for a little less than two weeks put the Pinkerton people on to him.

Even then, DeWitt was only sentenced to two years in an Ithaca, New York rehabilitation school. It was a light sentence; he could have been tried as an adult, in which case he would have faced at least three years in prison for computer theft. “He snowed the juvenile court judge, plain and simple,” says Marjorie Bennett, an Ithaca social worker who was DeWitt's guidance counselor at the school for two years following his conviction. “He was an attractive kid, and he made that judge believe that he was just a mixed-up young man instead of the cunning little hustler he really was.

“In hindsight, maybe he should have been sent up the river,” she adds, “but I doubt it would have done any good. Willard was a born liar.”

Bennett arranged for a standard IQ test to be administered to DeWitt, and was not entirely surprised to find that he scored 150 on the test—Willard wasn't a genius, but he had better than average intelligence. There was also his obvious charisma. Bennett says that he looked older than his age—“like a young Paul Newman”—and used his looks to good advantage. “He could charm the socks off anyone,” she remembers. “All he had to do was fix those blue eyes on you and turn on the sugar machine, and you'd believe him if he told you he was the Prince of Wales.”

But DeWitt wasn't about to pose as the heir to the English throne; he had a better game in mind. He earned his high-school GED while in rehab school, convinced Bennett and New York State juvenile reform officials that he had cleaned up his act—and then, only a few weeks after he was released to his family, ran away from home. Before he went on the lam, though, DeWitt stole $25,000 from his father's savings account through computer networking: this time, the cash was transferred to a secret New York City bank account Willard had established under a bogus identity, again through the net. By the time anyone caught on, DeWitt had vanished from Albany, taking with him nothing more than a suitcase of clothes … and his father's Toshiba laptop computer. George and Jean DeWitt didn't see young Willard again for four years.