At all costs

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Jake and Carolyn fell silent in the backseat of the Cadillac as Thorne left Little Rock behind and drove closer to Newark. They were only thirty miles out now, and Jake marveled at how little anything had changed in fourteen years. The road stretched on forever, ahead and behind, raised above the surrounding swamps on an endless ridge of tightly compacted fill dirt. It didn’t seem possible, but he swore that even the billboards were the same. Faded by years of blistering sun and pounding rain, many had aged beyond legibility, but he could still make out the outline of a car here or a washing machine there. A roadside bar advertised “B er On Pr mis s” for the benefit of any passersby who wanted to get tanked before they continued on into hell.

“I swear to God those same letters were burned out last time,” he said, pointing.

All Carolyn could do was shake her head. They had no business being here, she told herself. As they drew ever closer to the origins of their nightmare, the plan began to feel progressively more foolish. Certainly, Harry could have helped them to disappear one more time.

“What is this place?” Travis asked, his voice heavy with disdain. His folks had dragged him to some god-awful spots over the years, but this was worse than any three of them put together.

Soon they found themselves passing through a downtown area, such as it was, and approaching a squatly brick post office ahead on the left.

“This place look familiar?” Thorne asked from up front. It was the first time he’d spoken since releasing his passengers from the trunk six hours before.

Carolyn gasped as it came to her. “This is where you picked us up the last time.” As she spoke, she squeezed Travis’s hand.

“Never thought I’d be back here,” Thorne grumbled.

“Makes two of us,” Jake agreed. “At least this time I’m dry and nearly clean.” About three hours ago, they’d stopped for a brief roadside bathroom break and clothes change.

Planted as he was between his parents in the backseat, Travis had to crane his neck to see the post office as it passed by the window. “So where were you hiding till then?” he asked.

Jake pointed with a sweeping motion of his hand. “Up there in the woods somewhere,” he said. “Not a lot different than last night, really.”

“Except colder and scarier,” Carolyn corrected. “God, we were scared.”

Travis pondered that for a moment. “Okay,” he said, as if settling an argument. “Tell me one more time. Why were you guys at Newark in the first place?” He looked to Jake for an answer, who in turn nodded for Carolyn to take the ball.

Nearly a century of prosperity in Newark came to a crashing halt in 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson shut down the 75,000-acre Ulysses S. Grant Army Ammunition Plant as part of one of the most expensive temper tantrums in history. In retribution for the incumbent governor’s refusal to integrate his state’s public schools, the Grant Plant was only one of countless federal facilities shut down, and the only one never to reopen.

Just like that, virtually overnight, the town of Newark died.

Until Harold Davis discovered a faint pulse. A twenty-something trust-funder back in the midseventies, Davis recognized the opportunity buried amid the local tragedy. Where everyone else saw endless acres of ugly, abandoned real estate, this ambitious entrepreneur saw a ready-made industrial plant, just waiting for the right customer. Moving quickly, and with great secrecy, he talked the bank out of enough cash to purchase all 75,000 acres for $5 million.

Harold Davis did nothing with the land itself for the better part of a decade, watching nervously as the market for Arkansas real estate plummeted, even as it went through the roof in the rest of the world. He never panicked, though. He knew in his heart that one day his patience would spell profit.

Finally, his dreams came true. The biggest peacetime military buildup in history began in 1981, when Ronald Reagan set out to resurrect the American armed forces from the smoldering ashes left by the Carter administration. Defense contractors sprouted like so many weeds in a garden, each of them fighting for a piece of the mass-destruction business.

Harold Davis knew instinctively what lay ahead for the CEOs who tried to find acceptance for their line of work in A List communities. Ultimately, weapons programs were about things that explode, and nice neighborhoods would want nothing to do with them. Finally, when the time was just right, Harold Davis stepped forward.

“Why not come to Newark, Arkansas?” he asked. “We’d love to have you.”

The Chamber of Commerce nearly bankrupted itself creating brochures that put the best face on this rural community, and oh, were they pretty. “Newark, Arkansas-An Outdoorsman’s Paradise.” Of course, the buzz-builders didn’t mention that people in Newark hunted and fished not for sport, but for food. The other town motto-“Like a Place from the Past”-translated to oppressive poverty and pervasive filth; where shoes remained unaffordable for a good ten percent of the school population and where dental care required a forty-five-minute car ride to Jefferson County.

None of this mattered in the longer view, of course, and Harold Davis knew it. If companies truly cared about living conditions for their employees, then places like Elizabeth, New Jersey, would have died years ago. Companies cared about money-specifically, about ways not to spend it. As custodians of a thriving weapons machine, the commanders at the Grant Plant had spent billions of dollars to construct thousands of buildings, designed for the specific purpose of developing and processing explosives. Say what you want about the Army, but they built their stuff to last forever.

When Harold made his pitch to boardrooms across the country, he sidestepped the community issues and focused instead on dollars. He offered a turnkey alternative to massive capital expenditure, and civic cooperation instead of endless zoning appeals. Some decisions are just easy.

In the twelve-month period beginning in April 1981, Harold Davis signed lease agreements with every one of the biggest names in the defense industry, worth over $100 million. With months yet to go before his thirty-eighth birthday, he’d made it onto the Forbes 500, and he didn’t have to share his profits with a soul.

Then, in the fall of 1982, his good fortune turned.

First established in 1885, the Grant Plant had nobly served two great wars, and several lesser ones, and over time had become the repository for all manner and types of military toys. From rockets and bombs to bullets, nerve gas, and nuclear triggers, its storage magazines had seen a little bit of everything. Sometime after the Second World War, as activities began to diminish at Ground Zero-local residents pet name for the place back in the fifties-operations within the sprawling facility became more centralized. Commanders transferred older, outmoded equipment and weaponry to storage magazines so far out in the miles-long stretches of identical bunkers that over time they were literally forgotten.

Before abandoning their stake in Arkansas, the commandant and staff of the Grant Plant had worked hard to ensure that every primer, shell casing, and propellant grain was transferred to suitable new homes elsewhere within the Army, but in retrospect, it seemed unreasonable to expect them not to lose something.

As corporate tenants arrived to claim and renovate their new spaces, they occasionally found odds and ends that didn’t belong and needed to be properly disposed of. The Army was reasonably cooperative in helping to remove or destroy ordnance once it had been identified, but they were quick to point out that their help was offered only as a favor to Mr. Davis and his tenants. By purchasing the property, Harold Davis had bought all the problems that went with it. There was, in fact, specific language to that effect in the purchase contract he’d been so anxious to sign.

Davis’s deal with the Army was simple: He would pay to have suspicious materials identified by private contractors and shoulder the burden of destruction for the garden variety of industrial hazardous waste. Uncle Sam, in turn, would take care of any weaponry they might find, but only after Davis had paid to have it identified independently. Bottom line, the Army didn’t want its personnel chasing wild geese through the private sector. It was a gentleman’s agreement, designed to make the area safe, while remaining profitable.

The first of the legal nightmares appeared late one winter, when the Environmental Protection Agency got wind of what was going on. Under hazardous waste regulations, it turned out, Harold Davis-as the owner of the property and therefore the “generator” of the hazardous waste-had a duty to report these waste sites as they were discovered, and his failure to do so had quickly run up over $1 million in fines, even as half the cases were appealed by his lawyers.

The specific horrors of Magazine B-2740 had been discovered by accident. A prospective tenant was touring one of the original, long-abandoned storage magazines in the outer regions of the plant in the company of Harold Davis himself when they discovered where, exactly, the United States Army had been stashing everything it wanted to forget about.

With no real choice, Davis hired Enviro-Kleen, which in turn hired unemployed chemistry majors to don impossibly hot suits to perform the ridiculously hazardous task of identifying the contents of the magazine.

“… and so your dad and I became glorified garbagemen,” Carolyn concluded, smiling at Jake. “To think of the rent Davis must have gotten off of the place while it was still up and working. It’s hard to believe that the government just abandoned it all.”

Jake frowned. “You’re kidding, right? I wish they’d nuked it.”

“That’s kinda what happened, isn’t it?” Travis interjected. “Nuked it, I mean. Poisoned it. Seems to me it’s the same thing.”