Aaron Ward is named after an alias used by Jack Reacher when Jack was investigating the activities of one James Barr who was accused of killing five random people going about their everyday business one unextraordinary day on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail outside PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, while hunkered a thousand feet away across the Allegheny River on the fifth floor of a parking garage with a high-powered rifle and scope.
Jack Reacher, variously described as a drifter “with nothing to lose” and a modern day knight-errant who’s not afraid to break the rules to do the right thing, is played by the actor Tom Cruise in the eponymous 2012 feature film. Aaron Ward was second baseman for the New York Yankees from 1917 to 1926. Jack always uses the names of Yankees second baseman as aliases. Aaron won the World Series with the Yankees in 1923.
Aaron lived in a detached two storey, two bed, two bath, 1200 square-foot home in Sammamish, Washington. Identical to every other unit in the gated community, the house is a simple box-gable design with light-grey siding, white trimmed double-hung windows, a white front door and a slate grey roof.
When Aaron died suddenly at the age of fifty, his brother Jack was shocked to find that Aaron had drawn down his entire 401K and had only $1200 in the bank. This was totally out of character for Aaron who had always been a man with a plan, especially regarding his finances. As adults, the brothers were not close and it had been more than a year, maybe two, since the last time they met. But Jack remembers clearly, five years ago, Aaron, over dinner at Olive Garden, it was his forty-fifth birthday, had tried to convince him to contribute to his 401K. Aaron explained, detailing it on a paper napkin and a pen borrowed from Sandy, the waitress for their table, how much he was setting aside with each paycheck, and how with employer-matching contributions and the market trend in the past decade, he was golden right then on two hundred plus grand and on track to retiring comfortably at age sixty-five.
All this was before James. In fact, Aaron first met James that very night of his dinner with Jack at Olive Garden. After dinner, Aaron had gone on to the Tap & Grill to celebrate his birthday with a couple of his friends. James was Lee’s friend. James wore an oversized “Frankie Say Don’t Do It” T-shirt, an impish grin, a buzz cut and, as Aaron would later sheepishly describe, a set of cheek bones to die for. It was love at first sight.
At the bank, the manager tells Jack that there had been regular withdrawals of $500, up to three to four times a week from Aaron’s account since August 2018. The bank manager looks again at his screen, scratches the back of his mouse, squints a little and says yeaaa, drawing the word out and leaving it hanging in the air, not really knowing where to put it. His records don’t go beyond that. He would have to file an official request for anything beyond three years. I’m sorry for your loss Mr Ward, the bank manager says and reaches his hand across the desk as Jack gets up to go. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
When Jack first enters the house the week after Aaron passed, he was shocked by the state of it. It looked almost as empty as it had been on the day eight years ago when Jack was helping Aaron move in. There was no furniture in the living room, just a dirty, threadbare old throw in lieu of a rug. In the kitchen stood a basic Ikea table of unfinished pine, its top ringed and scored. A solitary dull blue plastic folding chair sat next to it. The refrigerator had a takeout box of leftover Chinese and two cans of beer, one open and empty. In the freezer was a box of frozen pizza. All the kitchen cabinets were bare save for a half-used roll of aluminium foil and an open box of trash bags. The drawers held a couple of spoons and a fork.
James was the one who called 911 that night. The EMTs found Aaron on his back on the second floor in the darkened hallway. The bulb had blown out months ago. In the beams of their flashlights the EMTs saw that he was already blue and they could not revive him. When they spoke to James waiting on the ground floor he said that Aaron was on his way to the bathroom when he collapsed, making a sort of gasping noise and clutching the air before falling face down in the hallway. James turned Aaron over on his back but the convulsions got worse and then it stopped and then Aaron just lay there looking up at him.
From this point on in the story, James is neither seen nor heard nor written of again.
In Aaron’s bedroom on the second level, in the far corner by the bare mattress on the hardwood floor, Jack finds a stack of ATM receipts and receipts for purchases and cashback at Safeway and Walmart in a used Amazon A1-size cardboard box. From a cursory examination, Jack found that for months prior to August, Aaron had been spending about a hundred dollars on pizza, beer and milk and withdrawing around $1500 in cash every week.
Later that evening, in his one-bedroom apartment four hours away in Portland, Oregon, Jack picks up the large manila envelope slipped under his door and opens it. It is his lease renewal - one year at $1397.40 per month, two years at $1424.80. Why is it more expensive to rent a place for two years than it is to rent it for one? It didn't make any sense to him. Jack’s landlord tried to explain it to him once while standing in the hallway outside his door and Jack tried to keep up with the explanation, following the movements of his landlord’s lips as they opened and shut rhythmically like a fish out of water. In the far distance Jack hears the passing siren of an ambulance. From somewhere in the building a door, he can’t tell whose, slams shut.
At the end of the film, Jack Reacher metes out his own brand of justice and shoots the chief antagonist in the head, killing him instantly. Played by Werner Herzog, Zek Chelovek, literally translated from the Russian as “prisoner, human being”, is the leader of a Russian gang whose criminal enterprise includes extortion and murder. Herzog acts part-time but the German is internationally renowned as a film director. He is responsible for, among other acclaimed films, 1982’s Fitzcarraldo, about an opera lover who drags a steamship over a mountain to access a remote but lucrative rubber plantation in order to fund the building of an opera house in the frontier town of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. For the movie’s key scene, shot on location in the middle of the jungle, using only a rudimentary system of pulleys and a single bulldozer and filmed without the use of any special effects, Herzog had his cast and crew, risking life and limb, physically haul a 320 tonne steamship over a hill with an elevation of 150 feet, proclaiming himself afterwards as “The Conquistador of the Useless”. In Burden of Dreams, an on-site behind-the-scenes look at the making of Fitzcarraldo by American documentary filmmaker Les Blank, Herzog, in a piece-to-camera, standing arms crossed, harrowed and hemmed in the grips of a wild and manic tangle of vegetation, tells us that he has arrived at a truth regarding man’s place in the universe; that in an overwhelming and chaotic world indifferent to the human impulse for order, our search for meaning is nothing less than futile and pathetic. He states, “The trees here are in misery. The birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain. Take a close look at what's around us. There is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity…, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel.”
At the memorial for Aaron Ward, six of his friends and former colleagues gathered at The Last Chance, a pub and pizzeria out by US Route 99 across from the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, to share their experiences of their too-brief time with Aaron. It was at the tailend of the Covid-19 pandemic and they stood about in the makeshift outdoor service area mostly vaccinated and unmasked and swapped stories. And as the late summer sun dipped behind the airport terminal building across the highway and cast its dying rays on the unceasing river of cars bearing folks toing and froing about their lives, they raised their glasses and made a toast.
Jack Reacher the film, and its 2016 sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back are based on the Jack Reacher book series written by Lee Child. The author appears in cameo roles in both films. In the first, Child is a police desk sergeant. In the second, a security officer at an airport whose only line is, “Enjoy your flight.” The original Jack Reacher, as described in the books, is a big man, at six feet five inches, an inch taller than his author at six feet four. In fact, the name Reacher was born of an incident involving Child at a supermarket before he made it as a successful writer. An elderly woman had asked for his help to reach for a can of pears on the top shelf, and Child did. When Jane, Child’s wife, saw this, she said to him that if the book thing doesn’t pan out Child could be a professional reacher. Tom Cruise the actor is a reported five feet seven inches. Aaron Ward, Yankees second baseman, was five feet ten. The Aaron Ward of this story is somewhere in between and is smiling broadly and telling his brother Jack not to worry. The moment he hits sixty-five, he’s gonna be sitting pretty on his 401K and his social security. He’s gonna sell his house and move to an apartment by the beach in San Diego. Yes sir! He’s got it all figured out.