by James Siegel
“Were they still married?”
“No.”
“When were they divorced?”
“I told you. About five years ago.”
She hadn’t told me. She’d told me she’d lost touch with her son around then.
“So he began drinking.”
“I’m getting off the phone. I’m not going to sit here and talk ill of the dead.”
Only of the dead’s ex-wife.
“One other thing… did Dennis ever have cancer?”
This time she meant it about getting off.
“No,” she said, and hung up.
It all might have stopped right here.
Right that very moment.
What did I have exactly?
Nothing.
A curious observation by the attending doctor-that’s all.
An accident victim missing his testicles.
It had piqued my interest, sure it had, but that wasn’t hard to do. Not these days. I covered birthday parties, traveling rodeos, and used-car dealership openings, a charity case quietly doing his penance.
It might have all stopped here.
Except for two things.
I lived in a rented house.
When I came home, a plumber was working on my hot-water heater.
He was banging around downstairs with some kind of tool.
I hadn’t called a plumber.
When I informed him of this fact, he said, okay, then the home’s owner must have.
I hadn’t complained to the home’s owner.
My hot water was hot. There was nothing wrong with the heater.
Okay, he said, routine maintenance.
He smiled at me throughout. As if we were indulging in small talk at a party.
It made me feel uneasy. That and the slow realization we were alone in a basement. Basements are dark subterranean places you descended into at your own risk-every kid knows that. And there were other things. His face, for instance. His features were oddly indistinct-as if he hadn’t actually finished evolving yet. And there was his voice-squeaky high, as if he’d just sucked helium. It was decidedly creepy.
“Can I ask what company you’re with?” I said.
It was impossible to ignore what happened then.
To close my eyes to his ensuing hesitation.
Believe me, I tried.
There are certain questions bound to elicit a moment’s pause.
Do you love me?
Where were you tonight, honey?
Did you fabricate this story?
Yes, that one, too.
What company do you work for isn’t one of those questions.
I must’ve shrunk back, the way you can increase the physical distance between yourself and someone else without really moving. What you do in the presence of a stray dog who may, or may not, intend to rip your throat out.
You’re not supposed to show fear-every kid knows that, too.
We were both on to each other.
I felt the metal thing in his hand before I actually saw it.
SIX
It must’ve glanced off my forehead.
That’s what I determined later.
That I managed to turn my head just enough to avoid a dead-on blow. Nothing really hurt then-my nerve endings were numbed by the natural Novocain of raw fear.
I must’ve touched my forehead to confirm that something had in fact hit me-I only know this because my forearm took the next shot. I went down.
I landed on a fluffy white cloud. The white shag remnant of the sixties I’d laboriously rolled up and carted downstairs upon moving in-this memory actually rattling around the head someone was trying to cave in.
He whispered something in that eerie falsetto, and came at me.
I instinctually covered up in expectation of two hundred or so pounds crash-landing on my bones. When I didn’t feel it, I picked my head up and peeked.
He was standing stock still, staring down at me.
He leaned down and tapped me on the shoulder, then smiled and took off up the stairs.
I lay there till I heard the screen door rattle shut.
You’re it.
What he’d whispered to me.
Frank Futillo, MD-my bowling opponent of the other night-pronounced me more or less okay.
“A contusion on your arm, a head bruise, but that’s pretty much it. What did he hit you with?”
“I don’t know. Something metal.”
I was sitting on that waxy paper that is used to cover every doctor’s examination table in America, and trying mightily not to smell the ammonia. It was a scent I forever associated with childhood falls. Only it was my brother Jimmy who was always falling.
Never me.
“Yeah, well, all in all, I’d say you got off pretty easy,” Dr. Futillo said.
“You mean compared to the average person assaulted by a stranger in their basement?”
“You talk to the sheriff about that?”
Yeah. I’d talked to the sheriff about that.
Sheriff Swenson had listened to my story of assault very much like a certain editor had listened to my increasingly outlandish exclusives during my imploding days in New York. With a tired and deflated look of disbelief. Tap dancing at Auschwitz-that’s how I’d described it later to my court-appointed therapist. On my way to the gas chambers, but soft-shoeing all the harder.
“Now, Lucas,” Sheriff Swenson said. “You looking to make the front page?”
Okay. I’d expected a little skepticism. But I was standing in the sheriff’s office with a clearly tattooed forearm and a darkening bruise on the left side of my head.
“I’m looking to make a complaint. Aren’t you supposed to do that when you’ve been assaulted?”
“Well, sure. You want to look through our mug book of homicidal plumbers?”
“That’s funny. It is. But I’m thinking maybe he wasn’t actually a plumber. Just a suspicion.”
“Right. Well, what do you think he was doing? Stealing your copper wiring?”
“I don’t know. I asked him what company he worked for and he slugged me. We never got to the specifics of his visit.”
“Too bad. The fact is… Lucas…”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” I said.
“You do? Tell me something, would you? Why’d Hinch hire you again?”
“Believe it or not, I used to be a good reporter.”
“Really? I thought it was because he’s related to your PO. I stand corrected.”
Ordinarily, I might not have minded.
That’s the thing about doing penance, as the court-appointed therapist, Dr. Payne-yeah, his real name-repeatedly drummed into me. You had to learn to accept your moral failures. That meant accepting reminders of it. It meant turning the other cheek and saying: go ahead-slug me again.
Only I’d already been hit today-twice, by someone who probably had a lot more to atone for than me. I was going to verbally swing back, to stand up for myself, when Swenson disarmed me.
“What I was going to say, Lucas… is that we’ve had a number of home break-ins lately. Apparently he carries a plumber’s kit in case he gets surprised, or a neighbor sees him strolling in. He uses it to stash whatever he walks out with. You’re not the first complaint. I was just making sure-given your past history-that you were being on the up-and-up with me. You understand?”
Sure, I understood.
I told Dr. Futillo about the burglaries.
“Apparently we have some breaking and entering going on in the neighborhood.”
“You’re lucky your skull didn’t get broken,” he said.
It occurred to me that this was the second time in two days someone was being told they were lucky when they didn’t feel that way. Ed Crannell, and me.
“Has the body been sent back?”
“What body?”
“Dennis Flaherty’s body. Was it sent back to his mother in Iowa?”
“Oh yeah, absolutely.”
&nb
sp; “I looked up a sex offenders’ Web site.”
“Huh?” Dr. Futillo looked like someone who’d been told an intimate secret he’d rather not have been made privy to.
“The National Sex Offender Public Registry-a kind of Pedophile Central. I thought maybe our friend’s castration was court-ordered.”
“Well, was it?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t listed there.”
“Funny thing,” Dr. Futillo said, “about our friend.”
I’ve already mentioned that two things happened.
Two separate things that made me sit up and keep going instead of roll over and slip back into sleep. Which was pretty much what I’d been doing in Littleton for the past year, and two thirds.
The first was being assaulted in my own basement.
This was the second.
“What funny thing?” I said. “His castration?”
“Oh yeah, that. But something else. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say our deceased was black.”
“Huh? I thought you said he was Caucasian. White.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s what it looked like on his license.”
“So?”
“His thigh bones. Longer, and thicker at the joints. A signature of the African American race.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well, I saw it on Forensic Files.”
“What?”
“I saw it on Forensic Files. On Court TV. You never watch that show?”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say our deceased was black. Only he didn’t know any better. He was a village MD playing forensic investigator, which made him only slightly more qualified than the village idiot.
“I spoke to his mother,” I said. “She didn’t sound very black. Besides, unless I’m crazy, Flaherty’s an Irish name.”
“Okay,” Dr. Futillo said.
“Okay?”
“Bones don’t lie, my friend.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you just told me your entire expertise in this area comes from TV.”
“Fine, don’t believe me.”
Funny. For just a second, I heard myself. Sitting in the office of a truly prestigious newspaper, the kind of newspaper you sweat and bleed to merely have the chance to work for, and calmly and with a perfectly straight face stating this to that weary editor sitting across from me.
Fine, don’t believe me.
It worked for a while.
SEVEN
The town of Littleton, California, is known for two things.
Sonny Rolph, a B-actor from the fifties, was born there.
And it’s known for the Aurora Dam Flood, which, in a curious kind of colloquial contraction, the locals simply refer to as that damn flood.
It didn’t actually happen in Littleton, but in its tiny sister town, Littleton Flats, situated some twenty-three miles down the road. In the 1950s, they erected the Aurora Dam on the nearby Aurora River, renowned for its grade three rapids and its unpleasant muddy color. The dam was built by contractors who may or may not have gotten the job through generous kickbacks to the state. What’s fairly certain is that they built the dam with shoddy workmanship and egregious errors of engineering judgment. It was later termed-by an independent government commission set up to apportion blame-as an accident ready to happen.
It happened.
Three days of rain in April of 1954 swelled the river to historic heights, filled the dam to heretofore unknown levels, and caused the flawed cement walls to come tumbling down.
Littleton Flats was below sea level and directly in the water’s path. It ceased to exist.
The death toll was put at 892, amended from 893 when they found a 3-year-old girl downriver and still alive.
I knew about this only because I’d scrolled through the microfilm of the Littleton Journal when Hinch first hired me but gave me nothing to do. The fact that the back issues were still on microfilm and not computer disks gave me a hard clue that I wasn’t in the big leagues anymore.
A lot of people in town at least knew somebody who knew somebody else who’d perished in that damn flood. It was an understandably sore subject for them, something I discovered when I tried to interest Hinch in a retrospective piece on its fiftieth anniversary.
“We tried that before,” he said. “Your predecessor, anyway.”
My predecessor was named John Wren. I knew this because I’d appropriated more than his desk; he’d lived in the same rented house. He’d clearly been something of a pack rat; I’d found ancient bills from cable, phone, and Amazon.com addressed to a John Wren, hand-scrawled notes stuffed in various places-only half-decipherable and alluding to who knows what-and one of his stories, about a hard-luck and disoriented Vietnam vet who’d wandered into Littleton one day and bedded down in the town gazebo. “Who’s Eddie Bronson?”-the title of the story. It had evidently been put up for some kind of local journalism prize. It lost. My first day on the job, I’d been greeted with a list Scotch-taped to the inside of my desk: Wren’s Rules. Rule number one: back up your notes for protection. Rule number two: transcribe your tape recordings for in case!
According to Norma, Wren, a transplanted Minnesotan, had gotten a bad case of desert dementia, Santa Ana Syndrome, the small-town willies-that weird fugue that sometimes takes hold of people stuck in California desert towns in the middle of nowhere-and gone to trout fish near the Oregon border. Or pan for gold in the Yukon. Or ice fish on Lake Michigan-the details were hazy.
“You want to give the damn flood a shot, go ahead,” Hinch said, “if you can get anyone to speak about it.”
I couldn’t.
Hinch might’ve spoken about it, but he wasn’t really old enough to remember anything. He’d spent his entire adolescence somewhere else-Sacramento, I think. He came back to Littleton to take care of his ailing mother and somehow never felt the urge to leave. Maybe his marriage to the local beauty queen had something to do with that. He kept a picture of her-Miss Azalea 1974-on his desk. Miss Azalea had since contracted breast cancer and twice lost her hair to chemo. I think that picture helped Hinch keep the image of what she once was planted firmly in his heart. As far as I knew, Hinch remained true-blue to her-not my usual experience with editors, who tended to have a hard time remembering that they were married.
I was married once.
I don’t feel like talking about it.
I drove outside town to do a story on an Alpaca ranch.
Apparently alpacas are big business now, not so much for their fleece as the alpacas themselves, able to fetch upwards of twenty thousand dollars.
The owners of the ranch, Mr. and Mrs. Childress, showed me around, insisted I feed their babies some food, and regaled me with stories about the trials and tribulations of alpaca breeding.
Apparently the desert heat wasn’t ideal for them.
They were used to grazing thousands of feet above sea level in the Andes. Their ankles tended to swell on the worst days, causing them to lie down and play dead. Some of them were doing just that as we tramped around the property.
They looked like the inspiration for “Woolly Bully,” I thought. As if some aesthetically challenged geneticist had combined the lamb with the camel, then stood back and said whoops. Picture walking balls of yarn, with unkempt mop-tops cascading down over mournfully sad eyes.
It got worse. Mrs. Childress led me past troughs of oats into the dark coolness of a barn. She wanted to show me something. At first I thought it was two alpacas lying side by side on a soft bed of hay.
It wasn’t. There was only one alpaca in there.
It had two heads.
“We didn’t have the heart to kill him,” Mrs. Childress said. “One of his heads is blind. Poor thing.”
I asked Mrs. Childress for something to drink; I wanted to get out of there.
We sat on their porch sipping sour lemonade, and when I ran out of questions and they ran out of stories, we still sat there and sipped our drinks in silence, just like I imagined r
eal families do.
I finished my lemonade, stood up, said good-bye.
“Thanks for stopping by, Tom,” Mrs. Childress said. “Drive carefully.”
It must’ve been her parting words.
I started thinking about someone who hadn’t driven carefully.
I turned left on Highway 45 instead of right. I looped around Littleton in a wide circle. I passed a decrepit sign for Littleton Flats-they’d never taken it down, leaving it as a kind of memorial, I suppose.
I kept going, and eventually got to the place I’d been to before.
The evening sky was a messy palette of roses and purples, making the desert look nearly nuclear. The distant flats were glowing red, the cacti luminous green.
The wreck had been towed away. There wasn’t a single car out on the road.
I pulled off to the side of 45 and parked my Miata where the ambulance had been.
I stepped out, noticed a mud brown snake slithering off into the underbrush. Rattlesnakes were fairly common here. Every so often, someone got bit by one, didn’t get to the doctor in time, and died a horrible, lonely death.
Dennis Flaherty had died a horrible, lonely death.
I walked onto the highway, to the very spot where the two cars collided.
I kneeled down on my haunches, hands firmly clasped under my chin-I don’t know why-maybe as a kind of prayer, a sign of respect for the dead.
Then I noticed something.
The absence of something.
I tried to remember what Ed Crannell had said. His exact words.
I stood up, walked back and forth, stared at the ground. Something was rumbling down the highway like a coming storm. I stepped back to the side of the road and respectfully watched an eighteen-wheeler roar past, massive enough to make the ground actually stutter.
When I got back to the office, no one was there.
I found my notes in my desk drawer.
I beeped the horn at the last second, Ed Crannell told me when I asked him what happened. I beeped the horn at the last second. He jammed on the brakes.
Dennis Flaherty had jammed on the breaks to prevent himself from crashing headlong into the pharmaceutical salesman’s car.