by James Siegel
But not tonight.
No.
Tonight I was Carl Woodward, a hybrid between journalistic fervor and rampant horniness. Wine had loosened my tongue, all right; I was up on a soapbox with no intention of coming down. I was showing off.
“We may be in the democracy-exporting business-I mean that seems to be our only foreign policy these days, our crusade-but who protects democracy in a democracy? Those nine geriatrics on the Supreme Court? What protects the USA today is USA Today. Scary, huh? I’m not kidding. Like it or not, democracy’s in the sweaty little hands of the working press. Even if we don’t really know it. Even if we don’t really want it. I’m using we loosely here. Because truth always gets the first bullet.”
Truth-blithely using the one word in the English language I was least familiar with.
I was half-listening to myself, wondering if I sounded like a dangerous madman or, just as bad, a bore. But Anna seemed to be listening with semirapt attention. She seemed to like this me, this superhero of truth, justice, and the American way.
Then she said: “Why did you need a break?”
“Huh?”
“You said you came out here because you needed a break. What from? It sounds like you loved it-your work. Being on important stories. Why did you bury yourself out here? I don’t mean bury-I mean…”
I should’ve been more careful.
I’d started the night talking about things unrelated to journalism, hadn’t I? The New York Yankees, rattlesnakes, Caddyshack. Somehow, without quite realizing it, I’d navigated My Dinner with Anna back into dangerous waters.
“I had a problem at my last job.”
“Oh? What kind of problem?”
“Ethics, sort of.”
“Ethics, sort of,” she repeated. “Something you want to talk about or something you want to pretend I didn’t ask you about?”
“Something I want to pretend you didn’t ask me about.” It’s possible to become suddenly and shockingly sober-my purple haze had disappeared like protective netting blown off by an ill wind.
“Fine. Ethics sounds kind of interesting, though. Even a little dirty.”
“It was. But not in the way you mean it,” I said.
“Oh. Well, whatever it was, I’m sorry. I mean, you obviously adored being a reporter-you’re still a reporter, you know what I mean…”
“I made things up.”
There.
Sooner or later it was bound to come out. Sooner or later, she’d mention my name to one of her friends or acquaintances and they’d tell her how familiar that name sounded-that if they didn’t know any better they’d say it sounded like that reporter guy who nearly took down a newspaper. The one who wrote about things that never happened.
The liar.
“Tom Valle,” she said, as if sounding out a foreign language. “Oh shit.”
I tried to glean what I could from her expression-those few seconds when pure shock left her unguarded. Was it simple embarrassment I saw there? Disgust? Pity?
“Wow,” she said, lifting the wine glass to her lips, then placing it back down on the table with an awkward deliberateness, like someone relearning to use their extremities after a stroke. “When you said you needed a break, you weren’t kidding. Do you mind me asking… why you did what you did? I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
I didn’t respond right away. I could’ve said yeah, I’d rather you didn’t, and changed the subject. I could’ve trotted out something tried-and-true and meant for public consumption only. I was wrong. I didn’t mean it. I was going through a lot of stuff at the time. I could’ve editorialized.
I told the truth.
How it began. The morning I woke up late. The little exercise in creative writing.
“How many times?” she asked me softly. “After that?”
“I don’t know. They ended up auditing every story I’d ever written. They said there were fifty-six of them. Where I’d either partially or totally fabricated a story. I didn’t think it was that much. Maybe it was.”
“Why? You were a good reporter, right? I mean, you had a respected career. You worked at a great newspaper. You didn’t have to.”
You didn’t have to. The great mystery of Tom Valle’s criminal life.
“Ever walk into a reporter bar?” I asked her. “There’s a hierarchy in those places-you’re either holding court or bowing down. Maybe it was nice being bowed down to for a change. Besides, when you’re a mediocre student, being teacher’s pet feels pretty good. Being on page 1 instead of section 2 feels even better. It was nice making the B-list of talking heads, too. I even did Larry King Live. Once-Ben Bradlee was on the panel. Interns from the Columbia School of Journalism sought me out for pearls of journalistic wisdom. Other reporters stuck pins into Tom Valle dolls, when they weren’t falling all over themselves to buy me a drink. Which turned out to be my downfall, actually-one of those reporters bought me several drinks. It’s hard to keep your facts straight on four margaritas.”
She asked me how I ended up here.
“Here’s pretty much the only place that would have me,” I said. “The week I knew the jig was up, that it was all going to come crashing down around my head-the editors were already circling the wagons, beginning to sift through the wreckage; they had forensic accountants checking my expense accounts against my bylines. I mean, if I had eggs and coffee in a diner in New York on the third, I couldn’t have been at a DNC conference in Washington, right? Anyway, I got wicked drunk and went up there at 3 in the morning. I must’ve had the vague intention of stealing anything incriminating, which in retrospect means I would’ve needed a forklift. I don’t really know what I thought I was going to do. I broke into the national editor’s office and tried to find his computer files; I ended up passed out on the floor. It gave them the excuse they needed to press criminal charges, as opposed to just a nice public firing. I got probation instead of jail time-they weren’t going to throw me in jail for that. For one year I did nothing much but hibernate. My PO is related to Hinch Edwards-he owns the Littleton Journal. Hinch took pity. End of story.”
“Yeah, he’s a nice guy.”
That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that Anna maybe knew things I wasn’t aware she knew.
“You know Hinch?”
“I knew someone who worked for him,” she said.
“Who?”
“John.”
“John who? John Wren? You knew John Wren?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? We’ve had one dinner. I haven’t told you my middle name, either. By the way, it’s Alicia.”
“So you were friends or something?”
“Kind of. What’s so remarkable about that?”
“Nothing. Just kind of funny that you know two reporters who lived in the same house.”
“He lived in your house, huh? Of course, it’s a small town. Not that many houses.”
“Right.” I gulped down some wine, desperately trying to recapture a suddenly elusive high. “Do you keep in touch with him?” I asked.
“I’m not sure he keeps in touch with anyone. I came to visit my dad one time, and he was just gone. That’s where we’d met. At the home. He was interviewing people about that… flood… the one back in the fifties. You know about that, right? Horrible-a whole town went under. I think he went to the retirement home to try to scare up some memories.”
Scare. Good word, I thought.
“I don’t think he was very successful at it,” I said. “The story never ran.”
“Really?” Anna said. “He seemed pretty excited about it. He e-mailed me once after he left Littleton-my impression was he’d holed himself up somewhere to work on it.”
“That’s strange, considering he was no longer employed,” I said. “Anyway, word was he was pretty excitable in general around then. He went a little bonkers.”
“Bonkers? Is that a psychiatric term?”
“He locked himsel
f in the newspaper offices one night and had to be forcibly removed. I think that constitutes bonkers. I ought to know.”
“Was that what they said you were? Bonkers?”
“Only the nice ones. Everyone else said I was the devil.”
“You don’t look like the devil.”
“Thanks.” I blushed, took another sip of wine. “Was your father living here? Back when the flood happened?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t be able to tell you much about it, of course. Not now.”
Silence.
“I just tried to call him,” I said. “Wren.”
“Oh? What for?”
“I want to ask him about something I’m working on.”
“I thought you said he’d lost his mind?”
“Maybe he got it back.”
I was tempted to tell Anna that the something I was working on was the same thing Wren had been working on. The aforementioned nut job Wren.
It might sound paranoid to her. It might sound like a desperate reporter trying to get his mojo back.
Not that it really mattered.
Dinner had become uncomfortably awkward. It was as if the stopper had been pulled out of the bottle labeled Anna and Tom’s Dinner Conversation; the contents had poured out onto the floor, leaving nothing but a few paltry drops.
I felt less than whole in her eyes, an ethical cripple. The whole mood had soured. She made a halfhearted effort to resuscitate things, but she seemed to be going through the motions.
When I paid the bill, when we walked outside and I escorted her to her car, I didn’t know whether to say good night or good-bye.
We lingered in front of her red Beetle-more maroon in the moonlight-and it was like that moment in front of a girl’s apartment door when you’re either going to get shot down or rescued and you don’t for the life of you know which.
She leaned forward and kissed me.
On the cheek.
“I’ll call you sometime,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”
I wanted to say that’s it?
I wanted to take that butterfly that had begun flitting about my chest the day she fixed my car and never really stopped-I wanted to pin it down. To display it somewhere where I could hold it up to the light and stare at it.
She’d call me sometime. Then what? She’d call me as a friend or an acquaintance or something more? She’d call me because she wanted to, or because she had to, or she was never going to call at all?
“Don’t mention it,” I said.
TWENTY-ONE
The ride back was a journey into self-pity.
I was familiar with the terrain, having visited it on a number of previous occasions-mostly in that one-year period I spent holed up in my NoHo apartment like a prisoner in isolation. I journeyed frequently to Self-Pity then, sampling the local tequila and scribbling postcards to Dr. Payne: having no fun, wish you were here.
I’d mostly refrained from giving Anna the psychobabble, but Dr. Payne had shown no such restraint.
Why did this liar lie?
You really want to know, Anna?
Are you sure?
Because I woke up hours late one morning, and needed to.
Because the Ward Cleaver of editors patted me on the head and said good job.
Not good enough?
You want more?
Because I lied to my 9-year-old self, lied that my dad wasn’t sleeping with that waitress, that he’d be home any minute, that my mom was not a sadistic drunk, that the men trooping upstairs with her really liked me when they didn’t even like her.
That Jimmy was clumsy.
Children of alcoholics tend to see what they want to and not see what they don’t, Dr. Payne said.
You have no idea.
He slipped on the ice and he hurt his head.
He slipped.
On the ice.
Lying as defense mechanism, Dr. Payne said. Don’t knock it.
Lying as palliative, an elixir, a quicker-fixer-upper.
Lying like a cheap rug and a thousand-dollar hooker.
Lying as my MO.
Lying to caseworkers from Children’s Protective Services. To the police. To everyone.
What happened, Tommy?
He slipped.
On the ice.
He hurt his head.
When I saw a black figure sauntering up the front walk of my house, it didn’t register at first.
Even when I noticed he was carrying some kind of bag in his left hand, even then it took me a few seconds to organize that thought into anything resembling coherence. That’s interesting, I said, and took my foot off the gas pedal.
He stopped. Halfway to my front door. Where his face was momentarily lit up by the bug zapper attached to the half-dead elm on my lawn, those repulsive features illuminated in a sickly flash of purple.
You’re it.
Our friendly neighborhood plumber. Back for another service call.
He knew he had company.
My Miata had stopped dead in the middle of the street, as if that finicky coil wire had popped loose again.
He ran back into his pickup truck and zoomed off, quickly accelerating past the legal speed limit, assuming you weren’t allowed to do ninety on a residential street.
I gunned the engine, followed his taillights.
They dodged and darted and weaved and blew past the aluminum-sided homes on Redondo Lane, past the hacienda-style stucco ranch houses on West Road, past 7-Eleven, Shakey’s, and IHOP, past San Pedro High School and the motorcycle bar out in the flats. They ignored five stop signs and two lights and a bunch of rowdy teenagers on Warrow Road, who were chug-a-lugging beer from brown paper bags in the middle of the street and had to literally dive for cover.
I’m not sure if I’d ever driven that fast before.
Maybe in a video game.
I hadn’t realized how drunk I was-not until I clipped my first car on a wide turn around the high school ball field, a slight jolt accompanied by the awful sound of shearing metal, sound slightly behind sensation, as if the sound waves needed a while to catch up.
I clipped my second car somewhere by Littleton’s nine-hole golf course. This time not even seeing what I hit-just knowing I hit something, because my Miata rocked violently to the right and its victim cried out in pain, a car alarm bursting into full-throated fury.
Then something hit me.
Smash.
I’d turned a corner, and faced empty street.
I’d looked left. I’d looked right.
I should’ve looked behind me.
The plumber had ducked into a driveway.
Then ducked out.
It was like one of those Looney Tunes cartoons. Elmer Fudd furiously chasing the wabbit until positions suddenly reverse the way they magically do in cartoons-and poor gun-toting Elmer’s pumping away with Bugs hot on his tail.
Only it wasn’t a rabbit chasing me, and if anyone was toting a gun, it was him.
Smash.
He jolted my back bumper again, once, twice, then hard enough to actually propel me into the dash.
My chin hit the top of the steering wheel; my head snapped back.
I felt the wine coming up, the vermicelli alfredo.
I couldn’t stop.
If I stepped on the brake, he was going to end up in my front seat.
I could see that blackened shell on Highway 45. It was me.
I floored the gas, resisting checking the speedometer, thinking that the actual number might scare me, not wanting to take my eyes off an increasingly blurry road. Once or twice, we sped past other cars, but they seemed like stage props, seemingly frozen in place. I caught one face registering astonishment and outright fear.
It was mutual.
The plumber smacked me again. I felt a pain shoot up my spine as my car whiplashed right, clipping a curb.
Then again-harder this time, one hand stuttering off the wheel, as the car shimmied left.
This is what it feels like whe
n you’re about to be trampled.
This is what it feels like to have something brutish and unstoppable stepping on your heels.
There’s nowhere to go.
You can’t stop; you can’t turn right or left.
You can only try to outrace it.
Until you can’t.
I flew around a corner where the road suddenly widened out and structures disappeared.
I knew where we were.
The service road that passes two billboards: Spex in the City, the eyeglass store on Main, and Binions Casino, with three 40DDD showgirls in glittering sequins luring me to possible salvation.
The open highway.
If I could make it onto the highway, I had a chance.
I gunned the engine; I said a prayer.
I didn’t see the police-car lights come on until they were suddenly flashing in my rearview mirror.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing, Lucas?”
The first words out of Sheriff Swenson’s mouth.
I told him what I was doing, suffused with the gratitude of the suddenly rescued.
“What pickup?” he said.
He was standing outside the driver’s-side door shining a blinding flashlight into my eyes, making me feel less grateful and more as if I were in the middle of an interrogation. All that was missing was the rubber truncheon.
“The blue pickup that was right behind me,” I said. “The one with the man who broke into my house and beat me up.”
“Pickup?” Sheriff Swenson said. “What are you talking about? I didn’t see any pickup.”
Which was about when I felt it. That insidious chill that travels up your legs when you’re standing in a stifling-hot room in dripping-wet socks. You just know you’re going to be really sick.
“How’s that possible? It was five feet behind me.”
“Get out of the car.”
The headlights from Swenson’s cruiser illuminated a reject from Demolition Derby. The front fender was smashed in; there were jagged streaks of odd color crisscrossing the passenger door. The back bumper had two formidable dents.
“I caught him trying to break into my house again. Then he tried to run me off the road,” I said.