Deceit

TWENTY-THREE

I turned out to be two times over legal.

Drunk enough, at least, not to have noticed Sheriff Swenson placing his size eleven black boot directly in my path. I noticed it on my neck. Lying on the ground, my cheek pressed against asphalt still warm from the desert sun, I felt its blunt weight and unmistakable message about hierarchy.

I assumed this might be it. It being my life. It was going to end here, on this empty road in the middle of the California desert.

The sheriff, it turned out, was simply making a point about the consequences of reckless behavior.

Point taken.

I blew into a Breathalyzer, was interrogated as to where I’d hit what, got cited for driving while intoxicated and for leaving the scene of an accident-make that two accidents.

Then, astonishingly, I was let go.

He could’ve given me a night in jail to contemplate my crimes, something he reminded me of as a way to let me know how easy he was being on me.

I said thank you.

Thank you isn’t what I was thinking.

He never saw the pickup. How’s that possible?

Somehow, contrary to all the laws of physics, he’d missed a blue pickup dogging my tail at ninety miles an hour.

Where had the pickup gone? Maybe he’d seen the police lights and eased off the pedal, drifted to a stop, taken off down a side street.

Maybe Swenson hadn’t seen it.

I considered the sickening possibility that I was hallucinating.

There was that face in the bowling alley, the same one I later saw lit up by a bug zapper-it had vanished on me twice.

Was it possible I wasn’t okay in the head? That, like Dennis Flaherty, I was in dire need of some industrial-strength psychotropics?

No.

It’s easy to question yourself lying in bed at 1 in the morning, with a throbbing Chianti hangover and a Miata sitting in your driveway that has a date with the junkyard compactor.

Something else was going on.

I pulled Benjamin’s note out of my bedside drawer.

Happy hundred birthday.

It was grammatically flawed, of course. Odd I hadn’t noticed that before. Happy hundredth birthday was what he should’ve written. How old would the letter writer be if it really were her son? I reached into the drawer for the picture of the two of them-still marred by faint spots of blood.

It must’ve been winter. When the picture was taken.

Not that winters were particularly cold around here. Cold enough to don a tan wool jacket and dress your only child in a brown corduroy coat with five black buttons. She was holding him under his arms and it looked like he was maybe ticklish, had spent the previous minute while the photographer was framing the shot fidgeting in her lap and giggling out loud. He wore this charming bucktoothed grin, as if any second he was going to burst into raucous laughter. They say photographs can’t steal your soul-but every so often they can hold it hostage.

Who was the photographer?

Belinda’s husband? Trying to commemorate this moment for posterity? What moment? They were sitting under the sign for the Littleton Flats Café. Maybe they’d celebrated the day with a special lunch? Celebrated what? Benjamin’s graduation from kindergarten? He looked to be about 6 then.

Jimmy’s age.

The disaster must’ve happened soon after the picture was taken. Maybe that’s why the picture was so haunting-because of what was to come.

Those three days of unrelenting rain-unusual for the desert, sure, but sometimes it happened. Mother Nature went on the rag, and all hell broke loose.

Or cement walls did.

Just another Sunday morning in Littleton Flats.

Maybe Benjamin was looking at the funny papers, just learning to read, Jane running and Dick throwing and Spot barking, and maybe wondering why all these walking and running and throwing kids were white, or maybe not-maybe kids were still color-blind at that age. Maybe all he was thinking about that morning was when his mom was finally going to get home and bake some of her peach pie. I don’t know if Belinda baked peach pies-she was probably too busy cleaning that white family’s home in Littleton, what most black people did back then if they wanted to put food on the table. Maybe Belinda was making beds, cooking breakfast, cleaning up the kids she’d been stuck with that weekend when she heard that first rumble, like thunder, only it was a clear day-not a cloud in the sky. How odd, she must’ve thought-all of them must’ve thought-to be hearing thunder when there wasn’t a rain cloud to be seen.

The first thing the water hit was the water tower.

This was according to what I’d read on microfilm.

Kind of ironic, water hitting its own.

When the water finally stopped, they found the tower seven miles away from where it originally stood. Not that far, in fact, from where they found the lone survivor-a 3-year-old girl who’d rode out the flood on a storm-cellar door unhinged in the maelstrom. Buoyant enough for her to ride the wave of destruction like some precocious surfer at Waimea.

The town itself was flattened. News accounts likened it to Hiroshima-most Americans’ image back then of what total destruction looked like.

I’d found a few photos.

They were right.

Here and there, pieces of cement or steel structures still stood, like odd abstract sculptures. You would’ve been hard-pressed to identify what they once were.

The area was roped off due to the threat of disease-all those dead bodies bloating in the rancid water. It had taken them months to clean it up-to recover the bodies, salvage what was recoverable, board up, pull down, and cart the rest away. Then came the hand-wringing, soul-searching, and, eventually and inescapably, the finger-pointing. They formed an independent commission to investigate the building of the Aurora Dam, to painstakingly pore over the contractor’s blueprints, the requisition orders, the…

Ring, ring.

The sound of the phone startled me. I was lost in Littleton Flats of fifty years ago; suddenly the here and now was demanding to be acknowledged.

I picked up.

“Tom Valle?”

“Yes. Who’s this?” The ringing had restarted the pile driver in my head. Pound… pound… pound…

“John Wren. You called me?” he said, in a tone of voice that sounded vaguely accusatory.

“Yes, that’s right. Thank you for getting back to me.”

“No problem,” Wren said.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure how to proceed with the conversation.

How are you feeling these days, John? Still howling at the moon?

He continued the conversation for me. He asked about Hinch.

“He’s fine,” I said, then corrected myself. “Actually, no, he’s not fine. His wife, she’s sick again.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“So, what do you want?” he said.

“The Aurora Dam Flood. Hinch said you tried to do a story on it.”

“The flood? Uh-huh, that’s right.”

“What happened?”

“Not much.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was hard to get people to talk about it. Most of the people weren’t even around back then.”

“So you couldn’t find anyone?”

“I didn’t say that. I said it was hard. Why are you doing a story on the Aurora Dam Flood?”

“The same reason you did-893 people died.”

“It was 892. You’re forgetting the little girl.”

“Right. The little girl.”

“I met her,” he said. “She’s still around.”

“In Littleton?”

“San Diego. I tracked her down. She was my first interview.”

“How did it go?”

“Okay. For someone who was 3 years old when it happened, she had an amazing memory.” I heard a match light, the sound of Wren inhaling. “There was a little problem with what she remembered.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she remembered some very imaginative things about that day.”

“Imaginative?”

“If you think a ship of space robots rescuing her out of the water happens every day, then no, it wasn’t imaginative.”

“Space robots?”

“That’s right. Space robots.”

“Well, you said so yourself. She was 3 years old at the time.”

“Uh-huh. Of course, some of the stuff she remembered was half-believable. It’s the National Enquirer stuff I had a tough time with.”

“You mean, there were things besides the space robots?”

“Right. Beside the space robots. There was a lot about that day…” His voice drifted off.

“Like?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Tom Valle. You have the same name as that… fraud… you know the one I’m talking about; you must get it all the time. Tough being in the same business, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, tough.”

“Ever think about changing your name?”

“No.”

“Good for you. Why change your name because someone else pissed on it, right?”

“Right.”

“What happened to him? Didn’t that guy go to jail?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“I could’ve sworn he went to jail. He deserved it.”

“I’m Tom Valle,” I said.

“I know.”

“No, the Tom Valle you’re talking about. The one who didn’t go to jail.”

“I know,” he repeated. “I checked you out when I got your message. I was wondering if you were going to tell me.”

“Well, I’ve told you.”

“To tell you the truth-we are truth-telling here, right-I’m kind of surprised you haven’t changed your name. I’m more surprised you’re back working for a newspaper. Even if it’s in Mayberry. Hinch knows, I guess?”

“Yes.”

“Good for him. Is this an experiment in rehabilitative journalism?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Maybe I should do that. I mean, it’s kind of like letting a child molester back into the classroom, isn’t it?”

“It’s old news. I’ve paid my court-ordered debt to society. Honest. Why don’t we drop it? I just wanted to know if you had any information on…”

“It’s your debt to journalism I’m concerned about,” he interrupted me. “You can’t repay that debt. People like you come along, it leaves a stink on all of us. It breaks the sacred bond. Makes us all look like tabloid writers,” he said, his voice rising. “You were legitimate. The real deal. You got to where the rest of us all hoped we could get. Even if we couldn’t. You got the average Joe thinking, maybe it’s all bullshit. Reality TV-phony baloney, all made up. That’s why I called you back. I wanted to tell you that in person.”

I sat there and took it without hanging up.

Maybe because he was still a little crazy, even if he was still right. You can be crazy and right, can’t you? Or maybe it was because it had been a while, a long while, since someone had laid it out in all its awful majesty. The day I’d attempted to slink out of the office with a carton of my meager possessions, skirting malevolent stares and blatant cold shoulders, a few self-appointed avengers managed to corner me in the hall and apply a full nelson of journalistic indignation. One of them was my drinking partner, the one who’d knifed that quaint message into my desk. I lie, therefore I am. I’d taken their diatribe just as I took Wren’s now-I didn’t duck into the elevator, make a mad dash for the stairs, or take a swing at them. I listened, as stoically as Chuck Connors when they sliced the epaulets off his Calvary uniform and kicked him out of Fort Apache at the beginning of Branded. Part of it was because of Dr. Payne’s admonitions to own up. Part of it was because I deserved it. Part of it was because I thought if I took it from them, maybe I wouldn’t have to take it from him. The man down the hall whom I’d personally destroyed. The one who would be thrown out of the fort weeks later and never let back in. The one I called up when I got filthy drunk and said not one word to.

“So, you’re, what’s the word-reformed these days?”

“I wasn’t an alcoholic. I made up stories. I’ve stopped.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I’m curious about this story. The Aurora Dam Flood.”

“So you’ve said.”

“That’s why I called you. I was wondering if you knew anything about the death toll? If all the bodies were actually accounted for?”

“Accounted for how?”

“If anyone who supposedly died in the flood-if they ever just showed up later?”

Silence.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t think the laws of journalistic courtesy apply to you.”

“I think someone who was supposed to have died in the flood didn’t. I think he popped up recently to say hi to his 100-year-old mom. I think it may have been the same person who burned up in a car crash later with someone else’s wallet in his pocket. I don’t know this for sure-I think it’s possible. I’m trying to connect the dots.”

I heard the tap, tap, tap of a cigarette against ashtray.

“What are you asking me for-help? How? You want me to look for my notes? Is that what you’re asking me?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“It isn’t too much trouble. If I wanted to. I don’t. Not for you.”

I heard the impatience in his voice now, the implicit desire to get off the phone.

“Maybe that’s how I repay the debt,” I said.

“What?”

“The debt you mentioned. The one to journalism. Maybe this is how.” I don’t exactly know why I came out with that-I don’t-but when I did, it sounded right. It sounded, for want of a better term, true.

I heard him take another drag, pictured a coil of blue smoke slowly spiraling up to the ceiling.

“I’ll think about it,” he said after what seemed like a very long time.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t. I haven’t said yes.”