Deceit

TWENTY-FOUR

The color of the ground was the first clue.

It was suddenly redder, as if the earth itself had bled.

I’d driven my Miata to Marv’s Exxon station in the morning.

“It’s maybe salvageable, if you don’t mind it looking like Jed Clampett’s jalopy,” he said, then offered me a replacement car while he performed reconstructive surgery.

I drove down Highway 45 in an old T-bird with no backseat.

Past a weathered sign and down a road to nowhere.

It was impossible not to notice the absence of something.

Like standing in the remains of a Roman forum with no columns to define it. The space spoke like an open mouth.

And then, here and there, columns did appear, steel structures oxidized to rust. The humpbacked remains of cement foundations littering the moonscape. Or was it more like the plains of Mars-all that red earth?

I stopped the car and got out at the place that used to be Littleton Flats.

Have you ever stepped backward at a cemetery and inadvertently found yourself standing on a grave? You nearly blurt out sorry, don’t you?

I wandered around, past indistinguishable lumps of stone, scattered pebbles as opaque as blown glass, rusted cans of Old Milwaukee.

I tried to imagine what stood where.

The Littleton Flats Café, for example. Its small wooden bench sitting under the overhang of a sign, where a smiling black mother had held her smiling 6-year-old son up to the camera.

I skirted the edges of a large circle.

The water tower? The one they’d found seven miles away after the floodwaters had finally stopped?

I tried to picture it-the moment when it hit.

I’d seen the video footage of Indonesian tsunamis.

The seawater being sucked back into the ocean, grounding the fishing skiffs like little beach toys in the sand. Minutes of eerie nothingness, until the ocean suddenly roared back, deep black and two stories high, looking like some cheap cinematic trick until you realized those beaches and boats and hotels had people in them. Flailing arms and legs, bursting lungs and crumpled bodies.

Littleton Flats was populated mostly by the families of the hydroelectric plant workers that the Aurora Dam had been built to power. The very energy the townspeople harnessed and regulated had ended up turning on them, eating its own. The plant was destroyed in the flood and, with cheaper alternatives available downstate, never rebuilt.

Neither was Littleton Flats.

I stared down at the red dirt and saw someone staring back. A Lincoln penny, half obscured by moss, turning him into a kind of swamp creature. Creature from the Black Lagoon-one of those movies I used to bury myself in with the volume turned way up so I wouldn’t hear what was happening in the next room. Where she’d brought Jimmy. Suffer the little children. Like Benjamin. Except Benjamin had gotten away, somehow squirreled to the surface, and disappeared.

How?

Happy hundred birthday.

I became aware of the utter quiet.

Aside from the whispering wind, I couldn’t hear a single cricket or bird. Odd. No rattlers, either-kind of comforting for someone stuck out here by his lonesome.

Except I wasn’t.

I was sitting on a ledge of concrete, contemplating the penny that might have once bought Benjamin a piece of bubble gum complete with Bazooka Joe comic. I was turning it over in my hand, rubbing its green mossy surface between my forefinger and thumb, when I felt someone watching me.

It was a man.

He was half a football field away.

Standing maybe twenty yards from the battered T-bird I’d used to get here. I didn’t see another car, which made me wonder how he’d made it all the way out here. I was wondering something else. What he was doing here.

At first, I worried it might’ve been the plumber I’d last seen sauntering up my front walk with a bag in his hand.

Him.

It wasn’t.

This man was clearly older. If I saw him at the local Sears, or passed him at night strolling down Redondo Lane, I wouldn’t have given him a second thought. Not here.

I shot up, taking two steps back in an effort to gain my balance, which seemed to have been altered simply by his appearance.

He turned around and began walking away.

“Hello?” I shouted in his direction.

He kept walking, maintaining the same steady pace, a man on his morning constitution, a man who clearly hadn’t heard someone shouting at him to stop.

I hustled after him.

As I drew closer, he appeared even older than I’d first imagined. He had an aura of quiet dignity about him-even with his back turned. It might’ve been 100 degrees out here, but he was wearing a natty blue sport jacket with thin gray pinstripes. No hiking boots or tennis shoes, but polished black shoes that nearly gleamed. An old-fashioned fedora sat at a slight angle on his head.

“Excuse me,” I said, a little out of breath. “Excuse me, could I talk to you a sec?”

He stopped. And turned.

Late seventies, I guessed, maybe eighties. His hair, what I could see of it, was steely gray and trimmed short, just this side of a crew.

“Yes?” he said, as calmly and politely as someone asking you for the time.

“I was just curious what you’re doing out here?”

“Funny,” he said. “I was wondering the same thing about you.” He had what could only be referred to as piercing eyes-that striking shade of blue that nearly causes you to reach for your sunglasses.

“Tom Valle,” I said, “from the Littleton Journal.”

“Ah. You’re a reporter?”

I had the impression he was sizing me up-the uncomfortable sensation of being inside an MRI machine, innards intimately exposed to meticulous examination.

“Doing a story on what? This place?” he asked.

“Yes. On the Aurora Dam Flood.”

“I see.” He nodded, took his hat off, and wiped his brow with a clean white handkerchief that mysteriously appeared out of his jacket pocket.

“You should wear one,” he said, refixing his hat and sticking the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Sunstroke can be unforgiving.”

I believed him. I was starting to feel a slight wooziness, like purple haze without the fun.

“The flood,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

“Fifty years,” I said; I could feel a rivulet of sweat trickling down the center of my back. “So, what brought you out here?” I was going to ask him how he’d got out here as well, but I’d noticed the front grille of a car parked behind one of the rusting steel structures about forty yards away.

“Curiosity,” he said.

“You’ve read about the flood?”

“Yes.”

“Are you from around here?”

“Here? I don’t think anyone’s from around here. Now.”

“I don’t mean Littleton Flats. I meant from around the area?”

“No. I’m not from this area.”

“Oh. Just a flood buff, then?”

“Well,” he said, “I was here once.”

“Here? You mean Littleton Flats?”

“That’s right.”

“Before the flood?”

He nodded. “Not much left, is there?”

“No. What was it like?”

“Like?”

“The town?” I’d read a lot about the destruction of Littleton Flats, almost nothing about the town itself. Here was someone who’d walked its streets, who might’ve passed Belinda and Benjamin on their way to breakfast in the Littleton Flats Café.

“It was like any town. Entirely ordinary. Families, shops, houses, backyards. Just a town.”

“What year was that?”

“Year?”

“The year you visited?”

“ 1954.”

“That was the year it happened.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never come back? Till now?”

He shook his head. “No. I was passing through and I thought to myself, why not?”

“It must be kind of eerie for you.”

“Eerie? I would think it would be eerie for anybody. All ghost towns are.”

Yes, he was right. The soft wind whistling through the rusted steel sounded like the angry whispering of ghosts.

“A terrible thing happened here, didn’t it?” the man said. “You can still feel it.”

I reached for the pad and pen in my pocket. “Can I ask your name? You wouldn’t mind being quoted, would you? For my story.”

“I’m afraid I have nothing much to contribute. Just a flood buff, like you said.”

“But you were there.”

“Yes, I was here. So were a lot of people.”

“A lot of people don’t like talking about it. In Littleton, anyway. You don’t seem to mind.”

He looked down at his polished black shoes, both feet ramrod straight, making me wonder if he’d ever been in the military. “Okay,” he said, looking up. “My name’s Herman Wentworth.”

I scribbled it down. “May I ask, Herman, what you used to do?”

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Of course, I don’t practice anymore.”

Funny, I thought. That uncomfortable feeling of being examined when I’d first said hello to him. It hadn’t been an accident.

“Were you in private practice?”

He shook his head. “I was an army doctor.”

So he had been in the military. “The army, really? Where were you stationed?”

“Oh, everywhere. At one time or another. Pretty much all over the world. I started out in Japan.”

“Japan, huh? When would that have been?”

“At the end of the war. Right after the surrender.”

“Tokyo?”

“No,” he said. “Different part of the country. I was with the 499th medical battalion.”

“Treating wounded soldiers?”

“Treating everybody. Japanese, too. The Hippocratic oath doesn’t delineate between friends and enemies, just those you can save and those you can’t.”

“So, at some point in 1954, you ended up here?”

“For a day.”

“Did you know someone in Littleton Flats?”

He shook his head. “No, I was passing through. Just like today.”

I wondered where someone needed to be going in order to pass through Littleton Flats. It wasn’t exactly the crossroads of the world. More like its dead end.

Then he answered for me.

“I was transferred to San Diego. I wanted to take in some desert scenery. I was born up north-Minneapolis. You don’t see a lot of desert up there.”

“And so you stopped here for one day?”

“That’s right. Just one day.”

“What time of year was it, do you remember?”

“Afraid I don’t.” He repeated the ritual of minutes before, pulling that handkerchief out of his pocket, removing his hat, and wiping the sweat off his brow.

The wooziness I’d felt before had worsened. A dull headache had settled in the middle of my forehead.

“Do you remember anything in particular?”

“About what?”

“The town?”

“It was a long time ago. I told you-it was just a town.”

“Where were you when you heard?”

“Heard?”

“About the flood?”

“Sorry,” he shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I appreciate you answering my questions.”

“I don’t see how I was any particular help.”

“You were there. It’s nice to meet someone who saw it before it all washed away.”

I put out my hand and he shook it, a surprisingly firm grip from someone eighty or so. He went to leave, then turned back around.

“I wouldn’t stay too long out here.” He tapped his forehead. “Sunstroke can be murder. Remember, I am a doctor.”

“Thank you; I won’t.”

I watched as he made his way back to his car. I heard the engine rev, then softly idle for a while, before he finally pulled out from behind the splintered steel column.

He drove off, leaving the place deathly quiet again.

My headache had reached DEFCON 3; I felt nauseated as I walked back to my car. I opened the front door and collapsed into the front seat.

It felt better than out there in the sun, but I was dizzy enough to close my eyes.

I put the seat back and thought it might be nice to rest for a few minutes.

After a while, I was walking around Littleton Flats again.

The town was alive with people. The water tower was right there on Main Street. The men all wore old-fashioned fedoras. I could smell the aroma of blueberry pancakes and maple syrup wafting over from the Littleton Flats Café.

When I walked inside, the pretty waitress, the one my father left us for-Lillian, her name was-smiled at me. I blushed when she brought me a fresh place mat with connect-the-dots on it.

I began drawing lines from one dot to another, and now and then I thought I could see a picture in there, but when I held it up to show my father, it was blank.

I felt this awful frustration, an excruciating embarrassment as I kept drawing and attempting to show my father and Lillian something in the dots, but every time I tried it would vanish. Poof. I could sense my father’s growing disappointment, Lillian’s boredom, and I finally drew my own picture, just ignored the dots entirely and drew a picture of a woman and child sitting on a bench.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dark and I was covered in cold sweat.

I wondered if the army doctor had been part of the dream.