Deceit

THIRTY-ONE

They were listening to Eddie Fisher and Rosemary Clooney on the radio.

Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes…

They went to the Odeon on Sixth and Main to see Brando play an ex-boxer with a conscience.

They read dispatches from Seoul in the Littleton Journal. The Korean War had just ended-the full dress rehearsal for that Asian land war still to come. They perused the back pages for the baseball box scores as the New York Giants surged to the National League pennant.

Those who owned General Electric TVs chose between two major heavyweight bouts that year-Marciano versus Ezzard Charles, or Army versus McCarthy.

It hadn’t been a good year for Tail-Gunner Joe.

America liked Ike, but it wasn’t so sure about Joe anymore, the rabid Red-baiter who’d sworn on a stack of Bibles that there was a Red under every bed. Or at least, inside every department of the U.S. government. The incredible irony of his bellicose claims was still years from exposure-that lying-through-his-teeth Joe, this cheap opportunist whose name became synonymous with undeserved character assassination, was more or less on the money. There were Communists scattered throughout the U.S. government-Senator McCarthy just didn’t know it.

What he did know, or was at least beginning to catch a dangerous whiff of, was his own political mortality. He’d gotten angry at the U.S. Army because they wouldn’t give an exemption to his favorite hatchet man. Suddenly, the army was riddled with Communists, too. They held a public hearing on the matter-where Joe questioned the loyalty of an aide to the army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, where Welch uttered the now-famous line asking the senator if he had no sense of decency, and where the relatively newfangled medium of TV caught every mesmerizing, career-dooming moment of it. By the time the hearings ended, McCarthy was a power broker in name only. His bullying and general ugliness of character had been exposed for all TV-owning Americans to see. He was political toast.

Of course, there was the man and there was the movement.

Red-fearing was still very much alive and well.

One sniff of the mushroom cloud drifting over Russia was sufficient to send Americans running and screaming into their bomb shelters. Russia had the H-bomb! There was a picture in the Littleton Journal of a state-of-the-art shelter stocked with an entire wall of Campbell’s soups and two hundred boxes of Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes.

The innocent fifties, they called it.

It was innocence poisoned by fear. People always knew they were going to die; now they knew how.

Still, in Littleton Flats, they cleaned homes and diapered children and flipped burgers. Three-quarters of the men in town-give or take-worked for the hydroelectric power plant attached to the Aurora Dam. They wore steel construction hats and slipped cotton into their ears to keep out the constant roar of rushing water. They held barbecues on Sundays where they listened to the Giants take the World Series 4 to 0. They danced like William Holden and Kim Novak at the local church. Teenagers spent Saturday nights hot-rodding outside town. An article mentioned several smashups, one fatal, and the subsequent efforts of the sheriff’s department to channel youthful energies into more wholesome pursuits.

Like sports.

There was a little league made up of three teams. The local high school football team was known as the Littleton Flat Rattlers and went 3- 7 in 1953.

The seniors put on a production of Oklahoma! where the lead was played by Marie Langham; the school paper called her transcendent and noted that the boy who played Curly was also split end and defensive back on the football team. The high school boasted five Westinghouse finalists.

The town held a May Day celebration in the town square that year. They danced around a maypole and sang “It Might as Well Be Spring.”

During Christmas, they carted in a big fir and decked it in electric lights, topping it off with a gleaming star of Jesus. A toy collection was taken for down-on-their-luck families. The fourth-grade class at Franklin Pierce Elementary School wrote a letter to Eisenhower pledging their help against Godless Communism.

There was a Bing Crosby fan club in town.

The Rotary Club, staunchly Republican and a must if you were running for town office, advertised a June social.

Bingo tournaments were held every week at the Our Lady of Sorrows church.

The Littleton Flats Café served a breakfast special of three eggs-any style-home fried potatoes, orange juice, coffee, and toast for just fifty cents. Free refills on the coffee.

There were summer concerts at the gazebo-a barbershop quartet called the Flats Four was the main draw.

There would be two banner headlines in the history of the Littleton Journal. The day after Lee Harvey Oswald left his perch at the Texas Book Depository building was the second.

The first was the Monday after the Aurora Dam Flood.

Flood Disaster Wipes Out Littleton Flats!

The what, where, how, and when in a succinct six-word statement. The why of the matter wouldn’t be determined till later-other than the fact that three straight days of rain had raised water levels to ominously high levels.

Total Loss of Life Feared!

That was the next day’s headline-before 3-year-old Bailey Kindlon was discovered downriver and still alive.

There were the pictures.

A town swallowed whole, with bits and pieces peeking out of the water like dead cypress branches in a swamp.

One of the photographs appeared to have been taken from a helicopter. You could see a faint chop in the floodwater stirred up by the rotor blades, and the barest shadow like a whale hovering just below the surface.

There was a closeup of Littleton’s fire chief, looking somber and bleary-eyed, the expression of a surgeon informing the family that despite his very best efforts, the patient has died.

In the days that followed, a list appeared. It grew longer and longer, as if it were a living thing voraciously fattening up on the bodies of the dead.

Benjamin Washington-6 years old appeared by the third day.

By then, the list covered six columns and two entire pages.

By then, the National Guard had been called in, with an entire battalion from Fort Hood.

By then, the governor of California had held his obligatory press conference at the site of the disaster, the bishop of Los Angeles had said a benediction over the watery grave in which he referenced Noah’s flood, and blockades had been posted to keep the curious and grief-stricken away. There was the threat of disease-all the dead bodies in the hot sun. All that water-a natural breeding ground for dangerous microbes.

By the end of the week, fingers were already being pointed. There was no mention of Lloyd Steiner-not yet. Just rampant curiosity about how a dam built by top engineers could’ve crumbled like a Toll House cookie. Local corruption was suspected. Half the state’s underwater, someone was quoted as saying, and the other half’s under indictment.

An expert on dams, Major Samson from the Army Corps of Engineers, was quoted in the Littleton Journal: “Desert or not, you have to account for a rise in water levels and the increase in pressure. Any dam built to U.S. standards should’ve been able to withstand it. There had to have been severe structural faults to precipitate this kind of disaster.”

President Eisenhower conveyed his personal condolences to the families of the dead. Of course, most of the families of the dead were dead. Not everyone. Belinda Washington had been somewhere else that morning-taking care of another family’s children. There was no Mr. Washington on the list of the dead-maybe he’d gone MIA a long time ago.

The Congrave Funeral Chapel in Littleton went into overdrive, scheduling one funeral after another-sometimes three a day-in order to get everyone into the ground. The spillover went as far as San Diego, bodies outsourced to whoever had room. The Littleton Cemetery expanded by one half.

A few politicians of note attended the funerals. The vice president, Dick Nixon, came all the way from Washington and held Pat’s hand as they lowered a local alderman into the earth. The lieutenant governor of California attended two burials. Billy Graham said last rites over the Littleton Flats priest.

Life magazine sent a photographer who dutifully immortalized the massive outpourings of grief. One of his photos was reprinted in the Littleton Journal, of an elderly man from Minnesota, head bowed, dressed in black, white handkerchief dabbing at his eyes, paying respects to no one in particular-subscribing to the quaint notion that we’re all relatives in the family of man.

Flags in California drooped at half-mast for an entire week.

Bailey Kindlon’s smiling picture appeared four days after the disaster. She had two full moons for eyes and a smattering of freckles on both cheeks, a female Howdy Doody.

Lone Survivor!

The article said she was found floating on a storm door that had once been attached to Littleton Flats Grocery but was discovered six and a half miles away. She was rescued by a National Guardsman named Michael Sweeney. No mention of space robots clicking away like dolphins. She was reported to be in good physical health, despite minor scratches and bruises.

By the second week, articles about Littleton Flats followed the fate of the town itself and disappeared. Newspapers are constant reminders of that banal cliché uttered by survivors everywhere, that life goes on.

Local elections had to be followed and reported on. Box scores had to be reprinted and scrutinized. Weather had to be forecast and complained about. Senators in Washington who’d offended the national sense of fair play had to be reprimanded (quietly) and nuclear blasts in far-off places dutifully chronicled. Beetle Bailey, Li’l Abner, and Peanuts needed to be caught up with.

The next mention of the Littleton Flats disaster concerned the government commission that was going to get to the bottom of it all. That would decide who’d be publicly flogged to satiate the national bloodlust for a villain; 853 deaths demanded it.

Lloyd Steiner would get his fifteen minutes of infamy.

There was just one picture of him.

He was exiting the courtroom after a day of what must’ve been useless and damning testimony. A smoking gun had been found and brandished: secret blueprints found in Steiner’s possession that clearly illustrated a foreknowledge of certain structural shortcuts that had been approved and implemented.

Ostensibly by Steiner himself.

He’d evidently been caught unawares by a flashbulb, his head whiplashing back like a performer being whisked offstage by an unseen cane, his glasses lit up like Christmas bulbs. Which was metaphorically apt-the villain of the piece being snatched off the national stage to a federal prison cell, where he’d spend the next ten years.

I WANDERED BACK TO MY DESK.

I devoured a cup of Norma’s awful coffee, then went back to the coffeemaker and poured another.

Nate the Skate asked me for something to do, evidently believing that hard work was just the ticket for a ruptured heart. I gave him my hastily scribbled articles to proof.

Norma was monitoring the phone for news from the hospital. A nurse in ICU was calling periodically with updates on Hinch’s wife, none very promising.

I sat back in my swivel chair and played back the microfilm in my head, an endless loop flickering with stark and sobering images that nearly lulled me to sleep.

Nearly.

“Nate?” I said.

He peered up from his desk, looking suddenly older. I suppose loss will do that to you.

“How many Westinghouse finalists are there every year?” I asked him.

“What?”

“The Westinghouse Awards for high school kids. How many science finalists do you suppose there are every year?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Take a guess.”

“Not a lot.”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t think there are a lot either. I would guess fifty, maybe. Probably wouldn’t be more than that.”

“Why are you asking?”

“Let’s put it another way. What would you say the odds were that there’d be five from the same high school?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t there some big science high school in New York-the Bronx High School of… whatever?”

“The Bronx High School of Science. Sure-there might be five finalists from that high school. What about some other high school?”

“Is this a trivia game or something? Because I don’t want to play, Tom. Sorry, I really don’t. I’m in pain here. I’m dying.”

“I’d say the odds of there being five Westinghouse finalists from a single high school other than the Bronx High School of Science would be, to use a scientific term, astronomical.”

“Okay, fine. You win.”

“Now, what if it were a tiny high school? Some school literally out in the middle of nowhere? You’d be talking odds so ridiculous that Vegas would have to take it off the boards. Wouldn’t you think so?”

“I guess. Why?”

“Nate, I do have something for you to do. Something to get your mind off Rina.” At the mention of his ex-girlfriend’s name, Nate actually winced.

“What?”

“I want you to find out everything you can on the people who lived in Littleton Flats.”

“Littleton Flats? The town-the one that got, you know?”

“Wiped out, right. I want you to see if you can find out who those people were.”

“You mean, their names?”

“I have their names. Names are easy. I want to know who they were. What they did for a living. Where they came from. That kind of thing. Some of them must have relatives that are still alive. I need anything you can find.”

“Excuse me for asking, but when did those people die?”

“Fifty years ago.”

“Right,” Nate said. “That’s going to be easy,” exhibiting a sarcasm rare for him. Maybe it was his newly wounded heart-there he was skating through life, and he’d gone and taken his first tumble. He was all skinned innocence and bloodied optimism.

“Try the Internet,” I said. “Aren’t you the computer whiz? Didn’t you discover how to get on PinkWorld.com without paying?”

That seemed to momentarily brighten his disposition.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll give it a shot.”