Deceit

THIRTY-EIGHT

Dennis liked to read the passing road signs out loud.

“Dawsville. Exit 42. One mile.”

“Boise. Exit 59. Quarter mile.”

“Roadwork ahead. Next ten miles.”

I became used to it and eventually stopped looking at the signs altogether since I had my own human OnStar satellite system sitting right next to me.

When the distance between signs stretched for miles, Dennis would switch to reading passing license plates.

“A6572G4.”

“M87GT2.”

As traveling companions go, he wasn’t bad. Except for the near-constant drone, he remained affably calm and even drifted off on occasion-though he nearly always awoke in time for the next road alert.

When I put on some music, he told me he used to play guitar in a Metallica knockoff band, and even sang two lines from “St. Anger” in fair facsimile of James Hetfield.

There were five VA hospitals south of Seattle.

If need be, we were going to visit each and every one of them.

Dennis was my guide. It might’ve been the blind leading the blinder, but he was all I had.

It had taken some doing to get him into the car.

He’d just broken out of a VA hospital; he didn’t particularly feel like going back. Mrs. Flaherty had looked at me as if I’d turned as crazy as her son when I told her what I had in mind.

Dennis was running out of meds, I told her. That was a fact.

He was still clearly disturbed-that was also a fact.

It might not have been the smartest thing in the world for Dennis to have escaped from a federal psych ward, either. I didn’t know if having voluntarily committed himself absolved him from anything-but if it didn’t, I wasn’t going to bring it up.

I needed him.

It was the meds that convinced the both of them. She had no money for psychiatrists. She was one of the 40 million or so Americans without health insurance. Dennis needed the U.S. Army if he was going to stay on his regimen of antipsychotics.

The hospital was the best place for him-sad but true.

I would take him back there.

If we could find it.

I called Norma from North Dakota.

I’d dipped into my dwindling ATM resources again and paid for two rooms at the Sioux Nation Motel, which sported a mini-casino in the check-in area.

“I have bad news for you, Tom,” she said. “Laura passed away last night.”

Hinch’s wife.

That was bad news, but in the scheme of things not the worst thing I’d heard recently. There was that gunshot from the speeding blue pickup, for example.

“How’s Hinch taking it?” I asked.

My suspension notwithstanding, Hinch had always been good to me. He’d given me a chance when no one else on earth would’ve even considered it.

“About the way you’d expect. You know Hinch-God knows what he’s really thinking half the time. He keeps it bottled up real tight. He was pretty devoted to her.”

“Yeah. How’s Nate doing?”

“Okay. He had a little infection yesterday so they put him on stronger antibiotics. His mom’s here.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw her at the hospital.”

“No, I mean she’s here. In my house. I’m putting her up.”

“That’s nice of you, Norma.”

“The least I can do for the poor woman. Where are you, Tom? You sound far away.”

“North Dakota.”

“What in God’s name are you doing in North Dakota?”

“We’re looking for something.”

“Who’s we’re?”

“Me and my traveling companion.”

“Who would that be, Tom?”

“That would be the deceased from the car accident on Highway 45.”

“You’re scaring me, Tom, you know that?”

“Okay. He’s not actually dead. Though sometimes he appears that way.”

There was a small silence-the only sound coming from The 100 Best Songs from the ’80s on the motel TV. They were up to number 22: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

“Tom?”

“Yes, Norma?”

“All this stuff you’re talking about-I heard about some of it from Mary-Beth, who heard it from I don’t know who-you aren’t making it up, are you?”

“No, Norma.”

“I’ve never asked you about, you know… New York and all that.”

She hadn’t. For a long time, I’d wondered if she even knew. It wasn’t like she read the national papers-as far as I could tell, I’d never made Us magazine.

“I know.”

“I figured if you wanted to talk about it, you would.”

“Right.”

“So, you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, Tom. You didn’t give someone your gun to shoot at you, did you?”

“No, Norma.”

“Yeah, I thought that sounded kind of nuts. That’s what they’re saying, though.”

“Are they saying why I would do something like that?”

“To give you… credibility. Is that the right word? Make you the center of attention.”

“I guess it worked, then.”

“Huh? Didn’t you just say they’re wrong?”

“Someone stole my gun. I was trying to be funny.”

“Ha, ha.”

“Can you call Sam Weitz and tell him I’m out of town? That I’ll be back in a week or so? He’ll want to know why I’m not at bowling.”

“Sure.” Silence. “Tom?”

“Yes?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Credibility, Norma. Just like you said.”

Dennis was right about Seattle.

It was raining when we got there, a soft, steady downpour that caused clouds of steam to drift off the asphalt.

We drove through the downtown area because Dennis wanted to see Safeco Field where the Mariners played. Once upon a time Dennis used to be a baseball fan, but that was before reading the box scores began hurting his head. He used to be able to recite every player’s statistics by heart. Maybe that’s why he’d bunked out in the shadow of Detroit’s baseball park after he’d ended up on the streets. To feel the nurturing presence of America’s pastime.

We drove past the fish markets and restaurants that flanked the water and Safeco before we hit the highway going south.

The first VA hospital on our itinerary was on the border between Washington and Oregon-in the city of Tellings, population 159,000. At least that’s what Dennis read off the map.

“Sound familiar?” I asked him.

“Huh?”

“The city name. Tellings? Does it ring a bell?”

“Population 159,000,” he said.

“Right. I’m asking if you recognize the name-if maybe you were there?”

“Dunno.”

Dennis had begun swatting his face even though there were no actual bugs there. He sometimes whispered things to himself, but when I asked him what he said, he’d ask me what I was talking about.

I tried to imagine what we might look like to passing motorists.

A broken-down Miata sporting another car’s front bumper and a man in the passenger seat mumbling to himself when he wasn’t killing phantom flies.

Then I knew exactly what we looked like.

At least to one motorist.