Deceit

SEVEN

The town of Littleton, California, is known for two things.

Sonny Rolph, a B-actor from the fifties, was born there.

And it’s known for the Aurora Dam Flood, which, in a curious kind of colloquial contraction, the locals simply refer to as that damn flood.

It didn’t actually happen in Littleton, but in its tiny sister town, Littleton Flats, situated some twenty-three miles down the road. In the 1950s, they erected the Aurora Dam on the nearby Aurora River, renowned for its grade three rapids and its unpleasant muddy color. The dam was built by contractors who may or may not have gotten the job through generous kickbacks to the state. What’s fairly certain is that they built the dam with shoddy workmanship and egregious errors of engineering judgment. It was later termed-by an independent government commission set up to apportion blame-as an accident ready to happen.

It happened.

Three days of rain in April of 1954 swelled the river to historic heights, filled the dam to heretofore unknown levels, and caused the flawed cement walls to come tumbling down.

Littleton Flats was below sea level and directly in the water’s path. It ceased to exist.

The death toll was put at 892, amended from 893 when they found a 3-year-old girl downriver and still alive.

I knew about this only because I’d scrolled through the microfilm of the Littleton Journal when Hinch first hired me but gave me nothing to do. The fact that the back issues were still on microfilm and not computer disks gave me a hard clue that I wasn’t in the big leagues anymore.

A lot of people in town at least knew somebody who knew somebody else who’d perished in that damn flood. It was an understandably sore subject for them, something I discovered when I tried to interest Hinch in a retrospective piece on its fiftieth anniversary.

“We tried that before,” he said. “Your predecessor, anyway.”

My predecessor was named John Wren. I knew this because I’d appropriated more than his desk; he’d lived in the same rented house. He’d clearly been something of a pack rat; I’d found ancient bills from cable, phone, and Amazon.com addressed to a John Wren, hand-scrawled notes stuffed in various places-only half-decipherable and alluding to who knows what-and one of his stories, about a hard-luck and disoriented Vietnam vet who’d wandered into Littleton one day and bedded down in the town gazebo. “Who’s Eddie Bronson?”-the title of the story. It had evidently been put up for some kind of local journalism prize. It lost. My first day on the job, I’d been greeted with a list Scotch-taped to the inside of my desk: Wren’s Rules. Rule number one: back up your notes for protection. Rule number two: transcribe your tape recordings for in case!

According to Norma, Wren, a transplanted Minnesotan, had gotten a bad case of desert dementia, Santa Ana Syndrome, the small-town willies-that weird fugue that sometimes takes hold of people stuck in California desert towns in the middle of nowhere-and gone to trout fish near the Oregon border. Or pan for gold in the Yukon. Or ice fish on Lake Michigan-the details were hazy.

“You want to give the damn flood a shot, go ahead,” Hinch said, “if you can get anyone to speak about it.”

I couldn’t.

Hinch might’ve spoken about it, but he wasn’t really old enough to remember anything. He’d spent his entire adolescence somewhere else-Sacramento, I think. He came back to Littleton to take care of his ailing mother and somehow never felt the urge to leave. Maybe his marriage to the local beauty queen had something to do with that. He kept a picture of her-Miss Azalea 1974-on his desk. Miss Azalea had since contracted breast cancer and twice lost her hair to chemo. I think that picture helped Hinch keep the image of what she once was planted firmly in his heart. As far as I knew, Hinch remained true-blue to her-not my usual experience with editors, who tended to have a hard time remembering that they were married.

I was married once.

I don’t feel like talking about it.

I drove outside town to do a story on an Alpaca ranch.

Apparently alpacas are big business now, not so much for their fleece as the alpacas themselves, able to fetch upwards of twenty thousand dollars.

The owners of the ranch, Mr. and Mrs. Childress, showed me around, insisted I feed their babies some food, and regaled me with stories about the trials and tribulations of alpaca breeding.

Apparently the desert heat wasn’t ideal for them.

They were used to grazing thousands of feet above sea level in the Andes. Their ankles tended to swell on the worst days, causing them to lie down and play dead. Some of them were doing just that as we tramped around the property.

They looked like the inspiration for “Woolly Bully,” I thought. As if some aesthetically challenged geneticist had combined the lamb with the camel, then stood back and said whoops. Picture walking balls of yarn, with unkempt mop-tops cascading down over mournfully sad eyes.

It got worse. Mrs. Childress led me past troughs of oats into the dark coolness of a barn. She wanted to show me something. At first I thought it was two alpacas lying side by side on a soft bed of hay.

It wasn’t. There was only one alpaca in there.

It had two heads.

“We didn’t have the heart to kill him,” Mrs. Childress said. “One of his heads is blind. Poor thing.”

I asked Mrs. Childress for something to drink; I wanted to get out of there.

We sat on their porch sipping sour lemonade, and when I ran out of questions and they ran out of stories, we still sat there and sipped our drinks in silence, just like I imagined real families do.

I finished my lemonade, stood up, said good-bye.

“Thanks for stopping by, Tom,” Mrs. Childress said. “Drive carefully.”

It must’ve been her parting words.

I started thinking about someone who hadn’t driven carefully.

I turned left on Highway 45 instead of right. I looped around Littleton in a wide circle. I passed a decrepit sign for Littleton Flats-they’d never taken it down, leaving it as a kind of memorial, I suppose.

I kept going, and eventually got to the place I’d been to before.

The evening sky was a messy palette of roses and purples, making the desert look nearly nuclear. The distant flats were glowing red, the cacti luminous green.

The wreck had been towed away. There wasn’t a single car out on the road.

I pulled off to the side of 45 and parked my Miata where the ambulance had been.

I stepped out, noticed a mud brown snake slithering off into the underbrush. Rattlesnakes were fairly common here. Every so often, someone got bit by one, didn’t get to the doctor in time, and died a horrible, lonely death.

Dennis Flaherty had died a horrible, lonely death.

I walked onto the highway, to the very spot where the two cars collided.

I kneeled down on my haunches, hands firmly clasped under my chin-I don’t know why-maybe as a kind of prayer, a sign of respect for the dead.

Then I noticed something.

The absence of something.

I tried to remember what Ed Crannell had said. His exact words.

I stood up, walked back and forth, stared at the ground. Something was rumbling down the highway like a coming storm. I stepped back to the side of the road and respectfully watched an eighteen-wheeler roar past, massive enough to make the ground actually stutter.

When I got back to the office, no one was there.

I found my notes in my desk drawer.

I beeped the horn at the last second, Ed Crannell told me when I asked him what happened. I beeped the horn at the last second. He jammed on the brakes.

Dennis Flaherty had jammed on the breaks to prevent himself from crashing headlong into the pharmaceutical salesman’s car.

Too late to stop it, of course.

Something happens when you hit the brakes in a car doing sixty. You can safely assume that’s how fast Dennis Flaherty’s car was traveling on a mostly deserted highway in the early a.m.

It’s simple physics.

When you jam the brakes of a car traveling that fast, the tires can’t help but skid. Dry pavement, wet pavement, it doesn’t really matter. Somewhere it will leave little particles of rubber adhering to the road.

That was the something I noticed was missing.

Skid marks.

There wasn’t a single skid mark on the road.