Deceit

by James Siegel

  The wind howling outside but an even worse howling coming from the next room. A blizzard outside and a blizzard inside, Jimmy being slammed against things. The whop of belt against skin.

  That awful shrieking.

  Which finally, oddly, and suddenly stopped. Just stopped.

  In my dream, I do not walk out of the room, believing that it’s all over, that Jimmy will be sitting there, bruised of course, even bleeding, but still Jimmy, still alive.

  I do not walk out and see him lying there on the floor, stock-still and strangely blue.

  My mother does not order me to go back into my room and write down what happened. The story of clumsy Jimmy, of a 6-year-old who just could not get out of his own way. The story I will dutifully recount to the police and the caseworker from Children’s Protective Services and my own father, in all its awful and meticulous detail.

  My brother Jimmy slipped on the ice and he hit his head.

  He is always falling down and stuff like that.

  He is really clumsy.

  No.

  In my dream, my father returns to save us. He comes back to his family.

  I hear him shuffling up our front stoop.

  Sloshing through the wet snow.

  Banging on the front door.

  He’s going to walk in and shake the snow off his slicker, and run to Jimmy and make him wake up.

  The door opens.

  Dad, I say. Dad.

  But he can’t speak. The frigid cold, the swirling snow. He can’t speak.

  He motions me to come closer.

  I run to him in my Batman PJs, but they’ve somehow changed color. They’re drab and gray.

  And my dad. Something’s wrong with him. He can’t speak. He’s talking but nothing’s coming out of his mouth.

  He grabs me by my PJs and pulls me out into the snow.

  But there is no snow.

  Just an empty hall tinged in red.

  Shhh…

  He can’t speak, but he’s still able to whisper.

  Dennis motions for me to follow him.

  There’s a key glinting in his hand.

  Maybe I should’ve asked myself how he got it.

  The key.

  You could drive yourself crazy with that stuff.

  FIFTY-TWO

  If you were the night garage attendant at VA Hospital 138, this is what you would’ve seen: a sleepy-looking orderly making his way across the deserted parking garage.

  “Long day?” you would’ve asked him.

  The orderly would’ve nodded and said, “Yeah.” Then he would’ve searched through his pockets, looking suddenly surprised and irritated.

  “Jesus,” he would’ve said, after turning both pockets inside out. “I lost my parking ticket. It was right here this morning.”

  You would’ve nodded in sympathy.

  After all, the poor guy looked half out of it. If the truth be told, he stank a little-as if he’d been running a marathon. As if he’d spent all day wrestling unruly patients into submission.

  As if he’d plucked his stinking blue work shirt out of the dirty pile in the hospital laundry room.

  “What kind of car?” you would’ve finally asked him, taking pity and kind of eager to get his fetid presence out of your immediate breathing space.

  “A Miata,” the orderly would’ve answered. “Silver-blue and kind of beat up.”

  “Okay,” you would’ve said. “I’ll go find it.”

  “You sure?” the orderly would’ve asked, not wanting to get you into any trouble. “I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” you would’ve answered him, already walking out of your glass booth with a handful of numbered keys, on your way to the lower level, where, if memory served you correctly, you’d seen the silver-blue Miata with a lopsided bumper.

  Sure enough, that’s where you’d find it. Then you’d check the ticket on the dashboard, fit the right key into the door, and drive right up to the very grateful orderly who looked like he could really use a good night’s sleep.

  You’d watch as the orderly settled into his front seat and drove away. You’d think that car and driver suited each other. That even though neither was particularly ancient, they’d accrued a lot of mileage.

  It was just a matter of time before they both broke down.

  I followed the same roads i’d followed before.

  I was okay for gas. I had mad money-a credit card stored in my glove compartment just in case. My cell phone was in the cup holder where I’d left it. There was no need to turn it off and make it invisible to prying satellite signals. It was out of power.

  The surroundings were familiar.

  The thickening forests and creeping cold.

  I was headed somewhere I’d been.

  Back to six log cabins on the shore of Bluemount Lake.

  I knew where the turn-in was this time.

  I knew that I had to circle the lake two times like someone playing Duck, Duck, Goose, roundabouting my way to that sign nailed to a tree.

  I knew the car would shake, rattle, and roll its way through the woods.

  I knew that when the forest spit me out on the edge of Bluemount Lake, there would be no one coming out of that porch to greet me.

  I pulled up to the cabin porch and sat there for a minute, as if I might be wrong. As if Wren would open the door and invite me in for some vitriol and secondhand smoke.

  Nothing.

  I got out and walked up the steps. I pushed the door open and walked inside.

  There was no stove going this time, but it was still early afternoon. There was enough sun to take the chill off.

  No one had bothered to clean up the clutter. I saw it for what it was now-someone had ransacked the place. Just like they’d ransacked my basement before I’d moved in.

  I sat there and went through everything this time.

  Everything they must’ve gone through, too. I didn’t really expect to find anything, but it was due diligence. You never knew. Back when I was starting out in journalism, we called it gold mining. Why? Because in your average gold mine, it takes three tons of earth to accrue a single ounce of gold. The particles so small that they’re referred to as invisible gold.

  Sometimes you have to sift through a lot of mud to find what’s invisible.

  There were some personal letters addressed to Wren.

  An ex-flame named Dorothea-she didn’t write her last name; ex-flames don’t need to-reminiscing about steamy times in the Florida Keys.

  A Mr. Poonjab from Micronesia-one of Wren’s acquaintances from his days as a foreign stringer, maybe. Mr. Poonjab offered best wishes from his wife and family.

  Wren, himself, didn’t seem to have had a family. No letters from wives. No Hallmark birthday cards from the kids. That would’ve made it convenient for them-Wren not having any family. That and his sudden penchant for being alone.

  Mr. Poonjab said he’d be forwarding what Wren had requested in the next post.

  It was impossible to know what that was.

  What would someone want from Micronesia?

  Coconuts? Palm fronds? Seashells?

  Maybe something more germane. The United States had obliterated that South Seas idyll with nuclear test bombs until the 1960s-an island chain so polluted with radioactivity that it was largely uninhabitable. The United States was currently resettling the population and paying bargain-basement reparations.

  Maybe Wren had needed a first-person account from the nuclear moonscape.

  There were two medical journals under the couch, one of them a dry and sober treatise on the effects of radioactive fallout.

  There were ten copied pages from a book on America’s fledgling nuclear weapons program.

  A biography of the Hiroshima Maidens-a group of disfigured nuclear survivors who’d become something of a traveling vaudeville show.

  A study on Los Alamos soil samples.

  Sure.

  He must’ve driven out to Littleton Flats, just like
I had. He must’ve scooped up some of that red dirt and sent it away in vials to Dearborne Labs. I think it’s radioactive, he must’ve told them.

  I think it’s hot.

  He was right.

  There were the usual household bills-mostly from Wren’s years in Littleton.

  Oil and electric.

  Telephone and cable.

  A receipt from a roof gutter cleaner.

  An estimate for a carpet cleaning.

  There was a construction bill signed by Seth Bishop. Sheetrock work.

  Five hundred dollars scrawled in Seth’s spidery script.

  There were yellowed articles with Wren’s byline, posted from the exotic and mundane.

  Thailand. Poland. Newark. Cleveland.

  There were doctor bills. Wren appeared to have suffered from mild arrhythmia, high cholesterol, and occasional depression. I found a prescription for Xanax-a drug whose popularity around the newsroom was second only to uppers, since it was known as an anxiety soother. Reporters under murderous deadlines tended to have a lot of anxiety.

  I went through everything. Then I repeated it.

  I looked through Wren’s desk for a flashlight.

  It was still light out, but I would be trekking into the woods.

  The trees formed an arching canopy of almost absolute black.

  The trunks were mossy and slick.

  The ground was a mulch-mix of dead leaves, pungent earth, and tangled roots.

  Occasional deer announced themselves with whippetlike flashes of their retreating tails.

  Chipmunks darted between the dead branches.

  I walked an uneven perimeter around the cabin side of the lake.

  I kept sinking into the soft ground; in ten minutes I was sweating through the University of Oregon T-shirt I’d plucked from a five-dollar Kmart rack on the way.

  I’d done a story on a forensic guru down in Mississippi who planted his garden with donated cadavers-mostly the nameless dead who ended up with the state. He wanted to document what time and soil and weather did to the human body, to meticulously chart the deterioration in bone and sinew and tissue.

  Some of the bodies were left rotting in the air.

  Others he buried at different depths, digging them up at various intervals to check for damage.

  He soon discovered that he wasn’t the only one doing some digging. His garden abutted a nature preserve. Black bears and wild boars were able to sniff the buried remains. They had no trouble digging through up to six feet of earth to find them.

  He’d described what it looked like.

  Like a table at an all-you-can-eat buffet that hasn’t been bused yet.

  A mixture of gnawed bones, snapped teeth, and dung.

  If you buried someone out here, they wouldn’t stay buried for long.

  I walked through swirling clouds of gnats.

  Mosquitoes dive-bombed me like fanatical kamikazes. I squashed at least ten of them on my arms; when I looked at myself in the mirror that night, I resembled a survivor of paintball.

  I drifted through smoky pillars of fire-those few cracks in the overhanging tapestry where the sun managed to fight through.

  I tried to keep the lake in view at all times-mostly mere glints of it, enough to keep me from wandering in circles or, worse, plunging into the primeval forest and drowning in it.

  I was out there one hour, two, three, till it got dark enough to give up.

  I circled back and went to sleep in the same cabin as last time.

  In the morning I tried again.

  This time I went directly out from Wren’s cabin-a straight line into the woods.

  I was out there all morning; I was hot and frustrated.

  I sat down on a tree stump and stared at the dappled patterns on the leaves.

  White streaks all helter-skelter, having to do with the way the sunlight poured itself through the branches. The way it splashed down.

  Like staring at a Jackson Pollack and trying to find meaning in it.

  The casual arrangement of things.

  I was looking at one particular pattern-I was forming my own pictures out of it.

  When I looked for its source, I couldn’t find it.

  When I searched the leafy canopy for cracks, there were none.

  Not one ray of sunshine being let through.

  I heard the thick drone of insects. Smelled something.

  A vague scent-musky, sickly sweet.

  Something that must’ve once been truly awful, but was now barely tolerable.

  I noticed the clumps of moist black earth flung here and there. Discerned the clouds of swarming insects-horseflies, gnats, flying beetles.

  Drive into the woods now and they won’t find you till next year.

  I had to push a thick dead vine out of the way to finally stand there.

  Up close.

  Where the streaks of white sunlight looked like a wrinkled Halloween costume that’s been ripped off and thrown in the corner.

  You know the one.

  The skeleton.

  I had to swat the bugs out of my eyes. I had to keep staring at it.

  The white streaks of light that weren’t. The bones. They were dead white.

  Bitten in half so that whatever had dug them up could get to the marrow.

  I wasn’t a bone expert, of course. I couldn’t tell a deer bone from a human one.

  I didn’t have to.

  Deer don’t wear pants.

  Tan chinos, with the Gap waist snap still attached.

  FIFTY-THREE

  She answered her phone on the second ring, then even more surprisingly, she didn’t hang up.

  Maybe because I asked her if she was going to go back to her maiden name after the divorce.

  Back to the name Steiner.

  She went silent, one of those strangled pauses that say more than words can. Then she agreed to meet me on Lincoln and Ninth.

  The first day I’d met her, she’d told me about her father.

  My pop was a mechanic, she’d said, after I thanked her for fixing my coil wire. He basically lived under the hood.

  Just like someone else I’d heard about.

  He took auto-mechanic classes in jail-that’s what he ended up doing when he got out… The boy-wonder engineer, fixing cars for a living.

  There was more.

  At our second dinner, after she happened to mention that she’d known Wren.

  That’s where we’d met, she said. At the home… to try to scare up some memories.

  And what was Anna doing at the home?

  My pop. He’s got Alzheimer’s, she’d said.

  And when I’d asked Wren-not really Wren, but whoever was on the phone with me that day-if Lloyd Steiner was still alive?

  Barely.

  Did you try to speak with him?

  Uh-huh. Let’s just say he’s not talking.

  It was possible.

  Maybe even plausible.

  So you think Lloyd Steiner went to jail for ten years to appease the public and kept his mouth shut all that time?

  Maybe he had kept his mouth shut.

  Just not forever.

  I called the home. I introduced myself as a concerned relative. I asked a sympathetic-sounding attendant how Mr. Steiner was doing today. “Lloyd Steiner? Is he okay?”

  “No change. We’re pretty much down to force-feeding him now.”

  It’s what you do for someone you love, she’d said. He’s my dad. I’d do anything for him.

  In the end, maybe that’s what she’d needed to do.

  Anything.

  That picture she showed me.

  Cody on the push-and-pedal. The kid pumping his legs like nobody’s business-striking out on his own. Going wherever he wanted to-exploring the great wide world.

  Except he wasn’t.

  Mom was right behind him holding on to that pole and steering him where she wanted him to go. It was an illusion.

  Dirty trick, huh?

  Yes, Anna, it was.<
br />
  It was.

  It’s funny how she still stirred something in me.

  Maybe it’s our nature to let the body forgive what the mind can’t.

  Or else we’d all be at one another’s throats. And we’d never let go.

  “Someone paid you a visit three years ago,” I said. “A creepy-looking man with a voice like a girl’s.”

  We were standing on the corner on Lincoln. Early evening, lots of foot traffic heading toward the promenade.

  She nodded.

  “Your dad was in the early stage of Alzheimer’s by then. It was probably his last chance to get something out. Before he vanished-the part of him that could actually communicate with the world. That could still form words.”

  She turned away, rubbed something out of her eye.

  “This man paid you a visit. He said something like this-I’ll paraphrase. Your daddy made a deal. A long time ago. He’s got to honor it. Even if he’s gone off the deep end of the ocean-even if he’s begun muttering things to local reporters. A secret’s a secret. A deal’s a deal.”

  There was something in her eyes.

  Tears.

  “He’d begun talking about the past,” she said softly.

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “That’s pretty much all he talked about. It’s what happens when you start going… That’s what the doctor said… Like counting backward when someone’s putting you under. And then you’re asleep. You’re gone. Sometimes he was actually there, back in the 1950s…”

  “ 1954,” I said. “I bet he spent a lot of time in 1954. The year Wren was interested in hearing about. The year of the flood. By the way, what’s your real name? I feel silly calling you Anna.”

  “Does it matter?” she said.

  “No. Guess not. The deal your father made. Maybe it was the best deal he could get. Under the circumstances. I think they would’ve gotten him one way or another-he had a history. He spent ten years in jail, but he did something for his family. He got something out of it. You must’ve come later. After he got out.”

  She nodded. “They’d had a ten-year coitus interruptus.” She forced a smile. “I guess they were making up for lost time.”

  “You met Wren at the home. Maybe the creepy-looking man told you to do that-your dad’s blabbing about things he has no business talking about, and he’s talking about them to a reporter-get over here and keep an eye on him. Or maybe you met Wren first-when you were visiting your dad. And he sought you out and asked if he could speak to him. About a flood. And a town. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you became Wren’s friend-a kind of confidante?”