“So, you’re, what’s the word-reformed these days?”
“I wasn’t an alcoholic. I made up stories. I’ve stopped.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I’m curious about this story. The Aurora Dam Flood.”
“So you’ve said.”
“That’s why I called you. I was wondering if you knew anything about the death toll? If all the bodies were actually accounted for?”
“Accounted for how?”
“If anyone who supposedly died in the flood-if they ever just showed up later?”
Silence.
“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t think the laws of journalistic courtesy apply to you.”
“I think someone who was supposed to have died in the flood didn’t. I think he popped up recently to say hi to his 100-year-old mom. I think it may have been the same person who burned up in a car crash later with someone else’s wallet in his pocket. I don’t know this for sure-I think it’s possible. I’m trying to connect the dots.”
I heard the tap, tap, tap of a cigarette against ashtray.
“What are you asking me for-help? How? You want me to look for my notes? Is that what you’re asking me?”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“It isn’t too much trouble. If I wanted to. I don’t. Not for you.”
I heard the impatience in his voice now, the implicit desire to get off the phone.
“Maybe that’s how I repay the debt,” I said.
“What?”
“The debt you mentioned. The one to journalism. Maybe this is how.” I don’t exactly know why I came out with that-I don’t-but when I did, it sounded right. It sounded, for want of a better term, true.
I heard him take another drag, pictured a coil of blue smoke slowly spiraling up to the ceiling.
“I’ll think about it,” he said after what seemed like a very long time.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t. I haven’t said yes.”
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.