“Tom Valle,” I said, “from the Littleton Journal.”
“Ah. You’re a reporter?”
I had the impression he was sizing me up-the uncomfortable sensation of being inside an MRI machine, innards intimately exposed to meticulous examination.
“Doing a story on what? This place?” he asked.
“Yes. On the Aurora Dam Flood.”
“I see.” He nodded, took his hat off, and wiped his brow with a clean white handkerchief that mysteriously appeared out of his jacket pocket.
“You should wear one,” he said, refixing his hat and sticking the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Sunstroke can be unforgiving.”
I believed him. I was starting to feel a slight wooziness, like purple haze without the fun.
“The flood,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”
“Fifty years,” I said; I could feel a rivulet of sweat trickling down the center of my back. “So, what brought you out here?” I was going to ask him how he’d got out here as well, but I’d noticed the front grille of a car parked behind one of the rusting steel structures about forty yards away.
“Curiosity,” he said.
“You’ve read about the flood?”
“Yes.”
“Are you from around here?”
“Here? I don’t think anyone’s from around here. Now.”
“I don’t mean Littleton Flats. I meant from around the area?”
“No. I’m not from this area.”
“Oh. Just a flood buff, then?”
“Well,” he said, “I was here once.”
“Here? You mean Littleton Flats?”
“That’s right.”
“Before the flood?”
He nodded. “Not much left, is there?”
“No. What was it like?”
“Like?”
“The town?” I’d read a lot about the destruction of Littleton Flats, almost nothing about the town itself. Here was someone who’d walked its streets, who might’ve passed Belinda and Benjamin on their way to breakfast in the Littleton Flats Café.
“It was like any town. Entirely ordinary. Families, shops, houses, backyards. Just a town.”
“What year was that?”
“Year?”
“The year you visited?”
“ 1954.”
“That was the year it happened.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve never come back? Till now?”
He shook his head. “No. I was passing through and I thought to myself, why not?”
“It must be kind of eerie for you.”
“Eerie? I would think it would be eerie for anybody. All ghost towns are.”
Yes, he was right. The soft wind whistling through the rusted steel sounded like the angry whispering of ghosts.
“A terrible thing happened here, didn’t it?” the man said. “You can still feel it.”
I reached for the pad and pen in my pocket. “Can I ask your name? You wouldn’t mind being quoted, would you? For my story.”
“I’m afraid I have nothing much to contribute. Just a flood buff, like you said.”
“But you were there.”
“Yes, I was here. So were a lot of people.”
“A lot of people don’t like talking about it. In Littleton, anyway. You don’t seem to mind.”
He looked down at his polished black shoes, both feet ramrod straight, making me wonder if he’d ever been in the military. “Okay,” he said, looking up. “My name’s Herman Wentworth.”
I scribbled it down. “May I ask, Herman, what you used to do?”
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Of course, I don’t practice anymore.”
Funny, I thought. That uncomfortable feeling of being examined when I’d first said hello to him. It hadn’t been an accident.
“Were you in private practice?”
He shook his head. “I was an army doctor.”
So he had been in the military. “The army, really? Where were you stationed?”
“Oh, everywhere. At one time or another. Pretty much all over the world. I started out in Japan.”
“Japan, huh? When would that have been?”
“At the end of the war. Right after the surrender.”
“Tokyo?”
“No,” he said. “Different part of the country. I was with the 499th medical battalion.”
“Treating wounded soldiers?”
“Treating everybody. Japanese, too. The Hippocratic oath doesn’t delineate between friends and enemies, just those you can save and those you can’t.”
“So, at some point in 1954, you ended up here?”
“For a day.”
“Did you know someone in Littleton Flats?”
He shook his head. “No, I was passing through. Just like today.”
I wondered where someone needed to be going in order to pass through Littleton Flats. It wasn’t exactly the crossroads of the world. More like its dead end.
Then he answered for me.
“I was transferred to San Diego. I wanted to take in some desert scenery. I was born up north-Minneapolis. You don’t see a lot of desert up there.”
“And so you stopped here for one day?”
“That’s right. Just one day.”
“What time of year was it, do you remember?”
“Afraid I don’t.” He repeated the ritual of minutes before, pulling that handkerchief out of his pocket, removing his hat, and wiping the sweat off his brow.
The wooziness I’d felt before had worsened. A dull headache had settled in the middle of my forehead.
“Do you remember anything in particular?”
“About what?”
“The town?”
“It was a long time ago. I told you-it was just a town.”
“Where were you when you heard?”
“Heard?”
“About the flood?”
“Sorry,” he shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I appreciate you answering my questions.”
“I don’t see how I was any particular help.”
“You were there. It’s nice to meet someone who saw it before it all washed away.”
I put out my hand and he shook it, a surprisingly firm grip from someone eighty or so. He went to leave, then turned back around.
“I wouldn’t stay too long out here.” He tapped his forehead. “Sunstroke can be murder. Remember, I am a doctor.”
“Thank you; I won’t.”
I watched as he made his way back to his car. I heard the engine rev, then softly idle for a while, before he finally pulled out from behind the splintered steel column.
He drove off, leaving the place deathly quiet again.
My headache had reached DEFCON 3; I felt nauseated as I walked back to my car. I opened the front door and collapsed into the front seat.
It felt better than out there in the sun, but I was dizzy enough to close my eyes.
I put the seat back and thought it might be nice to rest for a few minutes.
After a while, I was walking around Littleton Flats again.
The town was alive with people. The water tower was right there on Main Street. The men all wore old-fashioned fedoras. I could smell the aroma of blueberry pancakes and maple syrup wafting over from the Littleton Flats Café.
When I walked inside, the pretty waitress, the one my father left us for-Lillian, her name was-smiled at me. I blushed when she brought me a fresh place mat with connect-the-dots on it.
I began drawing lines from one dot to another, and now and then I thought I could see a picture in there, but when I held it up to show my father, it was blank.
I felt this awful frustration, an excruciating embarrassment as I kept drawing and attempting to show my father and Lillian something in the dots, but every time I tried it would vanish. Poof. I could sense my father’s growing disappointment, Lillian’s boredom, and I finally drew my own picture, just ignored the dots entirely and drew a picture of a woman and child sitting on a bench.
When I opened my eyes again, it was dark and I was covered in cold sweat.