“I needed to feed the beast.” I said. “That’s all.”
The beast was frightening and ever-voracious, I could’ve added. After a while, I found myself in a game of Can You Top This, only I was playing against myself. It was ultimately exhausting.
I heard him take another puff-the muted background clink-clink of silverware scraping plates. A diner?
“Where was I?” he said.
“The closed-door commission.”
“Right, the commission. They took their testimony and made their report, and in the end they got their pound of flesh. Someone went to jail.”
“I didn’t know that. Who?”
“An engineer. Lloyd Steiner. Interesting guy-a borderline genius. One of those left-leaning, Lower-East-Side Communist summer camp kids-back in the thirties, when it was all the rage.”
“Was he guilty?”
“Of what? Being a liberal Jew? Sure.”
“Of building a dangerous dam?”
“I don’t know. He was the assistant to the assistant engineer. Hard to imagine he had enough control over anything to be guilty.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not sure.” Then he lowered his voice, making him sound nearly conspiratorial; evidently he didn’t want other diners to hear. “I can tell you he went to prison for ten years, and when he got out, his family had moved from a one-bedroom apartment in a government subdivision to a four-bedroom split-level adobe in La Jolla. I checked. He couldn’t get a job as an engineer, of course. Not anymore. He took auto-mechanic classes in jail-that’s what he ended up doing when he got out. Must’ve been excruciating for him. The boy-wonder engineer, fixing cars for a living. He must’ve had the only blue collar in the neighborhood.”
“You think he was paid off? That he was some kind of patsy?”
“I told you. I don’t know. Unlike your method of journalism, I can’t say if he was or he wasn’t. I can’t go put it in print. I’d need proof. It does make you wonder. Think about it-they could’ve hit him with all the Communist crap, summer camps where everyone wore red in color war. Remember, we’re talking 1954-McCarthy, bomb shelters, all that paranoia. And if he still felt like not playing ball? They entice him. A little payoff for his loved ones. The carrot and the stick. You do this, because if you don’t, we’ll bury you. But just to show our heart’s in the right place, we’ll let your family realize the American dream and get their house in the suburbs. I’ve seen the house in La Jolla -it’s some suburbs. I stopped there when I went to interview the girl. You remember her?”
“Space robots in the water.”
“Right.”
“Is he still alive? Lloyd Steiner?”
“Barely.”
“Did you try to speak with him?”
“Uh-huh. Let’s just say he’s not talking.”
“So you think Lloyd Steiner went to jail for ten years to appease the public and kept his mouth shut all that time?”
“It’s plausible. More plausible than a bomb-throwing pediatrician, don’t you think?”
Sticks and stones may break my bones…
“Is there anything else?”
“There’s always something else,” he said. “You just have to find it.”
He put the phone down; I heard him ask for the check. When he came back on, he nearly whispered: “I’m out of the game. Not you. They’ve let you back in. You said you want to repay the debt. Go ahead. Repay it. If you can.”
A shutter banged against the wall of the cabin; it sounded like a gunshot. It was certifiably spooky up here.
I asked him about the girl.
“What about her?”
“Your interview with her-it’s in your notes?”
“Among other things.”
“And she still believes all that stuff-about the space robots rescuing her out of the water?”
“See for yourself. They’re on my desk.”
I looked over at his rolltop antique. Like something blown up-but I thought I could just make out a small spiral notebook peeking out from the top of the trash, like the winner of King of the Hill.
“Why bother,” I said. “We can safely assume spacemen didn’t make a visit to Littleton Flats.”
“Not unless you believe in fairy tales,” he said. “Do you?”
“What?”
“Believe in fairy tales?”
“No.”
“Ever read one as an adult?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Maybe you should. Even when you stop believing in goblins, they can scare the shit out of you. Especially when you stop believing in goblins.”
I didn’t know quite how to respond to that.
“I guess you’re going to want to stay the night?” he asked.
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble. You have six empty cabins to choose from.”
I said thanks. Wished him luck with his truck in Fishbein.
“My notes,” he said. “You can copy them or memorize them. I want them back where I left them. I’d pick a cabin with wood inside. Sweet dreams.”
TWENTY-SIX
The interview with Bailey Kindlon had obviously been taped, then both sides of the conversation transcribed.
Wren’s Rule number two: transcribe your tape recordings for in case!
He’d begun by jotting down his general impressions of her. The 3-year-old survivor of the Aurora Dam Flood was middle-aged by now. She was divorced and lived alone. He noted her living room was lined with books on alien abductions.
He soon found out why.
He began by thanking her for seeing him and reiterating the purpose of his visit. He was doing a story on the Aurora Dam Flood. He was hoping she could remember some things about that day, even though she was so little at the time.
Actually, I remember a lot, she told him. You’d be surprised what a 3-year-old brain retains. Of course, doing the whole therapy thing’s helped.
Wren acknowledged that it must have been horrible for her.
You know, at the time, you’re a little kid, and in a way, that helps. And in a way, it doesn’t. I remember being photographed for some newspaper two days after I was rescued and cracking this big smile because I was going to be on the front page of a paper. This is two days after I was orphaned. So yeah, it helped being 3, but let me tell you, as the years went on, and all sorts of psychic shit began raining on my parade, it wasn’t so cool after all. Kids bury it, that’s all. And in some ways, that’s worse.
Wren asked her if that meant she’d remembered things only later on.
No. She’d always remembered some things. Playing in her backyard that Sunday morning.
I remembered putting my Raggedy Ann in a stroller and singing a lullaby to her. I remembered my mother flying out of the screen door, yelling something to me, but not really hearing it very well because there was this roar-like a jet engine, but then not like a jet engine, like some 747 landing right on top of you. It was too close. I remembered that sort of confluence of sound and sensation. Then it was as if I’d been lifted up-my dad would do that, grab me around the waist from behind and swing me up in the air like a loop-de-loop. It was like that. I was suddenly picked up except my dad wasn’t there, and my mother was gone too, and I was all wet. I was suddenly in a pool-but the pool was my whole backyard, the whole street. I remember whizzing past Mrs. Denning’s house-she was our neighbor-and seeing the house itself; her entire house began moving, spinning past me like a top, and it was like I was in The Wizard of Oz, that scene where Dorothy gets picked up by the tornado and everything is swirling around in the air, only this was water. I remembered all that.