“Your health?”
“Yes. You tested some specimens and I’m waiting for the results.”
“Right. You mentioned your health?”
“That’s right.”
Silence.
“We test soil specimens here, Mr. Wren.”
“Soil specimens.” I echoed stupidly. “Right. That’s why I’m concerned. Because I haven’t been feeling good and I thought there might be something in the soil.”
She asked my name again; she told me to hold. Then she came back on the phone and told me the results had been sent to me more than three years ago. Why was I calling now?
“I forgot,” I said.
As it turned out, there was something in the soil.
“You were right,” she said.
“Okay. Great. Remind me what I was right about.”
“It’s hot.”
“Hot? What do you mean?”
“You might want to get yourself a Geiger counter, Mr. Wren. The soil you sent us-it’s radioactive. Can I ask where you got it from?”
She could ask, but I didn’t have to answer.
I hung up.
I was still concerned about Wren’s health.
Back in Wren’s cabin, when he’d called me from Fishbein.
When I attempted to take the edge off and chat about fishing rods.
I told you. I’d done a story on a professional fishing contest up in Vermont. I’d sat around with men whose arms resembled twisted cord, who liked kicking back at night sucking on filterless Camels and swapping fish stories.
I fit right in.
I took notes for the article. I picked things up.
That’s what journalists do. We learn a little about everything, just enough to be wrong.
The men talked about their rods as if they were old girlfriends. Debating the merits of one over another with a nostalgic and loving eye.
I asked Wren about the rods leaning up against his wall. What kind they were.
He’d hesitated and said: trout rods.
There are all kinds of fishing rods.
Freshwater and saltwater, fiberglass and graphite, casting and fly.
There are twelve-foot rods, four-foot rods, and every size in between.
There aren’t any trout rods. Or flounder, tuna, or swordfish rods, either. That’s not how fishing rods are categorized-by the fish. Anyone who took fishing seriously, who’d retired to a deserted fishing camp to spend his days pulling lake trout of the water, would’ve known that.
One other thing.
Everyone has cleared out. I used to see them in the parking lot when I peered out the windows. Salesmen, RV-ers, families caught between point A and point B, even the semipermanent residents like myself who took their motel rooms by the week.
No more.
The motel’s deserted. It’s down to me.
It’s what you do before a siege.
You clear the area.
You isolate the target before you go in.
FORTY-EIGHT
I was still a free man.
I still had time.
Until they matched my prints; as someone who’d been on probation, they were on file. Until Detective Wolfe convinced some assistant-assistant DA that you didn’t really need all that much evidence when you were dealing with a convicted liar.
Maybe you didn’t.
Even though someone once calculated we lie a hundred times a day. To our bosses, employees, clients, spouses, kids, citizens, policemen, bill collectors, relatives, friends. To caseworkers from Children’s Protective Services. And to ourselves. And after we lie to ourselves that there’s a god, we go and lie to him, too.
Some lies are bigger than others.
The lie they’d told Benjamin. The lie they’d told Belinda.
The lie they made Lloyd Steiner tell.
I knew all about big lies.
Benjamin’s records were down on four just like Rainey said. The nurse down there was kind enough to hand them over to me after I trotted out my Detective Wolfe imitation again and requested them.
There was a problem with Benjamin Washington’s records, of course.
They didn’t say Benjamin Washington.
Rainey was right about that. They said Benjamin Lee Briscoe.
Born 1948. Vietnam vet. Charlie Company. Served in the Mekong delta from 1966 to 1968.
Something was whispering to me.
I sat down on a hard plastic chair and stared at the wall. The nurses used it as a kind of bulletin board. There were notices for apartment rentals, cake sales, dogs up for adoption, babysitters, even birth notices.
Birth notices.
The opposite of which are what? Death notices. Obituaries.
I reached into my back pocket. I pulled out my wallet and searched through the back fold where I’d slipped John Wren’s phone number a few weeks ago.
I’d scrawled it on the back of something.
A picture of the Vietnam memorial.
Black polished granite with an endless river of names frozen in stone.
I had to squint before I finally saw his name. Eddie Bronson wasn’t the only name on that wall.
A little further down, stuck between Joseph Britt and James Bribly.
Hello.
Benjamin Lee Briscoe.
That’s why the name had seemed familiar.
When I’d found Eddie Bronson’s name that day in the Littleton Journal, it was surrounded by other names. I’d stared at the picture one night in drunken reverence, a onetime obit writer contemplating the saddest obit of them all.
Benjamin Washington had died fifty years ago in a flood.
But he’d been reborn.
Just like the disoriented vet who’d wandered into the town gazebo that day.
He’d been reborn, too.
“Who’s Eddie Bronson?” Wren had titled his article.
Then Wren had gone to Washington and found out.
Eddie Bronson was MIA, was fertilizer in some Vietnamese rice paddy. The crazy vet who’d set up shop in the town gazebo had taken his name. He must’ve been suffering survivor’s guilt. That’s all. Not uncommon to take the name of a dead buddy when for some reason you’re still breathing, when your life has turned to shit. When the fog of war has followed you around like some black cloud.
Except…
He might’ve had survivor’s guilt, but it wasn’t Vietnam that he’d survived. Something worse.
They’d hustled him off to an institution.
When I handed the records back to the nurse, I asked her about this one.
This institution.
Did the hospital always belong to the VA? Or was it something else before that?
How’d you know? she asked. Yeah, it used to be a research hospital. Back in the forties and fifties. Run by the medical division of the DOE. It had a children’s wing specializing in rare cancers.
Did she remember what was it called?
Marymount, she said.
Marymount Central.
Thank you, I said.
I went to say good-bye to Dennis.
He wasn’t there.
“He threw a fit,” the soldier said. “They took him back up to the cuckoo ward.” He was obviously happy to have the room to himself again. “He went nuts. Check that-he’s already nuts.”
“Someone cut out his tongue,” I said. “That can kind of upset you.”
I should’ve taken off right then. I was armed and dangerous, loaded with combustible knowledge, and I should’ve run.
But Dennis was lying in a hospital unable to form words anymore, and just like with Nate the Skate, it was my fault.
I’d put him in harm’s way.
So I went back upstairs, took the elevator to the penthouse, and buzzed the intercom.
When Rainey saw me, he smiled.
Which should’ve been my first clue.
Maybe I was disoriented-I hadn’t slept much lately-and when I did, I spent most of the time being chased around by blue giants and 80-year-old doctors. In my dreams and waking nightmares, I knew they were the same person now.