James Siegel - Deceit

I’d almost passed the exit-on my way to the next one for sure. I took the turn on two wheels-my first wheelie since fourth grade-barely held the curve, then flipped back on all fours and rolled onto a mercifully empty service road where I kept right on going.

Listen.

Nothing.

How was it possible?

How could he know I was here ?

At the trailer park in Iowa?

On the road to Tellings ?

How?

Think.

Okay. There was one way. Sure there was. Assuming he hadn’t followed me all the way from Littleton-one way.

My ATM withdrawals.

My credit card.

The one I’d used at gas stations, at the Nevada Stop ’n’ Shop and the Sioux Nation Motel in North Dakota.

Like big, fat crumbs any good bird dog could follow with his eyes closed.

All the way from Iowa to Seattle to here.

Only…

You would need a special kind of access.

To get that kind of information-private bank records, credit card receipts, the kind of stuff they’re supposed to guard with their lives-you would need a special sort of access for that.

“Uh, I really got to pee, man.”

“A few minutes, Dennis.”

I was getting there-I was close. I’d sat down on a stool at Muhammed Alley and begun drawing something, and now it was beginning to emerge. If I peered really hard at it, maybe I could even whisper what it was.

I had to move faster. I had to Texas two-step.

As far as I could tell, the plumber hadn’t made the turnoff.

I’d shaken him.

I drove another twenty miles before I gave in to Dennis’s increasingly pitiful demands- I have to goooo, man -and turned in to a twenty-four-hour Exxon station.

You never want to end up in a hospital.

Not if you can help it.

You most definitely don’t want to end up in a VA hospital.

The army and navy and air force and marines pour most of their funds into trying to kill people, not heal them.

VA hospitals stink of neglect.

The one in Tellings was no exception.

There was a man in a wheelchair yelling in the visitor’s lobby. His waste bag had broken and no one was fixing it. He’d been yelling for two hours, he said.

The admitting nurse seemed oblivious to his ranting, as if she were hooked up to an invisible iPod and grooving on R amp;B.

She was only half-oblivious to us.

“Yeah?” she asked, a few minutes after we presented ourselves at the front desk.

We’d already skirted the grounds, walked the pathway circling the three innocuous-looking buildings that made up the complex. I asked Dennis if he remembered the place.

“Was this it, Dennis? Was this where you were?”

He didn’t have a good answer. He looked like a tourist contemplating something he’d read about in guidebooks-things half-familiar and half not.

There was an easy way to find out.

“Have you worked here a long time?” I asked the admitting nurse.

“ What ?”

“Have you worked here for more than a week?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. “You making some kind of comment on my abilities?”

“Have you seen either one of us before?”

“What exactly do you gentlemen want?” she said, in a tone of voice that said she’d seen enough of Dennis to know he wasn’t gentleman material. Me either. Spend enough time in a car and you start looking as if you live in one.

“We have a prescription,” I said. “Any chance you could fill it?”

“You see the word pharmacy written anywhere?”

“No.”

“Then why you asking me to fill a script?”

“Okay, fine.”

“Is he a vet?” she asked, motioning toward Dennis. She could’ve asked Dennis directly, of course, but she’d obviously been around enough psych patients to know one when she saw one.

“Saddam’s pumped me full of petros,” Dennis answered her anyway.

“That so?”

“I’ve got petroleum in my veins. I need a lube job.”

“Are you in charge of him or something?” she asked me.

“Or something.”

“You here to commit him?”

“No. Just looking for a refill.”

“You might want to rethink that. He doesn’t seem so good.”

“No, he’s okay. He just needs his meds.”

“Well, then. I’ve got a hospital to take care of.”

“Okay, sure. And you’ve never seen him before-right?”

“Right.”

We walked back outside, where a Support Our Troops sign was hanging off the front archway.

I did what I always did when we walked outside now-when we walked anywhere. I looked for a blue pickup truck.

“How many pills I got left?” Dennis asked.

“Not that many. By the way, you know they’re all different colors?” Dennis’s mom had anointed me keeper of the meds-put them in an old Band-Aid box and stuffed them in my pocket. I couldn’t help thinking there was something metaphoric about that-futilely sticking Band-Aids on a terminal wound.

“I’m hungry,” Dennis said.

“Okay, we’ll get something on the road.”

I’d been trying to conserve my cash because I was loath to hit the ATM again. Not that it mattered-I’d already filled the tank just before we hit the hospital, slipping my credit card into the reader like the notes UPS delivery personnel slip through the mail slot of your front door:

I was here.

The next hospital was a hundred miles away in Oregon.

Eisenhower Memorial.

Up till recently, I’d never been close to Oregon in my life. Now twice in two weeks.

“Dennis, if you see that license plate again, you’ll tell me, okay?”

“Sure,” he nodded. “What license plate?”

“MH92TV.”

“Oh, right.”

It was almost midnight. I’d decided there was safety in motion-no roadside motels where I’d need a credit card or cash withdrawal. Where someone in a blue pickup truck might creep up on us in the dark.

We reached Eisenhower Memorial at about 1 a.m.

It looked a bit like the elementary school I went to as a kid-only triple the size. A squat, red brick building with the requisite flagpole out front, the Stars and Stripes dishrag-limp in the sticky summer heat.

“What’s this?” Dennis asked when I pulled into the parking lot. “Where are we?”

That didn’t bode well.

When we walked up to the front desk, we suffered through a repeat of Tellings. This time the admitting nurse was a pale, owlish-looking man who asked us what we wanted, claimed to have never seen Dennis before in his life, then inquired about Dennis’s sanity when he swatted a bug that wasn’t there.

We took a little walk around the place anyway, just as we had in Tellings. It was a washout; Dennis had never been there.

We went back to the car, drove through the front gates.

I steeled myself for a long ride; the next VA hospital was more than three hundred miles away.

Dennis was acting fidgety.

I put him on license-plate duty. It gave him something to do. It gave me a semireliable sentry-scouring the passing jumble of numbers and letters for the ones we needed to fear.

Somewhere around 3 in the morning, I felt the kind of tiredness you just can’t shake. Dennis had already fallen asleep on the job and was snoozing noisily against the side window. I was perilously close to following him, the highway’s broken yellow lines like individual Sleep-ezes I was ingesting one at a time on the way to bed.

When I realized I’d drifted into the next lane-had literally been sleeping at the wheel-I searched for the next exit. Three miles later, I turned off the highway, looking for someplace we could grab a few hours’ rest.