James Siegel - Deceit

“That’s right. Then I drove here.”

“You never went into the store?”

“No.”

“You never heard a gunshot?”

“No,” I said. “But who knows, maybe that’s what woke me up.”

“ Who knows? You know.”

“I don’t remember hearing anything; I just woke up.”

“And you didn’t see anyone-exiting the bathroom, out in front, anywhere?”

“No. I was sound asleep.”

“And you never went into the store?”

“No.” He’d asked me that already.

“There were two bags of-what were they, John?” he asked his partner.

“Doritos,” John said, in a tone of voice intimating that he could use some right now. The snack machine had stubbornly refused to yield its bag.

“Right,” Wolfe said. “Two bags of Doritos were lying on the floor. Someone must’ve dropped them as they were running out of the store-like they were in a panic. We were wondering who that was? Since you didn’t go into the store.”

“The person who shot the gas-station owner?” I volunteered.

“Mr. Patjy was just the night clerk,” he corrected me. “You think the shooter picked up two Doritos bags on the way out, and then said what the hell am I doing with these Doritos, and dropped them?”

“Maybe he picked them up first,” I said.

“You mean he went there to buy some Doritos and then decided to shoot Mr. Patjy instead. And cut out your friend’s tongue.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Yeah. I don’t know, either.”

“What about the woman? Maybe she dropped them?”

“Yeah, that would make sense. Only we asked her and she said no. So it’s kind of a mystery.”

Silence.

“I wonder why they cut out his tongue ,” Detective Wolfe said.

As a warning… don’t talk. Don’t…

“I guess we’re going to have to wait for him to tell us,” Wolfe said. “Of course, he’s not going to be able to talk much, is he?”

“I don’t know; is he?”

“The doctor says no. And he goes in and out, that’s what you said. So it might not do us much good.”

“He was in Desert Storm,” I said. “He’s convinced he was poisoned-by the oil fields they lit on fire.”

“He probably was,” Detective Wolfe said. “It was a fucking disaster over there.”

“You were there?”

“That’s right.”

“Army?” I asked.

“Jarhead. How come you didn’t go into the store?”

“What?”

“Well, you found Mr. Flaherty covered in blood. His tongue had been cut out. Why wouldn’t you run into the store for help? Or use the phone to call an ambulance? You have a cell?”

“It wasn’t charged,” I lied.

“Uh-huh. So why didn’t you use the store phone? Why didn’t you run in there to get someone?”

“I don’t know. I panicked, I guess. I just wanted to get out of there.”

“Uh-huh. Well, maybe the security camera will tell us what happened to him,” he said, staring at me with an unwavering directness.

Then he said, “Oh, I forgot. The fucking thing’s broken.”

They put Dennis in recovery, next to a soldier covered in shrapnel scars.

“He get that in Iraq?” the soldier asked me about Dennis.

I was sitting in a bridge chair by Dennis’s side. It was evening; the fluorescent lighting over his bed kept erupting in crackling bursts of blue and white that reminded me of distant rocket fire.

I was thinking that there was something about this hospital.

VA Hospital 138 in Oregon.

“No,” I said. “Right here at home.”

“Shit. His tongue , huh?”

I nodded.

“Tough. His old lady’s not going to like that. She can sue the army for loss of marital services. If you know what I mean.” He stuck his tongue out and wiggled it back and forth.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to sue the army,” I said.

“ You’re not ? Fucking bullshit lawyer of mine.”

When I didn’t answer him, he said, “I’m just jerking your chain.”

Dennis came to about an hour later.

I must have been dozing; I woke to a plaintive mewling-like a stray cat trying to cry its way into a house.

It was Dennis.

He couldn’t form actual words.

What was left of his tongue was covered in stitches.

He had thick cotton wadding stuck into both cheeks.

“Don’t try to talk, Dennis. I’m going to give you some bad news. But it could’ve been worse. Okay?”

Dennis’s eyes widened; they were bloodshot and swollen. He looked Chinese.

“Are you in pain? Nod your head if you’re in pain, Dennis. If you’re hurting, you can push that little button on your IV and pump some more morphine into you.”

He continued to stare at me.

He continued trying to speak.

“Whoever attacked you cut out your tongue, Dennis. Not all of it. But a lot of it. I’m not sure what that means as far as… well, talking. I don’t know. You understand what I’m telling you?”

He didn’t respond yes or no.

Instead he turned his head, as if suddenly searching his surroundings.

“Do you remember what happened, Dennis? Do you remember who attacked you?”

He was searching for something else now-his tongue-rapidly swallowing in an effort to find it, then placing two shaking fingers into his open mouth trying to feel what wasn’t there anymore.

He was crying.

“Keep your fingers out of there, Dennis. You’re all stitched up.”

He closed his eyes, moaned, banged his head against the pillow.

I looked away, at the grimy hospital window. A tree branch was tapping against the outside of the glass as if trying to get in. I waited till Dennis calmed down, till he stopped banging his head against the bed.

“If I ask you some questions, can you write down the answers?”

He stared straight up at the ceiling.

“Just a few questions Dennis.”

There was a tooth-bitten pencil on his bedside table. I picked it up and placed it in his hand-he didn’t exactly grip it, but he didn’t drop it either. I found a discarded Oregonian lying out in the hall. I ripped out the full-page ad for Oregon’s best used-car dealership and put it in his other hand.

He stared at it with a blank expression. Then he wrote something down in an uneven, childish scrawl.

Why?

“I don’t know, Dennis.”

Why? he wrote again.

Why… why… why … over and over, like a kid who won’t listen till he gets his answer-why’s the sky blue… Why do birds fly… Why did someone cut out my fucking tongue?

“The person who did this to you-what did he look like?”

He shook his head. He pushed the magic button on his morphine drip.

“Was he strange-looking? No features, kind of?”

His eyes fluttered, half closed.

Sleepy , he scrawled.

“Did he look like that, Dennis?”

Sleepy.

“Right, it’s the morphine.”

I asked him again, but this time he didn’t bother to answer.

He was drifting; I watched him fall asleep.

Except he couldn’t.

His eyes would slowly shut, then suddenly fly open as if spring-loaded, as if he’d seen something in there that had scared him half to death. The bathroom. The plumber coming at him with a shard of broken mirror.

After a while, he picked up the pencil again.

Tell me a story , he wrote.

“A story?”

Bedtime story.

“I don’t know any bedtime stories, Dennis.”

Sleepy.

“Okay. Then go to sleep.”

I’m scared. A story.

“Look, Dennis…”

Mom.

“Your mom’s back in Iowa. I’m Tom. You’re in the hospital.”

A story.