James Siegel - Deceit

I went through everything. Then I repeated it.

I looked through Wren’s desk for a flashlight.

It was still light out, but I would be trekking into the woods.

The trees formed an arching canopy of almost absolute black.

The trunks were mossy and slick.

The ground was a mulch-mix of dead leaves, pungent earth, and tangled roots.

Occasional deer announced themselves with whippetlike flashes of their retreating tails.

Chipmunks darted between the dead branches.

I walked an uneven perimeter around the cabin side of the lake.

I kept sinking into the soft ground; in ten minutes I was sweating through the University of Oregon T-shirt I’d plucked from a five-dollar Kmart rack on the way.

I’d done a story on a forensic guru down in Mississippi who planted his garden with donated cadavers-mostly the nameless dead who ended up with the state. He wanted to document what time and soil and weather did to the human body, to meticulously chart the deterioration in bone and sinew and tissue.

Some of the bodies were left rotting in the air.

Others he buried at different depths, digging them up at various intervals to check for damage.

He soon discovered that he wasn’t the only one doing some digging. His garden abutted a nature preserve. Black bears and wild boars were able to sniff the buried remains. They had no trouble digging through up to six feet of earth to find them.

He’d described what it looked like.

Like a table at an all-you-can-eat buffet that hasn’t been bused yet.

A mixture of gnawed bones, snapped teeth, and dung.

If you buried someone out here, they wouldn’t stay buried for long.

I walked through swirling clouds of gnats.

Mosquitoes dive-bombed me like fanatical kamikazes. I squashed at least ten of them on my arms; when I looked at myself in the mirror that night, I resembled a survivor of paintball.

I drifted through smoky pillars of fire-those few cracks in the overhanging tapestry where the sun managed to fight through.

I tried to keep the lake in view at all times-mostly mere glints of it, enough to keep me from wandering in circles or, worse, plunging into the primeval forest and drowning in it.

I was out there one hour, two, three, till it got dark enough to give up.

I circled back and went to sleep in the same cabin as last time.

In the morning I tried again.

This time I went directly out from Wren’s cabin-a straight line into the woods.

I was out there all morning; I was hot and frustrated.

I sat down on a tree stump and stared at the dappled patterns on the leaves.

White streaks all helter-skelter, having to do with the way the sunlight poured itself through the branches. The way it splashed down.

Like staring at a Jackson Pollack and trying to find meaning in it.

The casual arrangement of things.

I was looking at one particular pattern-I was forming my own pictures out of it.

When I looked for its source, I couldn’t find it.

When I searched the leafy canopy for cracks, there were none.

Not one ray of sunshine being let through.

I heard the thick drone of insects. Smelled something.

A vague scent-musky, sickly sweet.

Something that must’ve once been truly awful, but was now barely tolerable.

I noticed the clumps of moist black earth flung here and there. Discerned the clouds of swarming insects-horseflies, gnats, flying beetles.

Drive into the woods now and they won’t find you till next year.

I had to push a thick dead vine out of the way to finally stand there.

Up close.

Where the streaks of white sunlight looked like a wrinkled Halloween costume that’s been ripped off and thrown in the corner.

You know the one.

The skeleton.

I had to swat the bugs out of my eyes. I had to keep staring at it.

The white streaks of light that weren’t. The bones. They were dead white.

Bitten in half so that whatever had dug them up could get to the marrow.

I wasn’t a bone expert, of course. I couldn’t tell a deer bone from a human one.

I didn’t have to.

Deer don’t wear pants.

Tan chinos, with the Gap waist snap still attached.

She answered her phone on the second ring, then even more surprisingly, she didn’t hang up.

Maybe because I asked her if she was going to go back to her maiden name after the divorce.

Back to the name Steiner.

She went silent, one of those strangled pauses that say more than words can. Then she agreed to meet me on Lincoln and Ninth.

The first day I’d met her, she’d told me about her father.

My pop was a mechanic, she’d said, after I thanked her for fixing my coil wire. He basically lived under the hood.

Just like someone else I’d heard about.

He took auto-mechanic classes in jail-that’s what he ended up doing when he got out… The boy-wonder engineer, fixing cars for a living.

There was more.

At our second dinner, after she happened to mention that she’d known Wren.

That’s where we’d met, she said. At the home… to try to scare up some memories.

And what was Anna doing at the home?

My pop. He’s got Alzheimer’s, she’d said.

And when I’d asked Wren-not really Wren, but whoever was on the phone with me that day-if Lloyd Steiner was still alive?

Barely.

Did you try to speak with him?

Uh-huh. Let’s just say he’s not talking.

It was possible.

Maybe even plausible.

So you think Lloyd Steiner went to jail for ten years to appease the public and kept his mouth shut all that time?

Maybe he had kept his mouth shut.

Just not forever.

I called the home. I introduced myself as a concerned relative. I asked a sympathetic-sounding attendant how Mr. Steiner was doing today. “Lloyd Steiner? Is he okay?”

“No change. We’re pretty much down to force-feeding him now.”

It’s what you do for someone you love, she’d said. He’s my dad. I’d do anything for him.

In the end, maybe that’s what she’d needed to do.

Anything.

That picture she showed me.

Cody on the push-and-pedal. The kid pumping his legs like nobody’s business-striking out on his own. Going wherever he wanted to-exploring the great wide world.

Except he wasn’t.

Mom was right behind him holding on to that pole and steering him where she wanted him to go. It was an illusion.

Dirty trick, huh?

Yes, Anna, it was.

It was.

It’s funny how she still stirred something in me.

Maybe it’s our nature to let the body forgive what the mind can’t.

Or else we’d all be at one another’s throats. And we’d never let go.

“Someone paid you a visit three years ago,” I said. “A creepy-looking man with a voice like a girl’s.”

We were standing on the corner on Lincoln. Early evening, lots of foot traffic heading toward the promenade.

She nodded.

“Your dad was in the early stage of Alzheimer’s by then. It was probably his last chance to get something out. Before he vanished-the part of him that could actually communicate with the world. That could still form words.”

She turned away, rubbed something out of her eye.

“This man paid you a visit. He said something like this-I’ll paraphrase. Your daddy made a deal. A long time ago. He’s got to honor it. Even if he’s gone off the deep end of the ocean-even if he’s begun muttering things to local reporters. A secret’s a secret. A deal’s a deal.”

There was something in her eyes.

Tears.

“He’d begun talking about the past,” she said softly.

I nodded. “Sure.”

“That’s pretty much all he talked about. It’s what happens when you start going… That’s what the doctor said… Like counting backward when someone’s putting you under. And then you’re asleep. You’re gone. Sometimes he was actually there, back in the 1950s…”