by Earl Emerson
Vanessa, sensing I was in no mood for chitchat and out of reach of meaningful dialogue, kept to herself in the kitchen. That we could be together without speaking to each other for thirty minutes at a pop spoke volumes to me about our relationship, which felt as though it had progressed from casual acquaintance to the sort of deeper friendship I’d read about and seen in the movies, yet had never partaken of; certainly not with a woman.
In high school the few relationships I had with the opposite sex were with girls who wanted to be around a bad boy, one-night-stand girls, flirts I met at city dances and never saw again. Looking back on it, I must have had a certain roguish charm, swaggering about in my battered motorcycle jacket, eager to fight any local bully. I looked older than my age and began picking up adult women, usually heavy drinkers. Once, I even had to go down to the King County Public Health office to take the cure.
It was the killing of Alfred that had resurfaced to bother me the most. I’d shoved it into one of those unused recesses we all keep in the deepest part of our gray matter, where things we do not, cannot, or will not think about are kept until such time as we might drag them out into the sunshine for scrutiny.
We had lost our mother in the ugliest way possible and slain a man minutes later. My brother and I. Two skinny-ass, rail-thin, ragamuffin boys nobody in the neighborhood had ever thought two licks about had been involved in the most bizarre double-killing in a decade. We’d killed a grown man. He had killed my mother, but that never made me feel any better about what we did to him.
I hadn’t thought about any of this in a long while.
These were the events that resigned me to a life crowded with isolation.
64. THE OCCUPATION ARMY
Vanessa stepped into the living room. “Dinner’s ready, but you don’t look hungry.”
“Sorry.”
She sat down beside me. “It’s okay. We’ll put it in the fridge. You can have it tomorrow.”
“I’ve been thinking about the night we killed Alfred Osbourne.”
“I notice you always say ‘we,’ but the way I understand it, it was your brother who killed him.”
“He’s the one who went to jail.”
“What brought this on? “
“Unconnected dots. Connect the dots long enough and you start seeing what you’ve missed before. I’ve been trying to understand things the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been trying to understand the wrong things. I’ve been trying to understand why I am the way I am.”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re saying.”
“You’ve seen me go off.”
“You mean your anger?”
“That’s part of it.”
She sat beside me on the sofa, and the closeness of her body slowed my thought processes and renewed the sexual tension I’d felt between us from the first night I saw her. “I’ve been wondering why I’m so angry all the time. I thought my problem was brain chemistry. Now I think it’s deeper. The point is, I don’t want to be walking around with all this anger. With this inability to connect.”
“Tell me what happened the morning your brother killed Alfred.”
“Well, this is what the police found when they arrived. Two boys standing in the living room in a pool of Alfred T. Osbourne’s blood. Our mother in the kitchen stabbed seven times. Five bullets in Alfred. Three in his left lung. Two in the back of his head, one fired from so close the muzzle blast set his hair on fire.
“The cops get there, and my brother’s covered in blood, my mother’s and Alfred’s and maybe a little of his own. He’s waving the pistol around. The first two cops point their guns at him. It was a bad minute or two. After they got the gun out of his hands, they cuffed him and searched us. In my pockets they found a blue see-through spinner yo-yo and twenty-five cents. In Neil’s pocket they found one of Alfred’s fingers that had been shot off when he put his hand out to fend off the attack. Neil hated him so much he was going to keep it as a souvenir. That was when Neil told them he killed Alfred.”
“So he confessed.”
“He lied.”
“What are you saying?”
“I was the one who shot Alfred.”
“What?”
“Neil took the rap for it, but I did it. I shot him once, and he looked up from my brother and said, ‘I’m going to make you eat that, you little bastard.’ Meaning the gun. Then he came around the end of the couch and I fired again. Twice. He dropped to his knees. After that, all he wanted was to get out of the apartment. He started crawling toward the door. Didn’t say anything, just changed his angle and headed for the door.
“He was crawling when I shot him in the back of the head. Remarkably, he kept on moving, so I put the gun against the back of his skull and pulled the trigger one last time. When the cops got there, my brother took the rap. I think he wanted to believe he was the one who fired the shots. Later on I found out about paraffin tests that can determine if you’ve fired a gun. But they didn’t test us.”
“That must have been terrible. Your mother, Alfred, all of it.”
I wanted to say something further, but instead of speaking I began crying. It came on so quickly I didn’t have time to head it off. It wasn’t the boohoo blubbering kind of weeping, but more the slow, teary, eyes-dribbling variety where your face falls and your brain goes numb and your limbs go weak and you don’t think it will ever stop and you don’t care who’s watching or what happens, because if this isn’t the end of the world, it’s certainly the end of something, and you are overwhelmed with this ineluctable sadness; you think this is perhaps the greatest sadness anybody on earth has ever tasted. Later, when you ponder it, you realize no matter what the trigger, you were really feeling sorry for yourself, for your miserable existence and for your own end, which is the last sadness any of us will ever feel and which is the underlying conceit in all gloom.
It went on for a while. For reasons I couldn’t decipher I felt no shame. Vanessa had seen me grouchy; she’d seen me in Terminator mode; and now she’d seen me crying.
Aside from the times when I sat alone in the dark watching a movie—National Velvet came to mind—I could not remember the last time I’d wept. I’d stopped crying over real events about the time I started using my fists at school.
For a moment or two I was afraid she was going to leave, but she shifted her weight, moved closer, and put her arm around my shoulder.
I was crying for a lot of things.
I was crying for my lost childhood. For my tortured adolescent years. For the hardness that had taken over my soul. I was crying for the eons Neil had spent in lockup, for the druggie he’d married, who might have had her own life if her stepfather hadn’t raped her. For the things that were within my grasp that I would never be able to reach. For the lives that could have been so wonderful but had gone so miserable. For my father’s ending. For all those years my mother chased the bottom of a bottle and allowed herself to be seduced by boozehounds and eventually murdered by one. For the timidity that had crept into my life, for my fear of women, for my craving for something higher and better.
Then suddenly something came over me. A sense of hope. A feeling you get when you’re being beaten senseless by the town bully and you know you at least have to try, that you can’t go down without at least trying.
I turned toward Vanessa. When you pined for an impossibility, you were destined for disappointment, and my life was full of disappointment. Once more wasn’t going to change anything. I wiped my eyes and kissed her.
She seemed surprised—no—astonished.
She pulled back and looked at me, and for a second I couldn’t decide whether she was going to slap me or call the vice squad. Instead, she kissed me. It wasn’t the sneaky guerrilla kiss I’d planted on her either, but more of a long-term-occupation-army kiss, one that knew it was welcome and would stick around for as long as needed, put up barracks, build roads, and buttress the economy.
The thing about a kiss that makes it so wonderful is not the
touch of warm moist flesh on warm moist flesh, although that produces undeniable electricity, but the mere fact that the other person wants to do it. Wants to be there with you, has nowhere else to be other than holding you and letting you hold them. Even if the commitment is only for a moment, it’s a commitment, and more than I ever thought I would get from this woman.
65. DOG DOOR GIRL
Dinner grew cold while we kissed on the sofa, colder still while we lay entangled in each other’s limbs, a haze of perspiration on her brow, my cheek next to hers, the gentle rise and fall of her breathing beneath me. Maybe she wasn’t in heaven, but I sure as hell was.
It was a strangely chaste encounter.
When I made a move as if to shift my weight, she whispered, “Don’t go. I like you right there.”
“I thought I might be too heavy.”
“I like it.”
After a few moments she said, “You’ve told me so many things about your life. I mean, so many things that didn’t go well. Would you like to hear something that happened to me?”
“I would.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m telling you this because I think it’s in any way comparable to the things you’ve told me about your life, but I haven’t thought about it in years, and it just sort of popped into my head.”
“I understand.”
“You’re going to think this is funny, but it wasn’t when it happened.”
“I’m not going to think it’s funny.”
“Yes, you are. I was a sophomore at the U. My best friend, a girl named Dilys Marlheiser, was from Wenatchee, a former Apple Blossom Princess. We did everything together. I had this boyfriend named Bud Hogan. Bud and I had been going together six months, and we were at a party and I got to talking with some people and lost track of Bud. I went to ask Dil if she’d seen him, but I couldn’t find her either. Finally somebody said I should look in Mark Hager’s room in the basement. Mark was Bud’s best friend.
“I should have known something was up. I went down there and the lights were off. I heard noises, so I fumbled around and found the lights. All Bud had on was socks, and all Dil had on was her bra. We just all looked at each other, and then I turned the lights back off.”
“This is terrible.”
“It gets worse. After the lights were off I began to think maybe I’d imagined it. You know how you see something and you have to double-check? I turned the lights back on. They were these fluorescent lights that took a few seconds to blink on. Neither of them had moved an inch. They were looking at me like owls. I turned the lights off again and ran through the basement in the dark. I ended up at the back door in this little storage room. I tried the door, but it had one of those locks you can’t open from the inside without a key. There was a little doggy door, and I thought if I put one arm up above my head and the other one down at my waist I might be able to wiggle through. That way I wouldn’t have to face Bud and Dil, and I wouldn’t have to run through that party crying either.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. I got about halfway through the doggie door and got stuck. I mean really stuck. I yelled, but the music was too loud for anybody to hear me, so I just lay there crying. I was stuck maybe twenty minutes when the lights came on and I heard voices behind me. The voices went away, and a few minutes later I could tell the room was filling up with people and they were talking about me. Finally somebody opened the door with a key. When it swung inward, I swung in with it. There were maybe fifteen people staring at me, including Bud and Dil. Bud said, ‘Jesus, Van. Have you gone crazy?’ “
We talked for a while longer. I’d never conversed with a woman like this, and I’d certainly never kissed a woman this way without it leading to sex. It was a novel experience all around. I remember Towbridge once saying as a joke that if you really wanted to get a woman hot for you, cry. There was some history behind that statement, but I wasn’t going to hear it from Tow any more than he was going to hear about tonight from me.
I said, “I guess I made an ass of myself.”
“Don’t be silly. Everybody needs to cry now and then. And it’s natural to feel bad about killing Alfred all these years later.”
“I never said I felt bad about it.”
“But you do.”
For reasons I cannot fully explain, her attitude infuriated me. Maybe it was her tone of voice. Or the fact that she presumed to know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought she was trying to own me. Alfred had “owned“ me. My grandfather had “owned“ me. Maybe I was so private I didn’t want anybody knowing what I was thinking unless I told them. Of course she was right. I felt horrible about killing Alfred, and had since it happened. Still, I couldn’t abide her telling me that. It was adolescent and immature, but it was me. I got up, feeling the poison stirring in me. “I’m glad we killed the bastard. I’d kill him again tomorrow. I’d kill him right now.”
“How can you say that? It must have been a freakish—”
“Don’t tell me what to think!”
Maybe it was the shame of having cried in front of her. Maybe I thought she was patronizing me. Maybe I didn’t want to get close to her only to have her dump me later. Maybe I couldn’t stand the suspense.
“I was . . . I was only trying to . . .”
I walked to the window and faced the water. I waited a long time without moving. A very long time. The wind picked up outside, and I could hear the waves slap at the pilings under the condominium. I didn’t turn around. She spoke to me twice, and twice I didn’t reply or turn around. Nobody could go mute like I could. Later, I heard her getting her things, heard the front door open softly and close just as softly.
Only somebody like me could twist something like what we’d had into something like this.
Later, much later, I dialed Vanessa’s number, thinking to put an apology on her voice mail, something along the lines of, I’ve had a lot going on in my life and I really liked her and wanted to keep seeing her, but . . .
“Hello . . . Is that you, Paul?”
I hung up.
It was a wonder I hadn’t mucked things up sooner. People talked about free will, but if there was such a thing, I didn’t know where to find it.
66. BLOWTORCH WOMAN
Marsha Connor called at noon to tell me there’d been a huge break at FIU.
“Paul. You didn’t hear this from me. Understand? Because this is all top secret, and I’d probably lose my job if anybody found out I was talking to you.”
“Nobody’ll find out.”
“Swear?”
“My lips are sealed, Marsha. What is it?”
“They caught that blowtorch woman in Oregon. I believe she was going by the name of Jaclyn Dahlstrom. They caught her and some guy using one of Steve Slaughter’s credit cards. I guess he cancelled the others, but he forgot a JCPenney card, and she tried to max it out in the jewelry department. They’re holding her on outstanding warrants for fraud.”
“And?”
“We sent two people down to interrogate her, and guess what?”
“Keep talking.”
“She was seeing some guy up here. He came up from Oregon after he got out of the penitentiary. Earl Ward. We double-checked Ward against a list of people they interviewed twenty-five years ago around the time your father was killed. We had to get the case notes from a retired firefighter. Guess what?”
“Marsha, can you just tell it?”
“I’m sorry. FIU interviewed Ward twenty-five years ago. Two different times they caught him in neighborhoods where they’d been having fires. One of those fires was at Twenty-eighth and Jackson.”
“That’s just a few blocks from the Pennington place.”
“Right. His mother used to work for Pennington. They’re looking for him now. But check this out. A few hours ago his mother said she caught him all dressed up in her clothing. So they’re not sure if they’re looking for a man or a woman.”
“Where does he live?”
“Now don’t go gettin
g any ideas. He’s not home anyway. His mother says when she told him we were nosing around, he took her car and she hasn’t seen him since. I can’t believe we have the pyro.”
“What was he in prison for?”
“He killed a fifteen-year-old girl in Oregon.”
“When?”
“You’ll love this part. A week after your father died. That’s why there weren’t any fires for twenty-five years. Because he was in the cross-bar hotel. He might have gotten out sooner, but he was linked to a series of fires inside.”
“Thanks, Marsha.”
By three o’clock it was on the local news. While there were plenty of pictures of Earl Ward as a man, there were none of him as a woman, nothing except the composite I’d cooked up with a police sketch artist. Using his makeup skills and a new wig, Ward could easily change his appearance again.
By seven I’d learned that Earl Ward’s mother lived near Station 33 close to the Renton city limits. I knew I had the right place, because as I drove past it I saw a city vehicle parked out front. A stakeout. They didn’t have him yet.
67. SORTA HANDSOME PYROMANIAC SEEKS
BIG-BOOBED NYMPHO
According to Earl Ward
The day gets worse as it goes on.
My feet have blisters from all that running in heels. My chest continues to ache where the guy poked me with the pole. There are black and blue marks that have begun to turn yellow and purple. It’s pure-dee nasty what Wollf did to me. I don’t know how these people can call themselves civilized.
I can’t get over the feeling of impending doom. It horrifies but also impels me to greater exploits.
Today starts off like every other. I wake up to hear my mother nagging that she’s already had lunch two hours ago and I need to find a job. I check my wounds, have breakfast while perusing the papers, and borrow Mom’s car on the pretext of following up on a job application to Boeing. Mom seems to be the only human being in the Northwest unaware that Boeing is laying off by the thousands.
