“Good. You navigate and I’ll pilot.”
I filled the tank with premium, checked all the fluids and the pressure in the tires, then drove to the other end of West Seattle. I eased down the hill to Hobart Avenue and cruised past the Pederson homestead for one last attempt at retrieving the bonds.
Fortunately, neither Iola nor Bernard looked out at the road, the epitome of blissful matrimony as they soaped and washed her Land Cruiser in the driveway. It was all very convivial and sudsy and no doubt postcoital, and they looked as if they were settled in for the day. He must have taken today off.
On the drive back to my place, I made a call on the cell phone.
“Robert?”
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“Hey. I wasn’t really trying to follow you this morning. You know that, don’t you? I was horsing around.”
“You followed me?”
“I couldn’t keep up. That car of yours moves like stink.”
“Tronstad broke into my place. He broke into my mother’s, too. He roughed her up.”
“Now are you ready to do something about him?”
“Not what you have in mind.”
The line was silent for a few seconds. “You got the bags yet?”
“There’s bound to be a window of opportunity, but not today.”
“Tonight?”
“I’m leaving town. I’ll be back after our four-off.”
“Tronstad’s going to be pissed.”
“I hope he is.”
I tidied up two rooms so I wouldn’t be coming home to a complete piggery, asked Mrs. Macklin to feed the cat, then packed a small bag and called Tronstad on my cell phone. No answer. I called his house, but the phone had been disconnected.
Later, as I was driving up the hill toward my mother’s apartment, my cell rang. Tronstad sounded either sleepy or drunk, his voice thick, guttural, and surprisingly friendly. “Hey, peckerwood. You got my stash yet?”
“I should kill you, you bastard!”
“Now, hold your horses.”
“She knows you, Tronstad. She’s been to the station.”
“Who knows me? What are you talking about?”
“My mother. And you know what I’m talking about.” There was a long pause while Tronstad tried to remember if he’d actually met my mother.
“I kicked the crap out of you once. I can do it again.”
Tronstad laughed, and I could feel rage coursing through my bloodstream like an illegal drug cut with cleanser. I drove two blocks with the phone pressed to my ear, the line silent except for static. Finally Tronstad said, “You’re treading on thin ice, buddy. You get those bonds and put an end to this shit. That’s all you gotta do. Just go get ’em, and we’ll divvy them up.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to my mother’s.”
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“Don’t fuck with me, Gum. Try turning me in, I’ll swear you were in on it. Every last bit of it, including the car fire. You fuck with me, I’ll burn your place down. I’ll burn your mother’s place down.”
“I wouldn’t be setting too many fires. Those bonds are paper.”
The line was silent for a few moments while he considered the prospect of accidentally destroying twelve million dollars. “Gum, I gotta get the money today. They’re going to hurt me. God, we never should have turned it over to you. I’m sleeping in my truck. I got cheated gambling. All I got is twenty bucks cash.”
“What happened to the other ten my mother gave you?” I asked, breaking the connection.
I found my mother upstairs at the kitchen table, packed and dressed for travel, the morning newspaper in front of her, sipping tea from a china cup and looking about as content with life as a sassy sparrow in a tree. The only remaining trace of Tronstad’s visit was a picture frame on the kitchen counter waiting to heal, held together with glue and a congregation of rubber bands. The photo in the frame was of me standing alongside my mother at my fire department drill school graduation, sunlight glinting off the silver buttons on my black wool uniform, my mother looking ten years younger and fifteen pounds heavier. She’d wanted me to finish school and become a teacher or an attorney, but in the photo she was just as proud as if I’d been elected President. I packed my mother’s bags into the back of the WRX and belted her in. A block south of my mother’s apartment house, I spotted Tronstad’s orange pickup truck. Maintaining a block gap, Tronstad followed us through traffic. Just a clue for all you thieves, murderers, arsonists, turddroppers, and mother-beaters: you want to tail somebody surreptitiously, don’t do it in a bright orange pickup truck jacked up so high you can run over stray dogs without getting dirt in their ears. I went through a yellow at Thirty-fifth, and he caught the red as we headed down the hill to the West Seattle viaduct. I knew he’d be thinking he could hotfoot it down the hill and quickly catch up, and it might have worked, too, except that once we were over the crest of the hill, where he couldn’t see us, I gassed the WRX and hit speeds that made my mother’s
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knuckles go white on the door handle, weaving in and out of traffic, doing everything but running over the tops of vehicles in my way. He was nowhere in sight by the time we were on I-5 heading south to the Albro exit. I turned north and used surface streets on the east side of the freeway until we hit Rainier Avenue. From there we crossed Lake Washington on the floating bridge and headed toward the Cascade Mountains.
“I suppose there was a reason for driving like an idiot,” my mother said.
“I think I’ve pretty much turned into an idiot.”
34. DECISION BY PARALYSIS
W THE HIGHWAY TRAVERSING Snoqualmie Pass rose only three thousand feet above the level of the ocean, but no road bisecting the Swiss Alps could have been more magnificent. Mom asked me to stop at the summit so she could spend a few minutes in the sunshine. It sounds macabre, but I’d come to the conclusion that the whole point of these trips was so she could get in touch with the earth before rejoining it. She sat on a rock in the sun watching a group of mountain bikers unload their bikes from the back of a huge SUV. When she asked why they had different styles of bicycles, she was offered a lengthy explanation on mountain-bike design and told the differences between standard and downhill bikes. She had so much to be inward about, and yet every aspect of her life was threaded outward, each day spent learning as much as was humanly possible about the creatures around her and how they interacted with the world. As we rolled down the slopes of the Cascade Mountains into Eastern Washington, cattle grazed in fields scorched brown from the hot summer. Horses stood like statues under the sun. The second mountain pass, Blewett, was a twisty, two-lane highway for most of the route, and once on it I passed slower vehicles at will, letting the turbo kick in as we climbed again into the cool mountain air.
It was late afternoon when we pulled into Winthrop, a dusty little Old West movie set of a town in the Methow Valley of north-central Washington. In keeping with the theme, the buildings lining the short main street all had false fronts of clapboard siding and sidewalks constructed of rough-hewn wood planks. When the snow flew, Winthrop metamorphosed into a mecca for cross-country skiers and snowmobilers; in the summers it attracted hikers, rock climbers, mountain bikers, equestrians,
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fly fishermen, and anybody else looking to get away from the clouds and rain on the west side of the mountains. It was just the sort of backwater bucket of humanity my mother loved to soak up, the chatty locals and atmosphere acting like Epsom salts on her woes. We ended up staying at the Rio Vista, smack on the main drag in Winthrop. The hotel had burned to the ground a few years earlier but had been rebuilt. Mom got the story when she asked about a color photo of the fire that was hanging in a frame on the wall. Since I had entered the fire department she’d been fascinated by fires, car wrecks, air crashes—
anything in which my job might inv
olve me.
Our room at the Rio Vista looked west out over the Chewuch River, which had dwindled to a trickle under the October sun. After opening the patio slider and spotting a bald eagle in a tree forty yards away, my mother got out her binoculars and I lay down on the second bed. I’d worked the night before, and that combined with the five-hour drive and my current situation had put me under enough stress to bend steel. I woke up an hour and a half later, and by then my mother was asleep on the other bed. I’d noticed lately her naps were getting more frequent and longer, and that she was slower than Christmas waking up. It was one of those observations I didn’t speak about and was sorry I’d made. She’d never really told me the details of her illness, only that she had breast cancer, that it had spread long before they found it. After a recent miserable course of chemotherapy, she told her doctors she would rather live the rest of her life taking painkillers in front of sunsets than undergoing expensive and ultimately ineffective medical procedures in windowless rooms. In reviewing statements she made over the years, most of which seemed inconsequential at the time, I came to the conclusion that my mother had always been comfortable with the thought of death, comfortable in the same way that many old people get comfortable with it. The four days we spent in the Methow were in the eighties, with a high overcast and some sun, and I wore shorts, though my mother bundled her frail torso in khakis and a fleece vest. We stayed three nights, taking short early-morning hikes each day before returning to the hotel for a 224
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nap. For the first time, she’d begun taking a second nap during the day, often inadvertently while reading in the afternoon on our room’s patio, or while I was out in the hills on a rented mountain bike. It became our custom to eat dinner at the Duck Brand Cantina across the street from the Rio Vista, where we eschewed the popular multilevel wooden decks outdoors in favor of eating amid a riot of ever-present Christmas lights in the back of the restaurant, beneath the Texas longhorn trophy. For breakfast each morning we walked down the street to the main intersection of town to eat at a place called Three Fingered Jack’s, billed as the oldest legal saloon in the State of Washington. The Old West atmosphere there was slightly tarnished by the big-screen TV blaring in the corner, but I guess that was part of the fun. Mom spent time talking to the locals, forming a particularly close attachment to a heavy-bottomed waitress named Doris at Three Fingered Jack’s. They promised to write, and I believed Doris actually would. My mother carried on a humongous e-mail correspondence, spending hours each day keeping up with various friends and acquaintances and, in some cases, people she’d met and knew only through the Internet, from as far away as Australia and South Africa.
On our final morning, after we’d paid our bill at Three Fingered Jack’s, she was sipping tea as I read a hundred-year-old ad on the wall for a single-cylinder automobile that cost two thousand dollars. She leaned across the table and fixed me with her steely gray gaze. Her scarf was pulled tight across her forehead. Once or twice on trips I’d caught her banging around our hotel room without her scarf, and seeing her bald head was as much of a shock as if I’d caught her nude. The hardest part of her illness for me was acting normal, acting as if I didn’t notice, and if I did notice, pretending I didn’t care. She needed that from me during these last few months, to know it wasn’t bothering me. Above all else, she craved normalcy.
“I know you’re in trouble, Jason. And I know you don’t think you have any way out.”
“You’re not going to tell me to have faith in God, not after what He’s done to you?” We’d spent so much time avoiding talk of religion and any
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discussion of her impending death that I was almost as embarrassed by my statement as she was.
Even though we both knew I was lashing out at her in order to fend off inquiries about my own problems, she said, “What’s God done to me?
I’ve had a wonderful life.”
“I love you, Mom, but you’re forty-one years old, you’ve lived most of your life in poverty. You don’t even own a car. You’re dying of cancer. I don’t call that being watched over by God. I just don’t.”
“Are you saying if I had a Mercedes, that would be a signal God was taking care of me? Don’t be silly. My life with you was a miracle. I’ve been blessed.”
“Your life with me was a struggle.”
“Don’t ever start feeling sorry for me or yourself, Jason. You were born in the wealthiest country in history. Most people on this earth survive on less than two dollars a day. Thousands of children starve to death each day, and we all march ahead as if it isn’t happening. Don’t ever feel sorry for yourself. And as far as me dying at forty-one? It’s only been the last hundred years or so women even lived this long.”
She stared at me, her gray eyes more earnest than ever. “Jason, don’t ever feel sorry for me. I don’t.”
“Okay.”
After checking out of the hotel, we drove to the Grand Coulee Dam and spent an hour at the visitors’ center, then walked along the sidewalk on top of the dam and took the tour inside. Everything about the dam fascinated my mother: the immensity, the historical footnotes concerning the construction, the permanence. On the way home we explored Native American hieroglyphics in the boulders off the highway and hiked up into the caves with a smattering of other intrepid travelers. Later we had dinner in Wenatchee, a good-sized agricultural town just this side of Blewett Pass, where she ordered a salad but then had it boxed up on the pretext that she’d eat it later.
I’d taken this trip in the mistaken belief that travel might clear my head, but the longer we stayed away from home, the more antsy and chaotic my thoughts became, until I thought I was going mad. Four 226
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people—no, six people—were dead, and had I done things differently, they would all be alive still. My primary character trait these days seemed to be paralysis.
Ted Tronstad had gone from being a small-time prankster and troublemaker to being a thief, then from a possibly accidental killer to an intentional one. A smarter, more confident Jason Gum could have stopped every one of those deaths.
Mom didn’t wake up until I was driving up the hill into West Seattle.
“Going to be a nice evening,” she said, sleepily. “The pollution always makes the sky pretty.”
“Yes, it does.”
The way I saw it, I had three choices.
I could turn the bonds over to Tronstad and Johnson and wait to see what transpired.
I could do something to stop Tronstad, either by myself or in conjunction with Robert Johnson. I could go to the authorities.
Each alternative involved risk. If I turned the bonds over to Tronstad, the odds were he would try to get rid of me as an unwanted witness, maybe by firebombing my car or my house. If I stopped him, Johnson’s euphemism for killing him, I would become what he’d become. I knew I couldn’t live with that. If I went to the authorities, I would most likely end up in a cell.
I carried my mother’s bags upstairs, made certain she was secure, kissed her brow, then went back out to my car, half expecting Tronstad to be lurking about, though he wasn’t.
When I parked in the short driveway in front of my garage door, Mrs. Macklin was staring at me from her front doorway, one of her unshaven adult sons alongside. “Good evening, Mrs. Macklin. What’s going on?”
I glanced to my right and saw what I should have seen when I pulled up.
My living-room window had a long crack running from bottom to top, and the drapes had been pulled off the wall. 35. MADE THEM SENSE OF NONE
W “HARRY TO OK MEto the fabric store to pick up some more green yarn for the Cottage Rose potholders I’m crocheting for Christmas presents,” Mrs. Macklin said. “Then we stopped by the Safeway for some lima beans and raisins. Oh, and I had to get me some lottery tickets and cigarettes, too. But the line wasn’t so long as usual. We couldn’t have been gone more than an h
our. When we got back . . .” She began weeping, her lower lip twitching.
“Somebody broke in?”
“They broke my back door. You should have been here. I can’t watch this place all by myself. I have to go out sometime, don’t I? I don’t even want to think what they would have done if I’d been home. A helpless woman all alone.”
“When did this happen?”
Her son piped up, “A few hours ago. I have a case number if you want to call the officer who came out. She said you could call day or night. I didn’t know whether to leave or not. You going to be around?”
“I’ll be here.”
“You sure?” Mrs. Macklin said.
“I’m sure.”
Inside, the two rooms I’d cleaned after the first burglary were the worst, as if he wanted to break my spirit by destroying what I’d already tried to remedy. He’d shattered, bent, destroyed, stepped on, torn, shredded, peed on, or stolen everything of value. He’d taken each piece of silverware and bent it in half. My dresser drawers had been flattened. In the garage the wallboard had been torn open with a shovel, a task that must have taken a good deal of time and made a lot of racket. Mrs. Macklin could hardly have thought I was remodeling, and she must have been home during some of it. There’d been a small fire in the center of the 228
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living room on the carpet, a calling card of sorts. He had tapped it with water from a pan, then collapsed the pan and left it on the charred carpet. He’d apparently toyed with the idea of burning the place down, arrested no doubt by my remark about the bonds being flammable. I formed a large pile of throwaways on the covered concrete patio out back. If I’d had any doubts this was Tronstad’s handiwork, they were dispelled when I checked my in-line skate collection hanging on the wall in the garage and found he’d taken a cigarette lighter and melted a hole in the toe box on all four pairs. The garage still reeked of melted plastic. I should have called the cops three days before, when he attacked my mother—she never did call them back. If I had, he might be in custody by now. I might be, too.
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