Pyro (6 page)

12. THE RESIDENT DICK

         
The last thing I remembered about the shabby apartment near the Aurora tunnel in Belltown was my brother and me being picked up by two burly SPD officers and carried bodily from the house, probably to avoid the blood, our shoes confiscated, bagged, and classified as evidence. We never got them back.

It had been a sunny morning, cold and crisp, blue skies. I still remember watching the exhaust fumes build up around the tailpipe on the police cars in the street. I remember trying to form mental pictures from the clouds of exhaust. Elephants. Zebras. The things kids do when they’ve just killed a man and their mother has just been murdered. We
were
still kids.

After a bit of poking around, they decided Neil had killed Alfred in cold blood.

They couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.

We spent the next twenty-four hours shoeless. It was early spring, and what I remember most clearly was how cold my feet got.

We’d been sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a room I’d always remembered as a small bedroom but which I later found out had been a closet. In the early days our mother would have given us the bed and taken the sofa, but she graduated from that and we’d been forced to make do with a mattress scrounged from a vacant apartment next door.

We slept in our clothes, often in our shoes too, and that morning we wore identical PF Flyers our mother bought at Chubby and Tubby. We didn’t see new clothes often, and I remember being incredibly vain about those orange sneakers.

Alfred T. Osbourne.

I heard him quarreling with our mother that morning. Then suddenly their arguing was replaced by a silence I remember to this day.

A few minutes later Alfred had Neil by the ankles and was dragging him around the room, cackling and laughing, making fun of Neil’s protestations, mocking his squeaky preteen voice. It could have been me. Alfred simply grabbed the first feet he saw. I’d seen him coming and pulled my feet up under the blankets.

Bouncing across the floor like a rag doll, Neil couldn’t see Alfred’s deranged eyes the way I could. I was across the room wedged into a corner, trying to make myself invisible, wondering why our mother didn’t come out of the kitchen and put a stop to the insanity. It was only then that I noticed the bloodstained knife in Alfred’s free hand.

“You little shit,” Alfred said. “You stinkin’ little shit. I’m finally gonna teach you some manners.” He threw me a bloodcurdling look. “And
you’re
next.”

I think about the past more than I should. I think about our mother, about that morning with the piano mover from hell. People tell me I’m a candidate for psychotherapy, but I tried a counselor once and she only pissed me off. There are things people never recover from, and for Emma Grant Wollf it was the death of her fireman husband six years earlier. For me it was the loss of our mother and the rest of that morning with Alfred.

Walking home on the wet streets on December 6, I could feel that old anger beginning to build in me. There had been random arsons before I got to Six’s, but last night we’d been hit by a true pyromaniac.

There was nothing I hated more than a pyromaniac.

I had no doubt our pyro had been watching for at least part of the time, watching our red lights and sirens drive past, watching as we stamped out his pitiful little fires, probably watching the Pennington house too. Pyros sometimes set fires just so they can see the firemen and trucks. The experience of watching the flames feeds a sexual appetite in some pyros, who might stand in the crowd and masturbate. Setting fires is almost never the work of a bold man as, too, it is almost never the work of a woman. Fire-setters are a breed apart—the lonely, the loony, the lost.

I’d been feeling the rage grow all night and knew if I ever ran into this guy I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

What made it worse for me was that this pattern of serial random nighttime nuisance ignitions was occurring in the same part of town as the fire that killed my father.

While I have absolutely no recollection of our father’s funeral, I recall vividly the weeks and months afterward in the darkened house with our grieving mother, drapes pulled, dishes piling up, milk spoiled. I recall our mother’s endless bouts of weeping, the fact that she wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for days on end.

Neil was seven. I was four.

Neil pretty much took care of me after the neighbors and relatives stopped coming around.

Mother stopped paying bills, and eventually, about a year and a half after my father’s death, we were evicted for the first time. After the eviction, she gathered her strength and moved us into an apartment, and for several weeks Neil and I thought things were going to be all right.

Then, just as abruptly as she’d gathered her strength, she retreated back into her bedroom. On my first day of school Neil walked me to kindergarten. God only knows who signed me up.

We lived two years like that.

Then she started drinking. Wine at first, then gin, vodka, anything with a kick to it.

In many ways her first year as a drinker was our best year with her. She began to regain some of her function. She cleaned the apartment and from time to time took us to movies, even shopped for Christmas presents.

My brother and I often spoke about the pyromaniac. Even then, three years after our father’s death, after the hero’s funeral I had absolutely no recollection of, even then we both believed the pyro would be apprehended and punished. We believed that the appropriate officials would arrest and convict the man who’d murdered our father.

As it was, nobody ever heard from the pyro again.

I know I made a fool of myself last night with the housekeeper.

I don’t know why. If I had to guess, I would say it was because I felt a spark between myself and Pennington’s granddaughter, and it scared me. The more I felt the younger Pennington trying to relate to me, the more I had to show off with the housekeeper.

I’m not cruel by nature. At least I try not to be.

The housekeeper kept asking what we wore underneath our bunking pants, and I told her there was only one way to find out. Good God. It was as if we were both in heat.

When we first ran into the Pennington woman on the front porch, my mouth went dry; I could barely get any words out.

The housekeeper was different. She and I are two of a kind.

Neil is the same as me. All his women have been lowlifes too.

There were so many things I might have said to the younger Pennington. I thought of every one of them on the walk home that morning to my condo on Lake Washington.

On Lakeside Avenue, I retrieved yesterday’s mail and went inside the Water’s Edge. In every apartment building there’s a guy who never says hi. Who never looks at you. Who you always think is a dick. I guess you could say I’m the resident dick at the Water’s Edge.

It was starting to drizzle when I walked through the front door and checked my messages—none; my e-mail—none. I took a shower, then put Patricia Pennington’s
River of Dust
into the VCR, turned the sound low, and dragged my father’s large black trunk out from its hallowed spot in the back of the coat closet.

On the TV a seventeen-year-old Patricia Pennington was being given her first horse by her on-screen grandfather, Charles Coburn. I watched her ride up and down green fields and jump over a fence. It was strange to realize the young woman on film was now the elderly pill-popper I’d rescued last night.

The top portion of my father’s trunk was filled with letters and some of my father’s fire department paraphernalia. A half-melted firefighter’s helmet—the one he died in.

I set the helmet aside lovingly and sorted through the newspaper clippings, picking one out more or less at random.

The yellowed clipping was dated by hand in blue ink. November 3, 1978. I never knew for certain, but I thought my father had penned the dates on these articles himself before he died.

RAMPAGE OF BLAZES CONTINUE

SEATTLE
—Areas of Capitol Hill and the Central District were struck again last night by a series of arson fires that continue to baffle fire investigators and are thought to be part of a string of arsons stretching back to last summer. Fire department Chief Frank Hanson says, “We believe the same person is responsible for most of the arsons we’ve been getting since August.”

Last night during a two-hour period firefighters fought five blazes, the largest outside a Safeway on East John, which was started in a garbage bin and quickly spread to the outside of the building.

All of the fires have occurred between eleven
P.M.
and six
A.M.

Fire department officials refused to confirm or deny reports that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has plans to assist in the investigation. Total losses last night were estimated at $15,000.

I picked up a pair of family photos from the time period. There were a couple of curly-haired boys roughhousing with their father. There was a mother so beautiful you could actually see a young man in the park turning his head to look at her just as my father snapped the picture, her auburn hair flashing in the sunlight.

13. BANANA SNATCHERS AND RAT SKINNERS

         
On Sunday I walked to the station, taking the long route down along the lake and up Madrona to Thirty-second and then to Cherry, carrying a rucksack and hiking the uphills almost at a running pace.

I’d spent two days flopped in front of one Patricia Pennington movie after another, a marathon of B movies in the sequence they were made, watching the celluloid woman age before my eyes. It was like sitting next to God.

When I walked into Six’s, the beanery was filled with A-shifters mingling with our shift. Having arrived with half an hour to spare, Zeke was standing along a wall, quiet and smiling in that sleepy way he has. Everybody liked Zeke. He was a gentle soul and meant well. Even his officer, Slaughter—when he wasn’t yelling at him—liked him.

Gliniewicz was swapping gossip with the driver on A-shift. Slaughter was talking to their officer on the engine.

There were four shifts working in the station, which meant four officers: three lieutenants and a captain for each rig. On Ladder 3 our captain was a man I’d worked with in the past, Frank Keesling. We shook hands and he congratulated me on my transfer to Ladder 3. We both knew I wasn’t likely to stay here. Keesling was in his fifties, balding, a grandfatherly sort who didn’t take too many things seriously outside of deer hunting and raising thoroughbred house cats.

“There’s this rat-catcher thing going on,” Keesling said. “I told your chief, Eddings, it was one of those in-house squabbles, but she had to come down the other day and get mixed up in it. Now it looks like it might be headed downtown.”

“Rats?”

Gliniewicz and the A-shift driver were making so much noise it was hard to concentrate. In addition, there were at least two other conversations going on, and the television was broadcasting a women’s tennis match. I wanted to hear what Katie Fryer was saying to Rideout because it sounded like a pretty good yarn, something about a GSW they’d responded to yesterday. Gunshot wound.

I turned back to Keesling, who said, “We had a rat problem out back. A couple of them got into the station, so I told the guys I’d buy a half gallon of ice cream for every rat they caught. B-shift told us they killed two, but some of our guys accused them of making it up. You know how that goes. They were just having fun.

“So my crew told their crew they had to
prove
they caught a rat to get the ice cream. The next shift we found a tanned rat hide pinned to a piece of plywood downstairs. That’s when you-know-who”—he made a gesture at Katie Fryer and continued in a lower voice—“complained to her officer that there’s a state law against trapping animals with steel traps. I thought she was kidding. Next thing I know your chief is up here reading us the riot act. Now I’m writing letters. Katie’s writing letters. Who knows where it’s going to end?”

“Heard anything more about the arsons?”

“Last night the cops arrested a coupl’a homeless guys lighting a Dumpster fire down by the Market. That was probably the end of that.” Keesling had a way of drifting off on you, losing interest in the middle of a conversation. “If you’re ready, I could scoot out and get home in time for church.”

“I’ll have your stuff off the rig in a minute.”

Even Slaughter, who’d spent years as an investigator with Marshal 5, thought the two guys they’d arrested downtown had started our fires.

Not me. I knew few pyros worked in tandem, and my vision of our pyro didn’t include a partner. Our guy was still out there.

That morning before we went out to drill Rideout, I walked into the beanery to eat one of the bananas I’d brought and found they’d vanished off the chrome island in the kitchen.

“What happened to my bananas?” I asked.

Slaughter, Rideout, Dolan, and Boles all stared at me guilelessly. It was the sort of practical joke Dolan might pull, eating four bananas just to get a yuk out of it. Gliniewicz strutted into the room from the watch office and said, “What’s going on?”

“Where’s my bananas?”

Gliniewicz sat down and picked up the sports section of the Sunday paper. “You leave stuff out, it’s fair game.”

“You ate them?”

“It’s out, it’s fair game. Ask anybody.” Without looking up from the paper, Gliniewicz patted his stomach. “I was hungry.”

Dolan started laughing.

Slaughter joined in when he saw my face. “Next time you better nail those bananas down.”

“I’d put a padlock on ’em,” Dolan said.

They laughed even louder when I began searching the beanery and found them in the back of the refrigerator.

Banana snatchers. Rat skinners. I guess it was funny when you thought about it.