Hooked (6 page)

14

N
otwithstanding the wild coincidence that another structure was ablaze, it seemed momentarily innocuous, like watching it unfold on CNN. Whatever had happened had just started. A wisp of flame jutted out from a front window. The house was three-story beige stucco, with black trim and a bright red front door. It looked to be intact and sturdy.

Then I heard a throaty boom. A surge of heat coursed across the yard. Fire burst out windows on the first floor. A man in athletic gear stood on the sidewalk holding a tennis bag and a cell phone. I scrambled over to him. He was on the phone with the fire department. “Thank God they’re all at the memorial service,” he mumbled.

Small miracles, but just small ones. No sooner had we concluded that the family wasn’t home than the man pointed to a window on the second story. A heavyset woman opened the window and waved her arms. She had a look of sheer panic.

“Back door,” he yelled.

“I’m gonna die up here.”

“The fire department’s on its way,” he chimed back. “Stay calm.”

“You stay fucking calm!”

Two boys on bikes jutted around the front and screeched, “The back porch is on fire!” Then I noticed the woman again. She gulped big fast breaths, hyperventilating. Not from fire, but fear.

Like a lot of San Francisco homes, the garage level was partially belowground. The effective second floor wasn’t more than twenty feet above terra firma.

“Just open the window all the way and slide your butt onto the ledge. Then let yourself down and we can grab your feet. You can hold on to the drainage pipe,” I found myself saying. “I promise you this will be very simple and easy and safe.”

The pace of her breathing increased. She was lost in her fear, and not hearing me. Panic attack. From what I could see, the worry here was less that she’d be engulfed by flames and more that she’d pass out and be helpless. I could see the physiology unfold; eventually the airways would clog with dark soot, constricting oxygen to the blood, heart, and brain.

The decision to quit medical school still haunted me. Partly because I sometimes found myself defensive when challenged by people with a résumé-centric view of existence. More so because of the periodic weight of a responsibility I couldn’t really bear. I could see a medical problem, or evidence of one, but not have the expertise to fully grasp or do anything about it. It turns out doctors aren’t generally lifesaving heroes, but I couldn’t even muster the illusion anymore.

What could I do here? It didn’t take a neurosurgeon to see she needed to stay calm.

“Put your head out the window,” I said. “Slow, deep breaths.”

She remained paralyzed.

“Hey!”

Nothing.

I took a step toward the house.

“Boost me.”

Instinctively, the man standing next to me grabbed my arm. Don’t be an idiot, he was thinking.

But then, he didn’t understand it was not nearly as idiotic as I was capable of being. That was spending my twenty-first birthday climbing Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, a 23,000-foot, highly challenging high-altitude ascent amid wicked winds.

I looked at the water drainage pipe running up the side of the house next to the window. This didn’t qualify as a particularly treacherous climb. And the woman was now slumped. If someone didn’t get up there to calm her down, she was going to suffocate at the summit and get cremated.

I looked around at the gathering of neighbors. No one seemed to know what to do. The first-floor doors and windows weren’t options.

I moved under the window.

I grabbed the pipe, and tested a foot against the stucco. It slipped off. I looked at my feet. Not an ideal time for the slippery black leather shoes I’d worn to the funeral. I pulled myself onto the pipe again. The man I’d been talking to, and one other, perched underneath me, and the pair hoisted my feet. With their help, standing on their hands, I’d have to pull myself only a yard on my own to reach the window’s ledge.

My feet balancing me on the house, I clung to a metal strap holding the drainage pipe to the building. I reached for a similar strap a foot above, and felt my grip loosen. I started sliding down the pole. I landed on my feet, then my butt.

I yanked myself up again and got a boost from the men. And I hung there, three feet below the ledge, looking less and less like Spider-Man every second.

Who was I kidding? I wrote medical stories for a dollar a word, played recreational hoops two days a week, and faced such hero-inspired challenges as eating tuna sandwiches with mayonnaise that was nearing the end of its freshness date. I didn’t even play a doctor on TV.

But I felt a surge of adrenaline, an almost foreign urge to act. Maybe it was Annie inside my head. I pulled myself within two feet of the window’s ledge and realized I wasn’t going to get closer. I could hear nearing sirens. I looked up to see the woman’s head against the window frame. Her lumpy chin rested on the sill, still rapidly gasping for air.

“Hey!” I shouted to her. “You ever see a guy fall and break his neck?”

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

“Agnes.”

“You’re going to be fine, Agnes.”

She turned her head to the side and threw up. Her head rolled back. She was so panicked that, given her weight, I was afraid she might arrest. Her blood pressure had to be skyrocketing. Her eyes were open. “I don’t want to die.”

Suddenly, an explosion rocked us. I barely was able to hold on to the pipe, my feet were blown away from the house, my legs waving out like a tattered flag. I pulled desperately to keep from falling. A howl of heat blew out the window, the flames near.

She started breathing quickly again. She was tremulous and crying. I had to get her talking. I had to get her to focus on me.

“What happened, Agnes?”

No answer.

“Agnes! I need you to tell me what happened here.”

Something in her eyes snapped open. “I’m just the housekeeper. It’s not even my regular day,” she said, pausing. “I was . . . I was cleaning. It got hot. Then everything . . . so goddamned fast.”

“Did you smell gas. Was there . . . anything strange?”

I heard the thump on the windowsill. I had been so entranced, I hadn’t noticed the arrival of the firefighters.

“Gas, maybe. I don’t know. There was an electrician when I got here. The house was empty because of the funeral. The electrician said she was doing some wiring in the basement . . . ”

She was cut off by another explosion, just as the firefighters made their ascent. One wrapped his arms around her. I felt a hand on my shoulder, guiding me down a second ladder.

On the ground, I swam through a growing crowd in search of Erin. She was still sitting in the car, looking stunned.

“Oh.”

That was all she said, as if the ability to express more complex emotions had left the building.

“Bad news, worse news,” I said.

“What?”

“All of this—the explosion. Andy, Simon. The fire. It’s all somehow connected to Sunshine Café,” I said. “The café is . . . at the center of all this violence.”

That was a revelation, at least to me. Up until then, I had no pattern I could discern.

She touched her palm to the side of my face. “What happened?” she finally said.

I told her what the woman said. Maybe someone had sabotaged the Andersons’ electrical system.

The electrical system.

I jerked forward.

“Andy’s place,” I said.

Erin sniffled. “What about Andy?”

“Outside his apartment. Someone was working on the lights. A worker, or an electrician. They’re going to try to burn it down.”

I turned the keys in the ignition.

“We have to go,” I said. “Now!”

15

E
rin dialed 911 and I flew down Laguna Honda, a secret passage to Cole Valley—and Andy’s apartment.

I pulled around a Windstar minivan, eliciting an orchestra of honks.

“I’d like to report a possible fire,” Erin said.

I heard her end of the conversation.

“No. No flames. No smoke.”

The operator slowed her down, and asked her a couple of questions. She gave Andy’s address. I gave the accelerator a punch. The tires squealed. The odometer hit 50.

“Please, his place may be . . . a target.”

Erin closed the phone and said they were sending an officer by.

I sped into the Haight-Ashbury, then screeched the brakes. Half a block ahead was a logjam. Or, rather, a peace jam—about a dozen twenty-somethings imitating peaceniks had gathered on the corner and were slapping tambourines and hoisting signs. They were for something. Or against something. You live in San Francisco long enough, you quit reading the placards. All I knew was they were standing between us and the next block.

I pressed palm onto horn. Big mistake. There’s no better way to antagonize a group of informal protesters. They had the look of people who had gotten stoned, watched Fox News, become angry, made signs, and headed down for the corner between pizza slices. They needed a common enemy, and they’d found me.

A couple paused in crossing the street to approach my window. The woman wore a flowing white skirt from the 1960s and a trendy windbreaker from North Face. “You’re polluting the earth with your death machine,” she said.

I rolled down the window. “You know the trouble with these big SUVs,” I said. “You barely feel it when you run over someone’s foot.”

I turned the wheel sharply and drove onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing the back of a Saturn and evading the protesters.

“What are you doing?” Erin cried.

In my new worldview, there were no longer stop signs, or anything close to speed limits.

“Nat! Look out!”

A teeny-bopper on a foot-fueled scooter appeared from outside my vision and laid rightful claim to the crosswalk. I slammed on the brakes. Erin and I lurched forward.

“Nat,” Erin said, when she sat back up. “Look.”

We were just around the corner from Andy’s house. I didn’t see anything unusual. I said so.

“That’s what I mean,” she said.

She was right. There was a complete absence of everything. No fire trucks, emergency vehicles, or smoke. No chaos.

We dropped into a moment of silence.

“What are we doing, Erin?”

She didn’t immediately offer an answer. There probably wasn’t one.

Or, rather, there were probably too many possible interpretations of the question. We had just flown across San Francisco in six thousand pounds of seething gas guzzler. Why? Was I overreacting? Was there any real danger? What about our own safety?

“You’re a little high-strung,” Erin said.

Should we leave this all to the police?

Perhaps this last question was born of subliminal observation. Pulled up behind us was a member of the San Francisco Police Department.

This was not going to be a friendly law enforcement encounter.

16

L
icense and registration please.”

“Officer,” Erin said. “We were the ones who called in a report about a possible fire.”

I extricated my driver’s license. I tried to remember where I had put my registration. Don’t cops know that no one actually has any idea where they put their registration?

“You called in about a fire?” said the officer, whose name-tag read Sampson. “You called the San Francisco police?”

“Nine-one-one,” Erin said.

I held my driver’s license up to the open window. The patrolwoman took it and scrutinized my height, weight, and picture like it could tell her everything anyone could ever need to know about me.

“Mr. Idle, can you please step out of the car,” she said.

I tried to remember if I’d done something wrong. The answer dawned on me just as Officer Sampson said it.

“You nearly killed a skateboarder,” she said.

She got points for hyperbole.

“We got two calls about a Toyota sport utility vehicle tearing through Cole Valley,” she said.

She seemed to take pains to enunciate when she said “sport utility vehicle,” like my car of choice would cost me points when we came to the me-making-excuses portion of our program.

“I didn’t see the incident,” she continued. “But I could hear the screeching of brakes and tires from around the corner. I could have heard it in the Castro.”

It was kind of funny. She didn’t smile. Still, the way she said it, it sounded like good news. Like maybe she wasn’t going to dig into my bank account for something she hadn’t personally borne witness to. I decided to go for the jugular. I began begging.

“I’m sorry, Officer. I’ve had an unbelievably bad couple of days,” I said.

She glanced at me without commitment. “Let’s see what the box has to say.”

She walked to the squad car. She sat. She started entering my information into her onboard computer.

“Underpants,” Erin said.

She leaned closer.

“The one and only time I got in trouble with the law. The one and only thing I ever stole.”

“Underpants?”

“A racy little pink number,” Erin explained. “I was fourteen. I had some friends who were going through a theft phase. I wanted to prove myself, but I was terrified.”

“By stealing big-girl undies.”

She curled a strand of hair behind her right ear and trailed a graceful index finger along her jaw, letting it rest on her chin. I’d always found the great challenge of rock climbing to be deciding which jagged outcroppings were solid and secure enough to make reliable hand- or toeholds. I still couldn’t decide whether to grasp on to Erin.

“Oh, no. My theory was much more flawed than that,” she continued. “I figured that I would steal something that I could readily conceal. I would simply try on a pair of panties, then walk out of Kmart undetected. Not only did I get caught, I had to undress in front of the manager. She was a nice older woman. But still . . . I was stripped right down to my thong, which fortunately I was wearing over two pairs of my own regular underwear and a pair of shorts. My father nearly disowned me. He was strict, capital S. I think it was a year before he let me out of the house for a non-church function.”

The cop exited her car and started heading in our direction.

“Anything short of a strip search, and I think you’re having an all right kind of afternoon,” Erin said.

“Mr. Idle,” the officer said.

She was using honorifics. That didn’t bode well.

“Are you familiar with the term ‘reckless endangerment,’” she asked. “We got two calls from possible eyewitnesses, including the mother of a boy who claims you nicked the tail end of his scooter.”

“What about the call to 911?”

It was Erin. She wasn’t letting go. The officer took a deep breath. She seemed like someone to whom patience came naturally. The uniform had weaned it out of her.

“A call was placed,” Officer Sampson said. “And responded to.”

She explained that a patrolman had been in the vicinity. Officer Sampson looked at the notepad in her hand. “Officer Eldridge reported no smoke or fire.”

She looked up.

“It’s not all bad news, Mr. Idle,” Officer Sampson said. She told me she was going to let me off in exchange for a favor.

“I’d like you to drive down to the station,” Officer Sampson said. “Lieutenant Aravelo would like to have a word.”

I said good-bye to Erin, and we headed downtown.

The only time I’d been in a police car prior to that was on career day in junior high. My friend and I pestered the stoic cop for exciting stories, but he wasn’t biting. Finally, he drove us to a cemetery and said, “Make something of your lives. Make sure you get good grades.” We laughed about it for years, but it was eerie and mysterious and we weren’t sure if he was suggesting life was short, or that he might kill us if we didn’t get straight A’s.

Andy’s death, his life, Erin’s too, mine, all bubbling with uncertainty, and begging for interpretation. Maybe every life, and death, is its own unsolved mystery. Certainly, I was realizing, that was the case with Annie.

As we drove to the station, I found my thoughts turn distant—to another time when confusion and anger had visited in its purest form. Only to be followed by death.