The Big Both Ways (4 page)

Slip felt nothing so much as sad. It was the sadness of reality descending on him. This woman was not the girl by the river. She was going to kill him. She was going to take the whole thing away: the cabin, the river, and the future too. He reached for the gun.

“This is the last favor I’m going to ask,” she said. She handed him the gun while she reached into her bag and took out two pieces of paper. One was a flyer advertising some kind of meeting, the other was ledger sheet with names and figures.

“Put these papers in your toolbox. Bring them to me in Seattle. The address is printed on the flyer. Bring the gun or throw it away if you want. Just don’t get arrested with it. Do you understand?”

Slip took the papers and nodded stupidly, as if this strange life were just too hard to comprehend.

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you deliver these papers to me day after tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you just take them?”

“It’s complicated,” she said.

Of course it is
, he thought to himself.

All she did by way of saying good-bye was pat him twice on the shoulders. Then she turned and walked into the shack and pulled down the window shade.

Slip walked out past the empty watchman’s hut. He stuck the revolver in his pants and covered it up with his coat. The morning birds had stopped singing and the early ground fog had cleared away. Just over the hump of the wooded ridge he heard the mechanical hum of the city. He slung his bindle over his shoulder, picked up his tools, and walked toward the clatter of the city, happy to be walking in any direction away from the still gurgling car.

TWO
 

George Hanson lived on a crooked road overlooking Lake Washington. His wife had wanted to live in the country but he still needed to work in town, so this house above the truck farms of the Rainier Valley was their compromise. Above the lake, white clouds floated on the winds like battle cruisers, while in the blackberry bushes song sparrows flitted through the vines on their pipe-cleaner legs.

George drank his coffee and idly turned the page of his newspaper. The free-flowing river of the revolution in Russia had been dammed and diverted by the Politburo, and the fascists were gaining power in Europe. The world seemed on the verge of some monumental change, and this change, whatever it was, hung over everyone around the globe like a new season no one had ever experienced, wedged somehow between winter and spring.

George Hanson’s father had been a broad-shouldered Finn who worked the Seattle docks during the wildest years of radical unrest. He had been a brawler and a speech giver who would often come home as cut up as a country tomcat. During the general strike of 1918, the Big Finn would stumble home with scars across his knuckles and blood scabbed across the bridge of his nose. Lying
in bed, George would hear his mother’s protests as the big man’s boots thumped the soggy wooden steps. He would keep his eyes pinched shut as his father boomed up the narrow stairway to the tiny dormer room cut out of the roofline. The stout man smelled of newsprint, blood, and whiskey as he leaned over the boy’s bed. He never said a word. He never touched the boy or straightened his blankets, but the battered man would back into the corner of the room and watch the boy pretending to sleep. The floor did not creak beneath his father’s boots, and the door hung silently on its hinges. All George could hear was the Big Finn breathing through his broken nose. Then, after a few moments, his father would turn and rumble down the stairs into the steamy kitchen of his mother’s boiling pots.

In 1919 the Big Finn had stood shoulder to shoulder with the Wobblies in Centralia and had faced the brickbats of the Legionnaires as they came to wreck the hall. He had run with Wesley Everest up the back alley toward the river and had swum downstream before Wesley shot Dale Hubbard with the broken pistol no one thought would work. Later that night the Big Finn had sat hunkered under the railroad bridge as the mob churned across Trower Avenue and Wesley’s body was flung over the side with one end of a rope tied to a trestle and the other knotted around his neck. The Finn pushed himself back up into the darkness beneath the bridge as the crowd above him trained their rifles on the dead Wobbly, his corpse slowly turning on the rope like a counterweight of a clock.

From that day until the day he died of a bad heart on the floor of a meeting hall in Ballard, the Big Finn burned with a hatred for the Republicans and the Legionnaires. He’d hitchhike across the mountains to shout speeches to field workers in Yakima, and he’d make goulash in skid road rooms for men carrying explosives to San Francisco. As for why he was seldom at home, he used to say that every breath he took was for the revolution.

To George, his anarchist father made all other human beings seem small, even from a distance. The Big Finn loomed over all of George’s elementary school teachers even though he had never set foot in the school. He dwarfed his high school football coach although he had never been to a game or practice. The Finn’s flamboyance had caused his wife to send their second child, a fragile and softhearted girl, to live with an aunt. The Big Finn had missed most of George’s childhood, and even though death separated them now, George had never really missed his father. But lately he had been haunted by the sensation of the old man crowding into the room where he slept, breathing through his crooked nose. The memory evoked the certainty that no matter what he would do with his life, whatever success he would have, or great accomplishments others would acknowledge, George would never be as vivid in this world as the Big Finn. The memory of his father made George feel as unsubstantial as a wisp of steam, even though he had become a champion boxer in his late teens and by his late thirties he was the best homicide detective ever seen along Seattle’s waterfront.

When the telephone rang, he did not rise to get it. The birds along the fence startled up and away. Emily walked to their telephone in the entryway and answered. George watched as clouds scudded over the lake from north to south, and he listened for the voice of a boy playing in the street though he could not make it out.

“All right. I’ll tell him,” she said. “No … he’ll be there. All right. Yes, good-bye.” She hung up the phone and walked toward the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron.

“Who was it?” he called out finally.

“The office,” she said absently as she flipped his eggs without breaking the yolk.

He waited, expecting more. “What did they say?”

“They said to come right away. I’ll make you a sandwich.”

“Thank you.” He drank the last of his coffee and got up to
put on his suit jacket, being careful to hold his tie back against his shirt as he rose.

“Did they say what it was about?” he asked her.

“Just that they found a body dumped near the slough.”

“They say any more about it?” He was putting on his jacket.

“They just said it looked like somebody you knew.” She handed him a sandwich and stood there, her expression blank as if she were already alone.

“That the body was someone I knew, or that the killer was someone I knew?” He wanted to move forward and give her a kiss but felt unsure of himself.

“I’m don’t know,” she said, turning away. “I think probably both.”

Slip stepped down from the train. He had bought the ticket with some of the money she had given him, but he was going to need a bit more. He wanted to rent a room for the night, maybe a couple of nights, and he wanted a bath. He wanted to wash the memories of the day’s events off his skin. He would use some money to stay someplace with a private bath. He would eat a beefsteak and maybe a bowl of ice cream before crawling between clean sheets for the first time in months. He had no intention of seeing that bottle blonde or her money again.

He found a mailbox near the station and posted the letters the boys from the camp had given him, then he ducked into an alley where no one could see his business. He dug his tobacco tin out from his kit. When he opened it up he felt hollowed out—sick to his stomach and icy cold. The tin was empty, all but for a single piece of paper. His two thousand dollars were gone. The woman must have taken his money while he slept at the cabin. The single sheet of paper was another flyer, the same as the one she had handed him along with the ledger page. The top of the flyer read, “Workers of the World Unite!” He stopped reading, and crumpled it up but did not throw it away.

He went looking for the meeting hall, but all he found was an empty house and he was sure the flyer must be wrong. He spent the rest of the day talking to bartenders and waitresses. He asked about Ellie Hobbes, if anyone knew where to find her. He talked to a few trainmen and a couple of busboys. They all said they didn’t know her but in a way that made Slip think that they did. As soon as they heard her name they looked around, as if someone else was watching, then they would shake their heads and deny any knowledge of the bottle blonde who wanted to fly.

He was hungry and he didn’t know how long he would need to make the money in his pocket last. He saw a handmade sign for a soup kitchen and followed the arrow. He turned the first corner and there was a line of men two blocks long waiting to get something to eat. A cop with a billy club walked up and down the line. Every so often he’d rap one of the bums on the shins with his stick and the little hobo would give a crow hop back onto the curb. When the doors to the soup kitchen opened, the line started shuffling forward with small steps as if they all wore manacles on their legs. Slip poked into the line to talk to some of the mugs, but they froze him out, thinking he was trying to cut in line. Eventually the cop came back, flipping his club by the leather strap, and told Slip to be moving along.

Black clouds were riding the back of the darkness easing in from the west. Slip walked down the hill toward the shipyards and the flat south of the docks. He would rough it for a few nights until he figured out what he was going to do. He would find a place to get out of the rain in Hooverville, but a bath and a beefsteak would be harder to find. As he headed down the hill he could see the sprawl of the slums coming into view.

The settlement was a vast collection of shacks and coops built on what had once been a pasture. Families who had followed the harvests and timber tramps back from the woods washed up here, and built shelters out of crates and pallets. There was no scheme to the pathways and lanes; people simply put up sheds wherever there
was space. Once you walked into Hooverville it was easy to lose your way.

He carried his tools and bindle swung over his right shoulder. He kept a good grip on his tools. If someone were to lay into him, he was ready to let his clothes go but he was damn sure not going to let go of his kit.

Children scampered around the sheds, in and out of the pools of sputtering light from gas lanterns. A group of three tough boys chased a pig out of a woman’s shack. She screeched at the ruffians and the group laughed and pounded on the animal’s back with sticks. A drunk laid out against a dying tree shook his fist and yelled something unintelligible in a scolding tone. Slip hadn’t planned on coming into this ragged part of town, but it was cheap and he could be anonymous.

He walked a hundred yards through the muddy labyrinth. The last of the sunlight shone thinly through the layer of clouds. The air held the promise of rain all mixed in with smells of human waste and wood smoke. He was looking for an empty shack, but there didn’t seem to be any. Families lay sprawled on mattresses. Women sat on crates in the doorways as if to block any more people from coming in. He looked up at the clouds and hoped for any shelter at all.

He turned the corner of the muddy lane. He saw a stunted maple tree at a crossroads and a skinny man sitting on a coffin. The old man was rolling a smoke and looking up at the sky.

“You looking for someone?” the old man asked.

“I’m just looking for somewhere to duck in for the night,” Slip told him.

“She’s pretty filled up,” the old man said, and he licked down the edge of his smoke. “I been hearing that the health boys and the bulls are going to start rousting folks out of here this afternoon. Chase ’em back up into the hills, I guess. When the good folks start complaining about the smell, the next thing you know they got to move us out. You got any
fire?” He looked at Slip, and the logger unbuttoned the top of his tool kit to take out a box of matches he kept there. He struck a match and lit the old man’s cigarette.

“I’ll rent you this spot if you want.” He smiled and rapped on top of the coffin.

“You sleep in this thing?” Slip asked.

“Hell, son, I figure it’s good practice.” The old man winked.

Slip shrugged his shoulders as if getting cold, and handed the man fifty cents.

A few raindrops spattered the ground, and the maple tree whispered as a fresh wind blew through the encampment.

He looked around, and opened the lid of the coffin. He sat on the lip, unlaced his boots, and climbed in, arranging his bindle under his head and his toolbox alongside his feet.

“Give me a hand there and pull the tarp over, would you?”