The Deader the Better (8 page)

“Adam needs to use the potty,” she announced proudly. Adam
swallowed his fist and kicked his feet. “Let me take him inside,
then we can say goodbye.” She turned and started for the house. The
little girl ran over and grabbed Rebecca by the hand.

“Come on, Aunt Rebecca; let’s go watch.”

Rebecca left in tow. She looked back over her shoulder. Look
number forty-two. Hang in there, baby. This won’t take long. We be
gone.

J.D. and I wandered up toward the cars. The cleared area at the
far end was the helipad. Let ’em keep the darn bridge. Said he was
only about twenty hours short of his commercial chopper license. He
explained how he was going to fly customers directly from Seattle.
Groups of four. Wine ’em, dine’em, limit ’em out for a few
days, back to the city for a new group. Eventually hire another
guide, get both boats working. Eight cabins at a grand a day. Do the
math. The newly bulldozed edge of the forest seemed embarrassed by
its silver nakedness. Several of the trunks showed the brown gouge of
the blade. Halfway up the hill, the frail tops of the hemlock
shivered in the breeze. J.D. pointed toward the back of the clearing.
A new aluminum shed, maybe thirty by forty. A couple of big black
storage tanks. A white U stenciled on one. A white D on the other. A
dusty Honda ATV. Big grassy traffic circle in the center of the area.
Big enough that boats on trailers could easily be backed up next to
the fuel tanks. Some sort of crude stone marker adorned the center of
the circle.

“See that pile of rocks?” J.D. asked.

“Yep.”

“Chappy,” he said. “I promised Ben we’d work around him.”

We rode in silence. All the way back to the working bridge, back
through Stevens Falls. Took the right fork over toward the coast,
instead of the left toward J.D.’s and the end of the road before
she broke the spell.

“Sorry,” was what she said.

“Nothing to be sorry about. You had no way of knowing.”

She made a rueful face. “Not exactly what I had in mind for
cheering you up.”

No argument there. The Olympics filled the windshield. Looming
slate gray against a cantaloupe sky. Two miles later, she gave me the
rundown from Claudia. How this whole thing with the business seemed
to have driven a wedge between them. How Claudia felt they were
slipping apart and didn’t know what to do about it.

“You and J.D. talk?”

“A little.”

“And?”

And I ruminated for a moment on how Claudia spoke exclusively of
relationships, while J.D. had confined his talk to the business. Why
wasn’t I surprised?

Then I gave her the rundown. Conspiracy Theory 1.

“What was your take on it?” she asked when I’d finished. All
I knew was that the more I thought about it, the more unlikely it
seemed. Sure…I could see a few redneck fisherman getting real upset
about losing their boat ramp to some tree hugger. And Lord knows
there’s no telling what a crazed cracker will do behind half a
gallon of Jim Beam. Yeah, I could see good old boys ripping out a
fence and pushing a car in the river. No problem there. But town
government? County government? They’re all conspiring? Over a
fishing hole? Please.

“That’s quite an operation they’re trying to put together
there,” I said finally. “I think it’s most likely they just
plain bit off more than they can chew.”

She nodded in agreement.

“Claudia wants him to ask his parents for money, but he won’t.”

I didn’t mean it, but I said it anyway. “He’ll figure it
out.”

I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Funny how
people are. To keep our pain at bay, we create a hierarchy of
suffering. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems like we
automatically place our own brand of agony at the bottom of the
order. Relegating it nearly to the status of the mundane. At the
other end of the pain chart are the sufferings of others, whose
tribulations always seem so much more romantic, so much more
dramatic, and, in the end, so much more life-threatening than our
own. Go figure.

FLOWING DOWN FOURTH AVENUE IN AN ADRENALINE MIST. The red bows on
the lampposts whispering a reminder that Christmas isn’t optional.
You will participate and you will
have a good time. You
will participate
…Seems like it never ends. Before the Halloween
pumpkins have even begun to rot, the Christmas decorations are
everywhere. No wonder it drives us nuts.

Rebecca had a list. A “Things to Be Buried with the Pharaoh”
scroll. She worked it hard with a pencil. Crossing out, then erasing
and then crossing out some more. I heard her rolling it back up and
then heard the snap of her purse.

“Done,” she announced. My heart soared like a pigeon.

“Ready to head back to the car?” she asked, removing the other
parcel I’d been squeezing with my forearms. That left me with one
jammed under each arm and a shopping bag in each hand. She reached
for another bag. I shook my head.

“I’m good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We surfed down Fourth Avenue on a wave of hustling humanity.

“I wanted to compliment you, Leo on how patient you’ve been.”

Across the street, a four man steel drum band played a reggae
version of “Deck the Halls.” The sound of Salvation Army bells
came from several directions at once and, although there wasn’t a
tree in sight, the air smelled of pine boughs.

“Must be middle age,” I said.

Distressingly, she agreed with me.

We turned right down Olive, passing under the Monorail, then cut
diagonally across Fifth Avenue and around the corner toward the Vance
Hotel. The Explorer was parked about four blocks up Stewart. We were
giving a scant nine bucks to park for the afternoon. In this
neighborhood it’s a buck a block. Every block closer to Third costs
you another dollar, until it peaks at fifteen bucks a pop to leave
your car for a couple of hours. Joni Mitchell was right. You want
good advice. Put up a parking lot.

By the time we’d stuffed our second load of holiday cheer into
the Explorer, rear visibility was a thing of the past. Hell, there
was barely room for us as we bounced down Boren.

“You ask the Boys to the party yet?” she asked.

“I can’t find ’em. I asked around the square the other day
and nobody’d seen ’em for a couple of weeks.”

The Boys weren’t exactly boys. As a matter of fact, with the
exception of Nearly Normal Norman, they were all pushing seventy. The
remains of my old man’s political machine, Harold Green, George
Paris and Ralph Batista had all managed to drink their way out of the
middle class and into the streets. They’d been homeless since
before there was such a thing as homeless. Back then, they’d just
been bums. What I discovered, however, was that, if I kept them
relatively sober, they made excellent street operatives, because they
could hang around places for hours and nobody noticed; they were
invisible.

Nowadays, I try to find them a little work whenever I can. Between
their meager monthly pension checks and what I throw their way, they
manage to stay juiced nearly all of the time and out of the rain some
of the time. Works for them. Rebecca and I had been thinking about
throwing a little Christmas party for them. Maybe the week before the
holi day. Wasn’t like you could have a big regular Christmas bash
and just invite them along with the rest of the crowd.

“You mind swinging by the Zoo on the way home?” I asked,
naming their favorite hangout. She said she didn’t and took a hard
left on Fairview.

The Eastlake Zoo had occupied the corner of Lynn and Eastlake for
as long as I could recall. It hadn’t always been called the Zoo,
but it had always been a tavern. Fisher’s back in the forties. Then
Mac’s and then Hank’s. I remember my old man bringing me into
Hank’s and how I used to love to play the bowling machine. The one
where you slid the little shuffleboard disks at the pins and how they
folded up when you hit them. I could still hear the
kaa-ching
sound. That was back in the days when it was illegal to walk around
with your beer and ladies were allowed to sit only in the booths.
Back in my heyday, the seventies, it was called the In and Out. A
place where you could always find a cold beer and a good blues band
on Friday and Saturday nights. Rebecca pulled the car into a loading
zone across the street and I hustled inside. Terry the bartender was
polishing glasses behind the bar. I nodded on my way by. A dozen
people were spread throughout the gloom, a couple of pool games in
progress, a couple playing pinball, half a dozen smokers up in the
balcony. But nobody I knew.

“Ain’t been here in a couple of weeks,” Terry shouted.

“None of ’em,” he added. Terry had bad feet. Always walked
like he was barefoot in broken glass. He motioned me up to the far
end of the bar. “They found a crib.”

“Really? Where?”

He told me.

“You’re shittin’ me,” I said.

He held his hand over his heart. “Swear to God,” he said.

“Stopped in last week to see for myself. Ya can’t miss it,
Leo. Gotta see it wid your own eyes.”

“You go in?”

“Hell no. No way in hell you get me in there.”

We parked way up the street so’s not to blow their cover. Two
square condos. Identical and ultramodern. Brown. Built on a highly
questionable piece of ground between a freeway exit and the base of
Capitol Hill. Everybody remembers when these two started sliding down
the hill because they’d closed the whole northbound half of 1-5 for
three days while they figured out what to do next. What that did to
traffic will live in commuter infamy for years.

Generally, any house that slides thirty feet downhill is firewood,
and anybody who has the misfortune to be inside becomes the dear
departed. What saved both the occupants and the structures was the
sheer enormity of the piece of ground that moved. The entire section
of hill upon which the structures stood, at least three acres square,
had separated from the surrounding earth as if sliced by a spade, and
slid the better part of thirty feet closer to the highway. Everything
went in one piece. The concrete sidewalks showed no cracks. Hell,
from what I could see from behind the police barrier, the shrubbery
was still alive down there. The original fear had been that any
further slippage might result in the condo’s sliding the rest of
the way down the hill and landing on the interstate. That’s why
they shut it down. After surveying the scene and crunching some
numbers, state and federal engineers, however, assured the city that
were further slippage to occur, the hill and the houses would surely
take the steeper line down the gully to the south and therefore posed
no danger whatsoever to the highway. I remember reading in the paper
that the reason the condos hadn’t been razed was because the
insurance companies were suing the county, claiming that building
permits should never have been issued for such an unstable piece of
property. The county was countersuing…yamma…yamma.

Rebecca peered down at the square roofs and laughed out loud. “No
way I’m going down there,” she said. She held a hand to her
throat and chuckled some more.

“I’ll either be here or in the car. Give the lads my love.”

I had a feeling that this was going to be something worth seeing,
but Rebecca Duvall wasn’t the type of person one talked into or out
of anything, so I didn’t bother trying. I said I’d tender her
regards to the troops and set about looking for how it was they got
down there. Two things I knew for sure. First, the path wouldn’t be
hard to find. Stealth required just a bit too much attention to
detail for this group. Second, it would not be hard to negotiate.
These guys got way too drunk for anything even remotely athletic. If
they could get there, Stephen Hawking could get there.

It was like I figured. A hundred yards up the sidewalk, I stepped
over the cable guardrail onto a dirt path that meandered along the
top of the freeway wall. Nice and wide. Chain-link fence to hold on
to. Following the contour of the land downward until, eventually, I
took a right through a grove of scrub oak and stepped onto the lawn
of the nearest condo. Fine, unless you turned and looked back at the
hill, where a wall of mud loomed overhead like a cresting brown tidal
wave. I made a mental note not to look in that direction and started
across the patch of grass separating me from the porch.

From the street above, the structures appeared to be sitting more
or less on the level. From here it was obvious that they sloped away
from the hill at a fairly substantial angle. I walked gingerly toward
the door. I knocked hard. Silence.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhh,” I heard. “Shhhhhhhhhh.” Then the sound of
feet. I knocked harder and longer.

“Open up. It’s Leo,” I said. More scuffling feet and then a
watery red eye at the peephole. A full thirty seconds of fumbling
before the door finally swung open. Ralph Batista had once mustered
the longshoreman vote for my old man. Pound for pound he was the
biggest lush of the lot and could, in any given day, put away more
booze than anyone I’d ever met. He was full-scale hammered and
having trouble with the slope, weaving and sliding back along the
incline until his grip on the doorknob jerked him to a stop. “Leo,”
he slurred. “Whatcha…Hey hey hey…”

I checked my watch. Bad timing. Three-thirty-five. I’d caught
them at the low point in their drinking day. Especially if they had a
crib. Having a crib completely changed their drinking habits. While
the average citizen would relish being able to sleep dry and warm,
the boys saw the windfall in totally different terms. To them, having
a place meant they didn’t have to drink in bars, which, in turn,
meant that the price of booze went radically down, which likewise
meant they could drink even more than usual. Not only that, but a
crib meant a place where they could pass out whenever they wanted
without risking waking up at either the King County Jail or the Union
Gospel Mission. Yeah, three-thirty was just about nap time for this
crew.