Red House Blues (14 page)

Tonight Palmer picks up his guitar while
Walt lights the candles and a few sticks of sandalwood incense.
Ferlin hands the beer around, the house trembling under his feet,
first sign of an excellent high, he thinks. Clay and Donna curl
into each other on the couch. He kisses her hair. She clutches his
fingers. At her shoulder a candle flares to life on the green end
table. Palmer fingers a chord - pain of strings cutting deep into
flesh - treasured pain - pain like food, nourishing as a memory he
returns to over again even though it cuts like razors. Charles
thumbs through a stack of albums looking for something to put on.
Walt sits on the floor, leaning back against the couch, against
Donna’s warm legs. He rolls a joint, sucking it alight and passes
it up to Clay; a snake of smoke worms through purple shadows
snarled with the dusty scents of sandalwood and beer, low chords
strumming orange. Charles slides the black disk from its sleeve.
Ferlin slumps in the blue chair, closes his eyes and draws in a
slow breath, climbing into the smoke wrapping itself into the iron
curl of the chandelier.

Palmer is suddenly tired. He passes the
Strat off to Charles and pops the top off a beer. The kid’s
impossibly long fingers like spider legs wrap around the neck,
fingers so fast Palmer can’t follow them. The kid never once
looking at the instrument, the fingers moving independently of
mind, music slashing through the haze suspended in the air, sweaty
and searing.

A mistake. Palmer realizes he has made a
mistake. He realizes he’s been tricked somehow into giving over the
guitar - how did that happen? Did the guitar trick him? He will
never get it back. It isn’t the kid’s fault. Charles is captured in
the steel jaws of the music that sweeps out from strings and body,
swallowing, eating, devouring. The room is a stomach, churning,
vomiting music. Palmer tries to close his eyes - vacuum of his eyes
- where did the words come from? He knows them but has forgotten
their origin. Vacuum eyes - drawing him into the guitar, the guts
are - guts were. Stair. Stare. He watches Charles sway with notes
that fly faster and faster, wings beating, bones and feathers
flying at the cage of walls and light - the house taking flight
into the night. And he knows it will destroy them all, destroy
Charles - this thing that has possessed the guitar - he sees it
clearly, its teeth chewing them up, absorbing them all into the
belly of the house. Why don’t they feel it? None of the others see
it. Struck blind. They don’t feel the house watching with its
famished eyes - don’t know the danger engulfing them, drawing them
into its hungry maw - only one can stop it, only one way to stop
it.

“What the hell you doing, Palmer?” cried the
kid.

Before any of the rest noticed anything
beyond their own thoughts Palmer ripped the guitar out of Charles’
hands and bounded up the stairs toward his attic room.

“What happened?” said Clay, disengaging his
hand from Donna’s.

“Damned if I know. He just grabbed the Strat
and ran like he was crazy,” said Charles.

“Somebody go after him. Clay, go see if he’s
all right,” said Donna.

“Yeah, okay.” As much as he thought it was
probably just Donna getting worked up again over nothing, he took
the stairs two at a time.

Then the group in the living room heard the
screams. Charles and Ferlin ran for the stairs, Walt reaching Donna
just in time to stop her from following them.

Ferlin was the first one to Palmer’s open
door. By then the bed was on fire, the guitar at the center. Time
constricted to a crawl in which each detail of the room was
illuminated by licking flames - Clay beating at the fire with a
pillow - ashen-faced Palmer screaming at him to let it burn as he
squirted lighter fluid at the core of the conflagration.

With a roar, flames exploded over Clay’s
hands at the same second Ferlin pulled the blankets off the bed.
Clay staggered backward into the wall and sat down hard on the bare
plank floor.

“We gotta get this shit out to the street
before the whole place goes up,” shouted Ferlin.

Together he and Charles wadded the bed linen
up over the guitar to smother the flames, a black and silver pall
of smoke filling the room. Clay lay stunned and forgotten in the
heat and smoke.

“I’ll get this end, man,” said Charles.
“Help me drag it down the stairs”.

They pulled the mass of smoking bedclothes
to the landing and pushed it down the stairs to the entry hall,
then went back for the mattress. The house was spinning, the stairs
spiraling away from them, the front door continually shifting
position so that they dropped the mattress several times before
they got it to the sidewalk.

“Shit, shit, shit,” shouted Ferlin, doubling
over in a fit of coughing. “God, what the hell was that all
about?”

A smudge of burnt wool filled the night air,
ember stars glittering from black blanket folds.

Charles didn’t reply. He didn’t know what to
say, and at any rate at that instant Palmer burst from the front
door and pounded down the stairs like someone was chasing him. He
flung himself on Walt’s motorcycle parked at the curb, kick started
it and bugged out down the street leaving Charles and Ferlin in a
cloud of blue exhaust.

“Come on, kid. We got to stop him before he
kills himself,” said Ferlin.

“How do we do that without a car?”

“We’ll have a car. No car in this town I
can’t jump.”

With that he ran across the street to a red
and white Chevy Impala, did something to the door, slid under the
dash, and had the car started before Charles realized what he was
doing.

“You crazy, man? You can’t steal a car!”

“Just did. Get your black ass in this car
and help me find Palmer before the police do.”

They found him fifteen minutes later where
he had skidded into a light pole. The police were just arriving.
Palmer was banged up but alive. Ferlin identified him for the cops
before the ambulance transported him to Harborview Hospital. Walt’s
bike was a pile of twisted scrap metal.

But the police knew Ferlin from the
neighborhood, and they also knew he didn’t own a car. He and
Charles were taken in on suspicion of car theft. The social climate
being what it was then, they let Ferlin off with a warning but they
booked the Negro for being in a stolen car. Because he had no
priors they gave him a choice - enlist in the army or face five
years in jail. He enlisted.

The aftermath:

When Palmer was sufficiently recovered from
his injuries he was transferred to Western State Mental Hospital in
Tacoma for evaluation, where he was committed and where he spent
the remainder of his short life.

Clay’s hands were so badly burned two
fingers had to be amputated. He moved to his parent’s house in Kent
where he suffered years of depression. The day before his thirtieth
birthday he walked in front of a train at the crossing in downtown
Kent.

After Clay moved to Kent Donna went back to
California. She couldn’t watch Clay suffer and he didn’t want her
to nurse him. Better to break clean he told her. She later joined a
commune north of San Francisco and became a skilled potter. She
fell in love with an organic gardener there and a year later they
had twin daughters. Donna tried to forget Seattle.

Walt was drafted a year after he graduated
from Cornish. He was killed in Viet Nam.

Ferlin stayed on in the Red House, and even
though he had his choice of bedrooms as housemates came and went
over the years, he kept his room off the kitchen. How he avoided
the draft is unknown but he was active in the antiwar movement
during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. In the mid ‘80s he bought a
small auto repair shop off Jackson Street with, it is rumored, the
proceeds of a drug smuggling operation he had been running for some
time. In his seventies he is something of a legend in the Central
District.

The kid stayed in the army only long enough
to avoid jail. He changed his name and launched his career as a
guitar player. He died of an overdose a few weeks shy of his
thirtieth birthday. One signature element of his performances - an
act he repeated on many occasions - was that of squirting lighter
fluid on his guitar and burning it in the middle of the stage.

Chapter 12

Text of a notice copied from Craig’s List
web site, sent as an attachment to the e-mail following:

Room available in great house for short stay
or ? Pretty room overlooking big yard. Plenty of parking,
washer/dryer, kitchen. Close to shopping and bus lines. Near
Garfield H.S. and Seattle U. High speed DSL internet. No dogs/cats,
no smoking (inside) no drugs/no heavy drinkers. Prefer female (20s
- 30s). $150 per week, two-week minimum. Call Linda @
206-555-2032.

E-mail to [email protected]:

Hi Claire! I’m going to have to stay down
here longer than I thought at first so I’ve taken a room for a few
weeks in a house near Seattle University (see attachment). I hate
to ask but could you check on the apartment and ask Mrs. Bloomquist
to water the ficus tree?

The house I’ll be staying in is only a few
blocks from where Sean lived (“lived”- the past tense still makes
me feel sick when I write it). Marla had to go back to Portland but
before she did she gave me a tour of the neighborhood. If I
imagined this area at all I thought it might be like Fairhaven or
Bellingham since a major university dominates the center of it. I
couldn’t have been more wrong. The Central District, or the C.D. as
the locals call it, is one of the oldest Seattle neighborhoods -
diverse, artsy and eclectic but there the similarity with Fairhaven
ends. It’s been pretty much a ghetto since the fifties, only
recently seeing the effects of escalating real estate prices, with
yuppies snapping up every other house - “gentrification is a
creeping fungus robbing the funky old C.D. of it’s last fuckin’
scrap of character” - or so Marla colorfully put it.

Anyway, Marla paraded me through tiny soul
food cafes, Tai noodle shops, African boutiques, Asian markets, and
of course (so she can deduct the expenses, I suspect) tattoo
parlors. She showed me the place on 24th (just up the hill from the
house on Fir Street, by the way) where the punk singer Kiki Zell
was found murdered in the ‘90s. Zell was apparently walking from a
club in the early morning hours to a house close by were she was
going to see a friend. Marla was lavish in the ghoulish details
complete with the positioning of the strangled body. Gave me the
creeps - but that was what she intended, I could tell. She wanted
to underscore her opinion that I “go back to the north woods like a
good little girl and forget about hanging out in the ‘hood looking
for trouble” (her words again). She means well. At least I think
she does. You’d probably agree with her. But I have learned so
little thus far that I can’t quit now, despite a few unsettling
events.

I moved out of the hostel when Marla left
for Portland. We’d had a lunch at a pho place on Jackson before she
caught her train. While I was gone I think someone may have
rummaged through my locker. I can’t be sure. It kind of seemed like
things weren’t how I left them. (Not that anything was missing.
Can’t imagine what anybody would steal from someone so poor they
had to stay in a hostel! Pretty pathetic pickings I’d say.) Still,
I had a kind of exposed feeling at the hostel. So I thought I’d
find somewhere more private, and as you see from the ad the house
has a DSL connection! Great improvement over having to go to the
library to e-mail you. I’m going to send a quick note off to Marla
to tell her I got settled in new digs. Talk to you soon. Love to
Tony (not that he wants it, but I keep trying). Love - Suzan

E-mail to [email protected]:

Suze, are you totally out of your frickin’
mind!!!!??? You are starting to validate every dumb blond cliché
ever created. I realize that’s an illusion you enjoy cultivating,
you creep. At least that’s what I thought until just now! Now I’m
not so sure it’s an affectation.

It was my idea in the first place that you
go down there so I feel somewhat responsible but my idea was that
you go to Seattle for a few days or a week, not an additional two
weeks! Where are you going to get the money to stay down there? You
were flat broke last I heard. So, what are you going to do, live on
cash advances from the credit card? That sounds more like something
I’d do, not that stuffy, practical compulsive person I thought you
were.

You’re right, I agree with Marla. I wish
you’d give this up and come home. And not just because of the
money. Something just doesn’t feel right about this whole thing.
You know I’m not the paranoid type but you think somebody might
have messed with your stuff!!?? And you don’t think that’s weird,
considering you’re trying to dig up info on your murdered husband?
And you were practically adopted by a total stranger who just
coincidentally knows lots about the neighborhood where your husband
died? I tell you what, if I were in your place I’d be seeing red
flags everywhere! At the least I’d think I was getting a bit
stressed. You said you went to the police first thing - do you
think they might have someone watching you?

Anyway I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d
get out of there - even e-mail seems risky to me. How secure is
that DSL thing down there?? I don’t trust all that password shit. I
know from what Tony tells me that if someone wants to read this bad
enough they’ll find a way.

You be careful down there. Sean had his
reasons for what he did and maybe we’ll never know what they were.
Maybe we just need to get on with our lives. Stay safe.

Love - Claire

E-mail to [email protected]:

Claire, you’re evolving into a mother hen!
It’s not a good look on you. I shouldn’t have told you about the
locker. It wasn’t fair to worry you. I’m sure it was nothing though
I appreciate your concern - really I do. Try not to worry (but I
know you will). Everything is fine. (How many more ways do I need
to say it?) So forget I told you about the locker thing. It was
probably my nerves getting slightly frayed. I hadn’t been sleeping
well. You try sleeping on a swayback army issue iron bed! Not
pleasant.