An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (13 page)

But then again, maybe that’s who a detective is: someone with nothing else to do but act like a detective and with no one around to tell him not to.

MR. HARVEY FRAZIER
of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was awfully cagey for an old guy and pretended not to recognize me or my name at first. And he was
old
, at least eighty, and spooky, too, because he opened his door just as I was ready to knock on it, as if he were expecting me
right at that moment
. Even though I was startled, I managed to say, “Sir, it’s me, Sam Pulsifer,” then unclenched my knocking fist and extended my hand for Mr. Frazier to shake. He didn’t shake it; instead he said, “I was about to walk,” and then he did, right past me and down the street. He was difficult to read, all right, and suddenly I wanted not only to know whether he’d set the fire or not, but also to know
him
, to really
know
why he wanted what he wanted, to know him in a way I hadn’t known anyone else — not my parents or Anne Marie or the kids — and you could say I was making up for lost time and missed opportunities as I chased after Mr. Frazier.

He was fast, too. For an old guy. Or maybe the speed was part of his anger at me for not responding to his letter for so long. I jogged until I caught up with him, and then said, “A walk, huh?” and when he didn’t take this conversational bait, I asked, “Where to?”

“Store,” he said. He spoke with that serious, terse Yankee accent that always makes me feel I’ve done something wrong, and when he said “store,” he sounded so ancient and formal that I imagined he was walking to an old-fashioned family-owned store, where he was going to buy something obsolete, like dry goods, whatever dry goods might be, or maybe tobacco, maybe some good-smelling pipe tobacco. But no, scratch that; Mr. Frazier didn’t smoke and never had, I was guessing, not even before it was known to cause cancer, because tobacco was expensive or at least an expense and Mr. Frazier was a tight-ass. I knew this because Mr. Frazier was wearing brown wool pants and a brown cardigan sweater and a houndstooth sport coat that were worn down to the last thin layer of fabric. He probably hadn’t bought new clothes in thirty years, and he’d probably bought the clothes he had on at a department store whose name he wouldn’t be able to remember, nor its location, although no doubt it was in a downtown somewhere, and no doubt it had gone out of business by now. Mr. Frazier would think the idea of new clothes silly. Absolutely ridiculous. Especially if you bought clothes made out of good, durable wool, which his had probably been before he’d worn them all to hell, which was how I knew he was a tight-ass. I mean no disrespect when I say this. I was merely trying to get into his head, trying to get a bead on his whole psychology.

“What are you getting at the store?”

“Newspaper,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t use articles, either, and I added that to his psychological profile. A few blocks ahead of us I could see a big chain supermarket, a Super Stop and Shop, and not a “store” at all. If this was where we were headed, I would add
delusional
to his profile while I had it out and was working on it.

Another thing about Mr. Frazier’s getup: it was excessively heavy for the very warm Indian summer November day that it was, and it was also an excessively formal getup for a daily trip to the supermarket or store or wherever it was we were headed. Or maybe it was just our immediate surroundings that made it seem so. Because the neighborhood was really gone, and Mr. Frazier was the best-looking thing in it. There was garbage everywhere — bottles, egg cartons, diapers — and almost no cans to put it in. On the sidewalk someone had written in pink chalk, “Shamequa eat pussy.” It was too bad because the neighborhood had once been very pretty, you could tell. The big white houses had probably been Victorian at one point, but they had been added onto so often that they now defied architectural classification. Yes, I bet the houses had once been owned by families, good, respectable families, and they’d probably all dressed like Mr. Frazier, and the families had made sure that the houses had straight ridgepoles and well-pointed chimneys and elm trees and squirrels, and they, the families, could do this because they had jobs at Pratt and Whitney making airplanes or at the Indian motorcycle plant making Indian motorcycles or at Monarch making insurance premiums. But at some point between the wars, people started losing their jobs. It’s an old story. They lost their jobs and then couldn’t afford to keep their ridgepoles straight or their chimneys erect or their homes single-family, and the elm trees began dying and so did the people, or they moved and
then
died, and the houses were aluminum-sided and divided into apartments — the multiple mailboxes, the tangled and bunched telephone and power lines, and the rusted cars parked curbside told me so. The neighborhood wasn’t Mr. Frazier’s anymore, it didn’t need him, and how could this not make him good and mad?

Just then we passed our first two human beings: two boys sitting on the front steps of one of those multifamily homes. They were shirtless and wore shorts that were not properly shorts, because they came down well past the knee. The boys were emaciated and their chests were as concave as mine had once been, and both of them had their nipples pierced with silver hoops. I wondered if air had escaped from the boys’ chests with the piercing.

“Good afternoon,” Mr. Frazier said as he passed them.

“Fucked
up
,” one of the boys said. When he said the word “fucked,” he didn’t exactly enunciate the
c
and the
k
but slurred the word straight into the final
d
. The other boy didn’t say anything but just laughed and shook his head.

I wanted to say something to the boys, something like,
Hey, what’s that? What did you say?
or maybe,
Why don’t you show some respect, punk?
But I was following Mr. Frazier’s lead and he kept walking and so did I. He had to know, of course, that the boys were talking to him, but he probably didn’t know to what exactly they were referring, and neither did I.
Something
was fucked up, that much was clear, and it wasn’t Mr. Frazier, no matter what the boys said. If anything was fucked up, it was the boys. Maybe they weren’t really boys at all: maybe they were grown men dressing like boys and acting like boys and not working adult jobs and not supporting their families, if they had families, and swearing like black people were supposed to swear, even though the boys looked white. The word
wigger
came to mind — it was a word I’d once heard on television — but I quickly got rid of it and didn’t mention the word to Mr. Frazier. No, Mr. Frazier did not want any new words in his mouth or head; I knew this without having to ask. There were enough words in the world already, and too many of them were curse words, and too many young people cursed in such a way that you could not discern the object of the swearing and in such a way that made you think that this was simply the way they talked — to one another, to strangers — and it made it difficult to tell whether the swearing was friendly or threatening, whether the swearing was black swearing or white swearing, whether there was a difference, whether it mattered to the person who was being cursed, if he was actually being cursed. I imagined poor Mr. Frazier all alone in his house at night, his lights off and him standing at the front windows, not being able to sleep, just looking at the neighborhood, which is even darker than his house and so, so strange to him. Somewhere out there, Shamequa is eating pussy and then testifying to that fact on the sidewalk with her pink chalk, and the trash is rolling through the streets like tumbleweed, and the words “fucked up, fucked up, fucked up” are blowing in the wind, and you can’t get away from them or know if they refer to you or to someone else. It was fucked up, all right. For Mr. Frazier, not knowing whether he was being cursed at or not must have seemed liked the most fucked up thing of all.

By the time we got to the store — it was a Super Stop and Shop all right, but I was on Mr. Frazier’s side now, and so it was a store — I was in something like agreement with the boys: it was
fucked up
, “it” being the store itself, which was more parking lot than building. And it was fucked up that those boys could speak to Mr. Frazier, that sweet guy, the way they had and suffer no consequences. Mr. Frazier
had
to be angry, at least angry enough to burn down a house or to want someone else to burn it down. But why the Edward Bellamy House? That’s what I didn’t understand.

“Hey, what do you say, Mr. Frazier?” I said to him. “I have a couple questions for you.”

Mr. Frazier didn’t respond. He bought his paper from the machine outside the store (who knows why? Maybe as long as he didn’t enter the building, he could in good conscience continue calling it a store), then turned and began walking back home. He was really setting a good pace, and I broke a sweat trying to catch up with him. Soon after I did, we passed by those boys again, still sitting on the steps, as if waiting for us. You don’t often get a second chance in this world to say what you wanted to say, or ask what you wanted to ask. So I stopped in front of them and grabbed a fistful of Mr. Frazier’s jacket to get him to stop, too. Mr. Frazier didn’t turn to face the boys but, like a spooked horse, looked at them sideways. I turned to face them, though, and I could feel my face get fiery red and I hoped that it shone on the boys like a beacon of sorts.

“Earlier,” I said to the boys, “you said something to Mr. Frazier here.”

“True,” one of the boys said. They both looked exactly the same, with their faint mustaches, their flat alabaster stomachs, their nipple rings glinting and glistening in the sun.

“Well,” I said, “I’d like you to apologize to him. I think he deserves an apology.”

One of the boys shook his head, and said, “Fucked up.” He said this without malice or slyness or any emotion at all. It was delivered as a statement of fact.

“Hey!”
I said, because I couldn’t take it anymore. Mr. Frazier had so much life left in him, but even if he hadn’t, even when old people were taking up space and air, they’d lived through a lot and you had to give them some credit and respect. I moved toward the boys in what I hoped was a menacing fashion. When I did so, they stood up — also menacingly — and I noticed that their white socks were pulled up very high, probably to their knees (I couldn’t tell exactly, because of the length of their shorts). Why pull your socks so high? There was only one reason I could think of: these were the kind of guys who might have knives in their socks, except the socks were so high they could probably have hidden a short sword in there. Me, I had no weapons anywhere. Plus, my socks were the ankle-high kind and couldn’t possibly harbor anything dangerous. I backed away from the boys, palms facing out, and as I backpedaled I whispered to Mr. Frazier, “Let’s get out of here.”

But Mr. Frazier ignored me. He turned his head slowly and slightly to look at the boys. Even that head-turning gesture was impressive. I wondered if it occurred to the boys how inferior they were to him. It was like watching a world-weary colossus swiveling to ask the puny villagers why they were pelting him with rocks. “To what are you referring?” Mr. Frazier said to the boy who’d spoken earlier.

“It’s hot and you wearing some
sleigh-riding
clothes, dude,” the boy said, and then fanned himself with his left hand to remind us all of the heat.

“Fucked up,” the other boy said.

“I see,” Mr. Frazier said, and resumed his walking, beating the now rolled-up newspaper against his leg, keeping time with his outrage, which must have been huge. I fixed the boys with one last meaningful stare and then, before I could see how they’d respond, turned and ran until I caught up with Mr. Frazier.

His clothes: they were what was fucked up, and all of a sudden Mr. Frazier was hot, very hot, his face nearly as red as mine ever got. He stopped beating his leg with the paper and began using it as a fan. The fanning would do no good; I knew this from experience because we both had powerful heating mechanisms inside us, big furnaces of shame and rage somewhere down there around our hearts and livers and other inner organs, and you can’t cool the inside from outside. Mr. Frazier learned this truth quickly. There was an overflowing trash can on the corner and Mr. Frazier tossed the newspaper on top of the heap and crossed against the light, daring traffic to hit him, us. But there was no traffic and we reached the other side unscathed.

He kept walking, beating his leg with his hand (I bet he already missed his newspaper). I didn’t say a word; I felt bad for the old guy. He was in worse shape than before I’d arrived, I could see that, and as if to illustrate the point, he sat down right on the curb. I sat down next to him, glad for the rest. Like me, Mr. Frazier was breathing heavily, and again I feared for his heart and what I had done to it. Yes, I felt bad for him, and for myself, too, which has to be the truest kind of empathy. I wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Was it possible that I was incapable of helping someone? It didn’t seem fair. Was it possible that there was no such thing as fair? These were my questions, and I was about to think of others when I looked up and noticed that we were sitting in front of the Edward Bellamy House. There was a big, handsome brown wooden sign on the house that said so. I could read it clearly from our spot on the curb.

“Hey,” I said, “there it is.” And in my excitement, I pulled Mr. Frazier to his feet. It wasn’t difficult: there wasn’t much weight to him beyond his clothes. I pulled him up and dragged him across the sidewalk and to the house. I don’t know how I missed it in the first place. Next to Mr. Frazier it was the best-looking thing in the neighborhood, even though someone had tried to torch it: it was gray with green trim and a neatly mowed lawn and electric candles glowing in the windows and a picket fence outside and even an antique black iron boot scraper next to the front door. It was pretty. It was very, very pretty. You wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong with it except that it was ringed by yellow police tape, and there were some faint black singe marks near the foundation. It was like looking at a beautiful woman who’d just gotten a bad haircut. After all the ugliness we’d seen in the neighborhood, its beauty was a fresh, cool breeze on a hot day, and I still couldn’t figure out why Mr. Frazier would want to burn it down. Why not burn the boys’ house down if they were bugging him so? To burn this handsome old house was screwy and made no sense.