“Honey, please, just for me, will you go get changed?”
Tad, still gazing upward, conceded. “Okay, I’ll find a bucket.”
Back with Augie’s book, she found it altered since her last reading, the lines of print now infused with his voice, his blue eyes, his military mustache, his prosthetic grin.
Where before she’d heard a boy speaking, in a pure, heart-tugging treble, she now registered a man’s dry tenor, and fancied she could tell when he broke for lunch, went to the bathroom, or finished work for the day. This new, slightly embarrassing intimacy between author and reader dampened her pleasure somewhat, but it was authentically him.
Here he was in Lodz, in 1943, a pinched and hungry little waif hiding in a bombed-out house with two older girl orphans who’d taken him under their wing. Right across the street, fifth floor to fifth floor, they saw a gang of jackbooted Nazis clearing Jews from a rooming house. One, an elderly man with bad arthritis, couldn’t rise from his chair, so the Nazis threw it and him right out the window into the street.
For a second, the old man remained sitting in his leather armchair, riding on air. Then he fell out of it. We heard two separate thumps in the street: one was the chair, the other the heavy ker-flup of a human body landing unevenly on cobbles. None of us could speak. We stayed there, motionless at the window, unable to tear ourselves away from the scene below, too fascinated by what we saw to fear detection by the German soldiers.
He’d written the book in a month, he’d said. It was inconceivable to Lucy how anyone could bear to relive five years, packed solid with such harrowing brutalities, in just four weeks. Wouldn’t that drive a normal person to rank insanity? After a couple of days of starvation, rape, torture, and murder, Jews being slung to their deaths from high windows, Lucy would be screaming and ripe for a lobotomy. Yet August Vanags had spent more than sixty years without speaking to anybody of his childhood, rarely even thinking of it, if he was to be believed. What had he said of his book? “A lot of it was news to me.” And to have the whole ghastly accumulation of memories of evil pour out of him in a month — how could his brain and heart take it? And to write it down in such a cool, even-toned style? His shockproof composure was beyond her.
She had lunch — a can of chicken noodle soup and a cheese sandwich — at her desk, watching the city reemerge, building by building, as the rain eased.
She’d never lost touch with the exquisite stab of delight she’d felt when she first took in this raptor’s view over Seattle, on that late-summer afternoon when Schuyler Winslow’s managing agent showed her around the place. Since childhood, Seattle had been Lucy’s fabled Emerald City of Oz. It was where Montana people dreamed of going, if there was life after drought. Although Minneapolis was closer to Miles City, everyone she knew instinctively looked to Seattle when they thought of restaurants, theaters, Major League ballgames, all the fantastic, distant pleasures of the metropolis. They were fans of the Seahawks, the SuperSonics, the Mariners. They spoke of dinner at Canlis as if it were the Russian Tea Room or the Four Seasons. When her discontented mother opened her great travel business, Flights of Fancy, on Custer and Main, she put up posters of Paris, London, New York, and Venice, but her hottest tickets, after cattle sale and harvest time in a wet year, were for weekend getaways from Billings to Seattle: two nights at the Mayflower Park, a Seahawks game, lunch atop the Space Needle, a show at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. Returning visitors would be as starry-eyed about their Seattle adventures as if they’d been sung to by Venetian gondoliers and pictured with Beefeaters beside the Bloody Tower.
Lucy bought into the dream. At college in Missoula, she thought as longingly of Seattle as Chekhov’s Three Sisters did of Moscow, and when the Post-Intelligencer offered her a job as the most junior of reporters, she knew she’d arrived. The view from the top floor of the Acropolis had set the seal on her big-city success, and now that the impossible new landlord was threatening to take it away, she treasured it even more fiercely.
Yet since 2001 she’d felt increasingly guilty about being here. In February, when the building was rocked by the Ash Wednesday earthquake, she was terrified for Alida, then twelve blocks away from home in her preschool classroom. And after 9/11, dire warnings of earthquakes had been replaced by government-sponsored rumors that Seattle was a prime target for dusky, hook-nosed, towel-headed bogeymen in beards.
Driving back from school this morning, she’d caught the latest news about the Algerian Safeco terrorist on the radio. Still in custody, he claimed that he’d left the game early to spend the night with his brother in Tacoma. An FBI SWAT team had raided the place only to find the brother gone. His American wife had been taken in for questioning, his children put in the care of Child Protective Services, and a nationwide APB had been issued for him and his white Jetta — and all this, Lucy was certain, because the Mariners had lucked out over the Blue Jays. One disillusioned baseball fan and his panicked brother constituted an “active cell,” even though no trace of a bomb had been found at the stadium. Again, she thought of calling the police — but why would they have any interest in a one-sided two-minute conversation on a ferry? Much like them, she had no evidence at all. They’d just blow her off, so why bother?
Too often lately, Lucy had felt she owed Alida the true security of the boondocks, instead of the muted daily terrors of Security. Of course Alida would hate the move — and so would she. But was it responsible to go on living in a city likely to collapse in an 8.0 temblor and possibly destined to be blown up by a thermonuclear “device,” or infected with a germ cloud capable of killing millions? How often did she and Alida go to the Fifth Avenue Theatre? Hardly ever. And they’d never eaten at Canlis. As the dream city became the dangerous city, Lucy was forced to admit that her prized view might be, like smoking, an unjustifiably selfish indulgence.
There was also the question of where to go. Once, she’d’ve returned to Montana — to Missoula, most likely, or Bozeman, maybe Livingston. But the entire state was tainted now by the presence of Lewis Olson. Even in Seattle, she was frightened of finding him at the door downstairs, piously wheedling, forgiving her her sins. And in Montana he could easily get to her and install himself in her life, ambushing Alida coming home from school, and doing his horrible Jesus stuff to her. No, they couldn’t risk Montana, not as long as Lewis—“We have a bond, you and me”—Olson was alive.
From these thoughts, Boy 381 was a welcome escape. Better to starve in the ragged costumes of faraway history than to think too much about the present. In the pages of the book, a peasant woman writhed and thrashed in her last agonies, strafed by a passing Messerschmitt, while Lucy, quite content now, reached for the peppermints in her bag.
SOME OF HIS STUDENTS were coming to stay for the weekend, so she’d have to air out the sheets in their bedrooms.
Minna Vanags, carrying an empty basket, walked the soggy path through the wide-open reach of waste ground and fenced pasture that backed onto Sunlight Beach Road. These days, she and Augie faced in opposite directions: he looked to the beach and the sea, while she looked instinctively inland. She’d been six when her deckhand uncle Max had drowned when his crab boat went down in a storm up in Alaska. She’d never learned to swim, and the sight of water, rough or calm, roused in her a childish terror of the sea’s deep-seated wickedness. It was like being afraid of the dark, and her first thought when she saw the house on Useless Bay was Too much sea.