by Brock Clarke
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 no
ticed 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.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why would you want to burn that beautiful house down?” As I asked the question, I realized the answer was right in his letter, which I’d skimmed, but only far enough to know what Mr. Frazier wanted me to burn and not why. So I pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket. But before it was all the way out, Mr. Frazier snatched it away from me. I didn’t even see his hand come between mine and the letter. His reflexes were that incredible. He was quite an old guy.
But he wasn’t much of a reader, at least not without his glasses. It must have taken him half an hour to get through that letter, which he held right up to his face.
“Mr. Frazier,” I said, “why don’t you let me read that for you? It’ll go faster.”
He ignored me and was right to do so. Because I was wrong about his eyesight; or maybe I was right, but it had nothing to do with the glacial pace of his reading. It was obvious that Mr. Frazier simply loved what he was doing. He was like my mother in this respect. He really knew how to read and get something out of it, too, and while he was reading, his face started going through phases, like the moon. He made reading seem like something noble and worth doing—life-altering, even. I again cursed myself for giving up reading so many years ago and vowed to continue reading Morgan Taylor’s fraudulent memoir just as soon as Mr. Frazier finished with the letter.
Finally he did. I knew this because even though it appeared he was still reading—his face was still very close to the letter—I heard this sound, this familiar, repetitive, guttural sound, and when I looked closely I saw that Mr. Frazier was crying, and his tears were getting all over the letter.
“Please, Mr. Frazier,” I said, “don’t do that, don’t—hey, why are you crying?”
“I miss you,” he said in between heaving sobs.
And oh, that was terrible, much worse than the crying! Except that I couldn’t figure out whom he was missing. It wasn’t me, I knew that. For one, I was right there, next to him; for another, he wasn’t looking at me. First Mr. Frazier stared at the letter; then he raised his head and seemed to look at an American flag sticking out of the porch flagpole stand. “I miss you,” he said again, in the direction of the flag this time. So I walked over, yanked the flag out of its stand, and handed it to Mr. Frazier. But that flag didn’t seem to be the thing he was missing: he immediately dropped it on the sidewalk and started crying again, really crying. I thought for sure his heart was going to give out this time, just fall out of his chest and right onto the sidewalk.
“Oh, I’m all alone, all alone,” Mr. Frazier said. Then it was my heart I thought was going to give out. And then it was me who started crying: we were a duo of weepers, all right; we probably scared away the neighborhood cats.
“I’m all alone,” he said again.
“I know,” I said. “I’m all alone, too.” Because no one was more expert in loneliness than yours truly: there is nothing more lonely than being an eighteen-year-old accidental arsonist and murderer and convict and virgin. So I told him that story, which of course he already knew in part. And because I had so much more story to tell and so many words with which to tell it, I went on a philosophical jag and told him that we spend most of our lives running away from loneliness, only to turn around and go and search it out, and as proof, I mentioned how I’d lied to my family for years because I was afraid to be alone, and then lied again on top of the lying, and in doing so I’d pretty much guaranteed that I would be alone. Yes, even though I didn’t know what the letter said, I knew what Mr. Frazier was talking about and why he would want to burn down the Edward Bellamy House and make a good, roaring fire out of the thing. I had seen and heard the reasons myself: the boys had told Mr. Frazier that he didn’t look like them, or, I guessed, like anyone else in the neighborhood, told him in so many obscene words that he didn’t belong anymore, that he was all alone. This was where the fire came in, because after all, you couldn’t feel lonely sitting—toes wiggling—in front of a fire. This was a known fact: even if you were all alone in the world, as long as there was a fire (and the Bellamy House was the biggest, most beautiful house in the neighborhood, and so logically it would also make the biggest, most beautiful fire), you could stare into it and feel its heat and it would remind you of another, happier time, a time long ago when the world belonged to you, when you understood it, when you could live in it for just a few damn minutes and not feel so lonely and scared and angry. “You’re not alone, Harvey,” I told him. “You’re just not.”
What was Mr. Frazier’s response to this? He said (he was stone faced and dry eyed at this point), “Did you just call me Harvey?”
I thought he was objecting to my informality, and so I said, “Yes, sir, I’m sorry, Mr. Frazier.”
“Harvey was my brother,” he said. “My name is Charles.”
At first I thought Mr. Frazier was lying, that he’d made up a brother out of thin air and as a proxy for his own wishes. As a kid I’d used this brother trick many a time myself, like when I accidentally threw a baseball through someone’s window, or accidentally ate someone else’s lunch in the cafeteria, or accidentally backed into someone’s car in the high school parking lot after the junior prom, and I would have used it after accidentally burning down the Emily Dickinson House if I’d been thinking on my feet. But I realized Mr. Frazier wasn’t making up his brother; making up a brother is easy, but it’s much more difficult to cry convincingly about how much you miss the made-up brother when he’s gone.
“OK,” I said. “But why exactly did your brother want me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?”
“Because he was … “And here he paused as if trying to understand his brother’s reasons. “Because he was odd,” Mr. Frazier finally said. “He had problems.”
“I bet he was a reader, your brother, like you,” I said.
“Yes,” Mr. Frazier said. “He read too much. That was one of Harvey’s problems. The world wasn’t enough like the books. It was always disappointing him. But at least he had the position at the Bellamy House …”
“Let me guess,” I said, awed by the serendipity of it all. “He was a tour guide.”
Mr. Frazier nodded. “He was a tour guide until the state had budget problems and they cut his position.”
“And that really disappointed him,” I guessed.
“Correct.”
“And so he wanted me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House because he got fired.”
“I suppose so.”
“And now he’s dead,” I said, wanting to get all the straight answers while Mr. Frazier was in the mood to field the questions. “He’s dead and you miss him.”
For a minute I thought Mr. Frazier was going to start crying again, but he didn’t. He looked at me a long time: once again his face started shifting, from anger to grief to resignation to nostalgia—he went all the way through the range of human emotions. He might even have smirked a little, no small accomplishment for the grave old Yankee he was. Finally Mr. Frazier said wistfully, “Yes, I do.”
“And so you finally couldn’t wait for me anymore, and you took it upon yourself to set fire to the Bellamy House.” It just came out of my mouth like that, as if I knew the truth and was only waiting for Mr. Frazier to congratulate me for knowing it.
Except he didn’t. “No, no,” Mr. Frazier said. He seemed genuinely surprised that I’d think such a thing. He even brushed off the front of his sport coat with the back of both hands, as though my accusation were lint.
“Well, who did, then?”
“I t
hought it was you,” he said.
I assured him it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, and he assured me again that it wasn’t him, and we went around and around like this until we’d convinced each other of our innocence (was this a bad quality in a detective, I wondered, to be so easily convinced of a suspect’s innocence?) and there was nothing more to say. I said my good-bye, shook his hand, and headed toward the van. Then I remembered I had one more question. When I turned around, Mr. Frazier was already on his porch—I saw now that his house was just three houses away from the Edward Bellamy House—and I asked him, “Hey, what’s that famous book that Edward Bellamy wrote, again?”
At that Mr. Frazier really perked up; you could almost smell the book learning come out of him, out of his pores. “He wrote the novel Looking Backward. Among other, lesser works.”
“Looking Backward,” I repeated. “What was it about?”
“A utopia,” he said before closing the door to his house behind him. He’d taken his brother’s letter with him, I realized after the door was closed, but I decided to let Mr. Frazier keep it. Maybe he would cherish it, the way my father obviously cherished all those letters to me. Maybe Mr. Frazier would hold his brother’s letter close to him and feel less lonely. In any case, I just let him keep it. This turned out, much later, to be something of a mistake on my part, but how was I to know that at the time? How are we supposed to recognize our mistakes before they become mistakes? Where is the book that can teach us that?
WHEN I GOT HOME it was just after five. I found my father in the living room, sitting on the exercise bike. He was dressed in gray gym shorts and a faded red tank top, and if he’d been wearing a headband, he’d have looked a lot like that fitness instructor who was so obviously gay that you thought he probably wasn’t. My father wasn’t pedaling the bike—he was just sitting there with his feet on the pedals—but I thought it was a huge accomplishment that he’d even managed to mount the thing in the first place. He’d even broken a little sweat. My father was drinking one of his forty-ounce Knickerbockers (someone must have gone to the store, unless he had a private stash); propped up in front of him, on the exercise bike’s magazine stand, was Morgan Taylor’s book. My father was flipping through the book, skipping forward one hundred pages and then back fifty, as though he’d never read a book before and wasn’t sure how it was supposed to go. I couldn’t tell how much of the book my father had actually read, but I could tell he was reading: the good half of his mouth was moving along with the words, the words Morgan had stolen from him.