First Avenue

by Lowen Clausen

  The bartender lifted the bar gate and came toward them in a semi-circle with the solitary man in the center. Keeping her focus on the man at the bar, Katherine waited for the bartender to approach. At the same time she positioned her right hand closer to her gun.

  “He’s got a knife,” the bartender said in a voice low enough to indicate secrecy, but not so low that the man at the bar could not hear. Still this man did not move except to sip from the glass, and he did not look at them. “A hunting knife. He’s got it in his coat pocket. The guy’s crazy. He said I shorted him and threatened to kill me if I didn’t fill his glass. I want him out of here.”

  The bartender wasn’t sure to whom he was talking. His eyes darted back and forth between Katherine and Mike and finally settled over her head as he finished. Katherine walked to the right side of the bar, staying ten feet from the man who now picked her up in his vision. Mike moved closer, too, but stayed between the man and the door. She put her right hand on the bar and lifted her right foot onto the railing as though she were about to begin a conversation.

  “We’ve got a complaint about you,” Katherine told the man. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  The solitary drinker studied his beer glass and turned it slowly on the counter as if there were instructions written around its circumference. He had a big, clenched, whiskered jaw and wore a dirty jacket.

  “I want you to take the knife out of your pocket and drop it on the floor. We’ll talk about the bartender shorting you after that.”

  The man ignored her, although she knew he was watching her. He gave her the creeps. It was clear that he would not talk down easily. She flicked on her flashlight and shone it on the man’s body. He seemed to wince.

  “Okay, mister, let’s drop the knife,” Katherine said with as much authority as she could muster. She was disappointed by the faintness of her voice.

  The man grunted and took another long drink from his glass. Then he swiveled around on the barstool and faced her. The lines of his face formed a cruel expression, and she knew at once that he was no harmless drunk.

  “Come and get it.”

  Without moving closer, she shone the concentrated spot from her flashlight directly into his eyes and unsnapped the leather strap across her gun with a flick of her thumb. She placed her hand on her gun handle but left the gun in its holster. He shielded his eyes with his left hand and squinted without fear into her soul.

  “What are you going to do, bitch? Shoot me? Yeah, go ahead.”

  Mike moved toward the man so that he was closer to Katherine but still out of the man’s reach. The bartender moved, too, farther toward the corner away from them.

  From his new position Mike spoke to the man. “Drop the knife. Nobody wants any trouble.”

  “Here, you want the knife?” He stood up and pulled the hunting knife from his coat pocket. He held the knife in a tightfisted grasp away from his body. “I want the bitch to come and get it.”

  The man had a long ugly scar that traversed his face from his right ear to the curl of his sneering mouth. It showed he was intimately familiar with knives. Katherine had no intention of stepping forward and sharing his experience. She drew her gun and brought it to the level of her flashlight. The light acted as her gun sight. Mike drew his gun at the same time. The man’s expression didn’t change, as if he had expected to see the guns. Slowly she lowered the beam of light from his face down his body to his crotch. In a voice only he was meant to hear and from a source she didn’t know existed, she said, “Drop the knife or I’ll blow them away.”

  She could feel how she had begun to hate this man and how her face had begun to resemble his and her voice his and her meaning. The man’s sneer faltered, and despite the strongest effort of will, he glanced down to the target clearly illuminated by her flashlight. The light beacon did not move.

  “I got witnesses here,” he said.

  “For what?” she asked. Her voice was no longer faint, and the light didn’t move.

  “Bitch,” he growled as he dropped the knife and began to look around the room for his indifferent witnesses. The light remained a moment more as a potent reminder of his impotent protest.

  “Turn around,” she said. “Put your hands on the bar.”

  With the least possible degree of cooperation he turned around, and she saw him again look down toward his crotch. She wondered if he thought the light might shine through his backside and expose him still. Mike holstered his gun and stepped forward to handcuff him. He kicked the man’s legs out farther and frisked him. He pulled one hand back at a time and clamped handcuffs on the man’s wrists. She lowered her gun but did not put it back into its holster until the handcuffs were in place.

  A steady flow of abuse streamed from the man’s mouth once he was handcuffed. Mike pushed the man’s stomach against the bar and used his handcuffed hands as a lever to tilt him so his face pressed against the soiled counter. Then he reached down to the floor for the knife.

  “Let’s get this jerk out of here,” he said.

  “I’ll get the bartender’s name,” Katherine said.

  The bartender tried to fade into the back wall like one of the ancient, yellowed beer posters. He began to fool with some empty glasses resting on a table and didn’t look up from his busywork as she approached with her notebook.

  “I need your name,” she said.

  “Look, I just wanted the guy out of here. I don’t want to get mixed up in any trouble.”

  “Yeah right,” she said in response to the line often repeated when the trouble was over. “You can either cooperate here, or I’ll bring in another car. We’ll close the bar and take you downtown and talk about it there. Your choice.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Yes I can.”

  “Bill Webster.”

  “Let me see your driver’s license.” She saw that he had given her his correct name, and she wrote it down quickly along with the other information they needed for their report—address, age, telephone numbers. “Has he ever been here before?”

  “No. First time I ever saw him.”

  “Tell me what happened. Make it short.”

  The bartender repeated the story he had told them before. He added bits of manhood—how he had stood up to the scarred man and only poured the drink to avoid trouble. “You sure got his attention, lady, I mean officer. Did you see the way he looked down at himself?”

  “Come on, Murphy, let’s get this guy out of here.”

  “That’s all I need for now,” Katherine said and abruptly walked away from the bartender.

  The arrested man continued to talk, even with his face pressed into the bar. He was getting more worked up the more he talked. Mike’s jaw was like the taut line of the other man’s arms, which he had leveraged to their maximum expression. Katherine grabbed the man at the elbow, and together she and Mike jerked him away from the bar and bumped him through the door and out to their car. Mike gave her the keys that he had stuck in his belt buckle, and she quickly unlocked and opened the doors. He pushed the offender headfirst onto the backseat and followed behind him without releasing his grip on the handcuffs. From the opposite door she pulled the man toward her as far as she could. Then Mike held him down with one knee while he crouched inside the car.

  Katherine drove rapidly toward the station and kept watch on the backseat to make certain that Mike was all right. It should have been her place. Mike had been the driver. While still blocks away, the suspect began to fight and Mike rode him like a rodeo rider. She drove faster then, turning her emergency lights on before each intersection and gunning through them when they were clear. They bucked up the ramp into the police garage and the roar of their engine reverberated from the walls of G deck. She screeched to a stop, taking up all the prisoner unload stalls next to the jail elevator, and jumped out to open the back door. The prisoner’s feet flailed the air and kicked her in the chest. She was knocked back several feet, but she didn’t have time to catch her breat
h. Mike had all he could handle just to hold the man down. He was like a wild animal in a cage. She ran around to the other door and flung it open. Together, they pulled the man headfirst out of the car and dumped him onto the concrete deck. Two other officers who were coming out of the patrol report room saw the commotion and hurried over to help. All four cops jumped onto the man’s backside, and there was hardly room for each of them to get a piece. She had the right leg, which she held down with the weight of her body, while the man thrashed and screamed insanely.

  Once it was certain that the man could not hurt any of them, the cops looked at one another for a moment before undertaking the next step. This crazy man, common enough but past understanding, made more than one of them shake their heads. “Take it easy!” one of the two helping cops shouted into the suspect’s ear, knowing that he would take nothing easily. The cop repeated the command, shoving the words into the man’s head with his hands, but still with the same lack of effect. The cop looked up, ready for the next idea. Mike said they would carry him. In a lurching mass they carried the man to the jail elevator, which was standing open inside the gated enclosure. There they dropped him on the floor and held him while Mike pushed the button to the sixth floor.

  A fighter received preferential treatment in jail. One of the jailers came quickly from behind the booking counter and led them to a padded room. There they stripped the prisoner and bound his body and legs into a straightjacket. Then they left him alone to scream all he wished under the watchful stare of a camera that transferred his distorted image to the front counter. They booked him for assault and resisting arrest. In his possession he had thirty-three cents, a belt, two work boots, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and one brown, corduroy jacket. As the jailer wrote down the inventory at the booking window, Katherine could hear the muted, insane voice echo through the bars and walls of the jail. She initialed the property form that the prisoner normally signed and where the jailer had printed “Refused.” She signed the booking sheet as the arresting officer with a hand that moved slowly as though it had been lifting a heavy weight and could not adjust to minute requirements.

  Back on the third floor she washed her hands in the women’s room before touching her clothes. Then she took off her gun belt and pushed her shirt neatly back into her pants. She washed her face, blew her nose, and washed her hands again. Her right breast hurt where she had been kicked, but she wouldn’t mention that in the report. Nor would she mention the one threat that seemed to bring temporary lucidity to that crazy man.

  Before this job she had never hit anyone except her sister. Now she had hit with her fists, which had little authority, and with her flashlight and nightstick, which had more. She had hit and been hit and could not scream—although she wanted to scream at the insanity of it all.

  What if he had snapped when she held the gun on him? She stood for a moment before the mirror, pondering that question and looking to herself for the answer. She remembered how she felt as she had told him to drop the knife. Hate. Was it really hate? She remembered the look on his face, the sound of the knife as it hit the floor, her lack of relief that he had complied, her indifference almost to his compliance. For the first time that night, that day, she smiled. It was a quick, odd, insufficient smile, but a smile nonetheless.

  Mike was strangely quiet the rest of the night as they went about their work. Katherine expected him to make some joke about what she had said. If the bartender had heard her, he would have heard, too. He said nothing, and when it was time to eat, he asked her if she was ready. For the first time she understood that he would wait if she was not. His testicles had not been threatened, but he almost acted as if they had.

  At the end of her shift her six days were over. And on the seventh day she would rest, although she had made nothing better and doubted that she left anything better than it had been before.

  Chapter 3

  Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest was the irreverent method all cops in the academy used to learn the downtown streets north of Yesler—Jefferson and James, Cherry and Columbia, Marion and Madison, Spring and Seneca, University and Union, Pike and Pine. Sam’s district began at University Street, although he considered all of First Avenue from Yesler north to Denny his territory.

  Beneath the pergola in a small triangle park at First Avenue and Yesler Street, a man lay stretched out on a bench with his feet sticking through the open end of the steel armrest. He was either asleep or dead. Asleep, most likely. At Madison Street, a drunken man struggled out the door of Pennyland and waved with a ridiculously proper movement at the policeman who passed slowly up the street in the blue car. Sam returned the proper wave. A young man with dyed blond hair, black pants, and blank hopeless eyes stood at the door of a porno shop between Union and Pike on the east side of First Avenue and watched him pass. Sam watched him, too. The Donut Shop at the corner of Pike was dark, and the parking lot behind it was empty. Sam glanced to the west where Pike Street became cobblestones and ran into the Pike Place Market, or simply the Market as everyone on the street called it. Two blocks more and he passed Stewart Street, the northern border of his district, the smallest patrol district in the city. Two blocks beyond Stewart was the Donald Hotel.

  He pulled over to the curb and braked. A light shone in the hotel stairway. He picked out Alberta’s room on the fourth floor, the top floor, three windows from the end. The windows were still open.

  He removed his foot from the brake pedal and idled back into the street. He continued his slow journey north. A block from Denny Way, he made a U-turn and retraced his path south on First Avenue. The man with yellow hair was gone, but there would soon be another to replace him. There was always another. The drunk in front of Pennyland had also disappeared.

  There were rumors that Pennyland was going to shut down, that the whole block was to become rehabilitated, like the drunks they picked up there and sent to the detoxification center. He heard that Pennyland was supposed to become a fancy hotel. Sam couldn’t imagine that.

  His education of First Avenue had begun at Pennyland. He and a friend, both eighteen and about to leave for Alaska for their first year of fishing, had taken a bus downtown to First Avenue. They walked the street, pretending to be men, and ended up in Pennyland. Even then, there was nothing to buy for a penny. They played pool for a quarter a game and eventually crept into the peep booths in the back room. Sam had never seen anything like them.

  There were signs on every booth then, just as there were now, prohibiting more than one person to enter, but he and his friend ignored the signs and stood in the booths together—curious, embarrassed children. They didn’t know that by feeding more dimes into one machine the scratchy movie on the smudged little screen would progress considerably beyond the single woman undressing. He knew that now, which explained as well as anything the nature of his continued education.

  Would rich people stay in a hotel that used to be Pennyland? He couldn’t believe it. He realized, however, that it didn’t matter what he believed because money was coming to First Avenue.

  Rehabilitation had gone first to the old buildings south of Yesler Street. There had been a lot of publicity about it in the tourist magazines. They called it Pioneer Square now instead of Skid Road. Then a new condominium development was built north of the Market with a view of the harbor and the latest in security locks. And now this in the center. A few banks had already arrived. He guessed that more would follow the new money like pawnshops followed the down-and-out taverns.

  At eighteen he was quite certain he would do something important, something that would take him far from First Avenue. Now twice that age, he wondered if he would ever leave. If the rumors were true, he would outlast Pennyland. Was it possible that he would outlast First Avenue, the street he knew, or would First Avenue only fade into hidden recesses and wait to be forgotten like old storybooks in an abandoned cellar?

  Sam turned west on Madison Street, leaving First Avenue behind, and drove downhill a block toward Elliot
t Bay. On Western Avenue he turned north again. Above him the Viaduct passed through downtown on concrete stilts. Where the north end of the Market met Western Avenue, Sam reversed his direction, shut off the headlights of his patrol car, and drove into Pike Place against the one-way signs. From his open window, he heard the popping sound of his tires crossing the rough cobblestones. He parked when he was even with the eye of the “City Fish” sign and pushed a button to eject the portable radio from its console.

  A shadow moved beneath the roof overhang of the fish stalls. Sam stood beside his car and watched. He heard the clang of metal as the shadow dropped a garbage can lid. One of the regulars was looking for food before the garbage trucks arrived. It was too late for the good stuff.

  Silve’s kitchen stood out like a beacon among the dark shuttered businesses, and Sam walked down the concrete ramp that led to it. He tapped on the door window. Silve walked quickly to the door, wiping his hands on his apron as he approached. The smile from the old man was a morning gift.

  “Good morning, sir,” Silve said as he unlocked the door. He had a rich accent he still carried from his home in the Philippines.

  “Good morning, my friend,” Sam replied—his accent from Seattle.

  Silve’s faded orange chef’s coat and hat were too big for him, but there were probably none smaller. The hat had a way of dropping over his eyes whenever he spoke with feeling, and Silve had many strong feelings. Sam wondered if it would not be easier to dispense with the hat altogether, but Silve thought the hat gave him the professional appearance he should have as the owner.

  After opening the door, Silve returned to his place behind the stove. He picked up his knife from the cutting board and resumed trimming and slicing beefsteak for the adobo. His hands were like those of a blind person. From touch alone, he could expertly trim the fat and gristle. Sam stood at the side of the stove close to Silve.