An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [45]
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 tightass. 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