Bert was a human barnacle that had attached itself to Jake and Krystal’s trailer house in 1989. He courted them with shopping trips to Spokane, boxes of garage sale books, a new furnace for the trailer. He promised to be a father figure. As soon as Bert moved in, he never moved again, leaving the couch only to go to the bar. He was surly and possessive, drunk and useless, and worst of all, fertile. Krystal was pregnant within a month.
Before Bert came, Frank had built a small storage shed for Jake, shoved up against the siding, between the back door and Jake’s bedroom window. Frank knew that Jake’s thrift store purchases were piled to the ceiling in his bedroom, each article of clothing perfectly folded but sandwiched so tightly that Jake was constantly ironing. Frank worked silently, building the shed out of cedar, so Jake’s clothes would smell less like old people and more like expensive people. He added a gambrel roof, sturdy enough to support Jake’s weight. Now Jake could climb out of his bedroom window and use the roof of the storage shed to push himself up to the flat metal panels on the top of the trailer house.
After Bert moved in, Frank built a privacy fence around his entire property in the summer of 1990. Bert had started trapping Frank’s feral cats in the alley, collecting them in metal cages. He drove to the boating launch and threw the cages in the shallows of the river. Bert described this process in detail but was secretive about what he did with the bodies. Frank’s fence was six feet high, enough to shield Frank from the sight of Bert drinking in the yard, the sight of Bert entirely.
Jake’s best friend, Misty, lived with her mother on the left side of Frank’s new fence. They had grown up together in the trailer court, walking endlessly around the unpaved loop of twenty-six houses and a Laundromat, throwing rocks at swallows’ nests. Misty blasted heavy metal at all hours.
Bert caused just as much commotion. When he had no one to fight with, Bert fought with himself, and loudly. Bert was the kind of drunk who fell on and off the wagon so many times that he called everybody at the bar by their last names and everybody at AA meetings by their first.
Frank was surrounded by this chaos but never called the cops. He was meek, a slight man with a thick dark beard. When he wasn’t feeding the cats, he watched the mountains with binoculars. He told Jake that he used to spend his summers in the fire lookouts and that these habits were hard to break. He looked for fire, even in the winter. Frank wore only bright yellow work shirts and dark green pants, and he told Jake that he had retired early from the Forest Service but never explained why.
The week before Christmas, Jake combed through the thrift shop, found several suits that looked like they would fit. Frank was silent when Jake brought them to his front porch, wrapped carefully, freshly cleaned by hand.
“I guessed your sizes,” Jake said. Frank said nothing, just accepted the neatly folded pile. “I thought you would look best in earth tones,” explained Jake. “Browns and greens, mostly. You’ll love the ties. I even found one with pine trees. There’s also a gray-and-red plaid jacket, and I figured you could wear it with blue jeans. Do you own any blue jeans?”
Frank remained silent.
The next night, Jake took his place on the roof, careful not to trip on the wires of Christmas lights Krystal had draped over the gutters. He had finally bought the entire “Like a Prayer” album, and a different rosary for every track, upping his collection to fourteen. Plastic or pearl, he had a necklace for every song and wore them on the outside of his snowsuit. He wrapped himself in blankets; the lawn chair was covered in new snow, and he sat on a plastic bag so his pants wouldn’t get wet. Frank began his concert for the cats, but ended it early after only twenty minutes. He blew into his bare hands, which must have been frozen; Frank could not play harmonica with mittens. The cats ate greedily, and Jake watched a skinny pair fight over a can of pork and beans. Inside the trailer, Jake and Frank could hear Krystal and Bert fighting about getting cable television, and their new baby was crying. Frank walked over to the fence and threw the harmonica up to Jake, and then he turned away and went inside his house, without speaking a word.
The ambulance came the next day. Krystal heard the details on the police scanner and told Jake to go to his room. He watched out his window as the volunteer firemen came in their massive vehicles, followed closely by the van of the volunteer ambulance. There were no sirens. Then the cars came to the trailer court—the onlookers. It was as if every person who lived in town had heard the dispatch on the police scanner. Jake snuck out of his window and found Misty on the street. Even in the freezing cold, Bert lay drunkenly in the yard, tangled up in a lawn chair, but the crowd paid no attention. Misty and Jake hid in the alley, behind a Dumpster that was missing a wheel, and Misty smoked a cigarette as the volunteer fire department surrounded the stretcher.
Jake and Misty watched as they brought out Frank’s body.
“I bet it was suicide,” pronounced Misty. “That’s fucking hard-core.”
“He never told me he was sad,” said Jake.