For hours, we’d prowl the green hillsides, watching the sailors yell at the invading seals from the top of the locks while the seals ignored them, skimming for fish and sometimes rolling on their backs and flipping their fins. We watched the rich-people sailboats with their masts rusting, the big grey fishing boats from Alaska and Japan and Russia with the fishermen bored on deck, smoking, throwing butts at the seals and leaning on the rails while the gulls shrieked overhead. As long as the rain held off, we stayed and threw stones to see how high up the opposite bank we could get them, and Peter would wait for ships to drift in front of us and then throw low over their bows. The sailors would scream curses in other languages or sometimes ours, and Peter would throw bigger stones at the boat-hulls. When they hit with a thunk, we’d flop on our backs on the wet grass and flip our feet in the air like the seals. It was the rudest gesture we knew.
Of course, most days it was raining, and we stayed in the Anderszes’ basement until Mr Andersz and the Serbians came home. Down there, in the damp — Mr Andersz claimed his was one of three basements in all of Ballard — you could hear the wetness rising in the grass outside like lock-water. The first thing Peter did when we got downstairs was flick on the gas fireplace (not for heat, it didn’t throw any), and we’d toss in stuff: pencils, a tinfoil ball, a plastic cup, and once a broken old 45 which formed blisters on its surface and then spit black goo into the air like a fleeing octopus dumping ink before it slid into a notch in the logs to melt. Once, Peter went upstairs and came back with one of Mr Andersz’s red spiral photo albums and tossed it into the flames, and when one of the Mack sisters asked him what was in it, he told her, ‘No idea. Didn’t look.’
The burning never lasted long, five minutes, maybe. Then we’d eat ho-hos and play the Atari Mr Andersz had bought Peter years before at a yard sale, and it wasn’t like you think, not always. Mostly, Peter flopped in his orange bean-bag chair with his long legs stretched in front of him and his too-long black bangs splayed across his forehead like the talons of some horrible, giant bird gripping him to lift him away. He let me and the Mack sisters take turns on the machine, and Kenny London and Steve Rourke, too, back in the days when they would come. I was the best at the basic games, Asteroids and Pong, but Jenny Mack could stay on Dig Dug forever and not get grabbed by the floating grabby-things in the ground. Even when we asked Peter to take his turn, he wouldn’t. He’d say, ‘Go ahead,’ or ‘Too tired,’ or ‘Fuck off,’ and once I even turned around in the middle of losing to Jenny and found him watching us, sort of, the rainy window and us, not the tv screen at all. He reminded me a little of my grandfather before he died, all folded up in his chair and not wanting to go anywhere and kind of happy to have us there. Always, Peter seemed happy to have us there.
When Mr Andersz got home, he’d fish a ho-ho out of the tin for himself if we’d left him one — we tried to, most days — and then come downstairs, and when he peered out of the stairwell, his black wool hat still stuck to his head like melted wax, he already looked different than when we saw him at school. At school, even with his hands covered in yellow chalk and his transparencies full of fractions and decimals scattered all over his desk and the pears he carried with him and never seemed to eat, he was just Mr Andersz, fifth-grade math teacher, funny accent, funny to get angry. At school, it never occurred to any of us to feel sorry for him.
‘Well, hello, all of you,’ he’d say, as if talking to a litter of puppies he’d found, and we’d pause our game and hold our breath and wait for Peter. Sometimes — most times — Peter said, ‘Hey’ back, or even, ‘Hey, Dad.’ Then we’d all chime in like a clock tolling the hour, ‘Hey, Mr Andersz,’ ‘Thanks for the ho-hos,’ ‘Your hat’s all wet again,’ and he’d smile and nod and go upstairs.
There were the other days, too. A few, that’s all. On most of those, Peter just didn’t answer, wouldn’t look at his father. It was only the one time that he said, ‘Hello, Dipshit-Dad,’ and Jenny froze at the Atari and one of the floating grabby things swallowed her digger, and the rest of us stared, but not at Peter, and not at Mr Andersz, either. Anywhere but there.
For a few seconds, Mr Andersz seemed to be deciding, and rain-rivers wriggled down the walls and windows like transparent snakes, and we held our breath. But all he said, in the end, was, ‘We’ll talk later, Struwwelpeter,’ which was only a little different from what he usually said when Peter got this way. Usually, he said, ‘Oh. It’s you, then. Hello, Struwwelpeter.’ I never liked the way he said that, as though he was greeting someone else entirely, not his son. Eventually, Jenny or her sister Kelly would say, ‘Hi, Mr Andersz,’ and he’d glance around at us as though he’d forgotten we were there, and then he’d go upstairs and invite the Serbians in, and we wouldn’t see him again until we left.
The Serbians made Steve Rourke nervous, which is almost funny, in retrospect. They were big and dark, both of them, two brothers who looked at their hands whenever they saw children. One was a car mechanic, the other worked at the locks, and they sat all afternoon, most afternoons, in Mr Andersz’s study, sipping tea and speaking Serbian in low whispers. The words made their whispers harsh, full of z’s and ground-up s’s, as though they’d swallowed glass. ‘They could be planning things in there,’ Steve used to say. ‘My dad says both those guys were badass soldiers.’ Mostly, as far as I could tell, they looked at Mr Andersz’s giant library of photo albums and listened to records. Judy Collins, Joan Baez. Almost funny, like I said.
Of course, by this last Halloween — my last night at the Andersz house — both Serbians were dead, run down by a drunken driver while walking across Fremont Bridge, and Kenny London had moved away, and Steve Rourke didn’t come anymore. He said his parents wouldn’t let him, and I bet they wouldn’t, but that wasn’t why he stopped coming. I knew it, and I think Peter knew it, too, and that worried me, a little, in ways I couldn’t explain.
I almost didn’t get to go, either. I was out the door, blinking in the surprising sunlight and the wind rolling off the Sound through the streets, when my mother yelled,’ Andrew!’ and stopped me. I turned to find her in the open screen door of our duplex, arms folded over the long, grey coat she wore inside and out from October to May, sunlight or no, brown-grey curls bunched on top of her scalp as though trying to crawl over her head out of the wind. She seemed to be wiggling in mid-air, like a salmon trying to hold itself still against a current. Rarely did she take what she called her ‘frustrations’ out on me, but she’d been crabby all day, and now she looked furious, despite the fact that I’d stayed in my room, out of her way, from the second I got home from school, because I knew she didn’t really want me out tonight. Not with Peter. Not after last year.
‘That’s a costume?’ She gestured with her chin at my jeans, my everyday black sweater, too-small brown mac she’d promised to replace this year.
I shrugged.
‘You’re not going trick-or-treating?’
The truth was, no one went trick-or-treating much in our section of Ballard, not like in Bellingham where we’d lived when we lived with my dad. Too wet and dismal, most days, and there were too many drunks lurking around places like the Black Anchor and sometimes stumbling down the duplexes, shouting curses at the dripping trees.