I keep secrets

There is a vault in my head where I keep all the secrets anyone has ever asked me to keep. Even some that people have not specifically asked me to keep, but I keep them there, because that's just who I am. Sometimes I might bring one out, at a party or something, and change a name, or not even include a name, use it as a hypothetical as we all stand around a table and discuss politics, and I might interject, "oh, I know a woman who is sleeping with the dean of a college just to make sure her husband remains employed."

Generally people just stop and stare. I am working on my delivery.

The point is, if you have a secret, almost any sort of secret, and you need to share it and know that the person you share it with will keep it good and safe, I am that person.

That said, I am in a sharing kind of mood.

Years ago I was in a sexual relationship with a woman in New York. She was a tough as nails print reporter in the city, I was working freelance stringer news jobs late at night. If someone shot up a diner, I would grab a camera and follow the police. It was not a good job, but sometimes I made money. The hard as nails print reporter was fairly new, so she got the shit jobs, and so we seemed to travel in the same circles. Sometimes late at night we would share a beer after staking out a suicide attempt or the arraignment of someone almost famous. After one such night we slept together and so it went. It was not romantic, and it was not really a lot of fun and this was a point in my life where I actually thought of myself as a fairly talented and intuitive lover.

After one grueling late night of work and an even later night of drinking we were back at her apartment and we were both laying on her bed, the aftermath of what seemed to me to be barely functional vanilla sex. I asked her what was up and she started to cry. Then, after a time, she told me of a rape incident in college, and ever since then, any sort of physical closeness with men has left her feeling used and alone. In her tears she confided in me that she had not been able to share this with anyone else. She had not reported the rape in college. She had dropped out and returned home. No one knew. I told her then, her secret was safe with me.

Recently I was given permission to share that story, otherwise, that secret would have remained right where I kept it all these years.

People, for whatever reason, feel comfortable telling me secrets. Sometimes they are not very big secrets. Recently a co-worker came up to me at the office and told me she had just walked out of the convenience store downstairs without paying for her candy bar. She looked me in the eye and said, that's a secret between you and me and then walked out of my office. But really, a candy bar theft really isn't something I am going to keep secret.

Now, murder on the other hand.

So a few years ago I was at a bar in North Seattle, waiting for my friend Glenn, who was supposed to be picking up a tree for me. Seriously, it was a free tree, and he said he could use his truck to retrieve it, meet me at this bar in North Seattle, and then he and I would drive to my house. Fairly simple plan really. So there I sat, an iced lemonade in my hand, at an outdoor table at a kind of run down skeezy bar, waiting for Glenn, when this burly man, who must have been about 6'5" - 250, walked up and sat at the table next to me. He had a beer and a rumpled baseball cap and he looked at the parking lot, scanned it for something, looked me up and down and took a sip. "You waiting for someone?" He asked. I told him I was. It was quiet for a moment. Then he said he was too.

I sipped my lemonade, he drank his beer, got up, went inside, got another and came back and sat down. "You're not from around here, right?" I told him no, that I lived in Seattle, but I was picking up a tree. "A tree, that right?" Yes, I told him, a free tree and I explained everything. We chatted about landscaping and he mentioned that for a while he worked as an irrigation specialist in Oregon. I told him how I always liked Oregon and he said he hated it. Hated working with water and pipes, but the pipes got him the job in Alaska, working on the oil pipeline.

I told him I had lived in Alaska, so we talked about about that. I mentioned my father had worked in the oil industry in Southern California and we talked about the oil industry. He got up, went inside and came back with another beer, I was chewing the remaining ice cubes from my lemonade cup. He sat down and looked me in the eye and said, "can you keep a secret?"

"Yes, yes I can."

"I was working that pipeline job in Alaska, and this faggot was working with me, he was the foreman. We did 12 hour shifts, they had us in these shit barracks. The money was good and we could take time off and fly to the lower 48 and spend all that cash, but life up there was hell. Anyway, this faggot foreman hated me, mostly cause I hated him, so he found a way to get me fired. I got a check and a company ride to Fairbanks, nothing else. Duffel bag of clothes. I checked and there were no flights to anywhere for 3 days, so I rented a car and was gonna drive to Anchorage. Put the car on my card, threw the duffel in the back and got in, pointed it toward Anchorage and drove. I drove for what seemed like forever. I was about 2 hours outside Anchorage, there was this place, the Chugash Mountain House, little shit bar on a hill. I pulled in, hardly any cars, walked in and ordered a beer. Had another and went to pay, no cash, so I handed the bartender my card. He pointed to some little sign behind the bar, something like cash only or something. He threw my card back at me, hit me right under the eye and I started glaring at him. He said to me, cash only asshole. I reached behind me and pulled a 38 outta my belt, don't know why, to this day I don't know why, and I said to him, who you calling asshole mother fucker. There was just one other guy in the bar, he hit the floor and crawled to the door and was gone. Bartender reached under the bar and pulled out a shotgun and I shot him in the chest right about the time he started to level it at me. I stood there for a second. I never shot no one before. He fell behind the bar. I put the gun in my coat pocket, walked out the door, got in the rental car and got back on the highway, changed course, drove 14 hours straight to Haines, caught a ferry to Seattle and never looked back. Shit, I have only told that to two other people."

I kept looking at him. He kept looking at me. Neither of us managed to say anything else. Glenn pulled into the parking lot. I set the empty glass of lemonade on the table, stood and walked out to Glenns truck and we drove away. This is not the first time I have told that story to someone.

Even though I do have a pretty strict policy about keeping secrets, the next day I called the Alaska State Troopers office in Anchorage and asked who I would speak to about an unsolved murder. I was put on hold. A man picked up, "who am I speaking to?" he asked. I told him, and then I told him the story of the out of work oil pipeline worker and bartender killer. The detective in Alaska had been working for the state for 25 years, homicide for 15. It's a huge state, but not a lot of murders and not many go unsolved. He said that in all the time he had been working, which would have been in the strangers timeline, no bartender had been killed and the killer had not been charged. Not one time. There was not an unsolved murder of a bartender in the entire state.

We exchanged numbers, just in case.

Just for the record, I do keep most secrets.