A Crime in the Neighborhood (13 page)

By the time Mr. Green turned on his sprinkler that evening, the men in our neighborhood had already met on the Morrises' lawn and partnered up to patrol the block in pairs. Like me, they had discovered the virtue of being careful. They called themselves the Neighborhood Night Watch, and they intended to patrol our neighborhood until a suspect had been caught.

Looking back, I believe no one asked Mr. Green to join the Night Watch because they forgot about him, the same way they had forgotten to knock on his door the night before to
ask for his help with the search. He hadn't lived in the neighborhood long; he was a quiet, self-effacing man, almost laughably forgettable. But it's also possible that he wasn't asked because of some echo of tribalism that agreed that only married men should stand guard over the neighborhood. Whatever the reason, Mr. Green stayed inside his house that night, listening to a jazz station on his kitchen radio, while Mr. Lauder and Mr. Sperling and every other man on our street took turns walking for two hours around and around the block. The same was true of the next night, and the next, and every night for weeks.

To imagine what happened to Boyd Ellison the afternoon of July 20th is something I've tried to do again and again, and I always fail. Memory is supposed to supply facts you didn't know you remembered until you sat down and remembered hard enough, but in this case the facts disappear whenever I try to cup them long enough to examine. Actually, it's not even facts that disappear, but impressions, constructions—leaving only that rough bit of grit, the event itself.

For me, all mental pictures of that day end at middle distance, with the image of a boy in shorts and a T-shirt on a street corner. Bare stocky legs, ending in white athletic socks and black basketball sneakers, half-unlaced. Blond hair stirring in the breeze, square face turned at a three-quarter profile as he, a good Cub Scout no matter what happened
with that paper drive, squints up the street to see if a car is coming.

Ahead of him lies a last wilderness: oak trees, white pine, and creeper, a litter of broken beer bottles and cigarette butts, the wooded shortcut to the mall. Soon to be a parking garage. But for now it is a green wood, a tempting darkness. He has, remember, spent the morning reading
The Call of the Wild
. Gazing at the white pines and scrubby oaks from across the street, he hears that call himself, ululating all the way from the frozen Northwest Territories to an East Coast subdivision in mid-July. The sun is shining on Spring Hill that day. It is eighty-nine degrees.

An elderly woman wearing a pink housedress walks past with her pug on a red leather leash studded with rhinestones. She smiles at the boy, who stoops to pat the dog and touch its curled tail. To the right bulks the brick Defense facility, mysterious and nondescript behind its black chain-link fence, fortified by shield-shaped “No Trespassing” signs in red, white, and blue and a sign that says “U.S. Government Property.” The woman and the dog walk on.

But now, just as the boy prepares to cross the street, a car does appear, a brown car, sunspot blazing on the windshield. The car slows, comes to a stop beside the boy. Then the car door opens with a metallic grunt; someone leans over the front seat. A man's hand beckons from inside. Come closer. The boy steps closer. He bends to listen.

What kind of summons could have persuaded Boyd Ellison
to approach that car and temporarily abandon his errand to buy straight pins and sherbet? What was requested of him that day, the boy who was himself so fond of asking?

Maybe only directions. Anything worse and he would have run straight home. It is 1972, after all, which if more innocent than our own time is still an era where children know not to talk to strangers. So he backs away from the car, back to the safety of the cement curb. All this the lady with the dog confirmed. The car door slams shut and the car drives on, disappearing around a corner. Half a block away, the pug whines, is told to hush. His leash winks in the sun. And off goes Boyd Ellison, still with his head full of blizzards and gray wolves—off he trots across the street and into the raggedy, fairy-tale woods behind the Spring Hill Mall.

Perhaps the man driving the brown car meant to go right on home that day. Perhaps he wasn't the worst man in the world. Perhaps he was a man who lived in a neighborhood full of children, a man with a neat lawn and orange marigolds around his front steps, a man who bought raffle tickets and lent out his jumper cables, a man who could—if you didn't look closely—resemble any other neighbor. Perhaps he had his own romantic dreams, ones that were not perverse, ones that would not hurt anybody.

Perhaps, perhaps—that careful word. Who can tell what went awry in those next minutes as Boyd Ellison stepped into the woods and the man in the brown car drove around the block to the mall's parking lot, parked in a far corner, and
walked up the hill? One step, two, three. Twigs crack; a beer can rattles, kicked aside. Overhead tree branches sway against a blue sky. A pause. There is still time. Time to turn back, time to stop. Time to recollect. But then another step, and another. Tree branches sway; another twig cracks. One step more. And there he is, a boy lost in the woods of someone else's imaginings.

After that I can see Boyd Ellison only after he has been killed, his hair blood-matted, blank eyes half open, blue lips parted. Or I picture him walking down the street, forever into that middle distance. I'd like to think that my inability to picture anything further involves something moral, but I'm as much a voyeur as the next person, probably more so. Every time I swung past the Ellisons' house on my crutches that summer, I thought about Boyd's body on the hillside behind the mall. I imagined his head twisted to the side, his arm bent under him, his T-shirt hiked up to expose his pale belly.

So strange and vulnerable a belly looks, especially a child's—like something left unfinished.

“According to Sergeant James McKenna, Montgomery County Police Department spokesman, the slaying does not appear to be ritualistic. ‘We have some items recovered from the site that we are checking on,' McKenna said. He would release no further details pending the investigation.”

My mother paused for a moment, then continued. “A
source, however, revealed that bloodstains found on the youth's clothing do not match his own blood type. Police believe he struggled with his assailant, perhaps scratching or biting him.”

Over the next few days she read aloud newspaper reports about Boyd Ellison during breakfast, very much as months before she had read aloud news about Nixon's trip to China so that we could apprehend history while it was happening to us. Perhaps she thought it was time we recognized that history was full of crime as well as mistakes, and the very occasional triumph.

She also read aloud articles about what people were beginning to refer to as “the Watergate bugging.” Convinced it was important by my mother's interest, I pasted into my notebook an article headlined
WATERGATE BURGLAR RECEIVED MONEY FROM CAMPAIGN FUND
.

In a confused manner, I think I'd begun to connect my father's leaving us with Boyd Ellison's murder and even with whatever it was that had happened at Watergate. Although I couldn't have explained it then, I believed that my father's departure had deeply jarred the domestic order not just in our house, but in the neighborhood, and by extension the country, since in those days my neighborhood was my country. My father left to find himself, and a child got lost. That's how it struck me.

Up until then we had lived a reasonably calm life on a reasonably calm street, where nothing extraordinary ever occurred,
at least visibly. People had babies and went to work and played catch in the evening or watched television. Mr. Reade's youngest brother had been killed in Vietnam; I remember overhearing him tell my father about it one evening as they stood by the curb watching Steven and the Reade brothers play basketball. But otherwise no one else spoke of the tragedies that befell them. It was, in a way that has ceased to be possible, a quiet neighborhood. And so in a peculiar way I began very early to blame my father for Boyd Ellison's death.

Especially as the days went on and the police didn't find a suspect, and my father didn't write to us. He waited too long. The longer he waited—out of shame or confusion, or out of a mistaken conviction that we wouldn't want to hear from him—the harder it must have become to pick up a pen or the phone. Slowly he crossed the line from someone I had always known to someone I could hardly imagine. Which is how, I suppose, we became for him.

The photograph that appeared in the paper the day after the murder showed a fair, solid boy with close-set eyes. His smile looked commanded, but not unnatural. It was one of those photographs found on the living-room mantelpiece of any middle-class family's home in America, taken in the elementary school auditorium by a middle-aged sweating photographer who motioned for one child after another to step forward and sit on a stool in front of a blue screen.
Smile
, he
ordered, and every child did, impressed by the flashbulb in its aluminum shell and the depthless black lens glaring at them, and by the fleeting importance of being recorded, as a person, as a human body.

But I remember a different-looking boy than the one in the photograph. I remember that he often squinted. I remember that he smelled of sandwich crusts. I remember the intimate grasp of his hand on the arm of my mother's chair, the other hand already lifting toward her coffee cup.

But mostly I remember this:

One morning in late April the year before, when the spring mud had finally hardened and we could go outside without shoes, the twins and I were in the front yard building a clubhouse with fallen branches and an old packing crate. It was a rare thing to be allowed to assist them in any of their enterprises, and although I knew I would be expelled from the club once construction on its headquarters was concluded, I ran around the yard in my striped overalls, dragging over bits of wood, offering suggestions. Finally the twins went inside to ask my mother for duct tape, leaving me to “stand guard.”

That was when I noticed that two boys had pulled their bikes together in the road in front of the Sperlings' house. They were holding something between them and staring at it so intently that I walked across the street to see what they had found.

It was a praying mantis. Although I don't believe I'd ever seen one before, I felt a kind of recognition at the sight of that
long segmented insect, sap green, with enormous fractured eyes on a small triangular head. It looked like a space creature.

The first boy, the one I didn't know, had taken off his baseball cap and, with his hand inside the cap, pinched the mantis between his fingers, crushing its gauzy wings and trapping its upper legs. The insect twitched; its jointed, mechanical-looking lower legs clawed the air while its head, moving freely back and forth, appeared to turn toward each of us.

“It's a vicious bug,” the boy said. “It can bite its own head off.”

He pinched it tighter. Then the other boy moved closer. I saw a bright glint and, as my heart beat faster and faster, I watched as Boyd Ellison, earnest as a surgeon, tried to slit open the mantis's abdomen with a penknife.

Holding my breath, I leaned in as he pressed the knifepoint against that strange, bulky body stretched taut like a pea pod. He pressed slowly, steadily, denting the smooth green belly—until finally it punctured. A white innard pulsed out from the wound; it looked like a cigarette filter. The mantis's limbs beat thinly up and down. Then the slim upper body twitched and a milky fluid leaked from its split gut. The legs kept waving silently, six legs; the upper two, now free, had cruel spiky hooks almost like hands.

Stomach heaving, I drew closer and stared, wanting to get even closer, to peer right into those alien eyes. What I felt, as I stared at that mutilated insect, wasn't pity; it was closer to a
lost word between revulsion and desire. I wanted to put the praying mantis into my mouth.

None of us flinched. We were serious as scientists or explorers, watching as the mantis continued to wave its legs.

The twins had come back outside and were walking toward us. I heard Steven shout something behind me, then felt him yank me back by my arm. He pushed me toward Julie and stood over the two younger boys huddled at their handlebars.

“That's disgusting,” he said, almost shrieking. “Look what you did.” His voice sounded extremely high and loud, like the school fire-alarm bell. I imagined everyone in the neighborhood rushing to their windows to see what disgusting thing we had done.

The boy who'd been holding the mantis dropped it on the street by the curb, where it lay struggling on its back, ruined abdomen lifting. A damp spot appeared on the pavement beneath it.

“You're
sick
.” This time Steven swung around to include me. Then he stepped off the curb and carefully crushed the dying insect under his heel.

“Get out of here,” he said when he had finished. He looked straight at Boyd Ellison, who was still holding the open penknife. “Get the hell out.”

At that moment, in the face of my brother's gleaming outrage, and faced with the prospect of my mother's contempt and fury once she heard about this episode, I hated Boyd Ellison
more than I had ever hated anyone in my life. I wished I had a rock to throw at him as he climbed back onto his bicycle and began to pedal away, flashing rubber Keds labels, tiny blue flags, on the heels of his sneakers. I wanted to kick him, smash his square face, and knock him down. I wanted to make him pay for showing me what I had wanted so much to see.

Miraculously, Steven did not tell. Instead, as the boys rode away he slapped me on the side of the head, just above my ear. “You're out of the club,” he said. “Jerk.”

Julie said: “She was never in it.”

For weeks, I went back to that green smear on the street, until it dried, and turned brown, and one day blew away.