A Crime in the Neighborhood (17 page)

So I took that pale balloon lifted from Steven's room, carried it outside, and dropped it on the sidewalk in front of Mr. Green's house.

Then, although I had been forbidden to leave our street, I swung myself all the way down to the mall so I could listen to the squeak of my rubber tips against the mall's terrazzo floor. The floor had just been waxed, so I used my crutches as poles and slid around on my good foot like a one-legged skier, leaving long gray streaks in my wake. In spite of what had happened right behind it, the mall seemed a restful place in the middle of the day, almost churchlike with its high ceilings and cool fragrance of floor wax.

The mall was nearly empty that day. I bought a bag of M&Ms and ate them with my forehead against the pet-shop window, cracking the candy coating gently between my teeth before biting into the chocolate innards, pretending I was scuba diving as tropical fish floated by. When only the green M&Ms were left, I dropped them surreptitiously onto the floor and crushed them under my heel.

I was still standing by the pet shop when I saw Steven run out of the drugstore.

He was followed a moment later by a skinny black man in red pants and a white shirt. The man was shouting, “Come back here, you little shit. I saw what you took, you little shit. I'm calling the police.”

Steven was running as fast as I'd ever seen him run; he ran right past without seeing me, smiling a tight, stunned smile. His sneakers slapped against the polished floor and his pony-tail flipped back and forth. He had a rectangular box in his hand, which he flung away as he ran; it skittered across the mall floor and came to a stop behind a large potted fern near the bank.

“Come back here, you little shit,” cried the man, pounding after him. His long dark face was sweating and he was kneading one side of his chest with his hand. But Steven was far ahead of him and in a moment had reached the mall's double glass doors. The doorway was filled with sunlight that afternoon and for an instant Steven hung there, a sharp silhouette, arms spread-eagled, legs flung wide, as inexplicable to me as a Chinese character. Then he was through the doors and gone.

Wheezing, the man stopped and swatted the air with his fist. His shiny shoes must have pinched, because he lifted one, then the other tentatively, hunching his shoulders as he stared out the glass doors at my vanishing brother. Finally he turned around.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you know that boy?”

I shook my head.

“Little shit,” he muttered, squaring his shoulders. He wiped
his forehead and stalked over to the potted fern. “Look at that. Tried to steal a whole carton of cigarettes.”

He glared at me again. “You know that boy, you tell him to stay out of my store. He's in here all the time, taking stuff. Next time I see him in my store I'm calling the cops.” He brandished the box of cigarettes.

I shrank against the pet-shop window. As if noticing for the first time that he was shouting at a little white girl on crutches, the man looked slightly stricken. He looked over his shoulder, fingering the plastic nameplate stuck to his breast pocket.
Hi, I'm BYRON. Have a Nice Day.
“Go on,” he said finally, shooing at me with his other hand, the one holding the carton. “It's no loitering in this place.”

By the time I got home, Steven was alone in the kitchen with the radio on. I could hear the Jackson Five piping, “ABC, it's easy as one, two, three,” as I came in from the porch. He was bobbing up and down to the music, fixing himself a sandwich.

For a moment I contemplated rushing into the kitchen and telling Steven that I'd witnessed everything. You thief, I would shout, with a beautiful self-righteous expression on my face. You criminal. But an odd kind of exhaustion came over me as I stood by the door. “One, two, three,” sang Steven in the kitchen. “Baby, you and
me
.” In the end I stumped upstairs to my room and lay on my bed.

The fact of it was, there had been something dreadful in the vision of my brother running past me through the mall, his
legs pumping, his mouth stretched into a sneer of fright. He had looked so unfamiliar. And at the same time, as he darted down that long echoing hallway and through those blazing glass doors, I felt I had never understood him so well.

I guess what I understood was that Steven had enjoyed himself, that he had been waiting for a moment like this to happen, and even that he had been careful in choosing which store to steal from. There was a kind of power in acting so bad so deliberately, a wild heady power, and it made him run like the wind. No one could have caught him. Or maybe I've only realized the last part since, thinking back on that furious black store manager with his pinching shoes.

The next afternoon the twins got themselves invited to go to Cape May for two and a half weeks with the Westendorfs. Amy Westendorf was in the same tenth-grade class as Julie and Steven. She had a crush on Steven, and had therefore cultivated a close friendship with Julie. She was short and gnomelike, with a long mat of red hair and oatmeal-colored skin; she picked at her red eyebrows and giggled compulsively, but neither of the twins seemed to mind.

“She's a bit of a doofus, Rod,” sighed Julie. “But what a nice stereo system. Lovely speakers.” All Steven said was, “I wish she'd brush her teeth.”

The Westendorfs were the wealthiest family we knew, and
besides their swimming pool they had their own beach house. Julie and Steven were ecstatic at the thought of going away.

“Oh Mom,
please
say yes,” cried Julie that night at dinner, dramatically clutching my mother's sleeve. “You don't know what an opportunity this is.”

“Yes, I do,” said my mother, smiling.

“Then can we go?” said Steven, grabbing her other sleeve. “Please, Mom?”

My mother thought for a few moments, or pretended to think. It was pretty to see her surrounded like that by the twins. Their eyes were bright and excited, and she was laughing to have so much of their attention. It must have been easier, I couldn't help thinking, in the days when she had just them.

“Of course,” she said. “Of course you can go.”

For the next couple days, Rodney and Felicia took over completely and skimmed around the house looking for their bathing suits, ironing their best tie-dyed T-shirts, demanding money to buy flip-flops and beach towels at the mall, strewing so many clothes on the floor in their rooms that my mother could hardly wedge their doors open.

In their excitement to leave us behind, they even warmed to several degrees within friendly. Julie allowed me to accompany her to the drugstore when my mother drove us to the mall, where she stole a bottle of baby oil and a pair of cheap sunglasses. She slipped them into her African straw bag.

“You,” she said coolly, “saw nothing.”

Steven must have told her all about his close escape a few days before because she took pains to pass by the store manager twice, and even asked him where she could find sanitary napkins.

The twins left in the Westendorfs' Volvo station wagon on a Friday evening, right before dinner. I had been looking forward to their going, and to having the house to myself so that I could investigate their rooms in a more leisurely manner, but soon as the porch door banged behind them, I couldn't imagine what I'd do with myself while they were gone. Suddenly the house, which had been full of their singing and arguing, their astringent British accents, and their gabby, interesting telephone calls, became almost silent. I could hear the sunburst wall clock tick in the kitchen.

Outside someone was mowing his lawn. Several cars drove by. The light slowly slipped out of our yard as my mother made us spaghetti for dinner, which neither of us felt like eating. Afterward she turned on the news and settled down with her glass of Chablis.

“Come sit with me,” she said. But I pretended not to hear. I took my notebook and sat on the porch and watched the neighborhood patrol go by on their rounds. It was Mr. Reade and Mr. Guibert that night. I waved when they passed our house, but they didn't see me. Or at least, they didn't wave back.

“For Your Marigolds,” read the note, written in blue ink on a white index card. The message was signed “A.G.”

My mother found it early the next morning propped against a yellow box of baking soda on the front steps. She carried them both inside and set them on the porch table, where she had already laid everything for breakfast.

“Look at this,” she said, holding up the card as she sat down to sip her coffee. “Who do you think A.G. is?”

Locusts rattled in the poplar trees outside. Julie and Steven had been gone less than twenty-four hours. Outside hot morning sunlight spilled through the leaves, dappling the crabgrass on our lawn.

“It's Mr. Green,” I said finally from behind the Cheerios cereal box. “Alden Green. The slugs. Remember?”

I wondered if Mr. Green could have somehow heard me talking about him to Luann. It's always been my experience
that coincidence does not so much happen as get summoned. And I have never entirely relinquished my vision of heaven as a celestial holding pen, where lost things wait for eternity, if necessary, but also where negligent comments and gestures hang briefly before descending to revisit you in unexpected ways.

“Oh Lord,” my mother murmured, picking up both the baking soda and the card and squinting at them.

“You asked him about getting slugs out of your marigolds.” Deliberately I talked with my mouth full, in the manner my mother found most objectionable.

But she wasn't paying attention; she kept staring at the note, which was written in a careful, looping script. “By the way, Marie Lauder called last night,” she said after a moment, still staring at the little white card, “after you'd gone to bed.”

My heart began walloping in my chest. Behind the Cheerios box, I searched for a way to deny any involvement in Roy and Tiffany's sordid exploits. My mother, although no prude, disapproved of children's sex games. “Get a book if you want to learn anatomy,” she had told Steven when she discovered his pictures of “tooties” under his bed. “What are you doing?” she always called up the stairs if she heard suspiciously creaking bedsprings. Luann is very mixed up, I decided to say. She doesn't know which way she's going.

My mother laid the card next to her plate with a sigh. “Marie said Luann found a condom on the street a couple of days ago. Do you know what a condom is?”

I shook my head, although before she had even finished saying the word “condom” I knew what it was and where Luann had discovered it, and my heart pounded even harder.

My mother gazed at her plate. “It's something men wear on their private parts. Do me a favor and never pick up anything that looks like—like a—”

“Balloon?”

“I knew it,” she said, trying to sound angry but looking up half-relieved. “I knew you knew what I was talking about.”

“No I don't,” I said. “But I guessed.”

My mother frowned. “It's very sad,” she said, “when children try to act smart. At any rate, Luann found this thing near our house and her mother says she's going to call the police if any of you kids come across another one. So just be careful, all right? Don't you go anywhere without telling me, even next door.”

She buttered a piece of toast and took a bite of it. “Marie also wants to know if we want to make something for that bake sale she's organizing this afternoon for the neighborhood patrol.”

“Great,” I said, with too much enthusiasm. “Are they going to buy guns or something?”

My mother narrowed her eyes. “In my opinion, this neighborhood is getting a little too excited about being vigilantes. This is not the Wild West, you know. This is not the O.K. Corral. This is Washington, D.C.”

“A kid died, Mom.”

“I know that.”

But instead of getting irritated, she watched me over the rim of her china teacup.

A bee fumbled outside, bumping against the screen. Across the street, Mr. Morris shuffled down his front steps to get the paper, his terrycloth slippers scraping against the cement, while in the distance gathered the rumble of a departing jet.

Unless what you're expecting is benign, no one likes waiting for something to happen. Not knowing what will happen to them makes people edgy and superstitious. Coincidence vanishes; everything is significant. I've had some experience in waiting for things to happen and not knowing what the outcome may be, and in almost every case I've been driven to reading the world around me as a lexicon of signs and symbols. The reddish stain in the snow means a bad lab report. A missed bus means a bad day ahead. Finding a penny on the sidewalk means good news. Cross your fingers as you pass a cemetery. Knock on wood.

Not knowing brings out the primitive in people. My mother, for instance, has always claimed to be slightly clairvoyant, a reputation I tend to dismiss or exaggerate depending on the degree of my desperation when I request her advice. I remember the summer after law school when I took the bar and asked her over and over whether she thought I'd passed.
She always said, “Yes,” without pausing to consider. When I finally asked her why she was so definite, she said, “Because someone has to be definite.”

While not entirely reassuring, this answer did remind me that my mother doesn't believe in playing games with fate. She would never resort to my craven tactics of pretending that I don't believe something will happen so that the gods will recognize my humility and allow whatever it is I'm praying for to take place. The gods are fond of surprises. To succeed in life, if you follow my reasoning, the odds have to be poor. As a child, I invoked this rule frequently. “I know I failed that exam,” I would eagerly tell other children, fingers crossed in my pockets. “I'm positive.”

And if I did fail, well, no one was surprised.

“Ask for what you want,” my mother has always prodded me. “Make your case. If you don't get what you want, then at least it won't be because nobody knew what you wanted.”