A Crime in the Neighborhood (23 page)

Night sounds started up: another cricket, a dishwasher running, the draw of a window shade. Footsteps passed—it
was the Night Watch going by, silent tonight. Like everyone else, they were listening.

I imagined Mr. Lauder, Mr. Sperling, then Mr. Guibert, Mr. Bridgeman, all the fathers on the block gathering just outside the nearest streetlight arc, watching from the street as my mother crossed and recrossed her long legs, her voice whickering softly. Now and again a watchband gleamed as they raised and lowered their arms, gesturing to one another. A faint crackle from their new walkie-talkies. A stifled cough.

By the time my mother had eaten her hamburger and refused a second, she and Mr. Green were neatly surrounded by the dark.

“Don't go yet,” he repeated.

In response she bent her head, only the side of her face turned toward him. A siren wailed in the distance.

Mr. Green dragged his chair nearer to hers and asked her what she thought of the news lately.

She drew in her breath, then laughed, bringing up her head. “No news is good news.”

“Don't you think,” he said deliberately, “don't you think the news has been very bad.”

She drank a sip of wine. “Well, if you mean this Watergate business, I agree.”

“Watergate?” He sounded bewildered. “I am talking,” he continued, with a resolute air of trying again, “about the news in the newspaper.”

“Oh. The news—? You mean about that little boy?”

“What it is, it's never what you think it will be,” Mr. Green went on as if she hadn't spoken. Now that he had begun to talk, he seemed resolved to continue. “All that comes up. It's never what you think.” In the dimming light, he looked like a bulldog. Then he looked like a lion. “Every day,” he said, “it's something different.”

“It does seem that way,” my mother answered vaguely.

“You always have to worry,” said Mr. Green, expansive now. He unfolded his arms from over his stomach and leaned toward her. “Worry all the time. That's what they tell you. Even about things you shouldn't have to worry about.”

My mother nodded.

“Like food,” he brought out, after a short consideration. He tilted his head closer to hers until she must have felt his breath against her cheek, warm with the smell of the meat he had eaten. Together they stared at the ground like two people studying a jigsaw puzzle.

“Your food,” he said. “And what you drink. And—air.”

“I guess you're right.”

“One minute you worry about this, then you worry about that. Then by the time you get back to worrying about the first thing, it's gotten worse. You can't worry about everything at the same time.” His voice grew husky. Perhaps he had never said so much all at once; the effort seemed to excite him. “But then again you have to,” he said. “You have to try to worry about everything.”

“I know about that,” she murmured.

“Yes,” he said, almost into her hair. “That's how it is.”

His voice was as deep now as Walter Cronkite's, as deep as the shadows all around them. And in the darkness it seemed my mother swayed closer, then closer to rest against him as a balloon drifted against her ankles.

“Mom?” I cried out.

Down below, my mother and Mr. Green lurched apart. “
Mother
,” I called again.

“I'm sorry,” she said, standing up in Mr. Green's backyard and overturning her cup of wine in the grass. “I didn't realize—”

“No—” said Mr. Green, rising also.

“I have to be getting back.” When he made a move toward her, my mother put a hand on the back of the chair she had just left, stepping behind it so the chair was between them. “You know, I just meant to drop by to say hello—have a glass of wine. I didn't mean—and now here we are sitting out here—”

“Please,” he said, standing also.

“Really, I have to go,” she said too loudly, as if just noticing that the rest of the neighborhood had hushed. “I do really have to get home.”

Mr. Green stared at her until she looked away.

She gestured upward. “I hadn't meant to come over at all,” she said in the same loud voice. “You see, I was making dinner—hamburgers, too, isn't that funny—but I hadn't meant—but when I saw you sitting out here all alone—well, I—” She tried to laugh, but the laugh caught somewhere in her throat and thinned to a gasp.

After a moment she tried to speak again but stopped. I saw her glance over at the pineapple, bristling on the card table. “Do you need help,” she managed finally. “Maybe you need help with carrying these things back inside?”

He didn't answer. Instead he walked over to the still-glowing barbecue pit and threw an unopened package of hotdog buns onto the orange coals. A moment later he tossed in the unused plastic forks and spoons and the paper napkins. The stink of scorched plastic curled into the air.

“Oh don't.” My mother held out one arm, her hand raised with fingers spread. From where I sat watching, she looked small and toylike with her foolish arm outstretched, as if someone could reach down and pluck her up by that little arm and carry her away.

“Please don't,” she said. “I know you'll wish you'd saved those things for another time.”

When he didn't turn around, she dropped her arm, letting it swing free as if she had only been waving. Then she walked very quickly across his neat side lawn and through our own overgrown grass. Mr. Green stayed where he was, standing in front of his barbecue pit with his back to the neighborhood.

The screen door opened, then banged shut. My mother's footsteps crossed the porch, and for the first time that summer I heard her close the front door and turn the lock.

By the time I clumped downstairs that evening, my mother was sitting in the dark on the living-room sofa, one magazine spread open in her lap, several more beside her, the room lit only by the street lamp outside and the light from the kitchen. She had poured herself a glass of wine. After a moment, during which she did not glance at me, my mother patted the cushion beside her.

For a while we sat quietly, looking across at the bare fireplace and at the piano, which no one had played since Julie had picked out “Heart and Soul” a few days before she and Steven left with the Westendorfs. My notebook lay across my knees and once or twice I flipped the pages. My mother drank her wine. It seemed a very long time since the nights when my aunts had filled this room with their swooping voices and long legs, or since the twins had lain on the floor with their chins in their hands watching television, or since the night my father had sat here staring at Aunt Ada.

This marks a new era, my mother had said that night, staring at Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao on the television screen.

The windows were open, and as the warm night breeze
brushed against our faces we heard guitar music from someone's radio down the street. The moon was up. Through the windows it looked blurred as an old coin rising over Mr. Green's rooftop.

As I watched the moon, I saw a strange thing, if seeing is the right word for it. I looked out the window and saw myself walking down the street toward our house. But then, I wasn't myself; I was a stranger in the neighborhood walking alone at night, looking in at the yellow lamplight of other people's living rooms. Most of our neighbors didn't bother to draw their curtains and it was easy to glance right in and see the green fronds of a plant, the corner of a corduroy armchair, framed photographs of babies and brides smiling on the mantel. On warm nights like this one most people's windows would be open, and up and down the street I could hear the sounds of running bathwater, the clatter of pots, children's voices, all mingling and interrupting one another until the whole street sounded as if it belonged to a single enormous family. As I passed each neighbor's house, each window lit up so that I could see bright flowers in vases and books on bookshelves and rooms full of people moving back and forth. But when I reached my own house I didn't hear anything; the lights were out and my house was as quiet as if no one lived there.

Beside me, my mother sighed and pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead.

Sometimes I wonder if it was only to break the silence
between us that I reminded her of what I had seen two and a half weeks before, on Thursday, July 20th, at 4:44 in the afternoon. Sometimes I wonder if it was as simple as that. But not very often anymore.

My mother sighed again. “What do you have to say?” she said at last, reaching up to switch on the small lamp beside her. “Because I have the feeling you want to say something. So if you do, say it now. Otherwise I'm going to bed.”

Perhaps, perhaps—that careful word again—perhaps I might never have said anything at all if she hadn't challenged me that evening. But then again, I know this isn't true. I had never been so prepared to do anything in my life.

“What?” she said, looking finally at me. “What is it?”

Though my fingers were trembling, I opened my notebook and showed her the page dated July 20th where, at 4:44 in the afternoon, not a minute sooner or later thanks to my water-resistant wristwatch, parting gift from my father, I had seen Mr. Green's brown Dodge drive by two hours before he usually got home. It was right there in my notebook. It's there still.

“What day did you say?” she whispered harshly.

I pointed to the book. Then turning each page slowly, almost reverently as I went along, I showed my mother every detail I had recorded about Mr. Green and all the newspaper clippings I had saved.

There was the black comb found at the murder site, a black comb that could be exactly like the one Mr. Green used so frequently.
And the police's theory that the assailant was left-handed, just like Mr. Green. There was the elderly woman on Ridge Road who had witnessed a boy talking to a balding man in a car just before five o'clock; the bag boy at the mall, who had possibly seen a brown Dodge drive out of the parking lot approximately at the same time as the murder would have occurred; the Band-Aid on Mr. Green's chin that day. There was the scratching and biting the boy was said to have done.

And there was this clipping, which I had pasted all by itself on a page and framed with a heavy red crayon border. It began: “Police investigating the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Boyd Arthur Ellison of Spring Hill believe someone living in the vicinity may be responsible for …”

We sat together in the living room, within that brief circle of lamplight, and I turned the pages of my notebook while my mother drank one and then another glass of wine.

“Stop it,” she said finally, not looking at me. “This is crazy. It's crazy and mean. And I don't want to hear any more.”

“Wait,” I said.

But she got up and went into the kitchen.

For a few moments I sat staring into the empty fireplace. It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn't believe my story. It was all there; I had saved everything. Anyone could see what a good job I had done. Outside the Sperlings' cat began to yowl. It was a low, ugly noise, and after a few moments of listening to it my face grew hot and I felt like throwing something out of the window at the cat, a mug or a
paperweight, something that would hurt. I flipped through my notebook again, riffling the pages so they fanned my face. I turned to the page where I had taped Detective Small's card, rescued from underneath a begonia pot. After that there was nothing else on any of the pages, just thin blue lines running across them, and one thin red line running down each left-hand side.

From the kitchen I heard a glass break. “You know what,” my mother said in a narrow voice, coming quickly back into the living room, her hands fisted by her sides. “I'm tired. I'm tired of you. I'm tired of myself. I'm tired of everything.”

“No you're not,” I tried to say.

“Oh yes, I am. Sick and tired.” And as furious as she suddenly seemed to be, she did look tired, even sick, standing there with the kitchen light behind her, outlined like one of those terrible sidewalk drawings that show where the crime victim lay. Her shoulders slumped and although I couldn't see her face well with the light in back of her, it seemed to me that it was shut and blank, as if she had already left me and gone to bed.

“But I haven't told you it all.” I was beginning to whine.

“I don't want to hear anything more.”

“But I know he did it,” I said, kicking the coffee table with my good foot.

“You don't know,” my mother said, folding her arms as she turned away and headed toward the staircase. “You only think you do.”

“I do know.”

“You only want to know. That's all it is, Marsha,” she said bitterly, turning back to me for a moment, her mouth a sharp line. And suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world to make her stay, to keep her from vanishing up those stairs and leaving me alone.

“Mommy,” I cried, holding out a hand. “Wait. I have something else to tell you.”

“My God. Stop it. Just stop it,” she almost shrieked from the bottom of the stairs, her hands flying to her ears. “Why can't you ever just stop it?”

I heard her run up to her bedroom, her footsteps falling like stones on the staircase. The Sperlings' cat started yowling again, this time closer to the window near where I was sitting. It was moaning and snarling at the same time, sometimes dropping to a guttural murmur, then pitching upward to something like a scream, making such a nasty, sad, desperate noise that I banged the window shut, then limped into the kitchen.

I laid my notebook on the table, next to the telephone and my mother's Peterman-Wolff vinyl logbook, and sat down. Upstairs my mother walked back and forth in her room, and as I sat there staring at her logbook I wondered what she was doing. Maybe she was packing a suitcase. Once or twice something fell on the floor above me, a book, a shoe. A door opened and closed.