A Crime in the Neighborhood (22 page)

He vanished through his back door, rematerializing a minute later carrying a plastic pitcher and a package of hotdog buns, which he set on the card table. Busily, he stacked everything onto the table, then with a final flourish turned on the radio, adjusting its dial until he found a folk-music station.

Where have you gone?
bleated a nasal male voice, accompanied by a train whistle.
Will I see you again?
Mr. Green stepped back to assess the card table. Then he shifted the paper napkins beside the paper plates and lined up the package of plastic forks beside the pitcher. He stepped back again. A moment later he moved the hotdog buns beside the paper plates. He fiddled with the radio dial.

An orange balloon rolled against his heel. Just then a lawn mower started up in the next yard with a hard stutter that leapt to a snarl. Mr. Green raised his head at the noise and frowned.

“Marsha,” breathed my mother into my ear. “Get back from the window.”

By four-thirty that afternoon, Mr. Green was sitting in one of his four folding chairs. He got up once to open the bag of
charcoal that leaned against his barbecue pit. He shook out some coals, then closed the bag, carefully folding the top over twice. Then he picked up a can of lighter fluid and squirted fluid onto the coals, lit a match, and dropped it into the barbecue pit. The match went out.

He lit another, then another. At last flames flickered up from within the barbecue pit, licking almost to his outstretched hand before settling into the coals.

After a minute or two, he leaned over the barbecue pit to inspect the fire with a dissatisfied expression. He was just picking up the can of lighter fluid again when my mother, who had gone from cleaning out her closet to cleaning the upstairs bathroom, still in the pink mini-dress, came up behind me and pressed her palms against the windowsill.

“It's lit,” she called down. “You just have to give the coals a chance to get hot.”

Mr. Green stared up at us, squinting into the sun. His face immediately lost its dissatisfied expression.

He waved, then he put down the can of lighter fluid, and before my mother could call out to him that she wouldn't be able to come to his cookout—due now to begin in a quarter of an hour—before she could say that she was so sorry, but she had a last-minute emergency, one she couldn't avoid, such a shame; before she could even clear her throat, he had disappeared once again inside his house.

Plucking at a sunflower button, she stepped past me on her way to the doorway, pausing for a moment before going
downstairs. “I've seen people burn themselves very badly with lighter fluid,” she told me. “People who think the fire has gone out. They squirt on more lighter fluid and the fire catches the stream and comes right back at them and blows up the can.” Fretfully, she touched her forehead with her wrist.

“By the way,” she said. “I've been meaning to tell you. I got an offer on the house.” Her bedroom smelled of stale perfume and the banana skin I had left on the nightstand. The air glinted with dust motes. She turned away, and I watched the slim slope of her bare shoulder as she walked toward the door. “It's a good offer,” I heard her say. “At least it's reasonable.”

She stepped out into the hall, where she hesitated for a moment. “Well, I don't know about you, but I'm going to start fixing something for dinner.” A cloud blew across the sun, darkening the room. I closed my eyes, then opened them again.

Mr. Green reemerged into his yard. Once more he sat in a folding chair, crossing his legs this time. Faint music twangled from the transistor radio perched on the card table. From where I sat, his reddening bald spot looked as red as a target in the late afternoon sun. As if he sensed that his bald spot was under scrutiny, he reached up and combed a few strands of hair over it with his fingers.

A moth fluttered palely behind him like a scrap of torn paper. He lifted his arm and angled his wrist to glance at his watch, then took hold of the folding chair's metal armrests.

He was still sitting in his folding chair at a quarter to six.
Downstairs my mother had begun to fry up hamburger meat; the sound of it sputtering in the pan floated upstairs. The refrigerator door opened and shut.

Outside, Mr. Green had not moved from his position in his chair for close to half an hour. He stared straight ahead, both hands gripping the metal armrests as if the chair were moving at high speed and he feared it might crash right into the barbecue pit and catapult him into the next yard. Gnats swarmed in a little gray wreath around his head. Up in the trees, locusts rattled and buzzed like a shaken tin can full of beads.

A song ended on his radio and another began. From the Sperlings' house came the faraway tinkle of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Overhead a jet boomed on its way from National Airport, momentarily stilling everything else. “Lu-ann,” Mrs. Lauder was calling when the jet had passed. “Lu-ann.” A screen door slammed. Someone was bouncing a basketball a few houses away, maybe one of the Reade brothers.
Kadoom, kadoom
, then the jangle of the ball hitting the hoop. From across the street, the Morrises' terriers barked twice in unison. Mr. Green gazed straight ahead in his aluminum folding chair, as distantly preoccupied as an astronaut. I watched him grow smaller and smaller, as if the longer he sat waiting in his chair, the more that happened in the rest of the world to exclude him.

As soon as he caught sight of my mother walking toward him across the grass, Mr. Green let go of the chair's metal armrests
and clasped his hands in his lap. Then he limped up from his chair—one of his legs must have gone to sleep—and took a stagger or two toward her.

When she drew close, he raised a hand. She was barefoot, and still wearing the pink mini-dress.

“This is for you,” she said, and lifted a pineapple toward him.

He dropped his hand and stared at the pineapple with grave surprise. Then he took it from her and placed it on the card table.

“Thank you,” he said. “Please sit down.”

He pointed to a chair, and with an awkward half-curtsy, my mother sat down and then looked at the jumbled card table, on which her pineapple now rested, like a small startled head, amid packages of potato chips and hotdog buns.

Mr. Green sat down in the folding chair beside hers, which looked unstable beneath him, as though he had neglected to pull the legs out completely. He rubbed one hand over the other. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Oh thank you,” she said, as if a glass of wine were what she most wanted in the world.

After pouring her a plastic cup of white wine, Mr. Green hurried over to his barbecue pit to wave a newspaper at the coals. Then he hurried back to the card table to pick up a bowl of potato chips, which he offered to my mother. He seemed relieved to see her take a small handful. He offered her more wine.

“I'm fine,” she said, and lifted her cup to show him that it was still full. “I can only stay a little while.”

He nodded abstractedly. “I think,” he said, “that I should put on the hamburg. Or would you like a hotdog?”

I could tell that my mother was about to say that she didn't want either, but she slapped at a mosquito instead. He had returned to the card table to fiddle once again with the radio dial and must have accidently readjusted the volume, because a voice suddenly blared, “Get the
lead
out! Drive the
clean
gasoline.” He glanced back at my mother over his shoulder, his smile frozen.

“I'll have whatever you're having,” she said.

“You could have hamburg or a hotdog,” he offered, turning off the radio altogether. “I have everything.”

He stared at the heaped card table with his hands hanging at his sides. But when she made a movement as if to get up from her chair, he straightened and gave her an almost haughty glance down his nose. “I guess I must have wrote the date down wrong on the invitations.”

“Oh. I'm sure—these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. I heard about a party once—no one came, you know, and it was because the hostess put down the wrong
month
on the invitation. April instead of May. Can you imagine? It was—” She stopped abruptly, perhaps hearing the hitch of hysteria in her own voice.

“I think I would like a little more wine, thank you,” she added after a moment, and held out her cup.

As he bent to refill her cup, their eyes met and she smiled up at him. “It's still early,” she told him. “They might still come.”

“Yes,” he said.

Two stories above them, I propped my chin on the back of a hand, leaning on the windowsill. Had she remembered to turn off the burner from under the pan of hamburger meat? Had she noticed, on her way out, if the freezer door was ajar?

When I look back I don't have trouble understanding how my mother got herself into Mr. Green's yard that night. All the time she had been preparing dinner she must have been glancing out the kitchen window, watching him as he sat alone in his unsteady chair, stiff khaki shirt fading into the early evening. I suppose it was the cumulative effect of that vision that finally made her fumble toward the door as if the hamburger meat had already burned, as if the whole house were filled with smoke. Because as I recall it now there
was
something dire in the sight of Mr. Green that evening. Something powerful enough to send my mother rushing from the house, barefoot, half-dressed, pausing only to snatch up that pineapple from where it sat beside the toaster. Turning from the complicated astronomy of her own kitchen, she must have gazed out and seen Mr. Green clutching the armrests of his folding chair, a lonely planet in a dark green yard surrounded by a constellation of colored balloons and paper plates. Pity wouldn't have much to do with her decision to leave the house. It was a kind of rage, I imagine, and a kind of fear.
What must have made my mother's eyes sting that summer evening, what must have made her almost run to the kitchen door, had to be the fury of mortal fear—the fear that comes from understanding all at once that you are by yourself in a vast world, and that one day something worse than anything that has ever happened before will happen, you will get sick and die, or be killed, even your children may die, and no one will be able to stop it, if anyone even tries to stop it, and you will be left alone.

As my mother stared out the kitchen window, she must have seen that such a thing could happen to her. It would happen to her. Meanwhile, it was happening to someone else.

Of course I could be making too much of my mother's defection that night, when she left my dinner unmade to present herself like a fruit basket to Mr. Green. It's possible that she simply empathized with his freakishness. It's even possible that she liked the idea of being a better Samaritan than Mrs. Lauder. Or maybe she only wanted me to know how tentatively we were bound together those days, she and I. That she could choose, just like my father, just like that. It's also possible that it was a confusion of all of these feelings that sent her running bare-legged across the lawn, in full view of the entire neighborhood, wearing a mini-dress, carrying a pineapple.

Now Mr. Green stood before her with a glass jug of wine, bending at the waist like a waiter.

“You know,” she said brightly, “after all—I'm sorry—I don't think I should have any more.” She withdrew her cup.

“I have a lot of wine.” He lifted the jug and gazed at her until she held out her cup again.

After a bit he sat down again beside her, drinking nothing himself. In fact, his hands seemed peculiarly empty; he held them in front of him as if he were wearing rubber gloves.

Across the street the Morrises' terriers began barking again. I wondered how many of the neighbors were watching.

“My husband—” my mother said suddenly; then she gave a shrill laugh that echoed the barking dogs. “My husband. Larry. Larry is my husband's name. I'm sorry you haven't had a chance to meet him—Larry. You know he hasn't been home for a while. In fact, he's traveling. Otherwise you would—you will—” She lifted her paper cup to her lips.

Mr. Green remained quietly attentive in his chair, his face and khaki chest presented toward my mother like a blackboard. Under his shirtsleeve paused the mermaid, waiting for him to flex his arm and send her dancing.

My mother reached down to set her cup on the grass. As she leaned over she must have smelled his musky onion scent and, looking up, seen the shaving rash burning on his throat, maybe even glimpsed the sly tip of the mermaid's tail. She cleared her own throat and sat up. “I am separated—as you may have guessed. My husband—”

She paused for so long it seemed that she had forgotten what she meant to say.

At last Mr. Green said, “Your husband—?”

“Left me.”

“Left you—?” Mr. Green stirred in his chair.

“It's all right,” she said, which was the same thing she had said a few days before to the detective.

Perhaps it was the memory of Detective Small standing on our front porch, emblazoned blue against wicker and a blear of plants, that made her lean too far over in her chair at just that moment, reaching for the paper cup she had just set on the grass, and tip sideways. In another moment she would have gone over. But Mr. Green suddenly reached out and grabbed the side of her chair, righting her again.

His hand touched her arm. A vivid ache sang through me, like cold water against a sensitive tooth. When my mother looked up, I saw that she had felt it, too.

For a minute they sat completely still.

“I really should be getting back.”

“Don't go yet.”

Light slowly drained out of the backyard as the shadow from the copper beech edged across the patio and over the chairs. Lit rectangles shone in houses down the street; here and there someone's television set shimmered blue. From the card table, one of Mr. Green's bubbled-glass candle holders glowed red. The streetlights had come on, each with its yellow funnel and spiral of moths.