The Neighbor (3 page)

Bad things happened to good people when invisible men or their equivalent were around. I quickly left the house, pulled the front door shut behind me, and joined Amalia as she descended the porch steps and hurried along the front walk.

As we passed through the gate, I said, “What was that about?”

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“When do you want to talk about it?”

“I’ll let you know,” she assured me as she turned toward home.

I said, “I guess we’ll have to eat those cookies ourselves.”

“Yeah. She doesn’t want them with walnuts.”

“And he doesn’t want them with chocolate chips. And I don’t think the new neighbor has any interest in cookies at all.”

“There isn’t a new neighbor,” Amalia declared as we hurried alongside our house, under the limbs of the twisted sycamore.

“There’s something,” I said, glancing over the fence at the Clockenwall place.

Sitting in my room, at the window, watching the house next door through a gap in the otherwise closed draperies, I tried to remember everything I knew about Rupert Clockenwall. He had taught English at Jefferson Middle School for forty years. He was scheduled to retire at sixty-two, but he died a month before the end of the school year.

During his career, he twice received the city’s Best Teacher of the Year award. He had never been married. Some people thought he might be gay, but he had never been seen in the company of a companion of that persuasion. Those were the days when people were ignorant enough to think that all gay men minced or lisped, or both, and had no bones in their wrists. Mr. Clockenwall exhibited none of that behavior. He never went away on vacations. He said that he was a bad traveler and a homebody. He always declined with regrets when he was invited to a neighbor’s house, and to express his gratitude for the invitation, he sent flowers. He never spoke an unkind word about anyone. His voice was soft and melodious. He had a warm smile. He liked to putter in the yard, and he grew amazing roses. Around the house, he favored Hush Puppies, khaki slacks, and long-sleeved plaid shirts; cardigans on cooler days. He’d once found an injured bird and nursed it back to health, releasing it when it could fly again. He always bought Girl Scout Cookies, usually ten or twelve boxes. When the local troop sold magazine subscriptions, he bought a lot of those, too, and when once they peddled hand-woven pot holders, he’d taken a dozen. He had a soft spot in his heart for Girl Scouts. He had no pets. He said that he was allergic to cats; dogs frightened him. He stood about five foot nine. He weighed maybe a hundred sixty pounds. Washed-out blue eyes. Pale-blond hair, going white. His face was no more memorable than a blank sheet of typing paper.

Rupert Clockenwall seemed to have been too bland a soul to come back from the grave on a haunt. The more that I thought about what had happened in his house earlier, the more certain I became that I had misunderstood it. After an hour, when I saw nothing of interest through the gap in my bedroom draperies, I went downstairs to help Amalia with her chores.

We worked together for half an hour, making the beds in our parents’ room, using the vacuum cleaner, dusting, before I asked if she was ready to talk about what had happened.
She said no.

Forty minutes later, in the kitchen, after we had toted that barge and lifted that bale, as we were peeling carrots and potatoes for dinner, I asked her again, and she said, “Nothing happened.”

“Well, something did.”

Focused intently on the potato that she was skinning, Amalia said, “Something happened only if one or both of us insists it did. If both of us decide nothing happened, then nothing happened. You know what they say—if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to see it, then it didn’t fall. Okay, all right, I know that’s not how it goes. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to
hear
it, maybe it didn’t make a sound. But my version is a logical corollary. Entirely logical. No tree fell in the Clockenwall house, so there was nothing to hear or see. You’re twelve, so maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but when you’ve had a few more years of math and a course in logic, you’ll understand. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If nothing happened, what is it you don’t want to talk about?”

“Exactly,” she said.

“Are you scared or something?”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing happened.”

“Well, at least now we’re talking about it,” I said.

She threw a ribbon of potato skin at me, and it stuck to my face, and I said, “Sibling abuse,” and she said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

That evening, after we washed and dried the dinner dishes, but before the old man could tell me to take it to the garage, I went out there with my saxophone, while Amalia sat at the kitchen table, being smoked at by our mother and made to appreciate the reasons for the dreadful inadequacy of the mashed potatoes that she had served with the roast chicken, even though both our parents had taken second helpings.

I didn’t start playing right away, but listened to some cool big-band stuff. We had a cheap stereo in a corner of the garage and some records, including a number of vinyl platters from the 1930s that we’d found for next to nothing in a used-record store. I was in the mood for the band called Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. Several times during the ’30s and early 1940s, they almost got famous, but never quite. Now, some thirty years later, I was a fan of their tenor saxist, Dick Wilson, and of Ted Donnelly, one of the best swing-band trombonists ever, though it was Mary Lou Williams on piano that fully captivated me. I sat on a crate and let “Froggy Bottom” wash over me twice and then “Walkin’ and Swingin’ ” before Amalia arrived.

We listened to “Roll ’Em,” which Mary Lou Williams had written, as good as big-band boogie-woogie gets, and when it was over, my always-energetic sister wasn’t jumping or finger-popping or in any way stoked by the music. She hadn’t brought her clarinet. We weren’t going to play together.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

She stepped to the single small window, which faced toward our deceased neighbor’s house, and the distilled sunlight of that early June evening gilded her lovely face. “There was this time I was in the backyard, standing at the picnic table, working on an art project for school. I was really into it, and after a while I looked up and saw Clockenwall just the other side of the fence, staring at me. He was very … intense. I said hi, and he didn’t respond, and he had this look, it almost seemed like hatred, but it wasn’t just that. The day was warm, I was wearing shorts and a tank top, and suddenly I felt as if … as if I was naked. He wasn’t anything like he’d always been before. He wasn’t Teacher of the Year, that’s for sure. He licked his lips. I mean, he made this huge production of licking them, staring at me so bold, I can’t even describe how bold,
with this
need
. Maybe there
was
hatred on his face, hatred and rage, but not entirely that, if you know what I mean.”

I knew what she meant, all right. “What did you do?”

“I picked up my art supplies and took them inside.”

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

“I was too embarrassed to talk about it. Anyway, who was I going to tell? Dad was at work. When he comes home, he doesn’t want anyone to get between him and that first beer. Mom was glued to afternoon game shows. I’d have rather put my hand in an alligator’s mouth than distract her from Bill Cullen and
The Price Is Right
.”

“You could have told me,” I said.

“This was four years ago. You were eight, sweetie. You didn’t need to hear about something like that when you were only eight.”

“And you were only thirteen,” I said. “Man, what kind of creep was he?”

She turned from the garage window, and that square of golden sunshine backdropped her head. “It happened again, about six months later. I took some trash out to the alleyway to put it in the can. He wasn’t there at first, but when I turned to come back to the house, he was right behind me, like three feet away. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he, but he did that lip-licking thing again. And he … he put one hand on his crotch. I dodged past him. He didn’t reach for me or anything, and after that, nothing ever happened again.”

“I hate him,” I declared. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

She sat on a wheeled stool near the crate on which I perched, and she stared at her hands, which were clenched in her lap. “When we were over there today, I really heard him, Malcolm.”

“All right.”

“I really did. He said ‘Sweet Melinda.’ And then when we were in the foyer, looking up the front stairs, he said my name … my name and something filthy.”

She raised her head and met my eyes. This was no hoax. I didn’t know what to say.

“Stay away from that house, Malcolm.”

“Why would I want to go there again?”

“Stay away.”

“I will. Are you kidding? I’m creeped out. Jeez.”

“I mean it. Stay away.”

“Well, you better stay away, too.”

“I intend to stay away,” she said. “I know what I heard, and I never want to hear it again.”

“I didn’t know you believed in ghosts,” I said.

“I didn’t. I do now. Stay away.”

We sat in silence for a while. At last I said I needed to listen to something that would soothe away the heebie-jeebies, and instead of one of the old vinyl platters, I put an album on the turntable, a collection of Glenn Miller’s best-known numbers. We liked rock ’n’ roll, but at heart we were throwbacks to another musical era.

Amalia listened to “In the Mood,” but just before the band swung into “Moonlight Serenade,” she said, “This isn’t going to settle my nerves. I’m going to bed and read. I’ve got this novel.” At the side door to the garage, she looked back and said, “Don’t stay out here after dark.”

“I always stay here after dark.”

“But not tonight,” she said. “Not for the next few nights.”

She was clearly frightened. I nodded. “Okay.”

After she had gone, I listened to “Moonlight Serenade” and then to “American Patrol,” after which I lifted the phonograph needle and returned it to the beginning of the album.

As “In the Mood” began, I left the garage and went into the alleyway. About forty minutes of daylight remained. I walked to the back gate of the Clockenwall property.

I was not a particularly brave lad of twelve. I well knew my limitations, and I was aware that if I ever got into a fight with another boy, I was less likely to beat him up than I was to knock myself out. In a confrontation with something supernatural, I would not fare well against an adversary more threatening than Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Nevertheless, I was compelled to cross the backyard of the Clockenwall place and climb the steps to the rear porch, because I loved my sister more than I loved myself, and I felt that it had fallen to me somehow to resolve this bizarre situation. I had never seen Amalia a fraction as disturbed as she had been when telling me about the lecherous teacher. She was fearless and resolute and more competent than anyone else I had ever known. I was loath to see her diminished by fear, and I was angered and depressed when I thought of her retreating to her bedroom and hiding behind a book, because that’s what it seemed to me she was doing, although I would never have told her so.

When I crossed the porch of the Clockenwall house, I was not surprised to find the back door ajar, as the front door had been earlier. Stepping into the kitchen, where less sunlight penetrated than previously, I boldly switched on the overhead lights. If the spirit of a dead man had returned home a month after his funeral, there was no way to prowl his house without his knowledge; I mean, surely a ghost is omniscient as concerns what happens in the place that it haunts.

The dish smeared with dry egg yolk and the dirty flatware were on the table, across which toast crumbs were scattered as before. Clockenwall had not returned to clean up after himself.

Switching on lights, I went through the house to the front stairs, where something invisible to the eye had earlier descended. Facing the first flight, I stood listening, but there was only silence so deep that the house might not have been located in the city any longer, might have been enveloped by some bubble in space—time and set adrift in eternity.

At last I thought to ask myself what I hoped to accomplish in that place. I wasn’t an exorcist. My family didn’t even attend a church. My parents weren’t atheists; they were just
indifferent to the issues of God and an afterlife, as they were indifferent to everything except what could be eaten, drunk, smoked, and watched on television without inspiring too much thinking. I had no good answer to the question that I’d asked myself; therefore, with what passed for logic in a twelve-year-old mind, I decided that I had been brought to that place by intuition and that I should trust it as a dog trusted its sense of smell.

When suddenly I heard a rapid pounding, I cringed and retreated from the staircase, but only until I realized that I had become aware of my heart drumming. Disappointed in myself, chagrined, I thrust my shoulders back and lifted my head and, telling myself the incredible lie that the Pomerantz family tree branched broadly with generations of warriors, I ascended to the second floor.

One of the good things about being twelve or younger is that you tend to believe that you’ll live forever. Therefore, you take stupid risks with little hesitation, and sometimes the risk pays off. Except when it doesn’t.

Upstairs, door by door, room by room, I searched for what I did not know, trusting my intuition to lead me to some revelation, some knowledge or instrument with which Clockenwall’s spirit could be sent back where it belonged, if in fact it had returned from the Other Side to leer at my sister. In the Teacher of the Year’s bedroom stood a desk where someone else might have put a vanity, and I was drawn toward it as an iron filing to a magnet.

Then a disturbing thing happened. With no memory of having sat down or of having opened any of the drawers, I was in the desk chair and had before me a scrapbook containing newspaper articles about a girl named Melinda Lee Harmony.
Sweet Melinda
. She’d been a middle-school student who, three months before her thirteenth birthday, disappeared while walking home after classes. Some of the clippings were dated—all from 1949, eighteen years earlier. I pored through them with growing dread, but I couldn’t stop turning pages, as though I had forfeited control of my body. The police, assisted by a large contingent of citizen volunteers, had searched the school grounds, surrounding neighborhoods, and Balfour Park, which lay along the route that the girl usually took from school to home. They found no trace of her. A reward was offered, never claimed. Members of her anguished family, her pastor, and a few teachers at her school spoke highly of her, this gentle and intelligent and charming child of great promise. One of the teachers was Rupert Clockenwall. Three photographs had been provided to the newspapers, all taken soon before she had gone missing. She had been a pretty girl, blond and
slim, with a gamine smile, and as I stared at her, I heard myself say, “Such a delectable little tease.”