“So you working on a new picture, huh?” Calvin asked. He pronounced it
“Uh huh. What’s the matter, you didn’t like that one?”
Calvin dragged, thin chest puffing. Volunteering nothing.
“Talk to me. How come you’re out trying to torch buildings in your own neighborhood?” Surely the kid had to realize that these rowhouses, with no airshafts between and sharing common walls, could act like dominoes in a fire. Set one off, they could all go.
Calvin chuckled. Too old, that sound. “You wouldn’t understand. You not from here.”
Calvin’s face in the streetlight, too old, like his laugh, too knowing. Too adult far too soon. In this part of town, make it to eight and you’re a combat veteran. Hit twelve and you’re qualified for squad leader.
“Try me anyway,” Leo said.
After a long moment of contemplation, “I done it for somebody.”
“Who’s that?”
An even longer pause, then, “Bricklord.”
The name was dimly familiar. Bricklord. Street gang, maybe. With his age obviously shy of double digits, Calvin probably wasn’t old enough to claim active honors: tote the blade, the gun, wear the colors, sell the crack. He probably had older brothers, or cousins, and most gang bangers had peewee chapters, training grounds for the up- and-comers, the new blood.
Bricklord. Maybe the street name of a gang leader.
“So how come Bricklord wants you to burn down your neighbors’ home?” Leo offered the bribe of a few more cigarettes to loosen his tongue, but all it bought was the shake of the kid’s head.
Leo gave him the pack.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Calvin said again. “You just not
“Gotta go,” said Calvin, and Leo did not stop him when he took sudden flight. Tattered sneakers flapping across asphalt as he darted into the street, and by the time Leo hit the mouth of the alley, Calvin was nowhere to be seen.
Leo headed for his original post in a quick stroll. Passing darkened stoops where figures sat, sharing wine and spicy food and the free time born of unemployment. Passing cars lined bumper-to-bumper at curbside, some blasting music, others sprouting legs dangling from open windows, still others as permanent as planters in suburbia. In the air that lingering miasma of failure, longing, discontent, of chances lost and opportunities never arrived. It was worse than the reek of uncollected refuse, because it was everywhere.
White faces were a minority here, this neighborhood among the city’s forgotten. But hate his color or not, nobody messed with Leo. Six-six and two hundred seventy pounds, shaggy-headed and full-bearded. He walked with impunity, back to the spot where he had been painting.
His canvas satchel of spray cans was gone, of course. A moment’s flicker of self-reproach, no more. At least the thieves had left his latest work unscathed.
Leo stood on the inner edge of a lot once occupied by a building that for years had threatened self-destruction. The job had been safely finished by a demolition crew hired by an urban renewal commission, and the lot cleared. Only the scorched earth of inner city remained, naked and blighted. The adjacent wall had been left blank, devoid of windows, as sheer a face as the Eiger. Before the plug had been pulled on the whole program, the renewal commission had at least had the wall whitewashed. The newness had quickly faded into a dingy hue to match the gray sky, but it was still more agreeable than the endless expanses of grimy brick.
And it made a much better canvas.
This one was nearly finished. Twin roses graced the side of the building, each bloom a full fifteen feet across. Shades of red and pink blended and merged to create a startlingly detailed depiction of petals yawning in the fullness of bloom. Two thorny stems curved gracefully toward ground, intertwining along the bricks and reaching for asphalt. They’d get there before Leo was finished. He was close enough now to work with both feet on the ground. The higher work had necessitated the painstaking task of securing himself with nylon rope and harness, and rappelling from the building’s roof.
With his paints gone, he could only hang up his smock for the night.
His final act was to haul a battered trash can from the building’s stoop out to the curb. Pickup in a couple days. He had already dragged it outside after investigating a shattering of glass — Calvin accidentally dropping a large jar — and finding the can stuffed with gas-soaked rags. Wedged beneath wooden stairs as Calvin fumbled with matches. The can reeked and fumed, but better this hazard sit curbside than in the building.
Homeward, then, three blocks and no scenic changes. World without end, world without help, world too low on hope.
Leo lived in a narrow, three-story rowhouse, like a brick cracker box turned on end. After quadruple-locking the door behind him, he paced into the kitchen, flicked on the light, snatched a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Then followed the creaking staircase up, to kick back on the unmade double bed.
That empty left side — he still thought he could see in it the depression from her final night here, smell her scent. There were still hairs on the other pillow, too long to be his own. But for the past month he had shared this house only with the schools of silverfish that channeled along the baseboards, and the troupe of roaches that tapdanced into hiding at the first mention of light.
That empty half of the bed, a minimalist monument to his own naivety. See how far my ideals have carried me?
He sat. He drank. He longed for more stupor than he would allow himself.
Soon, he slept.
