Urban Gothic

“Oh, shit . . .” Leo turned around and stared at the group. His eyes were wide. “Toward the house.”

Perry sat his beer down. “Well, then it’s got to be the cops.”

“Let’s go outside and watch,” Jamal suggested. “Might see some shit go down.”

The boys stood, but Lawanda raised her hand, motioning at them to sit back down again.

“Just hold up,” she said. “We don’t know what’s gonna happen. If there’s shooting or something, then y’all are safer in here.”

Perry jumped to his feet. “Oh, let them go look. Ain’t no harm gonna come to them, long as they don’t go down there.”

And besides, he thought. It will get them out of our house that much sooner.

Lawanda scowled at him. Perry scowled back. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Perry’s will broke. He turned away with a sigh.

“Come on, y’all,” Leo said, moving to the door. “We took up too much of your time already, Mrs. Watkins. We should get going. Thanks for letting us use your phone.”

“Boys!” Lawanda leaped up from her chair, flustered. “I really wish you’d stay inside.”

Leo glanced from Perry to his friends to Lawanda, and then shook his head.

“That’s okay. We’ll be alright. Like Mr. Watkins said, ain’t nothing gonna happen as long as we stay up here.”

“Shit,” Markus muttered. “On this block, something can happen no matter where we stand. Motherfuckers be tripping twenty-four seven.”

Lawanda put her hands on her hips, pressed her lips together tightly and nodded at Perry.

“You go out there and wait with them.”

Perry opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. He’d seen the expression on his wife’s face before. If he defied her, he’d be sleeping on the couch again. He hated the couch. It fucked with his hip and his arthritis. He was defeated and he knew it. Worse, so did Lawanda. Shoulders slumping, he walked toward the door and followed the teens out onto the stoop. The strange van was just passing by the house at the end of the block. They watched the brake lights flash as it slowed. Then the driver shut off the headlights. A moment later, the vehicle disappeared into the shadows. There were clouds covering the moon, and that end of the street was shrouded in gloom.

“That’s weird,” Leo mumbled. “What the hell’s he doing?”

The street was silent. It made Perry uncomfortable. The street was never quiet. He glanced at Leo and his friends and noticed from their stance that the stillness was making them nervous, too.

Then gunshots rang out from a few blocks away, and they all relaxed.

“Think he’s driving around?” Markus asked. “Scoping shit out before he goes up to the door?”

Perry shrugged. The van was still out of sight.

“Whatever he’s doing,” Leo muttered, “he’d better hurry his ass up. They been inside there a long time now.”

The other boys murmured their agreement. Perry nodded, but didn’t respond. Personally, he figured it was already too late for the kids inside the house.

***

With one hand on the steering wheel, Paul Synuria eased the van toward the curb. His other hand clutched a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee that he’d bought at a rest stop along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He’d spiked it with a splash of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey, the half-empty bottle of which was wedged under his seat. With the headlights off, he couldn’t see very well; there were no working streetlights or other homes near this abandoned house, and a bank of thick, slow-moving clouds covered the almost-full moon. His front driver’s side tire bumped up over the curb. The van shook and vibrated, and then slammed back down to the road again, jostling him. Coffee spilled all over his crotch. Cursing, Paul put the van in park. Then he set the coffee in the cup holder and rummaged around until he found a fastfood bag with a napkin inside. He wiped and blotted his pants. It looked like he’d pissed himself. At least the coffee hadn’t been hot.

On the van’s stereo, Slipknot’s “New Abortion” gave way to Jimmy Buffet. Paul liked to tell people that his eclectic musical tastes reflected that he was a man of contradictions. He’d say that he was the only Maggoty Parrothead around. But the truth was that he’d never heard Slipknot until a few months ago, when he found a carrying case full of compact discs at a construction site he’d been sneaking around. All the CDs were heavy metal—or what passed for heavy metal these days. No big hair. Just vocals that sounded as if Cookie Monster were fronting a band. He’d sold the stash at a pawn shop, but had held on to the Slipknot discs. He liked their melodies, and their shtick reminded him of KISS, from back in the day. Their music pumped him up before he scavenged a site.

Like now.

Paul turned off the engine so that the idling motor wouldn’t attract any unwanted attention. Then he blotted at the coffee again and shook his head, wondering, not for the first time, how he’d come to this. He’d once been the site coordinator for a group home that served people who had mental illnesses. He’d loved the job. Sure, it was stressful sometimes, but that tension had evaporated each day when he came home to his family—his wife, Lisa, and their two kids, Evette and Sabastian. But then the group home had been bought out by a bigger corporation, and they brought in their own people to fill many of the positions. After fourteen and a half years, Paul found himself out of work.

When his unemployment ran out, Paul still hadn’t found a job. There were no other group homes in his area, and when he searched beyond his region, he found that many of those facilities were also downsizing. Desperate, he’d taken a job at a metal scrap yard.

And that had led to this.

At first, Paul had been amazed. He’d had no idea that scrap metal recycling was such a big business. It was a booming, sixty-five-billion-dollar industry, thanks to an increasing global economy and the current social movement toward environmental awareness. Scrap metal was America’s largest import to China, after electronic components. Before getting the job at the scrap yard, Paul had always envisioned recycling centers as something out of Sanford and Son reruns. The truth was something different. There was money to be made in junk.

Especially on the black market.

He’d started simply enough. Legally, too. He’d been at the yard for a week. On his first day off, Paul explored his basement and the corners of his garage and toolshed. The assorted, castaway debris of their lives had been tossed into cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates, garbage bags, and footlockers and left forgotten in these places. Paul was pleasantly surprised by the amount of recyclable material he discovered—aluminum soda can tabs (saved for some long-forgotten charity but never turned in), brass fittings from an old cutting torch he no longer owned, bits of copper wire that he’d saved from various home wiring jobs, copper and brass pipe fittings, and other assorted junk. He’d hauled it all to the scrap yard the following Monday and made enough cash to cover one of his and Lisa’s payments on their auto loan.

So Paul went looking for more. Before this, he’d never broken the law. Sure, he had a few unpaid parking tickets, and there was a citation for public drunkenness when he’d been in college, but that was all. He took to blackmarket metal thievery like it had been what he was meant to do all along. Looking back on it, maybe he’d been bitter about how things had turned out—giving most of his adult life to a company only to be tossed aside like so much garbage. He told himself he was doing it for Lisa and the kids—the money he brought in was more than he’d ever made in his life, and although they didn’t know how he was earning it, they were happy with the results. But the truth was, he enjoyed it. After a life behind a desk, a life of board meetings and memos and stress, being a metal thief was exciting. Liberating.

He broke into construction sites, new homes that were not yet occupied, storage areas, foundries, ware houses, abandoned buildings, and even other recycling facilities. He scavenged electrical cables, aluminum siding and gutters, pipes, manhole covers, railway spikes and plates, electrical transformers, bolts and screws—anything he could resell. He even managed to score one hundred and twenty feet of steel and copper from an old abandoned radio tower in a remote section of Adams County.

Paul was smart about it. He didn’t steal near their home, preferring instead to scavenge throughout the rest of the state, and even into Ohio and West Virginia. He used the van, which wasn’t registered to him, and changed the tags each time he made a run. He drove the speed limit and obeyed all the traffic laws so he wouldn’t get pulled