about the sounds of electrical saws and drills they had sometimes heard coming from the little white house, nor about the odors of rotting meat, sometimes of excrement, that drifted through its walls and windows.
They knew little of the presentable-looking young man who had lived in the house with his mother and now lived there alone. He was friendly. He looked intelligent and he wore suits to work. He had a shy little smile, and he was friendly in a distant way with everybody in the neighborhood. The older residents had known and respected his mother, Florence Dragonette, who had worked at Shady Mount Hospital for better than forty years.
Mrs. Dragonette, a widow in her early thirties with an iron-bound reputation and a tiny baby, had moved into the little white house when North Twentieth Street had been nearly as respectable as she was herself. She had raised that child by herself. She put the boy through school. Florence and her son had been a quiet, decent pair. Walter had never needed many friends—oh, he got into a little trouble now and then, but nothing like the other boys. He was shy and sensitive; he pretty much kept to himself. When you saw them eating dinner together on their regular Saturday nights at Huff's restaurant, you saw how polite he was to his mother, how friendly but not familiar to the waiters, just a perfect little gentleman. Florence Dragonette had died in her sleep three years ago, and Walter took care of all the details by himself: doctor, casket, cemetery plot, funeral service. You'd think he'd have been all broken up, but instead he kept his grief and sorrow on the inside and made sure everything was done just the way she would have wanted it. Some of the neighbors had come to the funeral, it was a neighborly thing to do, you didn't need an invitation, and there was Walter in a nice gray suit, shaking hands and smiling his little smile, holding all that grief inside him.
After that, Walter had come out of himself a little bit more. He went out at night and he brought people home with him. Sometimes the neighbors heard loud music coming from the house late at night, loud music and laughter, shouting, screaming—things they had never heard while his mother was alive.
'Oh, I'm really sorry,' Walter would say the next day, standing next to the little blue Reliant his mother had driven, anxious to get to work, polite and charming and slightly shamefaced. 'I didn't know it got so noisy in there. You know. I certainly don't want to disturb anybody.'
Every now and then, late at night, he played his records and his television a little too loud. The neighbors smelled rotting meat and came up to him as he was watering his lawn and said—You put out rat poison, Walter? Seems like a rat or two musta died underneath your floorboards. And Walter held the hose carefully away from his neighbor and said, Oh, gosh, I'm really sorry about that smell. Every now and then that old freezer of ours just ups and dies and then everything in it goes off. I'd buy a new one in a minute, but I can't afford a new freezer right now.
Walter Dragonette's curtains had been open only two or three inches, a narrow gap, ordinarily nothing but entirely wide enough for two small boys, Akeem and Kwanza Johnson, to look through, giggling and jostling each other out of the way, fighting to press their faces up against the glass.
Akeem and Kwanza, nine and seven, lived across the street from Walter Dragonette. Their father was Kenneth Johnson, the English teacher who had been addressed as 'Rastus' by a Millhaven policeman eighteen months before. The Johnson house had four bedrooms and a porch and a second floor, and Mr. Johnson had himself installed in his living room floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, every spacious shelf of which was packed with books. Subsidiary piles of books stood on the coffee table, on the night-stands and end tables, on the floor, and even on top of the twelve-inch black-and-white television that was the only set Mr. Johnson had in his house.
Akeem and Kwanza Johnson were much more interested in television than in books. They
On the night before the morning when Walter Dragonette greeted fifteen armed policemen by telling them that he was the Meat Man, nine-year-old Akeem Johnson had come awake to hear the faint but unmistakable sounds of a grade-A horror movie coming from the speakers of the wonderful television set across the street. His father never let him go to horror movies and did not permit them on the television set at home, but a friend of Akeem's had shown him videotapes of Jason in his hockey mask and Freddy Krueger in his hat, and he knew what horror movies sounded like. What he was listening to, faint as it was, made Jason and Freddy sound like wimps. It had to be one of those movies he had heard about but never seen, like
He got out of bed and walked to his window and looked across the street. Instead of meeting as they usually did, Walter's curtains showed a narrow gap filled with yellow light. Akeem realized that if he got out of bed and sneaked out of the house, he could hide beneath the window, peek in, and actually watch the movie playing on Walter's big television. He also realized that he was not going to do that. What he could do, however, was wait for Walter to leave his house in the morning, and then just walk across the street and take a look inside that window and at least see if Walter's TV was the beast it sounded like.
The faint sounds from across the street came to an end as the movie shifted to one of the boring parts that always followed the excitement.
In the morning, Akeem went down to the kitchen and poured milk over his Cocoa Puffs and parked himself at the kitchen table where he could watch Walter's house through the window. About ten minutes later, his little brother dragged in, rubbing his eyes and complaining about a bad dream. After Akeem told him what he was doing, Kwanza got his own bowl of cereal and sat beside him at the table, and the two of them watched the house across the street like a pair of burglars.
Walter burst through his front door just after seven. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, so wherever he was going, he would have to come back to change clothes before he went to work. Walter hustled down his walk, looked over both his shoulders as he unlocked his car, got in, and zoomed off.
'Okay?' Akeem asked.
'Yo,' said his brother.
They slid out of their chairs and went to the front door. Akeem quietly unlocked and opened it. They stepped outside, and Akeem gently let the door slide back into the frame without quite closing. The brothers walked over their front lawn. The dew pasted grass shavings to their bare feet. They felt funny and exposed when they stepped onto Walter's front yard and ran up to the window hunched over. Akeem reached the window first, but Kwanza butted him sideways, like a little goat, before he got a good look in through the curtains.
'You take your turn,' Akeem said. 'Yo, this was my idea.'
'Me too, I wanna look too,' Kwanza complained, and slipped in front of him when he bent his face again to the uncovered stripe of glass. Both boys peered in to see the enormous television set.
At first, it looked as though Walter had been painting his living room. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the far wall, and newspapers covered the floor. 'Akeem,' Kwanza said.
'Where is that thing?' Akeem said. 'I know it's here, no way it ain't here.'
'Akeem,' his brother said again, in exactly the same tone of voice.
Akeem looked down at the floor where his brother was pointing, and he too saw the corpse of a large, heavy black man stretched out in a swamp of bloody newspapers. The man's head lay some feet away, rolled on its side so that it seemed to be contemplating the broken hacksaw blade stuck halfway through what had been its left shoulder. The broad back, about the color of the Cocoa Puffs dissolving into mush back on the Johnsons' kitchen table, stared up at them. Deep cuts punctured it, and sections of skin had been sliced off, leaving red horizontal gashes.
A few houses away, a car started up, and both boys screamed, thinking that Walter had come back and caught them. Akeem was the first to be able to move, and he stepped back and put his right arm around his
