I kind of knew her. I mean, I’d talked with her once. I’d said hello to her in the line at the grocery a few months ago, but she just nodded at me with this strange sort of smile. I’d said hello because some guys I know, when we get to talking about such things, said that women cops are meaner than men cops, because maybe they have something to prove. But that wasn’t true at all with this woman cop. She didn’t seem mean at all, just tough, and I wanted to thank her for looking out for the people in the neighborhood. I thought she might like that.
We didn’t get a talk going. To tell you the truth, her smile was sort of weird, that kind where she thinks maybe it’s all a trick or not sincere or she’s being made fun of. I figured she didn’t really trust me wanting to talk to her at all, so I just sort of dropped it. But she wasn’t mean or anything, at least to me. She had copper-colored hair, the same color as copper wire. Right now, sitting in the car, her hair was up in a bun, and she turned her head a little, and then the light changed and she drove off into the darkness across the intersection between rows of houses on both sides of the street. All I could see were her taillights receding into the dark, until even they went away down the hill and I was totally alone again.
So like a ninja I just waited and listened.
I didn’t hear a thing.
The blue light went off in the house across the street.
I smiled at that.
Sometimes in my house my dad falls asleep on the couch with the TV on and it stays on all night. If you try to turn it off he’ll wake up and get pretty angry, so I never even try anymore. To turn it off, I mean. But obviously this person was in bed, probably, because the light had been on the second floor, and it went out.
After a minute I thought it was safe to move, so I moved very slowly, dropping down to my knees and crawling into the bushes planted right alongside the house in a trench of black soil. I kind of crawled on my fingertips and shoe tips, keeping my knees off the ground, even though it felt pretty awkward, so as not to get muddy, because the soil was pretty moist, and I could smell it, heavy and cold and ashy in the wind that was blowing lightly through the yard.
I passed as quietly as possible through the bushes. My back scraped the leaves. They were these hard little conifer leaves like tiny green shells—I think they’re called conifers, because I did some gardening once for a lady who had them in her yard, and that’s what she called them. Whatever noise I made scraping through them, anybody listening would have thought it was the wind, which was moving the bushes up top where the branches spread out a little, making just the same sort of quiet, rustling noise.
When I was all the way through I stood straight. There was a space about a foot and a half wide between the bushes and the house. I could stand in it, completely hidden. It even blocked the breeze that was blowing. I felt warmer. The truth is, it was getting pretty cold. That happens sometimes here at night, even in August, and it means autumn’s coming early.
I stood on a tangle of roots and wiped my fingertips on the stone wall of the house. I didn’t want to get the wall dirty, but I had to clean my hands. Anybody looking in my direction would never have seen me. Only the closest observer might have looked down and seen my pants legs—the shadow of them, I mean. But they were so dark, and my sneakers were black. I was totally ninja, blending completely into the bush.
You have to know about the stone wall, though. This house was great.
Laura’s house.
It was twice the size of mine, maybe three times. And it was made of a zillion of these big slate stones, held together with concrete. It was totally unlike the houses where I live, just a few blocks down the street—the same street the woman cop had driven down. The houses there are all made of shingles, some in better repair than others, and there’s nothing worse than bad shingles to make a house look beat-up; they look like broken teeth. The shingles on my house are okay, I guess. My dad does pretty good upkeep.
But this stone wall was amazing.
I’d always wanted to live in a house made like this. Down where I am it’s true that the houses are older. They’re much older, and some of the people have a sort of attitude about that, like it makes them more a part of the neighborhood, the original part, by which they mean the better part.
I must admit my dad’s like that, because he’s third generation, and he’s pretty proud of that, and in fact when my mom gets on him for not having made much money, he always says that even though that’s true, he did get her out of Greenway Terrace, which to him is, like, the biggest deal in the world, but really only serves to piss her off. And she always says he should have moved, because the neighborhood sapped his ambition—she always says that, that it really sapped his ambition—and he never has much of an answer to that at all, because I think he actually agrees with it.
But up here across the intersection the houses are stone and the people are richer, all of them are richer. I’m sure you know what I mean. But also everything is newer, and people come and go a lot—some families stay only a few years and you never even get to
