The echo and reverberation of the gun was everything now, throbbing against the walls and ceiling, otherworldly, pure and untrammeled and wanton. The sound had severed something in Liebmann.
The kid was sobbing and sagged to his knees on the floor. “Crazy motherfucker,” he said, heaving, all his imagined power drained away. “You’re gonna kill me, right?”
A car passed outside, headlights searchlighting the room, the extent of the damage visible for several seconds. The floor gleamed with spilled and flooding booze and the jeweled light of shattered glass.
Liebmann looked back to the kid, held his gaze a long moment. Finally he said, “You do not deserve to die. You are not worthy of such an honor.” His voice shook when he spoke. He was breathless, tainted in some way that was just coming to him. He lowered the pistol to his side.
“You’re stone crazy, ain’t you?” the kid said. “Crazy Jew.”
Liebmann gazed at the boy for another moment, and then said, “Go. Get out.”
The kid lurched to his feet, slipping, working for purchase on the wet floor.
Liebmann turned and crunched across the glass back to the cubicle office at the front of the store. He opened the desk drawer and returned the gun to its place. The kid made his way toward the door, slipped once and went down on one knee and grimaced as he caught himself with the heel of his hand. There was a blood smear on the floor when he lifted his hand away, black in the half-light.
Liebmann was no longer watching. He sat at the desk, his back to the room. “Get out,” he said, speaking toward the wall. “I never want to see you again. Nowhere. Ever. Never in this life.”
The kid paused near the office. “You just did all that to make me piss myself. Well, I did. Hope you’re satisfied.”
Liebmann did not answer.
The kid said, “Crazy fuck.”
Leibmann sat long after the kid was gone and the night’s silence regained. An occasional car hissed along the wet street outside. He sat in the dark and looked at the wall and marveled that no police had come, no fire truck, not a curious neighbor, nobody seemed to have heard a thing. Shepherd Park is not the neighborhood it once was, he thought. The idea brought no feeling one way or another. In the morning he would call the police and the insurance company to file the reports and pretend that he happened on the devastation when he opened the store in the morning. Just another morning coming to work, only this time to a bad surprise. He would describe his distress at what he discovered. Because what could anybody do? Besides, he could never explain. Or say why it happened, even if it was possible to carry it that far. Or why he had not called the police when he saw the lights in the store and heard the sounds of the damage being done. Now, looking at the wall, exhausted, vaguely ill, Liebmann knew he could not explain his shame to strangers. There had been a problem, and it was his, and he had taken care of it—he would leave it at that, in his own mind. He was not about to relate the way he had gone down under the heel of time, how a simple animal rage had blossomed against the ways his life was taken from him.
He had no language for that kind of story.
Three cops came, two uniforms with a plainclothes officer who picked around in the ruins, trying to protect his shoes. The uniforms glanced at the scene from the door and went back to sit in their cruiser at the curb out front.
“Any idea of the damages?” the officer asked.
“Not yet,” Liebmann said. “I need a few days. I have to inventory.”
“Right,” the officer said. “I understand.” He slipped, but caught himself against a shelf. “Damn. This is some kind of mess. Who would’ve done this?”
Liebmann was sweeping glass with an industrial push-broom. He said nothing.
The officer looked around with the expression of a man who needed to move on to some other part of his day. “No enemies, huh? No big fights with anybody? Upset customer?”
“No,” Liebmann said.
The officer shrugged. “Vandalism. It’s getting worse. We’re seeing more of it all the time. Tough to connect anybody to these things, though. Not unless you walk in on them red-handed.”
The insurance adjuster came a few hours later. Older than the cop, world weary, wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a tired off-blue suit. By the time he arrived Liebmann had swept paths through the glass. The floor was sugared with congealed liquor and the insurance man’s wing tips stuck and sucked to the floor as he walked. He had a clip-board. He looked closer and harder at the damage than the police officer had, made notes as he moved through the wreckage, then left his business card with Liebmann, mum-bling something about how sorry he was.
From time to time Liebmann’s sister would appear and speak in his dreams. He had never seen her again after that morning in their bedroom in the family apartment in Berlin. Outside on the street the Nazis had separated the males and females—he watched his mother and his sister led away. An officer was saying over a bullhorn that everybody was being relocated for their own safety, away from Berlin and the Allied bombing runs, and he watched his sister in her little brown shoes, holding his mother’s hand, walking off. Just before he lost sight of her, she turned back and smiled and waved.
Dreaming, Liebmann heard her voice lift in the open happiness of a child, speaking in a language he did not understand, that seemed more like bells heard at a great distance than any sort of words he might recognize. As she spoke, her tiny white face hung suspended in the opalescent air of his vision.
Neither the police officer nor the insurance adjuster noticed the bullet holes in the outside wall. Liebmann found them when he came to the store the next morning. They were there if somebody cared to look. But he knew nobody would.
Reports were filed. Liebmann hired a clean-up crew, and inventoried, and replaced the losses, and filed his receipts with the insurance company. He sold the pistol to a dealer at a gun show at the Armory for twenty-five dollars, and about six weeks later a check arrived from the insurance company for the damages. Business went on as usual. Thrived as usual. People still came in every day to get the boxes they wanted for storage, for shipping, for whatever they needed. A few of the regular customers offered consolation. Sorry about what happened, Jacob. Maybe it’s time to get out of here. Move up the road to Wheaton.
Liebmann nodded. Maybe, he said. Maybe I need to think about that.
PART II
Streets & Alleys
EAST OF THE SUN
BY JENNIFER HOWARD
Hill East, S.E.
In that neighborhood, they said, you learned fast where trouble came from. All you had to do was keep your sense of direction and walk the other way. Hill East was still a little rough around the edges but most of the people wanted to be friendly. Stay away from the hot spots and say hello to everybody: That was the rule.
A month after we moved to Potomac Avenue we knew the places to avoid—mostly north and east, like the intersection of 17th and Independence, where the crackheads hung out, and the New Dragon, an all-night takeout joint over at 13th and C that sold liquor to go. You didn’t want to mess with the kind of people who patronized that joint. They didn’t go there for the food.
The Dragon was where the local pusher known as the Wheelchair Bandit did business. Having a disability didn’t make a person any more law-abiding than anybody else, apparently. Instead of a motorized chair, the Bandit had an old pit bull—I know it’s a cliché but it’s the truth—who used to pull him around when he wasn’t staked out for customers just outside the restaurant. Some people on the neighborhood listserv said you could hear the jangle of his keys—he carried at least fifty of them on a belt chain—and the panting of his dog before you saw the man himself. If you heard those sounds, they said, you’d better get yourself clear.
Nobody knew whether the food was any good at the New Dragon or whether in actual fact they even served any. Nobody moved to Hill East for the food anyway. Good pizza, decent Mexican, KFC—that pretty much covered the range. Thai takeout, if you were an office
type with a little more disposable cash than the longtime residents, the federal workers and postmen and steady jobbers who’d bought their places forty years ago and couldn’t believe what those old houses—nothing fancy, just solid 1920s brick numbers with modest front porches and envelopes of land front and back—went for these days. Couldn’t believe their property taxes, either. They cashed in or they stayed put until they couldn’t afford to stay put any longer. I used to wonder, once in a while, where they went when they left.
Drugs and real estate: two good lines of work to be in on the Hill if you weren’t a Republican or a lobbyist, or maybe even if you were. We didn’t care for the Republicans or the dealers, but none of that made trouble, not for us. It was just life in a town lousy with people who had too much money—the folks looking to buy up anything they could get their hands on—and even lousier with people who didn’t have enough to do anything at all. Not everybody could be a winner.
Overall I couldn’t complain about how things were going. Baseball had come back to town after thirty-five years—the Nationals were even on a streak, the winning kind—and after years paying good dough to bad landlords, we had a house of our own.
We felt lucky, finding that house. Lucky to have a front porch and a little bit of land to call our own, lucky to have a bedroom for each kid—Dani, who was almost four, and her baby brother Jack—when a lot of people we knew had theirs double-bunking. Especially if they lived in the older row houses to the west, over in the lockdown zone around the Capitol and the Supreme Court where the Homeland Security folks concentrated their loving attention. For the most part they left Hill East alone. There was nobody fancy here to protect, no essential governmental personnel, unless you counted the famous residents of Congressional Cemetery two blocks over. John Philip Sousa and J. Edgar Hoover were good neighbors.
I couldn’t say that of everybody. In the mornings, on my way to the Metro, I got in the habit of picking up the Styrofoam containers and soda cans thrown out of car windows by the people who blew down Potomac Avenue. You could find all kinds of things in the bushes along that strip—condoms (used), CDs (unplayable), every type of wrapping known to the fast-food industry.
The weirdest thing I found was a baby doll the color of an old copper penny. I say I found it but in fact it was Dani who did, on one of the aimless stroller expeditions she and the baby and I used to take down the alley behind the house when we had time to kill before dinner. The backyards of our block were as diverse as the residents. A couple had been shrubbed and landscaped until they looked like pages out of House and Garden. Others, like ours, were crammed full of kiddie gear, plastic slides, and sandboxes shaped like enormous frogs and ladybugs. A few, including William and Ida’s next door, had evolved over decades from outdoor storage to junkyards where unwanted objects went to die: broken-down jalopies, odd pieces of wood from home-renovation projects abandoned halfway through, steel meat smokers that looked like mini-submarines.
Next to William and Ida’s on the other side was a group house for the mentally disturbed, muttering sad cases who boarded a van each weekday morning and were taken off to some useful occupation and brought back each night to Potomac Avenue. At home, if the weather was nice and even if it wasn’t, they drifted along the sidewalk like so much human litter. That’s not a very nice way of putting it. But whenever I saw Louis and Juanita and the other residents, whose names we didn’t know, they looked emptied out like the discards I picked up along the margins of the avenue. If they were sad, though, they didn’t know it. They used to try to bum cigarettes off us. They never could remember that we didn’t smoke.
The backyard of the group house was a wasteland where even grass was too depressed to grow. One scraggly tree managed to stay alive there and shelter, under its few remaining branches, a row of those cheap molded-plastic chairs you could pick up for a song at Kmart or Wal-mart. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the inmates of the group house would park themselves in those chairs like so many city birds—what my mother would call “trash birds,” grackles and starlings and the like—and smoke themselves closer to an early grave. I could have done without the smoke that sometimes carried across William and Ida’s backyard and into our kitchen windows.
The alley doglegged across the block, connecting the streets—16th and Kentucky—that angled into Potomac on either end. Two lines of garage-style, brick-walled storage units faced each other across a narrow strip of concrete, sealed off from the alley by a chain-link fence that didn’t look like it would keep the rats out, must less any would-be burglars. That eyesore filled the lot right across from us, although it was interesting to speculate what might be hidden in those units. William said he’d seen a Rolls Royce in one of them, but that might just have been wishful thinking.
The day we found the doll, Dani was investigating a section of wall on the storage unit that bordered the alley. Three or four bricks had come out and created a gap. Right on the edge of it sat the doll, naked as the day it came off the Chinese assembly line. Other than that it looked right at home.
Over Dani’s strenuous objections I took it inside, put it in a place where she wouldn’t see it—who knew where that thing had been?—and forgot about it. I put a note in the alcove where we’d found it—We have your doll, come ring the bell at…—and then I forgot about that too. You forget a lot of things when you’re looking after a couple of kids.
Dani asked me if it belonged to William and Ida. I told her I didn’t think so. They had been there as long as I’d been alive, long enough for him to be called Mister William by most of the young people in the vicinity, while Ida stayed just plain Ida. They’d raised their kids and now they liked things quiet.
As for the young people, well, I didn’t much care for the teenagers who liked to hang out and yell at each other in the little park across the street, one of those orphan triangles of public space you find in D.C. where three or four streets come together at crazy angles. The teenagers scared me the first few nights we were in the house, but they weren’t real trouble. They just acted like they were. They liked to shout it up after hours when the rest of the neighborhood had locked itself behind doors for the night, but I never heard that they did anything but make noise. They weren’t part of the New Dragon posse. If you really wanted to freak them out, all you had to do was drive by slowly, roll down a window, and say hello in a big cheerful voice.
Weirdly enough, it was Juanita, not the teenagers, who freaked out. Like most of the group house inmates she looked older than she probably was—hair gone gray years before its time, half her teeth gone too, skin the color and texture of dried apricots. What really got to me was how she liked to wear latex gloves, the kind doctors put on for intimate exams. Lord knows where she got them, but they didn’t conjure up good associations.
One morning I came out and found one inside out on the sidewalk in front of our house. The fingers were still half-folded in on themselves, as though it had been pulled off in a hurry. Juanita stood about ten feet away watching me.
It was April, barely. March had come in colder than usual and stormed out again without leaving much in the way of spring behind it, and the first days of April struggled to catch up. I felt sorry for the flowers who’d pushed their way up expecting sunshine and mellow air and instead gotten the dismal leftovers of a winter that wouldn’t shake itself loose.
I was in a hurry that morning, trying to get my daughter in the car. Ida had stopped by to watch the baby for a few minutes; Dani was late for school already, and it wasn’t a day to linger out of doors. Juanita was out there having the first smoke of the day, bundled up and shapeless in the ratty down parka that had found its way to her through some dubious act of hand-me-down charity. I gave her a good morning that was as cheerful as I could make it under the circumstances.
“Man keys. Godababeedahl?” She cleared a wad of phlegm out of her throat—did she have to hawk it onto the sidewalk?—and looked at her shoes, Chuck Taylor All Stars a size too small
and almost worn through at the toes. Without a full set of teeth she might as well have been speaking Chinese. On a good day I caught every third or fourth word. She was gesturing now; her arms windmilled furiously. “Fur man. Keys.”
“No cigs, Juanita.” I shrugged as I got Dani buckled into her car seat. I didn’t like her getting too close to any of the group house residents. I had no reason to think they were dangerous, but with people like that you might not know until it was too late. “We don’t smoke.” I nodded in Dani’s direction as if that explained everything Juanita needed to know.
Her hands dropped to her sides all of a sudden, as if her battery had run out. Then she groped in her pocket for something that turned out to be a piece of paper. It looked familiar. When she handed it to me I saw why. It was the note I’d left in the alley in case the lost doll’s owner came looking for it.
Juanita handed me my own note and wrapped her arms around herself, the gesture of someone cold or in need of comfort, and shook her head back and forth so hard it looked very likely she was doing her damaged brain more harm. “Babee. Doll. Man keys. Man keys!”
“We didn’t know it was your baby.”
“I’m a big girl!” Dani shouted from the backseat of our
“Not you, honey.” I hated myself a little every time I used the word “honey” with one of my children, especially when I was in the kind of mood I was in this morning. “She’s talking about her baby.”
“Baby DOLL.” The Ls of the last word hung in the cold air. Juanita gave me a big gummy smile that looked more anxious than happy. I saw now why she kept her arms wrapped around herself—she was shaking. “You get it back.” Her head bobbled forward and back, forward and back. “Keys. He need it.”
“All right,” I said. She was more nuts than I’d thought. I made a mental note to tell Dave to keep an extra-close eye on the kids when she was around. “Sure.”
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