The Boys Across the Street

by Rick Sandford

  When I told him I’d written about the shooting the day before, he asked if he could have a copy of it, and so I turned on my computer, went into the proper file, and, after spacing the entry down so it was even, printed the five pages out, numbered them with a pen, and handed the account over to him. He said no one else would read it, that it was just for himself. I told him I’d tried to write down everything that happened. And I wondered, as I watched him holding the pages in his hands, just what did I write? It wasn’t finished, I hadn’t reread it, and it had never occurred to me that it might actually become evidence.

  He asked me if I thought he should go over there and speak to them.

  “I don’t know. It might be interesting for you, you’ll certainly find out what they think about me.”

  “Does anybody else have trouble with them in the neighborhood?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Well, when the school first opened they made a lot of noise and there was a mini-riot and one of the rabbis was arrested. The JDL left threats around the neighborhood saying that anyone who interfered with them would pay in blood, but other than that I haven’t been aware of any trouble. About a week ago the police came next door because someone complained about the noise in the back. There’s a family back there with four kids, and the three-year-old screams all the time. The man next door has seven kids—it’s really shameful. I feel so sorry for the kids. Dovid is eleven and he’s really nice, but I feel so sorry for him.”

  As he was leaving, Detective Bucher said he thought he would go over to the school, and he told me to contact him if there was any further trouble. As soon as he was gone I printed out another copy of the five pages I’d given him and read them over to see how I might have incriminated myself. It seemed all right, except that in the last two paragraphs I revealed that I only discovered my motivation after the fact:

  I’ve just been going over this and trying to piece my thoughts together. I called a couple of friends and spoke to them, and then while I was talking to Tom I suddenly felt like I found the hook, the solid objective reason why I was wearing a hat and tzitzis.

  The tzitzis stand for the 613 laws of Moses. One of those laws says that men should not lie with men, that they should be killed. That is offensive to me. And that is what their clothing says.

  I stayed in the house the rest of the day, reading and writing. When the boys went to the park I watched them from inside my apartment. They all looked over here, but I don’t think they saw me, what with the reflections on the glass.

  Later in the afternoon, after they had returned from the park, I decided to go outside and see if I could find any of the BB’s that had been shot at me.

  I looked at the window. It consisted of two panes of glass, one of which could slide open and was covered with a screen. As I examined the hole in the glass behind the screen, and the tear in the screen itself, I suddenly realized that I could deduce something of the angle of the bullet that hit the window.

  The BB had to go through the screen before it hit the glass, and as I looked at the window I noted that the incision in the screen was considerably farther to the left, facing the building, than the hole in the glass, pretty clearly indicating a direction compatible with the school across the street.

  I was surveying the ground when my landlord stopped by. I told George what had happened and asked him about replacing the windows.

  “We shouldn’t replace them too quick,” he said. “They might try and shoot you again.”

  I laughed: well, that was a practical way of approaching the matter.

  After George left I went back to looking for the missing BB’s. George had hated having to pay for the upkeep of a lawn and so had paved over our yard with bricks. The more I looked around, the less likely it seemed that I might find a small copper-colored pellet on the brick-covered ground. There was all sorts of debris—gravel, loose mortar, and dust. I tried examining the yard systematically, combing one small area after another, but it was very frustrating and then suddenly I found one of them: a little shiny copper ball. It was a couple of yards from where I’d been sitting when they shot me.

  I had just picked it up when I heard someone calling me from across the street. “Rick!”

  I turned around and saw Avraham over at the school. He was inside the compound, but he had climbed up on the wall and was holding on to the fence that surmounted it.

  “What?”

  “Did you see a little kid go by here just now?”

  “No, I didn’t,” and I gave him an explanation. “But I wasn’t really looking.”

  He nodded to me and then got down and went away.

  Holding the little pellet in my hand, I watched as Avraham disappeared between two of the school buildings. I suddenly felt as if a hand had been extended to me across an abyss, and I thought how sweet that Avraham should make such a gesture. That, to him at least, I was not a pariah . . .

  I had to blink away the tears.

  27 / after the fact

  The next day when I took a shower, my first since going to the hospital, I took off my two bandages, the one on my neck and the other on my arm where I’d received the tetanus shot. Both wounds were practically invisible. I also shaved for the first time in a couple of months: I wasn’t going to be a catfish with peyos anymore.

  I was just finishing reading the paper when Orestes stopped by. He’d just bought a new motorcycle he wanted to show me.

  What he really wanted was sex.

  An hour or so later (no crystal), I walked Orestes outside. He’d parked his motorcycle under the eucalyptus tree and it was quite the gleaming, stream-lined machine. He asked me if I wanted to get on it and I said sure. I straddled the machine, reaching out and grasping the handlebars, and I felt like I looked very cool— what with my shades, my tzitzis, my black dress hat, and my tanned bare legs.

  Several moments later I heard the boys, and then saw them as they appeared between the two school buildings, passing through the playground area and making their way toward the gate. As they became aware of me, the noise they had been making diminished into silence.

  Astride the motorcycle, I regarded them as they began to cross the street beside me. They were not talking and shouting together as usual, and it was curious to see them so quiet and subdued.

  “Nice hat.”

  I wasn’t sure which one had spoken to me, but what I heard was a simple affirmation and I responded with genuine gratitude for the acknowledgment that I could wear whatever I wanted to: “Thanks.”

  It was strange. They knew they shot me, I knew they shot me, and yet this knowledge could not be spoken between us because of possible legal ramifications: my emergency room visit and the price of my window.

  They are the aggressors. I am the victim.

  Whereas before it could be seen the other way around— myself the aggressor, and they the victims—now, with the roles reversed, I think we were all a little uneasy with our new definitions: I’d been attacked, and what they did had been officially classified as “motivated by hatred/prejudice.”

  My attack—the wearing of their “holy” garments—was symbolic.

  Their attack was physical.

  I wasn’t sure how many baby ravens were in the nest at the top of the eucalyptus tree, but at least one of them was out and clinging to a branch. While I was reading (“Self-Reliance” in Emerson’s Essays) I would occasionally look up to see it with my binoculars. The parents would fly away and bring back food. As soon as the baby was aware of them, it would start crying, and after some suitable interval—to see if everything was safe?—they would come and feed it, sticking their beaks down its gaping gullet.

  I got the feeling, however, that the parents were getting a little tired of this routine, and their cawing seemed to be impatiently imperative: “If you think you’re going to sit there the rest of your life while I fly around getting you food, you’ve got another think coming. Look at me! Open your wings and let the air support you! I know you can’t see it, but y
ou can feel it, can’t you? You’re not going to catch any worms just sitting on that branch.”

  Sometimes I answered their calls with a “Caw!” of my own, a loud high-pitched noise with a slight trill from the back of my throat.

  “You sound just like a bird.”

  I turned around and saw Avraham in the driveway behind me. Yaakov was standing just beside him.

  I shrugged. “I like to talk to them.”

  We looked at one another for a moment. I imagined that Avraham felt a wrong had been committed against me and somehow he wanted to make it right.

  “One of the baby ravens is out of its nest,” I told them. “You want to see?” and I offered them my binoculars.

  Yaakov came forward and took the glasses. He looked up into the tree. “Where?”

  I was used to looking up and being able to see it for myself, but now trying to point out the little black speck in that mass of foliage was very difficult. Yaakov couldn’t find it, so I showed him the nest instead, a dark mass at the top of the tree.

  While we were looking up at the birds I noticed Moshe and Yitzchak approaching us from across the street.

  I greeted Moshe, with a personal allusion to my stories. “My hero!”

  As he came up to me, he skipped over the preliminaries. “Do you have a gun?”

  “What do you mean? No.”

  “Not even a BB gun?”

  I shook my head. “Who told you that?”

  “Some of the boys.”

  “They think I have a gun?” I asked. And then I remembered standing there that day, the boys all gathered in the compound across from me, and I remembered that strange moment when they all scattered. At the time I’d thought one of their teachers was coming and they were afraid of getting into trouble, but it wasn’t that at all: somebody had said I had a gun, and they’d all ducked for cover. How strange.

  “Where did you get hit?” Yitzchak asked, looking up at me with curiosity—his beautiful dreamy eyes filled with what world of considerations?

  I turned my neck so they could see the welt.

  “Did it hurt?” Yaakov asked.

  “It was like a very hot sting. I didn’t even know I was bleeding at first.”

  “Do you think one of the boys shot you?” Moshe asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Do you know who?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t see. I think it was somebody on the second floor over there.”

  We all looked over toward the school. I could see a couple of boys at the windows.

  Yaakov turned back to me. “All the boys say you’re crazy. Are you crazy?”

  He was so endearingly bull-headed in his pursuit of the facts. I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe just a little—around the edges.”

  Avraham suddenly shifted his position so that the eucalyptus tree was between him and the school. “Is he looking?” he asked the other boys.

  “Yes,” Moshe answered.

  I looked at them. “You’re not supposed to be talking to me, are you?”

  Moshe shrugged his shoulders: he didn’t care.

  “What did the police say?” Avraham asked.

  “They just made a report. Do you want to see it?”

  They did and I went in the house and brought my yellow copy out to them. Avraham recognized the paper from some previous experience.

  “I even found the BB that hit me,” I said.

  “What’s a BB?”

  “You want to see? I’ll show you,” and I went in the house and came out with my notebook, and I turned to the last page where there was the entry about the day I was shot, and where I’d taped onto the paper the little copper-colored pellet. They examined it.

  “Moshe!”

  It was a voice from across the street. I could see the guy with the short curly hair calling from the room next to Avi’s.

  “Are you going to get in trouble for talking to me?” I asked them. “Do those guys have authority over you?

  “Do you have to do what they say?”

  “They spoke to our parents,” Avraham said.

  “Well, I talked to your mother,” I told him. “I told her what they said, and that I wasn’t Jewish and that I was an atheist and homosexual.”

  “Moshe! Come here.”

  It was the guy with the short curly hair again. The boys were a bit undecided about what to do. They clearly didn’t want to return across the street.

  “Follow me!”

  Avraham had spoken with absolute decisiveness and, taking the initiative, he led the boys after him as he walked away. My chair was facing the sun, and since I didn’t turn around to watch them go, I wasn’t sure if they went down the driveway to Avraham’s home or just continued on up the street.

  A little later I saw the four of them walking back to the school on the opposite sidewalk. Once they were in the compound, the guy with the short curly hair stopped them and spoke to them from his window. I lifted up my binoculars to see what this conversation consisted of.

  “Put your binoculars away, Rick,” the guy called over to me, but I didn’t, not until his conversation with the boys had ended and they had disappeared back into the recesses of the school.

  I spent the rest of the day outside reading. The baby raven was out on a branch most of the day. The parents both cawed at him with particular emphasis and occasionally he flapped his wings, but he still wouldn’t let loose and actually try them out.

  I was reading the Mishnah. I wondered if there might not be something in it about this whole situation—after all, it was practically a lawbook: was there some policy about attacking Gentiles who were dressed up as rabbis?

  There was an extensive index in the back of the Mishnah and it was easy to look things up. In the section called Baba Qamma I found something:

  Baba Qamma 8:1

  A. He who injures his fellow is liable to compensate him on five counts:

  B. (1) injury, (2) pain, (3) medical costs, (4) loss of income [lit.: loss of time], and (5) indignity.

  I. Medical costs:

  J. [If] he hit him, he is liable to pay for his medical care.

  That was interesting. But it still begged the question of whether it applied to the relations of all people or just Jews.

  While I was going through the book, the man next door started screaming at his kids. It was hard to concentrate as I could so clearly see in my mind Dovid and Yossi and their sisters receiving the brunt of their father’s rage. As I listened to the high-pitched inarticulate sounds, the process of interpretation seemed similar to the one I had applied to the ravens, only this was uglier: “Oh, my God, what are you doing! I set that book there for a reason! Don’t you understand! Can’t you look where you’re going? What if the Messiah were just about to come back and save us and then he saw you and decided it wasn’t worth it? How would you like that? And it would all be your fault!”

  I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned to look over toward their house to see if I could distinguish what he was actually saying by paying stricter attention.

  Avraham was standing in the driveway, and our eyes locked on one another as the screaming continued.

  After a long moment Avraham finally spoke. “He’s always yelling.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel sorry for Dovid.”

  We continued looking at each other and then Avraham, having done his part in identifying the disturbance, went down the driveway and into the street, on his way to the school.

  I felt as if I’d found as much as I was going to in the Mishnah, so I went and got my Tanakh and my concordance, and started looking for applicable quotations in the Torah.

  I found a couple:

  Exodus 21:18-19: When men quarrel and one strikes the other with stone or fist, and he does not die but has to take to his bed—if he then gets up and walks outdoors upon his staff, the assailant shall go unpunished, except that he must pay for his idleness and his cure.

  Leviticus 19:33-34: When a stranger resides with
you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.

  Late in the afternoon I saw Avi leave the compound and start walking up the street. I called out to him and said hello, but he didn’t answer me.

  I watched him walk away with his awkward gangly stride, the tzitzis hanging down beneath his shirt, and I thought to myself: Maybe I should sue the school. It would be worth it just to see Avi take the stand and explain what he thought about me for the court record.

  Orestes said he thought I should definitely take legal action and at least demand compensation for my hospital visit and my broken window. I told him I would think about it.

  Even though I didn’t have the money to pay for the damage (the estimated $200 for the broken glass and who-knows-what for the hospital visit), in a way I didn’t really want to pursue this thing. If I did, they could get into their defensive “You can’t prove it” mode, and that was definitely not a place where I wanted them to be.

  I wanted them to be ashamed of themselves, I wanted them to be sorry, I wanted them to apologize.

  I didn't want to force them.

  I wanted them to have to deal, inside themselves, with their own immorality.

  I just wanted to be friends.

  I wanted to hold Avi in my arms, and I wanted him to tell me he loved me, and I wanted him to come in my mouth, and I wanted him to see his God—in me.

  28 / the sacrifice

  There were only a few weeks of school left, and during that time the baby raven finally left his home in the eucalyptus tree and never came back. I wasn’t there when it happened—I didn’t get to see that initial victorious flight—but for a while I continued to see the parent birds around the neighborhood, and when I heard them I would answer their loud raven cries with one of my own.