On the street, I watch Sun pull around, prepared to drive back the other way. There’s still no one out here, but I want to make sure she gets a least as far as my line of vision unmolested. She doesn’t care that she’s in the hood. She’s comfortable. She’s comfortable in the hood, she’s comfortable in the woods. I’m jealous of that but it still makes me nervous, so I yell for her to roll up her windows till she’s out of Germantown. When Sun’s grille is pointed in the right direction, she stops her car on the other side of the street and yells back at me.
“You said your dad, he never threw out anything, right?”
“Right,” I yell back. I’m waiting for her to give me my platitudes now. Something like, And he never threw you out either.
“So what the hell happened to it?” she asks. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I keep listening, waiting for her to make sense.
“Your dad’s car? You said he never threw anything away.”
When she drives off, I get the gate open, but it takes a minute because my hands are shaking. Instead of heading straight for the mansion, I follow the dirt path that goes alongside the property to the garage. Its windows are broken and boarded; dirt sticks to the surface of the doors as if they haven’t been opened in decades; but I still can’t believe I hadn’t thought to do this before. There’s a lock, a padlock. I have my father’s keychain looped into my own. I take it out and try a few of the keys on it and start to consider the possibility that I’ll have to kick the glass out of a windowpane to get in, but then a key fits and turns. I pull off the lock and the garage door opens out. I can feel the dust filling my nostrils but through it I can already smell my daddy’s car. I can feel what it was like to ride on the cobblestones of Germantown Avenue with its spring suspension, what it was like when I fell asleep in there and he would pick me up and carry me to bed inside.
I get the garage door up all the way and there it is. The 1968 black Volkswagen Beetle. And there are the two crackheads, sitting inside. Their eyes ghostly and wide and frozen as they stare at me from its front seats.
My eyes are even wider.
—
I slam the garage door down hard, fast, quick, like the scream that shoots out of my mouth. I slam it down like the force will fuse it shut again, lock it and the vision away from me. I slam it so hard I fall backward to the ground, but I don’t care about that because I can crawl away without taking my eyes off the door if they come for me. I get a good fifteen feet away, and the wood’s still shaking. I should get up, but if I do I won’t be able to stare as hard at that garage door and part of me is certain that’s the only thing sealing the barrier. And then the wood stops. It’s stopped shaking. And it’s silent. And maybe this whole thing is a mistake, the vision a weird reflection of my own face. That when I stop breathing like this, it will return to normal. But the door springs up again before that can happen.
My dad’s black Beetle flies toward me.
I roll over. I roll and roll. Everything is spinning. I can feel the air, the wind of it as it passes. The Beetle’s still going. The Beetle shoots down the hill. That’s my father’s car. They’re taking my father’s goddamn car. I push to my knees and then to my feet to chase after it before they can get the gate open, before they take him away from me. But they don’t stop at the gate. They’re going to ram into it.
The gate’s iron clasp is rusted shut. The thick chain lock sealing it just adds to the message of closure. The Beetle’s got a good speed going by the time it gets to the entryway, aiming for the middle. I hear the crash, see broken glass powder out in the streetlight. The whole length of the fence surrounding the property shakes in response, angry at moving after a century of reliable immobility.
I stop running toward them, because I’m pretty sure I am now the owner of a his and her set of dead crackheads. I keep standing where I am. I keep waiting for the door to open. Now I just want to see them. I want to see their faces. I want them to see my face. I want them to know I’m standing now. I stare at those car doors. Just keep staring. Then I see a man standing fifty yards away, but over to my right, past the house on the other end of the lawn, who stares back at me.
I stand, his mirror, across the expanse of lawn. How he got all the way over there, I don’t know, I have no idea, none. But I stare back at him. I insist to myself that I’m not scared anymore. I have my cell in my hand now, gripped hard enough to break the glass, and it has magical powers that transmit sounds and visions into space. I stand and I don’t move because Tal is in the house, and I have something to stand for. I see the white woman. She also stands, twenty yards to his side. Just as still. Just as silent. If she was there before I don’t know because she’s just a dirty rumor in my peripheral vision. But he keeps standing there, staring at me. It’s too dark to see his face, to see much of anything but his dark bare chest and pants. He’s standing there, arms at his sides, chest out. So still. Standing there like he is waiting for me to state my intent. To tell him why I’m on his land. Tell him what kind of decent man disturbs the peace at this hour. Frozen in that inquiry.
“What the fuck?”
Tal’s voice. I jump. I put my fists out at the sound of her voice, almost as startling as the car crashing. When I finally see her face, dimly through the screened door on the porch, both my fists are aimed in her direction.
“What the hell was that?” Tal asks.
“Do you see people?” I have to know. But she doesn’t look at the lawn. She looks at me.
“You are so wasted,” Tal responds, then shuts the window back on me. It thunders on impact and I hear it echo, off the rotting porch, down the hill, bouncing to the row houses across the street, then coming back again.
I look back at the guy. I look back at the woman. Both gone. Both nothing.
9
AT THE ENTRANCE, the Bug sits crumpled and indignant. One of my keys goes to the chain sealing the driveway’s padlock, and I take the chains off so I can yank the twisted metal off its grille. I’m not even scared anymore. Just tired. If I wasn’t, I would take Tal and we would leave this house right now. Run. That’s what we should be doing. Running. This is what I really have to teach her. You can even run away from yourself — eventually, yourself catches up to you, but then you just run once more.
This house is going to burn because I refuse to be trapped inside its crumbling walls. I’m not going to wait years for this place to sell. I’m not going to rent it, and be haunted by tenant complaints every time something breaks, be indebted to it for life. I am not my past. I am not my hometown. I don’t want any crackheads in my future. I’m not going to be stuck back in Philly for the rest of my life, back in Germantown, dragged down by everything I’ve worked so hard to be free from. More important: Tal is not either. It simply cannot happen. There will be fire.
After I call the cops I take the coffee can of dead matches and cigar butts off the porch, remove the cigar butts, then I walk to the side of the house and dump the remains there. I don’t want to go near the garage because of the crackhead infestation, but I risk it and it’s okay, no one’s there. I dump the rest of the butts and matches inside the garage, in a corner, kick them around a bit for a more natural look. Evidence. When I get back in, I make coffee while we wait for the police.
The crackheads haven’t stolen anything from me. No, they’ve given me the gift of a documented incident to later prove probable cause. Crackheads destroy things. First, their lives, obviously. And then their families. But they also destroy houses. They light fires and they have poor judgment; both things are required if you’re going to be a crackhead. They make houses burn down. They’re not as thorough as meth heads, who have the benefit of their exploding labs, but crackheads have left a respectable number of ruined buildings in their wake. A crackhead did it is a reasonable cause of destruction on any forensic report. A history of crackhead infestation is a legitimate explanation for loss of property. It’s all so exciting I catch myself whistling.