Mystery

Tom looked up at the street sign on the corner. TOWNSEND was the name of the side street. He knew nothing in this neighborhood; he had not even known of the long green open area with a bandshell, swings, a seesaw, luxuriant shade trees, and a few exhausted animals in tiny cages, which lay half a mile east on Calle Burleigh. The milk driver had been astonished that any resident of Mill Walk would not recognize Goethe Park.

Tom stepped around the corner. A dark green metal rectangle with the legend 44TH STREET stamped in relief and painted a shining, almost incandescent white faced him from the next corner. In the section of Mill Walk that Tom knew, streets had names like Beach Terrace and The Sevens, and this designation seemed eerily impersonal to him.

The creature sobbed and snarled and choked.

Tom saw a hairy half-human thing sprawled in the dust, a thick chain lashed around its neck, its ragged fingernails digging into the dirt of its pen.

With the arrival of this image came a stomach pain so strong and sharp he nearly vomited. He clutched his stomach and sat down on the lawn of the corner house. It seemed to him that what he had seen was himself. His heart fluttered in his chest like a bird chained to its perch.

A door slammed behind him, and Tom turned to see a wide old woman assessing him from the front step of the corner house.

“Get off my lawn. Right now. That’s trespassing, what you’re doing. I won’t have it.” The woman spoke with a strong German accent that made each of her syllables strike Tom like a well-aimed brick. She was a nightmare version of Lamont von Heilitz.

Tom said, “I was feeling a little sick, and—”

The old woman’s face darkened. “L-I-A-R! L-I-A-R! Get lost!”

She began grunting down the steps, and when she reached the bottom, waded toward him as if she intended to launch herself at him. “Talk back, hey? I won’t have you tramping on my grass, you S-C-U-M, get back where you belong—”

Tom had already jumped up and was walking quickly backwards to the safety of the sidewalk.

“Back to your own place!” she shouted. Her blue housedress billowed around her as she advanced on Tom. He began backing up the sidewalk toward the next side street.

Now the woman stood on the very edge of her domain, with the toes of her flat slippers just overlapping the sidewalk. She had extended her arm and index finger very determinedly toward the alley and 44th Street. Her face was an amazing red-purple. “Sick and tired of you brats walking all over my property!”

Tom turned around and ran. He thought to cut up the alley between Calle Burleigh and 44th Street, but as soon as he swerved into the alley her voice exploded behind him: “Can’t sneak into my yard that way! You want the police? Keep going!”

He looked over his shoulder and saw her surging down the sidewalk toward him. Tom swerved out of the entrance to the alley and ran toward 44th Street. The woman bawled out a phrase Tom did not understand, or which he misheard: “Cornerboy! Stupid cornerboy!”

On the corner of Townsend and 44th Street he turned around again. She was standing at the entrance to the alley, puffing hard, her hands on her hips. “S-C-U-M! That’s what you are, you cornerboys!”

“Okay, okay,” Tom said. His heart was still beating hard.

“I see you where you live!” she yelled.

He turned west into the next block, and after he had taken a few steps his view of her was cut off by the house on the corner.

The flawless enameled sky of the Caribbean had begun to show the first traces of the yellow that soon would flash over its entire surface and darken in a moment to purple, then into real night.

Tom wondered if the old woman had gone back into her house. She was probably waiting to make another run at him if he tried to sneak back around the corner.

He lifted his foot and forced his leg to thrust it forward. A forlorn wail immediately blossomed in the air before him. He froze. He glanced at the houses on either side of him—heavy curtains had been drawn over front windows in both houses, giving them a vacant, closed-up look. At this time of the year, nearly everybody in Mill Walk kept their windows open to catch the Atlantic breezes. Only Mr. von Heilitz kept his windows closed and his curtains drawn. Even the people who lived in the “native” houses, naturally cooler than the European or North American buildings, never closed their windows during the summer months.

Of course, Tom thought, they closed their windows so that they would not hear the creature.

Tom stepped forward again, and up ahead of him, off behind one of the houses across the street to his right, the creature uttered a protest that set the chickens flapping and clucking: He thought he was going to melt down into a stain on the sidewalk. He would have to take his chances on the old woman’s having gone back inside her house. He turned around.

And then he was so startled he nearly jumped off the sidewalk, for no more than five or six feet behind him was a teenage boy his own height, frozen in place with one foot in advance of the other, his hands held out in a straight line from his elbows. The boy, who clearly had been trying to sneak up on Tom, looked as startled as his quarry. He stared at Tom’s face as if he had been stuck with a pin.

“Okay,” he said. “Hold it right there.”