CHAPTER 5

The lack of crime in the North End has not completely erased a sense of wariness. A lifetime’s expectation, even teaching, that, left on their own, some people will turn to violence. That some people will inevitably, maybe necessarily, manifest the worst that humans are capable of doing.

It has not happened here. It’s as if there is no motivation for such a descent into darkness. No items worth stealing that aren’t easily available to possess. No places of importance to defend or protect. No market for drugs or sex or some activity over which people would be willing to fight.

We live the uneasy peace of the tired and resigned.

I write this up for the paper.

Yet the next day, while walking back downtown from a commission meeting, a red car playing loud music passes me, slows half a block ahead, then reverses. The kids, white and brown, look out at me, the music still thumping in the car.

Of course I am wary. These people aren’t from here.

“What have you got?” one of the kids asks.

It’s clear they’ve wandered across the overpass. It happens a few times a year. Wannabe gang members or rich kids killing their boredom. I’m not sure which these ones are.

“What have you got?” someone asks again.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Where can we find something going on here?” another asks. “Where’s the party here?”

I shake my head. “There isn’t one.”

They are laughing. I’m an unshaven older man in a heavy, black blazer, carrying a camera and a notebook.

“What about that camera?” one of them asks.

I can’t say that I am nervous. I know that I’m not scared. I am just very aware of what might happen.

“Let me see that camera,” one says.

I say to him, “No.”

“I said, ‘Let me see that camera.’”

“No.”

We’re in a dark area, a few square blocks where all light has been shut off. The only streetlights are a few blocks away.

“One more time,” says the kid in the passenger seat. “Let me see the camera.”

I turn and run. I cut between two houses, through a back gate, into the alley, and I can hear their voices somewhere behind me. Not close yet, but moving.

I turn right, down the dark alley, staying close to the fences and garages, running fast. Faster than I’d thought I could run. Wind blowing past me with force. My legs and arms and chest pushing forward.

A block and a half away, I hop a fence, then slip into a garage. It’s hard to see because it’s so dark, but my eyes are adjusting to the limited light.

I hear their voices in the alley, right outside the garage. I can see the outlines of their bodies through the dirty, cracked windows.

Once they pass, I find what I am looking for, gasoline in a metal can high up on an old shelf. I also find a screwdriver on the floor and put it in my jacket pocket.

I hear the kids still walking down the alley. They are talking to one another, bouncing their hands along fences and garage doors. Not trying to be quiet as they look for me. But also there’s the reality that there is no other noise. In the North End, at night, there is a nearly total lack of sound. These four kids, they have no idea how loud they are. And so I hear it all, every step they take, every fence they touch, every breath they inhale then exhale as they walk.

“Where’d he go?” one asks.

I listen for a minute and make sure I hear four voices. All four of them left the car.

I slide out of the garage door, then head into the dark, abandoned house in front of the garage. It’s a small house that only takes a few minutes to get started. I leave through the front door. I’m two blocks from their car. I cross the street in darkness, standing behind a low shed, watching the house begin to burn. In another few minutes, the kids all show up, staring at the burning house, standing near it at first, but then having to step back as the fire grows. They are laughing as they watch it, one jumping in place, another beginning to do some bad Native American dance, a bad impersonation of a warrior around a campfire.

Boys always like fire.

I turn away from them, moving behind a house, then finding the alley and running again. A few blocks away, I go back into the street.

I can see the glow from the fire. The boys still stand there, the four of them now still, watching the flames, staring up, mouths slightly open, rooted in place in the street before the blaze.

They have forgotten all about me.

And the sound of the fire is loud. Consuming every other noise the kids might otherwise hear.

I’m standing next to their car. I take the screwdriver and break the valves on both front tires, the air now escaping with a high and steady hiss. Through the open window on the passenger side, I pour the last of the gasoline on the seat and light it, the fabric catching quickly, already spreading up the insides of the car’s upholstery.

I look back to where the kids are, but they don’t even turn. They are staring at the house on fire. I’m sure they’ll watch it for some time.

I lift my camera. Take a picture.

Then I walk toward the nearest fence and slip through the gate. The car burning brightly now. But I only cross the black backyard, then enter the alley.

It’s another twenty minutes till I reach my hotel.

There was a time when those kids would have scared me. A time when I would have quickly handed the camera to them. But I’m past that time. I’m not that person.

And although it’s unclear to me who I have become, I know I’m not a person that I would have ever known.

• • •

It’s months since the woman and boy left here.

Moments that fade. Conversations I can’t quite remember.

Because much of my memory is, of course, taken up with the things that happened.

So much of my memory. My thoughts.

My time.

• • •

At night, even covered by the many blankets on my couch, I hear a crash, thick and deep and distant, as another levee collapses to the north, the hiss of water rushing southward, the sound in the air echoing heavily, the water from the bay moving another few blocks toward me.

• • •

I have been walking for a few hours along a very old section of downtown when I notice something out of place in the rows of old, two-story brick buildings. I see the difference only because I’m across the street, where I can see past the top edge of the rooflines.

There is ivy. Bright green ivy, growing along the top edge of three of the buildings.

And there is a tree. A tall, leafy tree, only its top visible as it grows inside one of the buildings.

It’s the first green tree, the ivy the first living plant, that I’ve seen in many years.

I cross the empty street, wind blowing hard against my right side. There are windows on the fronts of the three buildings, but heavy shutters have been pulled tightly closed. The doors are all locked. Two doors have metal gates on them but the wooden door to the left does not. There is a burned-out car half a block away and I sort through the mess in the car before finding a tire iron.

After a minute of prying on the building’s door, I get it to open.

On the other side of the door, there is green. A courtyard, or small park. The three buildings have no roofs, no interior walls or floors. The front brick walls are braced with large timbers leaning at angles against them, the timbers also green, with ivy and flowering vines twisted all around them.

I am not far from my hotel. But I had no idea such a place existed. There is no green in the North End, no trees or flowers or shrubs of any kind.

Here, though, are shrubs and flowers and a tall tree in the middle of the space. It’s a young tree even as tall as it has grown, the branches covering a narrow space, the trunk itself not much thicker than my hand.

There’s something astonishing in this. An awe that renders me not quite able to speak or think or move.

The entire area is a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet deep, bordered on the front by the facades of the buildings, bordered on the sides and back by the tall brick walls of the neighboring structures. The ground floors of the three buildings have mostly been removed. But in some places concrete and brick remain, creating pathways between the plants, leading to a small stone fountain attached to a wall, to a table and chairs near another wall.

The only sounds are the running water from the fountain and the wind blowing across the open door I came through.

“The tree took quite a bit of effort,” a voice says and I flinch, startled by the sound. I turn to see a man sitting in a low chair near a table. “I’d prefer if you did not cut it down for firewood.”

“Of course not,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

He stands up slowly. He is middle-aged, semi-bearded, a black man wearing old corduroys and a heavy sweater under his thick blazer.

“You don’t need to,” he says. “But close the door if you would.”

I close the door, then turn back to him. With the door closed, it’s nearly silent here, no sound of wind. Just water running. I see that the water flows from the fountain to a stone pond on one side of the courtyard.

The man has a book sitting on the low table next to him. There are blankets on his chair. It is not too cold in here, though, as the wind doesn’t blow.

The stillness, the quiet, are deeper than anything I can remember.

“I’m sorry I broke your door,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Don’t worry. It’s fine for it to be unlocked. I don’t come or go that way. But maybe now I will.”

I look around to see how else he might get in and out of here. On the far back wall, there is a doorway, open, that leads into one of the buildings.

“This is what I do here,” he says. “I garden.” He looks around. “I guess everyone here has some kind of purpose. This is mine.”

I put my hands in my jacket pockets. An affirmation, I think, a sign that I am listening.

“For years I worked with the scavengers,” he says. “But eventually I focused just on this.”

I have a question but can’t figure out how to ask it. We’re quiet for a while.

“Nothing grows here,” I finally say. “Nothing grows at all.”

He looks around. “It’s not that nothing can grow,” the man says, pausing. “The old plants, the vegetation that existed, obviously that’s all been wiped out. It will no longer grow. But that doesn’t mean other plants can’t survive.”

He begins to walk along one of the brick paths, slowly, and in a moment I follow him.

“You brought the plants in from the South End?” I ask.

“I trade with the scavengers. They then trade with the brokers, who can find me every type of plant I want. It comes with their mentality. Traders and barterers. There seems to be no plant too exotic that they cannot eventually find.”

We’re silent again.

“I was a professor,” he says. He moves very slowly and his arms and hands and even his fingers seem very long, his brown skin in this light made flat and colorless. “I grew up here. I left a long time ago.” He pauses. “Then I came back a few years ago.”

He sits down at the table with the two chairs. In a moment, I sit in the other chair.

My wariness is sourceless but ingrained. A way of life for so many years. Wary of people and what they might say. Wary of strangers and what they might ask. Wary of my ability to interact, to talk, to even for a moment connect.

I ask him, “Why come back?”

“I came back to try to help,” he says. He leans an elbow on the table, but is sitting facing slightly away from me.

“Quite obviously,” he says, “I got here much too late to help.”

The garden he’s created, it brings about some kind of calm. The place feels warmer, not just in the absence of the sharp wind, but in the aura of the branches and the vines along the walls and the long grasses planted in curving rows along the ground. I find myself touching a small flower that grows up the side of the wall. I hadn’t meant to touch it. I only realize what I am doing as I notice he is watching me.

I take my hand away from the flower.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

I think of him as being much older than me, but as I look at him I eventually realize that we are about the same age.

In another moment, I shake my head. I can’t answer his question.

He leans back in his chair, again turned slightly away from me. Staring up at the tree in the center of the courtyard. He moves very slowly, as if some part of him is very much asleep. “That’s fine,” he says.

I find myself staring at the tree again, following the trunk where it meets the ground up to the branches spread out above us. Growing, right now.

“I should ask,” he says, “what is your capacity for violence?”

I shake my head. Confused.

“The scavengers ask that of the new people,” he says, smiling some. “‘What is your capacity for violence?’ People are honest among the scavengers. You work from dawn to dusk next to a group of strangers, doing work that is terrible, hard, involved. You want to know something about a person’s nature. At what point do they become impatient, what makes them angry, are they frustrated by difficulty.”

I run my fingers along the waxy leaves of ivy. The leaves are smooth and soft and spring back in place after I disturb them. I have a moment where I want to press my face against the leaves, but I blink then, and pull my hand away.

I say to him, “I don’t think of this as a place where there is violence. Or danger. Not from one another.”

He leans back farther in his chair, balancing on the rear legs of the chair, the back of his head touching the ivy. “It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? No roaming bands of violent men. No lawless acts of depravity.”

“Maybe we’re just too tired,” I say to him.

“Maybe,” he says. “But it’s also a place of an unexpected abundance. There are no luxuries. But, at the same time, there are few basic needs that are not readily met.”

I can’t understand how he’s gotten so much to grow here.

“And yet, none of that,” he says, “speaks to a person’s capacity for violence.”

I don’t understand how all this can be alive.

“I’m one of the people who believes,” he says, turning to me, “that whatever poisons are in the air and dirt and water, I don’t believe they’re insurmountable. Don’t believe that what is happening here can’t eventually be stopped.”

He tells me his name. I nod and tell him mine.

“I know who you are,” he says. “Most everyone here, you see, they know who you are.”

This makes me wince, though he’s turned away and doesn’t seem to notice.

He is pointing toward a table near the fountain. I can see my newspaper, three or four of them, stacked on the table’s lower shelf.

“I enjoy what you write,” he says.

I remember that, from years ago, before I came here. People enjoy what I write. They like me because of what I put in print.

I ask, “How do you know this can actually be stopped?”

He smiles some. Shakes his head slightly. “Good question.” He leans to the side. His motions are remarkably slow, methodical. “Because we don’t know for sure, do we?”

I’m staring at my hands for a moment. Seeing if they move as slowly as his. After a minute, I think to ask, “What do you trade with the scavengers? To get them to bring you these plants.”

His hand reaches out to his armrest, grabs it as if he’s going to stand. But he doesn’t. “Gardens,” he says. “I help them build gardens of their own.”

I shake my head. In silent surprise. That there could be a garden like this. That this man can even help people create gardens of their own.

“They are really quite beautiful,” he says.

His arms, I realize, his cheek and neck, are all scarred. Deeply. From his time as a scavenger.

I touch the tree trunk before I go. He watches me do it and it seems like a much too personal, even intimate act. But still I need to touch it. The bark is rough but slightly soft, water in the surface of the bark, the tree growing now, right in front of me.

“Come back some time,” he says. “Any time.”

And again I think I’ve spoken out loud, but in a moment I realize I haven’t. “I will,” I think I’ve said. But I’m already out the door.

• • •

I’m looking across acres of cars and trucks and buses and farm equipment, all spread out in the collected order of this junkyard in the industrial zone. The newer cars are parked farther away, I can see that with my binoculars, and the oldest vehicles are nearest me.

A half a mile by a half a mile, the junkyard is lower than the rest of the industrial zone. And the ground is covered in water. Six inches of it. From a levee that is leaking or has collapsed completely. It happened recently, the cars, the thousands of vehicles, all now looking like they are simply floating on the surface of a sea.

• • •

The scavengers are within a few blocks of where people here still live. They have reached one of the once grand boulevards that runs from downtown to a group of some of the North End’s oldest neighborhoods. I can see this from my windows, the clean swath of buildings that have been scavenged already, leading toward the wide avenue, gray and still. Block after block of houses are in the scavengers’ current path.

It’s not clear which direction the scavengers will go when they reach the avenue. The decisions about direction, about which area will be scavenged next, have always seemed so fluid and unclear. No one person is in charge of the scavengers. Instead, the value of what they find has always seemed to define the direction in which they move, as they quickly survey a house or building, sometimes passing over it just by looking at it, sometimes exploring that building for minutes or an hour before deciding it is not worth the time.

The scavengers will not touch a property where someone lives. There is no mentality of the angry mob. They are guided instead by the barely spoken decisions of a few hundred different people, those choices drawing the brokers who buy the items, the vendors who sell them food and water, the scavenging concentrated as the group slowly edges forward.

But now, if they move across the avenue, they will be scavenging a neighborhood dotted with current residents. It would represent a major change, a disruption of the landscape where people have chosen to continue to live. A neighborhood would then be altered even more, making it even more uninhabitable.

“Scavenging an occupied neighborhood,” the gardener says to me, “would confirm a fate that, now, goes unspoken. That the neighborhood will never come back to life.”

I write about this in the paper.

Within a few days, people are leaving letters at the office. They have written to say that the scavengers should not come across the avenue. Six letters in total, each short, but all signed at the bottom. Most have street addresses in or near the neighborhood, but then others are from addresses far away from the scavenging. They are people who know that, someday, the scavengers could move toward them.

I print the letters in the paper. More letters follow the next week. All say the scavengers should turn away.

Within a few weeks I can see it, the swath of distorted cleanliness, it is turning, southward, away from the avenue and the neighborhood. Instead it moves along the highway wall.

Some of the scavengers probably live there, I realize, in the neighborhood they’ve avoided.

But also there is the fact that the scavengers are people who simply need and want to work. Who’ve found some purpose and sense of place.

Their point is not to destroy, they’ve now said. It’s not to ruin. Or to even harm.

• • •

I’m in the office, the press running in the basement underneath me as I file my notes in pale yellow folders. My notes from that week’s stories. I pull the pages out of my notebook, staple them together, put them in the file folder with my typed copy of the story about a house along one of the canals. I put the negatives from the photos in the folder too. Everything related to that story is in one place. That way my notes are easier to find. And there’s the continuity. I have made something, even just a file, with facts and numbers and a history of a building, a house, a week in the life of the few people who now live in the North End.

The notes, the photos, the newspapers themselves, printed and distributed and archived here at the office and archived carefully at the library, I think of myself as leaving these things for someone else to someday find.

• • •

There is so little noise here. Mostly, when I walk the neighborhoods or the industrial zone or among the buildings near my hotel, I am the only sound I hear.

But in a neighborhood near downtown, I find a brick building taking up half the block. The building buzzes. It’s a mechanical sound, I realize, as I get closer to it. A steady, arrhythmic drone.

WATER PUMP NO. I.

A name is cut into the stone about the doors.

Inside, there are pumps, massive black pipes leading out of and then into the concrete floor.

“Hello.”

An old woman, sixty, is standing up from a green desk near one of the pumps.

I shake my head. “Sorry.”

She shakes her head. “It’s okay.”

I look around. “This brings water to the North End?”

She nods. “It comes up from the massive aquifer beneath us. For going on eighty years.”

I take my notebook from my pocket. “Can I write this down?”

She points to her desk. A newspaper, an article of mine. “Yes.”

No one pays her to still work here. Yet she’s worked here for three decades. Lives in her family house just a few blocks away.

“I don’t need very much,” she says. “And really, the station, it runs itself.”

“The water seems so clean,” I say.

“I guess it is. I don’t know.” She smiles some. “I just make sure it’s pumped up from the ground.”

She lives alone. Her husband passed. No children. A sister left long ago.

She smiles again, more this time.

I take her picture.

“It’s a good life, I think,” she says. She looks around. “I read. I listen to music. At night, I sleep very well.”

• • •

There is an abandoned airport here that I sometimes visit. It’s far away, nearly eight miles from my building, on the outer edge of the oldest parts of the industrial zone. I ride my bike there, a simple black bike that I found years ago and that I don’t often use.

Most days, I would rather walk.

Most days, I do not go very far.

Most days, the speed of traveling even by bike is unnecessary and almost upsetting. A reminder, in the wind pressing at my face and whipping past my ears, of the pace of a life I used to live. Driving fast through neighborhoods, seeming to run from my car to my office door, from a grocery store to the parking lot to the driveway to the kitchen, crashing into the house, the rest of them crashing in there too, all of us in constant motion, bouncing off each other as we hugged and said hello and pushed one another lightly but with purpose toward the next event of another day, homework and dinner and baths and sports, the rapid dance of the well-meaning and disconnected, beyond conscious, beyond aware, simply moving forward still, keep on moving forward, toward your next task and your next activity.

The wind, on the bike, is cold across my face and eyes.

I’ve decided that this week I’ll write about the airport.

I ride up the long ramp leading to what was once the departure area. Signs for Terminal A and Terminal B, directions for parking, commands to stop or not to stop, the brand names of airlines now faded and peeling from metal signs stretched above the road.

There are doors missing near the center of Terminal B and I ride through them into the building. It’s a vast and empty place. Blue counters where passengers once checked in, black conveyor belts where luggage once disappeared into the bowels of this facility, rope lines still cordoning off an impending rush of passengers, ready to corral them into simple mazes.

Enter Here.

This airport was closed a decade before the North End was itself abandoned. A bigger, brighter airport was built in the South End, justified through so many promises of new uses for the old airport.

Nothing happened.

The airport has been partially stripped of items. Most of this was done when the airport was first closed. The TV monitors were removed. The stores and restaurants were emptied of goods and cash registers and kitchen equipment. Since then, not much else has changed. There are chairs and tables in the empty food court. Rows of seats at each gate.

I ride toward the security checkpoint, passing through a dusty metal detector. The floors of the airport seem to have been formed from the densest bedrock, as if the airport had been built on stone that has always been here, that was simply buffed and polished into a floor.

The children once ran along concourses like this. Late for a flight or excited to have arrived. Six of us, our own tour group we joked, with six suitcases and six backpacks and a multitude of soft and special items, a favorite blanket or a favorite bear, brought along on this trip for comfort, a necessity, a mobile connection between some new destination and our home.

I glide now, coasting on the bike.

We always loved to travel.

A security guard walks along the end of the concourse, in blue and black uniform, a hat, black shoes, a gun and flashlight on his belt.

I have seen him here before. Have spoken to him one time, for an article in the paper. “I have worked at this airport for many decades. I worked here when this place was new. Worked here when the city built the new airport to the south. Worked here when this airport was shut down but still a crew of twenty watched over and maintained the place. Worked here when, one day, no one else showed up. When the power no longer came on. When the street on which I live saw its last neighbor pack up and leave in his small car. I have always worked here in this airport. I have decided that I always will.”

He raises a hand in my direction now, but makes no motion to come toward me. He turns to a door along the concourse, pushes it, disappears out of my view.

EMPLOYEES ONLY.

I ride to the very end of the concourse, where the walls push out into a circle and the ceiling rises even higher, vaulting upward, like a church or concert hall. I circle the room, slowly, staring up at the tall and unnecessary space. A grand reflection of our want to travel, an epic celebration of routine departure and arrival.

I circle again. Circle once more.

After a few minutes, I stop my bike along the wall, push open a door, carry my bike down a flight of stairs to ground level. On the tarmac outside, I start riding again. The smoothest concrete.

The airport was in near perfect condition when it was closed. There were complaints of an outdated baggage system, of a need for updates to the lighting. But these were really just excuses, thin justifications for the fundamental desire to have a new airport, one closer to the South End. To save twenty minutes in a car. To prevent people from having to drive through the rapid decay in the north.

This happened many times here. The central train station was demolished then replaced with a massive parking lot. Retail was abandoned downtown for a vast mall on the edge of the South End, a mall that was left vacant just a few decades later as a newer mall was built even farther to the south. The trolleys were torn up with funding from automakers who wanted more room for their ever larger cars. The roads themselves built wider, separating neighborhoods as crosswalks were removed to help the traffic move even faster, the roads getting so wide that the cost to maintain and repair them grew beyond anyone’s expectation or ability. Parks removed to make way for strip malls and highway on-ramps, the biggest of the parks cut through with the highway and the overpass near the community center, the south side of the park turned into strip centers, the north littered with thin, cheap houses of one size. Neighborhoods dominated by brick buildings and corner stores and baseball in the street were wiped away and replaced by vast and anonymous apartments. Grand homes torn down to make way for low duplexes with few windows and no porches. Schools left half empty as more and more people moved away, willing to spend tax money only on the new schools that they built, not the once-great schools they left behind. The wealth of a whole city drawn south, where billions could be spent on the new as the old was left to survive on a fraction of those dollars. And the city government that allowed all this to happen, that made decisions that drove more and more people away, some members of that government ended up in jail for their corruption. But most people in the government simply moved south with the masses, their abuse and their ineptitude never acknowledged or documented.

As I ride, I am in my mind writing this all up for the paper.

It’s not a story I’ve written before. Even though all of us here know it to be true.

I near the airport’s tall control tower, fifteen stories high, a concrete cylinder topped by a white circular structure, like a 1950s UFO with antennae and dishes atop it. I climb the stairs to the top room in the control tower, looking out over the whole airport. The spider web extensions of the terminal and its concourses. The accordion draped tunnels used to empty passengers from the planes. The massive hangars where aircraft were once maintained and repaired.

Like all of the North End, the airport was built on land claimed many decades ago from the bay, the land made available by a massive extension of the levees and canals. I find binoculars in a cabinet. I look out from the tower to the north and can see the far edge of Runway 1.

There is water, spread out, covering half of Runway 1. And covering all of Runway 2.

And beyond the runways, there is only water.

This is new. This is recent. Another few square miles have been reclaimed. The failure of the levees spreads. The destruction, it moves south.

But really, I’m still only thinking about how we always loved to travel.