THE POLICE come again, no lights this time—it’s the middle of the afternoon—but my heart is jolted by the crackle of radio static. Unacceptable. I am sitting in my bathroom on the closed toilet holding my breath when I realize I haven’t heard that crackling noise in a few minutes now, and when I venture out to the front window I can see that the patrol car is gone. The relief I feel makes me jump even higher when, behind me, there is a knock on my door.

“I’m not coming in,” Autumn says. While she talks she is staring at the eye level deadbolt I installed on the door months ago. It’s possible she’s never noticed it before. “Just wanted you to know that I tried to get them to interview you, but he said no need. He was a sarcastic little bitch about the whole thing, to be honest. Kept asking if I’d really called 911 about a tree, which obviously I did, he knew that. Serves me right for calling a cop in the first place. God, I fucking hate cops. Well, I don’t mind going next level if I have to. Stand my fucking ground. Listen, I never asked you. You didn’t see anything, did you?”

“No,” I say.

“Liar,” she says. “Why you want to protect these little illegals I don’t know. Don’t you remember being a kid? Kids are horrible, and these are the worst of the worst. Don’t let me find out you’re protecting them.”

Her hair’s in a ponytail, which frankly is a much better look for her than the usual sloppy bun. She has given herself some sort of manicure.

“No,” I say. “How would I even do that?”

“Anyway, one thing I can tell you, they’re cleaning that shit up. Those kids. They trespass on my property, and I can’t get the cops interested in that but fuck if I’m going out there and cleaning up after them. I promise you I can speak a language there that every one of those little foreign fuckers will understand.” She turns and energetically descends the stairs. One thing I’ve learned about her: she never says hello or goodbye.

She has a gun. That’s what that stand-my-ground nonsense is about. Once it dawns on me, I’m sure of it. She’s exactly the sort of person who would own at least one gun, “for protection,” and you can’t necessarily blame her, a woman living alone in her own house in a neighborhood like this.

The severed limbs look more and more dead; they turn incrementally brittle while everything around them greens. If I can see them out my window, Autumn can see them out her window, and of course the kids pass them twice every weekday. In their deadness, they are provocative. Something is going to happen if I don’t intervene but on whose side? I’m not anybody’s ally in this, and I don’t particularly want to be.

I want peace. A just and lasting peace, peace in our time. I’ve always wanted peace, and I used to imagine that made me some kind of radical. But now I get it that peace is self-serving; peace protects the status quo and those who like it.

When I get to the library I see with a start that all but two of the club chairs in Periodicals are gone. The librarian sees me looking over my shoulder, trying to remember how many chairs were there before, and says, before I can ask: “To discourage vagrancy.”

“I was wondering,” I say with maximum meekness, “if there’s any sort of printed directory or list of city services.”

It’s clear from her expression that she misunderstands.

“Not social services, municipal services,” I say. “Like schedules for trash pickup, that kind of thing.”

“Online,” she says. “All that information is online,” and she gives me the .gov address. “If you want, I can sign you up for one of the terminals. Half-hour limit if anyone’s waiting.”

“No thank you,” I say quickly, wanting to cut that conversation short before it gets to a request for ID. “Nothing in print, then,” I say. She shakes her head, and I give her a comic shrug and turn away.

And then the Black man in the polo shirt buttoned up to the neck, the same guy who’s always there, leans toward me, over the arm of one of the two remaining chairs. He says if I tell him what I want to look up, he’ll look it up for me. When I give him the request, his eyes widen and he laughs. “Man, if I’d known it was that boring, I would have kept my mouth shut,” he says. “Too late now.”

Yard refuse is picked up only on the last Monday of every month. The pieces must be no longer than two and a half feet in length and stacked neatly, not bagged, with the exception of mown grass, raked leaves, and Christmas trees, which must be bagged. He wrote it down for me, in a visibly shaking hand. His name is Oscar. He is nosy. “What you want to know all this for?” he says.

That indie hardware store, Feeney’s, where I bought the deadbolt kit? Gone. Out of business. I know where there’s a True Value, and a Home Depot, and an Ace. But I won’t go in there. That is, there’s got to be a way to avoid going in there. Extremely unlikely that the Goodwill would ever have a saw—who would donate a saw?—but I ask them anyway if such a thing ever comes in. “No weapons” is the rote answer.

Time is a factor and I have no other ideas: I ask Oscar if he knows a good place to buy tools that’s not Home Depot or the like. I have prepared an answer for when he asks me what I’ve got against Home Depot, but instead he asks, “What tools you need?” A saw, I say, like a hacksaw, for tree work. “I got a pruning saw,” he says. He’ll even deliver it to me if I’ll tell him where I live. I say he shouldn’t go to such trouble; he can just bring it to the library and I’ll meet him outside. He appears hurt by this but agrees. When he hands over the saw the next day, it looks suspiciously unused. I promise to return it tomorrow, and he just shakes his head and laughs and turns without a word to enter the library, where, armed now with a saw, I cannot follow him.

It’s a total of seven cuts. Exhausted, I put the nine pieces in a pyramid on the edge of the grass just beside where the trash bins go on pickup day. My back feels like it’s on fire. I turn to look at Autumn’s windows; all the lights are out, but it’s impossible to conclude for sure that she’s not in there.

If she confronts me, I will tell her that it was a matter of self-interest, that I couldn’t have the cops coming around here anymore. I can’t permit any confrontation that might draw me in. She won’t like that, but she will understand it.

How to be invisible when you are walking down a crowded city sidewalk on a sunny day past homes and stores and you are carrying a large saw? There’s no way to normalize it. Everyone stares at me. I have not thought this out very well, or at all really. If Oscar is not at the library, I will have to turn around and go home. He’s usually there this time of day. Still, they are not going to let me stroll into the library holding a saw. So what am I going to do? Stand outside the windows and wave it at him? That turns out to be exactly what I do. He looks at me in astonishment; I try, with a sort of sheepish smile, to make it seem like this is in any way a normal sort of interaction.

He puts on his coat, his hat, rather unhurriedly in my opinion, and meets me out on the sidewalk.

“So, thank you for this,” I say. “It really did the trick.”

He doesn’t take it from me, only looks at me quizzically.

“Are you crazy?” he says, though his tone is not angry. “What am I supposed to do with that?” He is careful not to look at it, even while referring to it. “You couldn’t put it in a bag or something?”

A fair point, though I’m not sure a saw wrapped in a white plastic trash bag would have looked less ominous.

Oscar shakes his head. “A Black man, in this city, walking into a public library carrying a saw,” he says.

I try holding the saw flat against my leg so that it’s not as visible. The effect, Oscar’s look tells me, is absurd.

“I have a pen,” he says. “Do you have a piece of paper, anything, maybe like an old receipt in your wallet?”

“No,” I say.

“You don’t even want to look?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t have a wallet.”

He shakes his head. “What’s your address?” he says. And I am so cowed and nervous at this point that I give it to him. “I’ll be there at three,” he says, and he turns and walks back inside. I take the saw back home, this time holding it casually, swinging it a little even, though the expression on my face is probably not all that convincing.

At ten minutes to three I put the saw in a trash bag and take it out to the sidewalk. I am praying that he will not be late, because if he is then we will risk being out there when the students flow home from school. But I can’t wait inside. I never mentioned anything about the separate entrances so he would knock on Autumn’s door for sure.

He is on time. Men who wear their shirts buttoned all the way to the neck are not likely to run late, I suppose. He’s back to his usual demeanor, like we are great friends, like everything about me is his business. “This your house?” he says. “It’s nice!”

He reasonably expects to be invited in. “No,” I say, “I just rent a room here.” I point to the window and instantly regret it. I’m just trying to explain what would otherwise read as an aggressive lack of politeness or gratitude. The fact that he’s Black and I am white is certainly part of my fear of being misread.

He nods and looks down at the wood pyramid a few feet away. I can hear distant, loud voices, high voices, on the street behind me. “So you just doing some yard work,” Oscar says, “to help out?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Get a break on the rent?”

The voices are getting louder, and I am afraid to turn around. “Listen,” I say. “I don’t want to be rude, but I have to go. I’m so grateful for your lending me the saw. It really helped me out. With my landlord. So thanks.”

His face clouds. There is no way to explain to him what is happening, but in the absence of that explanation, a familiar mistrust takes hold. “Yeah, okay,” he says, in a new tone. “Well, maybe I’ll see you.”

“Sure. Tougher since they took all the chairs out of the library, though. That seemed kind of unwelcoming. Why would they do that?”

“Yeah, well, always a chair for a white man. Though you might try dressing better. Anyway, now I know where you live, right? In case I ever need my favor returned.” And he takes the bag from my hand and walks away. I feel relieved and also guilty but right behind that guilt is a kind of hot defensiveness, like fine, fuck you, I was never the one looking for a buddy anyway. “Excuse me,” says a polite voice, and a girl passes me from behind as I stare down Sugar Street. Head down, I cross the lawn toward the exterior stairs, trying not to run.

That night—quite late, late enough that I’m lying in bed with the lights off, though sleep seems unlikely—I hear steps on the stairs. I brace for a knock, but instead I hear the swish of a piece of paper sliding under the door. After the steps recede, I get up and unfold it. The light from the street is enough to read by, and my eyes are adjusted to the dark. It’s just handwriting on a plain piece of paper, like from a computer printer. “You are the cuck of all time,” it reads. “I want you out.”