2. Abandoned City

There were always two or three new houses going up around the development. My across-the-street friend Michael McDonald and I liked these new houses better than any playground. The workmen were there most of the day, banging with their hammers and pushing wheelbarrows and climbing ladders, but there was usually and hour or two toward the end of the day after they left and before dinner when we could look around, marvel that what looked like just a wood scaffolding and dusty pieces of plasterboard could turn into a house.

We grabbed whatever we could, whatever it seemed like the workmen were going to throw away. We each had a collection of about a hundred nails, many of them rusted or bent from being hit wrong but some in perfect condition, like the workmen had just thrown them out for no good reason. We stored the nails in the empty cans of paint we salvaged, after we’d brought the cans into the woods and tried using the bottom skim to paint our initials on trees.

We also collected scraps of wood and pipe and rope, pieces of insulation, bits of electrician’s tape and wire mesh. We saved our collections in special, private spots in the woods behind my house.

The woods were another place we liked better than any playground. Both Michael and I came from New York City; we’d never been around woods before. We explored as much as we could, a little more every day, convinced no one had ever seen what we were seeing. One of our favorite spots was The Mossy Place, where the trees suddenly opened and there was a sunny spot covered in deep moss, so soft when you lay back down on it and let the warmth cover you. Then there was the Vines, a place where long vines hung from the trees, far out of reach even when we tried to climb the trees. We knew that if we only could reach them, they would be perfect for swinging on, just like Tarzan.

Back beyond the woods was the cow’s field. The cow’s fields weren’t nearly as much fun as the woods, just a big wide open stretch of high grass. You couldn’t even run back there, because some of the grass was the sharp kind that cut up your legs. And then there were the cow turds, which were everywhere, often hidden under the grass. If you stepped on a dry one it wasn’t so bad, but one time Michael stepped on a fresh pile and got so much stuff on his sneakers his mother had to throw them out and buy a new pair.

The cows didn’t pay much attention to us. We avoided them. We knew they wouldn’t hurt us, but they were just so big. We thought it was better to stay away.

Michael and I couldn’t believe it when we found the abandoned city at the edge of the cow’s fields. It wasn’t a whole city, just two collapsed buildings made of busted-up gray wood. But it was easy to imagine there’d been other buildings around these two, even streets. Through one of the collapsed walls you could see right into the dark basement of the buildings, just like we could see into the basement of the new houses being built on the block. This was different, though: these buildings were old, they were mysterious.

“It’s like an old Western town,” Michael said. “A ghost town.”

“It could have been,” I agreed. “It definitely could have been.”

I told my father about it that night as he was looking at my teeth. He did that every night, scraped at my teeth with a fingernail to see if I’d brushed them. “We found someplace cool today,” I told him. “A ghost town.”

He listened as I described it. But instead of being excited, he said, “That sounds very dangerous. I don’t want you two going back there anymore, okay? One of those old walls could cave in. Someone could get really hurt.”

I told Michael what my father had said the next day. He said his father had told him the same thing, that he wasn’t allowed to go back there either.

We never meant to. We would never say to one another, “Let’s go to the abandoned city.” But we’d just start walking in the cow’s fields and we’d end up there somehow.

We knew we were doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing. But we didn’t talk about that, either. Once there, we never touched anything. We believed what our fathers had told us about how dangerous it was.

One day we were sitting there in the abandoned city, talking about the night before’s Batman episode, whether the Penguin or the Joker was the better villain—everyone knew the Riddler was the absolute best—when we heard something. A whimpering noise. At first we were both scared. Michael said wanted to leave.

But I said, “No. We have to investigate.”

We figured out the noise was coming from underneath the buildings, from the dark basement.

“It must be a dog,” Michael said. “It must be a dog stuck down there.”

“You think?”

“Yes. Listen.”

He was right. It did sound like a dog.

“Here, boy,” I yelled, “come on out,” and then Michael yelled the same thing. We both tried to coaxing the dog out for a while, but it stayed in there, whimpering.

“It could be hurt,” I said. “It could have fallen in there and broken its legs.”

It was getting dark. We had to go home. But I thought about that dog all night, that poor dog with its broken leg in the dark basement. I wanted so badly to tell my father about it, so that he could call the Fire Department and they could put a ladder down and get the dog out. But of course I couldn’t tell my father, since I wasn’t supposed to be at the abandoned city in the first place.

I woke the next morning with a plan. I went over to Michael’s house early, waited at the bottom of his driveway until he came out.

“We have to go back,” I said. “We have to get that dog out.”

“How are we going to do that?”

I pulled up my shirt and showed Michael the hammer. It was from a set of tools my father had bought just a few months before at Sears, still silvery and unused, with a black rubber handle. “We’ll build something,” I told him. “We’ll use the wood that’s there and our nails and rope, what we’ve collected. We’ll make a pulley.”

Michael nodded. I took off running, into the woods toward the secret places where we kept our stuff. I didn’t need to look back. I knew Michael was right behind me.

But when we got to the abandoned city, tired from carrying our paint cans full of nails and scraps of wood and pipe, we didn’t hear anything. We got up close to the building, closer than we ever had before. We listened hard, lying flat on the ground because we’d seen in some movie that laying flat on the ground helped you hear better. But there was still no whimpering.

“Maybe he found a way out on his own,” Michael said.

“Maybe,” I answered.

“I hope he did,” Michael said.

 nodded. I was sad for the dog, of course, and like Michael hoped he’d managed to find a way to get out on his own. But I was also sad because I had my heart set on rescue, and now I wouldn’t get the chance.

1. Brices's Dog

The Brices were our next door neighbors right from when we first moved onto our block. They were an oddity in our neighborhood. Most everyone else was new families, young Moms and Dads, just moved from the city and starting a new life in the suburbs. The Brices were older and, even more strange, childless. Mr. Brice had white hair and was very tall and wore his shirt tucked into his underwear, which I thought was pretty stylish though when I tried doing it my myself mother made me pull it out. Mrs. Brice was short and black-haired and spent most of her time working in her garden. She prided herself on her lawn. It was a story my mother loved to tell, the way we’d first met the Brices just a few days after we moved into our house, how my mother came outside and spotted Mrs. Brice throwing rocks from her lawn onto ours. 

“Why,” my mother asked Mrs. Brice, and the more times I heard her tell the story the more sarcastic she’d make her voice, “why are you throwing rocks from your lawn onto our lawn?” 

“Well,” Mrs. Brice answered, “you already have so many rocks, I figured a few more wouldn’t matter.”

Which was absolutely true. Our yard at the time was a dirt pit. We hadn’t put out any seed and there were still deep truck tire ruts left by the builders. The Brices, though they’d only been in their house for a few months, had managed to rake their whole yard and level it and were well on their way to having the perfect, green carpet they’d maintain for most of the twenty years we lived next to them. 

Still, my mother considered it a pretty un-neighborly way to act, throwing rocks on someone’s lawn without asking.

For the first two or three years our relationship with the Brices was nice enough. We waved hello to them, chatted to them from the driveway. They did the same. My parents never invited them to their parties—no one else around the block did either; the Brices wouldn’t have fit in—but when the Brices had a big block party they did ask us, and it turned out to be a good time. The party was their celebration for having finished clearing out the woods behind their house. It was a process I’d been fascinated with, the way the workmen cut the trees down piece by piece, never all at once, smaller and smaller until they were just stumps and then dragged the stumps out of the ground with chains and a truck. 

The Brices had their block party in the cleared area. Chinese lanterns hung from the remaining trees, and underneath their light the adults played horseshoes in a pit Mr. Brice had had built. We kids watched the shadows made by the lanterns, listened to the clanging of the horseshoes, drank endless cans of soda fished from ice-filled garbage pails. I didn’t get home until way past my bedtime.

Another time, my father was on the back porch drinking beer playing Irish music, which was something he did every few months. He had these boxed sets of  records, “100 Irish Favorites,” “Sing If You’re Irish,” which he’d bought at flea markets. They were completely scratched up but he’d stack them on the record player and sit on the back porch and drink beers. It was clear when he did this he didn’t want any company. I didn’t like the music very much anyway, so that was fine with me.

This one time, my mother and my brother and I were watching television in the living room while my father sat on the porch with his beer and Irish records and citronella candle when we heard voices. I was sent by my mother to investigate. There was Mr. Brice, sitting with my father. Mr. Brice had never been on our porch before, that I knew of, and definitely never in our house. I don’t think my parents had ever been in theirs, either. 

“Go get Mr. Brice a beer, Chris,” my father asked. “Get me one while you’re there. Mr. Brice loves the traditional music too.”

I got the two beers, brought them out, and left my father and Mr. Brice alone. They were still there talking when the other three of us went to bed. 

That was a one-time thing, though. Mr. Brice never came over again during one of my father’s Irish music jags.

Over the years, waves hello and chats in the driveway became just waves hello, and then not even that . We were still next-door neighbors, and we saw them every day, but they didn’t really acknowledge us and we didn’t acknowledge them. The inclination to make an effort just wore out, over time. Plus, as the Brices got older, they either got meaner or just got more comfortable being their mean selves. Mrs. Brice hated it when my friends and I played on the strip of lawn we shared with them, and if we set up third base an inch into her property some kind of alarm would go off in her head and she’d be outside yelling at us to stop tramping on the grass and couldn’t we go do that somewhere else? And we often overhead Mr. Brice yelling at Mrs. Brice over the littlest things, like she’d forgotten to lock the car doors overnight—no one locked the car doors in our neighborhood—or she hadn’t put away one of her yard tools and it had rained. He yelled at her the way our parents yelled at us.

When I was sixteen or so, the Brices bought a dog. A puppy, but a big puppy, some kind of German Shepherd. It was the loudest dog I’d ever heard. The Brices didn’t let the dog sleep in the house, but instead had built a cage in their landscaped backyard for it, and they’d put the dog out there at about ten o’clock every night. It would bark for a half hour straight, fall asleep, and then start barking again whenever a car door slammed. The dog woke up barking at the crack of dawn, and kept barking until the Brices finally woke themselves and brought it inside.

It drove my mother crazy. She was working in New York City three days a week by then: she took the early train in, so the morning barking didn’t really bother her, but she was often in bed before nine and said the dog was making her so tired she was going to lose her job. She said the Brices were being selfish and inconsiderate, but hadn’t they always been selfish and considerate, how about the time with throwing the rocks in our yard, it was all just the same and they were just not good people. 

Though we didn’t talk about it with as much anger as my mother, my father, brother, and I also hated the dog’s barking. It was especially bad on weekends when we all wanted to sleep in. 

This one Saturday morning, I was awoken first by my father coming into the house, and then by the dog barking. Princess was the dog’s name. Coming home at dawn on Saturday was something my father had started doing a couple of months before, around the same time the Brices got the dog. Playing cards, he said, and that was probably true, since when he woke up at noon or 1 o’clock he would tell my brother and I how good a night he’d had and give us each a few dollars, crumpled bills that smelled like smoke and felt soggy even days afterward.

Princess was going to town this morning. Barking as usual, but also howling, whimpering, mewling. Loud, loud, loud. I put a pillow over my head and managed to drift back to sleep. I was getting used to the barking by then, the way you can get used to almost anything.

The next thing I heard was the front door of our house slamming, and then a few seconds later a loud rapping next door. A rattle of a screen door opening, and then my father’s voice. “Bring your dog inside. My wife is trying to sleep.”

“What are you talking about?” I heard Mrs. Brice say.

“Your dog. Your goddamned dog. Bring the dog inside, so my wife can sleep.”

I knew my father really meant was to take the dog inside so he could sleep. He’d never shown any interest in my mother’s complaints about the dog. It was a Saturday anyway.

“You don’t tell me what to do about my own dog and my own house,” Mrs. Brice said.

“I’m telling you to bring the dog inside, so normal people can sleep.”

“Normal people? You just getting home at this hour, you’re calling that normal? Do normal people come home at dawn?”

My father and Mrs. Brice continued to argue for another five minutes or so, Mrs. Brice saying more or less the same things about my father coming home at this time of the morning and having no right to tell Mrs. Brice what to do anything and my father saying his wife couldn’t sleep and if she didn’t bring the dog inside the house he was going to call the police and the ASPCA.
My father came back to our house. My mother was awake by now. I could hear her moving around in the kitchen, but I didn’t hear her say a word to my father when he came in the door, and I didn’t hear him say a word to her as he walked down the hall to their bedroom and slammed the door closed behind him.

A little while later, when I was awoken again by what I thought at first was more howling from Princess. It took me a second to recognize the noise as Mr. Brice. 

“John Newsome,” he was screaming, in a voice full of fury. “John Newsome, come out here! Come out here, you motherfucker!”

He must have been standing on his back porch, shouting across the lawn. That’s where it sounded like his voice was coming from.

“John Newsome, you don’t talk to my wife that way! Come out here now, and I’ll tear you apart! Come out here and be a man, you pussy!”

It was funny and scary at the same time. The things he was saying were ridiculous. But his voice, it seemed to be coming from somewhere so deep inside him. It seemed so full of hatred.

“John Newsome, come out here. I want your blood!”

I got out of bed; my brother was already up. He and my mother were in the kitchen. I smiled. “What in the world is going on out there?”

“It’s not funny,” my mother said to me. “It’s not funny, and you better get that smirk off your face.”

“John Newsome! I’m going to punch our your lights, you pussy motherfucker! Come out here and fight like a man.”

My father appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. He was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, his summertime pajamas. He was looking at my mother, but not like he wanted her help or guidance. More like he somehow blamed her for getting him into this.

“Don’t even think about it,” my mother said to him. “Just turn around and go back into that bedroom. It’s enough for one morning.”

My father nodded slightly. And, for once, did as he was told.

Later in the afternoon, my father called to me as I walked in the house. I’d been playing basketball down the block, and I was really sweaty and wanted to get something to drink, but he caught me before I could get to the kitchen. He was alone in the house, watching sports on TV. My mother must have taken my brother shopping. My father turned the sound down on the television, and motioned to me to sit down on the couch.

“I imagine you heard most of what went on this morning,” he said.

I nodded, a kind of shrugging nod.

“That’s too bad.” He thought about it for a few seconds, and then he said, “I want you to know two things. Mr. Brice is old, and he was drunk. He was drunk at, what was that, eight o’clock in the morning?”

I nodded the shrugging nod again. 

“He’s old, and he was drunk. Those are the only reasons I didn’t go out there. It wasn’t that I was scared of him. You know that, right?”

The thought had never even crossed my mind. I nodded again and said, “I know, Dad.”

My father reached over, smiled, cuffed me on the arm. “Good. I just wanted to make sure you understood. Go do whatever you were going to do.”