A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [27]
The pleated door closed quickly behind him. The tall arc lamps spilled a lavender glow over the dingy streets. Bradley Hill had once been one of the more desirable neighborhoods in the city. Now most of the large Victorian homes had been partitioned into apartments like this one on the corner, its massive oak doors flanked by rows of mailboxes and doorbells. Spray-painted on the porch wall was the word Aurora. Unmatched colored curtains hung in the windows, some too short, others knotted and wafting in and out over the sills. Leaving gaps like missing teeth, balusters had been wrenched or kicked out of the railing. Where the wide front lawn had once been green with tended grass and neat hedges, now six cars were parked on paving laid from the sidewalk right up to the granite foundation. The front door opened and a plump, bare-armed woman in baggy jeans came onto the front porch, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. She sat on the top step and lit a cigarette. She stared down as he walked by. He remembered going to Joan Kruger’s seventh-birthday party under the pear tree in the backyard there. Mrs. Kruger had silvery frosted hair, a fur coat, and a cleaning lady who came every week. A cleaning lady, and she didn’t even have a job, which to his mother was the epitome of privileged indolence. In the front hall there had been an enormous mahogany hat tree, in its center an etched mirror surrounded by brass coat hooks, ivory hat holders, and a purple velvet bench flanked by two ornately carved receptacles, one for umbrellas and the other for walking sticks.
When he was curled up on his bunk with his back to the cell door, such recall of detail had been a vital nightly ritual. Under the constant glare, sleepless with the stink and groans and snoring around him, he would try to visualize each room he had ever been in, the furniture, where doors and windows had been, the color of walls and carpets. The one room he could never recall had been that room that night. It had been too dark, a hellish cave of lumpy shapes and shadows in the glowing red numbers on a clock radio by the bed: 9:16, that’s what he remembered, that and her damp hair. The hiss of a startled cat. The rug sliding under his braced feet. The pillow feathers flattening until through them he could feel her jaw struggling against his palm. Her fingernails had been painted a bright red, but this he knew from the blown-up photos on the courtroom easel, showing two nails torn to the quick. The heartbreaking proof of a young woman’s desperate fight to live, this delivered with the snap, snap, snap of the prosecutor’s pointer on the glossy paper accentuating each word.
Gordon turned the corner and then stopped, toes curling in his shoes. The spinning blue light lit up the peaks and angles of the crowded rooftops. A cruiser was parked in front of Mrs. Jukas’s house. The old woman’s shrill voice cut through the night. “They were selling drugs. Right down there on the sidewalk. Right in front of my house. People kept pulling up and the girl, she’d go over to the cars and give them the drugs right there, bold as brass, then she’d come back and give the money to the one I told you about.”
“Which one?” asked the bony-faced, older cop, his flat tone only fueling the old woman’s agitation.
“I already told you! The one they call Feaster!”
Gordon had made it halfway up his walk when the cop called out, asking his name. Gordon, he answered. The cop asked if he knew Feaster.
“No, sir. Not—”
“Yes, you do! I saw you talking to him!” Mrs. Jukas shouted with an angry gesture over the railing. “Just last week! I saw you! With my own eyes I saw you!”
He wiped the sweat from his