In the Dead of Summer (14 page)

It should have worked. It would have, if he hadn’t been Lowell. If I hadn’t still been aiming for nice-girl politeness. “Get lost” would have been less ambiguous. As it was, he claimed that he was invigorated by the exercise and the scintillating—truly, he used that word—company, and he’d walk a bit longer, if I didn’t mind. He even patted his spare tire and said the exercise would do him good. He was much too sedentary, he told me, spending all his free time keeping up with the literature of his field and working at his computer, surfing the Net.

I wondered what I’d do when we actually reached Society Hill. I wasn’t sure whether Sasha was in town, let alone home. And in fact, Mackenzie was coming to my house for a dinner for which I was totally unprepared. How would I get out of this? Get rid of Lowell and turn back without antagonizing him, without putting pennies in his insane-o-meter?

So on we walked. It wasn’t all that unpleasant. I didn’t have to utter a syllable. Lowell waxed poetic about the Infobahn, as he loved to call it—many times.

I was relieved to see no one I knew. In particular, I cringed at the thought of a student seeing me with Lowell and making drastically wrong assumptions. It was very third-grade of me, I know, but it was also the truth.

However, I didn’t recognize a soul, and Lowell wasn’t overly interested in either architecture, history, or fashion, so he didn’t dawdle or stop to admire or despair of anything along the way and our progress was speedy. I, on the other hand, studied the ever-increasing displays of personal flags hanging out of homes. Close to the Fourth, as we were, some were patriotic fantasias in red, white, and blue. One was a sunflower. Presumably, in autumn, the owner changed it to corn or chrysanthemums. Some reflected private passions—a fish biting a hook, a sailboat against the sun, a golf ball and club. I wondered what the one with a whale meant. Maybe Ahab lived there.

And although the custom flags were too expensive a decorative object for me to consider, I still wondered what I’d put on one if I could. The question used to be what your sign was. Given these outfront signs all over town, was the question: What’s your symbol?

“Your friend lives in Society Hill?” Lowell asked.

That was indeed Sasha’s address—but only when she was in town. We turned right on Sixth Street while I considered my options. I thought of the dire warnings I’d been given as a child about the snare we set when first we tell a lie.

I could go in her building and wave Lowell off. I could buzz somebody else. I could…I could perhaps stop acting as if this were an old
I
Love Lucy
script? Maybe I should just come clean. Admit that I wasn’t to meet Sasha, after all.

Except there she was. Big as life—which is quite big, indeed—and in Technicolor, a camera balanced near the tip of her nose. She was in front of Mother Bethel, the church that former slave Richard Allen began two centuries earlier, when he and other black members knelt in the
white
pews of their Methodist church and were told to leave in mid-prayer.

“Sasha!” I called. “I thought you’d be home, whipping up dinner. I’m starving. What are you doing out here?”

She lowered the camera and looked at me intently.

“This is Lowell,” I said. “He graciously kept me company on my walk here to my dinner date with you.” As blatantly put as I dared. She either got the message or was off my list of friends.

Lowell studied her warily. Dressed in a fuchsia scarf crisscrossed around her chest and what seemed a bedspread, emerald and ocher this time, draped into a sarong low on her hips, she towered above him, her six feet enhanced by clogs that looked like hand-me-downs from the Wicked Witch of the West.

“I told you dinner would be casual,” she said. “I’m using the kitchen as a darkroom today. Which means takeout. Thought we’d hit Reading Market and make a choice. Hi, Lowell. Pleased to meet you.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” he said with mortifying earnestness, as if he’d just invented the phrase. “Besides, any friend of Mandy Pepper’s…”

His approach was a little backward and a lot overconfident. I’d known Sasha since elementary school, and Lowell superficially for three weeks.

“Oh,” he said, “well, not
exactly
any friend of Mandy Pepper’s, because we were just talking about
one
of her friends who isn’t as worthy as others.”

“You were talking,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

“No problem,” he answered.

Sasha blinked. “Well, sure,” she said. “Whatever you say. I’ll be with you in a sec. I’ve been trying to catch a sense of it on film. I’m not sure it’s possible, though.”

Surely, the African Methodist Episcopal mother church was too massive in its High Victorian brick and stone for Sasha to capture at close range.

“So violent,” she said. “And meaningless.”

The street was deserted, the only oppressive element the heat. Violence seemed far away in spirit and geography.

She waved toward the recessed entry, dark in shadow. “Come look if you want to be depressed.”

I came and looked and was depressed. The building had an arched doorway with a stained-glass window over it. Its doors, designed to be solid and welcoming, ready to swing open and admit the visitor, had been defaced. Rough red circles with a spray can’s aureole of fuzzed spatters, and one long drip, like a bloodstain, down to the threshold.

“I tried to get into the pure aesthetics of it,” Sasha said. “The brightness of the red, red blood, rebellion—but I couldn’t. It feels like violation.”

Lowell squinted in the direction of the doors. “You’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “This isn’t meaningless.” His face was flushed, not from the heat, I feared, but from unwholesome excitement.

I wanted to warn Sasha about Lowell’s fixation on evil, and I raised my index finger and pointed it at my temple, meaning to spin it in that universal body-language indication of craziness. But Lowell straightened up and looked at me with a bright and expectant expression. I put my index finger to work scratching my eyebrow.

“Further evidence of the pervasive menace that sprayed those graves, Mandy Pepper. Perhaps related to the mud in Flora Jones’s room today as well.” He sighed and grew silent.

“Did you finish that thought? Are you going to?” Sasha felt no need to suffer fools gladly, or at all.

“Those aren’t circles.” Lowell pointed at the doors.

They surely weren’t squares, or stars, or random shapes. There were four circles—ineptly drawn, but circles nonetheless.

“What do you think they are, Lowell?” Sasha asked with absolutely no inflection in her voice.

Lowell looked at her with a poorly shaven face full of contempt. “I don’t
think
they are. I
know
they are. And what they are is eights.”

That didn’t sound nearly as crazy as I had feared. Eights weren’t much. I’d never cared for them particularly, had trouble with their times tables, never got excited about Crazy Eights, either. But still and all, two eights seemed fairly innocuous.

“Eight-eight,” Lowell said.

“Really,” Sasha said. “I would have sworn it was just a swing or four of the spray canister.”

I didn’t get it. A lot of taggers used their neighborhood, their street number, for example, but there wasn’t any Eighty-eighth Street that I knew of.

“It’s part and parcel of the evil encircling us,” Lowell said. He was obviously fond of that image.

I wondered if Aunt Melba knew what a sicky her nephew was. Worse—I wondered if my mother knew, and was so desperate about my single status that she didn’t care.

“It’s their mark.” Lowell’s voice trembled with emotion. “
H
is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Two eights represent two
H
’s.”

My irritation with his pseudodrama, with his entire being, must have been
visible at this point, because Lowell pointed at me and with still-greater dramatic flair. “I am not crazy!” he shouted, or as close to a shout as you can get in a tremulous, whiny voice.

“Of course you’re not,” Sasha said. “But you’re not comprehensible, either, sweetie. Aren’t you going to tell us what’s the big deal about those two eights that might also be
H
’s?”

“Aitch, aitch,” he yelped, like a yappy dog. “It’s code! It stands for, ‘Heil, Hitler.’”

I stopped laughing, even silently, at him.

The shadows of the recessed entryway of Mother Bethel,
symbol of human dignity, reached out to the sidewalk, blotted away the sun and spread darkness over the street. And deep in its shadow, I thought I could see Flora, screaming.

I backed off from the building, from the bloodred
loops on its doors, before they encircled me as well.

“I STUDY THE PHENOMENON,” LOWELL SAID.

Sasha was still trying to document the outrage on the church’s front doors, twisting to the left and right, moving in for closer angles, back for the play of light and shadow.

“This is the fourth recent eighty-eight sighting,” he went on. “Previously, there was a rash in Bucks County, but it’s spreading, growing ever more powerful. And you, Mandy Pepper, could be in danger because of your open friendship with one of their targets.”

“Flora?”

He nodded. “You appear a sympathizer. You put your arms around her today. You comforted her. Everyone saw.”

“Please.”

Lowell’s zealot’s eye and mouth were not to be stopped. I was being punished for hypocrisy. I vowed to never again try to be nice to anyone I instinctively disliked. Even if they were shaving-impaired.

“Or perhaps this is a new group,” he said. Sasha clicked a few more times. I wondered how many shots of a door one person could take. “A more subtle, and therefore more dangerous cadre.” I was no longer sure what Lowell was talking about, only that I didn’t want to hear it. “After all, nothing is signed per se, and there are none of the indications that it’s one of the groups with which I am familiar. Still, the defilement of graveyards, the harassment, the abduction—”

“April’s abduction doesn’t fit,” I said, rather snappishly. “It doesn’t make sense in your context.”

“In what context does it make sense?”

“I didn’t mean it that way. But it only makes sense in the way that nothing makes sense today. In the sense of urban crime, in the sense of bad things happening to good people, as random, senseless violence. That’s where it fits. Nobody left a note, or made a phone call or gave it any symbolic, larger meaning, the way they did on the doors.”

“That sort of naïveté lulls people like you into a sense of false complacency,” Lowell said. “As your friend, I have your best interests at heart, and I’m warning you: be alert. Sometimes, their only goal is chaos, so of course, you can’t figure out the sense of it.”

He gave me the creeps, and I wondered if he wasn’t like the pyromaniacs who started fires and even fought them, like the preachers who railed against the very sins of the flesh that occupied their free time. Lowell doth protest too much. What made him obsessively interested in hate groups? Was he really only a worried observer? “There isn’t a single skinhead at school, if you’re saying that the business with Flora’s classroom is a—”

“They’ve gotten craftier. You can’t identify a neo-Nazi by a look or an outfit anymore,” he said. “It could be the clean-cut young man next to you, the ordinary-looking—”

Sasha snapped the cap back on her lens. It sounded like a sonic boom. “I hope you don’t think I’m rude, Lowell,” she said loudly, “or frivolous to think of food given the state of the world and the many plots against its people, but Mandy arid I, we had this date and I’ve made us late already, so if you’ll excuse us?”

“I could walk you to Reading Market,” he said. “That’s where you said you were going.”

“Well, see, the date includes…there are others involved,” Sasha said darkly.

He didn’t get it. “This is a big, mean city. Sometimes, even in broad daylight, it’s smart to have a male escort.”

“You don’t have to convince me of that,” Sasha said. “I’m a male escort enthusiast. Wherever. But today we have to stop off at my apartment and do girl-things, you know?”

Lowell, master of evil, protector of womanhood, blushed so hard that even his unshaven facial hair took on a rosy hue. “Oh, yeah, sure.” But he didn’t move, except for his brow, which furrowed. Then he remembered what men said when taking their leave. “So I’ll see you tomorrow, Mandy Pepper, right? And a pleasure to have met you, Sasha.”

We watched his stooped shuffle for a moment, then we turned and headed north, toward the market.

“Is he by any chance your mother’s handiwork?” Sasha asked.

“How did you guess? Her two latest suggestions have been Lowell and—get this—that I join AA to meet men.”

“That idea finally reached Boca Raton?”

“You’ve heard it already?”

“Heard it, done it. It’s
ancient
.
First you meet them in a bar and then in AA. It’s very Eighties, though. The bookstore’s the place this decade. Better pickings and more to talk about than his recovery. My advice? Don’t fix what ain’t broke. Mackenzie ain’t broke, except for his leg. Wait till he is.”

“Speaking of which, want to come to dinner? The slightly broken Mackenzie is limping over.”