I had no desire for another run-in with the old hooker, and I d seen most of the

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1 THE DESCENT OF MAN by KEVIN DESINGER (excerpt) I had no desire for another run-in with the old hooker, and I d seen most of the rest of downtown, so I stayed on Cleveland, east of the river and south of Mill, cruising at exactly the speed limit. In our town the cops can pull you over for this, especially during the small hours of the morning. I guess it s considered suspicious behavior to act according to the letter of the law. I wasn t trolling for cops specifically, but I was definitely trolling for something anything, actually and wouldn t have cared about being pulled over. I would pass the Breathalyzer test. I was ready to take any test they wanted to throw at me. Being pulled over would have helped me feel a part of society again. I was in a familiar neighborhood, one I hadn t seen in a long time. There would be an all-night grocery just up the street. A soda pop sounded good, something cold and fizzy, with lime in it. I parked in front of the store. Although the painted sign beside the door still said, Open 24 hours, it was obvious that the place was closed. There was a pop machine out front beside an ice freezer, but I had wanted the experience of going in past the counter, where an older fellow seated at the cash register would be trying to stay awake on a slow night by watching TV with the sound turned down. He would nod hello without saying anything and with a quick appraisal decide I was harmless. I would select my bottle from the cooler a Squirt or Quench, if those were still around and return to the counter, avoiding an exchange of pleasantries with the merchant (who would be 99 percent wanting to be alone again and 1 percent relieved that I wasn t there to rob him). He would hand me my change and drop the receipt into the wastebasket, completing the late-night encounter between two urban strangers. I sat in the car thinking that I hadn t 1

2 really wanted a pop at all. I d wanted to relive that experience. Marla and I used to live four blocks over from this store, on Agate Street behind the grade school. That first summer we would walk down here in the evening for ice cream. Sometimes we would get two sweet rolls to set out by the toaster oven for breakfast the next day. I had forgotten this period, which had been short, and a blur besides, because we d been lost in the early days of love. Marla had seen the open-house ad in the Saturday-morning paper. She told me to put on my shoes because it started in ten minutes and it was a ten-minute drive. We found the address and parked in front of the small bungalow. It was part of an area that was on the rise, though it still had more than its share of rental houses. Before we went in Marla stopped and said, This is it. The yard was a flat expanse of sunburned grass surrounded by a four-foot-high chain-link fence. I said, I m looking at a desert. There s nothing here. Exactly. A blank slate. We can do whatever we want. The interior was neat and cozy, with some built-ins and a fireplace. The kitchen had good space and light and looked out over a backyard that had a maple toward the back fence but otherwise was another blank slate. There were quite a few other interested people, but we didn t mind. Marla said that as a couple we were too cute to be turned down. We lived there our first year together our honeymoon year which was in fact closer to fifteen months before we married and had a real honeymoon. During her free time Marla dug beds into both the front and back yards. The landlords, barely older than we were, said they would pay for any plants and trees we put in as long as we cleared it 2

3 with them first. There must be seminars in which landlords are advised to deduct the cost of shrubs and trees from the rent if their renters are willing to work in the yard. Every week Marla called with new ideas, and she kept getting the go-ahead. I helped with some of the heavier labor, but for the most part she simply made decisions and went to work on her own. She seemed to be turning the rental into the place she wanted to live for the rest of her life. (In fact, it was more like a practice pad, but I didn t see this then.) In the front yard she dug beds along both side fences and plugged them with three carloads of plants. A narrow concrete path ran from the sidewalk to the porch, dividing the front lawn into equal squares. She had me dig a hole in the center of each, shoveling the dirt onto a blue tarp. Meanwhile, she took the pickup I owned at the time over to the nursery and returned with two pear trees, which I waltzed across the yard, shook out of their buckets and rolled into the holes. The next weekend she planted some kind of climbing vine honeysuckle, I think along the front fence to reduce the chain-link barracks look. That s how it went for the first couple months, and soon the yard was how she wanted it. How we wanted it, I should say; it was beautiful. It was this yard that made me want to find a house to buy. I wanted to own the work we put into a place. Over the years I had forgotten the house number. The street name was easy because we had always referred to it as the Agate House, but the numbered cross streets weren t registering. I idled down Agate for three blocks before I found the familiar run of houses, ours second from the end. I sat in my car in the middle of the street with the engine idling. It was three in the morning. 3

4 They had painted it since we d left, gone from a light-gray body and dark-gray trim to a soft yellow body and walnut-brown trim. Supporting the porch roof were two large boxed pillars, the left one bearing the four address numbers in red glaze on white ceramic tile. This and the scalloped shingles covering the pillars were what set this house off from its neighbors. I could imagine the crazy month almost a hundred years earlier when this entire row of houses had gone in, the constant syncopated industry of hammers and saws. Each was distinct from the others simply by variations in the porch pillars. Marla s pear trees were twenty feet tall now, and the shrubs around the foundation were full and neatly trimmed. She had done a good job of shaping our first nest. We had been innocent here, just starting to learn who we were as a couple and what path in life we would take together. I couldn t recall any of the decisions that had led us from the people we d been in this house to who we were now, but in the years since living here we had come a long way. In some senses we were very much the same people, and in other senses we were horizons beyond those younger selves. It was no surprise to me, then, to find myself stopped in front of the first house in which we had lived together. It was like looking back toward the path I needed to find again after my momentum had carried me through this strange detour. The attempted theft had pulled me off course, gotten me behaving in unfamiliar ways. I was caught between my world and the world of the Hood brothers, and I wondered what it would be like to be them, to steal cars on a regular basis. The technical aspects disabling the keyed cylinder or sorting through the color-coded ignition wires were beyond me. And I also lacked the internal structure the emotional and ethical twists that allow guys to steal cars without being crippled by guilt. But I wondered what a 4

5 guy would feel when he was, as Rainey put it, committed to the act. The car parked beside me was a fairly late import, well kept, worth thousands of dollars. The neighborhood had improved since we had lived here. What would be the first step? Probably trying the door to see if it was locked. It s a common enough practice in the quieter neighborhoods for people to leave their cars unlocked. I looked up and down the block on both sides of the street. Every porch had its light on, but not one window was lit. I got out of the Camry and went around to try the door of the parked car. It opened with a click. No alarm, just the silent glow of the dome light. I sat in the driver s seat and gripped the wheel. I was beginning see how some guys took to this kind of enterprise so much value just sitting there at the curb, almost daring the thieving brothers, or the backpack bicyclists, to hop in and go. It didn t make the idea of stealing cars any more tempting to me, but it made sense that guys did it. I remained in the seat and closed the door, and the light went out. I leaned back and wondered how much you could get for a stolen car. As with anything without a fixed price, you probably waited for the other person to name a number, then you named a different number, and the two of you worked toward each other. But where would you take the car to begin the process? How would you even begin to find out? And I couldn t drive away in both cars what would I do with the Camry? Maybe park it up the street and figure out a way to come back for it a couple days later. As I sat in this stranger s car, thinking through all these things, I grew more relaxed than I would have thought possible. 5