Drugs and real estate: two good lines of work to be in on the Hill if you weren’t a Republican or a lobbyist, or maybe even if you were. We didn’t care for the Republicans or the dealers, but none of that made trouble, not for us. It was just life in a town lousy with people who had too much money — the folks looking to buy up anything they could get their hands on — and even lousier with people who didn’t have enough to do anything at all. Not everybody could be a winner.
Overall I couldn’t complain about how things were going. Baseball had come back to town after thirty-five years — the Nationals were even on a streak, the winning kind — and after years paying good dough to bad landlords, we had a house of our own.
We felt lucky, finding that house. Lucky to have a front porch and a little bit of land to call our own, lucky to have a bedroom for each kid — Dani, who was almost four, and her baby brother Jack — when a lot of people we knew had theirs double-bunking. Especially if they lived in the older row houses to the west, over in the lockdown zone around the Capitol and the Supreme Court where the Homeland Security folks concentrated their loving attention. For the most part they left Hill East alone. There was nobody fancy here to protect, no essential governmental personnel, unless you counted the famous residents of Congressional Cemetery two blocks over. John Philip Sousa and J. Edgar Hoover were good neighbors.
I couldn’t say that of everybody. In the mornings, on my way to the Metro, I got in the habit of picking up the Styrofoam containers and soda cans thrown out of car windows by the people who blew down Potomac Avenue. You could find all kinds of things in the bushes along that strip — condoms (used), CDs (unplayable), every type of wrapping known to the fast-food industry.
The weirdest thing I found was a baby doll the color of an old copper penny. I say I found it but in fact it was Dani who did, on one of the aimless stroller expeditions she and the baby and I used to take down the alley behind the house when we had time to kill before dinner. The backyards of our block were as diverse as the residents. A couple had been shrubbed and landscaped until they looked like pages out of House and Garden. Others, like ours, were crammed full of kiddie gear, plastic slides, and sandboxes shaped like enormous frogs and ladybugs. A few, including William and Ida’s next door, had evolved over decades from outdoor storage to junkyards where unwanted objects went to die: broken-down jalopies, odd pieces of wood from home-renovation projects abandoned halfway through, steel meat smokers that looked like mini-submarines.
Next to William and Ida’s on the other side was a group house for the mentally disturbed, muttering sad cases who boarded a van each weekday morning and were taken off to some useful occupation and brought back each night to Potomac Avenue. At home, if the weather was nice and even if it wasn’t, they drifted along the sidewalk like so much human litter. That’s not a very nice way of putting it. But whenever I saw Louis and Juanita and the other residents, whose names we didn’t know, they looked emptied out like the discards I picked up along the margins of the avenue. If they were sad, though, they didn’t know it. They used to try to bum cigarettes off us. They never could remember that we didn’t smoke.
The backyard of the group house was a wasteland where even grass was too depressed to grow. One scraggly tree managed to stay alive there and shelter, under its few remaining branches, a row of those cheap molded-plastic chairs you could pick up for a song at Kmart or Wal-mart. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the inmates of the group house would park themselves in those chairs like so many city birds — what my mother would call “trash birds,” grackles and starlings and the like — and smoke themselves closer to an early grave. I could have done without the smoke that sometimes carried across William and Ida’s backyard and into our kitchen windows.
The alley doglegged across the block, connecting the streets — 16th and Kentucky — that angled into Potomac on either end. Two lines of garage-style, brick-walled storage units faced each other across a narrow strip of concrete, sealed off from the alley by a chain-link fence that didn’t look like it would keep the rats out, must less any would-be burglars. That eyesore filled the lot right across from us, although it was interesting to speculate what might be hidden in those units. William said he’d seen a Rolls Royce in one of them, but that might just have been wishful thinking.
The day we found the doll, Dani was investigating a section of wall on the storage unit that bordered the alley. Three or four bricks had come out and created a gap. Right on the edge of it sat the doll, naked as the day it came off the Chinese assembly line. Other than that it looked right at home.
Over Dani’s strenuous objections I took it inside, put it in a place where she wouldn’t see it — who knew where that thing had been? — and forgot about it. I put a note in the alcove where we’d found it — We have your doll, come ring the bell at… — and then I forgot about that too. You forget a lot of things when you’re looking after a couple of kids.
Dani asked me if it belonged to William and Ida. I told her I didn’t think so. They had been there as long as I’d been alive, long enough for him to be called Mister William by most of the young people in the vicinity, while Ida stayed just plain Ida. They’d raised their kids and now they liked things quiet.
As for the young people, well, I didn’t much care for the teenagers who liked to hang out and yell at each other in the little park across the street, one of those orphan triangles of public space you find in D.C. where three or four streets come together at crazy angles. The teenagers scared me the first few nights we were in the house, but they weren’t real trouble. They just acted like they were. They liked to shout it up after hours when the rest of the neighborhood had locked itself behind doors for the night, but I never heard that they did anything but make noise. They weren’t part of the New Dragon posse. If you really wanted to freak them out, all you had to do was drive by slowly, roll down a window, and say hello in a big cheerful voice.
Weirdly enough, it was Juanita, not the teenagers, who freaked out. Like most of the group house inmates she looked older than she probably was — hair gone gray years before its time, half her teeth gone too, skin the color and texture of dried apricots. What really got to me was how she liked to wear latex gloves, the kind doctors put on for intimate exams. Lord knows where she got them, but they didn’t conjure up good associations.
One morning I came out and found one inside out on the sidewalk in front of our house. The fingers were still half-folded in on themselves, as though it had been pulled off in a hurry. Juanita stood about ten feet away watching me.
It was April, barely. March had come in colder than usual and stormed out again without leaving much in the way of spring behind it, and the first days of April struggled to catch up. I felt sorry for the flowers who’d pushed their way up expecting sunshine and mellow air and instead gotten the dismal leftovers of a winter that wouldn’t shake itself loose.
I was in a hurry that morning, trying to get my daughter in the car. Ida had stopped by to watch the baby for a few minutes; Dani was late for school already, and it wasn’t a day to linger out of doors. Juanita was out there having the first smoke of the day, bundled up and shapeless in the ratty down parka that had found its way to her through some dubious act of hand-me-down charity. I gave her a good morning that was as cheerful as I could make it under the circumstances.
“Man keys. Godababeedahl?” She cleared a wad of phlegm out of her throat — did she have to hawk it onto the sidewalk? — and looked at her shoes, Chuck Taylor All Stars a size too small and almost worn through at the toes. Without a full set of teeth she might as well have been speaking Chinese. On a good day I caught every third or fourth word. She was gesturing now; her arms windmilled furiously. “Fur man. Keys.”