The only significant change occurred when the couple upstairs, who were both accountants, eventually retired and moved to a house in Vermont, and their place was taken by a quiet, beautifully dressed black man and a smaller, noticeably less well-dressed individual who looked like he might have come to steal her jewelry, which, had fate not introduced him to his current partner, might well have been the case. Still, they were very polite gentlemen. Mrs. Bondarchuk suspected that they were gay. It gave her quite a frisson for, by the standards of the city, she led a very sheltered life.
If any problems arose with her apartment, Mrs. Bondarchuk left a message with a delightful young woman named Amy, who answered the phone for Leroy Frank Properties, Inc. Actually, Amy answered the phone for a great many businesses, none of which needed or wanted an actual physical presence in the city. Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., owned a number of premises in New York, of which the one on the Upper West Side was the sole residential property. Amy was under explicit instructions to deal with Mrs. Bondarchuk’s problems promptly, at the very latest by close of business on the day the call was received. A premium was to be paid to the relevant plumber, electrician, carpenter, or other professional to ensure that this was the case. A list of approved individuals was kept in a file in Amy’s desk, all of whom were aware of the particular needs of Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., in relation to this building.
Mrs. Bondarchuk knew the first names of the two men who lived above her, and referred to them, respectively, as “Mr. Louis” and “Mr. Angel,” but she had never connected the black man, Louis, to Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., even though “Leroy Frank” was not a million miles removed from “Le Roi Français” and, while there had been a great many French kings, the name most commonly found among them was, of course, Louis. No, Mrs. Bondarchuk made no such connection, for it was none of Mrs. Bondarchuk’s business to think about such matters, and her life was, for her, quite idyllic, so she had no desire to go poking her nose into dark corners. She had enough money on which to live quite comfortably; she had quiet neighbors; and the soundtrack to her life was the yapping of happy Pomeranians and the soothing strings of the Mantovani Orchestra, which, she had discovered, could provide an album for every occasion. And because she valued her situation so highly, Mrs. Bondarchuk guarded every facet of it very closely indeed. When the tradesmen came to fix a leak or change a light bulb, they did so under the unflinching stare of Mrs. Bondarchuk and assorted small dogs. The mailman never got beyond the doorstep. Likewise delivery men, salesmen, small children at Halloween, large children at any time, and any adult who was not her old friend and fellow widow, Mrs. Naughtie, with whom she played an often bad-tempered series of backgammon games, fueled by cheap sherry, every Thursday night.
Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had installed an expensive and complicated alarm system when it had taken over the ownership of the building, and Mrs. Bondarchuk understood the workings of that system intimately. Mrs. Bondarchuk did not know it but, in her way, she was as essential to the security and peace of mind of the two men who lived above her as the guns that they occasionally carried in the course of their work. She was the Cerberus at the gates of their underworld.
Now, as she lay in her bed and listened to “Swedish Rhapsody” on the little CD player that Mr. Angel and Mr. Louis had given her for Christmas that year (Mrs. Bondarchuk preferred to go to bed late and wake up late: she had never been a morning person); she heard them enter, heard the soft weeping of the alarm before they silenced it with the code, and then a final single beep as the door closed and they reset the system.
“Night, night, Mrs. Bondarchuk,” called Mr. Angel from the hallway.
She did not reply, but merely smiled as she stopped the music and turned off her light. They were home, and she always slept better when they were around.
For some reason that she could not quite fathom, they made her feel very safe indeed.
That night, Louis lay awake while Angel slept. He thought about his past, and the hidden nature of the world. He thought about lives taken and lives lost, about his momma and the women who had raised him. He thought about Bliss. He followed the threads in the patterns of his life, pausing where they overlapped, where one connected with another.
And then he closed his eyes, and waited for the Burning Man to come.
It was a small town, a sundown town. That term meant something for the boy and those like him. True, there was no longer a sign advertising that fact at the town limits, which counted as progress in some small way, although there might just as well have been, since most everyone beyond the age of seven could recall where it had stood, just below the gate to Virgil Jellicote’s farm. Old Virgil had made sure that the sign wasn’t obscured by dirt or, as had once occurred during the period of unrest that followed the killing of Errol Rich, by the judicious application of some black paint, so that the sign was transformed from “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town” to “White Folks, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town.” Old Virgil had been mightily troubled by that act of vandalism; other people, too, and not all of them white. What was done to Errol Rich was wrong, but riling the cops and the town council by screwing with their beloved sign was just plain dumb, although when the police came asking who might have been responsible for the damage, they were greeted only with silence. Being dumb wasn’t a crime, not yet, and the law had plenty of other ways in which it could punish people of color without another being added to the list.
The town wasn’t even unusual in its overt exclusion of the black population. It was one of thousands of such towns across the United States, and even whole counties had turned sundown when their county seat did. Half of all the towns in Oregon, Ohio, Indiana, the Cumber-lands, and the Ozarks were, at one point, sundown towns. God help the black man who found himself in, say, Jonesboro, Illinois, after dark, or nearby Anna (which was known, to both whites and blacks, as “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” and would continue to have signs to that effect on Highway 127 as late as the 1970s), or Appleton, Wisconsin, or suburbs like Levittown on Long Island; Livonia, Michigan; or Cedar Key, Florida. And, hey, that goes for your Jews, your Chinese, your Mexicans, and your Native Americans, too. Be on your way now, son. Time’s a killin’…
The thing about the boy’s hometown was that it was a pretty place. It was clean, and there wasn’t much cussing, not in public. Main Street belonged on a postcard, and the flowers growing in its pots were always appropriate to the season. It was small, though. In fact, it was so small that it barely qualified as a town by any reasonable reckoning, but no- body in those parts referred to anywhere as a village. The place in which you lived was a town or it was nothing at all. There was something substantial about a town. A town meant neighbors, and laws, and order on the streets. A town meant sidewalks, and barbershops, and church on Sundays. To call somewhere a town was to recognize a certain standard of living, of behavior. Sure, folk might go off the rails now and again, but what was important was that everyone knew where those rails were. All derailments were purely temporary. That train kept on running, and all good people made sure they were on board for the whole of the journey, allowing for some unforeseen stops along the way.