Empire Falls

middle-class street, theirs and the Minty place next door were the first houses to prefigure the deterioration of the whole neighborhood. Miles’s father, though a sometime house painter, had been disinclined to paint any house he himself happened to be living in. Summers he was busy working on the coast, and by October he would pronounce himself “all painted out,” though he sometimes could be induced to work for a week or so if the landlord—with whom they had a reduced-rent arrangement contingent upon Max’s keeping the house painted and in good repair—complained or threatened eviction. Resentful of such a strict literal interpretation of their agreement, Max retaliated by painting the house half a dozen different, largely incompatible colors from the numerous leftover, half-empty cans he’d appropriated from his various summer jobs. The Roby cellar was always full of stacked gallon cans, their lids slightly askew, the damp, rotting shelves full of open mason jars of turpentine, the fumes from which permeated the upstairs throughout the winter. Miles was in fourth grade when one of his friends asked what it was like to live in the joke house, a remark he passed along not to his father, who was responsible for its harlequin appearance, but to his mother, who first flushed crimson, then looked as if she might burst into tears, then ran into her bedroom, slammed the door and did. Later, red-eyed, she explained to Miles that what was on the inside of a house (love, she seemed to have in mind) was more important than what was on the outside (paint, preferably in one hue), but after Miles went to bed he heard his parents arguing, and after that night Max never painted the house again. Now its motley color scheme had weathered into uniform gray.
    Miles hadn’t been parked across the street for more than a minute, staring up at the dark, shadeless window of the room where his mother had begun her death march, before a police car wheeled around the corner two blocks up Long and came toward him, swerving across the street and rocking to a halt so close that its bumper was mere inches from the Jetta’s own grill. A young policeman was at the wheel, one Miles didn’t recognize, and when he got out of the cruiser, putting on sunglasses that the gloomy sky didn’t warrant, Miles rolled down his window.
    “License and registration,” the young cop said.
    “Is there a problem, officer?”
    “License and registration,” the cop repeated, his tone a little harder this time.
    Miles fished the registration out of the glove box and handed it out the window along with his license. The policeman attached both to the top of his clipboard and made a couple notes.
    “You mind telling me what you’re doing here, Mr. Roby?”
    “Yes, I do,” said Miles, who would have been reluctant to even if he’d had an explanation that made any sense. That a demented priest had called his mother a whore, thereby compelling him to visit the house he’d grown up in, as if his mother, dead these twenty years, might be rocking on the porch, did not strike Miles as the sort of story that would satisfy a man who felt compelled to wear sunglasses on dark, rainy afternoons.
    “Why’s that, Mr. Roby?”
    To Miles, this didn’t sound like a serious question, so he didn’t answer it.
    The young policeman scratched some more on his form. “Maybe you didn’t hear the question?” he finally said.
    “Have I done something illegal?”
    Now it was the cop’s turn to fall silent. For a full minute he ignored Miles, apparently to prove that he too could play this silence game. “Are you aware that you’re driving an unregistered vehicle, Mr. Roby?”
    “I believe you have the registration in your hand.”
    “Expired last month.”
    “I’ll have to take care of it.”
    The cop didn’t register this remark, instead pointing at the inspection sticker on the windshield. “Your inspection’s also past due.”
    “I guess I’ll have to take care of that, too.”
    No opinion on this either. “So what are you doing here, Mr. Roby?” the officer said, as if he were asking this question for the first time.
    “I used to live in that house,” Miles said, indicating which one.
    “Used to. But not now.”
    “That’s right.”
    Miles then caught a glimpse of something red in his rearview mirror and turned in time to see Jimmy Minty’s red Camaro pulling up behind him. Jimmy, who’d grown up next door, was about the last person Miles