The Hanged Man's Song

perfectly nice place, assuming that we weren’t in the best part of it. The part we were in was run-down and maybe even run-over. Some of the houses thatpassed through our headlights seemed to be sinking into the ground. Driveways were mostly gravel, with here and there a carport; otherwise the cars, big American cars from the eighties and nineties, were parked in the yards.
    The streets got bumpier as we went along, and eventually we got into a spot that was overgrown with kudzu, the stuff curled up and down the phone poles and street signs. Water was ponding along the shoulders of the roads; street signs became hard to locate and, with the kudzu, even harder to read.
    “Too bad you can’t smoke that shit,” John said. “Solve a lot of problems.”
    At one point, a big black-and-tan dog, probably a Doberman, splashed in the rain through our headlights, looking at us with lion eyes that said, “C’mon, get out of the car, chump, c’mon . . .”
    We didn’t. Instead, John picked out streets on his map, confirmed it from one street sign to the next, and finally got us onto Arikara Street. “He ought to be in this block, if the numbers are right.” The street was bumpy, potholed, with trees hanging over it, and was lined with widely spaced houses with dark exteriors and dark windows. I’d brought a flashlight along with me, and John had it on his lap, but we didn’t need it. We came up to a bronze-colored mailbox, the best-looking mailbox I’d seen all night, and in the headlights saw 3577 in reflecting stick-on numerals.
    “That’s it,” he said.
    I went on by. We looked for light, for movement, for any kind of weirdness, and didn’t see or feel a thing. The house had a carport, but it was empty. Some of the houses had chain-link fences around the yards, but this one was open. A porch hung on the front of the place.
    “Take another lap,” John said. “Goddamnit. We shoulda worked out an alibi.”
    I shrugged. “Tell the truth. That we’re old computer buddies of his, that we knew he was near death, and that he asked us to check on him if he ever became nonresponsive.”
    “Yeah.” He sighed. “I wish we had something fancier.”
    “At two-thirty in the morning? We were out looking for Tic Tacs, Officer. . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah. I just rather not have them run my ID through their database.”
    “No shit.” The next lap around, I said, “I’m gonna pull in, unless you say no. You say no?”
    “Pull in,” he said.
    >>> I PULLED into the driveway, up close to the house and, before I killed the lights, noticed a wheelchair ramp going up to a side door from the carport. The neighborhood was poor, but the lots were large and overgrown. The neighbors to the left could see us, if they were interested, and the people across the street might get a look, but there were no lights in the windows. Working people, probably, who had to get up in the morning.
    When I stopped, John climbed out, with me a second behind, and we shut the doors quickly and as quietly as we could, to kill the interior lights. Dark as a tar pit, rain pelting down; the place smelled almost like a northern lake. We squished through the wet side yard to the porch, then walked up to the door. John hesitated, then knocked.
    Nothing.
    Knocked again, then quietly, to me, “Jeez, I hope there’s no alarm. I never even thought of that.”
    “If there is, we run.” I tried the knob. “Shit.”
    “What?”
    “It’s open. Don’t touch anything.” I pushed the door with my knuckles, and immediately smelled the death inside.
    “Got a problem,” I said.
    “I smell it.”
    The odor wasn’t of physical decomposition, but simply of . . . death. An odd odor that dead people gather about them, an odor of dying heat, maybe, or souring gases, not heavy, but light, intangible, unpleasant. Something best not to think about. I was afraid to use the flashlight, because nothing brings the cops faster than a flashlight in a dark house. Instead, I pulled John inside, closed the door, groped around, found a wall switch, and turned on a ceiling light.
    The first thing we saw was the wheelchair, and then what looked like a pile of gray laundry in a corner. We both stepped that way and saw the nearly weightless, eggshell skull of a young black man, with a scattering of books around his head. There was no question that he was dead. His face had been wrinkled, maybe from pain, and though you could tell he’d been young, he had a patina of