While I let the team detail the scene — what was the Judge wearing? What was in his pockets? His wallet? — I stepped outside and joined uniform going door-to-door.
I should have gotten a dog, I thought as I made my way up the street, the sound of cicadas twisting thinly in the wind somewhere up overhead. Maybe there was still time. The way I stood in relation to this land — there were far too many people in Charlottesville who played at place. There were also too many roads. Walking through the ups and downs of a neighborhood like Belmont, however, walking until you felt the activity and noise of being sandwiched between Monticello and Sixth more or less recede, you also felt a kind of welcoming low-to-the-groundness, a wandering around barefoot quality inherent to the South, and the only way to honor the land when you couldn’t actually touch the land was to maybe get a dog, someone who followed their nose, who could smell the concentrations of clay and aluminum in the soil; who could smell the snakeroot, the green dragons, and the devil’s walkingstick, all names forever teetering on the edge of obvious myth; and who would stand on mysterious patches of seeming nothing but would do so because they sensed a tree beginning to grow underneath and who just wanted to be lifted high. Uppies.
A man with a frathouse fire hydrant of a face, dress blue shirt, and khakis was walking past me down towards JBird Coffee. The slowly fading in affirmations of “Yeah, dude” made it clear that he was on the phone with a friend.
“Yeah, dude. Yeah. It looks like he’s done it again. I have no idea where he gets these ideas for his movies, you know? Like, wow. First Oppenheimer and now something called The Odyssey? I don’t know what that is, but it sounds thick.”
My eyes glanced over at the mispronunciation of ‘sick’ and saw that a small handful of teeth had fallen out of the man’s mouth. He had caught them with his hand and was looking down, still not breaking his stride.
“Hah, hah,” he said, perhaps in response to something his friend said. I had stopped walking and watched as more teeth fell out of his mouth — they clattered at his feet all slot-machine like — as he made his way down the hill. “Hah, hah.”
“Hey!” I called out. The man turned and looked back at me. Blood had pooled around his mouth in such a way that it looked like his bottom lip was melting. Small flecks of his blood were beginning to rain drop their way across his shirt. His teeth were gone.
“Are you okay?”
He smiled a toothless smile at me. He gave a thumbs up. He pivoted and got back on the phone. I heard a distant, “Sawrry, dude. So —”
The first door I came to had paint flaking off the walls and water stains running up the sides. A knock. Nothing. The property was either abandoned or six months away from it being abandoned on account of the occupant’s declining health.
I hitched my belt slightly and once for lack of anything better to do and took a look up and down the street.
It was the kind of day where it felt like humidity was smoking its own cigarette, which meant that it would be the kind of evening where you could watch fireflies congregate in everyone’s backyards to have end-of-day beers. It also meant it was the kind of day where — for one reason or another — no one was probably home. All tubing down a river someplace. It was either that or they were literally sitting upon their air condition units, ready to move for no man or woman.
A second house. Brick walls. Fake American Tudor. I scribbled a note on the back of a business card, left it in the mailbox, and then compulsively checked my phone, where I tried to read an article I’d had trouble reading —
Mel Walker wasn’t much for reporters. He was a busy man. When asked to go on the record—about his chicken, one of his trendy new neighbors on West Main Street, or C’ville soul food in general—he’d offer a look that was one part “I don’t have time for that” and two parts “you’ve never written about me before; why now?”
I stopped, let my phone dropped, and sighed. I took one breath, scratched the area of skin right beneath my right eyebrow, and breathed in and out.