GOOD NEIGHBORS by Viet Dinh

The Walkers’ house next door had stood vacant for three years, and I thought it’d stay that way forever. It was another abandoned feature in the neighborhood, the front lawn a bed of hay, plywood nailed across the front windows, the iron rails leading to the front door disintegrating into sharp flakes of rust. One night, someone – or several people, the police never did figure it out – stabbed Mr. Walker twenty times with a pocketknife. Mrs. Walker, they bludgeoned in bed. This was the summer of 1991, when I was eight and DC was still the murder capital of the world. Mrs. Walker’s bedroom was directly across from mine, and I kept my window open to catch wayward breezes drifting through. Most nights, she prayed before going to sleep and coughed loud enough to shake the bed. But the night she died, I didn’t hear anything. It was like she’d decided to go quietly.

As bad as their deaths were, no one was surprised. There’d already been plenty of knifings and drive-bys in Logan Circle. On my way to school, I passed men who high-fived each other a quick exchange of cash. Prostitutes walked the Circle as if the confluence of streets confused them. One afternoon, my best friend Marlon dared me to peek into the Walkers’ house. He knelt on one knee and I stood on his leg, boosted over the plywood. The walls were thick with shadows, the carpet littered with beer bottles, discarded clothes, unidentified stains. If this house had once held life, it held nothing but darkness now.

So our block rallied. We gathered at Vermont Avenue Baptist and walked single-file to the Walkers’ house, holding candles poked through the bottom of plastic cups. On the sidewalk, Rev. Kramer said, in his broad, rumbling voice, “My brothers and sisters, what happened in this house will never happen again. Not now, not ever! We will take back our neighborhood.” The crowd shouted back Amen! Right on!

My mother says this was the turning point. People started sweeping their front steps and planting petunias in the small strips of earth we called yards. We said hello to people we knew and stared down the unfamiliar. It wasn’t long before everyone was up in everyone else’s business: they knew Skittles, Mom’s best friend, had man troubles; they knew my success in the District spelling bee. My arm grew sore from waving hi. The neighborhood got better, little by little, the way autumn starts by turning just the tips of leaves orange. But for me, the real turning point didn’t come until someone finally moved into the Walkers’ old digs.

       One day in May, workmen asked Skittles to move her ’78 Eldorado. They had a van full of stuff to unload. Before the van had finished parking, Skittles had called half the neighborhood. All the shades along the block pulled open at once. Someone finally bought the Walkers’ place!

“I don’t know who they are, but their agent must not have told them what happened,” said Skittles. The crew removed the old carpet in a single log on their shoulders. “Ain’t that against the law or something?”

Mom shrugged. “If they want that house, it’s their business.”

“But it’s white people! We got white people moving into the neighborhood. If they was black, they would have just moved their asses straight in.”

“Girl,” Mom said, “you full of it.”

Over the next few weeks, new shingles went up, sparkling in the sunlight like wet hair. Dark soil the scent of rotting leaves replaced the lawn. When I passed by, I smelled the tarry cigarettes Mrs. Walker used to smoke, as if the digging had disturbed the ashes she had tapped into the yard. The outside walls disappeared beneath a layer of beige, and the window frames and eaves became orange-brown. The new paint stood out like a black eye against the rest of the street’s chipped, peeling facades. Mom wanted her boyfriend Eric to repaint – we rented our house from a landlord I never saw in my sixteen years of living there – but he waved her off as if she were crazy.

Marlon guessed it was a young couple.

“I didn’t see no kid stuff getting delivered,” he said.

After four months, a compact pulled up behind Skittles’ hoopty, and out came two men. They stood at the threshold a moment before walking, side by side, into the Walkers’ house. Eric watched their arrival from our front window, silent. When Mom finally pressed him, he said, “Dupont Circle ain’t enough? Now they gotta come here?” and refused to say anything more.

       I found out later that one of the men, Michael, worked as a lab tech for the NIH. We left our respective houses at the same time; me towards Shaw Junior, him towards the Dupont Metro. Michael had an endless supply of white shirts; Dan, on the other hand, had every color except white. He’d been a teacher at some point but now made displays for department stores. Dan seemed more of a housewife than any other woman on the block. Mom worked as a nurse aide; every few weeks, her shifts swapped between day and night, and whenever she worked nights, I was left alone. After she left, I bolted the doors, secured the windows, and turned on lights until there wasn’t a corner that was dark. I put on the chain lock, and when she came home at 5 in the morning, she banged on the door until I unfastened it. She would be too tired to yell at me for burning all that electricity. People don’t believe me when I tell them that I grew up afraid. Even my wife teases me – You lived in Logan Circle, and you’re whining about a papercut? But while the Walkers’ house stood empty, I sometimes heard voices conspiring in those dark rooms. They whispered: that house is empty. That house is an easy hit. Why two gay guys would want the Walkers’ house was beyond me. At first, Dan waved as he unloaded groceries from his car or dragged his trash barrels to the curb but stopped after a while.

I knew better than to show overt hostility, but Marlon didn’t hold back. Whenever Marlon saw them, the world slowed long enough for him to say, “Yeah, you’d better keep walking.” I slipped once, and only once. Mom heard me say Oh, those faggots? while talking to Marlon, and she came outside and popped me in the mouth, hard enough that my teeth clacked together. “I don’t want you to ever use that word, you hear me?” She pushed her finger into my forehead, as if pinpointing where I had gone wrong. “You’re too young to remember anyone calling you nigger, but that doesn’t give you the right to call other people names. They got to live just like anyone else. They need to eat, they need a place to sleep.” But what was wrong with calling them faggots? That’s what they were, right? All I knew about gay people back then was that they were somehow threatening.

Of course, Dan was the least threatening person on the block. He looked as formidable as a loaf of bread. I saw into their bedroom, the way I had seen into Mrs. Walker’s. A bookcase appeared. A face in a picture frame, a dark smudge that hadn’t been wiped off the walls, a shifting shadow from a swinging light fixture.

Eric cracked his knuckles when he saw them. He worked road construction and came over in t-shirts splattered with black streaks of tar. His skin felt as if the sun had sunk into it. I remember asking Mom if they planned to get married, and she shrugged: “If it happens, it happens.” But she seemed to be in no hurry to tie the knot, and neither did he. When she ribbed him – “Why don’t plant some flowers in the yard?” “Why don’t you fix the roof?” – he’d glance at the Walkers’ house, as if it were the source of his misery.

       Trouble at the Walkers’ started small: someone knocked the garbage can over; someone picked the garden clean of flowers. Their yard became littered with fast food wrappers dotted with ketchup, half-crushed cans of beer, cigarette butts. Once, I let a candy bar wrapper slip onto their property, and my mother yelled, “Curtis! Pick that up right now!” Dan had been smoking on his porch, and he said, “It’s OK,” but my mother insisted, “We do not trash each other’s homes.” This may have been true during the day, but at night – who knew what went on?

I kept my window open until the first snowfall, making up for summer days without air conditioning, and the life from the street flowed into my room: cars revving, sudden bursts of laughter, and, occasionally, sharp cracks of gunfire. One night in October, I heard a booming sermon from a street preacher. They came to Logan Circle on a regular basis, microphones in hand, amplifiers stocked with batteries the size of dynamite sticks. But this was two in the morning. I woke up, confused and annoyed.

Then – the scream. A streetful of anger and fear rolled into a single voice. I ran outside in my pj’s; the bracing cold pricked my skin. The night stood still; the city held its breath. Only a few houses had exterior lights on. No one else had come out. I looked around until I recognized another presence: a speck of light, bobbing up and down. Dan, smoking. I stepped backwards, thinking that I could ease back inside. He stubbed out his cigarette against the brick wall. “Hey,” he said. “You’re up late.” His voice filled the air as much as the scream had before. I nodded, and sweat made the air bite deeper onto my arms. “You’d better get inside,” he said.

I wanted to ask if he’d heard it too, but I didn’t. I didn’t speak with him the next day, or the day after that. Halloween was only a few days away, and I wondered if I had just imagined it. But at night, I slept on the cusp of a nightmare: my heart throbbed, and the blood pulsed on my neck, and I startled at the slightest sound. Each time I woke, I looked at Mrs. Walker’s old bedroom. The drapes shimmered as if tousled by a breeze.

On Halloween, Marlon lobbed egg after egg at the Walkers’ empty house. I stood by, his lookout. The eggs hit the house with pffats, little sighs. Two shattered in his hands, and he shook the goop onto sidewalk. When he’d run out of eggs, he rooted around for rocks.

“Don’t,” I told him.

“Why? I don’t want no faggots living on my street.” It was a challenge. Whose side are you on?

“If someone hears you breaking a window, they’re gonna call the cops.”

He said, “You chickenshit,” but backed off. I wasn’t worried about who lived – or had lived – in the house, but the house itself disturbed me: the slate shingles, the crushed lintels. Even painted in yolk and albumen, it held sway over the neighborhood, a darkness that could not be renovated. The next morning, Michael chiseled off petrified egg with a screwdriver. Dan pointed out chunks that Michael had missed. He turned my way briefly, and I gave a weak wave, feeling a nervous chill run up my arms.

My mother stirred her coffee hard, as if it hadn’t all dissolved yet. “That’s too bad,” she said. But I heard relief that it had been them and not her.

“Yeah,” said Eric. “It’d be a real shame if they upped and moved.”

“Why? You gonna buy?” Eric shrugged, shifting the weight on his shoulders onto the rest of the world.

* * *

I kept what I heard in the house to myself: the shuffling from the attic when there were no lights on, tuneless humming from empty rooms, muffled thumps like someone collapsing against a wall. Dan, I noticed, began spending more time outdoors. It didn’t matter what the weather was: the wind blowing the sky white with snow, he was there, cigarette wedged between his fingers. A wet, February day when the cold and humidity turned your bones into icicles, he was still there. He was like one of those men who lived on their stoops, taking swigs out of paper bag-wrapped bottles. He took to feeding stray cats, lightning-fast balls of hiss and swipe. Mr. Walker had hated those cats. He shooed them with a broom, and the battle left him panting on his front steps, a pile of shredded straw in the yard. We all knew better than to try to pet one. On trash day, the cats went from can to can, leaving prints of bacon grease and soda syrup. Mom watched as Dan unpeeled a can of tuna, the cats crowding around his feet. “Doesn’t he know he’s going to bring more cats around?” she asked. Then, Michael came out, face apoplectic red, mouth wide. Michael waved the cats away, and when Dan tried to stop him from dumping the tuna in the trash, Michael shoved him. Mom said, “Don’t people know better than to put their business out on the street?” and dropped down the blinds.

I read everything about ghosts that I got my hands on. I exhausted the small section in the school library. They had lots of made-up stories – Goosebumps, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark – but I wanted the real thing. On days when Mom didn’t get home until well in the evening, I trekked to the Sursum Corda Library, a sea-green trailer stocked wall to wall with books on metal shelves. I examined photographs that had captured ghosts: white blurs like a rip in the world, faces materialized out of nothingness. There were two types of spirits, I decided. The first were memories, echoes of something that had already passed. Sometimes, they re-enacted something terrible, but they couldn’t affect the living, not really. Not like the other type. The other ghosts had their own will, their own secret purposes. They had unfinished business with the living, a need for revenge, a message they had to pass on.

I had a disk camera – first prize in my fourth-grade spelling bee – and I waited in the dark for something to happen. Another scream. A sudden burst of gospel. I bent the metal in my blinds until they deformed into the shape of an open mouth. It had been almost five years since the Walkers had died, and I couldn’t remember what they looked like. But if I snapped a picture at the right time, maybe I’d capture Mrs. Walker’s ashen face and maybe I could figure out what she wanted. I never heard anything, and when I tried to look for her, all I saw was Dan. Sometimes, he stared out the window back at me. But he didn’t see me, and sometimes it felt like he was looking right through me.

The time I should have had the camera ready to go, it was in the back of my closet. One night, someone broke into Dan’s car, and the next morning, Michael looked at the damage, tensing his jaw as if he were grinding his teeth down to nubs. Broken glass sparkled in the street, pale blue specks of ice. I heard Michael from my room – fuck this, goddamn that – and Dan came out with a dustpan, saying, “It’s no big deal. Calm down.”

“I knew this would happen,” Michael said. “I knew it.”

The glass crackled against itself as Dan swept. “It happens everywhere.”

“But it happens a lot more here, and don’t you try to tell me fucking otherwise.”

As Michael duct-taped a black garbage bag over the broken window, I glanced into their bedroom and saw Mr. Walker, his face shaped out of smoke: wide-eyed, whiskered, all jowls and age spots. I blinked, and he had disappeared. The next day, a security company came to the Walkers’ house, and bars went up on the windows and doors. A little shield-shaped sign appeared amidst the begonias: PROTECTED BY SLOMINS.

“What, they don’t trust us anymore?” said Mom.

“You think they trusted us in the first place?” asked Skittles.

       When I finally used up the disk of film, I asked Mom if she could take it to be developed. She smiled, a gesture I had almost forgotten she could do. We hardly saw each other anymore. Eric had stopped coming by for reasons I wouldn’t learn until I was older, and Mom had suddenly aged. She often sat at the kitchen table, still in her nurse’s outfit, legs outstretched as if her thick-soled shoes were filled with stones. When we did talk, she didn’t speak to me as much as she spoke through me, channeling her words into my semi-transparent form. “Let’s go get it developed today,” she said, extending her hand for me to hold, knowing full well that once we stepped outside, I’d let go. It was one of those unreal March days, when the sun stood bright in the sky but the cold, still air slapped your face.

We walked south to the Convention Center. There’d be plenty of tourist places there, my mother reasoned. While we walked, I told her about the haunted places in D.C.: Ford’s Theater, the Old Post Office, Oak Hill Cemetery.

“Mm-hmm,” she said. She put one foot in front of the other, a mechanical act, but once we found a photo processing place, she flared back to life. The staff behind the counter passed my camera back and forth as if they’d never seen anything like it. “Could you please be careful with that?” she said. “It’s my son’s.” The manager told us they couldn’t develop the film; they didn’t even stock it anymore. Our best bet would be in Dupont. My mother had him write down the address, so that we could walk straight to it.

On the way, I told her everything I had learned about ghosts. “You’re scaring me,” she said. She pointed at a man walking across the street from us. “Is he a ghost?”

“Mom.”

“Just checking. He’s so white.” She laughed. “How can you tell if something’s a ghost or not?”

“Well, sometimes people feel a cold spot.”

“Cold spot,” she said. “Yeah.”

The store in Dupont said that they could develop my film, but they’d have to send it to a special lab. It would cost us $25. “No way,” Mom said, and we walked out. The film was in my pants pocket, in a little cardboard sleeve, and my camera in my other pocket. I remember thinking that the day had been a failure, that we didn’t accomplish what we’d set out to do. “We’ll find some other place,” Mom told me, but I don’t think either of us believed it. Three years later, when we moved to College Park, both the camera and the film got lost.

       The last time I sensed the ghosts, Dan and Michael had lived in the Walkers’ house for a year and a half. It was February, and the day had started out warm enough for a light jacket, but while I was in class, trouble moved in on black bands of clouds. Even before school was out, the wind drove the snow into the windows, fingernails tapping on the glass. I ran home with my hands inside my sleeves but found that I’d locked myself out. Mom wouldn’t be home from work until 7. I pulled on the doorknob until it came loose and rattled in its socket. Skittles’ car was gone, and Marlon was probably off raising holy hell somewhere I wasn’t welcome. I hunkered on the steps, already half-ghost, not entirely present in the world. My shoulders were dusted with snow; the flakes on my neck melted and dripped into my shirt. The sky had become as dark as evening. I couldn’t call Mom. She’d been a real bear, prone to snap or swipe from a distance that she knew wouldn’t connect. Frostbite seemed preferable.

“Hey,” Dan said. The tops of my ears had gone numb, and his voice barely registered over the wind. He wore a beige knit sweater, the collar thick as a man’s arm. “Don’t sit outside and freeze. Hey!” Cars crawled by, tires biting unsteadily into the snow. He held the door, the light from within like the only light in the whole city. I stood up slowly, as if breaking ice off of my joints.

I stomped the snow off my feet before I stepped inside, the way Mom had taught me – she smacked my fanny for tracking in muddy footprints onto the carpet. But the Walkers’ house didn’t have any carpet. Not any more. The floors were wood the color of honey. “Make yourself comfortable,” Dan said. They had old furniture, but a different kind of old from ours. Our sofa was old because it was so used – our butts had worn off the floral pattern on the cushions. But their sofa was old because it had been preserved, as if they’d only recently taken off the plastic covers. Their walls were painted a coffee brown that trapped heat. I’d never seen walls that weren’t white or wallpapered.

“Would you like some hot cocoa?”

“Yes, please,” I said. I flexed my fingers. “Do you have the kind with the marshmallows?”

“No marshmallows, I’m sorry.” Dan stirred the chocolate with a wooden spoon. “I’ll have to remember to pick some up for the future. I haven’t made hot cocoa in – God – years. But it seems perfect for a day like today.” Dan tilted his head as he tapped the spoon against the side of the pot, and I noticed a bruise on his neck, above his collarbone, with yellow edges. And like that, it was gone. Dan handed me a steaming mug, and the hairs on my arm stood straight up, as if on alert. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of books in that backpack of yours,” he said. I unzipped it and started laying out its contents: math, social studies, science, and books on ghosts. “Ghosts, huh?”

“I think this house is haunted.”

“This house?” He looked from side to side, and his eyes widened. He was putting me on. “What makes you think this house is haunted?”

“Sometimes I hear things,” I said. “You know how the Walkers died, right?”

“No,” he said. “What happened?”

I told him what I knew, and he said Oh, my and That’s terrible in the appropriate places. And I told him about the scream and the gospel music and about Bethune College, where the students continued to hear Mary McLeod Bethune singing gospel even long after her death. “There’s something in this house,” I said. I remembered Mrs. Walker and her cane, how she smiled even when she was huffing from the exertion of walking downstairs. She stocked a limitless supply of lemonade in her refrigerator and poured me a glass when Mom and I walked her home from church. How was it that she’d become malevolent in death?

“Have you seen anything?”

“Just once,” I said. “When your car got broken into.”

“Really,” Dan said. He used the word to hold time.

Another chill.

“Did you feel that?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Maybe we should have a séance or something,” I said.

“You think?”

I closed my eyes and searched for Mrs. Walker. But the more I tried to remember her, the more I heard the neighborhood outside: the squeak of tires on snow; muffled beats from windows rolled up tight; raucous laughter over a shared bottle. The neighborhood pressed in on this house, all our fears and disappointments and rage. A wave swept over me, the strongest yet, as if these walls weren’t anything against the cold. When I opened my eyes, Michael stood before me.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. The cold I had felt was only Michael coming in.

“Oh, hi,” Dan said. “Curtis got locked out.”

Michael breathed, puffing himself up, throwing back his shoulders, tensing the muscles in his chest.

“He was stuck outside in the snow.”

“I’ve been telling him about ghosts,” I said. My words were the only sounds in the kitchen, and they shriveled before something I couldn’t identify.

“Talking,” Michael said. His lips were pursed tight, white around the edges. “Dan, can I see you in the other room?”

“Sure,” Dan said, but with a tremor that was not sure whatsoever. The mug had lost its warmth. My hands gave it more heat than it gave me. A skin had formed on the surface, and I swirled the liquid, trying to dissolve the rings of residue lining the inside. I heard Dan and Michael dimly, their voices muffled behind door and walls, but I picked out certain words: thug, hoodlum, delinquent.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. I heard Mrs. Walker. She was singing. This world is not my home. I can’t live at home in this world anymore. I heard it deep within me. Her voice weighed me down, kept me rooted. Logan Circle wasn’t a home, not for any of us. What did we know of the people who lived next door? Of ourselves?

Dan came back. His face was pale, as if he had just come in from the snow. “Curtis, I’m going to call your mother.”

I mumbled thanks. Thanks for the cocoa, thanks for talking. I repacked and shouldered my bag. Dan sat with me until my mother rang the bell. As I walked through their living room, I didn’t see Michael.

“Thank you,” she said. She still had her uniform on.

“It was nothing,” Dan said, and he closed the door.

The snowflakes were now as big as silver dollars. Our tracks were smothered as soon as we made them. Once inside our own home, Mom said, “Curtis! Why are you so stupid? Why didn’t you go to Skittles’?”

“She wasn’t home.”

“Or Marlon’s? You could have gone to Marlon’s house.” I didn’t get a chance to explain. “I don’t want you next door ever again.”

I had taken off my shoes. My socks were soaked through, my pant cuffs ringed with ice. “Why?”

“I just don’t.”

“But Dan was really nice. He gave me hot chocolate – ”

“Curtis! Do not argue with me or, so help me – ” Her face had set into something hard, impenetrable. “Get changed. I’ve got to get back to work.”

That night, the new-fallen snow reflected the streetlamps, so that the ground glowed purple, the whole neighborhood bathed in an otherworldly light. I had turned all the lights off and sat quietly in the dark. The ghosts next door kept sobbing, and I spent the night figuring out what message they were trying to send.

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Viet Dinh’s stories have appeared in The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories, A Best of Fence: The First Ten Years, Zoetrope: All–Story, Threepenny Review, and Five Points.