Nashville: The Mood (Part 2)

  In a heavily shaded neighborhood just off Main Street heading north out of downtown, the neighbors were used to knowing just enough about each other to make life interesting. Several of them had lived on the same street for years, even decades, but most had come in more recently, as others had departed. Very few families had been there more than five years, and only a handful more than ten. There was a little connectivity, because some of the long-timers made it a point to get to know people as they moved in. They might meet them walking around the neighborhood, spotting the newcomers out in their yard or driveway, or they might run into them at a nearby convenience store or grocery market. But even that presented challenges; many of the newcomers seemed to especially resent the old timers in the neighborhood. It was as if they feared information about them being stored in such a long chain of knowledge.

  The people in the neighborhood were from all over. All over the United States and all over the world, just like many neighborhoods in the city. This neighborhood had originally been more upscale, then had declined during the white flight of the civil rights era, and had hit bottom in the 1980s—a familiar pattern. Slowly, beginning in the early 1990s, it had begun to turn around—first with one family willing to tough it out, make small improvements, but not too many improvements, then another family following it a couple of years later, then another the next year, then perhaps two in one year. Soon, after a decade or more, the neighborhood took on a different look. Some newer residents seemed to be motivated into keeping their houses and lawns up, making changes as needed, not deferring repairs for too long such that more serious damage appeared, and generally taking an interest in neighborhood affairs, even if their views didn’t always coincide with others.

  It was sometimes striking what people noticed and didn’t notice. One neighbor, who lived in the center of the neighborhood, at a street corner, seemed to keep track of the comings and goings in all the homes surrounding him, up to at least five houses in each direction. Most of the neighbors resented him, because he was quick to point out a piece of trash in a neighbor’s yard, or even on the street near a neighbor’s yard, and he was particularly touchy about noise after ten o’clock at night. He had been known to get out into the streets for fierce verbal altercations with neighbors, usually immigrants, and had often called the police to the neighborhood. Some neighbors liked him, feeling that he was generally honest and had the best interests of the neighborhood at heart, but even they understood why others would be irritated with him. He seemed to notice everything.

  And yet, there were things he didn’t notice. Usually, when someone came to him for information about something, some incident they had witnessed, and he didn’t know about it, they found that he would usually dismiss it as being unimportant. Only the things he had observed first were important enough to be discussed. That quality about him added another layer of irritation to his neighbors’ evaluations of him, although perhaps it was more like icing on the cake.

  And that was the pattern that was followed when one of his neighbors, a woman from two doors down the side street by his home, stopped by late one afternoon to find him finishing the task of mowing his grass. She had been out for a daily afternoon stroll, and noticed him turning the mower off and pushing it toward his garage. She called to him, and he turned to acknowledge her.

  “Mr. Randall,” she said to him as she approached, “I wanted to ask you about something.”

  “What is it?” He assumed it would be about something unimportant, but he was friendly enough.

  She stopped a few feet from him and pointed down the side street. “Do you know the couple that lives about seven or eight houses down, at the corner of the next block? The right side of the street, the corner on this side? It’s just a man and his wife, no kids.”

  “No, I don’t think I know them.” He seemed to show no curiosity about the reason she was asking him; he waited for her to continue.

  “I don’t know them all that well,” she said quietly. “They moved in three or four years ago, at least. I’ve seen them and waved to them, but it seemed like every time I went over to speak to them, they either went into the house, or happened to be going into the house at that time. So I’ve never really had a conversation with them. But I’ve seen them often enough to know them, and they usually waved back if nothing elseYou know, it’s terrible how distant people become, stuck in their own little worlds.”

  Randall showed no reaction whatsoever—no smile, no nodding, no grimace—nothing. Perhaps he was treating those words as unimportant also. In his own mind, however, he was agreeing with her. He had often wondered why people didn’t welcome his presence, when they saw him marching boldly across the grass on their lawns to talk to them about some issue down the street or, more directly, something he wanted to bring to their attention about their own behavior, or the circumstances in their own home. After years of doing the same thing, he still never seemed to understand why anyone would take it personally that he was pointing out something that obviously needed to be corrected, immediately.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me about them?”

  “It’s about the wife,” the woman said, trying hard to keep any type of emotion out of her voice. “At least I guess it’s his wifeShe’s disappearedI haven’t seen anything of her in more than a month.”

  “Maybe they broke up.”

  “MaybeI never saw them fighting.”

  “Maybe she’s visiting family, out West or somewhere.”

  The woman nodded. “It’s possible, but somehow I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “The husband sold her car,” the woman said, a little more excitedly this time. “He put it up for sale right after she disappeared. Within a day or so. I didn’t think about it at the time. He had the car in the driveway with a ‘For Sale’ sign in the front windshield. It was backed in the driveway facing out, so I could see the sign in the window. I thought it strange that it sat out there for a week or so, up for sale, and I never saw her. Then I remembered I hadn’t seen her for a day or so before he put it up for sale.”

  “Only a day or so before?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  There was a long pause, and she stared directly at him, waiting for some reaction. Apparently, she waited long enough, because he nodded one time, slowly, almost as if to signal to her that he had heard her, and nothing more. Randall tried to remember what he knew about the woman telling him the story. He had told enough stories about people to know that there was the story, and then there was the person who told the story, and the people the story was being told to. All were important in the acceptance of a particular story. He knew because that principle had been applied to him numerous times over the years, and it had taken him a while to understand what was at work. Now, he was applying the same principle to her and her story.

  “So he sold the car, then you realized you hadn’t seen her since before he sold the car, and you haven’t seen her since?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “It all sounds real vague to me.”

  “Yes, it does to me, too. I just didn’t know what to do. You seem to know all about these things, so I thought I would run it by you, to see what you think. It just seems strange to me, that she was always there, and now she isn’t.”

  “It’s probably nothing. Just keep an eye on things, she’ll turn up sooner or later. People don’t just vanish out of a neighborhood anymore like they used to. There are too many ways of keeping track of them.”

  The woman nodded, and thought over what Randall had said. She said goodbye to him quietly, then turned and made her way down the street, resuming her normal walking speed. As she approached the house at the corner on the right, she saw the man of the house in the driveway, the trunk of his car open. He was bending over into the trunk, seeming to position something inside of it. He seemed to notice her out of the corner of his right eye, and raised his head slightly and, looking to the side, turned just enoug
h to be able to see her. He reached up and put the trunk down, seemingly in a hurry. He turned to look at her for a few seconds, then seemed to avert his eyes, and turned away to walk quickly into the house.Less than a mile away, off the main road, a block behind the large diesel college, sat a somewhat large block of apartments. They were shabby, with discolored paint and shingles missing on the roofs, but the buildings were close to being fully occupied. Many had lived there quite a while, while people came and went in many other units. It was a little bit of a world unto itself, positioned back off the road, surrounded by single-family homes and duplexes, with a lot of traffic from the college a block or so away.

  Many of the students who attended the diesel college either came from families with some means, or were on scholarship. The tuition was quite expensive, on a par with community colleges, or even greater, and the curriculum was somewhat demanding.

  Many of the residents of the apartment complex could see some of the individual houses up and down the adjacent street; they could see the yards, the driveways, the windows, and the doors. As many of the residents in those apartments were idle much of the day, some all of the day, and almost all of them were around from the late afternoon onward, they naturally took an interest in the comings and goings not only of the apartments surrounding them, but of the single-family homes and duplexes within their field of vision. And so it was that, in early summer, a number of them began to talk among themselves about the comings and goings at a small brick home straight across the parking lot and adjacent to the large complex.

  Like much of what people noticed within their neighborhoods, it began with one person. This person, a man who had lived in one of the apartments for about four years, began to notice comings and goings at the house across the way—or thought he did. He was more certain that those comings and goings meant something odd than others, after listening to his observations, initially were. But there was no doubt, once anyone began paying attention, that a lot of vehicles came and went from the home. It was not simply one, or two, or even three vehicles coming and going multiple times. Rather, it was a seemingly unending stream of cars that came, beginning early in the morning, usually shortly after eight o’clock, and continuing off and on through the day. As the residents of the apartment complex patched it together, there was a lull from around four-thirty in the afternoon to around seven-thirty in the evening, then it picked up again, and lasted until the wee hours of the following morning. This seemed to happen on a somewhat daily basis.

  It took a while for the story to unfold, because no one was awake twenty-four hours a day. At first, only those who noticed the comings and goings during the day put the story together among themselves. Then someone from that group spoke with someone from the nighttime group, and the period of time when this activity was occurring immediately doubled in length. Soon, a real buzz began, and many of the residents of the apartment complex actually began to schedule things in their own lives so they could spend the most amount of time watching the comings and goings at the house across the way.

  The initial assessment of the situation drew the conclusion that some type of drug activity was underway. But, over time, that conclusion changed. Two young women lived in the house across the way. The callers, however, were all individual males, each spending approximately thirty minutes to an hour inside before exiting. Although a few speculated that the women could be running a legitimate business, most of the speculation turned quickly to prostitution.

  Several informal meetings were held among the apartment tenants. These occurred at random hours, depending on who was around, and who could be gathered together in one place. It was more of a general ongoing discussion than separate formal meetings. Several observations were made: there was no unruly noise or visible activity to complain about, there appeared to be no children in the home, and the comings and goings didn’t seem to cause a traffic problem. But beyond those conclusions, there was a general resentment that simmered as the summer progressed.

  Someone suggested that the women could be running a massage business, although perhaps one of questionable ethics. Others, more cynically, suggested that it was an out and out prostitution operation. The idea was floated of trying to determine how the male occupants of the vehicles knew where to go, and it was suggested that perhaps the women were running an advertisement somewhere to bring them in. This set off an internet search, using the address of the house, for just such an advertisement, but nothing at all turned up.

  At times, it seemed as if the house was drawing more and more foot traffic from students at the diesel college, and this diminished the automobile traffic somewhat, although it was still strong. The parade of students walking the block or so from the college to the house, and then back, seemed to increase as the hot weather wore on, and made the whole scenario even more noticeable. It had been bad enough to see one car pull in and leave, then another, then another, but it was still another thing to see a youthful pedestrian begin to make his way down the block toward the house, knowing all the time where he would wind up, then to see him march back up the street toward the college, then another student take his place, and on and on.

  A suggestion was made to contact the landlord of the building, and inquiries, subtle or otherwise, were made to determine the name of that person. It turned out to be an immigrant from Iran, now a U.S. citizen, who had been in the country almost thirty years, and who owned at least a dozen rental homes on the northern side of the city. Calls were made to him. He was sympathetic to the callers, but he reminded them that as long as his tenants were well-behaved, and their guests were also, there might be little he could do. Still, he was interested enough to leave the door open to further inquiries, further telephone calls, and more information.

  After enough such calls, the owner of the house paid a call on the two young women occupants. When he broached the subject of the calls he’d been receiving from neighbors in the apartment complex, one of the women told him that the two of them were performing massages, but that neither one was licensed, and that technically they could be fined for their activity. However, they assured him that that was all that was going on, that nothing more serious was taking place. They even offered to treat him to a free massage.