Gunfire at Night

[swimboy]

When we moved into my neighborhood about 12 years ago, we soon became inured to the sound of sirens, but gunfire continued to get our attention. When you hear gunfire, you don't run to the door as they often do on television; you hit the floor.

That night, I was ironing when we heard gunshots, obviously very nearby. After a prudent amount of time passed with no further shots fired, we resumed our activities. Before long, however, there were flashing lights at the window. I stopped ironing and went carefully to the window. There was a man lying shot in the street with the police standing around him. He was dead, I was standing on the radiator in my underwear peering through the shade and I could hear the studio audience laughing at David Letterman's opening monologue in the background. I knew I would always remember the jarring incongruities of that instant. The police covered the body with a plastic sheet and taped off the crime scene.

It wasn't long before a small cluster of onlookers had gathered at the corner to peer across the yellow boundary, discussing what had occurred. A light wind began to pick up, and the sheet over the body began to rustle and flutter. From my window I watched as the breeze lifted the sheet suddenly and blew it directly toward the gathered spectators. I have never seen people go so immediately into motion, and I understood it completely. I don't know if you are a superstitious person, but a wind-driven shroud is indisputably a bad omen.

The house across the corner from ours had been a party house for a while and I guess it was inevitable that something of this sort would occur in relation to what was going on there. I was wrestling with several feelings and briefly angry that violent crime so often sets the tone in the city, thought "So let the drug dealers kill each other off." Then I remembered to remember that he was somebody's son, brother, father. This point was driven home over the next several years when on every anniversary of the shooting we woke to find someone had emptied a can of red paint on the spot where the body had lain. That had to be done by someone who cared for him, and I had nothing but respect for that.