The multitude of unseen crickets chant. He regards the indistinct, moonless sky above, so tainted with ambient light as to mute the stars. Soon it is apparent that the night sky is clear except for the few dully twinkling stars.
Down out of the lamp-lit, asphalt-paved hills he walks, wary of the racing cars and pickups with the alcoholically insane behind the wheel. In the distance drones a police helicopter. Closer still whines the siren of a police car.
At the highway crossing, just above the city line, two motorists—apparently sane—wait patiently for their signal as he slinks across
Not a soul has touched foot to ground, in his path or in his wake, for nearly three miles.
The unmarked gate to the ghetto yawns; a military fence of barbed steel to the right, a row of houses with barred doors to the left.
As he ambles by the old mansions and increasingly fortified row homes, the dark hedges rustling and shadowed, crowd the sidewalks and he takes to the street.
During this two-mile descent into the City only three vehicles cruise by. As he crosses Main Street, having skirted the territory of the dominant gang, police sirens begin to wale in that direction, a half mile out.
A single truck cruises through the lamp-lit streets, the gray-stone church hulking above, the trees waving darkly behind.
He passes behind the church, through the half-lit lot, to the tree-lined lane, redolent with ill-kept shrubs, butchered hedges and waving stalks of giant rat-grass.
Not a two-legged soul navigates the narrow way.
A fox crosses the street ahead, lopping toward the safety of a bamboo thicket.
Twenty yards on, a possum crosses in the opposite direction, having emerged from a bunch of rat-grass, heading for high ground on the south side of the street.
A night bird flutters unseen from a hedge behind him and flaps skyward as the breeze pushes out of the west at his back.
A cat prowls before the vacant house next door as he turns one last time to ascertain he has not been followed and enters this pace which was old before he was born and will stand long after he is gone.
Thriving in Bad Places
