Long Bright River(30)

I looked to my right: Truman on the ground.

I peered around the building: the perpetrator was gone.



* * *



—

I played no part in the young man’s arrest. For an agonizing month, he was on the loose. During that time, Truman underwent the first and second of the several surgeries he has had while on medical leave. When the perpetrator was, eventually, apprehended, it was not due to any usefulness on my part, but rather to the discovery of video footage from a storefront a few blocks away that revealed the face of a known offender.

I was glad to know he was off the street—for a long time, too.

But I took little further comfort in his arrest, because it did nothing to assuage my guilt, my sense of shame. My conviction that, in not acting quickly enough—in retreating, when commanded to by the man in question—I had failed my partner.

I visited Truman only once, in the hospital. I kept my head down. I kept my condolences brief.

I couldn’t look him in the eye.





Truman’s new house is in Mount Airy. I’ve never been. I make several wrong turns along the way, which adds to my nerves.

I didn’t go frequently to his last place, in East Falls—with few exceptions, my relationship with Truman took place at work—but I knew it, at least; I dropped him off and picked him up there, over the years, and once or twice attended gatherings there. His daughters’ high school graduation parties; his wife’s birthday. That sort of thing. But two years ago, he announced, with forced casualness, that he was getting a divorce from Sheila, after more than two decades of marriage, and that he would be moving out. The girls were in college now, he said, and there was no point pretending any longer that he and Sheila had anything in common. If I had pressed him, I believe he would have acknowledged that the divorce was her idea, not his—a particular sadness, an unusual flatness to his affect, convinced me of this, along with the many years he had spent before that lighting up whenever he spoke of her—but I did not ever press Truman for personal details he didn’t volunteer, and he returned the favor to me. (This was, I believe, one of the main reasons that we always got along so well.) Mount Airy represents a section of the city I’m not familiar with. When I was growing up, the Northwest might as well have been in a different state from the Northeast. The Northwest does have its own problems, a few high-crime pockets, but it also contains within its borders great stone mansions with long stone walls and rolling lawns, the sorts of homes Philadelphia was known for back when a mention of the city’s name conjured Katharine Hepburn rather than crime statistics. Most of what I know about the history of the Northwest Ms. Powell taught me: it began as a settlement for twenty German settler families and was called, appropriately, Germantown.



* * *



—

At last, I find Truman’s street. I turn onto it.

From the outside, the house looks charming: detached from its neighbors, just barely, a tiny stretch of grass on either side. It’s narrow across the front but appears to be deep, with a short front lawn that slopes steeply down to the sidewalk, a front porch with a swing on it, and a driveway running up the side. Truman’s car is parked there. There would be enough room for my car, too, but I hesitate and then park on the street.

Truman opens the door while I’m still walking up the front steps. He ran cross-country in college and ran marathons after that. His father, he has told me, was an internationally competitive track star in Jamaica before emigrating to the United States, hanging up his cleats, earning his master’s in education, and then, sadly, dying too young. Before he did, though, he passed on what he knew about speed and endurance to Truman, and in Truman one can still see the vestiges of his own athletic career: he’s tall and thin and ropy. He’s always walked on his toes, as if ready to spring. On the many occasions I saw him take off after some perpetrator, I almost felt bad for the runner. Truman had them on the ground before they took five steps. Today he’s wearing a brace on his right leg, outside his jeans. I wonder if he’ll ever run again.

He doesn’t greet me with anything aside from a nod.



* * *



—

It’s calm inside the house, pale walls, neat to the point of absurdity. His last place was neat, too, but still contained within it the trappings of family life—shin guards in the foyer, scribbled notes on a bulletin board. Here, an old radiator coated in thick white paint occupies a space near an interior wall. One lamp lights up a corner of the room, which is otherwise dim. The house is shady, the front of it overhung by the ceiling of the porch, the sides devoid of windows. As if he, too, has suddenly noticed this, Truman walks to a corner and turns on the switch to an overhead light. There are built-in bookshelves everywhere, which is perfect for Truman. A major topic of conversation between us was always what we were reading. Truman, unlike me, was raised in a functional and affectionate home; but he was a shy only child, and a speech impediment that he’s since outgrown made it difficult for him to speak up without getting teased. Books, therefore, were great friends to him. Today, one is open on the coffee table in the living room: The Art of War. Sun Tzu. A year ago I might have teased him lightly about this, asked him whom he was planning on fighting. Now the silence between us feels syrupy, tangible.

—How have you been? I ask him.