18th
Homicide on Cubs Path
There was once a coffee shop by the name of Brown & Smith.
It was on Main Street, in a town.
In terms of area, the town was large, bigger perhaps than the commonwealth’s capital.
There were few other places to go for food.
They were called Carbone’s and the Golden Spoon.
For ice cream, there was Brigham’s.
For drinking, you had the Central Tap Room, Cornell’s Roadhouse, and T.J.’s Spirits.
In terms of population, the town was small.
The town was mostly woods.
The people were humble.
Occasionally, someone from the town would do something remarkable, like start a basketball team or a rebellion.
Crime did not occur in the town.
Crime was something they talked about every four summers at the Republican Convention.
Still, if you were a boy, riding with your friend to the town outskirts, you might fantasize that murders were being committed, murders that you and your friend might be able to stop, rescuing damsels in distress, thwarting child molesters, defending the weak from ruthless mobsters who thought they could get away with something in the sticks.
There were railroad tracks at the northern border of the town, just past the reservoir; these seemed dangerous, a place where somebody could get killed and have their body dumped.
But it was really the case that you could bicycle everyday all over town on every nice day for years and years and the worst thing that would happen was a sunburn on your nose that never healed.
That afternoon you were riding down Fruit Street and you took Saddle Hill past the golf course that was the only thing in the woods.
Soon they started carving up the woods.
First, in the carved woods they built industrial parks to herald the future.
Then the future turned out to be big houses in the carved woods for people who worked in the industrial parks and happened to be richer than everybody else.
By this time, they had built a station on the railroad tracks, so you could go to the city and back like never before, and the tracks didn’t seem anymore like a good place to kill somebody.
You never saw anybody from another country in the town until one day you did.
But he was British, so that was probably fine—even if everybody here used to be Irish—and his wife was from around here even if she wasn’t from here exactly, and they had a baby, who would end up being from here, whatever that meant anymore.
The age of computers had arrived, so if you could just sit in one of those new houses in the carved up woods, and play with your computer, what did it matter if there were no more coffee shop?
And if you could put on headphones, what did it matter if there were two highways screaming just on the other side of the trees?
The town now had more people, more money, more traffic lights, more soccer teams, a Chinese restaurant, and a little less woods?
Was it even a town?
Yes, because there was still a barbershop, and a drug store, and a family-owned supermarket, the same old fat gym teacher, and a rope swing by the reservoir where you could pretend you were in a Mountain Dew commercial.
And in one of those houses in the carved-up woods, right around the corner from your great-aunts house, right down the hill from the golf course you rode by that day you got the sunburn that still hasn’t healed, on a lot where one summer, who knows, you might have been one of the grunts planting the lawn, laying bricks for the walkway, or building a stone wall, it finally had a murder.
—Brown
