The Invisibles

Smiling Down at Ellie Pardo

84 smiling down at ellie pardo— 1. After the Second World War an ambitious developer cleared woods east of the city, measured acre lots, and built colonial houses and cottages.Though he’d had a vision of white money flocking to the country, when the bank seized the land only half the houses had sold. In subsequent decades farmers razed most of the remaining forest to grow soybeans and corn, but when my parents bought the second house down from Woodacre Lane’s dead end, enough timberland enclosed the neighborhood to pass off the setting as an enchanted forest. Throughout my boyhood I played ranger in this paradise, exploring each grove with my pellet gun in hand; I eliminated rabbits, possums, starlings, and blue jays, and made room for squirrels, cardinals, robins, migrating finches, and sparrows. My sense of what made a pest came from my taciturn parents, amateur gardeners who poisoned shrew burrows and smiled to see the furry rodents lying swollen among the vegetables and vines. When circumstance forced me back into the house of my childhood, which devastated my pride at the age of thirty-four, it was difficult to regard the little wood around the neighborhood without feeling a pinch of guilt. I’d buried so many varmints in mass graves behind the woodshed that the random stab of a spade could turn up a pile of white bones. Yet I had not committed my crimes alone, and when I opened the paper to see Henry grinning suavely in an ad for his legal services, I knew our paths would cross in a city of eighty thousand smiling down at ellie pardo — 85 factory hands and bankers. A divorce lawyer, he’d helped more than a hundred residents leave their spouses. He was like a movie star, only less popular. I lacked the patience to let small-town fate reunite us. I called him at the office, and soon we were passing weekends together. 2. The night a neighbor let herself into Ellie Pardo’s house and discovered Ellie cut to pieces in the basement, Henry and I were playing friends-turned-cops for money on Frogville’s center table. Frogville was a neon-signed brick billiards house in the snowy fields south of the city. We’d come here a lot in high school, hoping to witness fights or solve the mysteries that surrounded getting laid. Teens still gathered in the stale heat with the same ambitions . They lined the vandalized walls, smoking clove cigarettes and Marlboros, watching the matches proceed on the twelve redfelted tables. We were the oldest players in the bar, maybe the only ones of drinking age, though a lot of kids had bottles in hand.What made us stand out more was the muscular guy in the police uniform handing over more ten- and twenty-dollar bills after the end of each game. The only thing that seemed to prevent him from killing Henry was the woman beside him, who was also a cop, though in her off-duty loveliness it was hard to believe. “Don’t be so upset, babe, now listen to me.” Watching us with her big eyes, Officer Candy covered her hand with her mouth and talked strategy to Officer Perzik. Friends since childhood, they had become cops, fallen in love, and decided to get married. Maybe it had to do with the way they each looked in uniform. Perzik’s radio crackled unexpectedly, startling shooters at the next table. He liked to have his presence known while he pre- 86 — smiling down at ellie pardo tended not to notice.These little disturbances of other games were his only solace as he lost and lost. “I should arrest you both.” Blue dust rained from his hairy fist as he chalked his cue. He missed an easy six-in-the-corner and shouted, loud enough to silence the hall for a moment. “Am I up again already?” Henry asked. A slim pretty boy with parted hair and a suit, he never questioned his influence over the room, keeping a step ahead of his skeptics. As Perzik muttered in frustration over a mistake, he stepped right in to line up his shot. Though we were on a team together, he was the one winning. From the way Candy glared, as if wishing he’d get it over with so she could go home with her fianc...