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Jr. Way. But the man who yelled it, standing on the porch of his warrenlike apartment building, didn’t mean it in jest. He walked toward Bill. A not quite elderly black man, only slightly grizzled, missing most of his teeth. Name: Bobby.
    Seeing that this might get ugly, I walked downstairs to intervene: “Sir, you know the rules around here. If it’s in a pile, it’s up for grabs.” Bobby didn’t say anything. It was apparently a man thing, between Bill and Bobby.
    “I fixed it,” Bill pleaded.
    Bobby put his hand on the handlebars. “Uh-uh,” he said. Who is this asshole? I thought.
    But Bill wasn’t going to fight about it. I could tell he had second thoughts. He looked down, then up. “I’ll give you $20,” Bill said, excited at the possibility of a solution. At that, Bobby took his hand off the handlebars and beamed. Bill passed him the bill. The matter concluded, Bill rode off on his bike. A beautiful friendship had—yes—blossomed.
    Now Bobby helped us do things like move cars around.
    “OK, stop,” Bill yelled to me and Bobby. We let up. Bill jumped into the Mercedes and braked—Bobby and I had gotten a bit too zealous in our pushing. The red Mercedes barely avoided smashing into our neighbor’s Honda.

    B ill swung open the gates to the garden. The F-250’s wheels spun as I jumped the curb and backed into the lot. Our friend Willy had loaned us his truck for the weekend, so Bill and I had spent Saturday and Sunday making runs to a horse stable fifteen miles away, up in the hills. The free rotted horse manure had been our ticket to gardening success.
    Since most of the lot was under a one-foot layer of concrete, Bill came up with the idea of building raised beds. Most vegetables don’t require more than a few feet of topsoil, so it’s entirely possible to grow plants in large containers. We made open-topped boxes, filled them with composted horse manure, and planted the majority of our herbs and vegetables in them.
    Bill, the ultimate bottom-feeder, wouldn’t even buy wood to build the beds. In the early days of the lot, Bill would return home, his dark hair mussed, a crooked smile of delight on his face, the borrowed truck filled with sheets of plywood and odd chunks of lumber found along the streets of GhostTown. In the massive abandoned piles, Bill found garden-building materials.
    We learned that four chunks of a two-by-four made corners for boxes and connected everything. I got good with an electric handsaw. The only things we bought were screws and an electric drill.
    Now in our third spring of gardening, we were still building new beds and topping off the existing ones. Every year, gripped by the fever of spring gardening, our mantra was always “More manure, we need more.”
    A series of raised beds, like coffins, scattered the lot. That weekend, we had topped off the three existing beds and begun dumping the rest into new, yawning, empty boxes. I parked near the biggest one, cut the engine, and jumped into the truck bed.
    Bill was already there, sinking the shovel into the crumbly black gold. We had only one shovel, so I squatted down, facing away from the bed, and used my hands to bulldoze the manure between my knees over the edge of the truck. Bobby watched us unload the soil with a mix of curiosity and disgust.
    In February, Bobby had been kicked out of his apartment. This is why he was living in a car parked in front of his old house. We never asked why he had been evicted, though he was seeming less and less lucid, so we had our suspicions. He had become the unofficial security guard of the 2-8.
    That he lived in a series of cars wasn’t the kind of thing that raised eyebrows on our street. One neighbor, after arguments with his girlfriend, regularly retires to his car—a cream-colored BMW with the windows knocked out and replaced with Mexican-soda cardboard boxes. When we see him shouldering a bag of clothes in one hand, headed to the BMW with a defeated slouch, Bill and I