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help make two families feel at home and let the rest of the neighbors observe it.
    Therefore, with a relatively small down, I quickly snapped up the two houses on Clio Street, presented myself at the front door of each as the new owner and gave my pledge to the two startled families inside that I intended to keep the houses as rental properties, all reliances and responsibilities to be meticulously honored, and that they could feel confident about staying put as long as they wanted.
    The first family, the Harrises, immediately asked me in for coffee and carrot cake, and we got started on a good relationship that has lasted to the present—though they’ve since retired and moved in with their children in Cape Canaveral.
    The other family, however, the McLeods, were unfortunately miles different. They are a mixed-race family—man and wife with two small children. Larry McLeod is a middle-aged former black militant who’s married to a younger white woman and works in the mobile-home construction industry in nearby Englishtown. The day I came to his door he opened it wearing a tight red tee-shirt that had Keep on shooting ’til the last motherfucker be dead stenciled across the front. A big automatic pistol was lying just inside the door on a table, and not surprisingly it was the second thing my eyes lit on. Larry has long arms and bulging, venous biceps, as if he might’ve been an athlete once (a kick boxer, I decided), and acted surly as hell, wanting to know why I was bothering him during the part of the day when he was usually asleep, and even going so far as to tell me he didn’t believe I owned the house and was just there to hassle him. Inside on the couch I could see his skinny little white wife, Betty, watching TV with their kids—all three of them looking wan and drugged in the watery light. There was also an odd, bestilled odor inside the house, something I could almost identify but not quite, though it was like the air in a closet full of shoes that has been shut up for years.
    Larry kept on seeming mad as a bulldog and glaring at me through the latched screen. I told him exactly what I’d told the elderly Harrises—all responsibilities and reliances meticulously honored, etc., etc., though I specifically mentioned to him the requirement of keeping up the rent, which I spontaneously decided to drop by ten dollars. I added that I wanted the neighborhood to stay intact, with housing available and affordable for the people who lived there, and while I intended to make needed capital improvements to both houses he should feel confident these would not be reflected in rent increases. I explained that with this plan I could realistically foresee a net gain just by keeping the property in excellent condition, deducting expenses from my taxes, keeping my tenants happy and possibly selling out when I was ready to retire—though I allowed that seemed a long way off.
    I smiled at Larry through the metal screen. “Uh-huh,” was the total of what he had to say, though he glanced over his shoulder once as if he was about to instruct his wife to come interpret something I’d said. Then he returned his gaze to me and looked down at the pistol on the table. “That’s registered,” he said. “Check it out.” The pistol was big and black, looked well oiled and completely bursting with bullets—able to do an innocent world irretrievable damage. I wondered what he needed it for.
    “That’s good,” I said cheerfully. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other.”
    “Is that it?” Larry said.
    “That’s about it.”
    “All right then,” he said, and closed the door in my face.
    S ince this first meeting nearly two years ago, Larry McLeod and I have not much enriched or broadened each other’s world-views. After a few months of sending his rent check by mail he simply stopped, so that I now have to go by the house every first of the month and ask for it. If he’s there, Larry always acts menacing and routinely