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the supplies.
    It was depressing, and the folks next door must have known we felt that way, ’cause they liked to hang out on their front porch come dark and stare at us. We could see them over there beneath their little yellow porch light, congregating like the bugs that swarmed the bulb above them.
    And their light and our porch light, when we used it, was about all the light there was for Comanche Street, because the street lights had long been shot out and no one had come to replace them. If they had, the crack house people would have shot them out again. The only beacon they wanted on the street was their beacon, one that called people to their place to buy something to make them spin and float, help them coast through another few hours.
    There were a couple houses across from us, but they kept their porch lights off, and what lights they burned were filmy behind curtains, looked like lights seen from a distance and underwater. Decent folks on Comanche Street didn’t come out of their houses at night, lest they encounter the dealers or the druggies themselves, the latter looking for a quick few dollars to purchase a hunk of rock.
    For that matter, during the day you didn’t see folks much. The working people came and went, but didn’t linger. The kid we had seen on Leonard’s front porch that day, we began to see more often. He wore a beeper on his hip. Acquired a cool walk. Had some nice clothes. He looked as if his soul was melting.
    The bars and locks on Uncle Chester’s door began to make sense. You didn’t nail something down in this neighborhood, it’d show up at the pawnshop, and the money received for it would finance some druggie to do some business.
    Got so we left the house, we had the impression we might come back to the front door off the hinges, rammed in, and all the little goods that Uncle Chester had left would be gone, except the coupons. Or maybe the shits next door would start to think they ought to get even with me and Leonard, and we’d come back to worse: smoke and charred wood.
    Considering all that, way we did, was something had to be bought, one of us nearly always stayed while the other went to get it.
    Got so Leonard stayed pissed all the time. Kept his brow furrowed and his uncle’s shotgun oiled and loaded, and not with rat shot. He made jokes about how many niggers next door it would take to roof the house, he sliced them real thin.
    We cleaned inside the house, too. Uncle Chester and his odors finally departed. The flies went in search of deader pastures.
    Nights, after a hard day’s work, was when we did our cleaning and searching for what the key went to. No safe or locked box or locked floor or wall panels were found. Some of the coupons from the deposit box were good, though. We used them for eat-outs, one of us running into town to pick up pizza or burgers.
    At night, we worked to the sounds of Leonard’s country music; hillbilly voices fighting it out with the rap and rock sounds next door, stuff I sometimes preferred to lost loves and drinking in the barroom, but Leonard, he used the decibel knob to drown them out. ’Least they were drowned out in Uncle Chester’s house. I don’t know they noticed next door. Nobody called the law on either of us. In that neighborhood, somebody wasn’t getting hurt or robbed, a little loud music didn’t mean much. For all the good the law did down there, they might as well have just drove near the neighborhood and honked, tossed out a few Don’t Do Drug leaflets.
    Last room we tackled was the one with the newspapers. It was hot in there, and the little fan managed to stir the dust and make you choke. The roof had leaked, gotten on the papers and mildewed them, and in some places the water had soaked through and joined the wood beneath them and rotted out sections of the floor. We could hear it squeak, feel it sag when we walked.
    We decided best thing to do was remove the papers, glance through them quickly as possible, see if there