Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“Well,” she said, considering this new information carefully, “I don’t think Uncle Hal would have us write a story that isn’t true.”

“Oh, me neither,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t hear the irony in my voice.

“Cool. So what do we do now? Where do we start?”

She looked up at me expectantly. The bright blue eyes were shining again. She plopped her elbows on top of her desk, leaned over and rested her chin in her palms, treating me to a rather unfettered view down her scoop-necked top.

I sat down to remove myself from temptation. Had I not resolved to maintain a perfectly professional demeanor around her, I might have enjoyed that vista. There was no denying the young lady was rather fetching-I mean, if you like shapely twenty-two-year-old blondes, that is-and she had a wholesomeness about her that put certain unwholesome thoughts in my head. As a tall, nearly broad-shouldered, thirty-two-year-old single guy with a reasonable body mass index and no facial disfigurement, I could entertain the thought she wasn’t repulsed by me.

But while there’s no official policy at the Eagle-Examiner against fraternizing with the interns, there were at least three factors to consider. One, Uncle Hal might decide his paper needed one less investigative reporter if I made a play for his buddy’s little girl. Two, I had some unresolved romantic issues with Tina Thompson, our city editor, and I suspected she would not be impressed if I summited Mount Intern. Three, I was getting exhausted just trying to listen to her for five minutes; an entire evening’s worth of conversation and flirtation might make me slip into a coma.

All in all, it seemed like enough reason to leave Sweet Thang to the Sigma Alpha Epsilons.

“Do you want me to call the fire department?” she asked. “Or find a national expert on space heaters? Maybe there’s a space heater awareness group out there? Or a space heater safety nonprofit or something? I want to do this story exactly how you would do it. How would you start?”

I was tempted to tell her I planned to start like any self-respecting reporter approached a story in which he has absolutely no interest: waste time chatting with colleagues, return several lengthy personal e-mails, take an extended lunch, check in with old sources on completely unrelated matters, then start making phone calls around three o’clock when there was absolutely nothing better to do.

But that didn’t seem like the kind of example I should be setting for an impressionable young person.

“Well,” I said. “I like to get a feel for what I’m writing about first. Visit the scene. Take in the sights. Talk to some neighbors. So what do you say we make a little trip out to Littleton Avenue?”

The question was barely even formed and she was already grabbing a notebook and her car keys.

“Can I drive?” she asked.

“That depends. What kind of car do you have?”

“It’s the cutest little BMW. My dad got it for me for graduation. It’s red. I call him Walter. He’s got an iPod dock and everything. I just love him.”

I immediately got this image of Sweet Thang bopping through the hood in her shiny red BMW, blasting Taylor Swift on Walter’s speakers. The carjackers would play rock-paper-scissors to determine who got dibs.

“No,” I said. “Better let me drive.”

* * *

My car is a five-year-old Chevy Malibu. It has traveled some undetermined distance beyond a hundred thousand miles: dead speedometers tell no tales. I bought it for a suspiciously low price from a used car dealer in Newark. I’m not saying the guy was unscrupulous, but the title work looked like it had eraser marks on it.

It wasn’t exactly a chick magnet. But the Malibu had certain benefits that were practical-no, essential-when operating in a rugged city like Newark. You didn’t have to worry about it getting beaten up by the potholes because it was already beaten up. You could leave it unlocked with the motor running outside a chop shop and not have to worry about it being there when you got back. And when it comes to blending into the hood, it does just fine.

Which is good, because in most Newark neighborhoods, I don’t exactly blend. It’s not just that I’m white. It’s that I’m a peculiar subset of the white race, one that disappeared from Newark long ago: a purebred, stiff-upper-lipped, can’t-dance-a-lick WASP. I’ve got carefully parted brown hair, blue eyes, and a way of walking and talking most inner-city black people just find funny. I wear well-pressed shirts-usually white or blue-with pleated slacks and a tie with a half-Windsor knot. Even white people tease me about how white I am.

So I’m perfectly aware, when I enter many parts of Newark, that I create a little bit of a scene. Some people, assuming I’m lost, will approach and ask if I need directions. Most merely stare like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man just went past.

People have suggested to me that if I acted like I have some street in me-wear hip-hop clothes, drop certain colloquialisms into my vocabulary, get a haircut that didn’t look so Leave It to Beaver -black folks might open up to me more easily.

But I don’t believe that. You can only hide who you are for so long. The simple truth is, I grew up in Millburn, a proper New Jersey suburb that is only a few miles away from Newark geographically but a full country away demographically. From the time I grew out of onesies, my mother dressed me in collared shirts. My upbringing featured things like tennis camp, Broadway musicals, and trips to Europe. I went to Amherst, a small, expensive, exclusive liberal arts college that doesn’t exactly do much for one’s street cred. I’m pretty much what black folks refer to as The Man. If I pretended otherwise, I’d come off as a fraud. And no one-of any race, gender, or creed-wants to talk to a fraud.

Besides, I like half-Windsor knots.

And, funny as it may sound to my fellow WASPs, I like Newark, too. And not just because of the gentrification that is slowly (very slowly) taking root or because of the new, shiny stuff being built downtown. I like the old parts of the city, too-the old neighborhoods, the old churches, the old stories that seem to be lurking around every corner. Say what you will about Newark, but it’s got character. And heart. Two things we could all use more of.

So I didn’t mind that as Sweet Thang and I pulled up to the scene of the fire on Littleton Avenue, two old guys on a nearby porch openly gawked at us. The Man-now with a bubbly blonde anchor in tow-tends to have that effect.

The air was still acrid from the fire, with that wonderful aroma of burned plastic and toasted toxin wafting about. Even if I didn’t have the address, my nose could have led me there.

The house wasn’t at all what I expected. Usually, when fatal fires broke out in Newark, they were in nasty, tottering, ninety-year-old tenements, the kind of places that had been fire traps for so long you wondered how they hadn’t burned down sooner.

But this one was a relatively new construction, one of those architecturally challenged boxes that started popping up around Newark at the turn of the new century. It had been quite a moment for a long-depressed city. Real estate developers had finally discovered that, for all its ills, Newark is still just a twenty-minute train ride from Manhattan. Soon, builders were falling over themselves to snatch up the abundance of empty lots and toss up one- and two-family houses.

At the peak of the boom, new two-family houses were going for more than $400,000, an astounding number to Newark residents who remembered the not-so-distant time when they couldn’t even give away their houses. Then the bubble popped, the foreclosures began hitting in waves, and it was back to reality.