The final gunshots

Nearly every day of my life, I drove through the Penn and Dowling avenues intersection. It was the route to the freeway and I often stopped for the cheap gas that was sold at the station there. At 2 o’clock one morning, a man waiting in his car for the light to change was shot to death.

I did not hear that shot as it was four blocks from my house. I heard about the shooting the next day after work when Dave, from the neighborhood patrol, called me. Dave hadn’t been able to pick up much information from the police scanner that he listened to constantly, just that someone had died.

Two days later we read in the newspaper it had been a random shooting of a man named Donald Ross who’d been coming home from work. He was almost home when he’d been shot dead. It was weeks before two men were picked up and charged with the shooting. They really hadn’t had any reason for the murder except that Donald Ross had been there and they’d been there, too, with a rifle.

It was time to leave. Not because there’d been another shooting, but because the balance had shifted on my block. People who were willing to take a stand against crime were outnumbered by the criminals and the people who wouldn’t take a stand against crime.

We’d lost Martha. With her recruitment to the dark side – no, we didn’t believe she was selling drugs, we believed she’d fallen to drugs – we had lost the critical balance. She’d been a lynchpin for stability, this woman who wanted to raise her kids in a quiet place. She was soft on the outside, hard on the inside, but not strong enough to stand alone in life. A smart woman who’d tried to straddle the social classes and the race classes but that hard inner core wasn’t quite enough. I was alone, too, but I’d had my education and I’d had my parents and I had my color. I could afford to sell my house and lose money. I would get another chance. I put up a ‘for sale’ sign.