White Flight
by
Charlie Kondek
Timmy, a child, didn’t know why there were so many abandoned houses in his neighborhood. He knew it had something to do with people going to live somewhere else, and he’d heard one of his parents’ friends joke about it in the sudsy, smoky bubble that sometimes coagulated around their kitchen table while his dad played records with names like Styx and Toto. “You guys seen that bumper sticker that says, Would the Last Person Leaving Detroit Please Turn Out the Lights?” The grown-ups laughed.
Timmy also knew Donald, his best friend, was different because Donald was black, and he sensed there was something different about their families, but he couldn’t determine what, especially because it wasn’t important to him – playing with Donald was. They usually played at Timmy’s house because Donald didn’t have a house; he had an apartment in one of the area’s rare tall buildings, Hellton Towers, which Timmy’s parents called “the projects,” and he was discouraged from playing with Donald there. Admittedly, it didn’t take much to discourage him. Timmy thought it would be like “Good Times” with Jimmie Walker on TV but it wasn’t; it was crowded in Donald’s family’s apartment, and getting there meant climbing flights of stairs that smelled like cigarette smoke and mold under a layer of fresh paint.
Timmy also couldn’t put together that the two phenomena were related: there were so many abandoned houses in their neighborhood because white people were leaving Detroit. Timmy’s own family was planning to move to some place called Madison Heights, which Timmy barely thought about the way a child barely thinks about the days between now and his next trip to the dentist. Far from being a visible symptom of decay, abandoned houses were for Timmy and Donald objects of fascination. They’d been told countless times by their parents not to play near or especially in them, but what child can resist an abandoned house, any more than it can resist a climbable tree? There was one on the next block from Timmy’s, two stories with a brick porch and basement windows level with the ground, and a yard and detached garage surrounded by a warping chain-link fence. Timmy and Donald circled it, threw rocks at it – broke a window once and ran like hell – and finally worked up the nerve, one Saturday afternoon when they were bored by the horror movie on Sir Graves Ghastly, to go in.
They entered by a basement window and regretted not bringing flashlights. Using a two-by-four, they knocked away some glass and old curtains to allow in enough light to see what was there, which was not much, a concrete floor, some support beams, an old tool cabinet. Donald scared the piss out of Timmy by suddenly opening this and shouting, “Baaah!” and Timmy barked angrily, “Dammit, don’t do that!” They mounted the wooden stairs to the first floor.
They emerged in a space near the kitchen. What was unsettling were not just the dusty, empty rooms, visible in the light that bled through partially taped windows, but the small clues that had been left by the previous inhabitants – a table leg, a scrap of newspaper. There was also an inescapable feeling that this was still a house, someone’s home, and the owners might return any moment. Might in fact be here even now – you’d turn a corner and there’d be someone, some old lady maybe, in the barren dining room, wondering what the hell you were doing. After they’d explored for a while the ripped seams in the carpet and the peeling wallpaper, Donald announced, “This is Satan’s lair.”
“Don’t say that!” Timmy hissed. There was a staircase leading to the second floor, the bedrooms, and Donald said he was going up. “Don’t do it,” Timmy said. “Let’s get out of here.” But Donald insisted, had already mounted the stairs while Timmy watched, trepidation and regret expanding in his chest. “Come on,” Donald urged, but Timmy wouldn’t go, watched Donald climb the stairs to the second floor where there was less light. If the rooms on the ground floor that they’d already invaded seemed to belong to someone, how much more private the upper rooms, how forbidden. Which is maybe what thrilled Donald and repelled Timmy.
Timmy could no longer see Donald because he’d turned a rattly knob, opened a door, and entered a room, when Donald suddenly screamed, “TIMMY, HELP!” That expansion in Timmy’s chest burst through his ribs and he ran as fast as he could for the front door, locked, then down the basement stairs, terrified Linda Blair was waiting there for him, then out the window they’d come in, cutting himself on the jagged edge of something, glass or mortar. He heard Donald scream his name again, “TIMMY! DON’T LEAVE!” Scrambling to the front lawn of the abandoned house, crying profusely, Timmy shouted, “It isn’t funny, Donald!”
Timmy waited. “It isn’t funny!” he repeated. Trembling, tears abating, stutter-breathing through his armpits, he walked up and down the sidewalk trying to catch a glimpse of Donald in the upper windows, which were not taped up much but somehow swallowed sunlight and returned only an olive-green sheen. After a while he walked up to the front door and pounded on it. “COME ON, DONALD!” Still nothing happened. A child’s panic set in, a paralyzing fear of consequences, a desire to turn back time to before he had done something he now viewed as stupid, but he waited another hour before seeking help, too scared to tell his parents or go back into the abandoned house.
When he finally did run home and confess, Timmy’s parents called Donald’s down from their apartment and the two families searched the house and the neighborhood, but Donald was never seen again. The eventual police theory was that someone had been in the house and taken Donald, but Timmy had seen those upper rooms himself when Donald’s father frantically ripped them apart searching – empty, like the rest, sparsely littered with remnants, a spool of thread, a doll’s arm – and he couldn’t understand how anyone could have been up there in the airless rooms, snatched a nine-year-old boy, and carried him away.
No, Timmy, whose family did move to Madison Heights after that, had a different idea, and it followed him the rest of his life. The old house where Donald disappeared also disappeared, sagging and collapsing into the earth, where it was eventually demolished and never replaced even as increasing numbers of houses in the neighborhood became similarly abandoned. Like Hellton Towers, which looked down on them all from its place on the horizon, a stately manor turned beacon of doom, the surrounding houses were emptied out year by year until all that remained were death-traps, junkies and secrets. Timmy believed Donald was still there. Was sure of it, in fact. Because every time he drove past the old projects and visited the streets and the lot where the house once stood, he could hear Donald calling him. Timmy, help!
Timmy, don’t leave.
Bio:
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and writer from metro Detroit. His work has appeared at Mystery Tribune, Hoosier Noir, Yellow Mama, Bull, The Saturday Evening Post, and others. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
Punk Noir Press 