Every evening, a lone trumpeter sings out from the low brick apartment building across the street. Tonight, he plays a single, sweet jazz riff over and over. He can't get the F.
I am walking my dog Max and we pause, as we always do, to try to figure out which window. I think the western-most one on the second floor, the one with the cool darkness behind rattling blinds. On the east side of that building, on the first floor, is an opera singer. She rehearses with piano in the afternoons. Even when the windows are closed I can hear the arias; when the windows are open I can see her, her broad back to me, her music snapping crisply in her hands.
We walk past the building on 160th and St. Nick, with its cage of noisy parakeets propped up against the steel bars. It is an apartment, I'm sure of it--but it is also a beauty shop, and on Saturday mornings, women chat on the couch with rollers and foil in their hair. A makeshift salon is on the fourth or fifth floor across from the back courtyard of my apartment, also. A buff gay guy lives there. I see flashes of him at night in his long mirror; some evenings, he stands before a woman and carefully holds up strands of her hair.
Tonight, the air is soft and almost wet. A girl with a long ponytail practices maneuvers on her skateboard; a white woman woman comes up from the C train with pink roses nestled carefully in a shopping bag and twin blisters on her heels, red spots revealed by her flipflops. Max and I cross the street, past a small gang of children doing what one of them calls the "chicken little" dance, with complicated feet and a few jerks of the chin. If it were afternoon and sunny, these same kids would be playing baseball, or stickball, a broom handle cracking against a ball made of hard, white rubber.
An entire family is camped out on a stoop, their toddler screaming when she sees my dog; her mother smiles at me and comforts her. They speak to me all at once in a rapid-fire English/Spanish. "His name is Max," I say. "No, he's not a wolf." I have rehearsed this speech, and I can say it in a halting Spanglish in return. I have seen this family before, too. On Sundays, the men haul out a white plastic table and folding chairs or milk crates and play a slapping, militant game of dominos.
The firefighters have turned on the fireplug across from their station. They watch lazily as it shoots water in a blue arch onto the street. From where I live it looks like a fountain, back lit by a car's aqua headlights. We start to walk home. Two rats, the size of the small dogs the neighborhood Dominican women carry, munch contentedly at the vulnerable corners of a plastic bag left out for tomorrow's trash. Max takes no notice.
He does notice, however, the chicken bones that are scattered everywhere on the sidewalk, like a talisman. I never see anyone eating chicken. Yet there are always the bones around the bases of trees, and they are tempting to dogs. He tries not to look at me as he pulls toward them. I jerk him away.
A trio of men stand by an open car door that's playing reggaeton. A city bus thunders by, one of the new hybrids. Max and I make our final circle, through the darkened, cobbled streets of Jumel Terrace. The gate to the mansion is closed, as it always is at night. Still, we look for a glimpse of the resident Tom cat who usually splays out on the schist wall. Yankee Stadium shines in the distance across the river, brighter than the waning moon. On quiet evenings, with the right wind, the name "Alex Rodriguez!" or a snippet of the national anthem will float gently over to our borough and flutter in the trees.
I trudge slowly up the steps to our brownstone. The trumpeter tries one more time. Dark has fallen completely.
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