Behind the Hood

I went running in a hoodie recently and a car swerved too close for comfort.

I live in a typically jumbled Vegas suburban neighborhood—brand-new cars and shitty ones, shuttered rentals and meticulously manicured homes, elderly hoarders and young upstarts. Here, few people make use of the hoods attached to their hoodies, opting instead for hats or umbrellas. We have long, winding lanes where the silhouette of a person coming down the hill can be seen from far off. My neighbor’s young sons sometimes walk to the gas station; some days, they make it to the main street before they pull their hoods back down. This could be personal preference; I’ve never asked these boys about it, they could easily say they don’t think about it. Still, some community members get spooked easily; signs for neighborhood meetings about rising crime have been popping up with some regularity. The Catholic school down the road just hired contractors to make the spear-tipped gate around the playground taller, with the addition of opaque dark green privacy sheets. Rumblings about unhoused people sleeping in the park or graffiti in the pedestrian tunnels near the playground. The nights come earlier and sometimes in the middle of them, there are loud, not-too-distant sounds like glass breaking or doors slamming or voices yelling, followed by the low-flying vibration of a police helicopter, its spotlight flashing through the backyard, the siren of an ambulance or a firetruck, the vacuum of pregnant silence after all the noises stop and people—well-meaning and rational—become fearful.