Neighbors

“Neighbors,”by J.M.Lamoreux

Look at how we live. You can peer down at neighborhoods from the sky and realize how predictable we are, can’t you? Look at those houses all tight and nice in a row moving up and down the tentacles of streets making dusty arteries to and from the personal business of people, many of them strangers to each other, all of them neighbors. How closely do we really pay attention to the person next door?

Here and there we wake from our trance and wave as we stoop to pick up a paper, or rush to run kids off the lawn or curse that broken sprinkler. All these things are tightly knitted into a fabric we take for granted, strapping it on every day as we turn the key in the ignition and drive to places where we pay for it all.  A neighborhood is also the place where murder can occur, and often does as the local police blotters will attest to if you’re curious. Neighborhoods are a mixing pot for just about everything good or bad.

Everyone had their own fraction of an acre on Lawler Street. They picked, poked and prodded at it and teased up their little yards. Often their efforts were rewarded with smiles and nods from people walking their dogs; sometimes the passing judgment was made with a cigarette butt or candy bar wrapper. This is where all of them came and went, where doors opened and closed, beds thumped against the wall late at night, lights went on in bathrooms all up and down the street as the sun crawled up the telephone wires to meet the day.

Mrs. McIntyre had lived on Lawler Street since 1995. Her roses had bobbed and sighed from the same white fence for many years. At 5:00 AM her screen door would open and Ritzy would charge across the yard, jump the small garden rocks and proceed to shit on any moist and dew soaked lawn he could find, other than Mrs. McIntyre’s. You can almost see it now can’t you, the little doggy fur-ball yapping and snarling, pausing and then making a tripod on the lawn as its little intestines struggle to void themselves on the sparkling grass blades?

Sometimes he would be sprayed with a garden hose, other times he took a meaty newspaper to the hind flanks. But he was never deterred. Mrs. McIntyre seemed to never understand the rage her little dog provoked among her neighbors.  Maybe she thought that her longevity had provided her the right to let her dog use everyone yard as its personal toilet? She was challenged on this point many times. But it didn’t seem like anyone was getting through.

Picture this if you will, this spreading, smoldering resentment against this old woman smelling of stale perfume and dry apricots oblivious to the anger poisoning this otherwise peaceful neighborhood. As you watch from high above on the telephone wires with the crows this little dog is spreading malaise all over the place like a furry bumblebee−with his tiny turds−and it seems everyone is powerless to stop it.    

Mrs. McEntyre was not as you would say a “caregiver.” Mr. McIntyre lay naked under the sheets in his bed trying to breathe through green oxygen tubes most of the day. He had succumbed to jet fuel poisoning at the engine manufacturing plant. She brought him tea with oatmeal and would spoon feed him like a large, wrinkled baby. Then she’d leave him to the heat and silence while she watched the Soaps twenty to thirty steps away in the TV area. There she would coo and scowl at the TV as its plastic life flickered across her red eyes. Outside Ritzy would be asleep under the tall junipers, his puffy tail taunting the sun.

How do you know when you’ve had enough? Manuel Esqueva was trying to be a good neighbor. He exercised restraint with the little dog. He would dutifully head out across his green lawn with a black shovel and scoop the tiny turds up and bury them in the Jalapeno garden.  His wife had died last summer. She was the one who knew English best and without her Manuel was lost. He stopped driving to the store; he attempted to wash large sheets in the small washer and dryer. He was a stranger in a strange land.  “El dios bendice los estados unidos.”

So now you see how the dynamics of this story is evolving. Lawler Street is set up like any other neighborhood all across the United States. Here a house, there a fence, then another house. The yards cut and splice themselves together up and down the street, some well trimmed, others a weed garden. And all the while the furry bumblebee and its unsuspecting mistress have no idea how powerful the rage is mounting. How could they know, where were the indications? When does the “annoying” traipse menacingly over into the “homicidal?” At what point does that button get pushed?

“I’m sorry my dog shit in your yard” the apology would go. Nod and smile embarrassed but never once pick up a shovel and cure the offending stain. On and on the drama goes and people just shrug and talk trash about what they’d do to “that little bastard” if they ever got him alone. Some of the impromptu revenge scenarios were funny, some cruel. But for the most part it was just talk. Everyone was just talking…that’s all.

Ultimately we come to the day when the talk suddenly got serious. It was what we call the “fateful day.” It was a day with a big yellow sun in the sky and flocks of crows bouncing on telephone wires looking with shiny black eyes down on Manuel’s driveway. His brother-in-law had called early that morning and asked if he could go through his sister’s clothes again this Sunday. He was looking for a broach his mother had asked about at the supper table last night.  And so Manuel had walked out into the garage already collecting the days’ heat and started the car to move it away from the clothes boxes.

He missed his wife. He missed talking to her in the evenings on the porch, the tea clinking in iced glasses. He missed her smell. He missed her voice. He missed her sex. He engaged the gears of the transmission and glanced into the rear view. His eyes fixed on the ball of fur forty feet to his rear licking itself. Not five feet away he saw the brown humped back of a tiny turd resting in his freshly mowed lawn. Something snapped.

Manuel gunned the engine and with no thought of the consequences slipped into reverse and spun the tires. The little dog had no time to react. There was a small “thump” off of the tire and he tumbled in a fur-ball across the yard and then sprawled out settling into eternal sleep like a fuzzy little flower, twitched a little, then collapsed into the grass, his bloody tongue lolling at the green blades. Manuel got out of the car as Mrs. McIntyre dropped the garden hose and came screeching around the white fence to throw herself on the dead Ritzy. No one else was home and heard or saw anything. It was just Manuel, Mrs. McEntyre and a dead Ritzy. Time was trapped in the rays of the sun and the hot air like a white bug in a spider’s web.

Manuel stood on the driveway, a smear of dark blood streaking at an angle across the cement to the place where Mrs. McIntyre pawed at Ritzy’s bloody hair.  She stopped petting the dog and sat up, her eyes fixed on Manuel’s.

“You did this on purpose you damn Wetback,” she snarled. “You killed my dog!” She was right, both times unfortunately.

She struggled to her feet, her eyes never leaving Manuel’s. She rose up from the grass, dog’s blood smearing the flower patterns of her summer dress.  Her bony frame seemed to move towards him in a series of weird, mechanical robotics. Her eyes were brim full of blue hatred. Her yellow teeth chattered in her wrinkled mouth from rage. Manuel saw the Devil rise up in her tissues and animate her old body with waves and waves of beet red white woman’s angry bald faced, ass kicking righteousness.

“I knew I should have called Immigration on you months ago,” she hissed as she struggled towards the shaking Manuel. He was wondering what he had woken. It was like when he had troubled a snake’s lair on sunny day in Mexico and a rattler had chased him for a quarter mile before slithering into some cactus. This was something truly evil coming towards him now and he felt his heart racing in his chest.  The snake in the pink summer hat was advancing quickly, its bony arms flailing the hot summer air. Manuel staggered backwards spinning a wooden lawn chair onto the porch to make way for a quick retreat. He inched along his car burning his palms on the already hot metal.

She was not stopping. The air was blue with curses and agitated with bony, swinging fists. One came down on his passenger side rear view shattering its mirror. He danced backwards among the trash cans and around the side of the building. She followed him, cursing all the way. He saw the old snake coiling and undulating, raising herself to strike and that’s when his hands reached for the shovel. The black metal scoop came down in a hard and fast arch and made a sonorous sort of “bong,” off of the woman’s skull. Her blue eyes rolled up inside her head, her teeth ceased to chatter, and she collapsed in front of him like a sack of potatoes.

The silence afterwards drifted upwards into the hot face of the sun. Clocks stopped. He felt the red blood cells in his veins seize. His lungs contracted with panic and heat. He rushed over to the old snake and held her head in his large hands. She stared in the bright yellow eye of the sun and didn’t blink.

“Ah mi Dios. ¿Qué acontecerá a mí?”

What would he do now? Who could he tell? He had killed the old woman with a shovel. The “Policia” wouldn’t understand his broken English. Where was his wife when he needed her? He patted the old woman’s face. Blood from her head wound spattered on her cheek. He took off the pink hat and felt a dollar size plate of her skull shift under his bloody palm. There was no putting the old woman back together again, or her dog.

What would you do in his place? His neighbor was in his yard, her skull broken by his shovel. Mercifully no one saw. Cars passed by the house but the stucco walls blocked them enough that the drivers didn’t seem to notice anything.  Manuel lifted the old woman and carried her to his back porch. He sat her in a rusted lounge chair like a rubber store mannequin and she seemed to disassemble into the fabric. Her skin was dry and like the leather of old saddles. She had pissed herself. This was awful. He sank under a sense of having done the most terrible thing he could have done in all his life. He had to hide it somehow. It had to go away. He couldn’t live another second with this evil on his porch, this human tragedy, this huge white mistake.  And then there was the damn dog.

Manuel retrieved the Devil Dog and stuffed him into a black garbage bag from the kitchen. Then he rushed back out to the driveway and quickly washed down the dog blood on the cement and the grass. The jet of water disturbed a veil of flies. As neighbors three doors down passed by in their station wagon they waved, and he waved back hoping his smile didn’t look too creepy.  The dog was easy to take care of. The woman would be another matter.

What would he say at confession? Forgive me for killing an old woman whose dog shit on my yard? What would he tell her kids when they came over to see their mother next door? What would he tell the old man? He looked at her face as the flies licked lazily at her blood and tried to erase her dead eyes from his mind. Why couldn’t he take the morning back? He would gladly let that dog shit all over his yard forever just to take one minute of this day back.  

He couldn’t call the police. Here he was with a bloody shovel and a dead white woman and no excuses. He only had a green card. There goes his citizenship. How would he live with himself now? He could see his arm waive as the woman’s children came up the dry walk surrounded by her dead, un-watered flowers. “Where did all these newspapers come from,” the daughter would say. He could hear the scream of anguish in his mind when they found her, and dropped to his knees on the warm grass.  He crossed himself and felt faint.

The old Gringa had to disappear. She had to go away. It would be like she never existed. That was the only solution. He rose up like brown smoke from the grass and turned to the corpse in the lawn chair. He dragged her and the chair into the garage. He needed a cervesa. There is no need to do anything without a cervesa. It always turned out wrong without one. Inside the refrigerator hummed and throttled on the freezer cycle. He opened it up and cool mist seeped out and searched along on the hot air for something. The cervesa was very chill, and tasted bitter on his tongue. He drank the whole thing and then got another. In the kitchen sink, dishes baked in their own grease. Flies left dark spots on the windows. He missed his wife.

What are you going to do with the old Gringa, Carone? He went back out into the garage. There was a tree saw, a gas hedger, an axe. To make the old Gringa disappear he would have to carve her up like a deer. That was the only way. He selected the tree saw and knelt over her. He would need to strip her; he couldn’t cut through all that material. He swallowed his rising gorge. This was going to be “muy feo.”

He took off her blouse and dress, then trying to avert his eyes he turned her over and removed her bra. Her flesh was like raw leather speckled with herd after herd of dark moles and age spots. She smelled of talcum and piss. He removed her dress, her shoes and support stockings. There she was now on the garage floor like a used up child drying out like a large white Jalapeno.  He removed his shirt and put shop coveralls on, then held the tree limb blade over her right elbow. He would remove things down to the trunk. He drew back the blade and made it lightly skim over her wrinkled skin. The saw teeth bit and blood came.

“What do you think you’re doing you lousy Wet Back?’ she hollered into the cool cement. “Ahhh,” she added, “He’s trying to rape me!”

She rolled back and forth on the cement like a large white bug. He screamed and struggled backwards falling against the washing machine. She tried to roll her shoulder to get up, threatening him all the time.  The snake was alive and after his soul again. He crossed himself and crawled along the washer and dryer to where a pick axe hung between two nails. He lifted it from the wall and turned to the snake with his weapon raised high in the air.

“Muéralo Diablo!”

It came down in an arch and hit her knee. She screeched like a tea pot so loudly he thought he felt the tool rack shake. She was up and swinging even on that sagging knee. He screamed in terror dropping the pick axe and fumbling for a screw driver. Gripping the handle of the biggest one he could find he swung it at her wildly. She fended him off and grabbed his brown hand and sank her teeth into the flesh.  He screamed and pushed her backwards, she struggled in the air for a moment like some giant white Mantis, then fell, sliding across the garage floor and hitting her head on a cement utility sink footing. The already broken skull bone finally gave up and settled into her brain like a plastic spoon in melting ice cream.

Her eyes once again rolled back into her head and she looked as though she had finally breathed her last. He crossed himself and fell on her now with the tree limb cutter.  

Hours later he opened the garage door, backed the car out and washed the blood off the floor through the back door. Everything smelled wet. He was surrounded by black garbage bags, neatly bound in silver duct tape. Now what did he do? This wasn’t good. Anyone could find these bags and trace them back to him. He wasn’t done yet. He felt the Devil laughing at him from the darkness of the garage as he closed the large door.

He whipped out his cell phone and called that pinche cousin in Lakewood. That donkey owed him a favor for letting him use the car to make a run to Mexico last summer. Pinche Alvarez would have to bring over that wood chipper tonight…”y rapidamente.”

Two hours later the wood chipper arrived, Alvarez had a cervesa and one for the road, and as his tail lights bounced out the driveway on the way back to Lakewood, Manuel got to work quickly to finish before 9:00 so that no one would call the police for the noise.

No one called. “Dé gracias a Dios.” The little dog went into the wood chipper as an after thought.

In the morning as the police were arriving next door and it seemed the whole neighborhood was awake and gathering in front of the old Gringa’s house, Manuel was washing out the wood chipper.  Now everything was in two bags all mixed in with branches from the peach tree he trimmed down a week ago. Everything was nice and mulched and ready for a trash run. Pinche Alvarez could take the bags to the dump when he took back the chipper.  

The red and blue lights from the three cop cars whirled around touching and coloring everything in the neighborhood caught in the dissolving morning shadow. The old Gringa’s daughter wept loudly in the driveway. Neighbors talked amongst themselves in clusters. A detective even asked Manuel if he had seen anything.  “No, hice no,” he said to the police interpreter.  He had no idea where the old Gringa was, or her dog.

Later, Manuel burned the old Gringa’s clothes including the pink hat. No one thought it was strange that he didn’t burn his leaves too. The ambulance came for the old man and carted him off. They took those big green oxygen tanks with him. Manuel went to the refrigerator and got a cold cervesa. He walked to the porch where he and his wife had spent so much time, and sat down in his wicker chair. He put his feet up on the low porch railing. As he raised the cervesa to his lips he saw something on the lawn. He got up and stepped down the porch and over to it. He knelt and picked it up. It was a red collar with a medal marked “Ritzy” attached to it.

“What an old pain in the ass!” Bob Forrester said from the end of his driveway. “Do you have any idea where the old broad went Manuel?’  

Manual slipped the collar into his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. “Yo no hablo ingles,” he told his neighbor.

“Well wherever she is I hope she took that goddamn dog with her,” Forrester said as he turned to walk back up his driveway.  Manuel saluted Forrester’s back with his cervesa and then went to his own porch.

It was dark and the crickets were chirping as pinche Alvarez drove up with his truck a day later and loaded the bags in the bed while hooking up the chipper to the tow hitch.  “Damn eseh, did you shit in these bags,” he said, wrinkling his nose as he slung them into the truck bed. Hours later he was on his way to the dump and Manuel was watching the moths flutter around the porch light.

He would wash the shovel soon enough. He wouldn’t need it for the dog shit any more.

He went to bed hours later with this terrible feeling that he had done something very wrong again. The teeth marks on his hand had grown an angry red from infection. What if somebody asked him about them? Did the detectives see? He thought he hid his hand pretty well in the interview. Maybe not well enough. Any minute someone would come and accuse him of killing the old Gringa and they would be right. He sat on the bed curled around a pillow under a crucifix on the wall. Who could forgive him of what he had done? Only the Devil.

He looked at the picture of his wife smiling at him from the bed stand under the glow of the lamp−and then tried to sleep.  After a little while, he turned off the lights and lay there in the darkness. Outside in an unmarked car two detectives smoked and watched Manuel’s house until the lights went off in the bedroom, and then they slowly drove away.