We live in a nice neighborhood. Except for the occasional incident in which one neighbor shoots another through the throat at close range with a high-powered deer rifle, it’s been quiet.
To be fair, the shooting thing has only happened once in the three years we’ve lived here. But who knows? Maybe our neighborhood averages a shooting every four years. We could be due for another one.
The day after the violence, I was working at the local newspaper and was assigned to cover the story. I showed up at the house where the victim lived. Family members were abuzz with conversation out in the yard, which is understandable since that’s where they kept most of their furniture. If by “furniture” you mean the back seat from a 1997 Chevy mini-van.
I walked up to ask a few questions. Here I was, a member of the media, forcing my way in on them after a tragedy. The guy who would turn out to be the spokesman for the family eyed me a little suspiciously at first. The split ends of his stringy hair brushed his shoulders as he turned. The bristles of his moustache hopped as he opened his mouth to reveal gaps where his front teeth ought to have stood. He took a long drag on the cigarette he clenched in his rippling fist.
His eyes narrowed as he locked his gaze upon me and said, “You live right down the street, dontcha?”
Appearances to the contrary, they turned out to be a welcoming bunch, and surprisingly nonchalant about the proceedings of the previous evening. A member of their household lay in the intensive care unit after having had a large chunk of his airway ripped apart by a large caliber bullet, and his family’s attitude seemed to be, “Hey, why sweat the small stuff?”
The perp, they said, had claimed the shooting was an accident. Yeah, he was angry. Yeah, he knew the gun was loaded. Yeah, he pointed the barrel at his neighbor. Yeah, he pulled the trigger, but the whole thing was an accident in the way everything is an accident for certain people who’ve forgotten to take their meds. The victim lived, and as far as I know still bunks down, next door to the dude who shot him. Let no one say people in our neighborhood aren’t willing to let bygones be bygones.
Our neighborhood seen from the air would be a single loop set away from the main road with an inner and outer ring of houses. They are small and close together, built for working-class inhabitants. I love living there and every morning my heart swells when I step out of the house and look around.
Still, strange things happen.
Almost since we moved in, I have been mowing not just our front yard, but the adjoining yard of one of our next door neighbors. Lately, the job has gotten complicated.
You see, our neighbor is a nice enough guy, but his dog is wanted in six states. For murder.
Our neighbor keeps this Rottweiler in the backyard. Whenever I push the mower past the fence separating front yard from back, the dog hits it with the force of a spurned buffalo. The fence, built with all the structural integrity of a cheap kite, shudders along its length. Meanwhile the hound is barking in a way that indicates that on the day that fence falls he’s got an “accident” planned.
And I fully expect that dog to get free some day. In my imagination, I can see a long line of people missing limbs outside our neighbor’s door, demanding their arms and legs back, and my neighbor frantically tearing up his back yard with a shovel shouting, “Just a second, I’m sure they’re here somewhere!”
So I’ve just stopped mowing the half of his yard the dog can see. Since his own mower has been broken for years now, this leaves half his front yard nicely manicured and the other half looking like the set of “Platoon”.
The day before yesterday, we encountered another of these odd locals. Every summer, the local ice cream man comes tootling down our street. His big paneled truck roams around with pictures of cold, sweet treats plastered to its side. For a few quarters, the driver, Mark, will offer you heaven on a stick.
But Mark is not just an ice cream man; he is also a prophet of doom, though only part-time. In the winter months last year he wrote a book that purports to explain “why society has all these problems.” I know this, because right there on the side of his truck, right next to the advertisement for “Rocket Pops”,which feature three jolly, fruity flavors, is the cover of his book. It features a mushroom cloud.
Talk to him for a few minutes, and he’ll be happy to tell you the extent to which society has fallen apart due, in part, to a rotten educational system. There are plenty of other causes too, for sure, but if you’re interested, you’ll have to flag him down and buy the book.
I avoided the subject when we stopped him earlier this week. I groped instead for something else to talk about.
“So,” I said, “you’ve been driving this truck for a long time?”
“Thirty-two years,” he said, smiling broadly from behind the lenses of his pizza-plate-sized glasses.
He started up the truck and pulled away. As he did, he flipped whatever switch started the music coming through the loudspeaker atop his vehicle. It seemed Mark had been playing the same cassette tape for his whole thirty-two years. The tune was cheerful but warped, distorted as if floating to us from a far-flung seasick circus band.
From now on, when we hear that sound coming down the street, and my daughter looks up and says, “What’s that, Daddy?”, I think I’m going to say, “Well, sweetie, I’m not sure, but it sounds like the Apocalypse.”
