Kill Your Neighbor Read online

  I grabbed our bag of food and stepped out of the driver’s side.

  She approached me.

  Rather, it was like she was pulled along by the dogs approaching me, gnashing their little teeth and barking furiously with a high pitch that stabbed me somewhere in the back of my brain, lighting some kind of rage center that sent my adrenaline shooting off the charts.

  “How ya doin?” I looked at her mottled, cheese-like face. Tried to make eye contact but she just stared wild-eyed at her furiously barking dogs.

  I assumed the bag of food was what the dogs were barking at so I just hoisted it up and said, more or less shouting to be heard over the dogs at this point, “Falafel and fries!”

  Still getting no response, I just shrugged my shoulders, said, “Nice meeting you too,” and turned toward the house.

  Emma was already unlocking the door.

  I followed her in and turned the lock behind us.

  Emma laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked. “That was horrific.”

  “Do you think that crazy bitch even knows what falafel is? She probably thinks you were making fun of her.”

  “You’re right. I probably should have just told her it was filled with bombs and liberal ideology.”

  “Christ. Welcome to Trumpland, I guess.”

  “Maybe it won’t be that bad.” I parted the blinds to our front window to see if she was still out there. She was. “I’m pretty sure the dogs are pissing on the car’s tires.”

  Without any words being exchanged between the neighbor and us, the mild irritation deepened to a low-level hate over the next few weeks.

  We would be sitting in our living room, trying to read or watch movies, and the sonic landscape would be torn asunder by the yapping of the dogs. It was clear she was walking them over to the extreme edge of her property, putting them as close to us as possible.

  “You know,” I said, “you would think she’d take them to the other side of the yard if they’re going to bark like that. I don’t think anyone lives over there. Or just let them run around in the backyard. It’s fenced.”

  “She’s just a psycho cunt,” Emma said. “She’s trying to bother us. She thinks we’re like her and she wants a fight. She wants one of us to go out there raging.”

  More often than not, the neighbor would be standing in her yard with one-to-three dogs, always approaching us and barking furiously, when we came and went. We still hadn’t bothered doing any research on her so we began making suppositions based on casual observations.

  She didn’t work. We’d never seen her SUV leave the driveway. Maybe she no longer drove. She was older, so she could be retired. But she also looked borderline homeless and seemed wildly unstable so it was just as likely she was on some sort of disability.

  We’d never seen anyone else come or go from the house so were pretty sure she lived alone.

  For the first couple of weeks, if we saw her out there, we’d wave and say hi, but quickly abandoned that practice when all we got were blank stares and angry barks.

  So, instead, we just started making medical assessments of her.

  “Maybe she’ll die soon,” I said.

  “She doesn’t look very good,” Emma said.

  “Morbidly obese for sure. Her heart could just give out in her sleep.”

  “She was wearing shorts yesterday. She had a nasty looking rash on her leg.”

  “Hm. Probably has diabetes.”

  “I heard her out with her dogs again last night. Sounded like she was about to hack up a lung.”

  “With the way that air conditioner runs, she probably has Legionnaire’s or something.”

  We tried telling ourselves she was just a nosey, lonely old lady quite possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or just had a weak brain partially rotted by years of a poor diet and little to no exercise.

  Until we started noticing the shit.

  Piles of it everywhere.

  The dogs were tiny, so it wasn’t like the piles were massive, but they seemed to be strategically placed all along our driveway and even the strip between the sidewalk and the road. We only had the one car so we never parked on the street, but I guess she wanted to cover all of her bases.

  “Isn’t there a law that says you have to pick up after your animals or something?” Emma said.

  “If there isn’t, I’m pretty sure it’s at least part of the social contract. She’s got like a Mason-Dixon line of shit going out there.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, if Trump’s serious about that wall, he should just fly all the dogs to the border. Nobody would want to cross that. And, hey, if they’re all Chihuahuas, wouldn’t that be like they were paying for it?”

  I flipped open my laptop and searched ‘animal waste.’

  “Apparently if it’s in her yard we can’t really do anything about it.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s technically our property.”

  “I guess I could try to say something to her but I don’t think it would help. If she weren’t doing it to be combative, it wouldn’t be there in the first place.”

  “We could at least call and report it to animal control or something.”

  “I guess. But, I mean, it’s going to be obvious who called. We’re the only other people back here.”

  Emma let it drop. I was glad. We tried to shut the bad neighbor out of our thoughts. Or, rather, we just worked around her. We left the front blinds and the blinds on the neighbor’s side closed at all times. We heard the dogs barking late at night and turned the music or the TV up or just laid our books in our laps, closed our eyes, and took deep breaths. We had moved out of the city because we were ready for some peace and quiet. We were ready to move forward with our lives. The neighbor was little more than a stumbling block. Broagies was an expanding franchise and increasingly popular. I was busier than ever. Emma had received a small pay bump from the Point and had to take on a few more responsibilities. We didn’t need the hassle and anxiety that an all-out war with a neighbor would bring.

  We busied ourselves with putting the finishing touches on the house and hoping our neighbor would meet some natural death.

  Four

  Of course the back door was locked.

  We stood on the deck, a much shabbier version of our own. It didn’t even feel safe to stand on and I imagined it creaking and bowing under Meg Chinaski’s girth.

  We backed up from the door, staring at our smudged reflections in the smeared and streaked glass.

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I asked. All the blood had rushed to my head. My heartbeat sounded thunderous in my ears.

  Emma was smiling, the machete gripped firmly in her hand.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more.”

  When Emma came in the front door, one foot raised above the throw rug, I knew some action would have to be taken.

  “I stepped in it again,” she said. “You have to say something to that bitch.”

  “I will,” I said. And I meant it. I hated conflict but I hated the hurt look on Emma’s face even more. I hated the feeling of having worked hard for something only to have your spirit crushed when you finally achieved that thing.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then go do it.” She took off the other shoe and went into the kitchen where she put both shoes in a plastic bag and tied it off.

  “I’m not going to do it now.”

  “Why not?”

  “What? I go over there and pound on her door? You think she’s even going to open it if she sees it’s me? She’ll probably think I’m there to rape her. She’ll probably come to the door with a shotgun.”

  Emma was angrily scrawling something onto a piece of paper.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Leaving that cunt a note.”

  I looked at what she’d written:

  PLEASE WASH AND RETURN.

  THANKS,

  YOUR NEIGHBORS

  She then stormed outside in he
r socks, marched to the edge of our driveway, and flung the bag so it landed perfectly on the neighbor’s front stoop.

  I thought it was a pretty badass thing to do but knew it probably wouldn’t end well.

  When we left for work the next morning, the bag lay in our front yard, returned with an equal fit of anger. No note was attached because we assumed the neighbor probably couldn’t read or write. Emma marched the bag to the trashcan and dropped it in.

  She got in the passenger side and said, “If she comes out with those dogs, you should just run the little shit machines over.”

  Sure enough, just as I backed out of the driveway and into the street, the neighbor’s door opened, her immense frame filling the doorway.

  Emma glared at her.

  “Big bad bubba,” she said. “Fucking hillbilly trash.”

  “She’s just, like, a fucking bully,” I said. “A hillbully.”

  I spoke to the neighbor for the first time shortly after that. Emma had picked me up from Broagies and we’d gone home. Pulling into the driveway, the neighbor was out with all three dogs.

  “I know,” I said before Emma could say anything. “I’ll talk to her.”

  I got out of the passenger side and almost slammed the door on Emma, who was also getting out on the passenger side so she didn’t have to deal with the shit and the barking and the hostile glares.

  I told myself to be calm. Take some deep breaths. I’m not an argumentative or combative person but, in the few times I’ve been forced to, I usually just end up getting mean and basically making fun of who I’m arguing with. It’s fairly childish and always leaves me feeling bad about myself, but it’s about the only thing I know to do. I had to tell myself that, at the heart of it, this was a woman—probably around the same age as my mother—and, being a man, I probably shouldn’t physically threaten her or devolve into calling her things like ‘bitch’ or ‘cunt’ or ‘white trash piece of shit’ or anything like that.

  I took another deep breath and thought, “Be civil.”

  I walked over to the edge of the driveway, staring down at the piles of shit lined up.

  The dogs were less than a foot away from me, gnashing their teeth and straining against their leashes.

  “Got a problem?” the neighbor asked.

  And she must have felt a huge sense of satisfaction. Here was the confrontation she’d been begging for for the past two months. That’s what she’d been hoping for. Every act had been one of aggression, a taunt, thirsty for retaliation. When the dogs were outside our window at night, she wanted one of us to stagger out in a half-drunk or half-asleep rage fugue and ask her what the fuck she thought she was doing. Just like Emma had said when we first moved in. I’d always just wanted to be left alone so this was behavior I didn’t understand.

  “Kind of,” I said. “Do you think it’s possible to keep your dogs away from the driveway a little bit? Maybe give us some space to at least get out of our car?”

  “That ain’t mine. You seen where I take my dogs. Up there by my house.”

  “I see you taking them all over. It’s even down there by the street.”

  “Well, you shouldn’ta moved here if you don’t like dogs. You knowed they was dogs in this neighborhood. Strays go all over. I know you’ve seen em.”

  In truth, we hadn’t because we’d kept the house pretty much closed up because of this upright whale.

  “This isn’t from strays. And I definitely don’t hate dogs but you shouldn’t use them as weapons.”

  “Yer just mad cause you got suckered into buyin this place. Thought you got yerself a deal but it’s covered in mold just like them other two no one’s livin in. They’s dead from mold. You’ll feel like you got a deal when you’s both in the hospital with lung infections. All they did was paint over it but it’s in the walls . . . everywhere.”

  I was so baffled by the change of direction I was momentarily lost for words.

  “I’m not trying to be a dick or anything just . . . give us some space, okay?”

  The dogs had not stopped barking during this entire exchange and it finally dawned on me that I was accomplishing exactly nothing by trying to talk to this psychotic idiot. And the dog noise was so loud and constant I couldn’t even manage to put together an argument that was as equally insane as the one she was giving me.

  “You are,” she said. “Think yer too good for this place. Throwin yer junk over into my yard. Wantin me to do yer laundry. Well I’m just waitin til you’s both all packed up with mold.”

  She was even crazier than I’d thought so I started backing away. I tried to give her a smile.

  “Anyway,” I said, now shouting over the dogs, “I’m Kip! My wife’s name is Emma! It was great meeting you, neighbor! You seem like a wonderful person!”

  Then I turned to the house, listening to her tell her dogs what a fucking asshole I was.

  I shut the door behind me and said, “That didn’t go well.”

  That night we did our research.

  Emma started by typing in the neighbor’s address in a county records database.

  “Meg Chinaski,” she said. “House isn’t paid off. Looks like she has a second mortgage on it.”

  “Chinaski,” I said. “That sounds familiar.”

  I tapped on the wi-fi icon. There it was: ‘Chinaski1’. That must have been her handle. I promptly changed ours to ‘SatanLovesChinaski’ from whatever generic one we’d used since buying the router and felt a glimmer of satisfaction.

  Then Emma typed her name into Google. We were thinking she was so crazy it would have to turn up some incident report or criminal record. Instead, the only thing it turned up was an obituary for her late husband, Gerald.

  Emma shivered. “Oh, man, this means somebody actually fucked that bitch.”

  The obituary contained other information. He was 69 at his death, so we assumed she was probably around the same age. He was survived by his wife, Meg, and two children—Michelle and Kenneth—and one grandchild, no name given.

  “If she has kids and a grandkid,” Emma said, “she really must be a raging cunt if they don’t come to visit her.”

  “Maybe they don’t live around here or something.”

  Emma typed their names into Google.

  “Well,” she said, “it looks like the son’s in jail and the daughter lives pretty close. She looks like a party girl.”

  Emma smirked and turned her laptop to face me. She clicked through the images, revealing a beefy, overly tanned, bleached blond woman who looked around forty—a really hard forty—and wore clothes a lot more tight-fitting than she should probably wear.

  “Yikes,” I said.

  We didn’t turn up anything else significant and I didn’t know what we were supposed to do with the information we’d obtained. I guess it was knowledge and they say knowledge equals power.

  Emma went to the city’s website and reported her for all the dog shit in the yard. I thought it was unlikely they’d do anything about it.

  “One thing’s for sure,” I said. “I’m not trying to talk to her again.”

  I held that promise until one evening over the winter when I took the trashcans down to the curb. Chinaski was, of course, out there with her dogs. They started yapping and lurching as soon as they noticed me. I tried to tune it out. Told myself she probably wouldn’t say anything to me. Probably just wanted to be left alone. And I couldn’t just lay into her out of the blue, even though there were about a million things I wanted to say to her, not that any of them would have done any good.

  I heard her mumble something and glanced in her direction, thinking she was probably talking to the dogs, even though what she was saying was probably about me.

  She was looking directly at me.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  There was still a part of me that wanted to think all of our suppositions about her were completely in our own heads. Maybe she wasn’t an antagonistic, malicious, combative hillbully. Part of me wanted to think she’d
possibly uttered something neighborly:

  “Gonna be gettin cold soon.” Or “How you likin the new place?”

  What she said, apparently, from what I could hear through the swirl of barking dogs, was: “You think you could make any more noise?”

  Once again, she’d taken me completely off-guard.

  “I was, uh, just bringing the trash down.” But I should have just walked away. She wanted to rant and vent. She wanted nothing resembling a rational discussion.

  “Every night!” she squawked. “Every night yer up all night. Sleepin all day. Yer a motherfuckin alcoholic!”

  At this point, I was again stumped. Emma and I did stay up late on the weekends watching movies and, sometimes, we had a few drinks, but it wasn’t like we were having a party in there or anything. And it wasn’t like it was any of Chinaski’s business if we were. It was only just the two of us. And, unlike our neighbor, we actually woke up and left the house by nine to go to work. True, we didn’t typically get out of bed before noon on the weekends but that was because we were fucking adults and didn’t have to.

  I knew there was no arguing with her so I began walking back to the house.

  Then I thought, what the fuck? She’s already riled up.

  So I doubled back.

  “What’s your problem with us?” I shouted over the dogs.

  “I done told you. You’s a fuckin alcoholic drunky. In there all night carryin on with yer drinkin and witchcraft!”