Kill Your Neighbor Read online

  “Fuck,” Emma muttered. She’d been lying on the couch browsing through a brochure for spring bulbs to plant in the front yard once the weather broke. She threw the brochure across the room.

  I, too, had been lost in a reverie of hope and dread. The hopeful part of me envisioned a spring and summer of hard work and recreation. The yard and the outside of the house still needed cleaned up. I was raised on a farm and loved being outside, loved breaking a sweat while enjoying the sights and sounds and smells of nature. While there had been a decent park area near our downtown apartment, it felt contrived and manmade and was, let’s face it, basically just an outdoor hotel for the homeless. Hardly relaxing. Other than the rare hiking excursion to Twin Springs, that nature-longing part of me had been sorely met. I wanted days of being out in the sun and nights of unwinding on the deck with a beer and the company of Emma.

  The dread stemmed from the thought of who would move in after her if she had died. I figured it could go either way but, in the end, the dread was softened because I didn’t really see how it could be much worse unless it were like a family of hillbillies who actually shot at the house or something. I’d lived a lot of places my entire life, had many neighbors, and hadn’t had a problem with a single one of them.

  But that was all wiped clean with the cacophony of barking dogs and I was back to that place of feeling trapped, of feeling like I’d made a terrible mistake, of feeling like I’d contributed to the purchase of a prison, not a home for my wife and I.

  I Googled ‘how to get out of a mortgage.’

  Emma said, “So if she can not come out of her house for two weeks at a time, it means she really does bring them out there just to torture us.”

  Emma brought up a good point. What did she do with them when she didn’t bring them outside? I imagined Chinaski sitting around in her moldy little house, surrounded by little piles of dog shit. Or maybe she didn’t want to deal with it. Maybe she just locked them in the basement and let them go down there. After all, she’d probably be dead before it became too big a problem. Let someone else deal with it after she was gone. Or maybe she just caught them when they were ready to go, held them up over her head, and let them shit in her mouth, eliciting a response almost sexual in nature. I imagined what her life must be like. All time and attention spent on those dogs. There was clearly no love in the woman’s heart. I’d never heard her utter a single kind word to any of the dogs—so the drive for someone so obviously lazy and hateful almost had to be sexual in nature. That is, she wasn’t into the zen-like ritual of maintaining them. Her days were filled with dragging them inside and out, standing out there in the yard, focusing in on their little dog assholes, waiting for them to dilate and those brown ropes of shit to slide out. I imagined her getting inside and taking off her shoes, noticing she’d stepped in a pile she couldn’t see over her enormous torso, bringing the shoe up to her nose and breathing in the aroma as though sampling the bouquet of a fine wine, a slight moistening between her legs as the love of dog shit massaged whatever dim pleasure center rotted away in her fat head.

  The first warm week drew to a close and Emma mentioned taking care of our problem for the first time since that winter. It was a week of perfect weather. The time had changed so we had an extra hour of daylight and we divided our time between work and staying inside with the windows shut and the blinds drawn. Normally, even living downtown, it would have been that much heralded first week when you can lie in bed with the windows open, listening to the sound of the world warming up and coming back to life.

  Instead, we lay in bed with the house fan running to keep it from feeling too stuffy.

  “This is ridiculous,” Emma said.

  “There has to be something we can do about it,” I said.

  “There is.”

  “Not that.”

  “I’m starting to think it’s the only way. She’s not really doing anything illegal. You can’t call the cops on people for being annoying. And even if you could, it’s not going to make her go away. She needs to go away.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to spend another summer locked up in the house. Look at us. We’ve both taken on so much responsibility at our jobs, sometimes working fifty-plus hours a week because neither one of us wants to come home anymore. We have hundreds of dollars’ worth of deck furniture we haven’t even bothered dragging out of the garage since we bought it. We bought a grill that’s been used exactly once. We should have been out all weekend planting flowers and playing outside and instead we stayed inside and binge-watched nearly every season of Dan Banal . And we’d seen them all before. And it’s not even very good!”

  I could sense Emma getting worked up.

  I said, “Have you thought about putting the house up for sale? We’ll be at the two-year mark toward the end of summer so we won’t have to pay the inflated earnings tax.”

  “No. If we move, it means she wins.”

  “Maybe it’s more than just her. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe this area just isn’t for us. Maybe we should just move back downtown.”

  “We can’t afford to. Plus we overpaid for this place. We probably wouldn’t even get what we owe for it.”

  “So . . . what? We kill her?”

  Emma smiled. “You’re the one who said it.”

  “Hey, wait. I wasn’t—”

  “Think about it, Kip. We’re both bright people. We can figure out how to cover our tracks. Neither one of us has a criminal record. There’s no one back here. It’s not like we would ever be caught in the act. It would probably be weeks before anyone even noticed. And who’s to notice, anyway? Maybe the mailman says something after her mailbox fills up and he notices an odd smell coming from the house. But maybe he doesn’t say anything either. You’ve seen the way she terrorizes him with her dogs. So maybe he still delivers the mail until the mailbox is too full and puts a hold on her account. Maybe she just disappears. Who’s to know? Who’s to care? It happens all the time. People would just assume she couldn’t keep up on her bills or house payment and just moved in with one of her kids or something. No one’s going to try tracking her down. Think about it. We put her on trial when we moved in here. A trial with a two-person jury. We’re open-minded, forgiving people. We have given her every chance to prove her innocence—even simply her compliance to the social contract—and she just keeps getting more and more insufferable. It’s like tribal law and that law has found her guilty.”

  “Okay,” I said, more or less to get her to stop talking about it.

  We spent the next month hammering out the details.

  Seven

  And I’d fucked it up.

  I was supposed to handle the dogs and Emma was to take care of Chinaski.

  Now I stood over Chinaski’s well-stabbed corpse, one of her dogs writhing and yapping and gurgling in my left hand, the other remaining one sniffing obliviously around my ankles.

  The only thing I could think about was Emma.

  “Emma!” I called.

  Between the gun blast and the barking dog, I was having trouble hearing much of anything else.

  The dog was making me furious.

  I held it out in front of me and stabbed at it until it was quiet and then flung it back over my shoulder.

  “Emma!” I called again.

  She emerged from the bedroom, her fingers plunged into her ears. She jostled them like she was trying to get some water out.

  She seemed to be moving okay.

  I didn’t see any blood on her but she was wearing all black so it was impossible to tell.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She now stood over Chinaski’s corpse.

  “Oh, Kip,” she said.

  “Emma?”

  She moved closer to me and placed her head against my chest.

  “Oh, Kip.” She raised her face to mine. She was beaming a radiant smile. “I’ve never been better.”

  I dropped the knife and took her in my arms, rubbing my hands ov
er her black-clad curves, possibly to make sure I didn’t feel any blood. I was still shaking with adrenaline and, the more I explored her, the more I convinced myself she truly was unharmed, the more I felt like crying.

  She pulled away a little and made a pouty face.

  “What’s wrong, Em?”

  She looked down at Chinaski’s bloated corpse.

  “You knew I wanted to do it.”

  And then I did break down. Because what she said was so banal. So petty. So Emma.

  She wiped a tear from my cheek and said, “Oh, Kip, I know you did what you had to.”

  “You know,” I said, “she’s still right there.”

  Then Emma pulled me down to her and I felt her hot breath in my ear saying, “I love you so much.”

  The old fat dog was now sniffing around Chinaski’s corpse, lapping at the blood.

  I felt Emma’s hand brush my cock and was surprised to note that I was hard.

  Then my lips were on Emma’s and after that everything became something of a blur. Clothes were removed and tossed wherever. Emma was in my hands and I was in hers. We attacked each other like it was our first month together, ascending to such a plane that I felt close to blacking out.

  I recall Emma stabbing Chinaski’s corpse repeatedly, dipping her hands in the offal and rubbing it all over her beautiful pale body, shouting, “I never thought bathing in someone else’s blood would feel so good!”

  And she was right.

  We didn’t leave Chinaski’s house until just before dawn.

  We spared the final dog, letting it wander out into the yard before exiting out the way we’d come.

  Still, outside, the sound of the infernal air conditioner. It would be months before she got so behind on her electric bill they shut it off.

  I pulled the bloody machete out of Emma’s hand and rammed it through the grate at the top of the unit. Just stopping the fan already reduced the noise. I felt like it would only be a matter of time before it overheated and blew up.

  Exhausted, we went back to our house.

  Emma collapsed onto the bed wearing only her bra and panties, covered in blood and who knew how many of our own bodily fluids. I wore just my underwear, black to begin with but now sodden with the same substances.

  I turned to Emma and smiled.

  I opened up our bedroom windows and collapsed next to her.

  We heard a high-pitched whine shriek from the air conditioner and then the only sound in the room was the soft hum of the cicadas and a few early birds. Emma moved into me. I put my arm around her and she put hers over my chest.

  I thought I would feel bad.

  I thought I would feel guilty.

  But I didn’t.

  I felt relieved.

  Eight

  We woke up the next afternoon to a sound we hadn’t heard since moving here: children playing.

  There would have been a time when I would have found this annoying but, after the past two years, it was nearly soothing.

  I turned my head to look at Emma, awake and smiling behind her mask of dried blood.

  “I know,” she said. “I think I even hear an ice cream truck.”

  I had to see what was going on. I threw on a thin robe and staggered toward the front door.

  I pulled it open, greeted by the sunlight.

  A couple of kids—a boy and a girl—rode their bicycles around the cul-de-sac. I glanced at one of the houses on the ends and saw what may have been their parents, emerging from the house like liberated concentration camp survivors. They threw their heads up at the blue sky and, even from this distance, I could see the smiles on their faces.

  I raised my hand in a wave.

  They did the same.

  I was startled by a couple walking up the sidewalk from the right.

  They also looked pale and emaciated yet, strangely, full of life and energy.

  The woman jerked her head toward Chinaski’s house and said, “We were thinkin bonfire.”

  I laughed and said, “We’ll bring the hot dogs!”

  Introductions were made all the way around. They didn’t seem too concerned about the blood. Maybe they just saw it as a common sign of living in a war zone.

  I closed the door and walked back into the house, feeling as hopeful as I had the first day we’d moved in.

  “We did the right thing,” I said to Emma.

  Now maybe we could begin the life we had been trying to live.

  That night we sat on the deck with beers, watching the lightning bugs chase each other around the backyard and listening to the katydids and cicadas punctuate the sleepy hum of the distant highway.

  The old fat dog came around the corner of the house, its teeth clamped around a purple diabetic ankle.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  Emma and I clicked our bottles in a toast.