From behind me I heard Owl ask: “Where’s he going?”
The featherworkers’ and jewellers’ quarter was in uproar. It looked as though a gale had swept through it, blowing down awnings, plucking reed mats from the ground, scattering the traders’ wares to the four directions. The merchants themselves stood, ran about, or lay on the ground, arguing, screaming, or weeping. Nobody appeared to be in charge, and of the police there was no sign.
“Where are they?” someone jabbered at me as I stood trying to take in the scene. “Where are they when we need them? Running about looking for some feckless barbarian while a gang of kids comes through and ransacks the place!”
I sighed. “You’ll find the police are everywhere but here.”
At that moment Hailstone stumbled into sight, gasping from the exertion of running all the way from the main entrance. “Yaotl! You’ll never guess what happened...”
“Bet I can,” I said.
“No, but that envoy — the moment I told him where you’d gone, he suddenly turns to those foreigners...”
I grinned. “And says something like this, I suppose, in fluent Nahuatclass="underline" ‘They’re on to us, lads! Time to run for it!’”
He stared at me. “How’d you know?”
“It’s a gift,” I said dryly. “You’d better get your men together. I think the merchants could use some help cleaning up. Not to mention an explanation of why you were all running after some non-existent barbarian, on the word of a fake envoy, instead of guarding their property!”
(c)2007 by Simon Levack
Neighbor Lamour
by John Goulet
John Goulet is a short-story writer and author of the novels Oh’s Profit (William Morrow) and Yvette in America (University of Colorado Press). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the London Times Literary Supplement. A recent review in Sewanee Review placed Yvette in America in the ranks of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. The following story is Mr. Goulet’s EQMM debut.
My friend Eugene and I remembered when Lamour moved into the three-bedroom ranch across the street fifteen years ago — sharp red car, tailored suits. Eugene remembered a BMW, but I said Jaguar. Big parties that would go late into the night and clog up Pinecrest Lane. We knew he was a lawyer. Office in downtown Milwaukee. A trial lawyer, we heard, with various connections, some of them shady. Fortyish back then, maybe five years older than Eugene and I. Friendly enough to wave, say hello.
We used to kid that if we ever murdered anyone, we’d know who to call on to defend us.
A year after he’d moved in, we weren’t exactly surprised to see Lamour’s name listed for the defense in the Albert Coniglio murder trial. Coniglio was high up in the Milwaukee mob, and the news of the trial was splashed across the front of the Express. For a while, black limos glided in and out of Lamour’s driveway. A touch of sleazy glamour on Pinecrest Lane, which apart from Lamour was L.L. Bean chinos, Weber grills, and Packers bumper stickers.
The stupid little war between Lamours and O’Dells that started around then didn’t have anything to do with Harry being involved with the mob. No, it was his kid, Junior, who started it by pulling up my mailbox — it was on a post out by the road, like all the Pinecrest Lane boxes. The morning I found it lying on the ground, I went across the street. The kid was whittling on a stick in his backyard. He was about fourteen then, skinny as a dagger, with poured-resin hair, and eyes too big for his head. “Junior, I don’t know for sure who pulled up our mailbox, but I think it’s you. If it happens again, you’re going to be in trouble.”
My friend Eugene worried a little about it. That night we took our wives to the movies. Afterwards, he pulled me aside. “Are you forgetting our neighbor’s connections?” he asked me, only half kidding.
Well, I didn’t think Milwaukee’s gangland was going to put out a contract on a music teacher at a small Catholic college because he’d objected to Harry Lamour’s son tearing down his mailbox.
Of course, neither did I think that Harry Lamour’s son would, over the next few years, make a hobby of pulling out my mailbox. Each time, I’d call the cops. The cops would come and examine my mailbox, and walk across the street to talk to the Lamours, and make the rounds of the neighborhood looking for witnesses. Fat chance someone was going to volunteer to testify against a family with mob connections. And I didn’t have any physical proof, of course.
Lamour Senior cornered me in my garage one day and demanded that I get off his son’s back. “My boy can be a little impulsive, but bringing in the cops just makes things worse.”
“If he keeps it up, I’ll catch him at it,” I said. And I told him to get off my property.
By that time the friendly waves and neighborly Hi’s had already come to an end; the war had begun. Eventually, it would go beyond mailboxes — way beyond.
After the next time, I sank the post in cement.
Tire tracks on my lawn — Junior had his license by now — told the story of his subsequent attack. He’d looped a chain between his back bumper and my mailbox and pulled the whole thing out, cement and all. It was complicated enough that I was pretty sure he had help from his father. That they’d formed a team.
My solution, after the cops had performed their useless rituaclass="underline" more cement.
Team Lamour’s response: enough firecrackers loaded into the box to send aluminum shrapnel fifty yards.
Soon after, the birch tree out in front was toilet-papered, and a few months later the amusing expression I AM AN ASSHOLE! was printed in big block letters on my garage door.
More cops, even a little local news coverage, more “lack of proof.”
I don’t want to give the impression that the war was nonstop. It wasn’t. Junior’s last semester in high school, he was too busy banging a cute little brunette to worry about his across-the-street neighbors. And when he started commuting to the community college in the next county, that slowed him down. Plus, Senior’s life had started to come unraveled. But for a while back then I never knew when I’d find the mail glued to the box, or covered with red paint. Or I’d open the mailbox to find it full of dried dog shit. Nails sprinkled on the driveway. Garbage cans tipped over, the garbage spilled out onto the lawn. Newspapers gone missing...
Margie wanted to move.
“One of these days,” I promised her, “I’ll catch them.”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
Then I got serious: I installed one of those remote cameras; motion-sensitive lights; I even wired an alarm to the mailbox. That did it — the dirty tricks stopped. A little later, Junior dropped out of college and disappeared, leaving Pop without an ally to carry on the war. That was about ten years ago. Peace descended on Pinecrest Lane, at least until last year, when Lamour’s wife died and Junior came home for the funeral.
My friend Eugene made his living on prostates — enlarged ones, that is. If anyone in town could pare your prostate to a reasonable size without affecting your hard-on, he was your man. More than once I’d heard “he’s the best in town” from people who didn’t even know Eugene and I were best friends.
Of course, Eugene was careful about his reputation. What’s more important for a physician? Lamour Senior must have taken that into account last year when he decided to reopen hostilities. That and the fact that Eugene was my friend, and scamming him would be a way of getting back at me, another stage in our stupid little war.