Harold Cummings, the neighbor to my right, wasn’t as lucky. She had slashed the two rear tires of his Volkswagen Gallant. The Popovs, an older husband-and-wife team, escaped altogether because their car had been in the garage. They rarely went out anyway.
For a long time I stood looking at my tire and then walked a full circle around my truck, inspecting it for additional damage. Every few steps, I would glance over at the house to my left, a simple bungalow design with a shadowy porch and grizzled yard spangled with dirt patches. The only evidence that it might be occupied was a black POW You Are Not Forgotten flag hanging dead and heavy outside the brick porch. The FOR SALE sign was still sitting out front, where it had been for the last several months. In all that time I had seen no potential buyers come or go. In fact, Harold and I had even taken turns mowing the grass, since no one else seemed at all interested in doing so. We had always prided ourselves in our quiet little cul-de-sac, a place of calm and reflection, filled with residents whose principal occupation was minding their own damn business.
In the entire four years I had lived there, I think the biggest issue had been a complaint or two about the Popovs’ pet dachshunds running loose and dumping on other people’s yards. As I looked over at the bungalow, I realized we had moved far beyond the scourge of doggie droppings.
“How goes your day, sergeant?” Harold called from behind me. He was standing at the front of my truck, arms crossed, grinning. Harold was a retired professor of psychology and dressed the part to a T. In fact, if he were masquerading as a retired professor, he couldn’t have found a better outfit — lightweight, rimless spectacles, a two-toned sweater vest, khakis, Birkenstocks, and a curved alabaster pipe. He looked like he’d just walked off a campus movie set.
The Popovs shuffled up and huddled behind him like a pair of eager students.
“Has anyone called the police?” I asked, fumbling for my cell phone.
“Hold on now,” Harold said. “We were just talking about that, and the consensus is that it will only make things worse.”
“Please,” Anna Popov said. She was clutching one of her two long-haired dachshunds across her chest.
Her husband, Vlad, had the other dachshund tucked under his arm like a newspaper. “Yes, no police,” Vlad said. “This is to be no good.”
The Popovs were Russian and had moved to the States ten years earlier. Harold was convinced that Vlad had been a member of the KGB who had gambled the wrong way when the spirit of glasnost finally petered out. Their faces were always shiny and suffering, their accents heavy. They butchered English to the point that we wondered just how much they really understood.
“Well, good luck with your consensus,” I told them as my thumb hit the 9 and then the 1.
Harold reached out and covered the phone with his hand. “Seriously, we think you should talk to her first.”
“Who?”
He gestured toward the bungalow with his pipe. “Her. Ramba.”
“And say what, for chrissake?”
“Talk,” Vlad said with a nervous grunt. “No police.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Please to be talking only.”
Harold added, “Try to get her on our side.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I said.
“Look,” Harold said, “I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before, mostly with new students on campus. Moving into a new environment is one of the biggest stressors in life, and this may have been her way of getting it out of her system. If we just tell her we’re nice people who don’t want any trouble, then—”
“There’s already trouble,” I said, jabbing a finger at my Michelin 3000 in desperation. “Jesus Christ, Harold, look at my tire! Look at your tires!”
He maintained a serene demeanor, even raising one eyebrow scoldingly. His expression seemed to say, In the grand scheme of all that is life, what’s a tire? “She just moved in, and she clearly has issues,” he said. “But getting the police involved at this juncture could make things worse. Today, we hold the deescalation card. Tomorrow, she could be cutting our throats.”
Vlad winced and Anna gasped and both of the dogs — their names were Foo-foo and Rocky, or Rocko and Fee-fee, I wasn’t exactly sure — began to whimper.
“Harold,” I said, pleading for reason. But he just stared back at me. I had known him since I moved in. We shared a love of landscaping and exotic beer but beyond that didn’t have much in common. I suspected he was a bleeding-heart lib, and he probably thought I was a right-wing warmonger. But since we never knew for sure how the other felt, we generally got along. I admit that for once, his psychobabble was appealing. As I said, I wasn’t interested in escalating anything with anyone, least of all a bowie-wielding lunatic.
“It’s for the good of us all,” Harold said.
I smirked. “Then maybe we should all go up there. We could deescalate together.”
Anna gasped again and muttered something in Russian.
Harold was shaking his head. “Too confrontational. Besides, she’s got a POW flag, so maybe she’s prior military. Tell her you were in the air force. Tell her about Iraq. Connect with her. Above all, don’t take an aggressive posture.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,” I repeated, even as I shoved my phone into my shirt pocket and began walking up her driveway.
When I mounted the porch steps, the lawnmower buzzing in the distance hit a patch of rock and stopped dead. The wooden planks of the porch creaked with neglect and resentment beneath my feet. I could feel the eyes of my huddled neighbors watching me. And right before I knocked, I heard Anna’s weak, frightened voice utter, “Is he just to be talking, Mister Harold?”
Harold answered her in an unruffled, professorial manner. “That’s correct, my dear,” he said, teeth clenched on the stem of his pipe. “He will just to be talking.”
She opened the door on the first knock. I was prepared for anything, especially hostility, but she was wearing the same tremendous smile she wore when she introduced herself. I made sure to locate her hands. One was on the door, and the other was brushing some dust off the front of her shirt. The features of her face were stark white against the darkness of the hall behind her, her eyes open wide and gleaming, as if the strain of her pulled-back hair had stretched the skin too tight. She looked about as crazy as I’d ever seen a person look, like a mad monk preparing to burn a heretic at the stake.
The effect left me speechless. My mind fluttered between what I wanted to say and, per Harold’s suggestion, what I was supposed to say. Was it I’m here about the tires, you crazy bitch? Or Gee, I just love your POW flag, so let’s connect? But I couldn’t even open my mouth.
She stood up on her toes and looked past my shoulder at the other neighbors. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re not happy I moved here.”
I cleared my throat and tried to soften my tone, all the while hearing Harold’s droning voice: Don’t take an aggressive posture. “That’s not exactly true,” I said, “but I—”
“And you don’t know what to do or say because you’re not used to having someone — especially a new neighbor — greet you like I did?”
“Well...”
“Well what?”
“Well, um, I really love your flag. Were you in the service? The military? I was too, so I thought we could, you know—”
Her response was immediate and electric. She clapped her hands together, and her eyes glistened. “A veteran? Why the hell didn’t you say so? Come on in.”
And here I retreated a step. I was no fool. I had lived long and bore the scars of many narrow escapes to prove it. But then Harold’s voice persisted, like some kind of suburban secretary of state. Play the deescalation card. Get her on our side.