by Paul Z. Ford
“I know, but there ain’t nothing else for us to do right now. Might as well.” Griffin set the box down on the small front stoop and hugged his dad, each clapping the other loudly on the back. Griffin grabbed the box again and walked it into the house. Llewelyn walked to the edge of the driveway behind his son’s truck and waited for him to return. After a moment, Griffin came back out and stood next to his dad. Griffin was slightly taller than his father and had a thicker head of blondish hair. They stood in silence for a moment, enjoying the warm Texas air.
“Christmas ain’t til tomorrow,” Llewelyn broke the silence.
“Well, maybe it’ll snow.” Both men laughed softly at Griffin’s joke.
A loud noise nearby made both men snap their necks to the right. One of the new neighbors, across the corner of the T-intersection, had let his screen door slap loudly on the front door frame. He was carrying a bulky duffel bag out to his open car, a Tahoe, already half loaded with bags and other loose items.
“Gotta get that door fixed!” Llewelyn hollered across the street. “Shouldn’t let it slap shut like that. Ain’t good for the frame.” The man’s expression seemed to brush over with confusion or anger, and he did not reply.
He loaded the bag in the Tahoe and shut the back gate. He went to the driver’s door and opened it, leaning his large body into the car. A woman came out of the house with another load and the screen door banged shut again. She looked across at the two men staring with a similar expression to her husband on her face. Llewelyn slapped his son’s arm.
“Going back to Mexico,” he stated loudly enough that they could hear his voice all the way in their yard. He softened his voice conversationally, “Can’t cash their welfare checks, amirite?” He chuckled.
“Probably ran out of food,” Griffin added, gesturing toward his father’s house.
“That ain’t my problem,” Llewelyn spat. “They come over here looking for a handout. As soon as there’s a hard time, they’re back to where they came from. It ain’t my job to feed every neighbor that can’t feed himself. Look, there’s another down there.” He pointed down the sloping road. Several houses down another family seemed to be loading their vehicle with personal supplies.
“I ain’t saying it’s your problem. Just saying that’s why they’re going, that’s all. Good luck in Mexico. Some of the highways are blocked. It’s getting hard to get around. Lots of accidents in the rain. Then the cars just stay wherever because no cops or tow trucks are out working. It’s strange, like everyone is hiding or waiting. Waiting for something to happen I guess.”
Both men continued standing in silence for several minutes. Each time the neighbor’s door slammed they looked over and watched them load another item. After a while, they brought out their two kids and dog and loaded them in the SUV. The husband locked the door and let the screen bang against the house one last time. The Withers listened to the sound of their engine fade away as they left the neighborhood. Soon, the neighbor down the street did the same, passing the corner and disappearing.
“Have you found David?” Llewelyn asked quietly. His other son had been missing for a week now. Part of Griffin’s time was spent tracking where his older brother might have been on the day of the announcement. Griffin shook his head in defeat. Their concern grew in the silence of his answer.
A motorized sound and movement came from directly across the street, breaking the silence. The home facing Llewelyn’s driveway was flat on front, unusual in a neighborhood full of L-shaped construction. Its driveway was directly across from Llewelyn’s. The motor of his garage door rumbled softly as the wide enclosure slowly opened. Llewelyn and Griffin watched the door raise to slowly reveal a man with dark brown skin and a dark and slightly wild beard. As the garage door reached its peak the owner of the house stepped onto his driveway. His hair was bound in a tall, round ball in a white turban on top of his head.
“Goddamn! You got a goddamn rag head living across the street?” Griffin hissed quietly to his father. Llewelyn stared grimacing as the man walked to his car. He unlocked and opened the passenger door of the sedan, grabbed something small, and then quickly walked back into the garage. The motor rumbled and the door slowly closed.
“That’s my Iranian,” Llewelyn told his son. “I watch him close.”
“What the hell? How the hell did they let him in the country? Ain’t they trying to nuke us? Goddamn system is broke. Send them home! Especially now that they attacked us again. You can’t be safe living next door to a terrorist.” Griffin replied, exasperated.
“Son, you are preaching to the choir. He stays at home now so I keep an eye out. He used to leave and be gone all the time before this terrorist attack happened. Don’t worry, I know he’s up to something and I’m keeping my eye on him. He’s easy to spot with that diaper on his head. You head on home now, don’t worry about me.” Llewelyn reached over and gave his son another back-clapping hug. They chatted for a minute as they casually walked to Griffin’s truck. Eventually, they said their goodbyes and Griffin backed out of the driveway.
Llewelyn occupied his day as he had for the last week. He read some. He made himself some small meals and watched some DVDs. When the clock hit 5 o’clock he cracked open his first beer, and then tried to find a TV channel or radio station that was anything other than the same emergency line repeating itself.
Dusk came quickly and Llewelyn ate his last meal of the day. He walked around the house, checking out each window and door. He planned on ending his round at the front door, switching on the massive outdoor light that illuminated his driveway while he slept. Before he got there, he turned off the overhead light and paused in the master bedroom. Peeking out one of the bedroom windows, he saw something that was briefly alarming. He thought he saw a man with a turban walking into one of the homes down the street. He just caught the image as the door closed, but felt a tinge of fear that this suspect person was visiting others in his neighborhood.
He waited in the dark for about ten minutes until his fear was confirmed. The far neighbor’s door opened, light spilling out into the dark yard, and his bearded, turbaned neighbor walked out of someone’s house. He spoke for a moment to the occupant and then turned away with a smile. The door closed and the warm night made him disappear.
Llewelyn let the blind close, mind racing about the implications of what he’d seen. They must be plotting. They must be working together to further their radical agenda. He couldn’t think of any other rational explanation. He briskly walked to his own front door and double-checked the locks. Wide-eyed, he stood inside his door imagining the awful infection he saw on the screen happening in his neighborhood.
“I ain’t no weakling,” he whispered to himself, thinking about his neighbors working against his way of life. Was he paranoid? Was he exaggerating the threat these people represented? No. They made him live in fear. They made him close the factory. They made the system break down.
They made his oldest boy disappear.
He quickly and smoothly opened the front door and slid out past the screen door. He pulled the solid wood portal shut and the screen door followed with a silenced hiss. He stood on his small stoop in the pitch blackness. There was a street light on his corner, but it hadn’t worked for months. He had blamed the lazy people working for the city, but now it served his advantage. He walked softly, thankfully in tennis shoes and not boots, and followed the front of his garage to where the driveway turned toward the yard. He stood, watching, trying to spot his neighbor down the street.
Silently, he watched a beam of light come from the front door of another house. The man exited this house and paused conversationally like at the previous home. Llewelyn could see his smile standing out against his dark skin and beard. Now that he was closer, Llewelyn could tell the man was carrying a small bag and was wearing a loose-fitting robe of some sort. The light illuminating the details disappeared with the closure of the door, as did the target of his surveillance. The night was dark with no moon, concealing
each man from the other.
He stood tensely, trying to spot the white turban in the dark. So many of the neighbors near him had left, including the two households he watched drive away today. It kept the whole neighborhood dark. This was not how Llewelyn defined neighbors. Neighbors didn’t sneak around in the dark. Neighbors didn’t work against one another. Neighbors went out of their way to help each other, talk to each other, get to know each other. This neighborhood no longer had his kind of neighbor. All he saw in the darkness were conspirators and spies.
Llewelyn began to walk across the street, confident in the pattern of visits. He strolled toward the abandoned house where his Mexican neighbors fled earlier in the day. He knew the two houses in between were empty as well. He crunched through the grass and stood against the brick on the edge of the empty home, back against the tall wooden fence. He waited, listening for anything and only hearing his own rapid breath.
Then, he heard a knock at the house next door. It was confident, banging on the front door in the darkness. He knew it would only be a moment until the man came to this house. Llewelyn prepared himself for the confrontation. He would tell this man to leave his neighborhood alone. To go home. To give America back to the Americans and head back to the Middle East to fuck up his own country. His breath quickened in anticipation, playing the future conversation over in his head.
He heard footsteps approaching the house through the grass. The soft sound changed as the man stepped onto the paved walkway. Llewelyn waited, trying to hold his loud breath. He wanted to catch the man off guard and honest.
A half-dozen loud knocks sounded on the nearby door. Llewelyn jumped a bit in adrenaline-fueled surprise. He listened and waited, and after a moment another series of knocks sounded. Now, he heard the other man softly clear his throat as he waited. Llewelyn slinked around the corner and moved stealthily toward the silhouette of the man standing at the door. After a few steps in the darkness, the man turned and looked in Llewelyn’s direction with a crinkle in his brow. Llewelyn cleared his throat loudly and took a big step onto the sidewalk in between the man and the street.
His neighbor jumped and cursed. “You scared the hell out of me!” he exclaimed with a slight accent. “What are you doing out here? I thought you were one of those… things.”
Llewelyn waited a moment, choosing his words. He stood straight and silent, trying to intimidate the intruder. After an awkward moment, he spoke.
“Why are you here?” he said softly.
“Why am I here? I’m just checking on these people, to see who needs help,” the man answered defensively, gesturing toward the darkened house. Llewelyn paused again, adding tension to the strange conversation.
“Why are you in this country? Why are you here if you ain’t with us? Why are you trying to turn the neighbors against each other?” Llewelyn’s voice rose a bit as his anger bubbled to the surface. He thought of the damage these people had done, the terrible images he had to endure, the dismissive acceptance of these radicals by those who were supposed to protect his country. He clenched his fists and teeth as his anger surged.
“Who’s us? I was born here, friend. I’ve seen you watching me. You need to leave me alone.” The man tried to walk past his angry neighbor. Llewelyn grabbed his arm through the thin material. It felt like a twig barely covered in muscle in Llewelyn’s powerful fingers.
“You need to go back to your country. I see through your lies. They say Muslims are part of our country, but you ain’t turning my neighborhood into a terrorist camp. Go home!”
The man shook his arm, trying to escape Llewelyn’s tight grip. The small bag he was carrying dropped to the sidewalk in the light struggle. His teeth gritted through the stringy, long beard on his face. His eyes flashed with quick rage. “I’m not even Muslim, I’m Sikh. I was born in New York; I’m just offering to help these people. I’m a doc-“
“Helped those terrorists in New York, huh?” Llewelyn shook the man’s arm, ignoring the rest of his reply. “All alone now, nobody’s gonna help you tonight. You need to get out of my neighborhood.”
Both stood glaring at the other, connected by Llewelyn’s hand. The Sikh neighbor shook his arm again, trying to get out of the vice grip, and attempted to push past Llewelyn. He was thin, much smaller than Llewelyn in muscle and height, and his struggling and pushing couldn’t budge the larger man. Suddenly, desperately, he reached up with his right hand and tried to strike Llewelyn’s hand away. The grip loosened, and the neighbor was able to shake his arm away and start a few steps down the sidewalk toward the street.
“Stay the hell away from me, old man. This is more my neighborhood than yours,” he only got a few steps away before Llewelyn’s fury took over his actions. He looked at the man’s dark skin, unkempt beard, and turban and only saw an enemy. Someone subverting his great country.
He grabbed the man’s turban with both hands and pulled his head backwards with force. The several-meter long fabric loosened, and the man staggered off balance. Llewelyn’s grip on the man’s hair made him cry out in pain as he flailed to regain his balance. Llewelyn felt the man’s thin body fall as he let go of his grip. The stranger hit the pavement with a thud, the brunt of the impact hitting the back of his head, stunning him. Llewelyn stood over the injured man, grinding his teeth and breathing heavily. The man was gasping and rocking back and forth on the ground. His arms were at an angle to his body as he struggled with the breath knocked out of him. The turban on his head had come loose, and as he rocked his hair started to work its way out of the white cloth.
Llewelyn reached down and grabbed the man by the collar. He had no worries that his neighbors would see. Nobody was left. All the immigrants had left. This Iranian was the only one left, and Llewelyn was now determined to teach him a lesson. Force him out as well, rightfully so. He dragged the man toward the nearby front door of the abandoned house, dragging him over the small step in the sidewalk. The man struggled, but was physically weak compared to his assailant and left off guard from the sudden attack. Llewelyn pulled the man onto the porch, knocking over a small ceramic decoration with a clattering crash. He dragged the man violently, cloth trailing his head, and tossed him behind the low hedge concealing the floor of the small patio.
The man tried to cry out, but couldn’t catch his breath from the fall. He wheezed and tried to call for help, but the words came out in a whisper. He held his arms up and kicked his feet along the ground, trying to get away. He was trapped on the porch, in between the dense bushes and his neighbor.
Llewelyn stepped forward, pausing for a moment before reaching down and grabbing one of the man’s flailing arms. He pulled the arm, spinning his small body on the smooth ground, and kicked him in the ribs. The man thrust himself back in pain, holding the spot where he was kicked with the other arm. Llewelyn kicked again, hitting his hand and hearing a loud snap. The man breathily yelled, closing his eyes tight against the agony. Llewelyn was emboldened and continued kicking and stomping while holding the man in place with his limp arm. Sweat sprung on his forehead and he tasted blood where he was biting his cheek.
He threw the arm down, and the groaning man immediately gripped his chest and side with both hands. Llewelyn stood panting over this object of his rancor. He had taught him a lesson, probably broken a couple ribs and maybe some of his fingers too. He spat in the bushes and brushed his wispy hair back with one hand.
But would this man learn from Llewelyn’s lesson? An ass-whoopin’ was how Llewelyn’s father taught him and his brothers a lesson, and it always worked. But these people were different. This man wouldn’t learn the same lesson from a beating. Llewelyn saw enough happening around the world to know that they couldn’t listen to reason. They were unreasonable. Un-American. He paced a few steps toward the front door and back.
He stepped over the body of the injured man, resolving to take care of his neighbors by making this man pay for what he did to others. He lowered himself on top of the man’s torso, covering his arms and putting
all his weight on the Sikh man’s chest. He took a handful of hair as the man whispered nonononono, blinking away tears of pain and trying to take in air against the larger man crushing his lungs. Llewelyn pulled the man’s head up and quickly rapped it against the concrete patio. The man released a high-pitched yelp as Llewelyn struck his skull against the hard ground again, and again, and again. He reached down with both hands and got a grip into the increasingly disheveled hair on either side of the injured man’s head. Llewelyn, frustrated, started tearing away at the long cloth of his turban, throwing it aside and resuming his double-fisted grip. The man was limp and his eyes rolled. Llewelyn lifted and struck his head again, several more times, panting with exertion. The violent effort quickly tired the attacker. Llewelyn pulled his hands back and stood over the lifeless long-haired man. He saw blood on his fingertips and quickly wiped them on his jeans.
A range of emotions flew through his mind. Was he dead? Did it matter? He just killed a man. No, not a man. A jihadist, a sympathizer at the very least, not a neighbor. Not an American.
He saw the small bag on the sidewalk and picked it up. He opened it to check the contents and pulled out the first item on top. It was a stethoscope. No, it didn’t matter what he was doing. He was contaminating the neighborhood. Llewelyn stuffed the item back in the bag and tossed it into the yard. He walked back across the street to his home, leaving the man behind.
Once he retrieved the cans of gasoline, one from the garage and one from the back shed, he had decided how to clean away the contamination.
The next morning, around twelve hours later, Griffin pulled onto his father’s street as usual. This time, black smoke and the stench of a fire burned his nostrils. He was relieved to find his father’s house still standing, and the man himself standing in the driveway. The two houses across from his, though, were smoldering still from the overnight fires. One was directly across the street, the home of the Iranian man they watched yesterday. The other was across the opposite corner, the one they watched as it was abandoned by the owners.