I quickly looked back down. The woman—for some reason, I hadn’t noticed her before—was wrinkled and blue-veined, with bright silver hair hanging in a pageboy cut that made her look like some dried-up flapper. She was sitting under the tree in a wooden folding chair, a paperback in one hand. She put the other hand up to shade her eyes and squinted at me from under a blue cotton sun hat. “Are you the new tenant?”
“Excuse me?”
She shook her head in exasperation. “In number 8. Over there, where the bushes are.” She pointed to one of the houses which had a small “For Rent” sign stuck into the tiny lawn.
Oh. Right. I mentally shook myself. “I’m sorry—you must be Mrs. Delaney. Yes, I’m Jerry Dawson. The realty company told me that you’d have the key.”
She stared at me for a very long minute. “I see you’ve noticed the tree,” she said. There was more than a hint of Irish in her accent, speaking of an immigrant childhood, or at least immigrant parents. “What do you think of it?”
I shrugged. “It’s a bit weird-looking for a tree. But then, I like weird.”
Mrs. Delaney smiled and dipped into the pocket of one of the ugliest polyester jackets I’d ever seen. She pulled out a key hanging from a huge paper clip, and tossed it to me. “Take your time,” she said. “I want to finish this chapter.”
The house was indeed small; I’d seen apartments that were larger. The living/dining room and the tiny kitchen were downstairs (with, omigod, a dishwasher); two small bedrooms and a bathroom were upstairs. It was nice. It was a house. I was sold.
But wait, I told myself sternly. Did I want to try to fit into this obviously conservative little enclave? Wouldn’t I be happier in an apartment somewhere where the residents—and the opinions—were a bit more, well, mixed?
Hell no. This was a house. With a dishwasher. And a staircase. And a lawn.
When I went outside, Mrs. Delaney was still sitting under the tree. ”So,” she said, not looking up from her book, “you’ve decided to take the house, have you? Ah, well, that’s lovely. I’m sure you’ll like it here.”
I offered her the key. “I’ll think about it,” I said, a little miffed at being taken for granted.
It was obvious that nothing I could say would either offend or impress her. She just waved her hand at the key I was holding out. “Don’t bother,” she said. “Just call the people who gave you the directions and they’ll arrange for the lease. You can move in whenever you like.”
* * *
She wasn’t joking. I sent in my answer and my references; a two-year lease arrived in the mail the next day. My lawyer glanced at the lease and said it was completely standard. I signed it, faxed it, and two weeks later was watching the movers drive away with a good chunk of my change.
I stood outside my new home and looked around. The Court was quiet; it was a weekday afternoon and all the residents were at work or doing something else. I did see, just for a moment, a lace curtain twitch in the house next to mine, but when I turned to look nobody was there.
I went in, shut the door, and began to unpack.
After a couple of hours, I sat back and contemplated the piles of boxes still on the floor and on my couch. Part of me—the part I inherited from my efficient, no-nonsense mother—said that I should keep unpacking, and that the sooner I got that done, the faster I could get on with my life. The other part wanted to go check out the local bars.
“Nu-uh,” I finally told myself. “You can check out the bars later. Work first.” I reached out to another box.
Then I smelled it. Smoky. Strong. Very unpleasant. It was coming from outside.
There were two windows in the front wall of the house, one on either side of the door. They were covered by cheap white blinds, which I had left up until I got something a bit snazzier to protect my privacy. I pushed a slat down and peered outside.
In front of the house next door, the one with the lace curtains, a man was carefully pushing small sticks into his lawn and setting the tip of each on fire with a lighter.
Okay. So I had slightly eccentric people living next door. I was a New Yorker—I could handle eccentric. I decided to ignore the whole thing.
Five minutes later, I decided I couldn’t ignore it. The smell was getting intense, to the point where I had to crank open the back kitchen window and dig out my fan to try to air the place out.
Time to meet the neighbors. I went for the door.
Once outside, I just stood there, not sure what to do or say. The man acted like I wasn’t there—just kept slowly, carefully putting the sticks into the ground and lighting each one. Small plumes of brown smoke drifted up.
I cleared my throat. “Hi, there,” I said, in what I hoped was a conversational tone.
The man turned and stared at me. He was practically a caricature of an aging Brooklyn mook: somewhere in his 70s, with thinning white hair and an impressive paunch. “Hello,” he said, noncommittally, in the sort of gravelly, well-used voice I always associated with construction workers and carpenters.
I walked over to him and stretched out my hand. “Jerry Dawson. I just moved in.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We saw.” He gave my hand a cursory shake. “Bob Halloran.”
“Nice to meet you. I was just wondering...” I got a better look at the sticks he was planting. They were what we used to call punks, bamboo sticks with a brown coating, used to light fireworks.
The man saw me staring and shrugged. “We got an animal problem here. Squirrels, cats—they dig, crap on the lawn. I figure this will keep them away.” He gave a wide wave toward his lawn, which I now saw was mowed down to about a quarter of an inch, so perfectly that the grass might have been painted on.
“Oh.” I was trying to figure out what to say to this when a large woman with streaked blonde hair and wearing a bright purple track suit came storming out of the house directly across from mine. “Bob Halloran!” she yelled, heading for us like a truck out of control. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I took a step back—she looked like she was planning to plow right into us—but Halloran just narrowed his eyes and stood his ground. “I’m minding my own business, Vivian,” he shouted back. “What is your problem?”
“You know damn well what my problem is,” the woman huffed, stopping just short of the row of smoking punks. “I’ve got two kids coming home from school in half an hour, and all I need is for them to burn themselves on one of these...things.” She made an abortive move to kick one over, then thought better of it and pulled her foot back.
She looked as though she would have said more, but a thin, white-haired woman wearing curlers and a bright pink apron that read, “Grandma Cooks Great!” came running out of Halloran’s house. “Vivian, what is your problem?” she demanded. “There’s nothing dangerous about punks—you used to play with ‘em when you were a kid, and you know it.”
After that, it became a verbal free-for-all. The three shouted at each other so enthusiastically I wondered whether I should call 911. Suddenly Mrs. Halloran’s eyes widened. She closed her mouth and gave each of the other combatants a quick stab with her forefinger. At this signal, the other two immediately stopped and followed her gaze.
Mrs. Delaney stood a few feet away, her arms folded. “I’m sure they can hear you out in Jamaica Bay,” she stated, quietly but quite firmly. “Certainly, they can smell those foul items.” She nodded at the smouldering punks. “The stench will pollute every living thing in the Court. Bob Halloran, I’d appreciate it if you’d remove them.”
She didn’t wait, but turned and strode briskly back to her house. I turned back to the trio. Vivian just smiled and nodded at me. “Come say hello when you’re ready,” she said, and went back to her own place. The Hallorans glanced at each other, and then quietly started pulling the punks out of their lawn.
* * *
It wasn’t over
, though.
A week after the incident with the punks, Halloran installed an electric fence two feet off the ground, which sparked unpleasantly every time a suicidal insect decided to pass by. That lasted until a small black poodle belonging to the elderly lady in the first house on the right ran into it and scurried away uttering a frightened whine. It wasn’t an hour later that a police officer was banging on Halloran’s door and the fence came down.
A couple of weeks after that, Halloran placed several jars of water on his lawn because, he stated categorically, “Cats are afraid of the effect.” Somehow, the cats seemed to have conquered their fear; they saw it as a great place to get a drink, as did the local squirrel population. When a neighbor’s three-year-old managed to spill the contents all over himself, the jars disappeared as well.
For a while after that, things were quiet. I finished most of my major unpacking and dragged the less important stuff down to the basement. I took a couple of days to strip the bedroom of some really vile wallpaper and paint it, and then settled down to make up for all the time I’d lost—as a freelancer, a couple of weeks could make a major difference in my income.
One afternoon, around week 12 of my residence at Bay Court, I was working on a proposal and listening to the voices of some of my neighbors gossiping outside—when the weather was warm, the center courtyard was a social gathering area—when I suddenly heard a sharp yelp and a loud squeal. It sounded almost like a baby screaming. I rushed to the door and stuck my head out.
Several neighbors were forming a tight circle on Halloran’s lawn, staring at something on the ground. There was another high-pitched, awful squeal that ran up my spine; without thinking, I strode to the circle of people and looked down.
A squirrel lay on the lawn, pawing frantically at the grass, its back leg caught in what looked like an old-fashioned mouse trap.
“My god,” I said. “What happened?”
“Halloran seeded his lawn with traps,” said Vivian scornfully. She stood there, shaking her head. “He musta done it last night, or somebody would have stopped him. Now look.”
The squirrel’s screams were terrible, but nobody moved. It was as though they were waiting for permission, or the cops, or something. The hell with that—I was still new there, but somebody had to do something. I stepped forward. “Someone get a pair of gloves. Heavy gloves, if you have them.” I looked at Vivian; she nodded and walked quickly back to her place.
I squatted down next to the squirrel.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to try to pull its leg from the trap. Does anyone know a vet around here?”
“There’s an animal hospital down on Fourth Ave,” said Mrs. McCarthy, the elderly woman with the dogs.
“Call a car service, somebody,” I said. “As soon as we have the squirrel, I’ll take it over to the hospital. And maybe somebody has a shoebox we can put it in?”
Vivian pressed a heavy pair of gloves into my hands. I put them on, and reached slowly toward the trap, but even wearing the gloves I was nervous—it was nearly impossible to avoid the teeth of the squirming animal. “Dammit!” I hissed.
Then I realized that, except for the squirrel’s cries, it had become very quiet.
I looked up. Mrs. Delaney was standing there, holding a small cloth bag. Without a word to any of the neighbors she sat down cross-legged in the grass next to me and, murmuring some quiet words I couldn’t quite hear, slowly moved the bag close to the frantic animal. She didn’t seem worried about a nip from those sharp and possibly diseased little teeth; she just carefully pushed the bag over the animal’s head and body and held it gently but firmly.
Whether it was whatever she was saying or the darkness of the bag or the loss of blood, I don’t know, but the squirrel stopped struggling. I was able to carefully take the metal bar of the trap in one hand and the wood base in the other, slowly separate them, and pull the trap from the animal’s leg.
I threw the bloodied thing toward the house and sat back. I suddenly felt very tired. “Did somebody call the car service?” I asked.
“Don’t bother yourself,” said Mrs. Delaney. “She’s dead.”
I looked up. Sometime in the last minute or two, the neighbors had quietly walked back to their homes. The only people left were myself, Mrs. Delaney and Vivian. I took off the gloves and handed them to Vivian, who dropped them on Halloran’s lawn. “He can get rid of them,” she said roughly. “God knows what kind of vermin that poor thing had.”
Mrs. Delaney had picked up the bag so that the squirrel slipped completely inside it. She looked into the bag and sighed. “Too much fright and too much blood lost,” she said, as if talking to the squirrel. “Poor thing. Not to die old and tired or fighting a predator, but caught in a nasty human trap.” She looked up. “Vivian, I’m sure I can trust you to let Mr. Halloran know that I would appreciate it if he would remove those traps immediately.”
“Oh, he’ll hear from me,” said Vivian grimly.
“Don’t yell too much at the man, dear; he is miserable enough. Jerry, walk me to my garden. I need a nice strong young man like you to help me dig a grave.”
We walked slowly towards Mrs. Delaney’s house at the back of the Court. When we reached the tree, she stopped. I waited for her, and then looked up; a mockingbird sat on one of the branches, singing to some unseen audience. It looked down at us and scolded, then resumed its concert. I laughed in spite of myself.
“You like mockingbirds?” Mrs. Delaney asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “They’ve got nerve. They’re not big birds, but if you go anywhere near their nest, they’ll attack, no matter how big you are. And they’re great mimics.”
We stood in the quiet Court, listening to the bird go through its repertoire, until Mrs. Delaney smiled. “Now, if that wasn’t a car alarm,” she said, “I’ll eat my hat. What a very smart bird it is.”
We continued to walk back toward her garden. “There’s a spade against the wall, behind that bush,” she told me. “You can dig a small hole there, in front of the window. Just deep enough so that cats don’t find her.”
The soil was soft, and it took only about 15 minutes to dig a hole, deposit the tiny corpse into it, and cover it up again. Just as I was finishing, Mrs. Delaney came out of the house with a glass. “Iced tea,” she said. “Tetley, with a bit of fresh mint in it.”
“Thanks,” I said. I drank gratefully, and handed the glass back. Mrs. Delaney regarded the small grave thoughtfully. “Something will have to be done about that Halloran,” she said, more to herself than to me, it seemed. “Dedication to your garden is a worthy thing, but he is causing trouble and pain, and that must stop.”
She looked up into the tree at the mockingbird, which was carefully grooming its wings. For a moment, it seemed to look back at her. A corner of her mouth raised just slightly. “The thought occurs to me,” she said. “You seem to enjoy birds as much as I do. Wouldn’t you like to put up one of those bird feeders? There’s a pet store over on Third Avenue, run by a friend of mine. Tell him I sent you. He’ll set you up.”
I thought to object—for one thing, a feeder in my tiny lawn would look absurd—but her statement sounded less like a suggestion than a royal command. The funny thing was, though, the longer I thought about it, the better the idea sounded.
Which is why, that Saturday, I found myself walking the seven blocks to the store she had mentioned.
* * *
The feeder didn’t come with instructions, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how to assemble it. And the next morning, when I opened my front door, three small brown birds who had apparently decided to breakfast at the new establishment took off in a panic.
It was sort of cool. For a moment, I pictured myself spending the warm evenings in a small deck chair, a beer at my side, a guide to New York City birdlife in my lap, and a phone in my hands as I, excuse the expression, tweeted to
my friends about the exotic species that were landing in my yard.
Then I thought about the daily outdoor Bay Court gossip sessions that I had, so far, successfully evaded. There would be no quiet birdwatching here. Still, I started to keep my living room blinds open so I could see the birds gathering outside. And each morning, before I even made coffee, I would go replenish the feeder.
On those few occasions I did see Halloran (which wasn’t often), we’d nod politely to each other, but I didn’t say anything and neither did he. A sort of truce, I thought, had been established.
Until a couple of weeks after I’d put the birdfeeder up. I was just finishing a call with a client when somebody pounded on my door as though trying to knock it down. It startled the hell out of me, but I didn’t want to alarm my client (since, as far as he was concerned, I was working out of some business office in Manhattan), so I asked him to hold, put the phone on mute, and opened the door to find Halloran standing on his threshold, in an obviously foul mood. “I need to talk to you about your birds,” he rasped.
The man’s face was a dangerous shade of purple. He didn’t seem to be armed, and he didn’t make any attempt to actually come in, so I said, “One minute,” and closed the door. I unmuted the phone, told my client I’d call him the next day with my estimates, hung up, and opened the door again.
“Yes?” I asked, my phone in my pocket and my finger on the speed dial for 911.
“It’s your friggin’ birds,” Halloran said.
“My birds?”
“Your birds. From your goddamned feeder.”
“Oh. Okay. What about the birds?”
“They’re crapping on my sidewalk and on my lawn,” the man growled.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Your birds! This morning, they started leaving their goddamn droppings all over my front walk! And my chair! And my grass! The stuff is impossible to clean up. What are you going to do about it?”
Halloran stepped aside and let me look.
Space and Time Issue 121 Page 8