The witchcraft was a new one and threatened to again derail me.
“Hey,” I said, “I think we’re decent neighbors. If we do something that bothers you, let us know.”
“S’what I’m doin, motherfucker!”
Now she was walking toward me, the dogs leaping against their leashes, barking furiously, and she was muttering, “Get him. Get him,” to the dogs even though she never let go of the leashes.
I dismissively waved my hands at her, figuratively throwing the whole situation into the trash, before going back inside to relay the whole scenario to Emma.
“So,” Emma said, “let’s see. We’re alcoholics because we stay up too late a couple nights a week. But she wouldn’t know we were up that late if she wasn’t standing in her front yard staring at our house like a bloated fucking creep. Oh, and she probably sits in there and listens for the sound of us taking out the recycling. I’m pretty sure she mumbled ‘Bar’s closed’ last time I did that. I wanted to turn to her and say, ‘Bitch, it’s only two in the afternoon, bar’s just now opening!’
“Noise? Again, there’s no way she can hear us from inside her house. Not over that fucking air conditioner that runs non-stop. So again, the only reason she ever hears us make a sound is because she’s standing outside ten feet from our fucking living room window.”
“What about the witchcraft?”
“Fuck. I don’t know. I have tattoos. We drive a black car. We both wear a lot of black. We listen to evil music. Well, when we’re not listening to NPR. That’s probably the most evil thing in the world to people like her. Wait, no, people like her are too stupid to even know what NPR is.”
“Okay . . .” I said. “So she’s basically just batshit fucking crazy.”
“She’s the problem. We’re not the problem.”
Five
The night would have seemed quiet if we were not now less than five feet from the roaring, sputtering air conditioner. It faded the line between what should have been a quiet, residential cul-de-sac on a mid-summer evening and the inevitable chaos of what we would find inside Chinaski’s house.
“On the count of three,” Emma said, hoisting her brick up to shoulder-level and cocking her arm.
I did the same.
“One,” Emma breathed.
My insides felt drawn tight, my arm shaking. I hoped I’d be able to find the strength to throw the brick hard enough to break the window.
“Two.”
Probably the best thing that could happen was for something to go terribly wrong. For the bricks to not go through the glass. For the glass to shatter only for us to realize Chinaski wasn’t too poor for an alarm system. For a light to click on at that exact moment, her ghoulish face filling the window as she peered out to see the potential, easily identifiable intruders.
If I was going to say something, it had to be now.
“Three.”
Too late.
Emma’s brick shattered the glass. Mine hit far down on the metal frame in between the two doors.
The dogs were immediately alert, yapping and padding toward the door.
I heard Chinaski cough from somewhere in the house.
I was at Broagies on a Sunday. Even though I was the manager, I usually took Sundays off. I was there mainly to train Shawn Bibbles. I preferred to do all the training so new employees wouldn’t learn any bad habits right out of the gate and Sunday was the only day Shawn was available to come in. We were pretty short-handed and I needed to get him up to speed as soon as possible.
“It’s pretty simple,” I said, standing behind the counter, Shawn next to me. “You start with the butcher paper.” I reached up to the roll and tugged down a sheet of perforated paper. I pointed to an arrow on the left side of the perforations. “They want small, you stop and tear it at the first arrow. They want a medium, you do the second arrow. Large, the third. Pretty easy, huh?”
Shawn didn’t answer.
I glanced at him and noticed he’d slid his phone from the pocket of his pants and was tapping something into it.
“You paying attention, Shawn?”
“I’m trying, man. It’s real hard for me to focus.”
“That’s okay. It’ll get easier.” I tried not to criticize any of my employees, especially the younger ones. They seemed to get their feelings hurt pretty easily. Take, for instance, the fact that Shawn had arrived in sweat pants. I immediately thought about telling him he couldn’t come to work in sweat pants before deciding it was ultimately my fault. Or at least the fault of the Broagies franchise literature. It stated that pants must be black. It didn’t specifically state they couldn’t be sweat pants. I knew for sure because I went back and read it about five times while Shawn alternated between filling out his paperwork and checking his phone.
I watched him as he typed the last of something in his phone and dropped it into his pocket.
“Texting a bud or are you on MyFace?” I liked trying to connect with my younger employees.
“I don’t remember, man.” Shawn dazedly blinked.
“I met my wife on MyFace.”
“Nobody really uses that anymore.”
I felt old, like I’d said we’d met at a flapper dance or an ice cream cordial.
“Yeah. Cool, man. I haven’t used it in a while myself. So, okay, back to the broagie . . . We have three bread choices . . . Have you ever eaten at a Broagies before?”
Shawn shrugged and I didn’t really know what that meant.
“Okay, so there are three bread choices: white, wheat, and gluten free. If they order gluten free, you’re supposed to offer them a second fist bump. This is so they don’t feel so weird and alienated with their choice. You want to make them think they made the right decision but they’ve really just been upsold because we charge an extra two dollars for the gluten free. Do you need to tell them there’s an extra charge though? Absolutely not because it’s right there on the menu board.”
I turned to gesture at the menu board. Shawn turned slowly to do the same thing, but raising his head to actually look at the board must have thrown off his equilibrium or something because he stumbled back and collapsed onto the floor.
“You okay, man?” I asked.
He smiled a little and shook his head. “I think so. That was a tough move.”
I extended my hand to help him up, grateful there wasn’t anyone else in the store.
He didn’t take my hand, opting to try it himself. He tried to push himself up but tumbled back onto his doughy ass and laughed. “This is really hard!” he said.
“You can do it, man.”
He managed to get to his knees and grab the edge of the counter with his fingertips before proceeding to pull himself up from the floor with all the effort of someone escaping a whirlpool.
By the time he made it to his feet, he was breathing heavily.
I clapped him on the back.
“Shake it off, bro.”
I gave him a few seconds before asking, “Are you good?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Okay, so then you ask them how hard they want to bro today. Some guests will not know what that means and you can just ask them what they want on their broagie.”
Shawn’s back was to me, his phone in his hands.
I watched him type a message that said: “I gist fel don!”
“Shawn?”
“Oh.” He seemed surprised I was talking. “I forgot what I was doing.”
“It’s okay, man. Let me know if you’re not getting anything and we can start over.”
He stared at my chest and squinted.
“What’s happening, like, right now?” he said.
“Let’s go back to the beginning,” I said.
I walked him back to the butcher paper. His phone never went back into his pocket. There were sounds coming from it and I assumed he was watching a MeTube video or possibly even pornography.
“This is the butcher paper,” I said. “This is where we start.”
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Shawn wandered out from behind the counter and sat at a table.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was Emma. She never called me at work.
I answered it.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Can you come home?”
“Um, I’m training a new guy. I guess I can see if Chloe can come in.”
“Would you?”
“What’s up?”
“The neighbor. She’s been standing on the sidewalk and staring at our house all day. I wanted to weed the flowerbeds. She brings one dog out and then goes back in and then I come out and she brings another dog out. Then she starts murmuring about witches getting burned and says at least she knows who’s been breaking into her car at night. She’s standing out there now with a pair of lawn shears. I’m . . . kind of afraid.”
“Okay. Well, lock the doors. I’ll be there as soon as I can. If you feel threatened, you should call the police. We probably need to start keeping a record of the crazy shit she does.”
“I know. I’m probably overreacting.”
I hung up with Emma and called Chloe, who said she could come in in about a half an hour.
I went back to the counter to find Shawn standing on the other side.
“Can I order a broagie, dude?” he asked.
“Sure, man, whaddya want?”
“What is a broagie? Is it like a sandwich or something?”
“Yeah, man, it’s like a hoagie. Only vegan.”
“I just want chips then. You guys got chips?”
I pointed to the rack.
“Whatever’s fine, man.”
He was still trying to figure out how to pay by the time Chloe got there. He just kept tapping different apps, as though one of them would vomit money like a slot machine.
When I got home, the neighbor was no longer standing outside. Part of me hoped Emma had called the police.
But she hadn’t.
Lying in bed that night, she told me why.
Six
There was an immediate explosion of chaos and I panicked.
I kicked the first dog so hard, just to get it away from me, that it flew across the room and hit the far wall, bouncing onto the floor in a twitching, broken heap.
Chinaski’s house was exactly the same as ours and Emma turned toward the bedroom with her machete at the ready.
I reached down and snatched the second dog up by the collar. The third one was old and fat and wasn’t barking. Didn’t really seem to know what was going on at all. I started to cross the darkened living room when a movement to my right caught my attention.
Chinaski stood in the small foyer created between the doors of the two bedrooms and the bathroom. She stood looking into the second bedroom, the one where Emma had gone.
Fuck.
We’d gotten it wrong.
Chinaski had an old looking rifle. Her girth gave it the scale of a toy gun.
I lost it.
I couldn’t imagine anything happening to Emma and, luckily, hadn’t really had to up to this point.
With the dog still kicking and yapping in my left hand, I held the knife in front of me and charged at the massive hillbully. Already closer than I’d ever physically been to her, I watched her get bigger and bigger.
I aimed for the back of her neck and the knife plunged into her easily.
The gun blast was deafening in the small house.
I heard Emma cry out.
I slid the knife out and plunged it in several more times along her back.
Why did I think this would be hard?
Eventually she collapsed forward, leaving me covered in the iron stink of her blood and the gamey scent of her presence.
“Why didn’t you just call the cops?” I asked.
Emma was silent, her hands resting on her tiny breasts.
“Were you afraid?”
“I was afraid of her. I wasn’t afraid of calling the cops. I just . . . didn’t want to.”
“Why not?”
She chuffed out a cough and said, “Do you really think they’re going to do anything about something minor like that?”
“I don’t know. It seems like the dog shit is definitely breaking a law. And the staring and dog barking and insults have to be like harassment or menacing or something. Right?”
“Probably.”
“So why not?”
“There may come a day when the most efficient way to handle this . . . problem is to take care of it ourselves.” There was a tone in her voice I’d never really heard before. The potential for it had probably, realistically, always been there. It was probably one of the reasons I’d fallen in love with her.
“And if it comes to that,” she continued, “it wouldn’t look at all good if there’s a list of complaints lodged by us sitting on the police’s hard drive.”
I lay there in silence, rendered completely speechless. We were in the darkened, quiet bedroom of our first home, the only light coming from a flickering late night talk show on the small television. It seemed like the most banal scene ever but what Emma seemed to be proposing was complete and total insanity.
“That’s . . . that’s kinda nuts, Em.”
“Is it? I’ll tell you what’s crazy. This is our dream, Kip. It’s not perfect, sure, but it’s the start of everything we’ve worked our entire lives for. And since the day we’ve moved in here she has been literally shitting on that dream. Not figuratively. Not metaphorically. Literally. Yet we’re the ones who are not doing anything wrong. Still, we’re supposed to bend our lives to the will of her insanity. I know you don’t like conflict and arguments. I don’t like them either. You know that. But I’m not going to sit back and watch that bitch piss and shit all over us. I’m not going to waste a second of our time trying to reason with her, or get the cops to reason with her, or get her the kind of help she undoubtedly needs. I’m not going to do that because I shouldn’t have to. You can tell yourself she’s going to change. You can tell yourself we just got off on the wrong foot and if we’re nice to her eventually she’ll come around. But I’m telling you that’s not going to happen. There’s some dark force surrounding her and she’s trying to pull us into it. She just sits over there all day with those stupid fucking little shit bombs and focuses on ways to make our lives miserable. She doesn’t go anywhere. Nobody ever comes to see her. We’re all she has. And she’s not going to go away unless we do something about her.”
I smiled and laughed a little. “A dark force?”
“It’s not funny.”
“Come on. It’s kind of funny.”
That conversation happened in the fall of last year.
As with most things, I just tried to forget about it and hope it would go away. After all, it was getting cooler outside and Chinaski hadn’t been outside that much last winter and, while her bizarre behavior had ramped up considerably over the summer, I was hoping a new year would bring about a change.
But it didn’t.
She started ranting at night as we sat in the living room. Always in the form of dialogue with her dogs and at a volume low enough to prevent us from hearing the exact words. Some nights she stood out there whistling and some nights she laughed like a lunatic. It was always with the dogs, who were usually yapping away the entire time, further obscuring whatever she may have been saying or doing. Never for more than five or ten minutes at a time. When we left for work, she was out there. When we got home, she was there. She waited for us to take out the trash, standing blank-eyed, her mongrels’ leashes clutched in her beefy hand. We planned retorts and comebacks but, most times, she didn’t say anything to us, almost to the point of us asking ourselves if she’d ever said anything to us. And then we’d let our guard down and she’d accuse us of making bombs in the basement or operating what she called a ‘kiddie fuck ring’. It was always so bizarre that I couldn’t do anything but tilt my head and stare quizzically at the stained crazy woman standing in a foot of snow.
Over the winter, E
mma began researching spells and magick online. Maybe she tried some of the stuff. I don’t know. I was never a believer. And if she did, none of it worked.
We talked about gaslighting Chinaski but I pointed out that would probably only work if she were sane to start with.
Fortunately it was winter so we had an excuse to not go outside, didn’t feel like we were missing out on anything by not doing it. Chinaski continued to wage her war, however. We’d glance out through the blinds to see her vacantly walking one or more of her dogs around the yard. While she didn’t shovel her driveway or sidewalk, she did shovel off a small section of the lawn—something I’d never really seen anyone do before—and this was where she walked her dogs. Then, of course, we’d hear her all night, she hacking and muttering, the dogs yapping and yapping.
Then, for a period of about two weeks, she seemed to disappear.
We didn’t hear her.
We didn’t see her.
It was a glorious respite.
“I haven’t seen or heard her in, like, two weeks,” Emma said over dinner one night.
I hadn’t mentioned it. I was a little superstitious about things like that. Like teammates not saying anything when their pitcher is throwing a no-hitter.
“Maybe she died,” I said.
“It would be too good to be true.”
Given her age and body type, it wasn’t an unrealistic expectation. People get that big, especially if they don’t take care of themselves at all, and their heart just gives out. Plus she probably never went to the doctor. There could be a lot of undiagnosed cancer running around in that massive playground. Unless she ran on evil, I thought. It seemed like people who ran on hate and evil had the ability to live forever.
“Maybe she slipped and fell,” I said.
We’d often entertained thoughts of coming home to find her frozen, Jack Torrance-style, in her front yard. We both agreed we wouldn’t offer to help and would wait at least twenty-four hours before calling anyone. We didn’t know if that would be criminal or not and, quite honestly, didn’t care.
Late that night, as if just referencing it invoked some psychic darkness, we heard her.
Kill Your Neighbor Page 3