Posted by NL on August 14, 2004 at 15:23:37:
Neighbors
There was nothing to do, as usual, so Baldur slept until noon. Then, after rolling carefully out of bed, because his back hurt-- a pain he blamed on his lumpy mattress-- he pulled on sweat pants and a sweatshirt and lit the gas range. While water heated in a saucepan he took a leak. He was still barefoot when he carried the hot cup of instant coffee with him, out to the front porch. The weather was sunny and mild, not hot and not cold, and even a little breezy. He would have appreciated some clouds. He liked rain and especially thunderstorms, even though his roof leaked. He eased himself into the well-worn front seat, from a '65 chevy impala, that served him as a divan on his porch, and propped his bare heels on the railing, heedless of splinters. The coffee was good, at least. He had spilled a larger than usual amount of instant coffee crystals while preparing the cup. The little brown grains, reflecting light, had captivated him momentarily.
"Hey! Easy Money!" Baldur's next-door neighbor approached from Baldur's right and folded his bare, muscular arms on the porch rail. Baldur lived on a corner lot, so he had, in effect, only one next-door neighbor.
"Still workin' on that ol' car?" Baldur asked. Baldur had a car too, but it mouldered in his garage. The garage, itself, rotted in the sun, wind, and rain. It threatened to collapse on the car. If that happened, only the salvaged front seat would survive. It was lucky for Baldur that there was still a corner grocery he could walk to, and a thrift shop nearby as well. He felt he had everything he needed within walking distance-- lucky man.
Bruno, the neighbor, glanced back, over his left bicep, in seeming disgust, at the '76 Monte Carlo parked in his driveway. It sported insectoid metallic green paint and a peeling yellowish vinyl top. The hood was open. Its monster holly double-pumper carb rested on paper towels near the front bumper. "That old car is eatin' my lunch," Bruno said. "Don't suppose you know much about carburetors...?"
"Carburetors! No sir! When it come to them things I just gives up. Never did mess with 'em, never wanted to mess with 'em."
Bruno sighed. "If I had the money to get it fixed right, I wouldn't be fuckin' with it either," and rested his forehead on his arms.
Bruno felt expansive. It was a nice morning. "I used to have me an almost new '57 DeSoto once, and it never did run right. Fella told me it was the carburator messed up on it. Said he could fix it. But I just up and traded that car off-- got me a nice Plymouth, one of them Belvederes, like they made back then." Baldur remembered the Plymouth pretty well. It never ran right either. It turned out to be even more of a worthless road lizard than the DeSoto. He couldn't recall any car he'd ever owned that hadn't stabbed him in the back and turned his pockets inside out. He thought for a while-- "You know," he said, "the only good thing on that '65 chevy in there--" He gestured toward his ramshackle garage, which was not visible from the front porch, "is this here front seat." He bounced up and down slightly. "And just before I parked that car for good, this little lever thing that lets you slide the seat back and front busted off. It went all the way back and wouldn't scoot up no more! I almost had a wreck-- felt like a damn fool driving that thing with my arms all stretched out-- don't have no big long arms like you. As soon as I got that darn thing home I called on old Mr.Boris, he used to live in that house you got now, to help me pull it out and put it up on my porch here. Didn't wanna come out, either. I got me a busted knuckle and Mr. Boris he got his hand cut up real bad-- that Mr. Boris was a white fella like you. but real nice, a real nice man. Then we pushed that car into that garage and closed the doors on it. I ain't looked at it since. Ain't missed it none, either." But Baldur's wife used to drive that car, and he missed her, still missed her deeply, truth be told.
Baldur noticed Bruno staring at him, and it made him nervous. He didn't know this new neighbor very well, Bruno having moved into the house vacated by Mr. Boris's death, sudden death, in fact, just a few months' earlier. The house went to a property managment agency and became a rental. The new people moved in very quickly one day, with a lot of bumping and thumping and cursing and yelling back and forth. Then it quieted down, the hot rod Monte Carlo appeared in the driveway, and Bruno seemed then to be working on it every day. He'd had glimpses of Bruno's wife, but she wasn't out much-- she seemed to one of those really big-chested women, a slow mover and a slow talker except when you could hear her yelling sometimes. You never saw her without a cigarette in her mouth. They didn't seem to have any kids, that he could tell. Baldur wouldn't have minded children at all. He'd had his own kids but they were scattered all over the country, long gone, and mostly out of touch. He knew he had a grandkid or two, but his children just never stayed in touch, not even when Minnie was still alive. Only one, the youngest son, even bothered to show up when Minnie went in the hospital with the cancer.
"Hey! You're talkin' about bad luck," Bruno said. "I can tell you more about bad luck than you'll ever know! Bad luck! Real bad luck! See, me an' my wife was doin' real good over in Federville when I got laid off at the sewage plant, and then the goddamn CANCRON plant where my wife worked had to shut down and they laid off everybody! Fucking government! Had some stupid safety problem out there, some dumb shit, and they shut that whole damn plant down!"
"Oh my, oh my!" Baldur commiserated.
"Yeah," Bruno snarled, "Everywhere I go, no matter what I do, there's some SOB fuckin' with me. Before Federville it was Cantown, and before Cantown it was Busterville, and before that it must have been Pissing Springs! HA HA HA! My old man had the same crappy luck." Bruno fixed Baldur with a glare that slowly morphed into a goofy grin. "I ain't gonna work on that piece of shit car no more-- I'm gonna shoot the shit with my neighbor! Hey neighbor! You wanna beer?"
Baldur wanted to say that he did not want a beer, that it was too early in the day for him, and besides that he didn't drink anymore anyway, but Bruno had already turned away from him. He hollered in the direction of his house.
"HEY! YOU! Bring us out a coupla cold ones!" Baldur didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with his new neighbor, so he decided that maybe one beer wouldn't kill him. A short, chubby, blonde girl appeared on Bruno's front steps and hollered back.
"What the HELL you want now?"
"Two," Bruno said, holding up two fingers, except he used both hands and held out two fingers on each hand. Two! Cold! Ones!" It seemed surprising to Baldur that they would have such trouble hearing each other over a distance of not much over fifteen feet, at most. He thought maybe that they might have suffered hearing loss where they used to work. There were a lot of buzzsaw mills in the state, and although Baldur had never heard of CANCRON, he thought it might be one of those type places. And maybe sewage plants were noisy too. He didn't know.
Baldur set down his coffee cup, while his neighbor vaulted onto the porch, flopping his muscular bulk beside Baldur with an impact that made the floorboards crack.
"Life is a bitch," Bruno said.
"It can be a trial," Baldur offered.
A screen door slammed and Bruno's wife waddled toward them, a short, busty woman with two long-necked bottles of frosty cold Trout beer in each hand. Her fingers were almost too short and pudgy to go around the bottle necks. She whined as she approached. "Honey, when you gonna finish that car?"
"Fuck the car! And what the fuck you think you're doin', bringin' us all that beer?"
"You said..."
"I said two! Cold! Ones!"
"That ain't what you said! You was holdin' up two fingers!"
"Right! Two! Cold! Ones!"
"No! No, it was four fingers, you was holdin,,,"
"Shit. Forget it. Just leave 'em. Gimme these. Put those down over there." Bruno twisted his neck to face Baldur while he took two bottles. "If she wasn't such a good lay, I'd uh kicked her out a long time ago. Heh, heh." He turned back to his wife. "Gimme some cigarettes, baby, hmmm?" He fished a crumpled pack out of the sleeve of his t-shirt, where he had it twisted up with a box of matches, extracted the last cigarette, and tossed the empty pack into Baldur's neat little front yard. "Oh shit! My goddamn manners! This here sweet little piece uh ass is my wife, Delia, and this here's our neighbor, Easy Money."
"Hello, miss. The name's Baldur, and it's right nice to meet you."
"Just so's you don't get any ideas about my purty wife! HA HA!" Bruno had half of his beer drained already. He turned to Delia. "Go on, now, and get me some cigarettes!"
Delia sighed and half-closed her eyes. "We ain't got no more cigarettes, hun. We are OUT!"
"Son of a bitch!" Bruno's lower lip quivered. He let his head crash back into the wall of Bruno's house and closed his eyes.
"One fucking thing after another! First it was my pappy, gone crazy with his m-1. That slug made a hole in cousin Blybell big as a old whopper burger before all those places got cheap-- fuckin' Jews! Then it was my granduncle Burble, which was what all us kids called him, and I don't even know why we called him that, except we did-- really shoulda called him shithead-- and he took my little cousin Belinda and whooped her upside the head so hard, with his fist, he busted in the side of Belinda's little head. What he did after that was even worse. We don't even want to go there! That man was bad! Bad! I had me a little cousin name of Debro and he took her out behind the outhouse and peeled off her cute little pink dress and bit her all over her body. like she was a chicken and he was a geek in a freak show until me and my uncle Lemnial had to come out, cause my Daddy was drunk and my Mom was sick and off her nut, puking and frothing at the mouth and callin' on the Lord, running back and forth to the shithouse with a tumor hanging outta her dirt track like a goddamn fetus, some half-born child uh HELL! hung up half in her and half out, trailin' blood, stinkin' like a whore house on a Sunday morning-- or, no! stinkin' like that hellhole I used to work at, that sewage plant, or even worse, like that CANCRON plant, and I never did like that place-- I think it fucked up my woman so she can't have no kids cause we been trying and trying, fucking and fucking and fucking, ain't that right, Delia, and when she does have a kid I bet it'll be some gashawful abomination unto the LORD with two or three heads and little bandicoot legs, or LAIGS, like my grampappy used to say before he went plumb crazy, gettin' hit upside the head with a handful of dogshit, what did I know, I thought it was fun, and out he comes, outta the house with that dog turd still stickin' to the side of his face, and he starts shootin with that ol' AK of his, killin' pigs and chickens, and momma and daddy, and all my cousins and little friends, with me hunkered down under the porch lookin' out between the slats and seeing it all in slow motion. I thought I saw my daddy's brains flying away like two crows but it coulda been anything, man-- anything..."
"You goin' at it again," Delia sighed.
"Damn right I'm goin' at it again!" He started crooning, in a voice that sounded surprisingly professional and much like the voice of Elvis Presley to Baldur: "Hard luck and trouble--WUMP-- been with me all muh daze--WUMP--hard luck and trouble, be the death of meeeee--WUMP!" He smacked the old, loose, porch floor boards with every WUMP, making dust and grit fly.
"Oh, well, now, my, it cain't , you cain't..." Baldur made an assay at all the feeble, ineffectual, things he could say by way of consolation but nothing seemed to be up to the demands of the task. His coffee was cold, he'd hardly touched his beer, and yet another beer waited for him, getting warm and flat. His knees seemed locked in place, making it impossible for him to get his heels off the porch rail, making it impossible for him to get up and excuse himself and go into the house for the piss he so desperately needed. Also, he thought he might want to get his old .42 out of his dresser, out from under the mismatched socks, just in case.
"He's at least half-crazy," Delia said, squinting at him. Her blonde eyebrows and eyelashes, against a face reddened by too much sun, made her eyes, her very stoney blue eyes, very strange and vacant. "It gits real bad when he drinks, sometimes. He killed somebody once. But he didn't get caught-- he told me about it." She mounted the porchsteps, digging at the waistband of her tight shorts with the fingers of her left hand. Baldur heard an elastic snap against flesh, then she smoothed down her thin, white, almost transparent blouse. So close now, standing at Baldur's rickety legs, apparantly waiting for him to move them so she could go to her husband, it was evident to Baldur that Delia's breasts were naked under that blouse. Her nipples were standing up like she was turned on by something. I'm too old for this, Baldur thought-- don't need no white girl rubbing up against me, especially not no white girl with her crazy husband sittin' right next to me. The girl laid her hand gently on Baldur's knee. "Poor Baby," she said.
"I'm a poor son of a bitch, is what I am," Bruno said. He took his empty beer bottle and sailed it across the street. It smashed on the sidewalk. Venetian blinds jerked apart and a face appeared in a window of the house on that side. Baldur knew the people who lived there. It was a young couple with two little girls. He sometimes watched the children playing hopscotch on that sidewalk. "Stop that," Baldur said. "Don't be throwin' no bottles around!"
"Don't you be tellin' me what to do, you old black bastard-- old tightass tightwad. Shit, I'm startin' to sound like a neeegro myself-- wuffo! wuffo!"
"Don't be mean, honey."
"I ain't the mean one. I been askin' around. Everybody says this old fart has money. Social Security, insurance, pension, no house payment, no car payment, no goddamn wife. He's just sittin' on a pile of money, laughing at us! Laughing-- at the working poor!" Bruno drained his second beer and hurled the empty at a passing car, a late model mustang with a white boy driving it. Glass exploded in the middle of the street and some fragments struck the car on the driver's side. It screeched to a stop and the young driver stuck his head out the window. "Son of a bitch! Did you throw that goddamn bottle?"
"This here crazy nigger did it," Bruno shouted. "He don't like no white trash on his street!"
"What!"
"Don't get outta that car! He's got a gun! He collects shrunken heads! I SEEN 'em!"
The driver muttered something and pulled his head back inside after spitting into the street. He burnt rubber driving off.
"See that? He don't wanna mess with no badass neee-gro." Bruno chuckled.
Baldur's knees felt as though they were welded together. Besides that, he'd been sitting in a slouch for almost an hour. His back ached. He wanted to rise up, with dignified indignation, but he couldn't. He wasn't sure whether he would go so far as to try to drive his neighbor away with his .42, but it would have been nice to know he had the option.
"You crazy! You a crazy man!" Baldur heard the whine in his voice, heard the fear and saw his hands tremble, and hated it.
"All I want," Bruno said, speaking very calmy, "is a little financial assistance from my good neighbor-- if I am even lucky enough to have me a good neighbor. Are you going to be my friend, my good neighbor? Will you give me some money for beer and cigarettes-- and my car, to get it fixed up so I can go to work and earn me and my charming wife a honest living? I will pay you back just as soon as I get me a job-- I swear it! I swear to God!"
"I ain't crazy," Baldur said. "I got no money to give anybody, and if I did it wouldn't be to a crazy man like you!"
Delia backed away a step. She seemed scared. "Honey, he don't mean that! He's just upset about you throwin' that bottle, maybe!"
"He wants a piece of ass," Bruno said. "That's what he wants." Bruno sighed. "I guess I can respect that. You got a deal you black-ass mother. Fuck him, Delia."
"You wanna, you wanna fuck me? I'm real gooood..."
"Git away! Leave me alone!" Baldur flailed about defensively and accidently brushed his hand across her left breast.
"Hah! Lookit that! He's goin' after yer tits!" Bruno laughed.
Baldur groaned and closed his eyes. His chest hurt, now, more than his knees. He felt the pressure of Delia's voluptuous body as she mounted him, straddling his lap.
"I'm gonna use some of that gentle persuasion on him," Delia said. She began to unbutton her blouse.
"Oh man," Bruno said, "if he don't get hard, I sure as hell will. I'm gonna watch. I'm gonna sit here and jack-off in front of God and everybody!"
"You sick," Delia murmered. She was leaning forward, pressing her boobs into Baldur's face. He turned his head from side to side, eyes closed. "Please," he said. "Please..."
"Mmmm, you askin' for it now, baby!" Delia purred into Baldur's ear. "You like to do me sick, baby, stick me in my big fat ol' boobies with some nasty ass nigger knife? Hmmmmm? Cut my belly allll up, with a razor? Yes!" She started rocking, hard. "He wants to kill me! He wants to KILL ME!"
Bruno got got up and put his knees on the old car seat, on either side of Delia and Baldur, straddling both of them. He sat back, leaning against Baldur's legs while he loosened his belt and unzipped, then pressed forward, slipping his hands around Delia's waist, then into her shorts. "What's he doin' to you, baby, what's he doin?" Bruno nibbled on Delia's neck.
"He's stabbin' me in my GUTS! OHHHHH! They're all cut open, honey, I'm bleedin' sooo bad! My guts is comin' out, comin' out--- CUMMMMING..."
"Git off, git off-- I can't breathe, goddamn it!" Baldur couldn't feel his legs anymore, and that, at least, was a mercy. But he could feel his erection. He'd stopped moving his head. He let his lips and tongue go to work. But the peculiar thing-- Baldur thought it was peculiar-- was that he thought of his dog, a dog long dead. He remembered how he got it from a friend when it was still a puppy, a stray so weak from hunger and thirst it could hardly stand. Baldur took it as a favor, fed it and cared for it. It grew up into a fine animal, sort of like a German Shepard in general shape and appearence. His wife had liked it a lot, naming it Baldur for a reason of her own, making a private joke out of it. But, after a few years of health and vigor, it got listless and weak. It was hard for both of them when Baldur , as an act of final mercy, had to carry it into the garage and put a bullet into its brain. It was either that or let it die a lingering death.
Baldur sank his teeth into a fat, sweaty, breast, and bit, hard, and held on tight. "I ain't gettin' any younger," he thought. "And I ain't lettin go, either."