’80s, sat on blocks in the middle of his front lawn. Off-white (
Marcus was the one who elected to go over to talk to him about it. Bear in mind that we didn’t then, nor subsequently, ever use the term “property values.” We are not the kind of men who fixate on our lawns. In fact, those of us with southern exposures have switched to drought-resistant native grasses. And if there is grass that needs cutting, a communal Lee Valley push mower is used.
He was underneath the truck banging around, bare knees poking out, feet in decaying Adidas. Marcus tapped out the end-credit sequence to
He offered Marcus a greasy paw (our neighbour, not the dog) and heaved him up. After they “shot the shit for a while,” as Trevor put it, our reconnaissance man gave a wave and walked away wiping at his grass-stained butt.
“I lost my nerve,” Marcus said later. We assured him we would have as well, while Patel Seth pried his fingers from his third black mojito and suggested it might be a good time to up his dose of citalopram.
Fear, we all know, is a useful adaptation. “Only the brave die young,” Stefan Brandeis said rather soberly, and for once it seemed he might not have been joking.
The dog’s name was Gido. He wasn’t a bad dog really, despite being seriously misbred, his gene pool a murky concoction that no doubt involved at least one AWOL chromosome. Contrary to what his owner might have desired, he did seem all bark and no bite. His oversized head, with its long snout housing teeth in double rows like a shark’s, balanced on a dachshund’s body. He looked alarmingly like a life-sized bobble-head dashboard dog. How he ever managed to hold up that head for any length of time we’ll never know.
We can now admit an isolationist stance would have been best for all concerned. But we did what any civilized tribe would have done under the circumstances and invited our new neighbour to a dinner party. The soiree was held at the Brandeis-Lahr place, as they have the most accommodating deck. It was one of those sultry, edge-of- the-rainforest evenings, but the lingering smell from the last shift at the rendering plant soon drove us inside. We were discussing what Trevor Masahara’s wife maintained was an apocryphal story about the worth of a certain crowd-pleasing Egyptian Bastet cat statue at New York’s Metropolitan Museum when our guest of honour arrived with a two-four under one arm, dressed in sweatpants of some ambiguous vintage and, to everyone’s relief, a T- shirt with sleeves. He clamped a beer between his molars before anyone could offer him a bottle opener and said something like, “How is everyone?” (Patel Seth recollects it as the more colloquial “Howz it hangin’?”)
The cat statue, Kim Fischer continued, after a series of ill-executed high-fives and faux gut punches initiated by our new neighbour, turned out to be much too valuable an antiquity to be put on open display, so what museum- goers were gaping at was in fact a meticulously wrought replica. When this got out, no one was interested in viewing it anymore. Karlheinz Jacobsen recalled the story differently-that the actual statue
“It’s all the same in the end, isn’t it?” said Patel. “People place great stock in authenticity.” He turned to our guest, who stood squinting his eyes and chewing his upper lip as if deeply considering the issue, and asked his opinion. “What I’ve been wondering,” he said, thrusting his beer in the direction of Trevor’s chest, “is how much mileage you get with that rice grinder out there.”
Kim’s wife, ever diplomatic, extended a skewer of honey-glazed late-season fiddleheads, cultivated in the dankly shaded side of their house. “Kim’s a committed locavore,” Trevor said, recovering himself admirably. “He’s been trying to convert us all.” The Truck Guy smirked and twirled a finger alongside his right ear: “Loco what?” We had no choice but to laugh along good-naturedly, even Kim. He was our guest, after all, the new guy on the block.
The evening proceeded towards what could in hindsight be clearly seen as a preordained train wreck. (“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed jack is king,” a hungover Stefan remarked the next morning. To which Trevor replied, “Come again?”) Our neighbour actually giggled at Marcus’s lamb popsicles in fenugreek sauce, and when Karlheinz unveiled a test-tube tray of plastic ampoules filled with wild-morel cream that we were meant to squirt into our mouths (the women loved it, that clever Karl!), he pretended to inject his
Karlheinz was explaining his failed attempts at crossbreeding golden agoutis with voles in order to create sleeker guinea pigs when someone passed our new neighbour a plate of Trevor’s dulse salad. He demurred, muttering something about erectile dysfunction.
What felt like light years later, during which “Hot Rod” (as Stefan dubbed him that night) frequently interrupted the conversation with detailed descriptions of the modifications he’d made to his car-Noki adjustable shocks, Bruce Herb 1.31-inch anti-sway bar, two-inch lowered Simpson Michigan leaf springs[?], EJR carpet, Dyno-Mite insulation, restored dash pad, Ultra-Lite Automorphic gauges, Painfree Wire 16 circuit, ’68-’74 muscle-car kit, TPS polygraphite bushings [?] used throughout,
With that he disappeared into the night, and in the elongated silence that followed we could hear the waters of Lynn Creek churning through the gorge below the water-pipe bridge as the snowpack far above melted in the July heat. Already it had claimed a young man, the season of playing chicken with the creek only just begun. We could almost
Sure, we knew men like him existed. But we’d never had a chance to observe one in such close proximity. Karlheinz confessed to thinking of him as a
We have often wondered what Darwin would have made of the summer-long struggle for existence on our cul- de-sac. If he’d lived here, would he have taken the role of observer or participant? By all accounts he was a bona fide gentleman, didn’t partake of arguments, even kept his own counsel when the
Something we can be certain C.D. didn’t consider: reaching across the table and throttling FitzRoy until the man’s eyes bulged from their sockets.
We found his backyard well-kept, albeit oddly quaint. (“Holly Hobbie chic,” Stefan called it.) Garden gnomes stood here and there (“Gnomically,” Patel later said, as if reciting a Zen koan rather than a bad pun) amongst towering delphiniums and various mulleins. Lobelia and other generic annuals spilled from a small weathered wheelbarrow, and a blown-glass hummingbird feeder hung from the coral bark maple.
Surely the W-Cs couldn’t have left these things? But it was even more inconceivable that they belonged to him. (It now seems laughable that we wasted so much time over the following week debating the question of whether he had bought all this in earnest or whether he had an understanding of its kitsch value. Karlheinz had posited the most plausible theory: “It could be they were his mother’s and he maintains them through a sentimental streak.” That we could understand, although Marcus couldn’t help reminding us that sentiment is anathema to design.)
The “Q” stood in the centre of the yard like a Mayan shrine in the cloud forest of Coban, feathered in smoke and snapping and spitting as fat hit the fire. Mosquito torches on bamboo poles flanked the barbecue. (Trevor’s wife
