call for help if they need it. Also, they’ll meet once a week to read, discuss, and practice martial arts and shoot-out techniques. The Montoyas will give their martial arts classes, all right, but not at my suggestion. Old Mr. Hsu is having back problems, and he won’t be teaching anything for a while, but the Montoyas seem to be enough. I plan to sit in on the classes as often as I can stand to share everyone’s practice pains.
Dad has collected all his books from me this morning. All I have left are my notes. I don’t mind.
Thanks to the garden thieves, people are preparing themselves for the worst. I feel almost grateful to the thieves.
They haven’t come back, by the way— our thieves.
When they do, we should be able to give them something they don’t expect.
SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 2025
Our thieves paid us another visit last night.
Maybe they weren’t the same ones, but their intentions were the same: To take away what someone else has sweated to grow and very much needs.
This time they were after Richard Moss’s rabbits.
Those rabbits are the neighborhood’s only livestock except for some chickens the Cruz and Montoya families tried to raise a few years ago. Those were stolen as soon as they were old enough to make noise and let outsiders know they were there. The Moss rabbits have been our secret until this year when Richard Moss insisted on selling meat and whatever his wives could make from raw or tanned rabbit hides out beyond the wall. The Mosses had been selling to us all along, of course, meat, hides, fertilizer, everything except live rabbits. Those he hoarded as breeding stock. But now, stubborn, arrogant, and greedy, he had decided he could earn more if he peddled his merchandise outside. So, now the word is out on the street about the damned rabbits, and last night someone came to get them.
The Moss rabbit house is a converted three-car garage added to the property in the 1980s according to Dad. It’s hard to believe any household once had three cars, and gas fueled cars at that. But I remember the old garage before Richard Moss converted it. It was huge with three black oil spots on the floor where three cars had once been housed.
Richard Moss repaired the walls and roof, put in windows for cross ventilation, and in general, made the place almost fit for people to live in. In fact, it’s much better than what a lot of people live in now on the outside. He built rows and tiers of cages-hutches—
and put in more electric lights and ceiling fans. The fans can be made to work on kid power.
He’s hooked them up to an old bicycle frame, and every Moss kid who’s old enough to manage the pedals sooner or later gets drafted into powering the fans. The Moss kids hate it, but they know what they’ll get if they don’t do it.
I don’t know how many rabbits the Mosses have now, but it seems they’re always killing and skinning and doing disgusting things to pelts. Even a little monopoly is worth a lot of trouble.
The two thieves had managed to stuff 13 rabbits into canvas sacks by the time our watchers spotted them. The watchers were Alejandro Montoya and Julia Lincoln, one of Shani Yannis’s sisters. Mrs.
Montoya has two kids sick with flu so she’s off the watch roster for a while.
Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Montoya followed the plan that the group of watchers had put together at their meetings. Without a word of command or warning, they fired their guns into the air two or three times each, at the same time, blowing their whistles full blast. They kept to cover, but inside the Moss house, someone woke up and turned on the rabbit house lights. That could have been a lethal mistake for the watchers, but they were hidden behind pomegranate bushes.
The two thieves ran like rabbits.
Abandoning sacks, rabbits, pry bars, a long coil of rope, wire cutters, and even an excellent long aluminum ladder, they scrambled up that ladder and over the wall in seconds. Our wall is three meters high and topped off with pieces of broken glass as well as the usual barbed wire and the all but invisible Lazor wire. All the wire had been cut in spite of our efforts. What a pity we couldn’t afford to electrify it or set other traps. But at least the glass— the oldest, simplest of our tricks— had gotten one of them. We found a broad stream of dried blood down the inside of the wall this morning.
We also found a Glock 19 pistol where one of the thieves had dropped it. Mrs. Lincoln and Mr.
Montoya could have been shot. If the thieves hadn’t been scared out of their minds, there could have been a gun battle. Someone in the Moss house or a neighboring house could have been hurt or killed.
Cory went after Dad about that once they were alone in the kitchen tonight.
“I know,” Dad said. He sounded tired and miserable.
“Don’t think we haven’t thought about those things.
That’s why we want to scare the thieves away. Even shooting into the air isn’t safe. Nothing’s safe.”
“They ran away this time, but they won’t always run.”
“I know.”
“So what, then? You protect rabbits or oranges, and maybe get a child killed?”
Silence.
“We can’t live this way!” Cory shouted. I jumped. I’ve never heard her sound like that before.
“We do live this way,” Dad said. There was no anger in his voice, no emotional response at all to her shouting. There was nothing. Weariness. Sadness.
I’ve never heard him sound so tired, so… almost beaten. And yet he had won. His idea had beaten off a pair of armed thieves without our having to hurt anyone. If the thieves had hurt themselves, that was their problem.
Of course they would come back, or others would come. That would happen no matter what. And Cory was right. The next thieves might not lose their guns and run away. So what? Should we lie in our beds and let them take all we had and hope they were content with stripping our gardens? How long does a thief stay content? And what’s it like to starve?
