The Alarm He Called Paranoid
The whole road heard it
The siren under the eave is rated for a barn. It went off like the end of the world.
It is one long rising note and it does not stop and it does not care. It went up over the yard and out across the beans and I swear you could feel it in the ground. Every dog on 300 lost its mind at once. Down at the Kessons the porch light came on though it was full daylight. Old Merle Yandell, who lives across the road and has not moved fast for anything since his hip, came out onto his step in his undershirt with a mug in his hand. The propane truck was not Wade’s that day but the FedEx man was, and he stopped dead beside his open door with a box under his arm and just looked at my house.
And the phones. All up and down Route 300, forty some phones buzzed at the same second with the same words, because that is what the watch chain does. Alarm at the Kessler place, 4114 County Road 300. My phone buzzed against my hip with the company’s confirmation. Alarm signal received. Sheriff notified. And then, one after another, the little three dots and the replies started stacking up on the watch chain the way they do, folks asking if we were okay, asking should they come, and I stood there in my own backyard with two grown people naked in my pool and their clothes folded over my arm and I did not answer a single one.
Dale was shouting now. “Turn it off. Turn it OFF.” He had forgotten he had nothing to climb out in. Crystal had both hands over her face, which does not hide you when the whole thing is already on a camera and forty phones already know the address.
I stood by the panel and let it ring across the county and I said the only thing I had to say to him.
“Why would I turn it off,” I said. “You brought this into my yard. Five feet from my kitchen. You wanted quiet. You do not get quiet.”
Wade Boone’s truck
Here is the part I did not plan, the part that was already coming down the road while I stood there.
The watch chain does not only ping phones. It pinged Wade Boone’s phone too, because Wade lives on 300 and Wade is on the chain, and Wade had been calling his wife’s phone for the better part of an hour with no answer, and now his phone lit up with an alarm at the Kessler place three quarters of a mile from his own kitchen where his wife was supposed to be.
I heard his truck before I saw it. You learn the sound of the co op trucks when you keep the books. His tires came off the blacktop onto my gravel too fast and the stones sprayed the fence. He came around the house at a dead walk that was almost a run, and he stopped at the corner exactly where I had stopped an hour of a lifetime ago, and he saw what I had seen.