The Gas My Neighbor Kept Taking

The doorstep

I did not call the sheriff. I want to explain that, because plenty of people have told me since that I should have, and they are probably right.

It was a few minutes after seven. Clint opened the door in a gray T-shirt with a coffee cup in his hand. Behind him I could hear a cartoon on the TV, and somebody’s cereal bowl clinking.

“Morning, Darrell.”

“Clint, I need to ask you something, and I want you to think before you answer.” I held up my phone with the screen toward him. “Have you been taking gas out of my truck?”

He did not look at the phone. That was the first strange thing. He looked at me, and then he laughed. It was not a nervous laugh. It was an easy, warm, pleased laugh, the laugh of a man who has just been asked about something silly.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Yeah. A little.”

I waited for the rest. There was no rest.

“Have you seen what gas is going for?” he said. “Three-forty a gallon. I fill up two trucks. I have to get to the elevator every morning, and I take my kids to school, and I am out of the house by six. You are retired, Darrell. You sit at home. You barely use it.”

“It is my gas, Clint.”

“Oh, come on.” He lifted the cup to his mouth and spoke over the edge of it. “Do not be like that. It is a couple of gallons. We are neighbors. Neighbors are supposed to help each other out.”

“You were in my yard at one o’clock in the morning with a hose in your mouth,” I said.

“And?” He grinned. “God, you are so greedy sometimes. It is just gas. It is not like you have anywhere to be.”

I stood on his step. The cartoon went on behind him. A small voice called, “Dad, who is it?” and he said over his shoulder, “Nobody, bud, it is just Mr. Norris.”

Just Mr. Norris. That is how he put it.

I did not say anything else. I will tell you what I felt, because I think it matters for what came after: it was not rage. If it had been rage I would have shouted, and he would have had the satisfaction of a shouting old man, and I would have gone home and felt foolish for a month. What I felt was cold and very clear, the way I used to feel in the Army when a mission went sideways and my voice dropped without my asking it to. I looked at his easy grin and thought: all right, Clint. You think I am a man who sits at home. I am going to give you something to do.

“All right,” I said.

“All right what?”

“All right, Clint.”

I turned around and walked home. He called after me, “You are not going to make this a thing, are you?” and I did not look back.

Counting the cost

I sat at my kitchen table with the envelope from the glove box, a pencil, and my phone.

I went back through my fill-up receipts, which I keep in a coffee can on top of the refrigerator because Paula taught me to keep every receipt. I had been losing gas since early June. I worked it out as carefully as I once worked out rations. The camera showed me the pattern in just the first few nights: Monday, Thursday, and Saturday if I had filled up recently. When I averaged it, I had been feeding my neighbor’s two trucks about fifteen gallons a week for fourteen weeks.

That came out to two hundred and twelve gallons, give or take.

At three dollars and forty cents a gallon, it came to seven hundred and twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents.

I wrote that number down and drew a box around it.

What I could not forgive was the word. Retired.