The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

By July both of us were hollowed out. Hannah had the thousand-yard look. I was running my route on three and four hours of broken sleep, which is a dangerous way to drive a truck full of propane, and I knew it, and there was nothing to do about it. We were just holding on until the calendar turned and she grew out of it. You tell yourself a season is survivable because it ends. You just have to get through the nights.

And then Chet Holloway moved in across the lane, and the nights stopped being survivable.

The old Vacey place had sat empty most of a year after Miss Ruth passed, and in May a man rented it. First thing any of us knew about him was the truck. It was a jacked-up dually, lifted so high you needed a step to get in it, and it had a straight pipe on it, an exhaust with no muffler to speak of, so that when he started it at the end of the lane the whole creek bottom rattled. He did something with trucks for a living, detailing and light mechanic work out of the yard, so there were always two or three other loud trucks coming and going, and a compressor running, and him under a hood with the radio going.

I am not against a radio. I run one on my route. But Chet did not have a radio. Chet had a system. He had run speakers out to the open bay of the Vacey garage, the big PA kind, and he played them at a volume I did not know a private citizen could achieve. Country when he was working, the new loud kind, and classic rock at night when his buddies came, and under all of it that bass you feel in your sternum from a quarter mile off. It started around supper and it did not stop. Ten o’clock. Midnight. One. Two. There were nights it went till the birds started.

For about three weeks the whole lane just took it, the way country people take weather. You do not make a scene. You figure the new fellow will settle in, learn the rhythm of a place, figure out that folks out here go to bed because they get up. You give a man room. That is how we are raised.

But Nora could not sleep through the bass. It would catch her right as she was going under and snatch her back, and she would arch and scream, and Hannah would start to cry too because she was so tired, and I would stand in the dark of the nursery with my jaw aching from clenching it and listen to that bass thump across the lane like a boot kicking our door, over and over, and I would think things about my fellow man that I was not proud of.