The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

I told myself I was being neighborly by waiting. The truth is I was being a coward. I did not want the trouble. Chet was a big man, loud in the way big men sometimes let themselves be loud because the world has always stepped back for them, and some small animal part of me did not want to walk into that. So I waited, and I told Hannah to wait, and we lost three more weeks of nights we did not have to lose.

What finally moved me was a Tuesday.

Hannah had gotten Nora down at a quarter to eleven, which was early for us and felt like a gift. The baby had fought it for two hours and then just folded, mid-cry, dead asleep against Hannah’s shoulder, and Hannah had crept her into the crib an inch at a time the way you defuse a bomb, and come out into the kitchen with her eyes shining, and whispered, she is down, Wade, she is really down. And we stood there in our own kitchen like two kids who had gotten away with something, not touching anything, grinning at each other. Nineteen minutes.

At four minutes past eleven Chet’s system came on across the lane like the side of a building falling over. He had people. I heard a tailgate drop and men laughing and then the bass, that bass, and I watched my daughter’s cry come up out of the baby monitor one thin thread at a time, confused and then angry and then all the way gone, full colic, the sound that goes straight up your spine, and I watched Hannah’s face just come apart.

I put my boots on.

I want to be real careful here, because a lot of people later heard a version of this where I came across that lane hot, and that is not what happened, and the difference turned out to be the whole thing. I walked. I walked across the gravel in the dark with my hands open at my sides. I had made up my mind in the kitchen that I was going to be the kind of neighbor to him that I wished he would be to me, that I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, that maybe he just did not know. A man can not know a thing. I had decided to hand him the chance to be decent.

He was standing in the open bay with a can in his hand and three other men around him, lit up by a shop light, and he saw me coming and he smiled. I remember the smile. It was a smile that already knew.

I said, Chet, I am Wade, from across the way. I said it friendly. I stuck my hand out. He looked at it and did not take it, just kept that can up by his chest. I said, listen, I hate to even come over, but we have got a brand new baby, seven weeks, and she is sick, she has got the colic, and my wife finally got her down tonight, and the music woke her back up. I said, I am not asking you to kill the party, I am just asking, as a favor, neighbor to neighbor, could you bring it down a little after ten or eleven so a baby can sleep. I would owe you one.