The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

We were all awake. Every one of us. The whole lane, lying in the dark being held down by one man, and each of us thinking we were the only one who could not take it, each of us too country and too proud and too kind to make a scene.

That was the thing that changed. Not that I got brave. That I got to thinking about everybody else.

The next morning I ran my route on no sleep and I did a thing I had never done. On my lunch I drove back out to the lane and I knocked on Earl and Loretta Tedder’s door. Loretta answered and I could see she had not slept either, and I just asked her straight, does the music keep you up. And that old woman’s eyes filled up and she said, Wade, I have not slept a whole night in a month, and Earl’s heart is bad, the doctor says he has got to rest, and I did not want to be the complaining old woman, so I never said a word. She said, I did not know anybody else even minded.

I did not know anybody else even minded. I heard that sentence four more times that week.

I went to Dana Buford at her car before her shift and asked. She laughed the tired kind of laugh and said she had started sleeping in her scrubs in the break room at the hospital on her days off just to get rest, a grown woman, afraid to go to her own home to sleep. I knocked on the Pruitts, the young couple past the Tedders, Shelby and Tyler, who have a little boy named Eli who is autistic, and Shelby stood in the door with Eli’s hand in hers and told me the bass undoes him, that he will scream and bang his head on the floor and they can not make him stop, that they had thought about moving. And I went out to Roy Pike’s porch and I sat on the step with that old Marine, Army I should say, he always corrected you, and I did not even have to ask him. He just said, after a while, I know every one of my bad nights has his music in it. And then he said something I have kept. He said, Son, the worst ones were never the loud men. The worst ones were the ones who did it and smiled.

So now I knew it was not just my family. It was all of us. Seven houses and one man, and the one man had decided the other seven did not matter.