The Street That Watered at Six
Jeff is her cousin. He is a deputy with the Reno County Sheriff, and he would have been in our driveway in nine minutes with his lights off and his notebook out.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Dave.”
“Just don’t call yet.”
“He came onto our property with a golf club. He broke six of them. I counted. He broke them and he handed you one.” Her voice was shaking, and it was not from being scared. “That’s a crime. I don’t know which one, but it is one.”
“I expect it’s a couple.”
“Then why are you standing there holding a dustpan?”
I emptied the dustpan into an old Folgers can on the workbench. The pieces made a sound like dice.
I did not have a good answer for her right then. What I had was a feeling about what Carl Jessup had come over for.
He and his wife moved onto our street two years ago, into the Albrights’ old place. Corner of the lot touches ours. He came up from somewhere around Dallas to run the regional office for an insurance outfit. In two years I had been in his house zero times and he had been in mine zero times, and that was not for lack of asking. Nancy took a pan of cinnamon rolls over the first week. Linda Jessup took them at the door and said thank you. We got the pan back on our porch, washed, with no note.
After that came the letters.
Carl typed them. He folded them in thirds and put them in your mailbox with no stamp, which my mail carrier will tell you is its own kind of crime.
The Hendersons got one because their grandkids drew a hopscotch on the sidewalk in chalk and it ran over onto the square in front of Carl’s house.
The Pruitts got one about Gary’s bass boat being parked in the side yard, and when the letter didn’t move the boat, a man from the city came out and measured.
Old Mrs. Lang got two. One about her wind chimes. One about her bird feeders, because the sparrows were roosting in his gutter.
She is eighty-four. She has lived across the street since before I could drive.
Every one of those letters ended the same way. I have let you know.
So no. I did not think Carl Jessup wanted a clean car. I thought Carl Jessup wanted a fight with a file number on it. He wanted a fence, the paper kind, the kind where two men quit speaking and both of them get to be right for twenty years.
“If Jeff comes,” I told Nancy, “Carl gets to be the man whose neighbor called the law on him. He’ll wear that like a medal. He’ll tell it at the office.”
“And if Jeff doesn’t come, he gets away with it.”
“I don’t think so.”
She set the phone on the counter, face down, and crossed her arms.
“Then what are you going to do? Because you’re going to do something, David. I’ve been married to you for thirty-four years. You have the look.”
I looked out the window over the sink. From there you can see the whole strip of lawn along the line, the six dark wet circles, and past them Carl’s driveway, and the car.
And I thought about my dad.
My father bought this house new in 1974. Three bedrooms, a carport, brown brick halfway up. He worked thirty-three years underground at the salt mine and he came up every evening wanting to stand on something green.