Alternadad by Neal Pollack

Author:Neal Pollack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375424809
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Don’t You Be My Neighbor

May–June 2004

One Friday night around eleven p.m., I was sitting in my dark-blue leather recliner happily watching a Netflix DVD of Dirty Pretty Things, a movie about unscrupulous businessmen who harvest the organs of desperate immigrants. There were some noises outside. I looked out my window. Two guys were kicking the crap out of another guy on my front lawn. There was a white Cadillac parked at the curb. A woman got out.

“Ramon!” she said. “I told you to leave him alone. He didn’t do nothing!”

The victim got up and stumbled farther into my yard, dragging his left side. The other guys followed, knocked him over, and resumed booting him in the kidneys. I opened the window.

“Get off my lawn, goddammit!”

They looked up for a second, and then started into the guy again. He rolled away from them, across the lawn, until he was in the flowerbed directly under Elijah’s bedroom window.

I closed the window and bolted the door. Regina lurched out of the bedroom in her nightgown.

“What’s going on?”

“Stay away from the windows.”

“Are you serious?”

By the time the cops arrived, there was no one around for them to arrest. I explained to them that the white Cadillac often idled on the street corner. Sometimes women would get out and walk down the street toward the apartment complex two blocks away. Sometimes men would get into the car and it would drive away. A few hours later, it would return to pick up the women who were getting off their shift.

“Just be sure to call us if there are more problems,” the cops said.

“Don’t you worry. I will.”

Suddenly, I was the nosy neighbor who calls the police when there are “suspicious characters” about. Since I’d become a dad, I no longer found seediness charming, except for brief bursts in controlled situations like, for instance, a fight at a dive bar many miles away from my house. But this was too close for me. If three guys are fighting over a hooker under your little son’s bedroom window, then it’s time to clean up the neighborhood.

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