American Fanatics

LINNET STREET

L I N N E T S T R E E T Bill, our neighbor on Linnet, said the Jewish family across the street slit chickens’ throats for the purpose of smearing blood on their peach stucco lintel. I’ve seen them, he said, the old betrayers, the old meat dancers, trying to weasel out of something. Bill said his wife, a raw-rabbity blonde who never met our eyes, did “too good a job” cutting their lawn with a hedge trimmer she passed back and forth like a mine sweeper. “Too good, if you know what I mean.” Bill’s voice was dry as quicklime, slaked and buried, but his cough came up from a green cistern in his chest. He called Catholics “pope-licks.” Mondays we’d find movies he’d videotaped late at night on our doorstep. The Bad News Bears. Antonioni’s The Passenger. How old was his wife? Younger than Bill by twenty years or more  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 33 and frightened, someone who had already been struck by summer lightning. Not counting Maria-over-the-fence, who coveted our nopalitos in spring when the new hands of the prickly pear tore the hems of our garments if we weren’t careful, Bill was the only neighbor we talked to. We were renting then, keeping to ourselves as we do still, though we own a house in a nicer neighborhood now, at a price good sense inveighs against our faith in appreciation over time. Bill died on his couch one Friday morning while I was teaching. A wordless catalepsy, evidently, the coroner’s van still idling in the driveway when I pulled in to see Bill gurneyed into suddenly intimate sunlight wearing dirty corduroy scuffs over white socks like a shambling woman in the dented-can section of the grocery store. The wise men came the next day. That’s what we called the grim synod dressed in Vince Lombardi raincoats and hats who appeared unsmiling to instruct Bill’s widow in how to miss something  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 34 she couldn’t bear in the first place, though she tried, given the quiet sobbing we heard. Then out came her belongings, lamp by dented lamp, tatter by ghost, into their waiting Regal. A month later, lawn returned to dust and the house For Sale, she was gone, already married-off, Maria hissed, to one of those gray Scientologists.  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 35 ...