by Jessica Handler
Lawnmower. Birds. Three notes, High Low High. Airplane. Last night, late, there was drag racing. Who is drag racing up and down Moreland Avenue at midnight? Squealing brakes and Mickey and I hold our breaths in bed in the dark, waiting for the screech, the bang, the sound of metal against telephone pole, metal against the drive-through at Zesto’s hamburgers. Never comes. We fall asleep. There are gunshots at night too, sometimes, two or three blocks south, on my left from where I lie in bed. I am so used to distant gunshots that they sound like a string of firecrackers. One day, like a moral, a bullet will surely come down from wherever it went up. Damn Mexicans always celebrating something, Suzanne our neighbor says, during the day, walking her bulldog Jim. A bullet of a dog, that Jim, cut like a wrestler and straining at his leash. Suzanne’s husband is Dominican; do Dominicans have something over Mexicans that she gets to make an ethnic slur? Suzanne is from North Carolina; Xavier is from “the Dominican”. She
leaves off the word Republic so often that now I do it too.
Pantyman’s house is directly across the street from my front porch. Pantyman once propositioned Xavier, who is burly and soft-spoken and wears dark glasses and made sure that Pantyman understood his suggestion was way off base. Pantyman died of AIDS, but not until long after he was stabbed in the chest by a trick and staggered bloody into the road, after he got out prison, after he stopped pimping boys with Easter-egg dyed chest hair from the front room of his house. A For Rent sign hangs on the peeling white picket fence around his empty house. Pantyman spent a lot of time during what turned out to be late in his life driving a backhoe, digging craters in his back yard. When he wasn’t digging pits out back, he was lighting bonfires in his front yard and leaping around the flames in tighty-whities or a slippery looking Speedo bathing suit. He had a real name, but once you’ve seen his underpants fire dance from behind your curtains, he never could go back to Lee.
Birds outside my living room window institute a program change from the
three- note trill and another bird takes a solo, repeating Birdie Birdie Birdie. Woodpeckers are at work, too, tapping bugs out of tree limbs one hundred feet over my head. Woodpeckers sound like firecrackers, only muffled, feathered. Our backyard is deceptively rural. Lie on the grass as a partner to the cat, flat on your stomach at his eye level, and grass is a hideable place, trees are endless, bees as big as fists. Cat or human, there are no fences, no paths, no neat trails of gravel or lawn decorations from the home store. Half an acre from tectonic sidewalk in front to trash cans in back. Sit out back at night and see the lights of the baseball stadium downtown, if the oak trees are not full.
Hughey says when he came back from the war in '66, a pecan tree stood where my carport stands now. His mother and Mrs. Truelove and Mrs. Spearman who lived in these three houses in a row - Mickey and I own Mrs. Spearman’s house, Hughey is in his mother¹s in the middle, two freshly scrubbed newlywed environmentalist tri-athletes have taken the striped aluminum awning down from Mrs. Truelove’s to let in the summer sun. They’ll be sorry soon enough when their porch warps and their living room bakes - sat under the pecan tree and talked all that summer. Mrs. Spearman kept her dog on a run hooked to her clothesline. When Hughey came home he dreamed of buying a Ford Mustang.
Hughey’s empty orange Honda, rusted and fallen in, might be half-buried in my yard, or it might be in his. I would have to scare up my plat map to be sure. Hardly the neighborly thing to do, and to be honest, Hughey’s car does not bother me: it’s not making any noise. Our cat likes to sit in a rusty divot on the car hood. The cat pretends he is driving the car, an ancient model from the bicentennial year. Mickey says it would be funny to clean the car, pump up the tires, dig the vines out of the seats, and turn the car to face west instead of east. We wonder if Hughey would notice. We like the somnabulence of the yard, and never touch the silent car.
Hughey goes (in his pick-up truck, he¹s been a home a lifetime) to the VA hospital when he can to get treatment for the Agent Orange he got in
Vietnam. He would vote for that Hilary this election if she¹d run. The drugstore where Mrs. Spearman ran the lunch counter was still in business when I bought her house a dozen years ago, but she had retired to watch her stories on television inside her cool dark house. The drugstore is a crater these days, I-beams and plywood and Tyvek panels going up to make room for something. No one in the neighborhood knows what. The construction company billboard above the scaffolding reads Opening Spring. Suzanne says nail salons and dry cleaners. Deanne, who runs the coffee shop, says a coffee shop.
Jogging mothers pushing power strollers commandeer our street weekday
mornings exactly at ten. They are a battalion, five or eight across, at the only intersection with a traffic light at Moreland Avenue. On their way back they cluster in the parking lot of the Presbyterian Church (Thou Shall: Play Fair/Thou Shall Not: Cuss nailed to the backboard by the social hall), bending in angles for their runners stretches, slugging back water from sport bottles, chattering among themselves. Their babies doze under knit caps and bug netting, the mothers bounce under shiny ponytails tucked into baseball caps. On their return flight, the moms and babies trot past red clay lots erupted by bulldozers. Corners and sides of long lawns are made into quarters or fifths, surveyor’s flags marking off the footprints for tall houses. Herons among mockingbirds.
Across the street from my house, at the outskirts of the canopy of nighttime gunshots, a Mexican landscape crew is delivered by truck like so many bales of pine straw. The men go to work within blocks of their own casas, power blowing grass clippings into the gutter. A realtor’s Under Contract sign is parked in the front yard of this single tall, empty, fake Victorian house. Eventually whoever owns it will move in. Suzanne, who is a real-life Gladys Kravitz in a rock and roll t-shirt, has met them. “Nice boys,” she says. “I don’t know if they’re going to leave their BMW’s on the street, though.”
Lately, if I am home on a weekday I hear more air hammers than birds. On the gravel road behind my house, where someone used to keep a donkey and still keeps at least one rooster, hammers beat on something: a pop-up second story on an old house, a deck and a hot tub on a new one. Reverse-gear warnings beep over and over again: dump trucks bring fill dirt and flatbed trucks deliver drywall, shingles, concrete, new azalea bushes in burlap socks replacing old azalea bushes.
Most of the construction work is done by early afternoon. If I take a break from my own work quiet work, writing and go outside and lie in my grass with the cat (I never got around to getting lawn furniture, it¹s plastic and blows away or it’s wicker and gets stolen or it’s iron and hurts my butt) I can hear birds, three notes, then the bird who names himself, Birdie, Birdie, Birdie. I wonder about those babies racing up and down our street with their marathon moms. Will they hear birds in their yards? Will they hear bullets? Will they love them equally?
