The neighbor introduced himself to B one day when she was walking the dog. He introduced himself by saying that he hates deer and calls his wife the Secretary of War and he still fucks her.
B told me this and that when she told him her name, he said, That’s an odd name. I don’t know if I like it.
I’m imagining what if I talked to the neighbor because we’ve never talked before, and he talks like he’s talking to himself, so I don’t even get the chance to introduce myself.
The trees pitch in the sky over his head and the wind near-completely steamrolls his voice.
Pines and palms.
All the loblolly.
The sound the needles make when they hit the ground and blow over it.
I’m up in the office, picturing this, and I don’t know where B is.
Elsewhere obviously.
The neighbor would then, of course, start telling me more about his deer feelings. Yup, I hate them, I do, he’d say. I hate ‘em. Last week, I caught a buck stuck jumping the fence.
He’d explain to me, like he did to B, that the fence he had put up—pointy and wrought iron—can do a lot of damage to deer if and when they try to hop the fence but come up short.
He’d say, They tend to get caught in these kinds of fences, so naturally I put one up. And he’d say this winking, like, You know what I mean.
He’d go on, I was lucky to catch another one. Three this season.
The last one got snagged there next to the gate, and he’d point where. Snapped through a tendon or some ligament. Dangling there from the hind leg, bleeding out until my dog…
Got so bad, had to spray off the fence after… He’d trail off again and shhhsh me. Listen, he’d say, looking me in the eye. Do you hear that? That bird there? And I’d tilt my head up to show I was listening, vaguely hearing something squawking from the top of one of the tall, scraggly pines that run the length of our brackish street.
He’d talk about how it’s a familiar craw he can’t place and he hates it.
I imagine myself then, picturing eggs and nests and breeding and some other innocent thing that antagonizes him. I might remember the poisoned Northern Flicker I saw dead and stiff in the grass that that old neighbor somewhere else had killed. Underneath a tree in the same neighborhood where people argued about feeding the squirrels—whether or not it was okay to do. Notes on doors. Piles of peanuts on the sidewalk.
But I’d still be standing there, watching this neighbor talk at me and repeat all the things he’d told B, everything she’d repeated back to me.
I used to work in oil, he’d say. Retired now. Yup. Congratulations to me.
While the neighbor continues talking oil, I’d picture him bathing up to his neck in it. Black oil bubbling. I’d laugh to myself, I think, sitting next to the window above the backyard.
Outside, I notice two bucks finally meeting after a slow walk across the yard. They lock antlers in front of a half-dozen other deer that have gathered in a half-circle around them. Neither one seems to have the obvious advantage, and I watch their stalemate thinking in a Texas accent, It can’t be nothing like that.
In the middle of talking the neighbor might stop and about-face and head home. Like the Secretary of War had called him home. And when the neighbor gets home and opens his front door in a hurry, the swung-open bang of the door would cause a coconut to drop from a palm tree onto his head—Xs for eyes and blue and green parakeets flying around his head—right before he disappears inside.
What I could gather from what B told me is that this neighbor seems like a guy who doesn’t want to get in trouble with his wife, and maybe that’s the only thing that I can understand, because who does?
Still, to this day, I’ve never talked with him once. But I picture it, prepare for it.
In the beginning, I tried to wave hello a couple times when I walked by walking the dog with B. Neither of us had talked to him yet but we tried to be Texas hospitable and all that, but he just stared. After a couple times, anytime I walked the dog past his place with B, when he was sitting out by his garage, I just mean mugged him, talked shit about him to B and she’d shhhsh me.
It never accomplished anything, so I stopped.