New Neighbors

No sex or romance here, folks. Far from it. Just a situation that some of you at one time might have experienced.

It began with a rat, a big, fat dead one under the back porch of the house next door. The people who bought the house hadn't yet moved in. They had showed up to check on the work that the previous owner had done to get it ready. Neal, the retired sixty-something man who had lived in the semi-detached-rowhouse neighborhood for the last sixteen years, happened to be on his front porch when the people showed up—a woman around his age, her thirty-something daughter and the daughter's two kids, a boy and girl, both of grade school age.

Being a neighborhood of row and semi-detached houses, porches were connected, separated by low iron railings. "Hi, welcome to the neighborhood," Neal said. "I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but you have a dead rat under your back porch."

The older woman, Sandra, he learned later, arched back as if she was slipping a punch the man had thrown. She looked more exasperated than angry. Pearlie, her daughter, gave the man a cold, nasty look.

Neal then went inside, stepped through the living room and kitchen, and then emerged on his back porch to see what they would do. Moments later, the new home owners came around back to have a look. The boy, a chubby kid with a pile of curly brown hair, cried, "Aaagh, the rat, look at that rat!" He picked up a stick and was about to poke at it.

"Get away from it, boy!" Pearlie scolded.

She glanced up at Neal, shooting him the same hostile look. He despised her already, thought she was trouble. She was a broad-shouldered gal with pasty-white skin, arms tattooed to the hilt and long, curly hair, dyed a red-orange. The previous tenants were renters, a lovely family with two kids, friendly and responsible. Neal and his wife Nina almost cried when they moved and bought a house a few miles away. Better neighbors they couldn't have had.

Neal went inside, shaking his head, full of angst about these people. He took some consolation in thinking that they'd remove the rat that day or the next at the latest. Wrong! Five days went by and the rat remained, decomposing and covered by buzzing flies. Months before, Neal and Nina had found a dead rat under their own back porch and removed it right away. What was wrong with these people? For chrissakes, these were home owners and they do nothing to have it removed?

Neal was on the verge of calling the county to complain when the people came back with two rough looking characters who picked it up and tossed it in a trash bag. Then they tossed the bag in a tall, green, plastic trashcan that sat on the back lawn. Neal noticed that the can lacked a lid, another bad omen, he thought.

The next day, the people finished moving in, and as the days passed, they kept filling that trashcan until it overflowed with garbage bags. Instead of getting another can, they simply threw their additional trash bags on the lawn, along with other trash that had accumulated. Instead of putting the bags and can by the curb for the twice-weekly pickup, they kept them in the backyard. One would think that seeing a dead rat on their property would be a wakeup call to practice basic sanitation. Didn't they know that open trashcans and exposed trash bags attracted unwanted critters?

They'd been there just over a week and their backyard was already an eyesore, strewn with trash bags, boxes and other debris. Neal and Nina were disgusted. Neal envisioned hordes of vermin scurrying over their property, feasting on the trash and then invading HIS property. Should he confront his neighbors directly and risk an ugly confrontation? They appeared distant and cold, if not hostile, not the sort of people you could reason with. His only other option was to call and/or email the county complaint division. He was sure the way they kept their backyard violated property codes. If they wouldn't listen to Neal—and it appeared they wouldn't—they'd have to listen to the county, which had the authority to issues citations and fine them. Nina was onboard. "Let's do it," she said.

Two days later, an inspector showed up, looked at the mess, and then tacked a warning letter on their front door. Neal and Nina didn't actually see the inspector do this. They didn't have to; they could see Pearlie's reaction to know it had been done. They watched from the window of their backdoor, watched Pearlie react in outrage. Letter in hand, hands on hips, she shot menacing looks toward their house and at them, showing her fangs like an angry dog prepared to attack. "We might be in trouble now," Nina said. "That gal looks mad enough to murder us in our beds."

Neal nodded, thinking of that fully loaded tactical shotgun he kept in the bedroom closet. So far, he'd never had to use it, never came close to using it. Now? Well, maybe. Who knew what Sandra and Pearlie might do?

Meanwhile, the inspector's letter worked like a charm. The new neighbors got another trashcan (it even had a lid - imagine that!), cleaned up the other debris and set their cans on the curb on pickup days. But the bad feeling hung around like the odor of a decomposing rat. The new neighbors shot Neal and Nina cold, menacing glances when they'd see each other in passing. Well, at least Pearlie did. Sandra just looked away. Neal figured that it was Sandra's money that actually bought the house because he'd see her leave for work every day, while Pearlie appeared to be a stay at home mom, chauffeuring the kids to and from school and running errands.

Neal knew he had to do something to break the ice. He and Nina had no plans to move anytime soon, and these people shared a firewall between them, a proximity too close for a hostile relationship. He felt tense much of the time, anxious and coiled to defend him and Nina from some sort of retaliatory action. But even if no attack was coming, he couldn't stand the bad feeling that had begun even before they had moved in, that he knew wouldn't go away unless someone made a move to ameliorate the situation.

Neal thought he could do better with Sandra. She at least looked approachable. She was the one that had introduced her family on the front porch that day, while Pearlie was indifferent at best, cold and hostile at worst. Neal waited for the right opportunity, and it came one Saturday afternoon when he saw Sandra playing with her six-year old granddaughter in her backyard. Her yard was identical to his, a small, rectangular piece of real estate divided from Neal and Nina's property with a four-foot high wire fence. Fences divided all the backyards in the area. Good fences made good neighbors, did they not? Well, maybe not if Neal's experience with this family was any indication.

Neal, dressed in shorts and t-shirt after a five-mile run, stepped onto his concrete back porch, scooted his slender, five-foot-eight self down the eight steps into his yard and then approached the fence that divided their property. "Hi Sandra, can we talk?"

The small, frail looking woman with short graying hair and dressed in blue, worn-thin Capri pants, a white top and black flats, put down her granddaughter and stepped over to the fence. She didn't smile. In fact, she had the look of someone who rarely smiled. Her small mouth conveyed worry and pain and a life filled with sadness, suffering, hardship. She had an unsteady gait, perhaps from knees that were sore and worn.

Neal could see that she wanted him to speak first, so he did. "Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot. We didn't call the county to be nasty or to cause you any distress or inconvenience. All we're trying to do is keep the rats away. Rats can be a problem in densely populated communities like this one. We had to remove a dead rat from our own property a few months ago."

She grabbed a handful of her hair, brown on the sides with a broad streak of gray running through the middle, as if she was going to yank it out. Yet she spoke in a calm voice. "Well, you could have told us directly instead of calling the authorities."

Neal nodded. "I thought of doing that but didn't know how you'd take it. I thought you might get all defensive. We weren't sure what to do. Anyway, I apologize for any undo stress this might have caused."

He could see that the tension in her face, her look of mistrust, appeared to ease. She appeared to be a woman of few words. When he asked if she was from the area, she answered with just one word: "no." She finally told him that she was from Pennsylvania when Neal pressed a bit more. Obviously, she didn't want to get too personal or chummy, which was okay with Neal so long as they kept their garbage in the cans, preferably with the lids on, and their lawn trash-free.

Neal and Nina would have preferred a more "neighborly" relationship, the sort of relationship they had enjoyed with the previous occupants—shared conversations over coffee on the back porch, head's-up texts about mutual concerns, etc. But the new neighbors had other ideas. Sandra wouldn't say hi unless Neal or Nina said it first and Pearlie appeared downright unapproachable. Apparently, she remained bitter about receiving that inspector's notice. Or maybe bitterness was her nom de plume. She never appeared to smile either. Where Sandra looked sad, Pearlie looked mad all the time. Through the walls, Neal and Nina heard her scream at her kids every day. One time, they heard her screaming at Sandra. "I DON'T GIVE A SHIT!" she yelled, apparently in response to Sandra telling her to pipe down, least the neighbors would hear.

Neal didn't feel as tense as he once did. Still, he couldn't fully relax either. The news was full of stories about domestic situations that escalated into violence. Pearlie appeared like one of those people who held grudges, who waited for the right moment to avenge what they considered a wrong against them. And then there were those two rough looking characters that had removed the rat, biker types, tattooed with chains hanging from their jeans, friends of Pearlie's, Neal surmised. They came around almost every weekend, and Neal worried that Pearlie might enlist them to cause trouble for him and Nina. And if that was the case, he figured that shotgun sitting in the closet might one day be called to duty.