Paleo / The Doomsday Prepper Read online

  The man stared at him for a long time, his expression utterly neutral. “William Casey,” he said. He did not offer Pete a hand.

  “Okay, Will,” Pete tried. “Bill? Billy?”

  “William,” said William.

  “Okay, William,” continued Pete, who was still reeling from having his efforts to be friendly thrown back at him. Riding out the conversational turbulence was not going to get him anything, so he figured he might as well get to the point. “The thing is, your lawn is kind of overgrown.”

  “It’s my lawn,” William said. “It can be whatever length I like.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s ugly, and I have to look at it.”

  William looked Pete up and down, like he was noting the weight, the hair loss, the clothes, the extra decade, the thousands of subtle signs that, of the two of them, he made a lot less money – all of the things Pete hated most about himself. He opened his mouth, and then said nothing, only pressed his lips together as if pleased with himself for walking away from the low hanging fruit.

  Pete felt himself actually growing dizzy under the weight of the implied insult, all the more terrible for having been left unspoken. He glanced over at Addison, and she was staring at William and he could see that she had gotten it. She understood.

  There was no way he was going to let this douchebag humiliate him in front of his daughter. It was time to push back – not grow a pair. He was not about to use Rick’s bullshit lingo, even to himself. Besides, he didn’t need to grow anything. He’d always had a pair.

  “We live in a nice neighborhood,” Pete said. “This isn’t a frat house, and you can’t treat your place like a batch pad because you’re not the only one affected by letting the property deteriorate. You need to mow your lawn, William, and you need to do it this weekend.”

  Pete had scored. He had been direct and forceful, and he had schooled this punk. He looked directly into the asshole’s eyes and dared him to back down.

  William did not look away. “I am letting it grow for religious reasons.”

  This, admittedly, was something Pete had not seen coming. Laziness or territorial pissing, like the sort of thing Rick would do, made sense to him. But not this. “Are you Jewish? Is this like growing a beard or something?”

  William did not say anything.

  “Because, that’s fine if you are,” Pete continued, now trying to feel his way through unknown territory. “I completely believe in being tolerant of other religions.”

  “That’s great that you are willing to tolerate other people, Pete. That is super swell.” Somehow the fact that he hadn’t altered his tone made him sound even more contemptuous.

  Pete turned to Addison, who continued to watch these developments with great interest. He needed to take control of the conversation again.

  “What religion, exactly, is this that makes you turn your house into an eyesore for the entire neighborhood?”

  “A very old one,” William said. “And frankly it’s none of your business.”

  “It is my business,” Pete said, “because I have to look out the window every day and see—”

  William now took a step forward. Involuntarily, Pete took a step back, and he could see Addison watching him, a smirk on her face.

  “Honestly,” William said, “I don’t give a crap about what you have to look at and what you don’t. I am purifying my home according to my religious beliefs, and if you don’t like that, you can feel free to fuck off. Any questions?”

  Pete stood in stunned silence. William turned back into his house and closed the door, calmly, not slamming it, as though this encounter hadn’t even made him truly angry. Pete heard the turning of the locks and the leisurely shuffle of withdrawing footsteps.

  Though it was the last thing he wanted to do, he risked a look at Addison, whose face had blossomed into full smirk.

  “He’s totally cute,” she said.

  * * *

  Back at their house, Addison went inside, and Pete mumbled something about having to check on the sprinklers. The thing was, he couldn’t just let this go. Douchebag William, as he had already begun to think of his neighbor, had been rude and dismissive, and that annoyed him, but it was par for the course these days. Pete was used to his rich neighbors wrinkling their noses as they walked their dogs past his house. He took a strange sort of pride in it, though he wasn’t sure he could have explained why. No, this was something different. The neighbor had seemed off. Something wasn’t right over there.

  Without even knowing what he was doing, or exactly why, he crossed back over to the house and found himself standing on the front porch, finger poised over the doorbell like a viper ready to strike. Except he did not want to ring. Douchebag William would come back and get annoyed and act superior. Or maybe he wouldn’t even answer the door at all. There was no point in creating a conflict that Douche Will could win simply by not showing up. What Pete wanted was to have something on the guy.

  The neighbor had dismissed him, compared him to a Mexican, and closed the door in his face. Pete had heard him walk off, but he had not heard the security system re-arm. Why bother? William was awake, and it was daytime and he was a manly man. He didn’t need to cower inside his own house. There was no reason he needed to electronically defend the place.

  Which meant there was no reason Pete couldn’t have a look in the backyard. Pete inspected homes. There was nothing more natural or ordinary for him than walking onto a stranger’s property. If he were caught, he could just say he saw something odd in the foundation and wanted to check it out – to be neighborly.

  He walked around the side of the house, along the slate path lined by lush foliage and loquat trees weighted down by fruit a week or so shy of ripening. He reached the wooden gate and gave the handle a test pull. It was latched. On the other side of the gate, defending the security of William’s backyard, was a metal hook.

  This was no surprise. Pete had seen these things a thousand times. He’d circumvented them almost as often. People generally forgot to unlatch their gates, and if Pete needed to get into the yard, he could either go back through the house or he could do what he was doing now – find a narrow twig, slide it between the planks of wood, and lift the latch. No big deal.

  The yard was typical of the oversized houses in the neighborhood. The buildings themselves took up the overwhelming bulk of the lot, and all that was left was a sliver of land. William hadn’t done much with it, and the grass, like in the front, had been allowed to grow high. There was a wooden deck with a propane grill and a few chairs. The only thing unusual was the structure at the far end. It was made of planks of unfinished wood, and it stood a good ten feet high and maybe six wide. From Pete’s perspective, it was just a rough wooden wall, supported by angled poles that were driven deep into the ground. A plank projected from the top away from Pete, and he couldn’t see if it was suspending anything, but from the way the whole structure leaned forward, it seemed to be weighted down.

  Pete had a thought, and he made an observation, and these things happened at the same time. The thought was that the structure looked like the back of a makeshift gallows. The observation was the sound of a slow and steady drip. Something was suspended from the structure, something that dripped, and suddenly Pete felt like he should not be there.

  He wanted to run. He wanted to get the fuck out of there and never come back, but he willed himself to stay still. He was not some little kid who had to worry about whether or not his neighbor was the boogeyman. He was an adult, and while he had no idea what his asshole neighbor was up to, he felt pretty sure the guy was not conducting executions in his backyard.

  He moved a little bit forward, glancing up to see if there were any visible lights on inside the house. It was morning and bright, and there were lots of windows, which meant a light would not necessarily be on, even if Douchebag William were in the room. The implication there, of course, was that the guy could be standing at any one of those windows, watching Pete right now, and he wouldn�
�t know.

  Well, fuck him, Pete decided. Let him call the cops if he wants. Rather than sneaking around like he was ashamed of himself, Pete strode forward, carrying himself in a way that suggested he had every right to be there. He peered around the corner of the scaffolding to see what was dangling, what was dripping.

  At first he thought it was a dog. It was a long, spindly, gray thing with shaggy looking fur, suspended from the top by one leg. It was skinny, and Pete could see its ribcage jutting through the bloody muscle and tattered fur of its chest.

  He eyes followed it down, and came to the neck, which had been cut, roughly, like with an axe. It was jagged and uneven. Bits of sharp bone stuck out, and ribbons of meat hung loose like lolling tongues. And then, a few feet under that, was a metal bucket, slowly filling with the slow dripping of blood. Each drop landing and sending out low vibrations, the way plastic buckets never did.

  Off to the side sat the head, propped weirdly on what looked like a department store manikin, the kind with no arms. The plastic head had been removed and the animal’s placed there in its stead. It wasn’t a dog. It was a goat. Its roughly severed head held in place by some kind of metal spike coming out of the manikin, the glinting base just visible under the fur and gore. Beneath that, along the manikin’s heavily muscled shoulders and chest, blood streaked, bright against the sepia plastic.

  Then there was what was missing. The flies. Not a single insect buzzed around the goat. There was no buzzing of wings in the air. Just the dripping and, now, Pete’s ragged breathing.

  Pete felt a jarring cocktail of emotions course through him – shock, disgust, even elation over the discovery that his asshole neighbor was some kind of super freak. More powerful than the rest, however, was fear. Fear like this was some place he should not be – that little boy out of his depth-feeling rising to the top again. He also felt sure – he knew – that he was looking at something not meant for him, something that he was not supposed to know about, something that would get him into a kind of unfathomable trouble he dared not even consider.

  He was working this out, frozen by all the ideas and the confusion of feelings. He also knew that he wasn’t alone. He didn’t feel like he was being watched. Not exactly. He didn’t think that Douchebag William was up in the house, peering down, thinking, Oi, that wanker’s taking a gander at me dirty work. Why, in this vision, William had a cockney accent, Pete could not have said. But he did, and it didn’t matter, because Pete felt sure William was not watching him. He felt like there were a bunch of people watching him, dozens of them, hidden in the bushes, behind the fence, under the foundation. He felt like he’d wandered into a bar in a strange neighborhood, full of muscled and angry and ethnic types, poor and resentful – men who simply did not give a fuck what happened to them.

  Running would be a mistake. They would overtake him. They would come crawling out of their hiding places in the bushes and from behind the fence and under the foundation, and they would grab him with their dozens of hands and they would – he didn’t know what. Then he did. He had a clear vision of himself strung up on that makeshift gallows, his own headless neck dripping into the metal bucket, his own head propped on the bloody manikin.

  Pete turned away. He walked slowly, deliberately, plotting each step with geometrical precision. He crossed the yard, moving like he’d shit in his pants – which he had not, somehow. He opened the gate, and nothing grabbed him. He closed the gate again, and he was still safe. Continuing to move slowly, as though not wanting to alarm a growling dog, he passed Douchebag William’s untamed lawn, crossed the street, and stepped onto his own property.

  He expected to feel safe now, like the spell was broken, like he was touching base and nothing could hurt him. But he did not feel safe. He felt frightened out of his fucking mind.

  * * *

  After Addison’s bedtime, Pete sat in the living room with a can of beer in his hand. He’d managed to shake a lot of the fear from what he’d seen in the backyard. It was twisted and disgusting. It was fucked up and probably against city ordinances, but it wasn’t really all that terrifying, was it? He’d felt sure it hadn’t been that bad when he opened his first Shiner, and now, three beers later, he was pretty close to positive. The whole mess had something to do with whatever insane religion wouldn’t let him cut his lawn, which meant the dead goat was no more frightening than a bunch of communion wafers or Muslim man-dresses or whatever the hell else other people used for their strange churches. Pete had briefly considered Googling the overgrown lawn & dead goat religion, but then he decided he would rather not know. Maybe it was Pentecostal or something. He’d known a few of those types, and they were always weird.

  Next to him, on the L-shaped sofa, Jenny sipped at a glass of piss-yellow chardonnay she had tapped from the box in the refrigerator. She wore a tennis skirt and a clinging athletic wear top, and she was curled up into herself, legs underneath her in a way Pete could not possibly imagine was comfortable. Maybe it was something that came from always dressing like she was about to go to yoga class.

  “So, basically,” Jenny said, “the guy blew you off.”

  Jenny had gone out that morning and been with her friends most of the day. After dinner, once they both had drinks in hand, he’d told her about his encounter with William. He left out the business in the backyard. He tried to tell himself that he had concealed that little detail because he’d been there illegally, and she would have given him shit about it. Maybe there was a time when she would have been impressed, possibly even turned on, by his recklessness, but those days were rooted in the Bush years. But avoiding a fight wasn’t why he left it out. It wasn’t even because he’d been, at the time, and however irrationally, scared. Any sane person would be disturbed by what Pete had seen. The real reason, he knew, was because he felt like it was a secret, and in the past few weeks, keeping secrets had become second nature.

  “He told me he wouldn’t cut his lawn because of his religion,” Pete said.

  “He was jerking you around,” Jenny opined. “He was taking advantage of you because you let him.”

  “If Addison hadn’t been there, things could have gone differently, but I couldn’t let things get out of control in front of her.”

  “I suppose,” Jenny agreed, studying the contents of her glass like she was reading tea leaves. “You could have sent her home.”

  He turned to her. “It was your idea that she should come with me.”

  Jenny smirked. “So it was my fault?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Jenny pinched her lips together then drank down half her glass. “Meanwhile, we still have to look at that lawn.”

  Pete took a breath and then stood, threw his beer can in the trash, where it clinked hollowly against its fallen comrades. He went to the refrigerator to grab another. Jenny was giving him shit for no good reason, a pastime she indulged in fairly frequently these days. Pete knew another sort of man might have hit his wife under these circumstances. Certainly his father would have hit his mother, but Pete didn’t go into that sort of thing, and he had never hit Jenny. Not once. Not even when any rational man would have hit his wife. He didn’t regret it now. Not exactly. Even so, he couldn’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t both be a lot happier if Jenny had a sense of which lines she ought not to cross.

  He sighed, disappointed because he knew he was blaming the wrong person. If he was going to be honest with himself, he had to admit things going tits up with the neighbor hadn’t been Jenny’s fault. It was her fault she was being a bitch about it now, of course, but that was its own problem. Pete could see why Jenny thought bringing Addison was a good idea, even if it hadn’t played out so well. The question now was, how was he going to settle things with Douchebag William? His wife and his daughter thought he couldn’t get things done. His last shreds of authority were eroding away, and when Jenny found out about the lawsuit, they were going to be gone forever. He had to act. He had to turn the tide or he was going to lose his family an
d his business.

  Pete yanked the tab off his beer and looked over at Jenny, who had turned on the TV and was flipping through reality TV shows about rich women shouting at one another.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll deal with this.”

  Jenny changed the channel and took a sip of her wine like she hadn’t heard him or like she hadn’t wanted to.

  * * *

  Home inspectors liked to say that people in their professions came in two camps: those who had been sued, and those who hadn’t been sued yet. Homes always had problems, and sometimes buyers didn’t understand the reports they signed even though there was a basic concept that said if you signed it, you are pretty much telling the world that you understand it. Still, there’s a certain type out there that thinks they have a God-given right to a life without any inconveniences or, barring that, unanticipated expenses. Sometimes, after an inspector’s complete paperwork and diligent efforts to explain a house’s existing problems, a buyer might decide the shit he signed off on is not actually okay with him. This buyer might turn out to be both impulsive and a dick, always a bad combination.

  So, this hypothetical buyer jumps in with both feet, and when minor issues turned into expensive headaches, he can’t possibly imagine how fixing the problem he knew his house had when he bought it could possibly be his responsibility. He wants someone else – maybe someone who makes like a quarter of his annual income – to cover the bill because if there’s one thing he knows about the universe it’s that nothing is ever his responsibility.

  That shit was out there. The danger was real. Pete, however, knew how to protect himself. He did a good job, he documented like a motherfucker, he verbally confirmed everything of note, and he made sure the paper trail always covered his ass. He figured that if you can’t avoid getting sued, you can keep those suits from becoming real problems.