MEANWHILE, AT THE BLACK BARN
From First City Review
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A NIGHT AFTER the moving company wheeled his boxes in, he arrived inauspiciously enough in a rented car, nosed into the garage, and lowered the door. We had been calling his place the barn, for that was clearly what it was, or once was--our children regularly disappeared into the field to play in it before the carpenters and electricians and plumbers and HVAC people came to outfit it as a domicile. We laughed at the preciousness of the idea—living in a barn--and swore we couldn’t wait to meet this guy, that surely he must be some sort of character.
Before he had arrived, and as if to assure his reputation preceded him, two college kids came out, put up scaffolding, scraped the building, which had just gotten new windows, and painted the whole thing a creosote black, top to bottom. They left it to sulk behind our bright homes like some gothic heap.
But to be clear, his ground was of greater concern to us than his black house. It was nearly twenty acres of what used to be the Bredenkamps’ 100 and was worth quite a bit. To say the least, we were curious about what he intended to do with it, a good stretch of which bordered our back lawns. We wanted to know about him, what he did professionally and why he had moved here. He didn’t work in town, and he had come alone, and, as far as we could see, rarely left, so perhaps he worked in the barn, or commuted through the wire. We didn’t know. The Welcome Wagon gift bag hung forlornly on his front knob for a week--a bell hadn’t been installed at his front door; there was just this gaping buttonhole in the jamb, so we had to suspect, in a house that size, which was now insulated, it was possible he never even heard our wives knocking at his step, after yoga, with their baby-tees and their covered dishes.
That summer things there kept very still. He may have been gone for a good deal of it. His groceries were delivered, and the frequent UPS trucks in his drive suggested he might be a compulsive mail orderer. He didn’t own a vehicle, though sometimes he’d have a rental dropped off; once or twice an agent brought him home when his purposes had been met in the motoring world. But it was rare that we saw the guy coming or going, and when he did drive by, we’d wave, edging toward the curb with our hoses or rakes in our hands, sure he would stop once sooner or later, but he only ever raised his fingers in a small hello and never slowed or rolled his window down. He smoked. He had no visitors. He didn’t golf. We envied his leisure, and some of us perhaps even his eccentricity, but it would not be fair to say, that first year, he presented any kind of nuisance, really--aside from the weeds, which are worth mentioning.
A few years back, this farmland had been divided into smaller lots. Wide streets had been graded and crowned, and they knotted our neat homes together like bows. The mailboxes amassed on the posts like advancing molecular models, and voila, we were a community. The new guy’s ground, though, was nearly the size of our entire development, and he left it unfenced and rugged. The realtors had been paying to keep the sections around the barn and nearest us mown, and while our neighbor was now under no obligation to meet the landscaping standard set by the Peytons and the Kinkelaars, when he let it grow completely to weeds that first summer, it peeved a good many of us. The mosquitoes were rampant, and there was again talk of starting a Good Neighbor Association, which, alas, again, did not come to fruition, and so without discussion or plan, we found ourselves individually buying bug zappers at the Home Depot. Yard by yard, we established a chain of defense, a sparking blue pale strung against his negligence and the night.
We sent him an anonymous letter in October recommending his ground be better maintained the next year.
So, in spring, shortly after the dandelions came, a low-boy hauling a tractor with a bush hog and two power mowers came through our gates. It paused at the street signs before angling down the rock lane to the barn and into the field. Another pair of workers joined them shortly in a pick-up and surveyed the ground. The crew unloaded their equipment, and spent the day clearing a few acres of the brambles. Later in the week, they seeded it with fescue and covered it with straw and watered it and returned and mowed it once a week when it had taken root, and this gesture on his behalf, this indication of neighborly conscience, showed enough good faith that we carefully took down our bug lamps and stowed them in our garages. There had been growing speculation the things might be attracting bugs anyway.
And now, almost as if he could see all his behavior—the black barn, the brambles, the bachelorhood, the secrecy--was a bit much, and perhaps to make some further concession to us, he had a blonde wooden deck built off his kitchen. A day later, a little red grill appeared on it like a cherry on a mud pie, and that was that. Who knows? Maybe he intended to entertain us.
By now some were sure he had met a small fortune, had somehow come into it, and, lucky him, had retired young, was perhaps still gathering wealth as he sat there in a lawn chair on his new deck, wondering what to do with his money, the tiki torches burning in the dusk and bachelor-pad bossa nova clicking inside the house. At any rate, with the wilderness now leveled per se, we got a better view of him across the field, outside in his chair at night, with his cigarette and his gin and tonic. Or whatever it was.
We heard he worked in advertising. We heard he had been a jingle writer. Some said he was a pornographer. We had no idea. We had yet to be introduced.
LATE ONE SUMMER MORNING, the Krebbses’ girl unfolded a card table and hung a sign beneath the holly at the three-way. She went back into the house and returned carrying a sloshing pitcher of lemonade and a sleeve of cups under her arm and plodded back to the garage once more to drag a chair out. She sat there primly in the soft breeze and opened her chapbook for the summer reading program and waited for the first father to come home for lunch.
The new guy beat us to it, though, and what ensued quickly became the talk of the block. He emerged from the barn—sunglasses, neat gray pants and black shirt; messy hair (stoner, Kinkelaar said)—and he went straight down his lane with his thumbs in his pockets and stood like some visiting urban wraith before little Regina Krebbs. He spoke to her and thumbed through the bills in his wallet. We watched the girl squint up at him, dappled by sunshine and her last missing tooth bared in childish absence, perhaps stunned by a question too difficult for her age or simply awaiting instruction on how to complete the transaction. She looked at the bill he handed her and ran into the house through the garage with it, leaving him alone at the curb. Up and down the street, the curtains undulated.
For nearly ten minutes he stood there, quite still, just admiring the sky, as if listening to the birdsongs or maybe the muffled chirping of the ringing phones.
Inside the house, Erin Krebbs cycled through our advices in call waiting. Other messages were appearing in her inbox on the kitchen’s flat-screen. She squeezed the remote to turn the tv down as she twirled from counter to counter. Her daughter waved the twenty dollar bill across the dining room.
“Sit down with that,” Erin told her. “Just wait a minute. Jaclyn?” she said into the phone. “No, I’m not going to be the one who goes out there. I am not. Why don’t we all go out there? And meet him, I mean. I’m not even dressed for it.” She switched lines.
Outside, the stranger quietly poured himself a cup of lemonade and drank it while peering into the empty garage. When the Krebbses’ mud room door opened, he set the cup on the card table and crossed his arms and smiled, but it was not little Regina Krebbs flouncing back to him with his change. Rather her mother’s slender forearm reached through the crack of the doorway and scratched against the unpainted drywall, like a branch in the wind, until the fingers found the button. The garage door rattled and descended from the proscenium ending the scene rather unglamorously.
We regret this deeply in retrospect.
IN THE FALL, a small official notices box in the paper reported that our neighbor had received a permit for private egress out the rear of his property through the hollow and onto Highway 9. The earthmovers came and made it so. Another crew scraped up the gravel road which connected the barn’s driveway to our asphalt grid. The message was clear enough—everything but a fence—and we saw no more of him.
Occasionally, though, we might see an upstairs light on in his place long after dark, but at Christmas the barn seemed completely listless, and on New Year’s, when we figured he must be off sunning in the tropics, we shot butterfly fireworks over his ground, which lit his windows and the snow beneath pink and orange and violet. Our children laughed when a rocket whizzed under his eave, whacked a shutter, and scurried straight to the ground like a flaming rat. It exploded behind his ice-capped air conditioner in a way we thought might have done some damage, and our boys shook with their soda cans and noisemakers and hooted and begged us, hey, start aiming. We laughed, but pointed the rockets in another direction where they popped with less ado.
SPRING WARMED into summer.
We were all inside, most of us having dinner at that hour, potato salad and BLTs, macaroni and Gogurt, and so didn’t see him out on the property. In fact, we still couldn’t see him, but surely he had been there because through our sliding glass doors we were witnessing a black, tubular frame inflate like some great rising cobra, or the blow-up character of a roadside car lot. The thing proved to be rectangular: nearly 40 feet wide and at least 20 feet high. At the center of the frame was some synthetic black tarp, stretched taut by the expanding black edges and so forming a solid wall. The hissing stopped. Midway between our homes and his, the wall effectively shielded the barn from view. Like death itself it stood there, ominous, implacable, a certain affront to our happiness.
“Aw, hell,” Kinkelaar said.
Naturally we came out to the edge of our lawns to look.
Kinkelaar threw the pork chop he’d been gnawing to his terrier, Sergeant, who quit yipping and nosed at it in the grass. He wiped his hand on his shorts, and handed us cans of beer from his cooler. “Well, what is it?” he asked.
“It’s a big, black thing,” Fahey said.
In pajamas, our children climbed their play forts to look. The girls commented that the black thing looked like the biggest trampoline they’d ever seen, but sideways. We weren’t sure what to tell them. The boys pretended to shoot at it from afar and cried, “Hit the dirt!” as if something might fire back, and we couldn’t altogether discount the possibility. We drank our beers, watching the boys’ stiff fingers squeeze imaginary triggers and extend to become barrels again, whole guns there in their hand bones. They rolled around in the grass as if wounded, and, shortly, fell to their usual pastime of tattooing their biceps with fireflies. Our wives again admonished them for being gross as they drifted out and stood beside us. We seemed intact, communitywise.
“Well, go on already,” Sandra Daley chided. “One of you go ask him what the—yow…” She smacked a hamstring. “Skeeters.”
Indeed, we thought now might be the time to go over and inquire, but our easy patterns of conversation took hold and soon the sun was dropping off the table, and the night spread over our roofs like paint. We laughed in our circle, and poured more drinks. In darkness, the big wall was out of sight, and as out of mind as the barn itself had become. But an amplified crackle scratched the night and there descended a flurry of high strings.
“Oh lord,” Karen Kinkelaar sighed wistfully. She hung on Krebbs’s shoulder, and Krebbs seemed to straighten and look for his wife. “It is what you thought it was,” Karen purred.
THROUGH OUR backyard trees and hedges we walked en masse, stepping around gas grills and over upset toys, down to the edge of the block so we could survey the barn in profile. Kinkelaar towed the cooler, and we found Bill Metz waiting for us under his tasseled patio umbrella, a fuming citronella bucket beside him on the concrete. He smiled as we neared. “It’s a like a goddamn drive-in,” he said. “Look it.”
It was true. Out in the field, a skittish blue beam fluttered wide from the deck of the dark barn. We watched the ray shift and swirl with shadows, but our angle could not afford us a view of the screen—there was no way to see what our neighbor was watching without going deeper onto his property. Kinkelaar, who kept his pricy hunting equipment and a considerable entertainment room in his basement--it could seat up to fifteen—and of which, to be sure, he was quite proud, said it was possible the thing was concave. He cupped his hands to demonstrate. The music was clear and crisp. It wasn’t offensively loud, as maybe we had hoped, but it was obtrusive, we supposed, to a certain degree. We considered it. Was it louder than the Kinkelaars’ barbecue two weeks ago, when, around one a.m., Kinkelaar himself was beyond Peyton reviving him on the swing set and Karen slurred her husband’s name ad nauseam from the patio, even as she tried to read our palms? Oh, no. No, it probably was not.
“Can you make out what it is?” Fahey asked.
“Don’t know,” Metz said. “Sounds old time. I heard he’s little off.”
We looked at him.
Metz touched his temple and let the rumor settle.
Fahey squealed and cackled Kinkelaar’s direction. “That thing’s bigger than yours. Time to upgrade?”
Kinkelaar conceded it was. He stared out at it. “But what’s the point?” he demanded. “How many people you think are over there? There’s no cars in the drive.” He looked. “There he is. He’s out there.”
We saw the far-off cigarette flare, orange and insistent in the dark.
“Him and a date?” Kinkelaar said. “Huh?”
“We would have heard about that.” Metz tipped his head at the kitchen window, implicating the entire grapevine. “Unless he had one shipped in in secret.”
“Him over there by himself,” Kinkelaar muttered, “watching a forty foot movie. That’s the patheticest thing I ever heard. Hey,” he shouted. “Hey, can you see alright?” He pumped a loose fist and chortled.
“Dan Kinkelaar,” Carrie Fahey said, but she was smiling, too.
The score softened as a scene drew to a close.
Suddenly Metz stood up, and we squinted in the direction of his pointing finger. He hunched his shoulders and walked to the edge of his yard with a red Solo cup in his hand, peering into the blackness. He reached the border that separated our lit green lawns from the somewhat coarser void beyond and said, “There they are again.” We stood dumbly on his patio as he counted aloud: “Three... four, five...”
“What?” we asked.
He turned halfway to us, his eyes bleary but concerned. “Dogs,” he said. “Dobermans.”
THE NEXT MORNING the screen still stood defiantly in the grass, like an unanswered insult from the night before, and so Kinkelaar stepped into the dew with a bloody mary around seven-thirty and wandered all the way around the thing inspecting it. He paced it off and sized it up for several minutes. Later, when we had come home from work, he said it was pretty much the same on the other side, only white, which was what we figured, but we were all glad he had done it and didn’t want him to feel foolish for looking. “It’s not concave,” he said. “Just flat.” There were equipment boxes on the deck, too, the sort you see roadies pushing around backstage. “They’re padlocked,” he added.
Where were the dogs?
“I don’t know. No pen, no water bowls, no nothing. He must keep them indoors, or out on the land. I don’t know what.”
“No fences,” we said.
“Shock collars,” Fahey said, pointing to his neck.
Ah. We nodded. Of course, shock collars. But none of us had even once seen the Dobermans before. No one had ever heard as much as a yelp.
“You think we should say something to him?” Metz asked.
The question hung on us like a five year old.
“Say something like what?” we said.
“Now, come on. He’s got a point,” Kinkelaar said. “Big dogs like that could carry little Brittney or Ariel clean away. Think about it. Those aren’t neighborhood type dogs. This isn’t the wide open country over here anymore, this is a development. You can’t have wildebeests drooling in the...” Kinkelaar whirled his hand, “kiddy pool.”
We blinked.
“Somebody could get seriously hurt.”
We nodded slowly, imagining his thin girls wailing in the slavering jaws of black dogs.
Almost under his breath, Kinkelaar sadly continued, “Against dogs like that, little Sergeant wouldn’t stand a fart’s chance in a hurricane.” His eyes were blanks. “That would just make me sick,” he said.
“Well,” Fahey spoke up, “That’s why they’ve all probably got the whatchacall.” He zapped us with his fingers. “Shock wave.”
We rocked in our outdoor chairs sipping margaritas as we considered the big black wall and the great, green stretch of ground on either side and the now mysterious land beyond, between the barn and Highway 9.
“Zap,” Fahey burbled into his drink. “Zap-zap. Zzap.”
IT DIDN’T RAIN for two weeks, and every night was movie night. They weren’t all silent pictures like the first one, but they were older ones, the stuff you could see on the classic movie channels. It was decidedly not for us, and though we couldn’t see the pictures, the evening air was pleasant and we listened in anyway. There was lots of tough guy talk that first month, and we had picked up some choice one-liners.
“Hey, what’s a guy gotta do for a drink around here anyways?” Metz snapped as he stepped onto the deck. His wife hollered from two doors down. She wanted Metz to come do something to the something, right now. “Aw, dames,” he grumbled. “Quit squawkin. The show’s about to start. I’m out here relevatin with the fellers.”
More and more, once the movies started, we just sat together in silence, six or seven or eight of us, usually at Kinkelaar’s, and listened. Some nights, there were double features not all of us could stay up for; the rest of us would stay until we finished the beer. In July came the comedies. The women knew some of them: Adam’s Rib, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse, The Philadelphia Story. Fahey ran filmography searches courtesy of Kinkelaar’s high-speed wireless when we thought we recognized the voices of actors. It was hit-or-miss. He sat there in the glow of his laptop and sort of figured out the movies in reverse. It became impossible though when our next-door recluse switched to foreign films. Lame-O, Kinkelaar said, but he kept having us over. He jacked his eyebrows. “At least it’s one of the French ones,” he said. “Ooh la la.”
“That’s Swedish,” Fahey said.
Kinkelaar dismissed it with a hand. “Whatever the fuck. Whatever.”
The kids sat out on blankets in the lawn, with their grocery bags of popcorn and their sodas and juice boxes, listening to the black side of the screen. We put our arms around our wives. On the patio table, our phones had all been set to vibrate.
WE GOT INTO the westerns. Metz’s wife had made her cheese thing, and we’d been devouring it, and that’s probably why no one noticed Regina Krebbs missing. She disappeared quite a lot to be alone with her books; the Krebbses swore she was a heck of a reader. Voracious, is what Erin Krebbs called her, meaning her daughter’s appetite for books. But during a John Wayne movie, under cover of night and the whoops of backlot Indians, the girl disappeared.
Krebbs was licking his fingers when he heard the barking and her first cry somewhere beneath the Duke’s drawl. Most of us jumped up with him, and, over at the barn, the soundtrack fell dead instantly. The girl’s next scream fluttered and huffed in the dark. She was running. Around the table went the volley of oh my gods. Bright lights came on on the other side, flooding the grounds, and the great wall burned at its edges, casting a long, baleful shadow for us on the patio.
“Where is she? She’s in the thicket,” Krebbs yelled.
“Thicket?” Kinkelaar said.
“There,” we yelled. “There she is.”
In her Ewington Grade School sweat suit, Regina was jerking and flopping her thin limbs back to safety around the right side of the wall.
One of the dogs was upon her, and the kid’s terror was palpable.
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“Don’t stop,” we yelled.
“No, stop,” we yelled. “Stop, and it will stop.”
“No, don’t,” her mother cried. “Cross into the yard.”
With a lunge, the Doberman got her by the calf and tackled her to the grass and her shrieking was immense and we could hear the other dogs barking, though they had seemed to stay back, at the edge of the light.
Krebbs bolted out for his girl, a little wild with booze. He transgressed the invisible fence like a comet shooting for the eclipse, while the rest of us followed slowly, creeping into the shadow of the screen. We all drew short at the yard’s boundary, and we didn’t even need to look at each other to know we had done it. A shared shame hung among us.
Beneath the wall, Krebbs kicked the dog and pounded its forehead with an open bottle of Honey Brown Ale, and in the white glare of the lights the ale was splashing out of the bottle neck and over him and his kid and the dog. He yelled goddamn over and over and brought the bottle down hard on the bridge of the animal’s nose and the glass broke, and the dog unclamped from the girl’s leg with a yelp and turned its head and tore off out of sight behind the screen.
Karen Kinkelaar lit a cigarette and held her elbow to keep the thing aloft as Krebbs carried his girl back to us in a wartime tableau. Regina was whimpering. Krebbs’s hand was cut and bleeding. We gathered around the two of them when they reached civilization, and expressed our outrage at the dog’s violence and those who would own such beasts. We got Regina into the car and implored her to hold the kitchen towel full of ice to her leg, and they drove her to the hospital.
For some time, we stood calling intermittently at the edge, unsure where the other dogs were. Our anger was controlled at first, but this deportment quickly deteriorated into curses, due in no small part to Kinkelaar, who called our neighbor all manner of things, demanding he show himself for some sort of throwdown, right here, right now. Shortly, we heard the dogs echoing like loose belts on rusty machinery and decided they were in the garage. We thought we might go over there and pound on his door, and had the Krebbses still been here, we probably would have.
But the floodlights snapped out, and the black wall curtained any light in the barn, and the stars were above us, and all else over there was pitch, and, though we were indignant, we slowly felt foolish and ineffective—tiny, righteous things, taunting the darkness.
Kinkelaar was riled and would not sleep and so we sat with him. We came together. We were going to contact the police. We were going to press charges. We were in control, we had the numbers, and this would not be tolerated. When at last Kinkelaar’s rage had dissipated, he pushed his way inside his house to use the bathroom and didn’t return. We looked at each other and collectively exhaled and went home to bed.
THE PHONES were ringing before six a.m.
He was up early; he may have been up all night.
Kinkelaar stood on his picnic table holding his compound hunting bow and a fistful of arrows with his wife and Peyton in the grass trying to talk him down. He wasn’t even looking at them. Karen shook her head and threw her hands up and marched back inside as her husband notched an arrow.
“Come on, Daniel,” Peyton said. He was half-heartedly holding out a hand. His other held a travel mug full of coffee.
Karen slouched in a deck chair with a beer, muttering some incantation.
The arrow flew, incarnate of thought and word. It pierced one of the vertical inflated tubes and wobbled there like a dying thing as air leaked around it. Peyton shook his head and stepped away. “Fine,” he said. Kinkelaar had already strung another. He shot them off rapidly. Some were wide and slashed off toward the barn. One tore through the screen. Enough found their mark, though, and the landed hits set the whole wall to slumping, and at last it sunk like black socks in water and lay in the grass in a heap.
We could hear Karen goading him. No one else dared call anything. Kinkelaar lowered the bow. He stepped down onto the table’s bench and into the grass and went back to his patio, hung the bow on the rail, and poured himself a scotch and sat beside his wife, who was laughing at him. It was breakfast time, and we went inside.
The day passed. The sun went down. We chewed our dinners quietly, packed the new schoolbags, kissed the kids goodnight, and brushed our teeth. We went to bed uneasily, this new vexation strapped to the saddle of our usual things: our sales quotas and car payments, and our benefits enrollment and our overnights and our school district, our sick leaves and our re-fis... and when the neighborhood was still and it was after three in the morning and there was nothing but crickets, we were mercilessly awakened again.
The assault came by flashes through our windows. The light reflected off our mirrors and glass and china and filled our homes with silver and gold. We got up and walked about, more etherized than panicked, but turned our own lights on in some defense. Across our back yards, the projector was sweeping slowly, as a surveillance camera would, a turret bombarding our homes. Subtitles flashed across us, briefly legible. Cars folded over countertops. A young girl walked across our stairway and disappeared.
Surely we had driven him to some kind of madness.
Kinkelaar was outside hollering. His turkey gun blasted twice. He had shot out the transformer on the pole. The projector went dark. The whole neighborhood had gone dark. Kinkelaar ranted, vile and hoarse. We shrunk together in our windows and held our children’s heads, but there was no protecting them from the profanity. His voice was failing. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
And then they came charging. Growling, snapping, unloosed.