Chapter 1
The best stories always came out after two beers. One beer was good for getting your inhibitions down, maybe even helping you forget about how bad you had it at work or at home or whatever. But two beers, that was the magic number. Two beers got you transfixed. Two beers got you the good stuff. So, whenever Big Dave—my neighbor—came over, I knew once he finished his second beer, that’s when the best stories were going to come out. It was guaranteed.
“Did I tell you that I finally blasted that gosh-dern squirrel? The one that’s been driving me to Crazy Town?” Big Dave said, crushing the aluminum can of his second beer in his right hand, then throwing it into the recycle bin that sat on the opposite side of my back patio, which sat next to a small trash can overflowing with baby-blue face masks—our pandemic protective respiratory shields. He had a beautifully fluid motion to his throw like a premier NBA free-throw shooter. It seemed Big Dave threw it straight into the bin every time without even looking.
“No, you didn’t tell me,” I said, handing him a third beer from the plastic ice chest, sitting in between our patio chairs like a thrift store bargain-bin lamp table. I secured the lid back on after handing him the beer, then placed the caramel-colored glass ashtray back. “The squirrel that was running across your roof?”
“Yup.”
“Tell me then.”
“All right,” he started while cracking open that third beer, foam erupting out the top of the can, a little splattering on me. “So, I was in the kitchen cooking a pot of my famous chili—”
“Do you put beans in yours?” I interrupted, almost unconsciously. I soon regretted asking that question.
Big Dave shot me a hot stare. “No God-fearing Texan puts gosh-dern beans in their chili. Are you crazy?!”
“I like beans in my chili, so I guess I’m crazy.”
“Can I tell my squirrel story already?” he said, then gulped some beer.
“Yes, sorry. Proceed.”
“Thank you. So, I was cooking a pot of my famous chili—without beans, thank you very much—when that sumbitch started trotting across my roof, running back and forth like it was wearing clogs or something.”
“A squirrel wearing clogs?” I said, amused and bewildered simultaneously at the thought.
“That’s what it sounded like. So, I gave my chili a good stir and I set the lid on the pot and I went into my bedroom to get my gun.”
“Which one?” I said. As a writer, I can’t listen to anyone tell me a story without the smallest details, the minutiae of facts. I needed all essential information: every little bit.
Big Dave gave me the stink eye, then huffed. “My favorite, of course. The Glock nine-millimeter. The one with the silencer.”
I guffawed. “You shot the squirrel with a Glock?” It seemed like an excessive way to deal with an innocuous situation, but Big Dave had his ways.
“I said I had the silencer on. Duh,” he replied, drawing out the “uh” sound long enough to let me know that he meant business. “I wasn’t going to disturb the neighbors. But I hadn’t shot the squirrel yet in this part of the story. Maybe if you’d quit interrupting me, then I could finish telling it.”
“Yep,” I muttered. I sipped my beer.
He gulped from his, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then continued. “So, I got my gun and went out back, through the grass toward the back corner of the yard so I could turn around and survey the roof in all its glory. The sun was still out, so I could see real good. And up there at the top of my chimney, that sumbitch sat there just looking at me with his beady black eyes, and he had the biggest nutsack I’d ever seen on an animal that size. His nuts seemed bigger than mine!”
“I doubt that,” I cracked. This made Big Dave laugh and he punched me in the arm as a sign of approval. My deltoid throbbed after he socked it, then my dog—who sat inside patiently watching us—began barking, right behind the glass sliding door. She must have witnessed the assault and got fired up. My sweet dog loved me so much that she was willing to maul Big Dave to prove it. A yellow lab with a mystery breed mixed in—something naughty and hyper like a boxer or some such—she could barely contain herself. She scratched at the glass like she was running on a treadmill, slobber flying everywhere.
Her barking simply annoyed Big Dave. “Will you tell Valor to zip it?”
That was my dog’s name: Valor. “Zip it!” I repeated. Valor shut her trap and laid down on the rug, instantly sheepish.
“Anyway, his nuts were so big, it looked like he was sitting on a big ol’ hairy beanbag. And he just stared at me like he was taunting me. He was taunting me. I could tell he was. So I told him, ‘I’m gonna blast your nuts off for running across my roof!’ And I swear he scoffed at me. That little sumbitch scoffed. Can you believe it?”
Big Dave was getting excited now as he leapt up from his chair, shaking his fists toward the sky in the same direction I imagined he looked at that poor squirrel, the one who had no idea just how angry he’d made my deranged neighbor. People called him Big Dave for a reason as he was as big as a house, mostly bald underneath that filthy red Make America Great Again baseball cap of his, fists like boulders, feet like oak tree stumps, a gut like Enchanted Rock—the pink granite round-top mountain about ninety-five miles west of Austin (our hometown)—a scruffy goatee with breadcrumbs from lunch still stuck in it, and an attitude as big as the great state of Texas. In contrast to my lean physique, full head of brown hair, and business-casual work clothes I was still wearing (I had a meeting with a bookstore owner earlier in the day), we were an odd couple like no other. I imagine if it wasn’t for the beer and the close proximity of our houses, we’d probably never be friends out in the greater world. Oil and vinegar, as they say. Or is it oil and water?
“The only scoffing squirrels I know about live on the University of Texas campus, right behind the Business School.”
“Seems reasonable,” Big Dave agreed as he finished his third beer, crushing the can and tossing it in the bin. “Beer me.”
I took a cold one out of the cooler and handed it to him. He cracked it open and took a swig.
“So then what did you do?” I said.
“Well, I aimed my Glock at that uppity sumbitch’s nutsack while it sat there flicking its tail around. It was taunting me, it was, like I said. So, I firmly pulled the trigger and blasted that sucker. And you know what happened?”
“What?”
“Poof. It was gone,” he said, snapping his fingers, then chuckled.
“Gone?” I asked him.
“Yup.”
“Like, it fell off the roof and you couldn’t find it?”
“Nope. Obliterated is the word, I think. Blasted to particles. Its squirrel atoms evaporated into thin air.” Big Dave sucked on his beer.
I shook my head. “Doesn’t seem right that you shot a squirrel with a Glock.”
“It’s my right, you know? Second amendment. Come and take it.”
“Ummm,” I said, too dumbfounded to even drink my beer. “I don’t think forming a militia and shooting a squirrel in a neighborhood are even close to being the same thing.”
Big Dave turned to me, obviously offended at my statement. “Sure it is. That walking vermin nutsack was trespassing. I’m a one-man army, you know? Might as well be my own militia.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure it does. This is my property. I can do whatever I want.”
“No, it doesn’t. You could have shot my roof or some kid walking by. What if the bullet ricocheted?”
“Rico-what?”
“You heard me.”
Big Dave shot up from his chair and turned to me, his face a hotter-than-normal shade of red. His left eye twitched. He tilted his head back, gulping the last of his beer, then threw the empty can into the bin. He never missed no matter how he threw the cans. Right at this moment, my wife—Laura Ann—stuck her head out the back patio door. Valor burst out of the house below her and, at first, I thought she’d attack Big Dave, but she ran past him and out into the yard and around to the side, barking and growling out of sight.
My wife seemed cheery, yet concerned. Maybe she heard Big Dave slowly losing his temper. “Everything all right out here?” she asked us.
I shrugged.
Big Dave scoffed, probably how I imagined the now-nonexistent squirrel with the big testicles scoffed at him. “I know when I’m not wanted.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, sorry now. I wasn’t ready for him to leave yet. There was still plenty of beer to drink and the night was young with possibility.
“Besides, I hear my wife calling. Thanks for the beer,” he said, then started for the gate that connected our two backyards at the middle of our fence. Right as he closed the gate behind him, he called out, “Sayonara.”
Valor pounced on the gate a couple of times after him, then ran back to me and laid down at my feet on the cold concrete, panting and slobbering.
“Bueno bye,” I replied, softly.
My lovely wife sat in the unoccupied patio chair, probably still warm from Big Dave’s big behind. More and more beautiful with every passing day, she had her salt-and-pepper brunette hair pulled back into a messy ponytail, exposing her slender neck. So tantalizing.
“What was that all about?” she said.
“Beats me. Want a beer?”
“No,” she said, patting me on the hand. “I just wanted you to know that I was going to meditate and ask that you keep it down out here. Okay?”
“I’ll keep it down—by myself.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek. Then she got up to go inside. Before closing the patio door, she said, “See you in bed. I’ll put Valor in her crate.”
“Thanks, sweetheart. Looking forward to seeing you in bed,” I said.
She called Valor inside, then she slid the door closed.
I’m not sure exactly when my nightly ritual started, sitting on the back patio drinking beer, but whenever it was, I’m grateful. It’s truly my cherished time. I love it so much, almost as much as spending time with my wife. Now, if I’m sitting on the back patio drinking beer with my wife, then it would be doubly special. She doesn’t sit out there with me very often, though, just sometimes, and that’s okay. She has her own life. You know? She’s her own person. She has her cherished time, too, maybe almost as cherished as my time on the back porch drinking beer. Meditating, that’s it: her cherished time.
So, when I start thinking about when this ritual of mine started, it’s hard to pin down. There were certainly times before the pandemic that I sat on the back patio, drinking beer, and contemplating my place in the universe, or sitting with Big Dave and contemplating our places in the neighborhood, which in essence was our universe. But it wasn’t daily. I think the pandemic was the impetus to daily-sitting and beer-drinking on the back patio. I was already at home. I was in dire need of time in the out-of-doors without a mask on. I usually had a stocked refrigerator, or a pony keg of home brew, or an ice chest full of beer in cans and bottles, so no need to go to the store or to a bar. Besides, the pandemic cured my desire to hang around a lot of strange folks while drinking alcohol. I could simply do that at home by myself, or with Big Dave.
When Laura Ann and I bought the house, the gate connecting the two backyards was certainly something that caught our attention. We asked the realtor why they were connected and she didn’t know. “Maybe the previous owners were friends,” she said to us. Friends? How unusual, I thought. Being close enough to our neighbors to share our yards in this way was definitely a strange notion to us. We’d never been that close to our neighbors before, but it wasn’t long after I met Big Dave for the first time that he opened the gate one night and asked if he could come over. Once he saw that I had a beer cooler on the back patio, then it was all a done deal. Privacy: be damned.
But at this moment, with Big Dave angry and gone and my wife inside meditating and my dog lying in her crate, I took the opportunity to ruminate about the book I had been writing. It was the story of five city employees who worked for the water department who found a briefcase full of money: ten thousand dollars to be exact. They decided to share the money. Of course, they couldn’t keep their big mouths shut and they told everybody about the loot. Somehow, word got back to the mayor, who decided to use them as props for his own political gain. He called a press conference and invited all the reporters in the area. This book was something of a farce, very satirical in nature. It was supposed to be a send-up of Texas politics. I’d been working on it, on and off, for five years, but I seemed to have gotten myself into a creative hole that I couldn’t get out of. As I sat ruminating about my story, I heard the gate creak open. Soon enough, Big Dave appeared in front of me, looking sheepish.
“I’m not really mad at you,” he said. His face flushed. “You know, about that Second Amendment stuff and all.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not mad at you either.”
“Can I have a beer, please? I ran out at the house.”
“Sure, man.”
Big Dave smiled and opened the cooler, grabbing two beers. “Thanks,” he said, happier now. “I’ll have to get some at the grocery store tomorrow. Say, have you talked to Mrs. Trudell lately?”
“No, I haven’t. What’s up with her?”
“I saw her at the mailbox today. She told me her dog’s missing, the wiener dog.”
“You mean Cindy?”
“Yeah, Cindy the wiener dog. She asked me to keep an eye out for her. Damn dog disappeared without a trace. So if you see a wiener dog running around, then let me know so we can trap the sumbitch. Cool?”
“Cool.”
“And thanks for the beer,” he said, lifting them up to show his gratitude, one corner of his mouth also lifting like something similar to a smile.
“Two beers,” I replied.
“Yup,” he said, then turned around and stood there, looking off somewhere, ruminating about something, both of his hands—each holding a sweaty, cold beer—pressed to his hips. “Do you ever have dreams about making it big?” he asked me, yet still facing my yard.
“All the time,” I replied.
“What would you do if someone gave you a million dollars?”
I thought about that intriguing question for a moment, riffling through many ideas of making it “big” and what that meant, which all landed back onto this one simple idea. “I would just write books, man. I would just write all the time without a care in the world. You?”
Big Dave raised one hand, still holding a beer, and scratched the back of his head with a jutting thumb. I could hear his thumbnail scraping across his scalp through a hole in the back of his red MAGA hat. “I’d put it all in my plumbing business. That’s what I’d do. Keep the dream going.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Yup,” he said, turning around to wink at me, accompanied by a cluck of his tongue, then he walked back to his yard and closed the gate behind him.
Missing wiener dog? I thought. Weird.
Little did I know that this was a premonition to something strange, a series of events we—me and Big Dave, that is—would have never seen coming before to our neighborhood, some things weird and some things...well, I can’t really explain it even now. I just didn’t know. And for all intents and purposes, I’m still processing it all. As a writer, I like to think that I’m extra perceptive to this kind of thing. In literature, they call it foreshadowing. But in real life, it’s just what we all refer to as the unknown. When the future becomes the now, we rarely ever see the signs: the foreshadowing. People always say, “Well, I didn’t see that coming.” That’s the unknown. And what freaks people out more than the unknown? How about a registered sex offender as a neighbor? Or a night stalker that everyone believes is killing their pets? What about an unexpected weather event that could have destroyed our entire neighborhood? Crazy, right? Well, like I said, little did I know.
I chugged my beer until it was gone, crushed the empty can, and tossed it to the recycle bin. It clunked on the rim and fell to the concrete. I walked over and picked it up, tossed it into the bin, and went inside to wait in bed for my wife to finish meditating and join me under the covers.
