It was bitterly cold last night. Well, I'd heard the Professional Bad Neighbor prowling about. I suspected he was dumping rodents. Sommersburr, who sometimes gets food off the Professional Bad Neighbor, meowed in a distinct way he does--you can almost hear him meowing "Sir?" to the P.B.N. and "Ma'am?" to me--and the cats soon let me know they'd found rodents down cellar.
It occurred to me to say loudly, as if talking to the police, "We have a trespasser here. His name is..." Then I went on, telling the P,B.N. what I think of him, naming the people I count him as having killed, from the bees on up to his wife, and listing the animals either killed or found dead and left in the road to make the Young Grouch miserable, and describing the harm he's done to me, and considering how much harm his reckless spraying of poisons has done to people all along the Tennessee River. In the Seventh-Day Adventist tradition, I mentioned, we are told that the eternal fire will never need to be quenched because it will consume most of the trash of this world in one blast, but there are souls so vile that they may be unnaturally allowed to suffer longer, so that people can watch them suffering. Nero is generally believed to be one. Domitian is. Hitler is. "And you are another," I growled, "you, creeping around here trying to poison me, and I a widow and fatherless, having done you no harm!"
It occurred to me that the stupidphone, which I keep in a drawer as an emergency flashlight, would still call 911, so I called and told the police that if they came right out to look, in between my house and the Bad Neighbor's house, they were likely to find the Professional Bad Neighbor carrying a rattrap.
"A rattrap?"
"A rattrap, because he dumps rats out around my house. It's part of a campaign of harassment."
"Is he walking or driving?"
"He walked away from the house, but he has a truck parked nearer the road."
The dispatcher recognized the truck and sent police cars out to look for it. I heard them roll up onto the private road and back down, intimidated. The old Caprices they used to drive, which were serious cars despite the brand name, could get up the private road; some of the newer models can't. They did not get far enough to find the P.B.N.'s truck. Maybe he was already heading home. They roared away, presumably to investigate that possibility. With an uncharitable laugh I sat down to read the Christian book I'm reading--an interesting German thinker whose work is still being translated into English. The cats were having a good time with the rodents. Well, they'd eaten during the day. I hoped they wouldn't be tempted to eat any sick rodents just for their body heat.
And Sommersburr was meowing, "Sir? Sir?" again.
And something seemed to be dripping.
And then I smelled gasoline.
My blood ran cold. Stupidphone in one hand, shawl clutched tight around my neck with the other hand, I ran out to investigate the house. Snow was beginning to fall. No one seemed to have disturbed the snow. Everything was frozen and still. The smell of gas had faded in the air.
Meanwhile some bottles of water had been left in the yard, during the day, and needed to be lugged in. They were solid enough to be used as weapons. I released my shawl and picked up the bottles with my free hand, and carried them ten paces across the yard. Then I lay down in front of the heater and let my bottle-carrying arm go spastic with hypothermia as it warmed up. You really don't want to go out in subzero (Fahrenheit) weather with bare hands, bare ankles, or a bare face. My fingers stung.
But the Professional Bad Neighbor was still nearby; his phone was showing up on my network. I, or rather my sponsor, happen to own the network in the neighborhood. I see these things.
I called the police again to report that the P.B.N. was still here and I'd smelled gas.
"Right. An officer will roll by any minute."
I'd hardly laid down the phone when the P.B.N. drove up past the house, fast. I couldn't really see his truck but I recognized the pattern of lights on its back end.
The police truck rolled past, next, at a brisk rate. I sat down and considered the possibilities.
If the rodents were wild creatures who'd somehow left their own warm burrows in bitterly cold weather and taken shelter in the cellar, they'd be very sick rodents indeed, but the police would find the Professional Bad Neighbor without the rattrap. He could then say that he owned a little land in the neighborhood and had chosen to sit on it in his truck, to watch the snow, or watch for wildlife, or whatever excuse came to mind, and had burned a little gas in the engine to warm the truck, and I was harassing him with false accusations, and if anyone was harassing me it was probably (insert name of some poor dotty Senile Citizen from town).
Why would a person who has a warm house come out to sit in a cold truck in the woods on the coldest night of the year? To get out of a quarrel with his wife? But the Professional Bad Neighbor has no wife, no living family...does anyone go outside to freeze after a quarrel with a trashy woman? Couldn't any woman who'd been with the P.B.N. earlier that night just have been sent home?
No local rodent carries enough blood high enough above the ground to have made that dripping sound, but what had made it had not been gasoline poured around my house, as I'd feared. I hadn't smelled, but it could have been someone "doing a Billy Carter" down on the road. But it had been close enough that I ought to have been able to smell that.
Or someone pouring water from a bottle over his hair, or his clothes, to speed up what I've long thought the Professional Bad Neighbor ought to do, on the coldest night we've had in several years. The official temperature was only 1 Fahrenheit degree below zero, which means 4 or 5 below up here, with a wind chill.
Maybe the officer would take the Professional Bad Neighbor into town and get him into the sort of hospital where he's needed to be for so long. People in town think he's an ordinary old man with an unfortunately twisted face that looks as if he were grinning sardonically at everything. Maybe you have to have lived up here to know. Almost all of what I've seen the Professional Bad Neighbor do for thirty years has been things he's counted on getting away with because "no grown-up, sane, sober man would do a thing like that." I don't think he has one of the classic treatable mental disorders, but es loco, all right.
I saw the police truck's light flash by and hoped the P.B.N. was writhing with hypothermia in the back of the warm SUV. The cats were still having fun with rodents.
Half an hour later I checked. The Bad Neighbor's phone was still on the network.
Maybe that was just because they'd left it in the truck.
Anyway, I thought, it was now six o'clock in the morning, and the Bad Neighbor had either been rescued by the police, or frozen solid, or fallen down the steep drop into the upper entrance to the cave; and a man who'd fallen down that drop would be unlikely to be able to dig through the stuff piled in the cave to keep wild animals out of the cellar, so I could get some sleep at last. If he'd fallen into the cave, I thought, the rodents and the possums would probably have picked the bones clean before a real thaw...
About sundown a vehicle that I've seen being driven by a girl who looks just as I remember the Professional Bad Neighbor's sister looking, in high school, went up and down the hill quickly.
The Professional Bad Neighbor's phone is still on the network.
Well, that's this year's Creepy Christmas Story.
What I wanted for Christmas was not to have to deal with the Professional Bad Neighbor's poison spraying and trespassing and property damage any more.
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