Good Fences, Good Neighbors by Jeff McDonald

Wallace Bradley lived in a small world. He had a small brick house at the end of a small street in a small town. In fact, his home was on a cul-de-sac, and his only neighbor was a house that had lain vacant since the day he moved in. Wallace had few acquaintances in town and the only visitor to his home was the mailman, to whom he had never spoken anyway. Wallace didn’t receive anything except catalogs, but he still looked forward to getting the mail because it gave him a chance to admire his bumblebee mailbox. In his workshop, he had delicately sawed and sanded each wooden wing, crimped and polished the wire antennae, and applied black and yellow paint with a jeweler’s precision. It now stood by the curb as a proud testament to his fastidiousness. The rest of Wallace’s yard received equal attention. The grass was always as green and smooth as a billiard table. Never blighted by a weed or stray leaf, it remained a constant picture of the suburban ideal in all seasons. If the grass was an unchanging photograph, the garden he kept alongside his house was his laboratory. It was home to squash, tulips, snow peas, roses, and whatever else had caught his fancy. This year, the new petunias were coming in nicely and he had high hopes for the marigolds. The world might not care about a man like Wallace, but in this patch of real estate he was king, and he was quite happy with the arrangement.

Even though it was Sunday, Wallace pulled himself out of bed early. The rainy spring was turning into a hot summer, and that meant there wasn’t much time left for planting. He went to the closet to find his overalls and garden gloves hanging dutifully in their places. But as he walked back past his bedroom window, he paused in surprise. A moving van was parked in front of the house next door. He fumbled for his glasses and scurried outside. From his front door, he could see two movers struggling to unload a huge TV from the truck. Shouting directions from the curb was a broad, sandy-haired man puffing on a cigarette. Wallace walked over, still surprised by the scene.

“Hey, c’mon. Be careful with that!” the sandy-haired man barked between puffs. He finally noticed Wallace staring at him. “Hey buddy, can I help you?”

“I’m Wallace Bradley. I live over there. I, uh, wanted to see what was going on.”

“Just bought the place. The name’s Jack Hagger, and it looks like we’re neighbors now.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood.” It wasn’t much of a welcome at all. In fact, there wasn’t really a neighborhood. The next house was over a block away. Wallace did not like the idea of neighbors. He was spared from more small talk when Jack turned around to yell at the movers again.

Wallace ate dinner that night peering out of his kitchen window at the other house. He could see the intruder in the living room, arranging his gaudy furniture and installing his obscene stereo. Having a neighbor around was undoubtedly going to change things. Wallace liked his life the way it was, but what could he do? Calm down, he thought. This was just some guy who happened to live next door. Wallace’s sanctuary would still be his own. Early the next morning as he walked to his car, he looked back at the neighbor’s house. It was as dark and quiet as it had always been. Nothing is going to change, he told himself.

Wallace worked in town at the Valu-Rite Hardware. This was not a job that suited him because it required him to talk to people. Fortunately almost no one ever came in to the store, so Wallace was free to browse the seed packet bins all day. He spent his time daydreaming of new combinations for his garden, fresh medleys of flowers, vegetables, and shrubs. When closing time rolled around, he bought his favorites and hurried home.

As he was parking his car, he noticed an unfamiliar truck on the street. Barnes and Sons Surveying, the door read. He walked around to his garden, where he could see Jack standing in his back yard while two other men drew lines on the grass. Nobody noticed Wallace until he shouted at them.

“Yeah, puttin’ in a patio,” Jack called back. “For entertaining, you know.”

The next day was like a million other workdays for Wallace. He could hardly wait to get home and start planting the Autumn Blaze chrysanthemums he had picked out. But when he pulled in front of his house, he could only stop the car and stare. A black and yellow bumblebee rested on its side in the middle of his lawn. Its fragile wooden wings had cracked off and lay on the ground beside it. He got out of the car and walked around the house to look for more damage. What he saw at the garden turned his stomach. A wide swath of his cherished flowerbed lay stripped down to barren earth. A season’s worth of work, completely gone. Wallace slumped to his knees and gathered up the pile of plants that had been tossed aside. He swallowed hard before getting up and pounding on his neighbor’s front door.

“Excuse me, but do you know what happened to my mailbox and my garden? They seem to have been vandalized.”

Jack stared at him for a second. “Oh yeah… well, I had the surveyors check the property line, and it turned out part of your yard was really my yard. I needed to clear some of your stuff out of the way.”

“You did this?”

“Yeah. Did you find where I left your mailbox? Listen, my Hot Pocket is quickly becoming just a Pocket, so I gotta go. See you around.” The door closed, leaving Wallace red-faced on the stoop with a handful of dead flowers.

The next day was Saturday, a day usually reserved for pruning and weeding. Instead, Wallace stayed in his kitchen and bitterly watched the vile trespasser work on his new project. Jack had bought a prefabricated wooden fence and was busy putting all the pieces together. By the time he was done, it stood four feet high and was long enough to circle his entire property. Wallace could only scowl as he planted postholes through the middle of what used to be his garden. He spent the rest of the day painting it an awful sky blue.

Over the following weeks, Wallace’s life was made nearly unbearable. Jack continued his home improvement work by cutting down all of the trees in his yard that blocked his new satellite dish. Wallace discovered his other hobby was playing the drum in some sort of band called The Meat Grinders. Jack hosted all of the practices because none of the other Grinders wanted to upset their neighbors. After one especially tedious day at work, Wallace came home to find a bus-size RV parked in front of his house. Airbrushed across the back were the words “Jack’s Party Wagon”. “Relax buddy,” Jack told him. “I’ll move the P-Wagon tomorrow.” Wallace stopped asking him after a month.

Every day, the offenses mounted. But nothing irritated Wallace like the fence. He was a king whose kingdom had been snatched away and this usurper had the gall to build a fence around it. The nerve! There was no one else on this street. The only purpose of the fence was to keep Wallace out, as if he were a stray dog. What it left of his garden, the ground he once nurtured like a proud parent, was now barely wide enough for a proper row of carrots. He was thoroughly wallowing in his own misery when, for the first time in his memory, the doorbell rang.

Jack was outside, puffing his cigarette impatiently. “Hey pal, listen. I’m going on vacation-”

“From what?” Jack never seemed to go to work.

“From this stupid town. I’m taking the Wagon out to Durango for two weeks. Could you be a sport and pick up my newspapers while I’m gone?”

Hearing those words lifted the gloom off of Wallace’s face. He felt like a prisoner let out on parole for two glorious weeks. That night, he opened the bottle of wine that had been in his pantry for years (a sarcastic employee-of-the-decade gift from his boss) to toast the occasion. The days that followed were ones of peace and tranquility. He was able to step outside without having to see Jack tanning in the buff or burning garbage in a bucket or shooting at squirrels with an air gun. His yard returned to its airbrushed green shimmer, and he even started work on a bumblebee bird feeder. But the more things returned to normal, the more Wallace knew that it wouldn’t last. He could not simply go back to hiding from the monster next door. There had to be a way to fight back. The night before Jack returned, he devised a plan.

After dark, Wallace walked along the edge of his yard, carefully digging up every fence post between him and his neighbor’s house. In his workshop, he sawed off the dirt-crusted end of each post and replaced it with a metal stake (10 for $4 at Valu-Rite) hammered halfway into the remaining wood. When his task was complete, he took the sections back outside and reassembled the fence around his neighbor’s house. The fence looked exactly as it had before.

The next day, Jack returned with a vengeance. He left the entire contents of his RV on the sidewalk to air out, and Wallace soon awoke to the smell of sweaty laundry wafting through his window. But this time, he didn’t go to the kitchen to glare out the window. He went about his puttering until late in the evening, when he knew The Meat Grinders would show up for one of their jam sessions. Once they disappeared into the basement, he was able to operate unobserved. Now that the fence was anchored only by the metal stakes, Wallace could pick it up and move it whenever he wanted. He knew he would have to be patient. Every night, he could nudge the fence only an inch into Jack’s yard. At first glance, the change would be imperceptible. But by the next planting season, he would have his garden back and his neighbor would be none the wiser.

An ordinary man would never have the patience to pull off such a scheme, but Wallace was not a man of ordinary patience. He saw himself as a silent river, gradually wearing away a loud, obnoxious stone. Week after week, he inched the fence farther onto Jack’s lawn. Daily gains could be counted in blades of grass. By the time the leaves took on their autumn hue, he had won back most of his garden, but that was no longer the object of the game. This was his one instrument to avenge all of his neighbor’s crimes. The garden would not be enough. He decided to start moving all four sides of the fence inward. It was easy to shave off the ends of the cheap pressboard sections to keep the proper fit. But how far could he go before there was a confrontation?

Meanwhile, neighbor Jack wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down. He was now hosting parties for all of the people he had met on his road trip. Each weekend, a new vanload of greasy hipsters would descend on the cul-de-sac looking for a good time. Jack’s houseguests weren’t always content to stay on his entertainment patio and Wallace had to chase more than one out of his yard with the garden hose. But Jack wasn’t finished yet. For his next assault, he drove all the way out to the county line to pick up a new pet. “She’s a Toulouse,” he bragged. “That means she’s got papers.” To Wallace, ‘Toulouse’ was French for ‘goose’, and ‘has papers’ meant ‘attacks everything and poops on the doormat’. But with each new aggravation, Wallace squeezed the fence a little tighter. And though Jack seemed completely oblivious, the more his yard shrunk the more intolerable he became.

The December frost now hung in the air, signaling the return of Wallace’s favorite tradition. With almost genuine cheerfulness, he carried a large box up from his workroom and unpacked each piece of his handmade nativity scene. Over the years, he had carved and painted all of the figures himself, from baby Jesus to the mice in the manger. (This year, he left the wooden goose in the box.) Even though he and the mailman were usually the only ones to see it, Wallace would spend the afternoon arranging each character on his still unnaturally green lawn. This year, he didn’t even notice the quiet until it was broken by Jack driving up in a car filled with shipping cartons. He stopped long enough to unload them all onto his front yard before he drove off again. When he was out of sight, Wallace went over to examine the boxes. They all had the same label. “Santa’s Singin’ Village™ – For Commercial Use Only.”

Jack’s second carload was more of the same. Then the construction began. Spotlights were assembled, speakers plugged in, giant snowmen inflated. Wallace’s humble nativity scene now rested in the shadow of the towering animatronic circus taking shape next door. At night, the lights were blinding; during the day, the music was deafening. By now, Jack’s fence cut his yard nearly in half. All of the Christmas displays had to be crowded up against the front of the house. Jack had to weave through the Singin’ Village just to get to his door. But he still showed no sign of suspicion.

Christmas came, then the New Year, and the fence continued to contract. Jack’s yard shrank down to ridiculous proportions, but he still did nothing about it. Wallace couldn’t believe his eyes. Could a man give so little thought to his surroundings that he can’t see something this obvious? He had to go all the way. By the first blossoms of spring, the fence was nearly flat against the sides of the house. Jake would go up and down his front walk, but never ventured into unfenced territory.

Just as suddenly as he had seen him arrive, Wallace stepped outside one morning to find Jack loading his furniture into a moving van. This time Jack saw him right away. “You’re a real stubborn son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”

“What?”

“I tried cutting down the trees. The parties. The Singin’ Village. I even borrowed an attack goose, for Chrissake. And you don’t care!

What was he going on about, Wallace wondered. Time to put on the stupid face he practiced on Valu-Rite customers.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Jack continued. “I can’t stand neighbors! You were supposed to move away by now. A whole year of harassment and you didn’t even budge? I knew you were too much of a pansy to complain, but how could you just take it?!” By now he was out of breath.

His bumblebee? The garden? All of it was on purpose. Wallace struggled to keep his blank expression. “So you’re moving away?”

“You win. I cancelled the lease. Congratulations, the street’s all yours because you were too damn dumb to notice.” Jack growled bitterly as he lit a cigarette.

Wallace tried to sound as uninterested as possible. “I can see why you wouldn’t like that house. The yard’s much too small.”

Jack turned to look at his own house, actually seeing it for the first time. The cigarette dropped from his mouth. Wallace plodded back inside, leaving his ex-neighbor in the street scratching his head. He could celebrate the victory later. Right now there was fertilizing to do.