in the middle of the night. When I peered into the hallway, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, in the long t-shirt she used for pajamas, fumbling with the phone book in her lap. There was a telephone nook in the hallway. Our faux antique candlestick telephone sat next to her on the floor.
“Where’s the number for the police?” she yelled at the phone book, hands raised in exasperation. She looked up at me with a mixture of disbelief and outrage. “Those sonsabitches tore down our fence!”
I went to the window next to the front door overlooking our front yard. Below, someone sprinted out of the darkness toward our place, and then turned and jumped our hedge toward the apartment building next door. It was mostly dark but I could tell it was Eddie. The white plaster cast on his left forearm reflected the glow of our porch light. Rommel and his apartment buddies were cheering him from their balcony above, just as Jim Morrison reached his screaming climax.
As he ran into Roxie’s apartment and slammed the door, I thought of the title of another, very different, LP from the late sixties: “Living with the Animals.”
The police arrived about a half-hour later. By then all the revelers had retreated behind closed doors and turned off the music and their lights. The cool damp air suddenly was devoid of commotion. When I saw the police car’s amber lights winking through the tree foliage, I went down and met them on the grass where the interlopers used to wash their cars, with our water. The cops both were tall, well-built guys about my age, in navy blue uniforms, no hats, and black leather belts that creaked when they moved. One had a long, five-cell flashlight that he trained on the shattered fence. I hadn’t yet seen the extent of the damage done. It looked like the remnants of a one-man suspension bridge that had fallen into a ravine.
“What happened here?” he said.
“Well, our neighbors there didn’t like a fence we put up so they tore it down.” I made a noncommittal nod toward the apartment building.
“These neighbors?” he asked. The spot from his light roamed over the doors and windows of the now dark and placid-looking building. Maybe because her unit was closest to the mess, the light seemed to linger on Roxie’s windows and door. I guessed she wasn’t home from work yet.
“Did you see ‘em do it?” he asked. He holstered the flashlight and took a small notepad and pen from the pocket under his badge. His partner drew closer, arms folded across his chest, listening. He was mechanically chewing gum, like a baseball coach on the sidelines.
“Not exactly,” I said, “but my wife did. I was asleep but she ran downstairs and saw them. She yelled at them.”
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