The Invaders (23 page)

She was screaming at Jeffrey to get off the walkway. She said, “Don't you see the signs?”

He said, “Fuck you, woman. I live here.”

I didn't think I heard him correctly. He was talking to a neighbor, not some person on the street. She said she was going to call the police because he was trespassing on association property. He screamed that he belonged here as much as anyone else. And then he started trying to rip the No Trespassing sign out of the ground. Mrs. Humphrey disappeared into her house, but Jeffrey did not stop yelling.

“You fucking cow, come back here!” I saw the security guard who had been there the night Teddy had his accident approach Jeffrey. Jeffrey lunged at him, screaming, “YOU!”

Then two police officers came through the Humphreys' yard and Jeffrey started yelling at them, too. They tried to reason with him at first, asking him to move away from the water's edge. He refused to get off the seawall.

He said, “I pay my taxes. This is my walkway, too.”

Mrs. Humphrey said, “I've never seen this man in my life. He's trespassing. He's a vagrant!”

“You cow!” he screamed.

I nearly laughed and nervously checked Lori's windows to see if she was at home, if she could hear the commotion, but they were dark. Jeffrey looked wild, almost young with anger. The police moved toward him and he swung his arm at them, missing by a wide space.

“Calm down, sir.”

“Don't tell me what to do.”

“Let me see your ID,” one of the officers said.

He told them he wanted to see theirs. They asked him if he'd been drinking and Mrs. Humphrey yelled that he had thrown a glass at her. She used the words “assault” and “scared.”

“I'll kill you if you come near me,” Jeffrey screamed. “I was here before you bastards were even born!”

I inhaled sharply, knowing that was all they needed to hear.

They tackled him then, driving his face into the grass of Mrs. Humphrey's yard. I thought about her two little corgis and hoped they had used that spot to urinate—the spot where Jeffrey's nose was being screwed into the ground by the hand of a policeman. I could hear his muffled yelling and almost convinced myself that I could feel the reverberations coming up through my feet. I did not move. Not even when they picked him up and put handcuffs on him. He tried to struggle away from the police, but they were much stronger.

He screamed that the neighborhood was turning into a police state. “I have rights, too,” he said. “Why are you handcuffing me? I'm just taking a walk.”

“Public intoxication and trespassing,” they told him.

I could have helped him, but I didn't. I could have strolled over and said, “I'm his wife and we live nearly next door.” But I just stood in Lori's
yard behind her row of evergreen bushes and watched as they treated him like a criminal. I took comfort in the fact that none of us were safe—the fence was closing in on us all. Jeffrey stopped fighting and hung his head down as they led him through Mrs. Humphrey's yard to their police car. For all his screaming, though, he never mentioned that he had a wife. He never asked them to come find me. It was as if I didn't exist to him; we had become each other's afterthoughts.

I ran from Lori's yard back to our house and to the front windows. They put Jeffrey into the backseat and I watched as he sat there staring at the houses as if he'd never seen them before. He saw me staring at him and we locked eyes. He looked ragged, like an old man who had wandered away from his house in the night and was found confused. He started to say something in the backseat of the car and it slowed. I pulled away from the windows, hid in the shadows, and watched as he nudged his face toward the house and where I was standing and said something over and over again. The car came to a stop in front of our house and Jeffrey shook with fury. I panicked. He knew I deliberately hadn't helped him, that I had allowed his humiliation to go this far.

The car rolled forward again and I watched it go quickly down the one-way road. I came back outside then.

He was gone and I was glad.

“What happened?” Lori said, as I turned around. She was red-faced and confused, power-walking toward me with weights in her hands.

“They just arrested someone,” I said.

“See, see!” she said, pointing at the fence. “God, it looked just like Jeffrey.”

“Well, he's gone now,” I said.

“All this happening here. Christ,” Lori said. “I'm going to alert the security guard to keep an eye out for him, make sure he can't get back in here.”

“Good idea,” I said, and smiled. “Ready for the storm?”

“You know, the kids get so nervous. We're probably going to go to a hotel. No sense in riding it out. Who knows after the last few. You guys?”

“I'm staying until the end,” I said.

AS I WAITED FOR JILL
on the rocks, I thought about what I had just seen. They were really coming down hard on outsiders, and now someone had been pulled off the wall and hauled off in handcuffs. He was in hysterics and it was kind of funny to watch. The lady on the corner had cracked down on people walking near her house; all she needed now was a moat. Instead, she had to settle for big-ass signs threatening police action if you came near her house without permission. I couldn't remember it ever being like this. When we were kids, we rode bikes around, left them in neighbors' yards, and swam in the ocean, running down beaches that didn't belong to us. No one ever tried to stop us. The neighborhood was ours. Now it was nobody's. Each yard was barricaded in with fencing. We just needed some Dobermans patrolling at night and we'd be all set. They could really make this a gated community and have guards at every street entrance checking IDs and bank account balances, like they did with the really rich. What was so wonderful to
protect, anyway? The boats, the docks, the clay courts, their precious eighteen holes?

It was high tide and the water was hitting the rocks and spraying me. Usually I'd get pissed and move, but I had the best view of my house from where I was sitting. I searched the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of Cheryl. Any movement at all. There wasn't any. I pushed myself back and put my head on the rocks and waited. Jill had picked the right time, the sun would set and it would be nice. With everyone finishing the golf tournament and celebrating with booze and trophies afterwards, I didn't think anyone would see us. Even if Cheryl did, I didn't care. Who would believe anything she said? I saw a family on bicycles stop at the gate, afraid to go farther, past the fence. I didn't recognize them, so I didn't feel bad. The fence was doing its job. You're not welcome here, but have a nice day.

The fireflies were gone and summer was winding down. The club was rushing it with the golf tournament, the members sipping vodka out of their plastic cups with bendy straws. They would have to piss out there, hidden in the fescue, because of their prostate problems. It seemed pretty strange to be paying a thirty-five-thousand-dollar entrance fee only to possibly get a tick on your penis as you tried to hide the stream from the riders in the carts beside yours. It didn't seem that simple pleasures like that would be afforded to me anymore. I wouldn't get to swing anything, not anymore, right? None of this would ever be mine.

When I disappeared and went somewhere else, I could play up the disability and have people take care of me. Heartstrings and all that stuff, right? It was a possibility. Before, the best I could get was a job selling shit like my dad. Hawking medical equipment, pacemakers and those things that beeped in hospitals—the heart monitors, that's where the big bucks were. I would have started off in pharma, selling to doctors, one of the only salesmen in a sea of big-titted blondes with
fake tans who pretended to know the difference between Advair and whatever the fuck else they sold. Endless tests to make sure I knew everything about drug interactions, chemical makeups, all that. Now I wasn't going to do any of that. I was going to be handled differently, like I couldn't do things. And I had to decide if I was going to take it or not.

I didn't have to do anything anymore or pretend that I had some kind of calling.

Cheryl put kind of a kink into my plan of riding this out forever. My father would be pissed when he got home. Divorce probably. Or a slow burn of quiet, which they were already well into. I was blood and no one was throwing me out. She would go away, like the other ex-wives from the neighborhood, forced into a tidy condo in town, ousted out of the club. They didn't take kindly to single-lady competition here. Married couples in some state of misery or single men with liver spots. That was it. I didn't think Cheryl deserved a fate like that. I really didn't. She was different from the others, and really not that bad. She took care of me even after I spent years treating her like she didn't belong in our breaking-down home.

I saw Jill coming. She was wearing a short white dress again. I hoped it was see-through, especially with the sea spray still going strong. Even though I knew I would only get so far with her, no matter how bored she was in her marriage.

She waved at me and walked down the seawall quickly, careful not to fall when she reached the rocks. She was wearing some kind of cork shoes and held both arms out to steady herself. I got up to help her and she took my arm and smiled.

“Thanks,” she said. I nodded, suddenly very nervous. Her dress looked like a sack sort of, but it tightened around her breasts. She made everything look good. She leaned in to kiss my cheek and I could smell her. Sweet flowers, like the kind around here hanging over the white fences.

She pulled away and I asked her what the kiss was for.

“A hello and thank you,” she said.

She stared down at the rocks and tried to figure out how she was going to sit down. The seagulls dropped oysters and clams down on the rocks to break them into pieces and there were shards everywhere. I leaned down and scraped them away, trying to make her a seat. She sat down, folding her hands behind her ass and pressing down as she sat, so she could have some fabric beneath her.

“You missed quite a show,” I said.

“What happened?”

“This crazy guy was trying to vandalize the No Trespassing signs. The police came and hauled his ass off,” I told her.

“There's too many signs now.”

“How many would be enough?' I asked.

“I don't know, honestly.”

I thought it might be time to round up the guys to fuck shit up again, but most of them had moved away to start their lives already. Only Steven was left. I wasn't sure if he was up for it anymore. Besides, he'd probably burn her house down for fun. No one really understood the true extent of Steven's appetite for destruction unless they saw it firsthand.

Jill stared out at the ocean, at the setting sun, and smiled. “This is nice.”

“It's pretty good,” I said.

“I never come over here anymore because it's all blocked off.”

“It wasn't always like this,” I said.

She murmured that she knew.

“I bet the sunsets are nice over here,” she said.

“Girls like it,” I said.

She turned and smirked at me.

“Everyone does,” I continued.

“Everyone does,” she repeated.

We stared out at the water and I wasn't sure what to say to her anymore or what she wanted from me. Right now she just wanted to sit next to me and stare into space.

“What do you think will happen?” she finally said.

I didn't know what she was referring to and I hoped it wasn't some kind of big, philosophical conversation starter.

I said, “I don't think the storm will hit us.”

She turned back to look at the sky.

“Maybe it will,” she said.

I went into how the weatherman said it wouldn't, that it was already in South Carolina, but she wasn't listening.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” I asked her. She shook her head.

She asked me where I lived and I pointed to my dark house. Only the lights in the living room on the first floor were on.

She wrapped her arms around her legs and I asked her if the mosquitoes were getting to her. She shook her head. Was she giving signals for me to put my arm around her? “Where's your husband?” I asked.

“Out there.”

She pointed behind her to the course. They would have to come in around dark, probably go upstairs to the Captain's Lounge to have a few scotches, pat one another on the back and talk about their handicaps.

I nodded my head and watched the sun drift down. She looked down at my hands, my limp one in my lap and the other one I was using to steady myself on the rocks.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

I looked down. “I can't feel anything,” I said.

“Nothing at all?” she said. She leaned in and kissed me.

“I can feel that,” I said. I kissed her back.

She pulled away and said, “Good, what about this?”

She reached out to touch my hand, my arm. I couldn't feel it. She
pressed her thumbs into my skin and I saw the white imprints when she released it and then watched as they quickly disappeared. She pinched me and I didn't move.

“Stop,” I said.

She tried to pull my hand toward her, to touch her, to see if I'd flinch or move away, but I didn't. She put my dead hand on her leg and I was sorry that I couldn't feel anything. She had little blond hairs on her tanned legs; I wanted to feel those but couldn't. She put her hand on my pants, where my penis was, and it barely registered. She pulled it away quickly.

We looked at each other and she smiled at me like she was sorry for me and I wanted to pull my hand off her leg. I could have used my good hand to pull the dead one off, but that would seem to show even bigger weakness, so I didn't move at all and she kept smiling at me. Finally, she gave me my hand back and jumped up.