Upright Beasts (8 page)

The explosion pulls the different factions out into their yards: the neighborhood watch on ours, the
MPCV
and its sympathizers on the others. The air is thick with tension and smoke.

“This is a declaration of war,” Chet says.

“Each house is either with us or against us,” says Chad.

“You two don't even live in this neighborhood,” I say.

Chet scratches his ear. “Well, we get college credit if the mission here succeeds.”

Donald pulls me close, moves his body in front of me as if to shield me from the neighbors' eyes. “I'll find out who did this,” he whispers to me. “I have cameras they don't even know about, feeds beyond their wildest dreams.”

The driver is singed and shouting, “No, no, no! What the fuck?” No one moves to help him. His clothes are still slightly on fire. He looks around at all of us. He's wearing a pointed purple hat with embroidered stars. His pointer finger is outstretched,
and he moves it from family to family, yard to yard. “What kind of neighborhood is this?” he shouts. He says that this was only his first week driving the Wizsearch street-mapping car. Wizsearch has been expanding into online maps and is trying to get real-life pictures of every street. “It's supposed to be a public service. If you didn't want to be mapped, you could have opted out online!”

“You look just about ready to burst,” Diane Abelson says. She's standing in my doorway holding a casserole dish. She lets out a forced, high-pitched laugh.

“Another month or so to go,” I say. I'm thankful my belly is large enough to obscure my laptop screen. I reach my hand behind my back to close it.

Diane's eyes dart around the room. She mouths something that I can't make out. “I brought you my famous third-trimester tortellini!” Now she's talking much more loudly than necessary. “I ate this for a month straight with both Bobby and Susan!”

She hands me the casserole dish and then slides a note into my pocket. She steps back into the hallway and scans to see if anyone is there. “Well, I better be going. Hope to
hear
from you soon.”

After she leaves, I read the note. It tells me they know the room is bugged, so they can't talk. They want to know if I can broker a peace meeting, get the two sides to come to terms. “There is a phone in a plastic bag in the middle of the casserole. Use it outside, and Donald won't be able to monitor it. Call us if you can help end the madness.”

I drag all of my files—every neighbor I've gathered data on, each .doc of their life and .xls of their history—and place them in the recycle bin. I tell myself it's unhealthy to spend so much
time monitoring the lives of others and so little time looking at my own. Plus, when the twins finally arrive, I won't have time to look up my neighbors and video chat with masked faces. I'll be shaking brightly colored toys before their newborn eyes or watching to make sure they don't eat rat poison or loose nails.

I hover my cursor over the trash can icon. I click on it, and my breath gets short. I hit undo, sending the files flying back to the proper folders. There will always be time to delete them after the twins are born. I'll be able to make a clean break when that happens.

Until then, I fire up the browser and log back in.

And then one morning I wake up and the neighborhood is quiet. I don't hear the drones flying past. I don't hear Chet and Chad struggling with masked Donalds. I don't even hear the sounds of cars driving quickly down the street.

I get up and pee, wash my hands with antibacterial soap. I struggle to the window.

At the end of the street, I see two people being shoved into a patrol car. The rest of the houses have their driveways blocked off with police tape.

I move to my laptop, do a Wizsearch News search for “Middle Pond.” No results.

I look over at the casserole phone still in its plastic bag. I dial the preprogrammed contact, listen to it go straight to voicemail.

Someone taps spryly on the door.

Donald extends a handful of roses. His face is shaved, and he's wearing a new suit that fits just right. He looks nothing like the disheveled figure hunched over his charts in the basement I've been monitoring.

“It's all over, baby. We won, you and me.”

My heart is beating quickly, and I'm unsure what combination of fear, relief, and confusion is mixing in my head.

He hugs me and tells me he's taken down the cameras and will be renting the drones out for overhead photos of upscale weddings. “The North Lake Committee asked me to give you this.” He hands me a pendant of an eye surrounded by a white picket fence. The bottom says, “Sponsored by Wizsearch.”

“There will be a ceremony later, of course.” He pins it carefully to my blouse. “Margot, I have to say I had my doubts about you for a little while. I thought you were looking for kicks elsewhere, but I couldn't see the big picture. Obviously you knew I was monitoring your online activities. You knew I'd copy your files. Your research was the key to the whole operation's success. The data you had on the neighbors exposed it all: tax fraud, drug use, and everything else we needed to take them down.”

Donald takes me by the hand and leads me downstairs and out onto our front porch. “There'll be a housing depression for a little while, but with the bad elements gone, the market will stabilize before the twins are even in preschool.”

We step onto the trimmed green grass. I can feel the twins swimming inside me. The empty neighborhood they will be born into surrounds us. I look at the facade of the house across the street. It is similar to our house, but different. It has the garage on the left, and ours has the garage on the right.

NORTH AMERICAN MAMMALS

FILLING POOLS

P
eople say I have a baby face. You can look at me and pretend I'm drowning. I do this watery thing with my eyes. How you work the face is important in this line of work. Window to the soul and all that.

“Your child's childhood ain't your momma's childhood,” I tell the woman at the door. “Don't let nostalgia get in the way of safety.”

She has a six-year-old wrapped around her leg and a baby hooked into her arm. I can tell this lady is one who craves the visuals.

“One moment you're sipping ice tea on your lawn chair,” I say, rubbing my boot across the welcome mat. “The next moment, your little girl has bonked open her head on the bottom, chlorine rinsing her brain.”

The mom gets a twitch in her eye when I say that.

I fill in the deep ends of pools door-to-door. Make them all an even shallow. Learned how from videos online. It's a better business than you might think. All I have is a sump pump, a cement mixer, and some cans of blue paint. I had some other things, like a backhoe and a minivan, before the divorce. Now Sarah, my ex, has those things. Well, not the backhoe. The city repossessed that and then gave me a nice big fine.

The cement truck is mine and custom-made. A commercial cement mixer hooked up to the back of an '82 Ford.

“Is that thing up to regulation?” the woman at the door asks.

“Fuck the regulations,” I tell her. “We're talking about children's lives.”

I study faces a lot. I used to be a painter. I even sold a few portraits to Sarah's family, before the divorce. The woman in the doorway has a trustworthy face, soft and fuzzy like a
TV
interview lady.

“Is the mister around?” I say.

“I'm afraid the mister isn't ever around,” the lady says, looking down at the little girl. “He is, uh, on a long vacation.”

I nod my head sympathetically, offer a discounted rate, and hand over my card.

It all started when this showboat was doing backflips at night in the community pool. Apparently he had the deep end mixed up with the shallow. His lady friend ran screaming down the street buck naked.

I was there when they fished him out. If you wanted to see a good face, you should've seen his. All pop-eyed and head flopping around like a fish. It was disquieting.

The community was in an uproar on account of both this and the toddler who'd drowned last year during swim class, but City Hall wasn't doing anything. I knew a business opportunity when I saw one. Sarah was walking out the door for girls' night and gave me a face like,
Boy, I hope you know what you're doing.

My first job, so it was kinda lumpy. But there were a few people who might have said I was a hero. One newspaper did, and I carry a clipping around to show the customers.

I think my favorite faces are the faces of children. Like the next day, when I'm back at the lady's house, lowering a sump pump into the deep, and the little six-year-old is smushing her pudgy face right into the chain-link fence.

“What's your name?”

“Petunia,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, “like the flower.”

“No!” she shouts.

I hook up the hose to the pump and turn that sucker on. The girl's face gets all white and she runs inside.

It's a hot day, and I sit on a deck chair under a faded blue umbrella. Watching all that water being sucked into the sewer makes me wish I had a beer. A few minutes later, Petunia is back outside stuffing fish sticks in her face. She hands me one through the fence. It's still a bit frozen on the inside, but I swallow anyway.

“Thanks,” I say. I can see her mother watching behind the glass door. I give a little wave, flash my kindly neighbor face.

“Come around if you want,” I say, and I lie down in one of the pool chairs, listen to the sump pump churn. The sound reminds me that I need to call my ex-wife.

Straight to voicemail.

“It's good to hear your voice, Sarah,” I say. “Wondering if you can give me Bob's number.” Bob's our old plumber. I've got a burst seal in my basement. I pump it out every morning, but there's a new pool each night. “Let's let bygones be bygones. Also, let me know if you want to get coffee sometime.”

While I'm on the phone, Petunia opens the gate and sits down on a fun noodle near the pool's edge. I click the phone off, stuff it in my pocket.

“Why are you filling in our pool?” she says with an angry face.

“Just the deep end, baby-doll.”

“Why are you filling in the deep end?”

“So you don't die.”

She frowns and eats another fish stick. She walks to the edge and kicks a floaty duck into the pool, watches it lower inch by inch.

Backyard deep ends can go up to ten feet deep, which I level out to four. That's a lot of cement. Sometimes I toss little things down as it dries. A plastic truck or some coins, makeup or jewelry Sarah left at the house, whatever is around. They get covered up and left where no one will ever find them. You could fold a few bodies into that goop before it hardens.

After a day's work, I like to just drive around looking for splashes of blue over the fences. I keep a map of potential clients. What's funny about these neighborhoods is you drive around them enough, and they start to feel like a giant maze. You can't remember where anything is supposed to be. The faces of each house look the same as the last.

I give Sarah another call and again she doesn't pick up.