Straight Man

right though. Later that week a yellow bulldozer, a grader, and a large earthmover materialized along the shoulder of our county road, and for the next two days the air was thick with dust from falling trees. From our front deck Lily and I had a pretty good view. It was late November and the branches were barren, making the hill on the opposite side of the road visible. Red surveyors’ stakes were planted like winter blooms all over the hillside, mapping out lots and marking the twistings and turnings of the new access road.
    “I thought Harry told us the state owned all the land on the other side of the road,” I said to Lily, who had joined me on the snowy deck to watch.
    “Now you don’t want people to live across the road,” she observed. “You get more misanthropic every day.”
    “I get older every day,” I pointed out. I do not now and did not then consider myself a curmudgeon, but I can play that role. “My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.”
    “Actually,” she said, “you just get more like your father.”
    I knew better than to argue when Lily introduces my father into an argument. It signals a willingness on her part to get down and dirty. Further, it’s an invitation for me to raise the issue of her own father, and I know where accepting such an invitation will lead. “The difference is that my father enjoys being him,” I told her. “Whereas I hate it.”
    This must have sounded like some kind of concession to her, because she did not pursue her advantage. “Wish now that you’d sold to Rourke?”
    “Good lord, no.”
    “You may, though. He’s going to hate you forever.”
    This did not strike me as a crystal ball type prediction. I reminded her that Rourke had hated me long before I refused to sell him the lot, that he was predestined to hate me, that he was, after all, a demented rationalist, that his field (eighteenth-century English poetry) was the dullest in the long history of literature, that Rourke was a bitter renegade Catholic and failed seminarian, that he couldn’t quite eliminate the old theology he’d come to despise, that it gave him Jesuit gas. Had I allowed him to become our neighbor, proximity would have provided him with a dozen more reasons to hate me. And, living right next door, where he could keep an eye on my comings and goings, he might even have found by this time some way of murdering me and making it look like an accident. Whereas, if he wanted to kill me now he’d have to cross the street, pass houses occupied by Jacob Rose’s ex-wife, the ex–football coach’s ex-wife, and other ex-wives who know me. I consider these ex-wives my last line of defense.
    For a while, though, I doubted even they would protect me, because the new development—Allegheny Estates II—was ill-fatedfrom the beginning. Though to the naked eye our hills were identical Siamese twins, joined at a slender blacktop vertebra, the houses on the other side seemed cursed. Over there, when it rained everyone’s basement filled with water. Mud slid down the hill and formed an impressive mound at the base of the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the development. Under pressure, the pillars themselves began to lean inward perceptibly. Every wooden deck in the development was warped, and on quiet summer nights, on our side of the road, you could now and then actually hear the sound of a two-by-four snapping across the way.
    If all of this weren’t enough, a plague of gypsy moths defoliated the entire forest that surrounded Allegheny Wells one summer, giving us a wintry look in July, allowing those of us on the charmed side of the road a good view of life on the doomed side. The following summer the leaves returned to our hill, their green doubly bright and lush, while across the way more serious damage had mysteriously been done. There many trees died and had to be felled, increasing the severity of the mud slides, while the few remaining trees strained to produce anemic-looking foliage, which turned yellow-brown in early August.
    For all this—the flooded basement, the fissure in the family room wall, the mud he has to drive through between the tilting pillars at the entrance to Allegheny Estates II, even the gypsy moths—Paul Rourke holds me personally responsible. His protestations to the contrary, I know Rourke to be a profoundly religious man, not at all an atheist as he claims. His truest belief is in an evil deity whose sole purpose is to tax and heap