Caught Red-Handed

by Jan Burke

  In every nearly perfect suburban neighborhood, there is the family that makes it “nearly” instead of “perfect.” In ours, it was the Nabbits. You could find the Nabbit house without a street number. I would sometimes use its distinctive features to guide other people to my own home. “We live across the street from the house with the pick-up truck parked on the lawn,” I’d say. Or, “Look for the old mattress propped up against the side of the garage, then pull into the driveway directly opposite the box springs.”

  Sarah Cummings, who owned the pristine property to the right of the Nabbits, had warned us about these troublemakers from the day we moved into the neighborhood. “I call them the ‘Dag Nabbits,’” she said. “Nola Nabbit is a tramp. You watch. If Napolean’s army had been as big as the one that has marched through Nola’s bedroom doors, they’d be speaking French in Moscow today. Daisy, the little girl, is okay. But the kid! He’s a mess.”

  The kid was Ricky. Ricky Nabbit, I soon learned, was a frequent guest of the California Youth Authority. He had a seasonal habit of breaking into houses, shoplifting, and other purely selfish acts.

  “As long as it’s baseball season,” Sarah told me, “We won’t have any trouble. He’s a baseball nut. But every winter”—here, Sarah shivered—“he robs somebody.”

  When Sarah heard that I would be working out of my home, she was elated. “Maybe you can help keep an eye on things,” she said. Specifically, she meant Ricky Nabbit.

  We had moved into our home in the spring of the year when Ricky turned fourteen. I would watch him walk home from baseball practice at the nearby park. Skinny, clean-cut, and looking smartly athletic in his uniform, he wore a glove so often, I had visions of him eating with the mitt on his left hand.

  Sometimes I would see Ricky sitting on the front porch, oiling his glove, while from inside the house, I heard his mother and her boyfriend shouting obscenities at one another at the top of their lungs. Even with the doors and windows closed, we could hear them. This was especially true during the months when Clyde Who Parks on the Front Lawn reigned over the household.

  Clyde was, perhaps, no worse than his predecessors. No more a loudmouth lowlife than Bellamy the Belcher (whose wide-ranging eructative skills included saying the word “breast” as he burped) or Horace the Hornblower (who honked his car horn at all hours, as a mere introduction to rolling down his window and hollering “Nola! Get your ass out here!”). These were not their real names, of course, but my husband and I used this system to refer to them when lamenting our luck.

  Nola stayed with Clyde for most of the season, but broke up with him just before the World Series with a world-class drunken brawl in the middle of the street. Nola got a shiner, Clyde got the boot.

  Our doorbell rang a few days later, and when I looked out through the peephole, I was surprised to see Daisy standing on our front porch. She had long blond hair and beautiful green eyes, but was shy and slightly overweight. She was carrying a big cardboard box full of canisters of candy.

  She stammered out a good afternoon and asked if I would buy some candy for her church school fundraiser.

  “Church school?” I asked.

  She turned a deep red, and stepped back. If she had been a turtle, I would have been looking at nothing but a shell. I waited, tried to smile my encouragement. She swallowed hard and then explained that she attended a private school operated by a church. The church she named was a conservative Christian sect.

  Even though her church school was part of a denomination other than our own, I bought a canister, telling myself that I was doing my bit for ecumenism and good neighborly relations.

  I was leaving the house some hours later and saw her returning home, still carrying her box, looking weary and somewhat dejected. I noticed that the box was still nearly full.

  “Daisy!” I called.

  You would think I had fired a shot over her head. She halted, shrank back, and nearly dropped the box. As I crossed the street toward her, her eyes grew wide.

  I stopped a few feet away from her. Out of striking distance. She relaxed a little. “I just remembered,” I said, “that I need some gifts for some clients. The candy would be perfect. Could I buy more?”

  She looked at me in complete puzzlement.

  “Perhaps those ones you have with you have been spoken for?”

  She shook her head. “N-n-no,” she said, finally coming out of her daze. “No, ma’am, they aren’t.”

  I bought the rest of the box, and took it home. She thanked me politely and stared after me as I crossed the street. By the time I had set the candy inside my foyer and returned to my car, she had disappeared inside her house.

  “What the hell are you doing buying all this candy?” my husband asked that night. “I thought you were trying to lose weight.”

  “You’re so gallant,” I said. “Now, by my count, there’s a missing canister. Are you going to share any of it?”

  He grinned and went to retrieve his pirated treasure, then unwrapped the foil covering on a chocolate morsel and hand-fed it to me. “Mmmm,” I said.

  “I agree,” he said. “But are we converting to a new religion?”

  I explained what had happened with Daisy.

  “You,” he said, “are too easy.”

  “Gallant again.”

  * * *

  A week later, Ricky came by and asked if he could wash our car. “Sure,” I said, and paid him a dollar more than he’d asked, on the theory that honestly earned money might start to appeal to him. He washed our car every weekend until the rains started in November.

  He was always charming and polite. My husband agreed that we were better off making a friend of this kid than an enemy. Sarah Cummings told me I’d live to regret my kindness.

  With the November rains, the Nabbit’s lawn grew taller; fast-food containers littered their front yard. Their dog, a mangy Basset hound that smelled as if it had never been bathed, continued to use the neighbors’ lawns as his outhouse. (If American factories had the output that dog did, we’d be the most productive country in the world.) Nola stayed up late and laughed louder than the music she played. When she left for work, the hound bayed all day.

  The Suburban Avenger knew it was an old trick. She placed the paper bag filled with gathered dog droppings on the front porch, lit it on fire, rang the doorbell, and ran. With glee, she watched Nola Nabbit stomp the fire out. You can use old tricks on some dogs, the Avenger mused . . .

  The Cummingses put up a low wrought-iron fence and planted Italian cypress on the side that bordered the Nabbits. The Fredericks, on the other side, did the same, but planted rose bushes. The Cummingses called the police whenever the music was played after ten o’clock. Nola started turning the radio off exactly at ten, and shouting “Good night, you old bitch!” toward the Cummings’ house.

  Around Thanksgiving, Mrs. Ogden, a seventy-year-old woman who lived next door to us, asked me to keep an eye on her house while she paid an overnight visit to her granddaughter. When she returned, she discovered that her home had been burgled; her jewelry, her stereo, a small television set and her secret stash of cash were gone. I felt guilty, even though Mrs. Ogden didn’t blame me in the least. “You have to sleep sometime, honey,” she said. “I wasn’t hiring you as a guard. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get some of it back. I etched my driver’s license number on the stereo and TV.”

  As it turned out, the thief was caught trying to fence Mrs. Ogden’s stereo and later arrested, tried, and convicted. The thief was Ricky Nabbit.

  I didn’t hear much about him for a couple of years. Sarah told me that he didn’t get much of a sentence, partly because his father, who lived in a trailer park about five hundred miles north of us, had agreed to let Ricky live with him for a time.

  About the time Ricky left, Nola got a new boyfriend. Doug seemed to be as rough a fellow as most of the others, but soon we all noticed a ch
ange. No loud fights or partying sounds late at night. The yard was cleaned up. The place still wasn’t painted, the hound continued to leave its calling cards, and Nola drank less but still swore like a sailor. Still, on the whole, things seemed to improve. We couldn’t even come up with a nickname for Doug.

  “It’s been fairly quiet,” the neighbors would say to one another. They always looked at the Nabbit house when they said it.

  Then Ricky came home.

  He was over sixteen by that summer, and much taller. He had filled out, become stronger. He seemed less lively than he had been at fourteen, and there was a surliness in his expression that had not been there before.

  At night, we began to hear Nola shouting. Doug left a week later. Daisy seemed quieter and paler. Of her, we only saw a girl carrying books to and from the house. And, as I did every year, I bought a case of her candy. I was getting better at giving it away before my husband and I ate more than a single can of it.

  Ricky’s friends started coming over to the Nabbit house to play ball. Ricky had been kicked out of the baseball league some time before (for stealing more than bases from the opposing team), but his love of the game remained. He practiced on the front lawn.

  “Hey, batter, batter,” I would hear them chant, day in, day out. They played with a light plastic ball, shouted “I got it,” “Foul ball,” and “No way am I out,” “Steeee—riiiiike!” as well as certain other remarks that would have cost a Boy Scout his good sportsmanship badge. Ricky was not a Boy Scout.

  The shouting and the noise was annoying, yet we saw no reason to lodge a complaint. They were just kids, after all. And as long as he was playing baseball, Ricky could be seen by his nervous neighbors, none of whom had welcomed him back.

  Ricky ignored all of us. He became industrious enough to mount a light on the garage roof, illuminating his small playing field for night games of catch. That this light also illuminated our bedroom was not something Ricky was thinking about. Ricky, we had discovered, didn’t think about other people, except as a means to an end.

  The Suburban Avenger had been waiting for this night. The Nabbits’ car had been parked in front of her house, doors unlocked. She secured the frozen anchovy under the seat springs, driver’s side. She might not be present when the discovery was made, still she would know that revenge had been, well, reeked . . .

  It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in September when the hardball hit the bedroom window, shattering it. I was in another room, and rushed in to see large shards of glass on my husband’s pillow, splinters of glass everywhere else. If the game of catch had taken place a few hours earlier, or later . . . I ran outside.

  Two boys, Ricky and a kid he called Ted, stared up at the broken window. Although no one else played baseball anywhere near my home, I suspect they would have run away without owning up to the damage. But to Ricky’s great misfortune, Sarah had been in her front yard when the baseball was thrown.

  Nola came out of her house, too, ready to defend her chick against Sarah—until she saw the window.

  “It’s Ted’s fault,” Ricky said immediately. “He was supposed to catch it.”

  I reached down and picked up the ball, which had been prevented from going though the window by the screen.

  “Hardball?” Nola shrieked. “What got into you, Ricky? Playing with a goddamned hardball!”

  Ricky had no answer.

  Looking nervously between Sarah and me, she grabbed on to her son’s elbow and said, “This is going to come out of the money you earned at the swap meet, Ricky.” I groaned inwardly, wondering which of my neighbors’ stolen goods might be sold to pay for my window. “I think you owe this lady an apology,” Nola went on. I got a grudging “Sorry,” from Ricky and Ted.

  She eyed the window. “I think I’ve got a piece of glass that might fit,” she said. “Ricky can fix it.”

  “No thanks,” I said, envisioning Ricky with an opportunity to case my house for a future burglary. “I’d rather have a professional glass company do it.”

  The glass company charged forty-five dollars to fix the window. That left us with the clean-up. I did that myself. I told Ricky he could pay me back in five dollar increments over nine weeks. He smiled and said that would be fine.

  When the first payment was due and no five dollar bill appeared, I interrupted the next baseball game. A complicated tale of woe that would have won applause from Scherazade was given to me, along with the information that Ted would be paying for the window, not Ricky.

  “We’ll have it tomorrow for sure,” Ted said. Ricky just smiled.

  My husband and I began arguing. I should have asked for all of the money from Nola on the day it happened, he said. I never should have made the agreement about the five dollars. I was too soft. I should have let him handle it. We were never going to see that forty-five dollars.

  More days and more tales of woe, more smiles from Ricky and more arguments between my husband and me. Finally—after my husband refused to be budged from Nola’s front doorstep, a payment was made. Twenty of the forty-five.

  Sarah and I became better friends. It dawned on me that she had long sought an ally in her own battles with the Nabbits. “Don’t let the Nabbits turn us into rabbits,” she would proclaim.

  At eleven P.M., the Suburban Avenger sought her secret weapon. The baseball game had just ended, but the lights were still glaring on the field. The Nabbits had driven off to the store to buy more beer. The Avenger took the ice-cold water from the refrigerator and filled the trusty spray bottle. She knew she only had a few moments to act. She took her stance, steadied her weapon. Stream setting again. Squeezed the trigger. Her aim, perfected from practice on a certain Basset hound, was true. As the icy water hit each hot lightbulb, the bulbs went out with a satisfying pop and the Avenger returned to her hideout with time to spare . . .

  The city changed to automated trash collection in October, and like other households, our four, individual, thirty-gallon trash cans were replaced with one large, wheeled monstrosity provided by the city. The rules were clearly stated. The attached lid on the new container must be closed when placed at the curb. No overloading. If you threw away more than what fit in the trash can, you paid a charge for excess trash.

  With two adults using a trash can designed to hold the trash of a family of five, we had no problems staying within the limits. But from the first week of the new program, there was trouble. I put the trash out, and went inside. Later, when I went out to place the recycling bin at the curb, I noticed our trash can, like the Nabbits’, was overflowing. When I lifted the lid, I discovered that the Nabbits had placed several bags of their trash into our trash can.

  I began to wait until Nola had left for work to put the trash out. Inconvenient, but effective. And it meant that I put the trash out every week, instead of sharing the chore with my husband.

  My husband bewildered me by siding with Nola on this issue. He thought my outrage was wholly unjustified. “What if they’re dumping something toxic into our trash can? Something illegal?” I asked.

  “It’s just trash,” he said. Then, for good measure, added, “We’ll never see that twenty-five dollars.”

  It was after he left for work that morning that my Suburan Avenger fantasies began. As the afternoon wore on, I was shocked at the avenues my own imagination would take in the name of righteous anger. I wanted to plant my fist in Ricky’s smiling face.

  In the next moment, I was ashamed of myself for thinking such a thing. Was this the result of watching westerns as a kid? Too much violence on TV? Was I reading too many mysteries?

  I calmed down. The Suburban Avenger would be forced to stay in the realm of imagination. I needed to find a legal remedy. I went to the library and checked out a well-worn book on suing in small claims court, and began the process. I was finally becoming a true Californian. I was going to sue someone.

  I realized that I had
only heard the Nabbits’ last name. Were there two t’s or one? Two b’s or one? I tried the phone directory. No Nola Nabbit listing.

  The Suburban Avenger whispered in my ear.

  I let my husband put the trash out.

  After he left for work, but long before the garbage trucks arrived, I checked my trap. Sure enough, the trash can was bulging with added material. I felt nothing but smug satisfaction as I pulled a bag of Nabbit trash from the trash can, took it into my backyard and set it on a table I used for gardening.

  My excitement built as I rummaged—wearing old clothes and a pair of rubber gloves—through the Nabbit bag. Few things can tell our secrets as thoroughly as our trash will. The courts had long ago ruled that once a person put their trash out at a curb, the expectation of privacy was gone. Trash was fair game. Even if Nola hadn’t dumped the bag in my trash can, it would have been legal to search it. Still, I felt better knowing that she had walked the bag over to my side of the street. She should keep her trash out of my trash can, or be prepared to suffer the consequences.

  It didn’t take long to find an envelope addressed to Nola. It was marked “Please open immediately” and came from the electric company. It contained a past due notice. I didn’t want to slog through the beer bottles, coffee grounds, and cigarette butts that made up the next layer of the bag. I had what I needed. Feeling bad about not recycling the beer bottles, but knowing their presence in my recycling bin would be a dead giveaway, I hauled the Nabbit trash bag back out to the container at the curb.

  I typed up the forms needed to begin the process of suing Nola, and filed them down at the courthouse. She bellowed her outrage in her typical fashion when the papers were served.

  In December, our case went to trial. She dressed like a hooker for court and made a wholly inarticulate case for her defense. When the judge failed to accept her theory that Ted should be responsible for the damage, she shook her fist at him and insulted his antecedents, which undoubtedly did not help her in the least.