Jeff the Jerk

 

I was beginning to feel unsafe on my own property. My neighbor Jeff, the retired correctional officer, was living on the Hutchinson property to the east and had taken up target shooting. He'd also taken up drinking, and the combination was making me uneasy, as bullets would frequently stray onto my property, making a simple trip to the mailbox a life threatening proposition. Furthermore, he appeared to be enjoying my discomfort, and he seemed to be picking targets right in my path, so I'd have to play "Mother May I" just to get past him.

"Come on, Jeff!" I protested. "I need to get back up to the house."

<pew> <pew> <pew> <laughter>

"That's not funny!" I cried. "Do I need to call the cops?"

"Do I need to remind you that I AM the cops?" he retorted, invoking his sacred status as a retired law enforcement officer. 

<pew> <pew> 

"Look at him squirm!"

 <more laughter from Jeff and his drinking buddies>

"Jeff, we used to be friends," I said, appealing to some long buried shred of humanity inside the oafish brute. "You built my deck for me. You're not like this. What happened?"

His brother-in-law, a dark skinned man wearing a Panama hat, stepped out of the shadows. "What happened is...I thought you knew. Isn't it obvious?" 

He looked around the property and then back at Jeff with a gesture that somehow conveyed what should have been apparent to anyone with two eyes and a brain. The front yard was littered with beer cans, and the flower garden was untended. Quad tracks scarred the lawn, and a couple of vehicles sat on blocks with their hoods up and engines missing, hoses and wires issuing forth like entrails from their gutted carcasses. 

"How long has she been gone?" I asked.

"It's been four years," the brother-in-law said. "It was cancer. It ate her alive. But as you can see, what it has done to him is far worse."

I felt a wave of empathy for my neighbor and his misfortune, and guilt for my own inattention. I should have been aware of his struggle, but I'd been shamefully blind. How many times must I have passed him by without a word, without even the faintest inkling that something was wrong? And now it was too late. He'd turned into something unrecognizable, a feral bully of a man, an archetype, a meme, reprobate and inhuman.