The Beast of Barcroft (2 page)

S
UNDAY,
N
OVEMBER 9

Ben McKelvie watched a survival show on cable from his couch in Arlington, where the host, with an enthusiasm bordering on mania, was trekking across the Serengeti. The host stopped and unzipped his pants, and in his Australian accent said, “In this climate, dehydration can kill you in hours. I'm going to demonstrate how to create a solar still to distill my own urine!”

Ben shook his head at the television. “Oim gonna drink me own yoo-rine, so yew don't have to.”

Ben's greyhound lifted his head, one ear folded inside out. He had been sprawled out on the couch, leaving Ben little room, but as soon as he heard his master's voice, he perked up.

“All right, all right.”

The dog sprang from the couch.

On his way to the back door, Ben passed the small galley kitchen and found the garbage can's lid tilted up from all the trash. As he pulled the trash bag out and put a new one in, he saw movement through the window. Even in his torpor, his heart quickened. Was it a trick of the meds? He stared across the short distance between his house and the house of his neighbor and waited. Finally, he saw her drawn shades rattle. Then a large rat traversed the windowsill, between the blinds and the closed window. Disgusting, but not surprising. Once he had glanced over while making a cup of tea and spied her through the window, sitting on her couch in her bra, with a plump raccoon waddling across the couch's back, past her head.

It was hard to believe Madeleine Roux was dead. At thirty-eight, she had been only a few years older than him. It had been sudden. Her porch light was still on, and even in that, she defied the neighborhood. It was orange in color, bathing the façade of her brick home in a dim, eerie glow. Perpetual Halloween. A moment later, an even bigger rat darted past.

He made a face, but Bucky was at his heels. “All right, let's go.”

The greyhound squeezed between Ben and the door and bolted into the backyard as soon as he was able, nearly knocking Ben over with the trash. Ben cursed at Bucky, but his heart was not in it. The only thing that truly annoyed him anymore was that house.

He stepped out the back door into an unseasonably warm November night. He tried to appreciate it.

The dog ran back and forth along the length of the tall fence, sniffing and barking at whatever vermin still remained in Madeleine's yard instead of moving into her house. A corner of Ben's mouth curled upward. Other than filing complaints with the Department of Human Services, the only other weapon he had against the sprawl of filth was Bucky. A counter-irritant. But with Madeleine dead now, it seemed unnecessary. And maybe even cruel.

“All right, Buck. Do your business.”

In Barcroft, most houses were identical—modest brick homes built quickly after World War II to serve as a bedroom community for the influx of people to Washington, D.C. With the exception of an addition here and a deck there, most houses in Barcroft were indistinguishable from one another. Except Madeleine's. Ben had the misfortune to live next to the biggest blight in the county.

Structurally, the house was the same as his, another two-story brick built in the late 1940s, but the similarities ended there. Her masonry was crumbling, particularly along the chimney. The grass was so overgrown and the vegetation so thick that Ben thought it resembled a Southeast Asian jungle. Fortunately, she had a high wooden fence that concealed her backyard and a white picket fence that encased her front yard.

Worst of all, she had erected a large deck attached to the back of her house that terminated around an enormous elm tree. The tree was integrated into the deck, engulfed by it, and anchored a structure that resembled a chicken coop. Had Ben been five years old, it would have looked like a clubhouse. At thirty-five, it was an eyesore. Instead of walls, the wooden frame was connected by chicken wire, and beneath the deck was another level Ben could not see over the fence, even from his second-story windows. Ben and Rachel had moved in during the winter when the grass and vegetation were dead. The Realtor had glossed over the odd structure at the neighbor's, and they were so excited at the prospect of owning their own home in Arlington that they willfully ignored it. And Ben had not bothered to research his new neighbor. How bad could it be?

He learned his lesson almost immediately. The day they moved in, Madeleine sideswiped his car. He watched her stomp up his walkway in her strange gait, hunched over, dressed in shorts and a moth-eaten T-shirt in the dead of winter. It had been a minor accident, the damage to his car was small and cosmetic, but it was her appearance that unnerved him. She jabbered and her gaze darted all over the place, until it would suddenly fix on him without warning. “I'm really not a bad neighbor,” she assured him cheerfully, then tromped back down the walkway.

Things grew worse as soon as spring came. The grass grew, and when the neighbors woke their lawnmowers from hibernation to cut their lawns, hers continued to grow, ignored and unabated. It was as tall as his knees and growing. And on a run one morning, he caught his first glimpse of the raccoons, outside of their chicken wire cage. Three of them popped their heads over the fence as he jogged by. He peered through a gap in the fence and saw still more inside the strange structure, splayed and clinging to the chicken wire. Turns out it was a clubhouse, he thought, just not for people.

He never knew what animals the house was going to draw from the nearby woods, but it started with the birds. Hanging out a window, Madeleine routinely dumped twenty-pound sacks of birdseed onto the top of her back porch from her second floor, clouds of it wafting toward his house. That brought the pigeons, which roosted on her porch by the hundreds. Whenever Ben stepped outside, the birds would take to the sky en masse, the sound of their startled wings flapping in unison like a gunshot, jolting him every time. Before long, the side of the house and their cars were speckled with pigeon droppings.

In the summer, when the grass in her yard went from knee-high to thigh-high, he finally called the county. Arlington issued a citation and she hired someone to cut the grass, but his mower cut out at the end of every row. One Saturday afternoon, through open windows, Ben could hear the man speaking to someone on his cellphone, his voice desperate and cracking. “No, you don't
understand
. I've never seen anything like it.”

Unfortunately, the freshly trimmed yard revealed another problem—rats. With the steady supply of food in the form of bird droppings and water that swamped her yard from a garden hose Madeleine ran twenty-four hours a day for her raccoons, her yard was a haven for vermin. With their grass cover now gone, they fled into the surrounding neighborhood. Burrows appeared beneath the fence separating Ben's and Madeleine's yards. Rat droppings accumulated in piles. Half-eaten rats themselves were found in his yard, gifts from Madeleine's wild cats, which Ben could never keep an accurate count on.

Ben attended the next neighborhood meeting at the Barcroft Community House. The neighborhood was in an uproar. The local councilwoman, dressed in a power suit and a brittle smile, attempted to calm the riled crowd. “I hear all of your concerns, but if everyone does their part—”

A tall man with a southern accent stood up. “Ma'am, all due respect, this is bullshit. Let's call a spade a spade here. We all know the problem is stemming from one individual. The only question is: What are you going to do about it?”

“Again, I empathize with you, but the county can only cite an individual when complaints are made. The individual has thirty days to comply or a fine will be levied.”

It was maddening. After the meeting, Ben introduced himself to the seething tall man by telling him his address. His neighbor's face went from seething to incredulous. “Wait a minute, you're the next-door neighbor?”

Ben nodded.

“Brother, why am I just meeting you now?”

It was a legitimate question, Ben thought. It was his first meeting. He had spent the spring traveling back and forth to New Jersey, tending to his ailing father. When his father finally succumbed to the cancer, he suddenly found himself with time to fill and plenty of anger to burn. Since there was no breezy way to tell the man all of that, he said nothing. It was a rhetorical question anyway.

The man put his arm around Ben and yelled, “Lisa, get over here! This is the idiot who moved next door to her!”

That was how Ben met Jim, his best friend in Barcroft.

Jim introduced Ben to the rest of the neighbors on 3rd Street South, who were thrilled to have another join their ranks against Madeleine. They pumped him for information, and Ben was frustrated enough to share everything he knew. They were also eager to gossip about their own horror stories with her. The knot of neighbors pieced together her history for Ben. She had come from Seattle about ten years before, and at first, she was lovely. She was a practicing psychiatrist, until she began self-medicating. Then came harder drugs, eventually leading to her license being revoked. “After that,” said Jim, “she became a licensed raccoon rehabilitator.”

“Is that even a thing?” asked Ben.

“Whenever a raccoon gets run over or something and leaves behind babies, she takes them in. How you get a permit for this in Arlington, three miles from the damn Fourteenth Street Bridge…” He threw up his hands.

Jim's wife, Lisa, a nurse, leaned in. “I'm not supposed to say this, but she comes into my emergency room every couple of months to be treated for animal bites. Raccoons are not friendly.”

A white-haired man named Stuart, tall and stooped, raised his hand to continue where Jim had left off. He had piercing blue eyes, and as he extended his finger to continue, there was just enough of a flourish to capture Ben's attention and he suddenly remembered seeing the man at the summer block party, performing a magic show for the neighborhood children. He liked him instantly. “With the alcohol and street drugs, she started sideswiping cars. And she fed the birds beyond all common sense. She'd just dump a bag of seed on her front lawn and every chipmunk, rat, and rabbit in the D.C. metro area came to 3rd Street. Foxes too! One turned out to be rabid and the county had to come out and put it down. We all banded together and knocked on her door, begging her to see the light, but she kicked us off her property and put up a fence instead.”

“So that's why she dumps the seed in her backyard now.”

Stuart nodded.

An older woman who stood just outside the ring of neighbors made a clucking noise. “Fence doesn't do me a damn bit of good. She runs her garden hose 'round the clock so her critters can have running water. My yard is swamped more often than not.”

“Shit runs downhill,” said Jim.

“And Hazel is definitely in downhill territory,” said Stuart.

“What do you two know? You're at the top of the block. You don't have to contend with the rats or the runoff,” she said, then leveled a gaze at Ben, adding, “or the barking dogs.”

Ben looked at his feet. “All the animals stir him up…”

“Don't worry about it, man,” said Jim. “Hazel could hit the lottery and she'd bitch about the taxes.”

Hazel continued, unfazed. “I was having a toilet installed once, and out of the pipes sprang five long, skinny rats. One right after the other. Five long, skinny rats, I tell you…” She glared at Ben, relishing her moment in the spotlight.

“Eye on the prize, Hazel,” said Stuart. “What are we going to do?”

“We organize,” said Jim. “We file complaints, one right after another, forever and ever amen. We rotate. At the end of thirty days, one of us files another. Tall grass, rats, bird droppings, whatever. We get our Big Bad Wolf on and we huff and we puff until we blow that goddamn house down. You in, next-door neighbor?”

Ben thought of his house and car, perpetually caked in pigeon shit, and the rat burrows multiplying beneath his fence, eroding the barrier between him and chaos.

“Hell, yeah, I'm in.”

That was four months ago. A month later, Rachel left. Or was it two months? He did not remember anymore, and the antidepressants made it so that he did not care. All he remembered was that it was hot the day she moved out, which made loading her car even more brutal.

Ben stood in the center of the yard, looking at the top of Madeleine's bizarre clubhouse, just visible over the fence, while Bucky sniffed the ground and squatted at intervals. Even at her age, just a couple of years older than Ben, Madeleine had been taken by the drugs and the filth. It was not the solution Ben wanted. It was, in fact, not even a solution. The animals remained.

Bucky finished his business and began running figure eights around the yard. He was never more exuberant than right after relieving himself. It would take a minute to calm him down. Ben looked around, saw no lights on in Hazel's or the other neighboring houses, then unzipped his fly. The landed Virginia gentry, he thought to himself.

He blew a cool jet of air in front of him, then looked at the moon, now dotting Madeleine's crumbling chimney. He saw movement in the window on her back porch. Too big for a rat. A cat? When she fell ill, Animal Control came and liberated her menagerie of pets. Had they left a straggler?

The dog whined behind him.

“Just a second, Buck. You had your turn.”

He finished, then turned toward the dark corner of his yard, opposite Madeleine's. Bucky was lounging in the bushes like he was back on the couch. He was mostly hidden, but his paws were splayed out, not a care in the world.

“You're killing me, Buck. Now I have to clean you. Let's go.”

Ben was halfway to the bush when Bucky's legs slid from view.

He was trying to process how the dog could move like that, his four paws kicked out as they were, when he went cold. He felt the growl before he heard it, a vibration in the air between him and the greenery, twenty feet from where he stood. The hairs on his arms and neck stood up. The skin around his testicles tightened.