Seanna (n. shaw-nuh): Life with the Neighbors VI

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

When last we were in the mid 1990s with Wanda and Darryl, trees were coming down in unintended locations and with unintended results. Here is the tail end of Life with the Neighbors, Part V:

Darryl and his brother were backing the brother’s truck back into Darryl’s yard. I couldn’t really see what was happening but I watched as they finished chaining it up to the back of Darryl’s brother’s truck and then heard the chainsaws start up again. I took the children inside and told them to stay over on the far side of the house and then went back outside. This time, I made it out just in time to see another large tree starting to topple. It teetered right toward my bedroom roof, and then a little the other way, until it came crashing down through a section of the back of Darryl’s fence. This was clearly not the intended result. It was at this point Darryl got himself up on whatever they put against their fence when they wanted to, uh, observe us and told me that I should get inside and stay away from their side of our house.

I think I was just too stunned to really say anything to old Darryl, so I just went back inside the house and tried to wake up my husband, who by this time was working nights and sleeping during the day. Our room was most definitely in the strike zone of Darryl and his other brother Darryl, but my husband was too unconscious to care, so he risked an ugly crushing death in order to remain that way.

Fortunately, the Darryls managed to bring down the remaining tree without incident, and we all did indeed live to see another day.

Not too long after the tree v. fence incident, a black kitten showed up. Do I really need a more perfect foreshadowing tool than a black cat? I’ll let you be the judge. You can think of this kitten as the one who brings us to the true meat of the story. He’s going to give us a lot of mileage, that young black kitty. He showed up out of nowhere. I would estimate he was about 5 months old or so. We did not let him in our house, but we did feed him and the girls played with him. He was quite a friendly little thing. I believe Wanda and Darryl’s children also played with him. However, at no time did they claim ownership of the kitten or give any indication that he belonged to them. In fact, I’m sure they went out of their way to avoid any sort of pet owner/adorable black kitten formal relationship, and I’m also sure you will soon agree with me.

Did I mention along the way that my husband and I were enrolled in school by this stage of the game? The littlest children were only around two or three years old, and their big sister was getting ready to start kindergarten, so we decided to try to get back to school and finish up. Fortunately for us, we had Shannon and Audie, the teenage babysitters I believe I have mentioned before. Shannon joined the family when the smallest girls were 8 months old, and Audie (actually Andrea but the girls called her Audie so that’s what we call her to this day) followed along shortly after that. We had mostly afternoon or early evening classes so that one or both girls could come over and babysit after school. The arrangement usually worked quite well. Usually. One of my classes was a physical fitness class. I believe we could choose from an assortment of options, including Jazzercise. That’s how I found myself taking afternoon Jazzercise 3 times a week at one of the local gyms. By now it was 1994, I believe. For the youngsters who are reading this, guess what we had even back in 1994? CELL PHONES. I know. They were the size of bricks and almost as heavy (OK maybe a slight exaggeration), but we had ‘em. I believe they were called “car phones” back then. Definitely not cell phones. Anyway, so I had a phone that I lugged around with me in case there was an emergency with the children while I was out and about. This was a colossal waste of money, since our babysitters were these uber-confident, super-qualified young ladies. Except for one late afternoon in the fall of 1994. It was actually November 1st. I remember my husband remarking that Wanda had asked him if he had seen the stray black kitty around that afternoon, but then he went off to class. I had been a little worried about the kitty because the night before was Halloween and sometimes kids go looking for black cats on whom to perpetrate cliched evils, but I didn’t think too much about it other than that. I had just left my Jazzercise class and was going to pop on over to the campus to join my fabulous husband for the humanities class we were both taking when my CAR PHONE rang. It was Shannon. All these years later, and I still remember exactly what she said:

“Your neighbor is a kook, and I can’t handle this situation.”

I still remember where I was on the road when this happened. Shannon went on to explain that apparently, unbeknownst to everyone except Wanda, Wanda had run over the little black kitty that afternoon as she backed her van down the driveway to pick up her two boys from school. Rather than do something that normal people might do, she just kept going, down the driveway, down the road, leaving Little Black Kitty (LBK) all run over, hurt and damaged. Apparently when she returned, she set out to look for LBK, but he had dragged himself off somewhere, presumably to avoid getting run over when she returned from picking up her children. However, she left that detail out when she asked my husband if he had seen LBK.

Unfortunately for Shannon, Wanda apparently decided, in her gathering wisdom with respect to the LBK situation, that she needed to come over and ring our doorbell. Repeatedly. Shannon told me that she actually got the feeling that Wanda was trying to talk about her LBK vs. minivan episode loud enough for my children to hear her, so that they would get upset. By this point she had located LBK, and so her point in coming over was a little unclear. I do recall Shannon relating that at one point she let Shannon in on the plan whereby Darryl was going to his brother’s house on his way home to pick up a shotgun so that he could put the cat out of its misery. Shannon, a big animal—especially cats—lover, was horribly distressed by this notion. Not only that, but she was growing increasingly unnerved at the multiple Wanda visits and by Wanda’s seeming determination to upset my children.

So, instead of going to Loyal van Dyke’s humanities class to join my husband for another fun trek into the Renaissance Period (really, we totally dug it, not being sarcastic at all), I found the car pointed toward home. I had grown kind of fond of LBK myself by that point, and I decided that I could live with many things, but the idea of Darryl ( a ) bringing home a shotgun; and ( b ) actually shooting LBK, was incompatible with me being able to sleep at night. So I came home, and Shannon and I brought the children down to the normal neighbors’ house. We briefly filled them in on the situation and then we got a box. Shannon and I then went over to Wanda’s front yard. It did not take long at all to locate LBK. This is because he was wailing in much the way you expect a wounded animal to wail, causing quite a racket. He was huddled up against the front wall of their house, under a little shrub, I believe. I asked Shannon to put the cat in the box, and I do not believe I had any intention of having a conversation with Wanda. However, she came to the door and stepped outside, so I went up to her front door. She wanted to know what we were doing, and I explained that since she was not going to do the decent thing for this animal, I was going to do it for her and get it to a vet to be put down in a humane way. She said something like “Can’t you just wait until Darryl gets here? He will be here soon.” I said, “Don’t you think this poor cat has had to wait long enough?” Well, that made her mad. That’s when Wanda learned to fear me. She started to come toward me and I knew, absolutely believed then, no doubt in my mind now, that she was going to put her hands on me. The red veil of rage passed in front of my face, which has only happened just a small handful of times in my life. Have you ever literally seen red? It actually happens to people sometimes, or at least it has for me a few times. I’m not really proud of what I did next, but in retrospect it probably saved one or both of us from an ugly, embarrassing police record. I gave her the only warning she was going to get, so I made it a really good one: “If you lay one finger on me, I will rip your fu**ing heart out through your throat.” If I didn’t say exactly that, it was very close. And it was very, very effective, because I really meant it and I am sure I was selling it with my whole self. Wanda correctly interpreted the danger she was in and jumped back inside her house. I could literally see the fear in her eyes. Then she screamed for her son to get the phone so she could call the police and told me to get off her property. Fortunately, by this time Shannon had corralled the wailing cat and we hurried to the car and headed toward the vet’s office before they closed for the day.

At the vet’s office, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that LBK had a fractured leg and possibly some internal injuries, but the vet thought it was quite possible that he might survive, if he survived the next 24 hours. We were told to put him somewhere quiet and keep an eye on him, and I was given a bill for $78.40, which I paid even though money was quite hard to come by back then and it was going to be a little bit of a hardship. Then we loaded the cat into the car and went back to the house so Shannon could get her books and go back to her house. I also needed to put the cat into the bathroom of our house and get him settled. Well, by the time we did that and came back out, Wanda had figured out that we were back. I remember she was in her back yard, perched up on their lookout and then practically straddling the top of the fence, cordless phone in hand and screaming at me. She let me know that she had already called the police, for which I thanked her, and then as we got ready to leave again, I remember she screamed out, “Get back here, you RED-HEADED BITCH!!!!” That’s always made me sort of chuckle. Whoa. Call me anything but not RED-HEADED. That’s just too low.

Off we went, and the details are little fuzzy now, but Shannon and I went to get my husband at school. I had to go into our class, call him out, and then he had to excuse himself and leave. For some reason, we ended up driving back by the house.

This time, Darryl was there. And this time instead of me promising bad scenarios to Wanda, it was Scotty who was pushed too far, and he went after Darryl…

…and that’s where I will leave it for now, this having been a long installment. Coming up will be a visit by the police, a Darryl soliloquy we repeat often around the house even to this day, and the emergence of more insanity as Wanda and Darryl lie to their children about the fate of LBK and encourage them to mourn him, complete with crosses and black roses. Ohhhh, good times. And although this event I am in the middle of relating to you is the catalyst, what follows it is even more dangerous and more bizarre. 90% of the iceberg is still underwater, right?