October 4, 2008

• Freaks: Control and Otherwise

  [edited several times from the original, as I have recalled more details]

  You may recall the “rhubarb security tunnel,” the sight-line through the trees and bushes, that Doug and I trimmed so that I could see my garden from my window.  One morning a couple of months ago, I looked out that window and saw, at the end of the tunnel, a vehicle parked in the roadside ditch.  When it hadn’t moved for several days, I asked Doug to go take a closer look.  He came back and told me it was the abandoned truck that had been parked in the driveway next door.

  That truck had been left there, in Grayhorse’s yard (not to be confused with my Old Fart Greyfox, or with Gray Wolf, the other guy around here who is sometimes confused with Greyfox and Grayhorse) a year or three ago, when the man who had been renting the place just disappeared, leaving several dogs behind for my neighbor Lori, the animal control officers, and me, to care for.

  I then called Walt, Lori’s ex, who lives just on the other side of Grayhorse’s place, and asked him if he knew how that truck got in my yard.  He said it had been moved there by “the people from the motel,” who had moved in and were fixing up Grayhorse’s place.  At my request, Doug walked around the corner and talked to the people who had just moved in.  They said that it wasn’t their truck and they had no plans to move it from my yard.  Doug got the impression that it would do no good to try and reason with them.

  The motel, down on the corner next to the highway, is the place where the meth lab had been busted a few years ago.  I don’t know if the current crop of freaks were around there at that time or not.  If they are not the actual ones that were there then, they are at least members of the same species of freak.  In the intevening weeks, we have noticed that part of the motel was being demolished, and the lumber apparently being used for renovations on Grayhorse’s cabin.

  The old truck, a Mazda on flat tires with a bed full of junk and garbage, remained where it is.  A couple of weeks ago, I called the Troopers and asked if abandoned vehicles were their domain, or that of the highway department.  The truck will, if it remains where it is, interfere with snow plowing this winter.  The trooper said that who had dominion over it depended on where it was, and somebody would come by and take a look.  That was the last I heard from the Troopers until yesterday.

  On Wednesday, Doug and I went up to Sunshine to pick up my meds at the clinic, and get a few things at Moore’s Hardware (creosote remover and a new seat for the outhouse to replace the one that pinches us in tender places).  Doug offered to buy me lunch at Sunshine, and while we were eating, Walt and Lori came in.  Immediately, the new neighbors came up in conversation.

  There are some distance and a lot of trees between our house and Grayhorse’s, but I hear the new people’s dogs barking — a lot — and have been hearing sounds of chainsaws, heavy machinery and construction/demolition from over there for weeks.  I occasionally also hear sounds of hostility, angry shouting in masculine and feminine voices.  Walt and Lori are a lot closer to it, and are also in communication with Grayhorse.  He is, they say, distressed to learn that the new tenants have cut down all the trees on the half of the acre between the cabin and the road. 

  When Walt and Lori told Grayhorse that the freaks had rented a Cat and a backhoe, he responded that he hoped that since they had money to do that, they had some money for him, too.  I lost count of how many times Lori told me that Grayhorse is “really upset, because he’s a tree hugger.”  I forbore to mention that I’m a tree hugger, too.  Sometimes silence is the best way to avoid alienating relatively friendly neighbors.

  When I told Lori about the new neighbors having moved the junk truck into my yard, she said she would get a friend of hers to get it out of there.  Yesterday, she called me and said she wanted to introduce me to her friend Charles, who was going to get the truck out of my yard.  I told her I’d meet them at the truck in the ditch, then walked through the woods, and sat in the cab out of the chilly rain for a while, until Charles and Lori pulled out of Lori’s driveway, maybe forty yards away, in Charles’s van, and drove over to where I was waiting.

  Charles shook my hand and asked a few obvious questions like, “Is this the truck?” and “Do you want it out of here?” as if Lori hadn’t told him anything, or maybe he needed independent confirmation.  I sorta feel that way about some things Lori tells me, too.  The new guy next door was out in his yard, so Charles said he would go over and ask the man to move the truck.  He did.  He started out by asking if that was his truck.  The guy said no.

  There followed a bit of back and forth as Lori and I reiterated the truck’s history, and then, suddenly, things got very loud and hostile.  The little guy who has moved in next door wasn’t so much loud as just belligerent and vulgar.  Charles was the one being loud, insisting that the man speak to him, “like a man,” whatever that means.  First, Charles said aside to his teenage son Dakota and/or Lori, “Get my cell.  I want to call Grayhorse.”  The little man next door said that he had just spoken to Grayhorse.

  Then, Charles pulled his cell out of his pocket, asked Lori for Grayhorse’s number, and before she answered, but not before the little guy next door had said a few more nasty words, he said he was calling the State Troopers.  That sounded like a good idea to me, especially since it seemed to impel the hostile little man next door to shut up and go in the house.  I walked back through the woods to home, thought about it for a while, then called the troopers to tell them how that abandoned vehicle incident had escalated.  The dispatcher got my address and said somebody would come by.

  I had been thinking about posting a note on local bulletin boards, offering a truck “free to anyone who will tow it away.”  I had forgotten the year of the truck, and walked back out to look at the owner’s manual again.  I saw that it’s an ’84.  I also saw two trooper vehicles parked between Walt and Lori’s place and Grayhorse’s, blocking the road.  Charles was standing near the front bumper of one of them.  Assuming that the troopers had gotten there before the dispatcher had taken my phone call, I walked over to identify myself and see what the troopers had to say about that truck.

  Charles said both troopers were inside Grayhorse’s place, talking to the small man (smaller than Charles, who isn’t quite as big as I am — so maybe you’re getting a picture here of some mutual bantam rooster syndrome) who had “pulled a gun” on him (Charles).  The gun was a detail of that confrontation that I had missed.  If true, it would, maybe, account for Charles’s sudden and emphatic reaction to the little guy.  If there was a gun, I’m glad I hadn’t seen it.  The incident left me wired as it was.  If I had seen a gun in that little freak’s hand, I soon would have been trembling from adrenaline letdown.  I’m not afraid of guns or freaks, but I do have healthy adrenal glands at this stage of my life — something of a mixed blessing, in my opinion.

  While we waited for a trooper to come out of the cabin, Charles and I got acquainted.  He asked if I knew that those people were the ones who had been living at the motel.  I said yes, and said it appeared that they had been tearing down the motel for building materials to use here.  He nodded and said that he is now the caretaker for the owners of the motel, “cleaning up, fixing the place, guarding it.”  He said that he and Walt would be building a fence between their place and Greyhorse’s, and offered to put “something” along my property line to at least demarcate the boundary.  I think it is already too late for a few of my trees.

  After a while, a State Trooper sergeant moseyed out where we were standing.  I identified myself and said I had talked to the dispatcher.  He asked me about the truck, and Charles (seconded by Lori, who had wandered back out of her cabin) chimed in to say that it was Grayhorse’s truck.  I corrected him, and reminded Lori of the guy who had disappeared and abandoned the dogs.  Just as the light of comprehension entered her eyes, the trooper spoke:  “He didn’t abandon anything.  We gave him a free ride to Arizona for five years.”

  Alaskans will probably know this, but you might not:  Most of Alaska’s incarcerated felons are in a privately operated maximum security joint in Arizona.  Lori and I exchanged a look, and I said, “Well, that explains why he left the dogs.”  Counting a husky bitch, her newborn litter and several half-grown pups left outdoors, and two lap dogs left locked in the cabin, there had been over a dozen dogs left behind.  Animal control had taken the huskies, but were not authorized to enter the house without consent of the owner.  Lori had fretted over the yappy, whining little dogs until I popped the lock, fed and watered them.  I had kept caring for them for several days, until somebody took the little dogs away.

  The trooper sergeant told me I could get the truck towed away by a towing service, which is what the dispatcher had said not long before.  The dispatcher, however, had said I would have to do it at my own expense, but the sergeant said that the state contracts with local towing services to deal with abandoned vehicles, only they are not authorized to call for towing of a vehicle on private property.  He mentioned several local towing businesses and I started to say I would call one, when control freak Charles said he knows the owner of one of them, and he would call him.  I, not being a control freak, said okay.

  The truck is still there.  I’ll give it until Monday or Tuesday, I guess, before I take control of the situation.

  • 2:13 pm
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