BRICKS by Carol K. Howell
His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren.
Genesis 16:12
It ended with shoes, then bricks, then blood. But it began with Japanese beetles. Even before that, the families had snubbed each other at mailboxes, turned cold shoulders on garbage day, skipped each other’s houses at Halloween. Once, during a party, the Isaacsons sent their guests over to use the Hagars’ bathroom, rubbing in the fact that the Hagars had not been invited. The Hagars, of course, let no one in.
Pacing his driveway, Mr. Isaacson swore to his cell phone that he would raise his brick wall to block his view of the Hagars’ pool. In America, other people’s loud foreign–jabbering Speedo-overflowing families should not be forced upon you when you wanted some quiet time on your deck.
Leaning against his Lincoln Navigator, Mr. Hagar complained to his cell phone that the prison-wattage security lights next door had forced him to buy black-out curtains for his bedroom. In America, you ought to be able to get a decent night’s sleep without being forced to feel like you were hiding in a cellar under siege.
The neighbors hung onto every word.
Events escalated when Mr. Hagar, trimming a tree on his side of the wall, let some branches fall into the Isaacsons’ yard. Mr. Isaacson lost no time collecting the mess and tossing it back over. An hour later he was astounded to find it in his yard again. Back and forth the branches went, ending in a confrontation loud enough to draw the neighbors, some with camcorders, and a ringing vow from Mr. Isaacson that if the Hagars ever threw anything in his yard again they would be fishing it out of their pool.
Still, things didn’t move into high gear until Mrs. Hagar hung the Japanese beetle trap on her side of the Isaacsons’ wall. When she came out the next day to count corpses, she found that the trap had been shifted to her forsythia bush.
Mrs. Hagar nearly jumped out of her cloned Manolos. Why had the Isaacsons moved her trap? They couldn’t hear or smell or see it. It caused no trouble. It didn’t ask for anything. The answer seemed obvious: they’d moved it out of spite. Because it was their wall. Because Hagar property contaminated Isaacson property.
Mrs. Hagar longed to mount an immediate frontal assault. Ring the Isaacsons’ bell, rip open the trap, hurl dead beetles straight into Mrs. Isaacson’s face. She could imagine Mrs. Isaacson’s shrieks and the skittery sound the bugs would make as they peppered the varnished hall floor.
But she was the wife of a lawyer, so she called her husband instead. Mr. Hagar felt the insult just as keenly: even more so, because whoever had moved the trap had trespassed onto Hagar property – had, in fact, touched a Hagar shrub. Was the shrub damaged? Stripped of any leaves? Branches bent or broken?
Mrs. Hagar hurried back outside to check, disappointed to report no damage. But by then her husband had thought of something else. He had her pace from the brick wall to the driveway, counting out loud. Then he asked what size shoe she wore. Then he asked what size she really wore. Blushing, she increased the number by two. After that, Mr. Hagar hung up. The next thing she knew, a surveyors’ truck had pulled into her driveway and men were setting up tripods on her lawn.
Mrs. Isaacson, watching from between her heirloom curtains (Dutch lace had been the family business a few generations ago), gasped when she saw the surveyors and called her husband right away. Also a lawyer, he immediately engaged his own surveying team.
“You know what this means?” he asked his wife.
Mrs. Isaacson hadn’t spent two years at San Jose State for nothing: “It means the trip to Tahoe is off.”
Though extremely curious about the men and instruments on their lawns, all Hagar and Isaacson children were hustled into their respective houses and not permitted to watch from windows. Their after-school activities were cancelled, and they were actually told to go watch TV. Their parents spoke to each other in fierce whispers, both fathers in constant touch with the men pacing outside. The children wandered off, naively assuming the problem had nothing to do with them – perhaps because their study of history had been so laundered and bleached that they could not recognize rumbles of war, much less understand that children are always its first casualties.
But Isaacson and Hagar, Esquires, cell phones pressed to their jaws like the flaps of Trojan helmets, knew full well what they were leading their families into, and neither paused. Nor did their wives counsel patience and goodwill. Indeed, if the goddess Artemis had demanded a sacrifice – Mrs. Hagar’s three-quarter-length fox or Mrs. Isaacson’s new BMW or something even dearer – in exchange for favorable winds, neither lady would have hesitated. Both instinctively grasped the nature of holy war. For the surveyors had made their final report: Mr. Isaacson’s brick wall extended onto Mr. Hagar’s property by four inches. Clearly the Isaacsons were interlopers – invaders, even. Clearly the wall would have to come down. Clearly there could be no other view of the matter.
And yet, the law was often cloudy. Wasn’t that why jurisprudence had to be interpreted and cases argued? Wasn’t that why lawyers were necessary in the first place? There was a small matter known as domicile rights: the Isaacsons had lived in their house, with their wall, for nineteen years. The Hagars had moved in six years ago. By signing contracts and approving property rights then, they had tacitly agreed to let the wall stand exactly where it was. At least so one could argue. And so Mr. Isaacson would argue, and it could go on for a very long time, as Mr. Hagar well knew. But there were steps. There were steps that could be taken.
The oldest Hagar boy, who was a bit of a scholar, listened to his parents with some unease. “We are going to sue, aren’t we, Dad?” he asked.
“Oh, we’ll sue,” Mr. Hagar replied. “We’ll sue till they’re shitting bricks.”
If the children were thrilled when Mrs. Hagar failed to reproach her husband for this language, they were dazzled when she slipped out at night to hang another beetle trap on the wall. Their indignation the next day – when it was found mashed and mutilated on their front step – was touching: part loyalty, part family-sanctioned lust for blood. At school, the Isaacson children proved ready to respond in kind. The sorties took place in locker rooms, lavatories, lunchrooms, and playing fields, ranging from vicious words to shoves to brawls that had to be halted by teachers. Both sides gathered allies, both wore bruises of honor, both sets of parents were called to school and lied through their teeth, secretly proud. As the children were evenly matched, they enjoyed their hatred and suffered no permanent injury, except for how their ability to think and feel about others was being affected.
The parents were too distracted to notice. Their own skirmishes were petty at first – garbage scattered on lawns, rocks left on driveways – punctuated by occasional acts of guerrilla theater: the Isaacson children buzzing the Hagars’ guests with radio-controlled toy planes, Mr. Hagar pointing his mind-scouring leaf blower back at them like a giant ray-gun.
The line for true damage was crossed, however, with the marijuana incident: someone called the cops and told them the Isaacsons were growing it in their back yard. And indeed, a few spindly transplants were discovered in the fern bed. The incident could have destroyed Mr. Isaacson’s reputation and livelihood – if convicted, he would have been disbarred. Luckily, the police knew about the feud and accepted the Isaacsons’ denial – besides, only an idiot would plant marijuana in the shade. Still, there was no proof the neighbors had done anything either, so the cops just yanked out the seedlings and left.
Next, the Hagars’ swimming pool was strafed with ten pounds of bad calamari. No matter how many times the water was shocked, it never did smell right again.
Then the Isaacsons’ green velvet lawn was somehow transformed into hay. Probably a bleach job, according to their landscaper: “You take a jug of Clorox, poke a few holes with a nail, and you got yourself a bleach sprinkler. Shake that all over the lawn, and a couple days later – ” he swept out an arm – “gourmet cow delight. Kids’ prank,” he added. He wasn’t watching their faces.
But he had given them an excellent tutorial. Not a week later, the grass on the Hagars’ front lawn, selectively and precisely annihilated, spelled out the word TERRORISTS to the entire neighborhood’s horror and delight. Videos had started appearing nightly on YouTube.
Shortly thereafter, a billboard advertising Mr. Isaacson’s law firm – his face with its prominent nose featured in the middle – was expertly shot with red paintballs so that each nostril appeared to dribble blood. The police could do nothing for lack of proof. They barely bothered to hide their grins.
Undaunted, the Isaacsons donated their back yard to a friend’s son’s metal band for practice. While the band set up, the Hagars speed-dialed their large extended family – from the Speedo crowd to ancient uncles still in kaffiyehs – who arrived in SUVs packed with lawn chairs and karaoke equipment. For hours, while Mr. Hagar grilled shish-ka-bob on the driveway, Slayer and Megadeth battled Amr Diab, Ragheb Alama, Nancy Ajram, and classic Nooshafarin. When karaoke finally fell before Metal – gleefully stomped into mud, blood, and guts – the Hagars brainstormed a new operation: Hair of the Dog. Overnight, flyers went up at every dive, pool hall, garage, and pawn shop within fifty miles. They advertised an open party featuring free beer and a Hottest Biker Chick contest – cash prize five hundred dollars – to be held at the Isaacson residence the following Saturday. The Isaacsons snatched down as many flyers as they could, but they couldn’t cover fifty miles or kill word-of‑mouth.
This time police did get involved. They had to break up the brawl between angry beer-deprived bikers and Hottest Chick contestants with neighborhood residents defending their well-groomed turf. As golf clubs and crowbars clashed like spears, cops cuffed the worst offenders and loaded them into squad cars until the last disgruntled Harley screeched out of the neighborhood. Hagars and Isaacsons exchanged murderous glares, but again, nothing could be proved.
During the lull which followed – while police rolled through the development twice a day – each family waited for the other to make its move. The children, used to playing battle games on computers, held up perfectly well. The adults were showing strain. Mr. Hagar developed an irregular heartbeat. After a few emergency room scares, his doctor put him on beta-blockers and suggested a vacation. Mrs. Isaacson alternated between nausea and headache; her husband had insomnia; their doctor put them both on Xanax and recommended new hobbies. Soap-making? Swing dance? Mrs. Hagar tried on therapists like shoes. They diagnosed her with depression, anger mismanagement, perimenopause, and mini bipolar, prescribing support groups, a gluten-free diet, and a pharmacopeia of pills. She rejected everything in favor of online shopping and new apps for her phone. No one mentioned spiritual counseling: these were modern secular families. But Mr. Hagar did consider buying a gun.
Both lawyers, however, felt more comfortable with threats. Each threatened to charge the other with harassment, stalking, property damage, vandalism, littering, and fifth-degree assault. They threatened to sign mutual restraining orders. Their threats cancelled each other out, but at some point the Hagars discovered that the little lock on their electricity meter had been clipped off with bolt cutters. Actually, the meter reader discovered it and reported them to the power company, assuming they had been trying to cheat by changing the numbers. They could not prove otherwise and sustained a painful fine. The war was back on.
So the Hagars bought a new trash can. They poured it half full with a mixture of paint plus certain other noxious substances and tilted it against the Isaacsons’ front door. After calling UPS, they waited for the big brown truck. Just as it turned into the driveway, the smallest Hagar, hidden in bushes, popped up and rang the doorbell. Mrs. Isaacson, spotting the reassuring truck, didn’t hesitate to open the door. The mess drenched her and her Persian hall carpet. The UPS man tolerated the screaming for quite a while before ascertaining that there was, in fact, no package to be collected.
Mr. Isaacson sent his children out to buy up every fork the local thrift and dollar stores had to offer. They spray-painted them viridian, crept on their bellies Saturday night with ski masks pulled over their faces, and planted those forks, prongs up, in Mr. Hagar’s pristine back yard. Sunday was his day to mow the lawn. He loved his tractor-sized mower.
The Isaacson children never laughed so hard in their young lives. Mrs. Hagar thought her husband was finally having his heart attack. She did not know faces could turn that color. He tried to heave the ruined lawnmower over the brick wall. It was a riding mower. She had to unbuckle his belt and drop his pants to make him let go of it, which just made the hysterical Isaacsons even more so. The neighbors all held their phones up, recording.
Mr. Hagar in his underwear was bad enough. But that was not the last straw. The last straw was shoes. It was the Isaacsons’ fourteen-year-old daughter perched atop the brick wall, swinging her legs, flashing her Christian Louboutin stilettos. The red-lacquered soles were unmistakable. Mrs. Hagar had always coveted a pair of Christian Louboutins, but the Hagar budget did not stretch that far – they had more children than the Isaacsons, relatives to support, and that pool had turned out to be a real money pit. Mrs. Hagar wore knock-offs.
“Obscene!” she hissed. “Christian Louboutins on a fourteen-year-old! They’re doing it to spite us!”
“You realize,” said her scholarly son, “in some cultures, flaunting the soles of the feet is considered a deadly insult.”
Mrs. Hagar was insulted to death. She flashed out the door, raced to the wall, jerked the shoes off the shocked fourteen-year-old’s feet, and pelted them at her head: one! two! She was shouting what curses she knew in the old language, the girl was screaming, then they had their fists in each other’s hair as both families boiled out of their houses. Mrs. Isaacson, shrieking, pitched herself over the wall onto Mrs. Hagar. Mr. Hagar dashed to his garage and tossed tools to his children: picks, axes, sledgehammers, anything that could crush. They mobbed the wall, screaming: “It’s coming down!” as the Isaacsons seized their own weapons and met them. Mr. Hagar threw a thick orange utility cord to his smallest girl, who plugged it into the garage outlet. In his other hand he brandished what looked like a futuristic robot gun. But as soon as it roared to life, Mr. Isaacson recognized a hammer drill, the biggest one he’d ever seen. When Mr. Hagar applied it to the wall, his whole body shook like a man being electrocuted – he could barely keep his feet on the ground. The drill penetrated the wall in a flurry of dark red dust, as if it were spouting dried blood. When Mrs. Hagar saw her husband with his heart condition pushing this monstrous weapon into solid brick, did she grab his arm, pull the plug, yank out her phone to call the doctor? She did not. She snatched up the Christian Louboutins and, whirling, wielded them like Ninja weapons, not even noticing when one spike pierced her bookish son’s eye – the wet heel was already red, his shriek swallowed by the general howl. Metal smashed metal and thudded into flesh as the two families closed, swinging shovels and hatchets and hammers and hoes, even the smallest children hurling fistfuls of nails, as bricks and blood flew and the body count grew, and the wall, by God, came down.
Carol K. Howell’s stories have appeared in New Orleans Review, StoryQuarterly, The Greensboro Review, Passages North, and The North American Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.