Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

He’s working hard, Phoebe tells herself as Nick drives. His sunburned visage softens in the afternoon shadows as the freeway snakes through and around steep hillsides in the direction of home. Maybe, she thinks, it can still work. “Hey,” she says. She extends a closed fist. He bumps it.

The orange glow from across the street is a lit cigarette. Nick and Phoebe’s neighbor Metzger smokes in front of his tent. He’s in uniform, same outfit every day: khaki shorts, clean white New Balance sneakers, white socks pulled up over thick calves, and despite the heat, a white oxford, sleeves rolled up, left over from his days working at the bank.

“Fucking Kostya,” he calls out, meets Nick on his side of the black, windswept street. Whatever he carries by his side is dark, a crowbar or baseball bat maybe. Nick doesn’t want to know.

Kostya didn’t fasten the lid on his recycling can and the wind knocked it over, spilled plastic two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew and Sunny D and beer bottles all over the street.

“And his park job.” The truck is half backed out onto the street. “Is it that hard to pull your fifty-thousand-dollar Tundra up the driveway? Fucking Armenians.”

Nick laughs. “Ukraine. I think.”

Metzger’s pissed off about a lot of things: the pain in his partially torn Achilles that will require surgery he can’t afford. The weight he can’t shed. Gas prices. The deserted house next to his. The insane neighbor next to Nick and Phoebe. Kostya’s dirty, skinny kids. One night Metzger’s thick green lawn was empty; the next morning the orange tent appeared. His is a military-style double-wall combat tent with a vestibule providing twenty square feet of storage space. The atomic orange structure rests a few feet from the curb, putting the neighborhood on notice: Things have changed and aren’t changing back anytime soon.

“Close your eyes,” Metzger says.

The gun Metzger puts in Nick’s hands is a Mossberg 500 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. It’s black and cool to the touch, and Nick likes the feel of the matte finish, of the butt and pump, though he’s never fired a gun, so he says very little about it.

“Nice,” Nick manages. It’s heavier than he would have expected.

• •

A lone, illegible graffiti tag recently appeared on the wall of the drained pool in the house next to Metzger’s: a five-bedroom, three-bath new construction left behind a month ago. It was the first house to drop on their cul-de-sac. Cars, three or four young men deep, recently started appearing, crawling along Carousel Court on weekend nights. Nick gets the sense, and confirmed with Kostya and Metzger, that they’re surveying the terrain, zeroing in on the next target. Metzger in his tent with his new Mossberg is the first and maybe only line of defense so far. For that much, Nick is grateful. Metzger worked at Bank of the West until last month. Nick doesn’t know what he did there.

“Keep an eye out tonight?” Nick asks. This is the favor he needs.

Instead of responding, Metzger says, “Look at that mess,” and trains the beam of light from his police-style flashlight on another spilled recycling container. The mess is in front of the house belonging to the Vietnamese family. The mother is a former teacher and apparently now a very good nanny, someone Nick and Phoebe have been saving money for, wanting Jackson somewhere other than Bouncin’ Babies. The Vietnamese family’s recycling is all one-gallon plastic water bottles and newspapers, no soda, no beer.

“Kostya’s mangy dogs.” Metzger spits.

“Or kids.”

“Same difference,” Metzger says, and laughs. “Russian mutts.” Both men instinctively direct their attention to Kostya’s house, the biggest on the block.

A string of white lights dangles from a tall palm at the edge of Kostya and Marina’s property. Of all the generically grand properties erected in the last five years, theirs is the grandest. All of the houses went up cheap and quick, but theirs sits slightly above the rest, on a modest incline with a winding stone walkway and a wide sloped asphalt driveway big enough for his Tundra and her Suburban. The lights that mark the top end of the cul-de-sac are the first thing you see when you turn on to the street at night. Kostya, obsessed with the palm trees, saw a Corona commercial that came on around Christmas — that’s where he got the idea for the lights. But they were such a pain in the ass to string up that once he’d done it, he decided to leave them, lighting only one tree. So they have a lone skinny palm at 4590 °Carousel Court towering over all the other houses on the street. The white lights flicker when the sun goes down. Yes, Phoebe finally agreed when Nick pressed, it’s a nice effect.

Nick hears music, too loud, coming from the house next door.

“Believe this shit?” Metzger glares at the new construction identical to Nick’s. “What goddamn time is it?” He shines the flashlight on the house.

“Late,” Nick says. “Good song, though.”

Metzger reports that the neighbor has been in and out of his garage for the last hour, carrying boxes from his truck. This seems to agitate Metzger, for some reason. “And now this shit,” he says.

“Connie Stevens?” Nick says quizzically.

“You think this is funny?” Metzger turns away from Nick and says under his breath, “Just watch.”

The man living next to Nick and Phoebe looks about thirty. He has close-cropped blond hair, always wears a hoodie and shorts no matter how hot it gets, lives alone, and talks to no one. In the three months since Nick and Phoebe moved in, they’ve had one exchange: The man was ripping tiles from his roof and tossing them onto their driveway, where they shattered. Phoebe asked him to stop; he ignored her. His patchy yellow lawn has a couple of wilting date palms and a eucalyptus tree. Red spray paint recently appeared on the front door, a signal from the lender to interested parties: This house is dead and ours. The man added to it — a fuck-you to the bank — a red X on the wall next to the door, a white O and another red X, and a blue tic-tac-toe board separating the letters. His black pickup truck has huge wheels and looks new but, unlike Kostya’s, is filthy.

Metzger tosses his cigarette toward the street, orange ash on black asphalt, squashes it. “Vietnamese are rotten,” he says, pointing at a house by the entrance to the cul-de-sac. “Mexicalis are rotten,” he adds, pointing out another house. He lights a new cigarette. His cadence is caffeinated, jittery. “Mormons are rotten to the core. That’s three houses right there about to get tapped.” He draws three fingers slowly across his thick neck, indicating a throat slitting. The cigarette dangles from his dry lips as he speaks. He’s flicking invisible ticks from his thumb at each of the nine homes in their cul-de-sac, referring to their neighbors who are still, after three months in Serenos, California, forty miles east of Los Angeles, mostly strangers to Nick and Phoebe.

“Sucked dry,” Nick says.

Metzger shines the light on Kostya and Marina’s house. Aside from Metzger, and waving and smiling at the Vietnamese couple in passing, Kostya and Marina are Nick and Phoebe’s only friends.

“They’re fine,” Metzger says, “for now.” He shines his light on Nick’s house, the thick green grass. “Lawn looks good.”

Nick nods.

“But these idiots,” Metzger says, gesturing around the street. “If they can just talk to someone at the bank!” He laughs. “Guess what? I was the bank. You owe what you owe.” He’s following Nick to his car, and Nick isn’t sure why. He walks with a limp. He wipes perspiration from his forehead with his thick hand. Nick has his keys out and the driver’s-side door open.