Karolina Waclawiak - The Invaders

“You fucking cow, come back here!” I saw the security guard who had been there the night Teddy had his accident approach Jeffrey. Jeffrey lunged at him, screaming, “YOU!”

Then two police officers came through the Humphreys’ yard and Jeffrey started yelling at them, too. They tried to reason with him at first, asking him to move away from the water’s edge. He refused to get off the seawall.

He said, “I pay my taxes. This is my walkway, too.”

Mrs. Humphrey said, “I’ve never seen this man in my life. He’s trespassing. He’s a vagrant!”

“You cow!” he screamed.

I nearly laughed and nervously checked Lori’s windows to see if she was at home, if she could hear the commotion, but they were dark. Jeffrey looked wild, almost young with anger. The police moved toward him and he swung his arm at them, missing by a wide space.

“Calm down, sir.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“Let me see your ID,” one of the officers said.

He told them he wanted to see theirs. They asked him if he’d been drinking and Mrs. Humphrey yelled that he had thrown a glass at her. She used the words “assault” and “scared.”

“I’ll kill you if you come near me,” Jeffrey screamed. “I was here before you bastards were even born!”

I inhaled sharply, knowing that was all they needed to hear.

They tackled him then, driving his face into the grass of Mrs. Humphrey’s yard. I thought about her two little corgis and hoped they had used that spot to urinate — the spot where Jeffrey’s nose was being screwed into the ground by the hand of a policeman. I could hear his muffled yelling and almost convinced myself that I could feel the reverberations coming up through my feet. I did not move. Not even when they picked him up and put handcuffs on him. He tried to struggle away from the police, but they were much stronger.

He screamed that the neighborhood was turning into a police state. “I have rights, too,” he said. “Why are you handcuffing me? I’m just taking a walk.”

“Public intoxication and trespassing,” they told him.

I could have helped him, but I didn’t. I could have strolled over and said, “I’m his wife and we live nearly next door.” But I just stood in Lori’s yard behind her row of evergreen bushes and watched as they treated him like a criminal. I took comfort in the fact that none of us were safe — the fence was closing in on us all. Jeffrey stopped fighting and hung his head down as they led him through Mrs. Humphrey’s yard to their police car. For all his screaming, though, he never mentioned that he had a wife. He never asked them to come find me. It was as if I didn’t exist to him; we had become each other’s afterthoughts.

I ran from Lori’s yard back to our house and to the front windows. They put Jeffrey into the backseat and I watched as he sat there staring at the houses as if he’d never seen them before. He saw me staring at him and we locked eyes. He looked ragged, like an old man who had wandered away from his house in the night and was found confused. He started to say something in the backseat of the car and it slowed. I pulled away from the windows, hid in the shadows, and watched as he nudged his face toward the house and where I was standing and said something over and over again. The car came to a stop in front of our house and Jeffrey shook with fury. I panicked. He knew I deliberately hadn’t helped him, that I had allowed his humiliation to go this far.

The car rolled forward again and I watched it go quickly down the one-way road. I came back outside then.

He was gone and I was glad.

“What happened?” Lori said, as I turned around. She was red-faced and confused, power-walking toward me with weights in her hands.

“They just arrested someone,” I said.

“See, see!” she said, pointing at the fence. “God, it looked just like Jeffrey.”

“Well, he’s gone now,” I said.

“All this happening here. Christ,” Lori said. “I’m going to alert the security guard to keep an eye out for him, make sure he can’t get back in here.”

“Good idea,” I said, and smiled. “Ready for the storm?”

“You know, the kids get so nervous. We’re probably going to go to a hotel. No sense in riding it out. Who knows after the last few. You guys?”

“I’m staying until the end,” I said.

TEDDY

AS I WAITED FOR JILL on the rocks, I thought about what I had just seen. They were really coming down hard on outsiders, and now someone had been pulled off the wall and hauled off in handcuffs. He was in hysterics and it was kind of funny to watch. The lady on the corner had cracked down on people walking near her house; all she needed now was a moat. Instead, she had to settle for big-ass signs threatening police action if you came near her house without permission. I couldn’t remember it ever being like this. When we were kids, we rode bikes around, left them in neighbors’ yards, and swam in the ocean, running down beaches that didn’t belong to us. No one ever tried to stop us. The neighborhood was ours. Now it was nobody’s. Each yard was barricaded in with fencing. We just needed some Dobermans patrolling at night and we’d be all set. They could really make this a gated community and have guards at every street entrance checking IDs and bank account balances, like they did with the really rich. What was so wonderful to protect, anyway? The boats, the docks, the clay courts, their precious eighteen holes?

It was high tide and the water was hitting the rocks and spraying me. Usually I’d get pissed and move, but I had the best view of my house from where I was sitting. I searched the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of Cheryl. Any movement at all. There wasn’t any. I pushed myself back and put my head on the rocks and waited. Jill had picked the right time, the sun would set and it would be nice. With everyone finishing the golf tournament and celebrating with booze and trophies afterwards, I didn’t think anyone would see us. Even if Cheryl did, I didn’t care. Who would believe anything she said? I saw a family on bicycles stop at the gate, afraid to go farther, past the fence. I didn’t recognize them, so I didn’t feel bad. The fence was doing its job. You’re not welcome here, but have a nice day.

The fireflies were gone and summer was winding down. The club was rushing it with the golf tournament, the members sipping vodka out of their plastic cups with bendy straws. They would have to piss out there, hidden in the fescue, because of their prostate problems. It seemed pretty strange to be paying a thirty-five-thousand-dollar entrance fee only to possibly get a tick on your penis as you tried to hide the stream from the riders in the carts beside yours. It didn’t seem that simple pleasures like that would be afforded to me anymore. I wouldn’t get to swing anything, not anymore, right? None of this would ever be mine.

When I disappeared and went somewhere else, I could play up the disability and have people take care of me. Heartstrings and all that stuff, right? It was a possibility. Before, the best I could get was a job selling shit like my dad. Hawking medical equipment, pacemakers and those things that beeped in hospitals — the heart monitors, that’s where the big bucks were. I would have started off in pharma, selling to doctors, one of the only salesmen in a sea of big-titted blondes with fake tans who pretended to know the difference between Advair and whatever the fuck else they sold. Endless tests to make sure I knew everything about drug interactions, chemical makeups, all that. Now I wasn’t going to do any of that. I was going to be handled differently, like I couldn’t do things. And I had to decide if I was going to take it or not.