The Neighbors
There’s no fence between our property and Frank Nyborg's, our neighbor next door. One good thing about it is your mower doesn't bounce against the fence like a pinball when you cut grass. When Frank does his, he goes over our side a whole stretch. It makes us look kind of punk when we don't mow on the same day, but he's just being a good neighbor, everybody knows.
I walk over to Frank's side and find him, what else, busy. As if the year was still 1623 and he had just stepped off The Anne with a family of eight and a half-sack of groats. Frank, when he isn't attending to his business and it isn't nighttime, he'll be fixing his house, his garage, his car, his wife's car, his kids' cars, his friends' cars, or he might even fix a stranger's clunker, if he had nothing else to fiddle with. Idle hands, the devil's hands. I first heard it in Wyoming, and now I hear it in Montana too.
Frank owns a gun shop in partnership and he must've left it in the care of his sidekick today because it's almost noon and he's still hunkering around his RV. A portable radio on the pavement beside is playing, what else, country.
Let's say hello to Frank.
"Hi, Frank!!" I blast.
I said "blast" and boosted it with two exclamation marks not because Frank is making noise with a tool, or the radio is way loud – but because with Frank, you ought to push psychically real strong when you're connecting with him. Like with all flyover Americans overall. You do so to be on a par with them, otherwise they’d make a dent in your psyche and you’d start disliking the dudes who, like all dudes, press one onto another to make this heap of the world hold in one chunk. Plus, the Montanans are exceedingly good at that.
Frank turns away from the RV now, takes a few steps toward the street curb, leans over it, and out of a corner of his mouth with a splash of a two-pound trout lays a half-pint of burnt-toast tobacco juice onto the winter-cracked pavement of Acacia Street. I'm not getting this image from someone else, passing on to you a literary cliché, shortchanging you on good prose, no. That's Frank.
His mouth cleared:
"How ya doin'!!!?" he thrusts into my personal fence like a 1,200-pound steer, told you.
I withstand – allow me to congratulate myself – the lunge gallantly.
"Terrific!!!! How ‘bout yourself???!!" I swing back the hardest I can.
"Grrreat!!!!," he takes it appreciatively.
Our grit so mutually checked, we feel trail-worthy now in the open on who-knows-what country, and Frank slides back under his RV, I start up my roadster.