Free Animosity by James Newman Page A

imagination.
    My neighbors were talking about me.
    Floyd Beecham scowled and shook his head as he glared my way, his bony tax-collector hands balled into tight white fists. I heard him say something about “raped a little girl” and “Ben Souther told me, and he’s got no reason to lie.”
    From behind a cloud of thick blue smoke Ned Pastorek nodded emphatically, said, “One hell of a coincidence , if you get my drift.”
    “When you rot your brain with that kinda crap, what do you expect?” said Francine Beecham. She was leaned back in her chair, the silver cane from her recent hip surgery lain crosswise on her considerable lap.
    My ears burned like they used to when I was a kid and I’d been caught doing something naughty. I swallowed nervously and thinned the gap in my doorway, straining to hear more of the conversation across the street.
    The wind chimes on my front porch tingled and pinged in the evening breeze, as if threatening to betray me.
    “I mean, I’m all for freedom of speech,” said Ned Pastorek. “But there’s gotta be a limit, ya know?”
    “You got that right,” Floyd Beecham agreed.
    “If not, then look what happens.”
    “Just goes to show,” said Floyd’s wife, “you think you know someone, but you never really do.”
    Mitzi Pastorek took a sip from a gold can on the porch railing beside her, pondered with a melodramatic shudder, “I wonder what he’s doing in there right now … ”
    I thinned the gap in my doorway some more. Winced when the door’s hinges squeaked.
    A car sped by my house just then. It was Trey Glover’s new Mustang, a sleek black beast vibrating with the basso thump of rap music. For several seconds it drowned out the conversation across the street.
    Back before everything went to shit, I remembered, the Beechams used to have a reputation for raising a stink about such things. Francine had even written a letter to the Tribune earlier this year complaining about the “disrespectful youth of today thinking everyone and his brother wants to hear their sordid ‘jungle music’ ” As the rumbling Mustang passed between us now, though, as I watched them across the street, none of the people on the Beechams’ porch said anything. They just watched the Glover boy go by. Francine even threw up a meaty hand in friendly greeting.
    They had other things to complain about now.
    When the Mustang had passed, and the street was quiet again, my eyes grew wide. I watched Floyd Beecham stand to retrieve something from one corner of his porch. The way his skinny silhouette lurched and stumbled about, I could tell he had been drinking. A lot.
    “I’ll give him some of this, by God,” he announced.
    It was a gun. His hunting rifle. The same one, I was sure, that he had shown Ben Souther and me just several weeks ago, bragging about it as if it were the greatest specimen ever constructed by human hands.
    He pointed it my way. Sighted down the barrel.
    I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
    “Kapow!” Mitzi Pastorek giggled. “That’d do the trick.”
    Floyd belched, put the gun down, and fell back into his seat. “Goddamn right. Take care of things real nice, wouldn’t it?”
    I was about to turn away then, when someone else came out of the Beechams’ house. Someone I had always thought looked just like Pete Rose. The screen door slammed shut behind him. He held three bottles of beer, which he passed out to the other men on the porch, keeping one for himself.
    “Now, Floyd, old buddy,” he said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that.”
    They all laughed.
    Before he plopped down on the railing beside Mitzi Pastorek, the big cop took a second to open a new pack of cigarettes pulled from the breast pocket of his uniform. He winked at his friends in the glow of Ned Pastorek’s proffered Zippo and said, “Though I gotta admit, it’d probably make our jobs a helluva lot easier.”
    More cruel laughter at my expense.
    I stumbled back from the door, shaking my head in