I Have A Secret.

I’m only sharing it with you, my closest friends.  I hope you’ll keep it quiet for me, I wouldn’t want it to get around.

My secret  is – I’m plotting a murder.

Shhhhh, don’t tell.

Let me give you some background.

So where we live – it’s an ok place.  Just two houses down to the right, across a busy road from us, is a really nice neighborhood.  When we walk the dog, this is the neighborhood we walk through.  On our side of the street, the houses are smaller, more poorly built, but the people in them start out pretty nice.  Our 2-doors-to-the-right neighbor has a big scary truck and a big scary dog and a big sign that says No Trespassing or My Dog Will Eat You, but whenever we walk by with Virgil they come to us with their tattoos and their cigarettes and their face piercings and they coo and smile all over our puppy like nobody’s business.  So we like them fine.  Our next door neighbors to the right have a PIRATE flag hanging from their front door, so clearly they’re cool.  They have one son with Down Syndrome who screams my cat’s name and giggles whenever he sees her, and they built their boy his own little playhouse in the backyard with his own pirate flag, and they are about the nicest people you’d ever meet, so we like them a lot.  Across the street from us is a little old couple who drive about 3 miles an hour and have plastic orange sunflowers “planted” in their front lawn, but they smile as they creep by us in their car and are very understanding when we traipse through their fake flowers trying to fetch our wayward cat, so we like them, too, even though their American flag has been flying outside on their front yard flagpole at half mast nonstop for two years and looks pretty ratty.

As you head away from the nice neighborhood, down to our left – well, things go downhill very quickly.  At that end of the street is what we call “the drug dealer house” because it couldn’t be more obvious what it is.  Last year there was a shooting near there.  If a young lady such as my own self were to walk or jog that way, scary young men with nothing else to do will follow her and shout nasty menacing things to her.  We avoid that area, and stick to our house, and they pretty much leave us alone.

I’m getting to the point here now, I promise.

So, living in the house next to us on the left . . . well, up until a few months ago it was a redneck family with a really fat dad who wandered around with no shirt on, regardless of temperature.  They had a ghetto, smoke-belching car and cursed pretty loudly, but they seemed nice enough to their little daughter, and they mostly left us alone, so though we didn’t like them, we didn’t want to murder them.  Not even when they moved out and deposited a rotting mattress in their front yard near our driveway, along with other pieces of furniture, clothing, and assorted junk.  It was annoying, and irresponsible, but most of it got picked up by the trash people, and I took the little girl’s bike they left behind and gave it to a guy at work with 4 small daughters, so it wasn’t a total loss.

When our new left-side neighbors moved in and immediately dumped a rotting mattress and old furniture on the front lawn, I thought it was kind of a funny coincidence to have two mattress-dumping neighbors in a row.  But they were just moving in, and chances were that the previous neighbors had left this junk in the house, so I was willing to look past it.  And when they left their packing boxes littered all through their front lawn and front stoop and side yard and driveway and backyard for the first month, I thought – eh.  It’s exhausting to move somewhere.  I’m sure they’ll get them up later, once they’ve finished unpacking.  And even though it’s 2 months later and not only have they not removed the trash, they’ve added to it and now we have a stack of baby dolls, some folding chairs, a pile of blankets, some plant pots, an old outdoor fireplace, some sort of kitchen table, and various other detritus rotting in various positions around these people’s house, and that is definitely irritating, and makes me want to throw things at them, well it doesn’t make me want to murder them.  Besides, they have a really nice minivan and two cute kids, and color me prejudiced but I just keep telling myself that a family who can afford a nice minivan like that must have some kind of work ethic, in order to keep the job that pays for the van, and so I cling to the hope that they’ll clean this crap up someday.

Well.  Here’s the murderable offense.  So a few days after they move in, this sweet white puppy appears on their porch.  And that’s where he stays.  When they leave, which is all day every day and frequently overnight (who knows where they go), the puppy is left on the porch.  He wanders around the neighborhood, and frequently ends up in our yard, but is too skittish to come close when I offer him a treat.  He’s afraid of our puppy.  I’ve never seen these people touch this dog, pet him, play with him.  Not even the kids.  I’m not sure why they have him.

So now, somebody complains to animal control that this dog is running around the neighborhood unfettered.  We assume this, because animal control pulls up in their driveway one day when they are miraculously HOME for once, and after animal control leaves – THEY LOCK THE DOG IN THEIR WINDOWLESS BACKYARD SHED.  And in the shed he stays.  On the rare occasions when they are home and busy adding to their frontyard pile of crap, the dog comes out of the shed and gets parked back on the porch.  But whenever they leave, the dog goes into the shed.  He yelps and cries non stop.  Yesterday, he went in first thing in the morning, and when we went to bed at 10pm he was still in there crying, no sign of his stupid family.

I could strangle them with my bare hands.  I told my husband that I will be in court very shortly, accused of murder, if we do not call the SPCA and rescue this dog (I will be convicted, but clearly have a reduced sentence, because who wouldn’t be on my side?)  I very nearly took a hacksaw to the lock and let the poor baby out last night, but I’m sort of afraid that if I mess with their dog, one day they’ll mess with mine.  Besides the sheer cruelty of this neglect, besides the idiocy of purchasing a dog you do not want to have any contact with, besides the horrible example they are showing their small children – well, what kind of adult dog is this animal going to grow up to be?  Will he become a mean dog who bites me, my husband, my dog, my kids (when we have them)?  Will he be afraid of every little thing, and thereby much more prone to overreactions that could lead to injury, and to his eventual death by injection because he bit somebody who called animal control?

Tell me.  Wouldn’t your fingers be itching to wrap around some redneck necks?