Mr. Richard lived alone in a town of shaded streets in a country of four seasons. Medium-tall with pale blue-gray eyes and a thick head of white hair, he used an aluminum cane, and kept black-framed reading glasses hooked in his shirt front. He had been widowed for so long that when he thought of her, he had to strain to hear her voice. As for her face—the healthy, glowing, smiling face from the time before her sickness—he saw it as if through a diaphanous veil. Most of his other waking memories had lost color, dimension, and motion as well, rendering themselves as faded gray tintypes.

Mr. Richard spent most pleasant afternoons in his front yard, sitting in a lawn chair shaded by an old crabapple tree. Next to his chair he kept a small cooler stocked with bottled water and a pint of liquor. He would sit, hearing indistinct threads of conversation from passersby, and watch the birds and the morphing clouds. Sometimes he held harsh, muttered hindsight conversations with people who, if still living, had long ago forgotten about him.

Mr. Richard hugged slights close to his chest, while ennui wrapped around him like a leaden cloak.

When the yard filled with shadows, he would go inside and heat what he found in the freezer, then settle into his recliner and reflexively flick the television remote. Sometimes, once it was dark, he would stand in a window looking toward a distant causeway, and watch the lines of marching car lights, soft and sulfurous in the fog. When the gray tintypes began to gather and make him feel like a walking haunted house, Mr. Richard went to sleep, helped along by his pint of liquor. 

This afternoon was different. He was standing in the shadows of his stifling attic, looking out the open window, waiting for the young man with the multicolored hair. The varying hues of the fellow’s hair fascinated Mr. Richard. His late wife had colored her honey brown hair when it grew back shock white after the first bout with chemo, and she paid a pretty penny for a blend of professionally applied pigments that mimicked her natural color. To Mr. Richard, the young man looked as if he’d smeared his hair with finger paint. It must be the fashion, Mr. Richard thought.

But the issue wasn’t his hair, it was his dog. An ordinary, paroled-from-the-shelter mutt.

The dog had chronographic regularity, because it defecated in Mr. Richard’s front yard near the sidewalk almost daily. Mr. Richard would watch from his lawn chair and loudly clear his throat as the young man tried to walk off and leave it. The young man would sullenly shuffle back to the mess and clean it up with a plastic bag, then walk off glaring over his shoulder.

It was the same routine almost every day, for many days, until one afternoon when Mr. Richard cleared his throat, the young man simply raised his middle finger without looking and kept walking.

Now, Mr. Richard watched as they rounded the corner and came down the street. As soon as the dog squatted, Mr. Richard drew back on a whittled slingshot, and nailed the dog on the haunch with a tiny pebble. The dog jumped and yanked his owner down the street, while the young man looked all around.

Back in his chair in the shade, Mr. Richard was not surprised when the young man and his dog returned with a beat cop. The day was warm and the cop was sweating in his body armor.

“This guy says you shot his dog,” the cop said.

“What? I don’t know this kid and I don’t own any firearms.”

“It was a slingshot,” the young man said. “I heard it snap.”

Mr. Richard leaned forward in his lawn chair. He held up his hands and affected an arthritic curl to his fingers.

“I can barely hold a pencil, let alone a slingshot. And I like dogs.”

“Come on,” the cop said sharply to the young man. “Your dog probably got stung by a bee.”

As they walked up the street, the young man looked over his shoulder. Mr. Richard smiled and raised his middle finger.

****

Mr. Richard would dream almost every night. In some he walked in a fugue, where sights and sounds came and went through a heavy twilight mist. Others were vivid and painted in bright otherworldly colors—memories, really, that he would not allow himself to reflect upon while awake. This night he dreamed of the horses of his boyhood. Their rich herbivore scent. The satisfaction of caring for them—currying and brushing them one after another as they stood cross-tied in the barn. The way their eyes half closed and their heads drooped as he worked. His pride in having their trust. He never ran them too hard during exercise laps or was rough on their mouths with the bit like the other stable boys could be. Sometimes, he would just lean on the fence and watch them clustered in the paddock, their tails swishing. One by one they would walk over to him, snorting and blowing. He’d dig in the pocket of his tattered barn coat and feed each one a fresh carrot. To their distant owners they were livestock or investments—to him they were beloved pets. When they were sold off, he hid in the hayloft and cried as he listened to the metallic stomp of their hooves on trailer ramps. 

When he woke, he willed the horses back to gray tintypes.

****

There was a wooded lot behind Mr. Richard’s tiny square of earth, undisturbed for decades. It was far too rough to economically build on, and thick with crisscrossed timber too spindly for anything except firewood. Mr. Richard valued it as a privacy screen and for the birds it attracted—American robins, cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, and the occasional screech owl, dozing the day away in a tree hollow. Finally, the town took the lot for delinquent taxes and auctioned it off. Mr. Richard missed the auction. His neighbor, whose house sat diagonally to the rear of Mr. Richard’s, and whom he did not know, bought the abutting land for a pittance.

Mr. Richard’s bantam rooster neighbor dressed himself in new, stiff logging chaps, a new, shiny hardhat, and with a new chainsaw began clear-cutting the lot. It was slow work for one man and the saw’s racket rose and fell every day until dark. Whenever he successfully dropped a tree without it hanging up, the neighbor would shout, “That’s what I’m talking about!” Mr. Richard watched from his kitchen window as the trees dropped, one after the other.

When the neighbor reached the trees that bordered Mr. Richard’s tiny backyard, Mr. Richard took up his cane and hobbled the short distance to the property line where the man was bending over his saw, refueling it from a red gas can.

“Excuse me, neighbor,” Mr. Richard said, smiling.

“Yeah?” The man stood rigidly, as if expecting a challenge.

“Are you planning to cut all the trees?”

“Yup.”

“No border trees for erosion and privacy?” Mr. Richard asked, hopefully.

“Nope. Town says I can clear-cut a lot of this size, so that’s just what I’m going to do.”

Mr. Richard stood stooped, propped against his cane.

“Surely a few trees for privacy wouldn’t make a difference?”

“When I’m done cutting and ripping stumps, I’ll be trucking in fill and extending my side lawn out here. It’s my land.” He fished in his t-shirt pocket, stepped forward and handed Mr. Richard a business card. “That might help you out.” He yanked his saw into a sputtering idle and strutted away to the next tree.

Mr. Richard looked at the card in his fingers. Built-Rite Fencing, it read.

Mr. Richard watched for a moment as his neighbor gunned the saw to cutting speed. When it bit into the next tree, a half-dozen birds exploded from its crown and shot away in different directions.

Mr. Richard watched a tiny white feather slowly spin to the ground, then hobbled back to his house.

****

A warm spring became a dusty summer, and true to his word, the neighbor trucked in load after load of fill. The fill was trash, and Mr. Richard looked out from his kitchen window at a badland where a few rain showers surfaced small pieces of rusty metal, bits of broken glass, and some skeletal tree roots reaching up like bony fingers. The rain also germinated the weed seeds dormant in the fill, and the lot was soon covered with crabgrass, plantain, and creeping Charlie—which quickly infiltrated Mr. Richard’s yard. Mr. Richard saw his neighbor standing in his new, expanded side yard. His hands were on his hips and he looked pleased.

One morning, Mr. Richard treated himself to a diner breakfast. He sat at the counter, stirring his oily coffee. Over the clatter of silverware and sturdy plates being delivered to the tables behind him, he listened to the truckers and tradesmen bantering with the counter waitress and grill cook. Long ago, he would have joined in with their cheery wisecracking, but no longer. He just didn’t have the energy.

After breakfast, he drove to a lawn and garden center.

Days later, parts of the neighbor’s yard curled inward, turned brown, and died. Nothing else would grow in those spots.

A few weeks after that, the neighbor climbed a ladder to his roof to pound down some loose shingles. When he happened to turn and look out at his savannah, he saw the clear shape of an enormous phallus painted in dead grass. 

Mr. Richard peered out from behind a curtain as the neighbor stormed up and down his obscene crop circle.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Mr. Richard muttered.

****

Mr. Richard watched as his daughter’s car pulled into the driveway. She wore a light cotton dress with a floral print and looked divinely young. He had been expecting her and had brewed coffee and put out a plate of cheap supermarket pastry, devoid of any flavor except sugar.

They sat at the kitchen table with their coffee and untouched pastry. She always smelled as if she were fresh from the shower.

After answering her father’s how-are-you, how-is-work questions, she leaned forward and bore in.

“Dad, why do you do this stuff? Hobbling with that drugstore cane. When you think nobody is looking, you walk like a soldier. The guy living behind you. I heard about it. Only you would think to draw a giant penis on his lawn in weed killer.”

Mr. Richard shrugged. “That whole thing back there was a mess to start. Can’t prove a thing.”

“Come on, Dad!”

He raised his chin and looked her in the eyes. Father and daughter had the same blue-gray eyes, and the mirror image always startled him a bit. 

“Okay. The cane. It’s so I look harmless. Let’s see how people are when they think the guy at the counter is a just an old man. And Paul Bunyan out back?” Mr. Richard jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “He could have been a good neighbor and at least considered some middle ground, but no. You don’t like it, old man? Go buy a fence. Nice guy. I ate plates and plates of crap my whole life because of … people.” He spat the word. “My grinning boss with the Chiclet teeth patting me on the back all those years. Did you know that behind my back, he took credit for products I designed? Then there were the doctors who dismissed your mother as a hypochondriac no matter how much we argued—I argued—until she was terminal. Because I was Joe Nobody. Because I had no clout. Well, I’ll have no more of it.”

“That’s just not healthy, Dad.”

“Neither is habitually turning the other cheek. It only gets you slapped a second time.” 

“It’s unhealthy, Dad—you sticking to yourself and this house like you do.” She drummed her fingers on the table twice, her groomed nails clicking against the wood. “And your … antics when you’re offended are just plain … malevolent.”

“Malevolent. Now there’s a word.”

“Dad, everybody has runs of disappointment or failure. Life’s always up and down. And people die—early and unfairly. You can’t avenge yourself for every slight. It’ll rot you from the inside.” She leaned back and raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Good Lord. I can’t believe I’m giving lessons about adulthood to my elderly father. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“You know, honey, when you’re young, you wait for your life to unfold, like sitting in the audience excited to see what happens when the curtain goes up. You’re wide-eyed and expectant. But when you get to the end of act three, you want your money back.”

“People care for you, Dad.”

“Do they? When is my birthday?”

Her face colored. She looked down at her cup.

“It was last Tuesday, but who’s keeping score?” he said.

“You are. Always.”

“More coffee?”

“No.” She stood, her chair scraping, and made for the kitchen door. She rattled the door knob, and looked back at him.

“I’m sorry I’m another disappointment,” she said.

“Take some pastry.”

He watched her back out of the driveway a little too fast and speed away. He told himself he should have let the forgotten birthday slide. But he couldn’t. His instinct to counterpunch was far too strong, even toward someone who cared enough to check in on him weekly.

****

That night, after he took an antacid tablet for a vague heartburn, he crawled into his rumpled bed in his darkened, dusty-smelling bedroom. A breath of wind rattled one of the drawn shades. They were old-fashioned, dark green shades, to keep the light out. As he lay there blinking into the darkness, all his secret regrets came and went, like strobe flashes. They made him writhe and thump the mattress with his fist.

“I’ve been a crybaby my whole life,” he whispered into the dark. “With a mean streak. I think that may be the most honest thing I’ve ever said.”

But then it occurred to him that it might not be too late. There’s always a way out. A phone call. A gesture. He would call his daughter tomorrow.

That comforted him and gradually he drifted off. He dreamed of his childhood country, perfectly preserved in his memory. He stood at the edge of deep woods, smelling something rich and dark, familiar and comforting: forest, black dirt, rotting leaves. He looked up at tall maple trees, crowns gently circling in the wind.

Then suddenly it was autumn in his dream forest, and every flaming leaf was an exotic dancer quaking in the breeze. He stepped forward and felt his feet sink into the soft humus. It was cool in the shade.

He looked up just ahead toward an old cart path that bisected the woods. He tossed his cane aside, jogged to the path, caught his breath, and climbed through the broken stitchery of a collapsing buck-and-rail fence. He found himself in an ancient pasture. He stopped there at the fence, breathing hard and waiting for his fluttering heart to steady. In the center of the pasture was a colossal oak. Three compact, muscular, chestnut horses with thick black manes grazed in its shadows. He could hear the rip-rip-rip sound as they picked the best-of-the-best from the wild overgrowth. They were Morgans, these three, and one-by-one they raised their heads and started toward him. The gentle drumbeat of their hooves on turf was the most gracious sound he’d ever heard.

Mr. Richard leaned back against the mossy fence, pressed his palms against his throbbing heart, and waited for them.