The Haunted

Ignoring him, Julian opened the drapes. Sure enough, three skateboarders were on their driveway, one of them flipping his board into the air and then landing on it, the other two preparing to race down the sloping concrete to the street. It was the second time in two days that this had happened, and though theirs was the only driveway on the street not blocked by permanently parked cars or pickups (their vehicles went in the garage), that didn’t give neighborhood punks the right to use it as their own personal skate park. Angry, he started toward the front door.

“Don’t go outside, Dad. Please!”

“Get some ’nads,” Megan told him. She was sitting on the couch watching TV—a tween show on the Disney Channel—and she smiled derisively at her brother before turning back to her program. The two of them fought constantly, and even before Claire had become pregnant with James, Julian had known this would happen. He and his brother had battled throughout their entire childhood, especially during the teenage years, when his dad would sometimes have to break up honest-to-God fistfights. They still didn’t get along today. But Claire had read in some parenting book that it was better for siblings to be near in age, and she insisted that if they were going to have two children, the kids had to be spaced twelve to fourteen months apart. “That way,” she told him, “they’ll be closer. And when they grow up, they’ll be friends.” She’d since seen the error of her ways, although, of course, she would never admit that she’d been wrong.

“Did you hear what she said?” James cried, pointing at his sister.

“I heard. Megan, knock it off,” Julian admonished.

She snickered.

“Megan,” he warned.

“Ground her!” James said.

Julian opened the front door. “Both of you. Stop.” Walking outside, he closed the door behind him. On the driveway, the three teenage boys were spinning in circles, the backs of their boards scraping the ground, the fronts thrusting proudly in the air. He recognized one of them as Tom Willet’s kid from down the street, and though he didn’t know the other two boys, they were the same ones he’d had to kick off his property yesterday. “Excuse me!” he said loudly.

The Willet boy glanced casually over at him, spinning around. “Hey, dude, where are your daughters?” He stressed the plural, laughing, and Julian hoped James wasn’t listening.

“Get off my driveway.”

The three skateboarders ignored him.

“Now.”

“Make us.” The Willet kid stared back defiantly, still spinning.

Julian felt a hot rush of anger course through him, though he knew the boy had him trapped. He could yell at the skateboarders until his voice was hoarse, but if they didn’t listen, there was nothing he could do, since any attempt he made to physically remove them would have their parents calling the cops and filing assault charges. A middle solution suddenly came to him and, without saying a word, he walked over to the faucet at the end of Claire’s flower bed, turned on the water and picked up the hose. He twisted the nozzle three clicks, from “shower” to “jet,” and squeezed the trigger handle. A stream of water hit first one skateboard, then the others, as he swung his arm from side to side. He aimed higher, and the water shot into the boys’ legs.

The skateboarders started yelling.

“Hey!”

“What are you doing?”

“What the hell?”

“I’m hosing off my driveway,” he said calmly.

The boys quickly boarded down the driveway to the sidewalk.

“You squirted us!”

“On purpose!”

“I’m hosing off my driveway,” he repeated. “You happened to be in the way.” He smiled. “I told you to leave,” he said innocently.

“Fuck you!”

“Douche!”

Middle fingers raised in defiance, the kids sped away, racing down the sidewalk. Still smiling, Julian remained where he was for several minutes, until he was sure that the skateboarders were gone and not coming back. Finally, he walked over to the flower bed, turned off the faucet, switched the nozzle back to “shower” and drained the rest of the water, dripping the last of it onto Claire’s chrysanthemums.

When he walked back into the house, James was grinning. “That was great, Dad!”

He smiled back at his son. “That’s my job.”

Claire was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, looking concerned. “I don’t like this,” she said.

Julian nodded, saying nothing, not having to. They’d talked about the situation before. It wasn’t just the teenagers. It was everything. The entire neighborhood was going downhill. There’d been several foreclosures over the past few years, and more than half of the houses were now rentals. The kids who lived in them were much rougher than the kids who had been there before.

“Maybe we should move,” Claire suggested.