The New Neighbor

The small U-Haul van cruised through the streets of the northern California town of Springwood. Although the air was hot from the summer sun of 1997, the driver’s window was tightly closed. The man driving the vehicle kept his old eyes peeled for the house he was looking for.

He might be able to relax here, he thought to himself. After all, they had lost his trail back in St. Louis and he had been a free and unhunted man for over two months now, and he made good use of them. He might be able to let his guard down. Then he would live in peace.

For a while anyway. Until the Chasers sniffed him, out again. He did not know how he could keep living like this; the hunted lifestyle he led would be stressful on the health of a young man in his prime, and he was no young man by any stretch of the imagination. But he would manage somehow. He always had before and this time would be no different. And if he died on the road, what of it? He might be doing the world a favor. The worlds a favor, and besides…going back to that place was far worse than any death imaginable.

Alphonse Brightman’s mother had been one of those women who worry that they will look old before their time. And indeed, Michelle Brightman had shown traces of white in her chestnut hair before she was thirty two; the bitter irony of it all was that she had died before she was forty. She died of a heart attack in a grocery store, breathing her last among the vegetable and fruit matter on the floor while strangers questioned and stared.

Her gravestone said “Sadly Missed”, but Al didn’t really miss her at all. It was hard to miss someone who you barely remembered. Not that his father really helped. The two of them had fought one another since they had gotten married and when she died, he had been sad, but not grieved.

So Al did not ask questions about his mother’s life or even about her death. All he knew was “she died” as his father would tell him in a curt, flat tone whenever he asked.

Al was not an overly curious boy; he never sought to pass beyond his limits. He favored his father in his looks as well as his personality; his eyes were dark blue and he was short and wiry. “A scrapper”, everyone said. His black hair was messy and as no one made him comb it, it usually stuck up all over the place. He played on the school baseball team at Willow Elementary and his aspiration was to be the best in the fourth grade.

Al’s father worked as a teacher in the nearby school, so he was always up to his elbows in the work of other kids. Alphonse found it kind of funny. The fact that his dad was always working gave him time to do what he wanted to do, and he made good use of it.

Summer vacation had come to his hometown of Springwood and he planned to enjoy himself thoroughly. Currently he was heading down the sidewalk on his way to the Greed Sale, a candy store. The name was odd for a store, but it was named this by its owner Eben McLeish. McLeish was a crabby old man, but you would be hard pressed to find a store that sold better candy to the kids of Springwood.

Al finally reached the Greed Sale. The store was a large red building with gold trim around its silver door. Faded posters of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory graced the glass windows. Al stopped his bike against the walls and went in, the little bell tinkling.

The inside of the Greed Sale was green and dark. Its tiled floor was dark with the ground-in dirt of a thousand children’s shoes. Eben McLeish was behind the counter and currently he was ladling out jellybeans with the grim air of a bank worker taking coins from a vault.

McLeish was a thin man with a slightly stopped air and a wrinkly, age-spotted skin. As the kids ran away laughing, he yelled, “And don’t try and steal nothing on the way out!” he closed the glass over the counter, muttering to himself.

“Excuse me?” Al asked as he sidled up to the counter. His Chuck Taylor shoes crunched on old candy wrappers.

“Oh, it’s you” McLeish said without turning around. “So how’s your dad doing these days? Still keeping the little snots in line?” McLeish may have presented to the world that he hated children, but to the kids of Springwood, he was a venerated, if gruff, figure.

“Ah, Dad’s fine” Al said. “He’s still buried up to his chest in work.”

“Well, tell him I said that he still owes me a game of chess” the old man said. “Now what can I get you?”

“A jawbreaker” Al said, pointing to a large jar of multicolored jawbreakers the size of tennis-balls. McLeish grunted and went around to unscrewing the cap. He took one of them out and put it in a plastic bag.

“Here, boy” he said, handing the bag into Alphonse’s hand. “That’s a dollar.” Al laid the dollar in the old man’s dry palm and went out, the bell clinking behind him. After he had put the jawbreaker into his mouth, Al mounted his bike and pedaled back to his house.

As he traveled through the hot streets, past the palm trees planted in the sidewalk, he saw a small U-Haul van driving around the street as if it were looking for something. Curious, he peered to the van’s windows, trying to see the driver. He could not make it out however; the driver was a mass of shadows hunched in the driver’s seat.

A Hum, I wonder who that was? Alphonse thought, but his ten-year-old mind quickly put the incident behind him and he pedaled back to his house. Alphonse Brightman’s house was gray with a large, sloping red roof. The front lawn was a small square of green in the front, but the backyard was much bigger.

The development that Alphonse and his father lived in, Atlantis Green was full of townhouses. Lenore Avenue, the street on which Al lived, was where the better ones were. As he pedaled past one of them, Tanya Bergerac stepped out, dressed in a short skirt and shirt for the California summer.

Tanya was a cashier at the local supermarket, the Super F. Black and pretty with her red dyed hair pulled back in a ponytail; she carefully locked her door and walked down the steps. Alphonse always had liked her; she had babysat him on several occasions as an extra job.

“Hi, Tanny!” Al yelled as he went past. She waved at him absently and continued about her business. Al finally pedaled into his driveway, past his father’s green Sienna van. It was a teacher’s car; bulky and uninteresting. Alphonse did not like to even ride in it, which was why he had his bike ready this summer.

When he stowed his bike in the garage, he walked around the front path and looked out at the neighbors. The house on the right of his, the Hanchett house had, until five months ago, belong to Mr. Jack Hanchett who was a traveling salesman for a telephone company. The man had a serious gambling problem, however, and (according to Al’s father at least) had accumulated an equally serious amount of debts. In the five months that had passed since Hanchett had moved quickly out of his house because of raging bankruptcy, the dwelling had remained empty.

The Hanchett house was very similar to the rest of the houses in Atlantis Green development. It was painted a robin’s egg blue and had a dark black roof. Its shutters were red and it had a red door. The small yard had been carefully cultivated by Mr. Hanchett, and it had not deteriorated in the time that the man had been absent.

“Alphonse!” his father’s voice came through the door as it opened on the front porch. Frank Arbuckle stepped out. He was a large man with a balding dome of a head and a great black beard that seemed to be grown almost to make up for his lack of head hair. His face was lined and about as uninteresting as a car. A teacher’s face to be sure, one who is bored with the subject and only whishes for retirement. When Alphonse’s father and mother had gotten married, Michelle had wanted to keep her last name, Brightman. And she had

“So, where’ve you been all day?” Frank asked. He was dressed in a brown chambray shirt and blue jeans. Faded loafers covered his feet. Frank swept a hand through his badly thinning hair and sighed. “It’s great to be young, isn’t it?” he asked to no one in particular. His father did that sometimes, talked to thin and empty air without any embarrassment at all. He considered it what he called the “Widower’s Prerogative”. That little phrase applied to a lot of things, but this was what he used it for the most.

“I guess it is good to be young Dad” Al said, answering his father’s question even though he knew he was just having more of his “Widower’s Prerogative”. Frank glared at his son.

“That’s a fine way to greet your father who’s been working away all this damn hot day so that you can have a roof over your head and not have to go to the same school as where you daddy punches the clock.” Al went to the Vorpral School, a private school outside of town. Because his dad did not want his son to go to the same school where he worked (and Alphonse was eternally grateful for this) he went there instead.

Al entered the house with his father behind him and shook off his shoes on the floor. The floor of the front hall was littered with shoes that Alphonse and Frank had kicked off when they got in. It had not always been like this, but that was when Michelle was alive. She was a neat-freak and had she seen what the house had become, she would have had a heart attack all over again. It was not that the house was pigsty; it was just that the pristine standards of neatness that Michelle had kept had gone to hell in a handbasket.

“Well, I’m glad that Eb McLeish and I are still on for that chess game so I can beat his old ass” Frank laughed. “But now, I have to get back to work. Do what you want, just don’t leave the house. We’ve established that, right?”

“Right” Al said unhappily. The rule was, that after it had become 5:30 P.M. (as it was now), he was no longer allowed to be outside the yard of the house. His adventures around town had a cut-off point. Often Al did not mind. His friends were all gone for the summer, gone to places that had exotic names that he could not pronounce. He alone had not gone anywhere, supposedly because his father was working summer school for extra pay and could not leave California. This was true, but Al suspected that it was more because he did not want to go anywhere for vacation.

Alphonse had an idea about his mother and father’s relationship with one another. He sensed in a vague way that the two of them had fallen out of love with one another at some point, but he also thought that her death had affected his father in a very negative way. It had made him into a hermit of sorts, a man who was now a recluse from other people and the world, save a few select friends. Thinking about this always made Alphonse sad in a faint sort of way, so he did not think about it often.

“Earth to Alphonse Brightman! Come in Alphie! Come in!” his father teased, rubbing Al’s head.

“Oh, sorry, what did you say, Dad?” Al asked. “What happened?”

“I said we’re getting a new neighbor” Frank said. He crossed the front hall and went into the kitchen. Pulling open the refrigerator, he pulled out a long-necked bottle of beer. He took a deep swig, belched and continued, “I can’t believe that the Hanchett house is going up for sale. I guess it means old Hanchett’s debts really did finally catch up to him.”

“I guess they did” Al said, not really caring about the new neighbor one way or another. He hurried up the stairs to his room. His room was white and unpainted, with several posters and other decorations on the walls. It had four windows; two that faced the front of the house and two that looked over at the Hanchett house next door. Whenever the new neighbors arrived, he was going to be able to get a front row seat to their moving in. A TV stood on a stand near his bed, and a Nintendo 64 rested next to it. Okay, good. Time to start gaming.

Alphonse was halfway through a Mario game, when he heard a car in the driveway of the Hanchett house. Al stopped the game and opened the blinds on that side. The sound of a car from this side of the house was so foreign after all this time that he almost did not recognize it. When he looked outside, he saw that a small U-Haul van had pulled up in front of the house. He stared. It was the same van from before, he was sure of it.

The van door opened and slammed as the driver got out. Al squinted closer. The driver (and new neighbor, evidently) was a man. At this stage of Al’s ten-year-old point of view, there were two kinds of adults: Young and Old. The new neighbor was most surely one of the latter types. He was a small man and very thin. He had a rather square-shaped head and black hair that was pure white at the temples. His neck was scrawny and wrinkled and he could see the guy’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed.

He was dressed in a patched tweed jacket and old corduroy pants. His feet were clad in scuffed sneakers and the laces were untied. He looked like a retired college professor that had fallen on hard times.

This is the guy? This is our new neighbor? He looks pathetic was Al’s first, cruel thought. Then he revised his thinking and looked down at the old man who had opened the back doors of the van and was taking out a few meager boxes. He felt a small spark of pity for this unknown man and his little possessions. The guy’s probably as poor as a church-mouse he thought with some amusement. Abruptly the man looked up at the window, and Al gasped in spite of himself. The man’s eyes were a deep and steady blue that burned in his old man’s face like sapphires.

Al pulled the shades down and sat against the wall, his heart pounding. For a minute, as he looked into those bright eyes, he thought he felt something flip over in his head. Perhaps this new neighbor was going to be interesting after all.

I haven’t submitted a story in AGES!! Well, here it is, the first chappie. Hope you all enjoy