Chilanga Sprinkles

They called him John, not because that was his name, but because he looked like a John, in the same way they had once called their kid’s coach Mr. Dwarfman because he looked like a dwarf. They had no idea what John’s name was. When they saw John, they said “Hey”, or “What’s up?” being careful to never address him by name. They never introduced him to anyone. He’d been their next-door neighbor for decades. They thought John looked the type who had a wife, though no one had ever seen one. They imagined she was a sickly, pious Christian woman who lived in darkness. John kept all the window shades down. Maybe he was a frugal man trying to save on the electric bill, but they liked to think it was to keep his wife secret. Confined. His daughter had never played with the neighborhood kids. She’d walked, John securely holding her hand, to and from the elementary school a few blocks away. She spoke to no one. No one knew what happened to her in the years between elementary school and high school.  She simply vanished from the neighborhood. When at last she was seen leaving John’s house early one fall morning, they wondered if she was truly the same child, or if another had been substituted in. She walked sulkily, eyes to the ground, hoodie pulled over her head and face, until she found the bus stop for the area’s voc-tech high school. She stood and waited for the bus, talking to no one. She made the other students uncomfortable, and they showily ignored her, pretending she was not there. The neighbors saw her once walking down the main road that divides two subdivisions, a good 30-minute walk from the street they shared with John. They slowed and rolled down the window of their crowded Kia Sephia to ask her if she wanted a ride. If she recognized them, her gaze did not show it. If she thought they were strangers, her face showed no fear. After a few seconds of awkward mutual staring, they added “We live next door.” Without speaking she opened the back door and squeezed in next to their children. The next minutes were spent in a silence so intense that if one of them had farted, no one would have laughed. They parked in their driveway and John’s daughter got out and mumbled what they assumed was a thank you, and sulked through their yard into John’s and on through John’s front door. 

In addition to a daughter and presumably a wife, John also had a dog. It was a bark-less dog. On occasion they would feed John’s dog treats through the holes in the fence, and the dog would wag his tail with abandon and lick their hands and fingers until they were slimy with thick saliva. Their dog and John’s dog played together, running along either side of the chain-link fence that separated their yards. The dog’s name they knew, because when their dog got rowdy and barked at John’s dog, enticing him to frolic together, John would appear at his back door to quietly and evenly speak the dog’s name, and the dog would disappear into the darkness of John’s house.

When they’d arrived in the neighborhood, John’s house had been a muted 1970s green, the kind of green that wants to be vibrant but is too shy. Likely the original exterior color. It was well maintained, no peeling paint. Clean. John had the exterior washed every couple of years. An extravagance in this humble part of town. One year, instead of washing his house’s facade, John hired a short, quiet, possibly Latino man to revamp the house. The guy worked diligently, removing cabinet doors from John’s kitchen and bathrooms, He scraped off the lead paint, leaving the chips to filter into the soil of the front yard, then carefully painted one side, let it dry, then painted the other side of each door, and when they were all a pastel baby blue and he’d taken them all inside and carefully re-hung them on the cabinets, her carefully took down the front door and did the same. On that day, the neighbors walked by John’s house very slowly, trying to get a look inside the house, but even with the front door gone, nothing could be seen inside but darkness. By the end of the day, the newly painted front door was replaced carefully on its hinges by the small man. This was the only person other than John and his daughter that had ever been seen at John’s house. He would be remembered for years, not because of his skill or the care he took in his craft, but because had gone inside John’s house. 

Shortly after John’s house got a makeover, his daughter vanished once more. In that time, John began walking his dog in the evening and probably drinking less beer. His gut shrank to match the rest of his tall, wide yet lanky white body. He wore a baseball cap to guard his pale face from the sun. His dog was not like the neighbor’s dog. John’s dog walked at John’s pace, didn’t stop to sniff other dog’s urine, or to leave his own. He did not even pull on the leash at the cat house, three blocks over, to eat the cat-turd buffet. This went on for a few years, and then as suddenly as John started walking his dog, he stopped. Gradually, John’s dog stopped frolicking with the neighbor’s dog, each always in his respective back yard. Then John’s dog stopped coming out to the back yard, and John stopped leaving his house.

John’s daughter’s second coming was marked by a dented, faded, red sedan with fluffy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, a toddler with a droopy diaper and a newborn that lay listless in a car seat in the front yard, while the toddler sat picking grass blades from the dirt, and a 20-something man with a teardrop tattoo. The man-boy drove off in John’s old white Chevy hatchback a few weeks later and came back to John’s house late in the evening without the car. 

John’s wife appeared then. She sat in a white plastic chair on the stop step, next to the front door and tended to the toddler. She had long gray hair, pulled back tightly and held in a perfect bun. She never looked up. Never waved at passersby. Did not speak to the child. Did not occupy her hands with a crochet hook or a crossword puzzle or anything else. John’s daughter would come out, agitated, yelling in anger at the tear-drop tattoo man. She would get in the dented red sedan, slam the door, and speed away. By the time the new generation numbered three plus one in utero, John’s wife stopped sitting by the front door. There was a mass exodus of broken furniture, old toys, and musty drapes and carpets, which littered the curb awaiting the city’s large-item collection not yet scheduled for the neighborhood. A home improvement truck parked in the driveway, and John’s house was painted white, with black trim. The home improvement crew did not bother taking down the window screens or the front door. The house was not pressure washed or primed. 

When the neighbors walked or drove by now, their sadness for John’s house was greater than their curiosity, and they averted their gaze from the three-foot white cinder block fence that was begun, but never finished, meant to separate the yard from the driveway. They averted their eyes from the newly leveled yard where grass seed grew tender green shoots for a few days only to dehydrate and die untended in the sun.