It’s a Dog-Eat-Dog World

Iharbor no ill will toward my neighbors, but my dog hates their guts.

It started nearly a decade ago when we had just moved into the neighborhood. If my colleague Jim Geraghty is the most famous resident of Authenticity Woods, Va., then I’m a nonentity in Liberal Façade, just a few towns over. The Ukrainian flags are few and faded these days, but the “In this house we believe” signs stand tall.

Anyway, Buster got into a scrape with the neighbor dog -- let’s call him Fritz. I don’t know who started it, but I know poor Fritz got the worst of it, even though Buster is a calf-high Jack Russell and Fritz was twice his size.

Fritz’s human paterfamilias knocked on my door an hour or so after the fracas and made sure to note more than once that Fritz was “a show dog, with papers” -- both those facts each time, like Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. The air was laden with the implication that the creature’s wounds smarted all the more on account of his pedigree. I immediately volunteered to pay Fritz’s modest vet bill (barely a smear of ointment) so as not to start our neighborly relations off on a bad note. It didn’t work, and a chilly peace commenced.

At some point in the pandemic days, Buster went completely blind. Before you weep, know he’s happy and thriving. He just doesn’t like to go on walks much anymore. Instead, the old boy has free range of our backyard and has built a kind of biological Maginot Line along the tall wooden fence that separates it from our neighbors’. Fritz went off to his reward some while back, but Buster remembers.

A few weeks ago we got hit by the big blizzard. Normally we’d dig out a portion of the yard for Buster’s comfort, but this time, under my wife’s brutal yoke, we were so focused on the driveway and sidewalk that we didn’t get to the yard until the snow had already iced into “snowcrete.”

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Now picture poor Buster, old and blind and sniffing desperately for some naked patch of earth or greenery in subarctic conditions. There simply wasn’t anywhere for him to go. Accidents ensued. Desperate, I noticed that my neighbor had dug out a six-foot square of crushed gravel around his car where his property met mine (and had dug out literally nothing else, by the way, including the public sidewalk).

This slice of dirt and pebble was an oasis for my little fella, and we made use of it a couple of times, each time dutifully cleaning up after ourselves. The first night, I could swear I heard the little quarter horn-beep of a remote door lock. Once. Twice. A few seconds apart. Odd.

The next night, just as Buster was finishing his computations, the neighbor’s car alarm went off. I realized what was happening, but I couldn’t believe it. And then suddenly there he was in his pajamas, trembling with rage behind his hedge, telling me off. He said he’d been watching us on his security camera, and that if I let Buster go on his dirt again without picking it up he’d report me to the city. I made a brief and rough reply. Then his wife emerged and pulled him inside.

It bothered me the rest of the night and the next morning. I didn’t have l’esprit de l’escalier, exactly. The way I looked at it, skulking behind your drapes with your key fob to get one over on a handicapped dog is a kind of self-own. But I won’t live under a threat, no matter how petty.

So I reached out and apologized, but I also said the thing about living under a petty threat, adding that the same jowly boxer had moved his bowels on my front yard every day since the first Trump administration and it never occurred to me to be outraged by it so long as it got cleaned up. And I invited him to gather up his electronic evidence and join me at the city department of his choosing, where I would throw myself on the mercy of the authorities. I’d bring my own security footage too, which of course showed me picking up after my dog.

He demurred, but here’s the point: He was maybe within his property rights to make this scene, but it was a gross violation of neighborly norms. I wanted either to reestablish our chilly peace, governed by said norms, or to declare war properly, in which case only the Geneva Conventions would hold.

It’s the in-between that is a precarious place, where hybrid measures and mischief rule. There’s probably a lesson there for our political moment. More than one, actually.