Garage Sale
(1987)*
Lois McMaster Bujold

	It was the Great Pigeon Uproar that finally did it for Krieger. It was not, in all conscience, the worst of the incidents with his neighbor, Mrs. Arbor—to whom he referred when not being obscene as "that woman who waxes her driveway"—it was merely the last.

	Harold Krieger had always fancied himself as a mild-mannered man, easy to get along with, understanding; "live and let live" was his motto, both stated and implied. He would sooner have had his tongue torn out than tell a neighbor, say, to what height to clip his hedge, what tool to use, how to hold it, and what schedule to maintain for retrims, let alone what posture in which to stand while completing said chores.

	Mrs. Arbor, unfortunately, had no such inhibitions. That had been the beginning of their relationship. He had smiled fiercely, through his teeth, and resisted the impulse to finish the job with his hedge shears upon her steel gray hair, crimped in disciplined waves straight back from her frowning forehead.

	It was no skin off his nose if she chose to scrub her aluminum siding twice yearly, until the enamel was beginning to show signs of wearing through. Or chose to have her trim scraped and painted yearly, at the same time her driveway was re-topped. She was an empty-nest widow who obviously had too much money and not enough real work to do.

	For Krieger, it had been a toss-up for funds between paint for his peeling (non-aluminum) siding, and a swing set for the kids. The kids now swung happily, not minding in the least the occasional small now of paint chips when the summer breeze was brisk and in just the right direction.

	Mrs. Arbor minded, though; she had, in fact, demanded that he sweep his offending chips from her driveway. The little green dots on the pristine black surface must have deeply offended her sense of esthetics. There could be no other reason for the ruckus, as far as he could see, she owned no car.

	But the Cat Incident had been the worst. She complained frequently, bitterly, and nasally about Muffy.

	"Cat droppings," she sniffed, "carry worms and diseases. If you can't keep that filthy beast out of my yard, or tied up, I shall call the Animal Control Warden!"

	"Oh, come on," Krieger replied. "Nobody ties up cats. People can't catch cat worms, and besides, cat flops are good for your roses."

	But call Animal Control she had. Fortunately, the cat had been upstairs, sleeping and shedding gently on his bed, when the warden came. The officer had listened, with long-suffering politeness, to a harangue from Mrs. Arbor, delivered through her locked screen door. Krieger, like Muffy, lay low, peeking through the curtain, by now always kept closed, on the Arbor side of the house. But evidently no one was supposed to tie up cats, for the officer went away again without approaching Krieger. Krieger, who had just decided not to answer the door, pretending he wasn't home, was relieved.

	Somehow, changing the litter box had become his chore, although he could almost always outwait his wife on the subject of whose turn it was to do windows. But he drew the line firmly at Mrs. Arbor's telephoned request—nay, demand—that the report to her garden to police up cat flops.

	"Muffy's not the only damned cat in the damned neighborhood," he pointed out cogently.

	Her reply was freezing; his was obscene. She hung up, and he hoped that was the last of the cat flop flap.

	It was the very next day, as he sat contemplating his front lawn and wondering whether to part with the money to get the mower repaired (said cast to flow directly from that set aside for a small weekend fishing trip) or wait and rent a hay bailer, when Mrs. Arbor came around the side of his house. She was careful not to set actual foot on his tainted property. She had Muffy by the scruff of the neck, held out from her body like a plague victim's garment.

	"It was doing it!" she screamed at him. Her further words were drowned out by a much louder roaring and squealing. The city crew was trimming the trees on their street today, feeding branches through the woodchipper shredder. It made a noise like a hundred banshees with indigestion, which normally set Krieger's teeth on edge. Now he smiled, put his hand to his ear, and shook his head. She continued to mouth her complaints. The shredder stopped.

	"—filthy," she was saying. "You can't deny it this time; I caught it in the very act. Horrible smelly things!"

	"I wouldn't hold that cat if I were you," said Krieger. "It's got fleas, too."

	Her nostrils flared, as she inhaled and swelled with outrage. The shredder started up again with a roar. Her words were swept away in a torrent of sound.

	Suddenly she darted over the curb and flung the struggling beast past the workman into the maw of the woodchipper. If the cat cried out, the sound was drowned in the shrieking of the machine.

	"Oh, my God!" cried the workman. "Stop it, Bill!"

	"What?" screamed Bill back.

	Krieger stood with his mouth open, too astonished even to protest. It was much too late, anyway. Mrs. Arbor glared over her shoulder at him in malignant triumph and scurried into her house, slamming the door. In the sudden silence as the shredder stopped he could even hear the clicks as her two deadbolts were jammed into place.

	When the kids came home from school, he only said, "Muffy was killed in the street today."

	He did not personally miss the cat much; it had been afflicted with a chronic rhinitis, and it used to wake him up regularly at four in the morning sneezing gobs of cat mucus in his left ear. So he did not write "Psycho Bitch" across her front lawn in Clorox; but it was a near thing.

=<O>=

	Krieger could, when feeling vaguely Christian, see her point about the cat. It had been his animal; he could, he supposed, be construed as responsible for its end products. But the pigeons—the pigeons belonged to God. Or the city. Or the free air. Certainly no to him, in any case. They wheeled and swooped in the upper air and nested in his eaves. Not in Mrs. Arbor's eaves, of course, she had screens across hers. He didn't even mind their gently cooing and calling that drifted through the upstairs bedroom window on a warm summer's evening. They carried on their little pigeon lives, and he had no objection to sharing a bit of space with them, particularly as he never sat in the eaves himself. But of course, where there's life, there's shit.

	"Harboring those disease-carrying, filthy things!" was the way Mrs. Arbor put it. "Just look at the mess they're making on my driveway!" And she called the Board of Health.

	This time the officer did come to Krieger's house. They had a long talk. Fortunately, the wife and kids were away, visiting her mother. His wife had a tendency to go paranoid at officialdom, dithering in fear, and he was glad he did not have to explain to her that the Board of Health had no power to send people to concentration camps.

	Krieger kept his temper, barely. Until he had called the extermination company, and discovered the charge for pigeon-proofing his abode to run close to three hundred dollars. At his expense. By the time he hung up, the order from the Board of Health was clutched in a tight and damply wrinkled ball in his fist, and his eyes rolled whitely.

	He called Mrs. Arbor, and explained the difficulty in parliamentary language. She reiterated her position. The tone of the discussion dropped to a new low.

	"Come on, lady!" he cried. "Have a heart. I've been laid off for two months now. You don't live riotously on unemployment, believe me, not with a wife and two kids. I don't have that kind of money to throw away. We're up against the wall as it is!"

	"That's what wrong with this country," she returned. "Lazy bums who'd rather swill out of the public trough than go out and work an honest job!"

	"Nhg!" he snarled, beginning to hyperventilate. "The only job that's opened up in this town in the past four weeks was for a counter-boy at McDonald's I was there at eight in the morning. There were nineteen men ahead of me. Half of them were wearing suits and ties, for Chrissakes!"

	"I am going down to the City Offices tomorrow and personally—do you hear me?—personally follow through and see that you get what you deserve!" she shrieked at him. "If it takes all day!"

	This time he hung up, trembling, and in grave doubt about his blood pressure.

=<O>=

	He saw her scuttle out like a crab to the taxi early next morning, then scuttle back. The old clunker rolled off without her. In about half an hour a newer and cleaner vehicle arrive and bore her away. Krieger wondered if the first had been related to the taxi he last rode in, that had had a sick drunk for the previous passenger. He rather hoped so.

	The enemy dispatched, he wandered around outside his house gazing up at the pigeons, glumly estimating the price of pigeon pie at roughly thirty dollars the pound. He let his eyes roam over his neighbor's property, driveway black as a top hat, neat white garage trim as though cut from paper.

	It was the garage that started his train of thought. The temptation boiled up out of his subconscious like rising lava. He abjured it; he struggled with it; he was still fighting it even as his feet began to move.

	There was a long board and some blue paint left over in his garage. He had it fairly neatly lettered in minutes, without even having to crowd the letters together at the end. In moments more he stood before her side door, remembering how he had gotten into his own house the last time he'd locked himself out. Still he resisted. Then he thought of Muffy.

	He drew back his leg and kicked the door in.

=<O>=

	His first customers arrived almost before he had her kitchen table out on the driveway, hastily piled with the contents of her kitchen drawers. He made his next sign, "Everything on this table, five cents." And another, "Everything must go; make offer. Mother moving to Florida rest home." He found the key to her garage in the drawer along with her kitchen knives, and threw it open to the public.

	Her closets were next. Their contents might have already been arranged for sale, so neat and orderly and color-coordinated were they. All the shoes were in their original boxes. Every garment was in a plastic cleaner bag. He had but to whisk them out on the driveway for an instant emporium.

	The wood furniture was highly polished, without a mar or scratch. The lamps still had cellophane covers on their shades. The upholstered furniture was covered in white sheets like a Ku Klux Klan rally, to protect their fabrics' dyes from a sunlight that was never permitted to enter the draped windows. "Line new," was the next sign he lettered. "No offer refused."

	By noon he was mobbed, as the early customers returned after passing on the word of the extraordinary bargains to be had to relatives, friends, neighbors. They settled like locusts, and departed like Viking raiders, laden with loot. One came with a pick-up truck, the longboat of its day, taking the washer and the dryer and the refrigerator for an amazing cost of twenty dollars. Krieger threw in the food in gratis.

	Lunch was drunk in interrupted gulps from a half-empty carton of milk, abstracted just before the 'fridge was carried off, between trips upstairs to gut the bedrooms, the linen closet, the very attic. He collected the small change, not even counting it, and threw it in an old fruitcake tin. He pressed the slow-moving items on his surprised customers as premiums.

	He carted bedspreads and dressers with a berserk strength he had never know he possessed, heaving, hauling, his glasses askew and sliding down his sweating nose. Boxes of groceries. Canned goods from the basement pantry. Unopened soap and plastic-wrapped toilet tissue from the bathroom cupboard. A complete set of National Inquirers dating back to 19662 in cardboard cartons. A dozen volumes of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A matador, painted on black velvet, and praying hands in painted plaster, plucked from the living room wall. Everything.

=<O>=

	At four PM, as the afternoon light was beginning to slant through the maple trees shading the street, glimmering on the little whirling helicopters of their shedding seeds, it was done. He stood, wheezing slightly, on her black driveway, trembling with exhaustion, elation, and terror.

	"Here, let me help you," he said to the last pick-up truck owner. A taxi had just turned up the street, and was slowing as it approached. "Take this carton too. No, really! I can't haul this junk to Florida, it's just not economical. Thanks! Bye!" He waved him off.

	Krieger knelt in the driveway, the fruitcake tin between his knees, counting the day's proceeds for the first time. The taxi halted, its brakes skreeling like muted bagpipes. The door opened. Mrs. Arbor crept out. Her hat was crooked, her eyes wild.

	"I feel so strange!" she moaned. Indeed, she looked strange, almost translucent. Not only her floral print dress, but her very legs seemed backlit right through the heavy mesh of her support stockings.

	Her eyes fell on Krieger. "You!" she cried with loathing. "You! What are you doing here? What have you done with my things?"

	She staggered into her house, an image reflected on glass, past the door lock hanging like a loose tooth from Krieger's forcible entry. "My things!" her wail echoed within, from downstairs, from upstairs, from the basement. "My things! My things!"

	She emerged from the side door, Krieger smiled up at her, at her transparency. Her siding made horizontals right through her, like a portrait drawn on lined paper.

	Her last wail faded with her body. "My things ..."

	And there was only a little greasy blot left on the now scuffed surface of her driveway.

	Krieger finished counting. "Two hundred ninety-fine ninety-five, three hundred even, and a nickel left over. He rattled the three hundred dollars of bills and change in the fruitcake tin, removed from it the dirtiest nickel he could find, and placed it in the center of the grease spot. "There's your change, Mrs. Arbor."

	He rose, muscles creaking protestingly, to his feet. Before him, on the driveway, a blob of pigeon guano appeared with a sudden splat. It was mulberry season.

	He rattled the can, looking up at the flitting forms above him. "I've got enough to do you now, you hear?" he called to the sky. "Just call the pigeon SS, and it's the ovens for you!"

	He stared up at his crowded eaves. A gently twittering coo floated down upon him, like a benediction.

	"No, by God!" he shouted up to the pigeons joyously. "You can live, you little shitting bastards! I'm going to buy a case of beer and go fishing!"

The End