No brainer: When someone calls for help, you help

So today I'd just come home from running errands. My front door and back door are wide open, as are all the windows. There's a gorgeous cross breeze and no indication that we just survived four days of 80 percent mugginess.

I'm making a salad, singing to myself while I mix up some spinach, radicchio, red onions, almond slices, dried cranberries. I even go so far as to whip up a quick batch of orange vinegar dressing.  I'm thinking, "I could live like this every day. I have the best life ever." I hear summer noises: the rustling trees, twittering birds, buzzing of a lawnmower, the hammering of the contractor next door. It's pretty idyllic. Even the hammering.

I feel at home. Safe.

Then comes the screeching. At first I think it's a kid, maybe with a water gun. I smile a little, remembering. Back in the day, I had pretty decent aim. The screeching changes pitch. From my kitchen sink I see out the dining room window that the vinyl siding guy perched high on his ladder has turned his head to the screaming. Because it's screaming and crying now and I'm beginning to make out words: "Stop! He's hitting me! Make him stop!

I rush around the corner to the bay window at the front, and see my neighbor bent over, her body making violent front then back jumps. From my angle, I can't quite make out what the man next to her is doing. But he's doing something. He's moving violently too. She's bent over. Screaming for help. For him to stop. For someone to call the police. I see the neighbor who lives next door to her. He is continuing to mow his lawn. He is watching her as he makes neat shaven rows on this already perfect carpet. I hear hammering. The man next door? He's back at work.

I grab my phone and run outside to the curb. I yell, "Do you need help?" which is stupid because I know she does. I dial 911. I scream over and over, "Stop hurting her. I am calling the police!" I think he heard me above the mowing and the hammering because he started yelling at me in this deep, booming voice, and at one point stopped and crossed the street toward me. Then he noticed the woman running back to the front door and turned around to grab her and hold her and hit her again.

I'm telling the dispatcher all of this, and giving her all the information I can as the women screams his first and last name to me and tells me he, the estranged husband dragged her down an entire flight of stairs by her hair, hitting her the entire time too. 

I had a hard time hearing and kept yelling for her to repeat because of the hammering from the burly man on the ladder just one house over and because of the loud buzzing from the lawn mower still leisurely cruising the velvet front yard just second away from where the tall, muscular loser in a gold golf shirt and dark tan khakis continued to hurt the the mother of  his two-year-old son and continued to yell at me too.

For all I know he might have been threatening to kill her or to kill me. I don't speak or understand the language he was using. I'm pretty sure that the Polish-speaking guy next door and the Greek-speaking guy across the street didn't know either.Though by the tone of the wife-beater's voice and his strong, fast stride as he crossed the street toward me for those few seconds, yelling non-stop, they probably knew he wasn't asking me for a cup of sugar.

I ran in the house and locked my doors and my windows and stayed on the phone with the dispatcher as the animal across the street got into his dark blue new Pacifica and drove away while the brainless automatons next door and across the street continued their apparently life and death-saving important home maintenance duties.

The woman had run into the house. I told the dispatcher that and did my best to give her a description of the license plate though the guy took off too fast for me to get all the numbers.

Luckily, within second of driving off, he was back on the street again. He pulled into the driveway and ran into the house. I called 911 again though had to repeat the plate number over and over because my voice was shaking worse than my hands and the incessant nail poundings and grass attacking -- as I've said already -- was pretty loud and terrifyingly misogynistically constant.

He was only in the house a minute or two and I stayed on the phone with the dispatcher during the whole hectic hammering, mowing, and who knows what the hell that piece of fuck was doing to that brave woman who screamed for help closed door time.

I know that name-calling and swearing can be an easy way out and maybe reflects laziness or lack of vocab or whatever on the part of the writer. One of my biggest writing issues is that often I edit too much/ sugar coat and end up with neutral white bread that doesn't reflect who I am or what I want to say. I'm a work in progress and so is my blog. Kind of scares me, how much I let my mouth wander. But today at least, the shit stays.

 

The ball-less wonder dirt scum coward exited the house seconds later and jumped into his top shop maybe compensating for being a real man vehicle and took off, while the equally subhuman hammerer and what-kind-of-a-spouse-and-father-of-a-daughter-would-ignore-that landscaper/ monster continued diligently not making a difference one breath at a time.

I walked over to the house telling myself that I was a coward because seconds might matter and I should be running, phone in hand, and for the first time noticed the curtain rod hanging askew in the front window. I pushed open the door and saw the clothes and shoes and other throwing types of objects everywhere on the floor.

I called her name, the name of the only other human on the street today besides me. There was no response and I stood there trying to gain the courage to walk inside. I called her again and she responded and came down the stairs, crying about her hair being pulled and him hitting her again and again and she thought she locked the door when she ran back in the house but for me not to worry because she'd been safe the past few minutes behind her locked bedroom door.

By now, the noxious bug had skittered to the back yard for more cutting of already perfect and apparently more precious than human life greenery. The hammerer watched me as I crossed back to my house. I still held the phone in my hand just in case the third cowardly piece of crap I'd seen the last few minutes decided to return.

The hammer not-man asked if she was okay. Yes, he'd seen the "man" -- his word for the thing I don't have vocabulary to describe --  dragging the woman -- a mother of four not that that should make a difference but she's a mother of four and has a son about same age as the hammerer -- had seen him dragging her by her hair across the front yard, right in sight of the equally penis-deficient insult to all humanity mower.

The police came. They'd managed to apprehend the opposite-of-everything-a-human-should-be a few blocks away. They promised the woman he'd go to jail that night. Turns out, this was not the first time there'd been a problem.

I told her I would go to court with her for a restraining order. She says she'll think about it. I told the policeman to please explain to her that she needed a restraining order. He did. She said again that she'd think about it. When her twenty-year-old daughter showed up at the house, I told her to remind her mom that I would be more than willing to accompany her mom to court for a restraining order. I told her to make sure her mom called me any time for any thing. Emphasis on ANY.

The wife of the neighbor next door who did nothing -- I don't have the words anymore to describe how much I hate this whatever the thing she's married to is -- pulled into her driveway, just a couple of quick strides from the attacked woman's front door. I ran to the car and started telling her what happened because as far as I'm concerned, when one of us is hurt, we are all hurt. Plus, I wanted her to know in case I wasn't home and the woman needed help. Or in case I need help if the deviant decides to go for a two for one deal. Or maybe I said what I said next because the rage kept coming in waves and I felt justified and still do. I used words like fucking asshole coward piece of shit to describe um. . . the grass for brains that she's married to. 

The spouse of the mower? She's not speaking to me right now.  In fact, I'm pretty sure she won't be speaking to me for quite awhile. I just hope if she ever needs help, she knows to call me. I'll be there. Anytime. Until I move, I guess.  I just don't feel safe here any more.

When I think this in terms of running distances, I chuckle. Today it resonates for different reasons.