Dead bugs, orange leaves, and a few of Fawna’s cigarette butts floated on the pool’s surface, backlit by the underwater lights. The water seemed to ripple to the rhythm of the Def Leppard music that throbbed out of the speaker he had placed in his living room window. As usual, Frankie felt hemmed in by the redwood fence that separated his back yard from his neighbors’. Fawna’s scrawny, matted Pekingese had left a little pile of crap in just about every square foot of dirt and dead grass around the pool deck. He’d yell at her to clean it up, and she’d do it for a day or two, and then forget again. The neighbors—Russian émigrés on one side, a gay couple on the other side—didn’t like the noise when he yelled at Fawna, or the loud metal music he liked to play at night, but he didn’t give a shit. They were afraid of him; after coming over to complain once, and seeing the muscles on Frankie and the guys who hung out with him, the neighbors didn’t come over again.
