The Noise Ordinance

The first blast hit at 5:47 in the morning. The bedroom window rattled in its frame like it was trying to escape.

"Is that a jackhammer or a death threat?" Sadie asked, rolling over and pulling the pillow over her head.

"It's Tuesday," I said. "So it's a jackhammer."

"You said he wasn't allowed to start before seven."

"He's not. The city says seven. The city also says he needs a permit to run a demolition crew in a residential cul-de-sac, and yet here we are, listening to a hundred-year-old wall come down at dawn."

She lifted the pillow enough to look at me with one eye. "Are you going to do something about it or just narrate it to me every morning?"

"I'm going to do something about it."

"That's what you said about the dust."

The dust was a separate grievance. Rico, my new neighbor of six months, had a habit of running his saws with the wind aimed directly at our yard. I'd complained once, politely, over the fence. He'd said he'd look into it. Then he'd laughed.

So apparently complaining once was the mistake of my life. The next week his crew started showing up at five sharp, and kept it up for six months. Not 5:15. Five. The trucks idled in the street with their lights on until the exact second their phones ticked over, and then the world ended.

I called him on it that first Friday. I leaned on the fence with my coffee and tried to be reasonable.

"Rico. The ordinance says seven."

"The ordinance says seven," he agreed. "And I start at seven."

"Your trucks have been here since five."

"My guys have to park somewhere, Kurt. Parking isn't work. Talk to the city if you think it is."

He had a way of smiling when he said things like that. It was a contractor smile, the kind you get quoted a price under. I went back inside and drafted three emails to the city I never sent, because the city had already told me, in writing, that his permits were in order and I should "consider earplugs."

Sadie held views about all of it, mostly in the form of me not being allowed to buy anything with a motor. She's a landscape architect, so she designs outdoor peace for other people and gets none of it at home.

"You cannot retaliate," she said over dinner that night. "I know that look. That's the same look you had at the zoning board when the variance got denied."

"It wasn't a look. It was a plan."

"Kurt. We share a property line with this man for the foreseeable future. What's your plan, exactly? Noise him to death?"

"Something like that."

"You're thirty-four years old."

"That has never stopped me before."

She put her fork down and gave me the full two-eye look. "Fine. You want to fight a demolition contractor with noise? At least be smart about it. Nothing the city can trace, nothing that damages anything, and if a lawyer ever asks, you bought it for raccoons."

That's how I ended up at a supply yard on Saturday buying a commercial-grade ultrasonic pest repeller. Ninety dollars. The box said it covered up to a quarter acre and deterred rodents, raccoons, and "nuisance wildlife." Nothing on the box said it also constituted a declaration of war, but I read between the lines.

I mounted it under the eave on our side, aimed flat at the property line, and set it to motion trigger. Then I went inside and felt like I had just done something I'd have to explain later.

It worked faster than expected. I'd figured on Rico's crew hearing it, maybe. High frequency is mostly inaudible to adults, which is why mosquito devices are such a great prank. What I had not counted on was the cat.

Rico has a cat. Big gray thing, outdoor cat, spends its days patrolling the dirt strip between our houses like it's guarding a border checkpoint. At about four that afternoon it came over the fence, landed in our side yard, and immediately lost its mind. It went sideways. Then it went vertical. Then it did a thing I've only seen in videos of cats meeting cucumbers, all four legs stiff, and shot back over the fence yowling.

Sadie watched the whole thing from the kitchen window with her arms crossed.

"Kurt."

"It's for raccoons."

"It's for raccoons."

"You said raccoons."

"And the cat?"

"The cat is nuisance wildlife in this context."

I'll admit the sound of a cat doing that is not my proudest memory. But at 5:02 the next morning, when the trucks rolled up and the crew started unloading, the repeller triggered, and one of Rico's guys dropped a bundle of lath and grabbed his ears. Two more followed him off the property in a hurry. The trucks sat idling in the street for a full hour while somebody stood next to the fence with a phone, apparently calling his boss about a sound nobody could hear.

By eight I was out front pretending to check the mail. Rico came down his walk like weather moving in.

"Kurt. Get out here."

"I am out here."

"That noise thing. That's you."

"It's a pest deterrent."

"It's pointing at my house."

"Pests come from all directions, Rico."

He stopped at the fence and put both hands on it. He's a big guy, thirty-six, forearms like bridge cable, and he was doing the contractor smile, except it had gone thin.

"My cat won't come out from under the porch. Dominique," he said, meaning his girlfriend, "had to take the morning off work to sit in the driveway and coax it out with tuna. You know what that costs her? Project managers don't get mornings off, Kurt. They get fired."

"Then maybe move your start time to seven, like the law says, and the raccoons will leave you alone."

"The raccoons."

"The raccoons."

He stared at me. I stared at him. Somewhere behind him his cat made a sound from under the porch, low and wrong, like a motor trying to turn over.

Sadie came out before it could get worse. She knows exactly when to do that. She stepped between the fence and me with a plate of pancakes we didn't need.

"Rico, hi. I'm Sadie. We haven't actually met. Would you like to come in and talk about this like adults who share a fence? Kurt made way too many pancakes."

"I don't want pancakes," Rico said. "I want that thing off my property line."

"It's on our property," I said.

"It's aimed at my property."

"Both of those things can be true," Sadie said, in her zoning-board voice, the one that got us together in the first place. "Which is why I'm inviting you inside, and you're going to accept, and nobody's calling any lawyers today. Yes?"

Rico looked at the plate. He looked at me. Then he looked past me at the repeller under the eave, still blinking its little red light like it was proud of itself.

"Fine," he said. "But I'm bringing my side of this."

"Bring the whole side," Sadie said. "We'll do lunch."

He went back up his walk. The cat, sensing a change in the weather, or maybe just the absence of ninety dollars of ultrasonic warfare, poked its head out from under the porch.

"That was close," I said.

"That wasn't close. That was round one," Sadie said. "And you're making the tuna run if he asks."

The pancake summit lasted eleven minutes and changed nothing. Rico ate four pancakes, complimented Sadie's coffee, explained that his crew started at five because the flip house had a deadline, and called my repeller a war crime. I explained that pre-dawn jackhammering was also a war crime. Sadie and I walked him to the door and he shook my hand like a man agreeing to a ceasefire he fully intended to break by Thursday.

"He likes you," Sadie said after the door closed. "That's the worst part."

Then it's Wednesday and I'm at the corner coffee shop on Vine, the one with the terrible parking, waiting on a double espresso and a blueprint revision I could feel slipping. The woman next to me in line was on her phone, jaw set.

"No, I heard you, I'm asking if you heard yourself. You told the client Friday. Friday, Rico."

She hung up without saying goodbye and ordered a large