Catching them in the act

I opened the front door and hadn’t opened my mouth to call the dog when the pooch burst in, blowing past me, spooked, out of breath, fidgeting.  “What’s wrong, boy?” I said, and when I set my hand down to pet him, it came back wet. He was soaked!

I ran out the front door and saw, on the street in front of our apartment, the following clue:

A chubby man with a mustache, wearing an ankle-length gallabeya and sandals, wiping down the cars of one of his clients, and holding a garden hose.

Everything fell into place.

It was the boab employed to serve tenants of the building next to ours.  I’d seen this guy before and had given him rote pleasantries despite his glowers, made more menacing by the mustache. Always wearing that same light-blue gallabeya.  I knew he looked liked a bully.

Through the high chain-link fence I confronted the guy, demanding in my broken Arabic: “You put water on my dog?”

He looked down, a little sheepish.  Adopting a tone of you don’t understand what I was going through, man, he said, “He was barking …”

Barking?  As if a dog’s exercise of free speech could justify assault with a pressurized fluid!  I don’t think so!  Clearly the man harbored a sociopathic antipathy toward dogs.  Encountering one that morning, he noticed that he had a weapon in his hand, assumed he was alone, grabbed the opportunity and vented his sadistic impulses on this innocent animal.

I exploded in disbelief and expletives, but in English, so I was safe from offending or provoking.  I stormed off.

We had chosen that apartment in suburban Cairo, with its fenced-in front yard, in large part for the benefit of the dog.  Or should I say, for our benefit so that we could spend less time on the dog.  The tedious routine at our previous place was to find the leash, take the dog to the elevator (when it wasn’t out of service) and descend seven floors (hoping he could hold it that long) to let him heed his natural imperatives x times a day, guiding him along the sidewalkless street, yanking him out of the way of weaving cars while searching for a patch of something other than asphalt.  Now at our new ground-floor place we could just open the door and let him run down the half-flight of steps and run free, unsupervised, happy, safe.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m weak with love for the pup.  I’m not dog people.  I can’t respect ’em.  My outrage at the hosing incident was more toward the sense of invasion, albeit aqueous, of our private sanctuary.

In the days and weeks after the hosing incident, I made a point of being friendly to the light-blue boab.  A passive-aggressive reflex from my days in Minnesota, I suppose; maybe a way of reminding him that I still knew who he was, and at the same time a wimpy sort of plea for restraint, like, Hi, Blue Boab.  See, I’m acknowledging you.  I’m an OK guy so take pity on me; don’t be a meanie and abuse my dog.  I waved at him when I’d be driving down the street and he, without fail, would be sitting on the curb, sometimes with his co-worker, a skinny guy in a Members Only-type jacket.  I wasn’t satisfied that justice had been served, but I was comforted by the satisfying accomplishment of having caught him in the act, or rather just after the act, so cleanly that there was no room for denials; we had skipped past the usual argumentation that occurs in these sort of civilian-to-civilian squabbles and moved right to the endgame.  That NEVER happens.

Most times you’re just set on a time-consuming chase to even get the suspected perpetrator to face you.

Like that time smoke was blowing into the house, not just annoying but a health threat given Marcia’s asthma, not to mention she was pregnant.  I chased down the source: a rubbish fire.  Some bastard had ignited, like, 40 pounds of trash right on the parkway in a residential neighborhood. I don’t care if it’s wild, unregulated Misr, I said to myself: This must not stand. It’s supra-culturally wrong. A universal health and environmental issue informed by global morés.  Plus a burning trash heap is beneath the usual esthetic standards of the neighborhood, never mind the odd stack of gray bricks and a few dozen potholes.  But no human was in sight, and although I shouted, no one came out of the house to face me.  I ran home and filled up the mop bucket with water, and, after a few trips, doused the trash fire.

That was satisfying.

So it was during this cooling of relations with the Blue Boab that I walked out our gate one morning and nearly stepped into a big pile of pulpy slop sitting on a ripped-open white plastic bag in our walkway.  The substance appeared to a cross between oatmeal and pus bestride a smear of water.  With deep distaste I used a page of newspaper to grab it and carried it to the garbage can.  I inquired with the guy who’s paid a tokenary sum to sit in a shack in front of our apartment building and perform “security” functions, which mainly consists of jumping out of his chair and looking concerned when a tenant pulls up and parks.  The security guy had seen nothing to suggest who might be responsible for this security breach, although it had occurred just centimeters from his post.

Next morning:  Another slop-and-plastic talisman had been placed on the walk.  I threw it away.  The next day, another slopbag, in front of the hedge, and I kicked it away.  Next day, in the middle of the path.  And so on.  Twice I flung the bag in the street in a rage; the next morning it was still in the street and a new bag was in front of our gate.  The security guy remained clueless but he did finally explain the purpose of the substance: food for the stray cats of the neighborhood.  Egyptian stray cats are not the sort to fuel one’s philanthropic impulses.  They are battle-hardened, mean motherfuckers.  I once tried to shoo one from our walk by rushing straight at it and it shouting.  It stayed just where it was and looked directly at me with the eyes of a 10,000-year-old mercenary.  I had the impression I was about to be thrown to the ground and beaten.  I backed off.  I wish these cats the best of luck, but I don’t care to summon all the cats in the zip code to the front of my gate.  Who had deigned to choose me without considering the impact on my lifestyle?  Who had the temerity to keep doing this when I was throwing the bags away as soon as I could find them?

Eventually I became irritated enough to confront my old nemesis, the Blue Boab.  I walked up to him slowly as he sat on his curb so he had time to prepare himself.  He rose.  We exchanged pleasantries.  His mustachioed face was stoic and impassive.  He was uncowed and did not acknowledge our previous run-in.  “Sir,” I said, in Arabic, getting to the point, “someone leaves plastic bags with food for cats,” forgetting the word for gate, “over there,” pointing, then remembering the word for gate. 

“Not me,” he said, heavy with care but calm as a graveyard. 

It was clear he was telling the truth.  Maybe he was beyond lying.

I decided to place the onus on the security guy.  The overnight guy was a real slow type. Crew-cut, real light-skinned for an Egyptian.  Looked vaguely like a Russian lobotomy patient, so we called him Dmitri.  I forget his real name.  Despite the emptiness of the professional loiterer’s lot, this guy sincerely seemed to enjoy wearing the faux-police uniform that the guys on the other shifts eschewed in favor of their street clothes.  Yet night after night, it seemed he was always looking in the other direction when our catslop vigilante made his nightly deposit.  I told the slack-ass, tell whoever it is to stop; we don’t want this food here.  He agreed.

One night I was up at an odd hour, real late.  In a fit of charity I let the dog out, and in so doing I glimpsed the flash of someone disappearing around the corner.  A leg. 

I ran over and there was a new white bag with slop in front of the gate. 

“Who he put this here?!” I exploded at the security guy.  He looked at me and his face went pale.  (To this day I suspect he was in on it, but he would be fired before a full accounting could be made.)  He looked up, lucid, and pointed in the direction that the leg had disappeared.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!” toward the back of a dude in a dark-colored windbreaker who is walking fast as hell away and acting like he can’t hear me.  On the darkened street with every other streetlamp shorted out, he’s instantly out of sight.  I walk on and look around the corner past the next door building’s security shack, and lo.  There’s the dude.  It’s the skinny dude with the Members Only jacket, sidekick of the Evil Blue Boab.  Son of a bitch, what is with these guys?  So this means that every night the guy walks past two perfectly good entryways to his own building, i.e., the building he helps guard/tend, past the main entrance to our apartment building and to our private walkway, just to plop his cat slop in front of my gate.

I was coldhearted in my prosecution. 

“You putting this bag at my house?” I said.

He stared, stunned.

 “We don’t want the cats at our house.  We don’t want cats.  You love cats, you put the food at your house.”  His eyes moved down.  “Not put this bag by my house. Understanding me?” He nodded. I stormed off, still too enraged at the affront to feel the satisfaction of having caught another domestic saboteur red-handed, or to appreciate that I had finally imprinted my brand of justice on one small corner of this unruly land.

 

–November 2004