The Indigestible

It’s not every day that you look out from your bedroom window and see someone getting busted by the cops.

At least, I would hope not.

But now, it’s happened to me twice.

Years ago in Tucson I had a bust happen, literally, on my porch. I heard scuffling, words like I got him, and went outside when the noises lessened to see a couple of pretty winded-looking police officers standing in the yard. They asked me if I’d ever seen the man in the car — I hadn’t — or if he was a friend — he wasn’t. He’d got nailed trying to run from some crime scene, I guess, and the chase had ended outside my window.

This afternoon, while being consummately annoyed by the neighbor’s yappy Dachshunds for the nth time, I looked out and saw a pair of vehicles owned by the local constabulary in the alley.

My apartment is a split level. The bedrooms and main bath are on the top floor. I was hacking some stuff on the Mac upstairs, which was why I even noticed anything. From downstairs, no windows or doors let onto the alley.

In a few minutes an officer led a barechested, jeans-clad man to his car, did the pat-search, basically did the process thing. And off they rolled.

You know, this neighborhood has seemed, for the most part, quiet. But talking to my immediate neighbor and the woman who lived beside the house focused on in the bust, I learned that there have been issues from the place on the corner for years now. It’s a drug house. And apparently this is known, yet the perps seem to be set free, seem to come back.

The house in question is about a mile south of the only junior high school in town, and is on an arterial that goes to and from it. Preteen kids gather on the corner opposite this house, every day, waiting for buses to take them to their grade school. Teens walk or bike past every day on the way to their own classes at the JH, which was the same one I attended lo these many years ago.

I’m reminded of Shelley’s Frankenstein, of mad villagers waving torches.

And you know, maybe this is the incipient papa in me, but I wonder if perhaps a good old fashioned posse comitatus isn’t just what we need right about now.

They don’t have to die, but maybe they should be told, in terms that brook no misunderstanding, they will not be tolerated any longer.