Howard was oblivious to his wife’s activities. All he wanted was to be left alone to his own devices. He could care less about neighbors and their idiotic opinions on how he should lead his life. If he was able to drink his brew on Sundays and watch TV without lifting a finger, he was happy. All he cared about was work. The bloody neighbors could go hang themselves for all he cared. Immediately after he had allowed Anita to hire a landscaping company to zeroscape their lawn, a delegation of male neighbors had paid a call on him to protest his selection of landscaping materials. They agreed he was well within his rights under his purchase contract to landscape in whatever way he wished, but they pleaded with him to change his mind. Howard didn’t care one wit how the lawn was landscaped, but their insistent demands irritated him beyond endurance. He went to the closet and loaded a shell into the legally sawed-off “Sidewinder” shotgun he kept secreted for emergencies and came back into the family room with the shotgun riding over his arm to order them out of his house. Several of the men sputtered that they would have the law on him. Howard smiled as he rested the butt of the shotgun firmly on his hip and replied calmly that if they refused to leave, then that constituted legal evidence that he was correct in using force to evict them from his household. Then he leveled the short barrel of the shotgun threateningly and motioned them out of the room and his house at the point of his shotgun. They left and never darkened his door again. Howard became a pariah in his neighborhood. He didn’t give a tinker’s damn in Hell what they thought. He was an engineer and one of the best in the business. The attitudes formed in his childhood on the farm held fully sway. It was his land and he would do as he willed; his neighbor’s objections meant less than nothing to him.
To insure that everyone in the neighborhood knew how he felt, he told Anita to repeat them to her friends at her next Sunday brunch. When she demurred and said she couldn’t possibly repeat his words to her friends, Howard printed them up on his computer’s printer and posted his statement to the front door for the world to read. Howard’s statement read, “To whom it may concern. I have a right by law and custom to landscape the way I wish. If you don’t like it, then fuck you and the horse you rode in on! This is my property and I’ll do as I please. If you don’t like it, you can stick your opinions where the Sun don’t shine. Get off of my property! Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law! You have been warned! Begone!”
Anita pleaded with him to remove the sign, but to no avail. The sign stayed up until Howard was positive that everyone in the neighborhood knew his sentiments in the matter. Fortunately, Anita’s failure to mend Howard’s ways didn’t affect her standing in the community. Everyone felt sorry for the woman who was married to the antisocial, egregious shotgun-toting bastard who lived down the street. It was common knowledge what a nice woman Anita was. Everyone waved in greeting when they saw her driving through their quiet neighborhood. No one ever waved at Howard. Howard they feared. The women of the neighborhood told themselves, their husbands and anyone else who had patience enough to listen to their noisome complaints that Howard was dangerous to polite society.