Billy Napalm had been my neighbor for less than two weeks. Nevertheless I already knew enough about him to know that a sense of alarm was completely appropriate the evening I came home from work and heard heavy equipment noises coming from his back yard. I looked out my kitchen window just in time to see it swing a wide turn to the right, churning its way across the green, green grass, gouging another path through the earth.

I called his landlord.

“I just wanted to make you aware that Billy is plowing the backyard.”

She’s so sweet, so kind. “Oh, I know, honey, thank you for calling. But we did give him permission to till a little garden in the back.”

I’m perhaps not so sweet, not so kind. “I see. Well, the only issue might be that he’s not ‘tilling’—he’s PLOWING—and it’s not ‘a little garden’—it’s a FARM.”

It took her about fifteen minutes to get here from the other side of town, but by then, all vegetation in the likely ½ acre backyard was completely gone.

Days went by and I kept watch, waiting for rows of tiny corn, squash, tomatoes, maybe some beans, a watermelon or two, something, anything, but instead, he planted nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And that beautiful, rich, Alabama soil stared back at me, tempting me, luring me, calling me, daring me. I thought for some time how I could sneak over in the middle of the night and force a few things into the soil, but when I finally decided what to plant, it occurred to me that there’s a certain cruelty in planting Bud Light and Funyuns. After all, the White-Trash/Crazy gods already smile down on Billy in so many ways that there’s really no point in confusing the matter.

I was thus forced to grow used to the naked earth outside my kitchen window, and no matter my hopes for a thriving garden, by the weekend, Billy had moved on: his new project was in the front yard, towards the end of his driveway, just a few feet from the busy road.

I was curious when he took an old chair (its wicker seat the apparent victim of either someone who’d grossly underestimated their own weight or a rather active and athletic cat who has since likely been declawed) and placed it in his driveway. He stood there, his hands on the chair, and looked up, squinting towards the sun, and then he moved the chair. Over and over and over again, he looked at the sun and moved the chair, a lengthy exercise in what I can only imagine was an attempt to align the chair with god knows what. Then he went inside. And while most households would only have one such chair, Billy soon reappeared with a matching one, and went through the same rigmarole of looking into the sky, then inching the chair this way or that, before determining that the chair was finally in position.

He went back in the house again and reappeared with a broom, which, again, with much precision, he placed between the backs of the two chairs. And then he did the same with a mop. Things remained as such for a while, long enough for me to wander off and get interested in something else, but when I heard water splattering against the ground, I raced back to the kitchen window. There he was, at the end of his driveway, wringing out his laundry, hanging it on his wicker-chair-broom-and-mop drying rack in the driveway. Genius, pure and simple.

So while I’d thought that he’d spend the weekend gardening, his focus, instead, had been his socks and underwear. But later that evening, he did concern himself with that which springs forth from the earth.

My writing partner had come over and, while we sat on my front porch chatting, Mr. Napalm kept a watchful eye over us, and when we neither invited him over to join us nor acknowledged his obvious desire for such an invitation, he walked out to the edge of the road and started another gardening project of sorts: he rather unceremoniously unplanted his mailbox by hefting it from the ground, rather dutifully cleaning the dirt off the bottom of the post, filling the hole with some fresh, red dirt, and taking the mailbox away to an undisclosed location. I immediately conjectured that his psychiatrist reminds him of his appointments via the mail system and that was one way to stop THAT pesky little communication.

And the next day, he again concerned himself with the ground, as he was very, very busy, on his hands and knees, rearranging the pebbles in his gravel driveway, one at a time. Before I watched him do this, I was completely unaware that one pebble right here actually belongs way, way over there. It looked to be a rather exacting exercise and I’m not sure that he ever finished, but he did work for hours. And not once was I tempted to offer any help.

Things, however, are coming around.

Billy did plant some tomatoes yesterday, a whole row of them, maybe three dozen plants, which has led me to suspect that he either really, really likes tomatoes or that he’s the sole supplier for the nearest Ragu factory.

And the mailbox? It’s back. It reappeared, with a fresh coat of white paint, mounted on a white cross, sometime Thursday evening. I became aware of it when I heard car horns, one after another, and I looked out the kitchen window, and there he was, Billy Napalm, standing in the middle of the street, cars speeding by and honking on both sides of him, as he stood admiring his latest project, periodically screaming at a passing car, “Look at my fucking mailbox, you assholes!”