Denzel shrugged. “I wash my hands of it, Gerald. Also, we’re all getting hungry.”
“Hey, Park,” I called, as if the Asian were half a block away, “you didn’t tell me if you voted. Did you vote? And how did you vote? As a feminist, I want to know if you believe a woman has the right to choose.”
Ava turned to Denzel. “This asshole? He’s your buddy?”
“None of your business,” Park said. “This is still the United States, Gerald.”
“Are you sure about that?” I said. “Have you been paying attention lately?”
Ava walked back to the deck very slowly, as if she didn’t know the way or was terrified she might trip on a blade of grass. I watched her take her time.
Denzel crowded me. “Let’s go cook some food,” he said. My blood rose and I nudged him hard. I remembered how a friend, after two years in the military, told me that overseas under fire he could keep his cool most of the time, but now and then he saw red mist instead of air and went batshit crazy. “Hey, Park,” I shouted. “When the cops arrive, I’m going to ask them to take a look at your papers. Are you legal, my friend?”
The blood drained from Denzel’s face. “A bridge too far,” he said. He retreated and followed the mysterious Ava across the green lawn to the deck. They all sat there on deck chairs as if on the Titanic. Louise opened two more bottles of wine. I expected that she was unhappy with me. The wine would help with that.
Park crossed his arms, checked his watch. For the next ten minutes, until the constabulary arrived, I lectured him on nature, ecology, and the secret life of trees. I told him about the root system that was crying out in pain. I told him the tree was sending out a banshee wail to every other tree. “That tree is a magnificent woman,” I said. “Imagine if I cut your wife’s throat with a slice-and-dice knife. That tree is about to feel the way you would feel if I did that.”
“Is that something you might do, Gerald?” Park said, his vocal fry revealing his stress.
“Imagine it,” I said. “Imagine how that would feel.”
The cop car arrived and pulled into a vacant spot next to Fred’s tree truck. Fred, seeing the cavalry, started up his chain saw, moved to the oak, and made a cut into the trunk away from the house at an angle from above. It was a deep gash, maybe a quarter of the way into the gnarled trunk, just below a burl that might be saved and polished and made into an ashtray.
I walked over to Fred and reached out to grab him at the elbow of the hand holding the saw, but Peter—it was Peter in the cop car, burly Peter with his cross around his mottled neck as if he was the disciple and not a local rube with his belly jingling like a cow’s udder—wrenched me from behind, threw me down, and fell on top of me like a sack of grain. He cuffed me. “What the fuck,” I said, feeling my shoulder wrench, breathing in the smell of grass and soil, and turning my head to one side to catch my breath. “Get the hell off me, Pumpkin Eater.”
Breathing hard, Peter pulled himself up, fiddled with his uniform some, and then helped me to my feet, wrenching me up with the help of the handcuffs, which caused searing pain. For the next twenty minutes, after I caught my breath, there was a heated discussion. “Listen,” Peter finally said, “this tree is entirely in his yard. This community does not have a heritage tree ordnance. I looked it up. The trunk of this tree stands completely on Park’s land. That means it belongs exclusively to him.”
“The root system,” I said. “You’re forgetting the roots.”
Peter stared me down and continued. “If you had wanted to protect this tree, you could have brought it up to the homeowner’s association. You didn’t. Now, sir, it’s too late. Mr. Park has the right to do what he’s doing.” He caught his breath. He was winded. “Besides, don’t you folks—don’t all of us?—have more important things to worry about these days?”
“It’s murder, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re condoning murder, aren’t you?”
Peter shrugged and raised his eyes to heaven. He conferred with Park. He blew out a deep breath and perp-walked me not to his car but to my deck, where a G&T, the ice cubes melted, still sat on the round table beside my sun chair. I turned in time to see Fred make another gash, this one horizontal, in the bur oak deep enough to meet the first cut, which really is the deepest, I thought, and made a notch so that the oak would fall like a shot.
Ava was far away, in another country, the Boundary Waters maybe, her eyes bright, polychromatic. “You’re lit up, aren’t you?” I said. “Wish I was too.” She didn’t hear me, but the others wouldn’t look my way. Even so, they made my case with due diligence to Peter that seeing a resplendent oak cut down in the prime of its long life drove a stake through my heart that had to bleed when it was pulled out. “Damn right,” I muttered, though now, embarrassed myself, my voice sounded feeble. I had nothing more to say. Louise smiled as if one of our knock-down arguments had gone in her favor. “Gerry means well,” she said. She smiled sweetly, but I could tell she wanted to say something mean. And would, later, when we were alone.
“This settled, then?” Peter said. “Park won’t have to call me back?” We all agreed. Peter uncuffed me. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said. He held out his hand.
“Hell,” I said. I took it.
He shambled across the lawn to Park. They talked as if discussing the result of a blind date, whether any sparks had been struck, and then Peter turned to Fred and gave him a thumbs-up.
Peter and Park continued their talk. Both nodded twice. They shook hands once. Peter came back to us, and I laughed at his Santa Claus belly. “Santa Claus,” I said with bitterness, “about to give me a gift.” That’s what he did. “Mr. Park has agreed not to press charges,” he said. He had a high-pitched voice that sounded like the squeal of a mouse and made me laugh. It wasn’t a mean laugh. Such a big, clumsy man, such a tiny voice. “You know, I could charge you anyway if I feel like it. Public nuisance. Harassment. I’m only being nice for the sake of the neighborhood. This is one of the few that’s still intact.”
“Keep the peace and all that?” I said. Louise, sitting next to me in her own chair, pinched me hard. I felt emasculated and remembered what Ava had said about my wife’s plans. Surely it was BS. “There’s nothing to charge me with, and Park knows it.”
Peter shrugged again; it was his conflict-resolution gesture. I could see Park stare my way with a smirk on his face and thought about charging across the lawn like a gorilla. But I’m not that—a gorilla, I mean—and so I held my place, stewing in my own juices, the steak still not grilled.
In the middle of this mental hullabaloo, the tree fell with an anticlimactic whoosh, hardly the earth-shaking atrocity I had imagined. But bad enough. The earth shook beneath my feet.
Bad enough.
I nodded and waved a hand like a wand. “Look over there.” He did. I had to admire his equanimity. He could have put me in cuffs again just for the hell of it, to show me where things were at. My insides were boiling, but outside I was calm. My heart beat like a time machine taking me into a future I could only fear. I could see Peter pat himself on the back without moving a muscle. Another page from the new conflict-resolution package the local force received after a local young man in the right place at the wrong time was shot over nothing. “You see what I see?”
He pulled an ear as if turning on his battery and frowned. I nodded again. “Of course you do,” I said. “You know what you see? Absence. There was presence there and now there’s absence. Think of that when you wake at two in the morning to eat a doughnut. The something that was and the nothing that is.”
“You know what I see, dude?” Ava said. “A line of trees on the horizon—oaks, maple, birch, even a healthy elm or two. Who gets to have those anymore? Appreciate what you got.” She was talking about the faraway tree line a half mile beyond Park’s place that separated our tract neighborhood from farmland.
“We’ve had reports of Marauders coming this way,” Peter said. “If I were you, I’d make sure those armored vehicles are in place tonight.”
There was a stump and a dead tree cut into pieces where the bur oak had been. It was private property and Park, whether he voted or not, could do with it what he wanted. Soon Fred would return with a stump grinder. In a day or a week there would be nothing but new grass seed where the majestic tree had stood its ground for so many years. Park could burn the wood from the oak in his fireplace.
Peter drove away in his constabulary car.
“Dude,” Ava said, very relaxed after another long trip to the bathroom inside the house. “People tell me you’re the man when it comes to steak. How about it? We’re starving.”
“Coming right up,” I said. I’ve worked with junkies in the past. These days, who hasn’t? I had no intention of starting anything. Even so, Bobbi stepped between us. Louise buried her face in her hands. Denzel folded his arms, turned, and stared into the middle distance. Latesha was half-dozing on the chaise longue. Ava grinned. “Whatever gets us through the days, right?”
I grilled the steak and salmon. We went inside and ate and drank and came back out, woozy with booze and protein, to sit and stare at the place where the tree had been. Louise brought out homemade rhubarb pie and a bottle of chilled dessert wine and five long-stemmed glasses, but the mood of the evening was dead. The five of them drank wine. I had a cognac. The mysterious Ava disappeared again into the house. When she returned, her skin almost glowed in the dark. Those blue eyes had a light in them that wouldn’t go away. Whatever she stared at didn’t have anything to do with us.
Past the dead tree, along the tree line where the houses stopped, armored vehicles groaned into their designated slots. The mercenaries we had hired eased out of the vehicles. One of them turned on some music—hard stuff, drums and shouts, some kind of call-and-response. We sipped our drinks and listened.
The oak in Park’s yard was the first of many deaths in the neighborhood.
What’s Good for the Goose Is Good for the Baba Ghanoush
This is the tale about what happened when Frankenstein (aka Frankincense), the former talk show host, lately a volunteer on the border, where he worked with an endless stream of battered refugees, most of them kids, came out of retirement. Once an acclaimed broadcaster, his gray beard now a mess, he agreed to do a talk show, his forte, at the despoiled civic center in Fargo, North Dakota. It became what we now call the Week of Riots. He still had his signature low-pitched gravelly bass voice. His gray hair, once jet black, became so again, stained for the occasion, but he didn’t touch what he called his baba ghanoush beard. His manner could still be smooth like flaxen grains of winter wheat when stimulated by an audience of any kind, the undercurrent of his laugh like the chop on a north Minnesota lake in a brisk wind. Or so we hoped.
