Making Nice (16 page)

My job was to gut it—knock down walls and open up the others, then drag the rubble out through the garage. Every now and again a trench needed digging or rocks stacking, or dumpsters needed ordering or wood splitting, or the cowboy’s kid needed watching while he and his wife date-nighted. Phoebe liked to tell me things about her six-year-old life, like how she grew a pumpkin at school and that it was orange.

“Oh yeah? Well I grew an apple and it was bananas!”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Can I throw rocks at your dog?”

“Sure.”

And that’s pretty much how it went. I enjoyed the physicality of the work and my evening beers never tasted better because they tasted earned. I felt tired but good, kept my own schedule, was making a little more than I did down on the dock, plus it was off the books and Jason could hang out and lick whatever he wanted to, which more than once was black bear shit. There was a place in the village with great street tacos for cheap, and when I was feeling fancy after work I’d hit the wine bar for six-dollar glasses of dry Moscato served by white waiters wearing vests. I liked to get good and tingly-headed there, then walk to the Clocktower Pub and start arguments with locals who for some reason never beat me up. Most nights, though, I did nothing at all but sit on the unfinished deck with Jason, drink light beer, and stare at all the stars you can’t see in LA.

Besides the crazy-making loneliness of it—I hardly saw the cowboy, who rented a house on the other side of town while the demo got messy and kept himself busy with I don’t know what—it was the kind of work I’m good at, and after a month and change of long days I’d finished most of what he’d asked me to, the only job left being the last bits of sheetrock around three large, bird-killing windows, each of them on the southeast wall of the great room, each of them affording a terrific view of the small town in the valley as well as the lake and the mountains behind it, except that there were two trees in the adjacent lot that were particularly tall and particularly dead, and together blocked the majority of the otherwise terrific view. It was these two trees that I stared at while I adjusted the elastic straps of my dust mask around my ears, tugged once on each of my gloves, picked up the hammer and small crowbar, and set to work.

Removing drywall in general is no real problem. Basically you put a sledge through a wall. Repeat. Removing drywall around window frames, though, is slightly tougher, because you’re forced to navigate more studs and framing and nails, and also you have to mind the glass. It involves prying and nail pulling and well-aimed hammering and leverage. It requires restraint, and I’m not good at that. Things get even more difficult when dealing with the metal flashing that was used to join two pieces of sheetrock together before joint tape was invented, and in my opinion, whoever installed the metal flashing around the three windows used more nails than were necessary. I began to sweat, and it wasn’t even hot out. Maybe it was warm in the small town in the valley, but on the mountain it was a very comfortable sixty-something degrees. Soon enough, though, I was really sweating, and more than once I had to stop hammering and prying in order to wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my glove, and each time I did I’d glance up and out the window in front of me at the two dead trees. Eventually I walked over to the sliding glass door and opened it as wide as it would go, hoping for a breeze.

The longer I strained at removing the flashing the more confident I became that whoever installed it didn’t install it correctly, and a little later I was pretty certain that whoever installed it didn’t install it correctly, and a little after that I knew for a fact that whoever installed it was an unforgivable piece of shit and a real dickhole. I became even more upset upon discovering—in the upper left-hand corner of the window frame and in short succession—two small Phillips-head screws.

You can’t pull a screw, you have to unscrew a screw, which wouldn’t have been a big deal except my screwdrivers were in the garage in my tool bag, which wasn’t far but seemed it, none of which was the point. The point was I saw no reason or purpose for these screws except to make things more difficult for me, and I stared at them for a while while my ears and then all of me got hot, and I don’t do well in the heat. There’s a direct relationship between heat and aggression, which is why most riots occur in the summer. It’s also why—staring at those screws—I did the only thing I could do: I lost my temper and whaled wildly on them with the hammer. I cracked the window and hit myself once on the thumb and once, on the follow-through of a big upswing, on the top of my head. It hurt, like real bad, and I spun and threw the hammer across the room, then hopped around like an idiot, squatting and big-stepping in circles with my eyes clamped shut, spewing every curse word I could think of until I couldn’t think of any more. Then I just stood there, feeling the bump grow and hating the cowboy for all number of undeserved reasons—his buckaroo boots and Stetson hat, his turquoise rings and this asshole shirt-with-tassels I saw him wear once—all of it in service of some misguided nostalgia for the American West. I hated him for his full head of hair, his seemingly easy way in the world, his money and his car and his pretty wife. Mostly, though, I hated him for convincing me to take this jerk-off job in the first place, one that I knew was just another stop on the long line of disappointments, my only real qualification being a willingness to do it. I also knew that—just like all the other jobs—I’d work it until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then trade one hell for another. All lateral, no vertical.

When I finally opened my eyes I opened the left one first, then the right, and in front of me, out the cracked window, were the two dead trees. Only then did I wonder what killed them.

I first-guessed it was some kind of tree disease, then got lost on the idea of diseases for trees and then on the idea of diseases for everything. I don’t mean the stuff we’re used to hearing about—feline AIDS and dog cancers, mad cows and raccoons with rabies—I mean acute bee paralysis virus and koi herpes. I mean goat polio and moose sickness and a flu just for fish called fish flu. There’s turkey pox and something called Bang’s that causes spontaneous abortions in cattle. Dermo’s been plaguing oysters along the eastern seaboard since the forties. Bluetongue’s fucking up sheep all over New Zealand. There’s a disease that makes snakes tie themselves in knots they can’t get out of.

I glanced at Jason, who was watching me nervously from inside a tipped-over garbage can with his tongue half out of his mouth. We blinked at each other for a few seconds before I glanced at the two trees again. I suppose until then I’d only seen them as foreground—as blurred obstructions to the terrific view of the small town in the valley. But now that I’d focused on them directly, I could see clearly enough that they were burnt black at the tops, the bark exploded off in large strips. Of course it was lightning. They were particularly tall.

Or at least it was lightning that damaged the trees to the extent they became susceptible to disease—to root rot or needle cast or canker, to blight or blister rust, to whatever blind random illness you got.

Satisfied that I’d figured something out I headed off to find the thrown hammer, but halfway across the room Jason barked his bark and bolted out of his garbage can to greet Phoebe in the kitchen, the cowboy a few feet behind her, a beer in each hand, all, “There’s my guy!” and, “
Wow
, it looks
great
in here. You’re really tearing through it.”

I met him at the stairs—still heated but happier for the company and cold beer—while Jason chased a giggling Phoebe past the totem pole and around the pool table before she stopped short and stiff-armed him in the face like a little football player.

“I’m impressed,” the cowboy said. “Really.”

Then he smiled his smile at me, as practiced and mechanical as my mother’s oncologist’s. Even though I knew there was some false cheerleading going on I couldn’t help but appreciate it anyhow, especially when we came to the broken window and he told me not to worry about it, that they were thinking of upgrading anyway. “Some of that new triple-paned stuff,” he said and slapped me on the shoulder, more bud than boss. Then, to make me feel even worse about hating him earlier, he invited me for a short hike before dinner.

“It’ll be quick,” he said. “Just down the road. We can walk from here.”

I told him I had some things to finish up, but he insisted, said all the things you’d expect him to say—what’s the rush, the work will be there tomorrow, yabba blabba—and as I stood there considering a response and he stood there waiting for one, we both became aware of the quiet.

“Phoebe?” he said.

When she didn’t answer he called out for her again, this time a little louder. When she didn’t answer a second time he put his beer down on the sill and hurried off to look.

“Phoebe,” he said. “Phoebe?”

“Jason,” I said, just once, and he came trotting out from behind a pile of insulation. Phoebe followed a few seconds behind him, a dead bird in her hands held up like a gift.

“Look what I found,” she said.

“Put that down,” the cowboy said, but she did that selective-hearing thing that kids and dogs sometimes do, and he rushed over and knocked it out of her hands with more force than I’m sure he meant. It shocked her, and she started rubber-chinning as her dad carried her off to the kitchen to wash up. I glanced down just in time to catch Jason give the bird a quick sniff and a lick, and I said, Scram, jackass, and pushed him aside with my foot. He trotted a few feet away, only to stop and watch as I bent down to get a closer look at it.

It was a little gray-and-brown thing with white in the wings and yellow in the chest, its black legs curled stiffly underneath. Only one of its eyes was closed, and a small amount of blood had seeped out of its head and mixed with the sheetrock dust on the pine floor, making a tiny, silvery-white puddle that resembled mercury.

“What should we do with it?” Phoebe asked, still teary-eyed and wet-handed, already on her way back from the sink.

I looked at the cowboy, who was drying his hands on his too-tight jeans.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should have a funeral.”

“No,” the cowboy said, “I’ll get rid of it.”

He came across the room, picked it up with a dirty shop towel, and carried it out onto the unfinished deck. Phoebe and Jason followed, and I stayed inside and watched through the glass door. I could still see the breeze ruffle its feathers, its left wing moving a little before the cowboy took a few quick steps and threw it as hard as he could, all of us watching it arc through the air, a dead bird flying toward two dead trees.

“So how about that hike?”

*   *   *

Inyo National Forest is roughly three thousand square miles of contiguous wilderness in mostly Northern California, about a million and half acres of protected habitat for all kinds of stuff. There’s black bear, bobcats, mule deer and elk, rattlesnakes and this weird salamander thing, even a few bighorn sheep roaming around. But it was the coyotes that worried me most, on account of their reputation as smart and opportunistic, or as the cowboy once called them: “Jew-dogs.” After I let him hang there a few seconds, he added, “I mean that respectfully.”

Unlike Jews, coyotes eat pretty much anything, including dumb little pets that run off during late-afternoon hikes and don’t come back. On most hikes Jason would trail a few feet behind me, sniffing away at whatever before playing catch-up. But he seemed extra-excited that afternoon, popping in and out of my peripheral for twenty minutes before sprinting ahead about thirty yards, stopping abruptly to take a dump with this moronic look of worry on his face, then kicking dirt all over it and running a series of frantic laps around a large chunk of volcanic rock. I thought he was trying to herd it on account of, you know, his being an idiot. The next time I looked up, he was gone.

We all called out for him, the cowboy and Phoebe and me, and when he didn’t show I tried not to panic. I knew only what I knew—that it was getting dark and there were coyotes out there—but then I knew what I didn’t know, because the cowboy told me about a black Chow Chow named Cookie that got itself eaten a few weeks before I arrived.

“This one coyote wandered down the hill,” he said, “right at dusk, right in the middle of the road. When Cookie saw it he leapt off the porch and chased it up the hill and over the ridge, where a pack of ’em were waiting in ambush.”

I didn’t call him an asshole. Instead I just kept picturing Jason’s little bowling ball head and his ape eyes, his bat ears and his little paws, the pads of which I liked to pinch when he slept, their prints in mud like fat sand dollars. I thought about his gross tongue and smooshed face, his repeated attempts to dig holes in couches, the look of resentment on his face every time I’d spin him on linoleum floors. I thought about all the close calls: the time he ran onto a friend’s covered pool, stopped in the middle, and sunk; the Christmas he got into the weed cookies under the tree and peed sitting down for three days; when he jumped out of the back of my pickup truck and hung himself from his leash until blood bubbled out of his nose; the earless pitbull he bit in the nuts at the park.

I wasn’t crying, but I suppose it could’ve looked that way. The cowboy put his hand on my shoulder and said things like, “I’m sure he’s fine,” and, “He’ll turn up,” and, “There was a mountain lion sighting yesterday.”

“You’re an asshole,” I said.

“Just telling you what I heard,” he said. “It was on the news this morning. Someone got video of it near the hot springs, about ten miles from here.”

“I like hot springs,” Phoebe said. “And the dinosaur with the little hands.”

“T. rex?” the cowboy said.

“Yeah,” Phoebe said. “T. rex.”

“You know what I like?” I said. “I like pussy and baseball and having a dog that’s alive. That’s what I like.”

“Hey,” the cowboy said, but stopped himself there, instead picking Phoebe up over his head and placing her on his shoulders. She grabbed two fistfuls of his thick, full hair before sliding her hands down onto his college-ruled forehead. “It’s starting to get dark,” he said. “I should get her home.”