“For what? There was no offer from them; therefore, no contract. No,” he answered. “And her determination? Determination? How about determination based in stupidity like smoking when it’s killing you and you still smoke.”
“Explain to me how the rights to cut down a tree can be excluded from a real estate transaction, excluded from all my paperwork?”
“Nowadays, it’s rare but in this case, it’s the last piece of the original Arboles Costeros Ranch so the timber rights were likely grandfathered in somewhere along the way. Our understanding is just prior to the last of the ranch being subdivided into smaller lots, mid-late 70’s, they logged it, the last 1000 acres, though some trees were left, obviously this one. You must have been gone by then.”
“Arboles Costeros? Doesn’t that mean trees? Trees on the coast, something like this?”
Ignoring her, he repeated his question, not missing a subtle opportunity to put in a dig.
“You were gone by then I assume or—”
“Yes, we were gone by then,” Maybelline curtly confirmed, awarding him yet another stone in the fast, cold, now rising water.
“You want me to get to the point so I will. I got to the first one and now let me get on to the second.”
Maybelline had to go to the bathroom. All the coffee…
“Can we take a break? I need to attend to some personal needs. May I call you back?”
“Yeah, yeah. I know, me too. I’m sorry about all this but it was inevitable. Call me back and I will take your call if I am on another line. We need to finish this conversation if this is okay.”
“Agreed,” Maybelline answered. “Five minutes.” She hung up. There were more messages for her. From here on out, there would always be more messages. She would practically need a secretary.
It was more than five minutes. After hitting the bathroom, she wandered around her back patio like an imbecile, muttering “Millicent, Millicent, Millicent, damn you, Millicent,” tearing dead leaves off her geraniums. She talked to her hummingbirds, noticed a part of the stucco on the wall that had a crack. Some kids across the street at the park were talking-yelling-screaming. “I TOLD YOU! MONICA’S NOT COMING. OW, YOU ASSHOLE, STOP!”— the kind of kids that don’t know how to talk without yelling. Someone should teach them. It drove her back inside, back to the phone.
“It doesn’t matter now. It’s too late for the tree. We want to talk to you about the land. Here’s our offer. If you want to get out of this, scrap the whole damn thing, we’ll buy the lot back from you and even give you an extra $10,000 for all your trouble.”
Then you’ll turnaround and sell it to Squirrel-Mart for what, $100,000…or more? she thought. She THOUGHT, aware that they were at the point where they could start shoving one another off into the cold water.
As if reading her thought, Jim countered, “Squirrel-Mart is done with us. Like I said, what kind of corporation would go running back to a real estate company that one, didn’t catch the timber rights issue, and two, was undercut by its own founder, in this case, my own mother? But somebody else, another corporation, will buy it. We refuse to feel guilty if we make a decent profit off it and Mrs. Emmons, they will put a box on it and Tank will get his tree. It’s inevitable. Mom knew we needed this sale, needed the money. Things are just turning around after the so-called “Great Recession”. We were counting on this sale. I loved her but she kind of screwed everybody.”
Maybelline felt herself heating up and it wasn’t because of the ambient temperature.
“Well, she didn’t screw me. I suppose your assertion she undercut you is true but then she saw an opportunity with me, one that quite frankly fell into place easily—to save the tree. She changed her mind. She simply changed her mind and she didn’t have the heart to tell you. This is all it was, is. She was a dying woman who saw a chance for a legacy of some sort, to do the right thing on her way out—so she did. Maybe there is more to your relationship with her than I know. Maybe there were other reasons. Maybe she was angry at you. I don’t know. I know if I were in her shoes and she showed up, financially able to carry it off, I would have done the same thing.” Maybelline rubbed her temples. She had a headache. She never got headaches. “Is there any more?” she asked, hot, impatient, “because if this is all of it, I am getting off the phone. I’ve had enough.”
“The land. Do you—”
“My old friend, the last of my old friends, just died. I’m sorry if I am in no frame of mind to offer up the land so you can conveniently recover your financial loss. This whole thing is…to say the least, unexpected, and I am still trying to catch up. I just came ‘round to see an old friend and now I’m in this situation.”
“We understand that. She kind of screwed—”
“DO NOT TELL ME SHE KIND OF SCREWED…For now, please do not call me. I need to get off the phone and grieve the loss of my dear friend, your mother. May I suggest you do the same.” To insure she would not be the one to pick up the last stone and smash it into Jim’s skull, say anything worse in other words, she hung up and let herself cry.
Chapter 9
Trees. The damn things were everywhere and now she was noticing them more than ever. She wondered what the ones were outside her window, growing by the creek, tall, deeply fissured gray bark with heart-shaped leaves. She would find out.
She was out of sorts with so much to do if so much to do meant checking an endless stream of messages. The last time she had a constant stream of messages…when Jay died. He had so many friends, many that started out as customers. This is how he was. The business suffered because of how he was, not charging enough, or not at all. Sometimes it was justified. People get themselves in some insane fixes, like the woman who locked her baby in the car with no money to pay him. She said she would send him a check but never did. Or the demented old man who locked himself inside his son’s car and wouldn’t come out. The situation was so sad, he couldn’t bear to ask for payment. After Jay got the car door open, the old man refused to come out, started yelling, accused all of them of trying to murder him. Jay didn’t ask for a dime, just got in his truck and left. Maybelline put a stop to a lot of this, she had to. She allowed him “one act of compassion a month and make it a cheap one” because she knew he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help who he was, a loving man, a good man. What would he think about the circumstance she now found herself in? No doubt he would understand her compassion except this act of compassion was far bigger, more impetuous, desperate, possibly stupid.
She listened to the most recent message from Oak and Joni.
“Voice mail set up. Just used generic one. Tank’s nailing something to the tree right now as I speak, apparently the NOI (she didn’t know what a “NOI” was). You get through your paperwork yet? It’s more important than ever now that Tank’s putting up his. I didn’t give you all the words. Search on words like forestry, forest, oak, trees, timber, lumber, board feet, logging, natural resources, extraction, egress, ingress. I might have some more. There’s a crowd of people, say 20, looking up at us. Reporters, two cameras as far as we can count. Don’t know what stations. They’re yelling up at us. No cops, yet. Just want to let you know, it’s starting, the circus. We’re in the Big Top now and this includes you but you probably already knew this. Later, Mom.”
Maybelline played the message again and jotted down all the words. She didn’t remember seeing any of them but had to be sure. She was pretty sure her pilot neighbor, Andy, had a scanner. Now there was another reason to visit the cat. Hopefully she could figure it out. Dressing quickly, she grabbed the key to Andy’s duplex and let herself in. The cat ran to her like a dog, obviously lonely, leaving Maybelline to wonder if the cat sitter had even been there. The cat had no food. She picked up “Boeing”. Purring furiously, he nuzzled into her neck. Someone was opening the door. It was Katie, the cat sitter, a 17 year old girl she knew from the neighborhood. Stating that Andy said it was okay (thinking he would have helped her out anyway), she told
Katie she really needed to review some legal paperwork and did she have any idea how to use the scanner. Not wanting to mess with Andy’s computer, Katie told Maybelline to get her laptop. Maybelline was “eternally grateful” Katie knew how to hook Maybelline’s laptop up to Andy’s fancy printer/scanner/fax and make it scan. Too tense to wait, while Katie watered plants and fed the cat, Maybelline did “the search” using all the words from Oak, finding six of them buried on page 19. She realized in reading it days before, she had had either too much coffee or too many glasses of wine because by page 19, only four pages away from the last page, she had gotten sloppy, was just ‘scanning’ it, had convinced herself there was nothing to worry about. It was all just real estate gibberish. The six words read: [title exclusions—reserved: extractive natural resources]. In brackets. Why the brackets? Maybe that was good, the brackets?
Thinking Maybelline was having a stroke, Katie rushed into the room in response to a sound Maybelline was making, something between a wail and a moan.
“Oh my God, are you all—”
“I don’t even own THE FUCKING TREE!” she yelled at Katie. “Oh my GOD!” Still staring at Katie, she released what Katie considered to be a maniacal laugh, creepy. Slowly walking backward, Maybelline grabbed Katie’s arms.
“I just bought a piece of land with an old tree on it to save it, the tree, for a friend of mine who was dying at the time, she wanted me to, and look at this! LOOK AT THIS!” Maybelline pulled Katie to the screen. “Read it.” Katie’s eyes were plenty wide so there would be no problem here. “READ IT!” Maybelline demanded again. “What does it say? Right there?” Maybelline put her finger on the words.
Alarmed, confused, Katie leaned in and read, “title exclusions—reserved: extractive natural resources.”
“I’m sorry?” Katie offered.
Assuring Katie she was the savior in the situation, had absolutely nothing to apologize for, and she would tell Andy she availed herself of his scanner (leaving out any mention of Katie), she returned to her side of the duplex where she scrounged around in her purse for some bills, any bills, finding a $20. Rushing back to Andy’s side, she handed Katie the $20, gave her a hug, and returned to her side. She felt like she was going to throw up. After pacing inside and out accompanied by more yelling, she grabbed Jay’s bourbon and poured herself a shot. She had to calm down, think.
So this is how it was going to be—she against The Tank, the Darden’s, history, past and present, she and Millicent representing the present, the future, one of them dead. Taking a gulp, she walked into her bedroom. Not really sure what she was doing, why, she started unpacking then still dazed, moved into the garage where she paced, her anxiety finally settling on doing something that made sense, like checking the oil in the Jeep. Her life was now officially a mess. How she wanted it to revert back to “normal” but she couldn’t make it ‘normal’ now. Impulsive or not, she had bought a very valuable parcel out from under a large corporation, turning a family, a community upside down, and two young people were living in the tree on what was now HER land. Lifting the hood of the Jeep, she muttered, “sell the land back to them, just sell the land back to them”, then things could go back to the way they were before; predictable, lonely, meaningless.
Catching Katie on her way out, Katie now convinced Mrs. Emmons was nuts, Maybelline asked her if she could watch her side too, for at least the next week. “The sentence we just read?” Maybelline explained, Katie vigorously nodding her head yes, appeasing Maybelline just to get out of there, “well now I have to deal with it and it is in Santa Rosa.” There was no need to mention any of this to Andy. She would tell him. Katie agreed, glad to get away from the crazy old lady but also grateful for the extra money since she was saving to buy a car.
She needed to be there, at the ‘circus’, after all, she was the Ringmaster. She searched online for “long-term lodging”, “short-term rentals” and settled on a different hotel, “Holiday House”, two beds this time (queen), a little more expensive but closer to the tree and Oak. Staring at her bag, she unpacked, did laundry, then repacked, all simultaneously. Looking around the room, she tossed in a framed photo of Jay, and a small painting of a landscape with rounded trees in it, like her oak. A glass figurine of a howling wolf she bought when she and Jay were visiting the Grand Canyon years before was tucked inside a sock. Bustling around with a glass of Pinot, she filled the four hummingbird feeders, checked all the doors and windows, set the air conditioner thermostat, and watered all the plants inside and out. She emailed Andy, omitting any mention of using his scanner, the whole affair. She would do this later. Katie would be caring for both sides. Maybelline would kick in the money to pay Katie as always. If he was home, could he still check her plants, hummingbird feeders, the nectar already prepared in the refrigerator? “I’ve been called out of town. Thank you so much,” she wrote. Knowing just how mundane her life was, he would wonder…what could possibly call her out of town? “I’ve been called out of town by a tree” is what she almost wrote.
Once on the road, she listened to the message from the Planner I. Probably should have listened to it before talking to Jim, she thought. She could have gone into that conversation better prepared. The Planner I informed Maybelline she was calling “only because my boss, a Planner III, told me to”. The Planner I drolly recounted that in recording Maybelline’s deed, the county recorder confirmed that the logger, Mr. Darden, otherwise known as Tank, present at the (so-called) public meeting, “appeared to hold the timber rights to take off the oak otherwise the county would not have approved it years before when the lot was zoned commercial”. “My boss had a feeling you didn’t know,” the Planner I reported. “You can call her if you need to. I think you have the number.” She didn’t leave it. That was that. Maybelline scoffed.
By 9:30 p.m. she had arrived at her new temporary home. After checking-in, throwing her bags inside the room, she headed for the tree and her son. She would wait until she saw them to tell them what she found or perhaps, they had found it already, in brackets. Of course, she stopped by the grocery store on the way so she didn’t get to them until around 10:00 p.m. She maneuvered a few of the bags through the boughs, handing them up to Joni as Oak held the flashlight then worked his way down. Shaking his head, he hugged her and asked her if she wasn’t exhausted, something she was completely aware of but trying to block out of her consciousness. This simple observation of compassion and kindness broke her. Nodding her head and crying, she opened her chair, still against the tree, and collapsed into it.
“I found it,” she said releasing a sigh of exhaustion, possibly defeat. “In brackets.”
“Title exclusions—reserved: extractive natural resources,” Oak recited.
She looked up at him, his face like the sun to her, even in the summer night.
“I wasn’t going to bring it up tonight. You’ve had such a long day. Then again, we didn’t know how we would tell you.”
“Now you don’t have to.”
“It doesn’t really matter to us. We’re operating off the premise…Nobody’s cutting this tree down, nobody can until we, the court, the county, somebody sees clear proof of timber rights from the Darden’s. Remember, we have an injunction that is based on this, and it’s holding. In the meantime, we have our own research to do, and quickly. Joni’s brilliant with this stuff, better than me.”
“But from what I understand, it can just be a verbal agreement passed from one generation to another. It may not be in writing.”
“They have to prove it, verbal or not, show some chain of title. They’re scrambling no doubt to find something. Maybe they do have the rights but in the meantime, we have to beat them to it because something stinks.”
He kneeled down, meeting her searching, exhausted, bloodshot eyes. “Look, please don’t get discouraged. I wish I could express how many times we’ve seen this. How weird it gets, with trees, these sorts of things, and though we don’t always save them, most of the time we do
and in this case, it’s stacked in our favor. I mean, look at the public concern. It’s going to be all right. I just know it and we’re way smarter than all of them put together. We know what we’re doing and we have support.”
“I’m so lucky to have you,” Maybelline said reaching for his hand. “You’re an angel sent from Millicent. You have to be.”
He smiled. “We’re so lucky to have you. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Right now, please…” He motioned for her to go. She needed to rest. They would see her in the morning.
Chapter 10
Maybelline awoke with a start, for a second not even able to recall where she was, still trying to catch up with the current version of her life. Checking the clock, she was shocked to see it was 11:00. Then again, she needed the rest. Oak was right. The continental breakfast was long over and of course, when she was buying food for them, she failed to buy any for herself. Irritated by this, after showering and dressing, she hurried into the hotel restaurant and ordered a late breakfast. If they could hurry…she had to get to a meeting.
Back at the tree, Oak commented that she looked better, rested.
“You ready?” he asked with a big smile on his face. He was holding a hammer. “Because here we go.” He walked her around the tree to Tank’s notice, fully laminated and nailed to the tree in two spots.
“Notice of Intent to Harvest Timber,” she read aloud. “Timber?” she asked, looking around. “What timber?”
Oak nodded at their tree. Maybelline scowled and continued reading.
“Darden Enterprises, LTO. What’s—?”
“Licensed Timber Operator. Go on,” Oak counseled. “It gets more interesting further down.”
“Name of Timberland Owner and Submitter: Darden Enterprises.”
Oak nodded. “He’s officially claiming he owns the timber.”
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