by Matt Sumell
“Well he has the perfect job then,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “Doesn’t pay.”
But it was easy money. Besides the boredom and the occasional shit tank blowing up in my face, there was nothing to it. My boss Tommy left me alone, I could bring Jason with me, and it was all the free soda I could drink. I was old enough to appreciate that, but I was also old enough to have cul-de-sacs for a hairline and occasional dick problems. My mother was dead, my father was confused, I hadn’t slept or shit right since I was twenty-nine, and it seemingly happened overnight. I was young—blink—now I’m not. And with all the free time I had to sit around on the dock I couldn’t help but inventory my life every now and again and think: Is this it? Eight bucks an hour and drowsy? Should I join the navy or something? And not because I bought into all that Be all you can be bullshit—I just figured I’d Be all a dude with health insurance who’s good at push-ups. And from my chair on the dock, that seemed like an improvement. Most things did.
So when I got a call from a guy I’d met around the marina who thought he was a cowboy and was rich, I didn’t hang up on him. He’d recently bought a million-dollar mountainside A-frame five hours north of LA that needed some work, and he thought I might need some work, too, and some time off the boat, just a month or three, depending. “Don’t say no, say yes.”
I said, “No dude. I’m living the dream.”
“Some dream,” he said. “Last time I saw you, you were holding a bottle of your own urine.”
“I fixed my toilet two weeks ago.”
“Well that’s why I’m asking you up here,” he said. “You’re handy and accustomed to the less-than-ideal. Just think of it—”
“Appreciate the offer,” I said. “But no thanks.”
“C’mon … It’s beautiful up here. You’d love it, and I could really use the help. We can pay you more than you make on the dock, feed you every now and again, too.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Boat’s pulling up. Gotta go.”
So I went, and this time it was a beat-up twenty-six-foot Parker and it approached perfectly, nice and slow, its sun-colored captain bringing her in single-handed and smiley, then pumping his own fuel and small-talking me and the dog while he did it. Weapon of Bass Destruction was painted across the stern in gold leaf lettering, and when I noticed the dive gear onboard I asked him where he was headed.
“Couple shoals around the point,” he said, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it to me. On it was a list, and I gave it the once-over but the names were science-y so I handed it back. “Every now and then the aquarium pays me to pick things up for them. That’s today’s assignment.”
“Sounds like a great job.”
“Used to be,” he said. “It’s harder to find stuff now and the pay barely covers the cost of fuel anymore. I’d rather be loading trucks for the port … Those guys have it made.”
“I thought so, too, until a couple longshoremen walked into The Spot and started singing Ching-chong Ding-dong over a game of nine-ball. I asked Johnny about it and, apparently, the shipping companies are trying to replace retiring workers with lower-paid dudes from China. There’s talk of a strike before the end of the year.”
He shook his head, quit at a hundred bucks and three cents, pulled the nozzle out too fast and dripped a few drops of diesel into the water. I watched the rainbows stretch and go oval in the tide, then headed to the register to ring him up. He paid in cash, gave me a dollar-and-ninety-seven-cent tip, undid his bowline and climbed aboard. I undid the stern and handed him the line as he started it up, and as he drifted off he ducked into the cuddy and popped back out with a doggie biscuit and tossed it over. I caught it and waved thanks, sat in my chair and listened to the sound of his inboard/outboard idle away, then squinted into the sun, a big orange in the sky that yellow-brick-roaded the water westward. I fed Jason the biscuit and scratched his head and told him he’s my little guy, my mini-rhino, my retarded miracle. Because he was. It was all a retarded miracle right then, and I enjoyed and appreciated it for a good three or four minutes before Jason barked at a feral cat slinking along the gate. It reminded me of Whatsherface and Whatsherface’s face when I told her about my job, and just like that I was back to overwhelming boredom and despair, restlessness and worry, the feeling that I should quit the dock and put my favorite shirts in a bag and move in a hard straight line toward the horizon, any horizon, because it had to be better than this piece of shit one right here:
Due south was an eyesore rock wall that protected the harbor and a beach for Mexicans that was so polluted they had to dig it up and truck in new sand. On the cliff above it sat Fort MacArthur, an air force base from which—if it wasn’t closed to the public—you’d have had a terrific view of the port’s mega-cranes and endless stacked containers, the bait barge and the always-idling-for-electric cargo and cruise ships forever burning bunker fuel ’cause there’s no shore-power for things that big. Across the channel was an old marina of splintering docks and wood pilings that the owners refused to fix because the city wouldn’t renew their lease. Rumor was they were planning waterfront apartments and a theme restaurant I imagined would serve overpriced crab legs and have Jimmy Buffett on a loop. Another 22nd Street Landing minus the history: shit seafood and big windows, maybe good bread.
I wanted to leave so bad I got hot, but I couldn’t leave, not for another five hours, so I covered my left eye with my left hand for a while, then dropped and did push-ups until Jason ambled over and started licking my forehead with his gross tongue. I shoved him away and did like seven more, but then he came back and started again. “Quit licking me, Jason!” I yelled. “I’m doing push-ups!” He cowered and looked at me cautiously, and I felt like a real jerk about it because he had those eyes—half-smart and vulnerable, like an ape’s—and then he shot his back leg through his front ones like a little gymnast and sat down and looked out at the water. Then I looked out at the water and watched as a yacht club kid tried to right his tipped-over boat. He didn’t have the weight or the strength or the whatever it is necessary to do it, and after a minute of him failing at it, I reached out and pet Jason on the head. “How’d you feel about you and me finding some new shit to lick?”
He lay down and rolled onto his side, then his back, and I stared at his pecker while I scratched his stomach before calling the cowboy back and asking if his offer was still good. He asked why I was breathing heavy into the phone and I said I just did a whole lot of push-ups, man, “What about the job?” About the job he said, yeah, of course, and asked when I was coming up. “I’ll see you tonight,” I said, “late.” Then I went and knocked on Tommy’s boat and told him about some imaginary family problems and a few real ones, like how my old man ran around my brother’s house looking for his lost airplane ticket until my brother muted the TV and said, “Dude. You drove here.” I told Tommy I needed to take care of some things for a while—which wasn’t a lie, not really—that I’d be gone for a few months and appreciated working for him, that I’d like to work for him again when I got back.
He lit a cigarette. “Hate to lose you,” he said, exhaling smoke out of only one nostril. “Everybody likes your dog.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Let me know when you get back and I’ll see what I can do.”
“I appreciate that, too,” I said.
It should have ended there but didn’t, because Tommy spent the next few minutes telling me about a chili cook-off he went to before we finally shook hands and I rushed off to pack the truck with whatever and the dog bed and headed north.
* * *
The house was a ski-in/ski-out 1968 A-frame somehow connected to a 1970-something A-frame that looked like it was built by my childhood barber, Mario, who gave everyone flat-tops no matter what they asked for. The first thing you saw on entering was a tiny bathroom off a low-ceilinged kitchen, because what says welcome like the option of taking a shit in a former closet or making yourself a sandwich. The who
le place was the opposite of modern, a time capsule complete with wall-to-wall green shag, animal antlers above the fireplaces and doorways, a ten-foot-tall totem pole in the big room overlooking a three-and-a-half-legged pool table propped up by an encyclopedia on top of a cinderblock. In total I’d describe the place as a real dump on a half acre of volcanic rock and pine, buried five or six months a year, depending on the year, beneath a whole lot of snow.
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.