by David Downie
James pursed his lips. “The cord would get tangled in the shrubbery.”
“How about a cordless saw? I’ve seen them at the hardware store.”
Shaking his head, James explained that cordless saws were not powerful enough for the kind of cutting needed in Beverley’s garden. “Maybe I’ll rebuild that saw myself,” he added pensively.
“You know how?”
“Don’t you?”
“Why would I?”
“I never met a teenage boy in a place like Carverville who didn’t know how to take apart a chainsaw and put it back together again.”
Taz thrust his lower lip out and smiled. “Now you have.”
“Now I have,” James repeated. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, smelling the iodide in a gust of ocean air. Using his fingers like a caliper, he measured the thirty-year section of the stump he had counted, then moved inward four times until he reached the core of the tree. “I’m guesstimating a hundred twenty or thirty,” he said. “It was probably planted in the late 1800s, about the time my grandparents were born. And I was born here, about halfway, and, right about here, I sat under this tree when I was your age.”
Taz’s camel-eyes grew wide as he stared at the stump, then looked fixedly at James, as if studying himself in a mirror.
“So, Alexander,” James asked, suddenly self-conscious, “what say we finish fixing this fence, then take a walk around the property and figure out the next steps?”
“Beverley said you were leaving in a couple days, that the sheriff was going to make you move. Are you going to stay?”
James shrugged. “Maybe.”
“She could, like, hire you, like, to run the place, I mean. That would be awesome.”
“Watch your ‘likes’ or Beverley will dock your pay,” James joked. “We’ll see.”
Taz grinned mischievously and felt in his baggy pockets. “If you really want to rebuild that saw,” he said, pulling a smartphone from his hoodie and checking to make sure Beverley wasn’t back yet, “I can order the parts.”
“How?”
“With this, it’s my spare. You think I’d let Beverley leave me high and dry?” Taz held up the device and, showing it to James, tapped and stroked it, smiling then frowning then tapping rapidly four times in a row. The entire performance took less than one minute. “So, like, I found the original rebuild kit for the chainsaw, ran a comparison and ordered it from the place with the lowest price, they say it’ll be here tomorrow afternoon, by drone.”
“By drone?”
“Yeah, drone. They fly along the beach, it’s really cool.”
“How did you pay for it?”
“I used Grandma’s account, it was only $28.99. Beverley can pay her back. See, here’s a photo I took of the saw last week, when Beverley and I went to the garage in town to get it fixed. Here’s the model name and number, McCulloch SP 125. I found the rebuild and about three thousand reviews, it was first made in 1971, it says.” He smiled. “Tomorrow you can show me how to rebuild it.”
James blinked and opened his mouth but wasn’t sure what to say.
Dispatching Taz to the shack for nippers, pruning shears, and a machete, he walked back to the RV and returned to the stump wearing a daypack, with a pad of graph paper tucked under his arm. Kitted out like explorers, they followed an overgrown footpath south from the lawn toward Greenwood Creek, hacking and snipping as they went. Pausing when they reached an abandoned orchard, with a long row of half-dead plum, apricot, peach, and apple trees, James made a rough sketch of the property, noting the cardinal directions, adding the beach, creek, highway, and parking lot. Deciding not to include the old burial ground or the locals’ unsettling names for the site—Graveyard Creek, Graveyard Beach, and Graveyard Gulch—he counted out fifty squares along the length of the graph paper, and twenty along the width, making dark marks every ten squares, and then he drew in a scale. One acre equaled five squares. The property ran five acres along the highway and two acres to the cliffs but was rhomboid not rectangular. He wrote Garden Map across the top of the graph paper and noted with satisfaction that, so far, they had inventoried five fallen cypress or eucalyptus branches blocking paths. They would now know where to come back to buck and saw them.
“We need a weed whacker to get any farther,” Taz observed, hesitating in front of an impenetrable wall of vegetation.
“The kind with a metal saw blade,” James agreed. Then he remembered the shack. In it he had seen a gas-powered hedge trimmer, also vintage, leaning on the wall behind coils of barbed wire. It might do the trick. “You keep cutting,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”
Crossing the lawn, James detoured following another overgrown path and fought his way west through the undergrowth until he reached the access road and eucalyptus grove. Remembering the staircase to the beach, and Beverley’s mysterious injunction, he ducked through the buddleia grove following a second overgrown trail and was soon standing at the top of the stairs, his boots on the warped, buckling boards. Testing each tread with his right foot before putting his weight down, he counted to himself as he descended to the beach. Four steps straight to the first landing, six to the left, eight to the right, then seventeen to the rocks and sand below. “I’ll be damned,” he said to himself. “There are seventeen.”
Trying to recall why seventeen was a significant number for mathematicians and numerologists, and whether he had encountered it in the Sherlock Holmes books he had read when in his teens, he recounted while climbing back up the stairs and was soon burrowing among the discards in the shack.
Clutching the trimmer, a gas tank, and the two-stroke oil, James threaded his way back through the garden to Taz and the trail they were blazing. Another quarter hour slipped by as he tried but failed to start the motor of the antiquated trimming tool.
“What if we wounded a skunk or a raccoon with that?” Taz asked. “It looks like a weapon. Maybe we should warn them . . . we could, like, bang pots and pans.”
James set the trimmer down. “Strange, I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “Maybe we don’t really need to reconquer this part of the property,” he added, remembering the old graveyard. “We could map it and leave it alone, a kind of nature reserve with wild native plants.”
“Good idea,” said Taz, snipping halfheartedly at a blackberry branch. “But aren’t these weeds?”
“Weeds are plants you don’t want,” James said, fiddling again with the trimmer, aware that he was sounding pompous and professorial. “If you want them they aren’t weeds. Every plant is beautiful in some way, even that invasive Japanese honeysuckle. It has beautiful white-and-yellow flowers and a beautiful name, Lonicera japonica.”
“Lonicera,” Taz repeated, trying to turn his wavering tenor into a baritone sax and sound like James. “What about beach burs and poison oak?”
James seemed to have a revelation. “Ambrosia chamissonis is an amazing survivor species,” he said. “That’s the beach bur. And poison oak is handsome,” he added, “it looks like oak and it turns that oily shade of red in the fall.” He scratched his beard. “Have you noticed anything about this property?”
“What? It’s full of beach bur?”
“No. That’s normal. There’s no poison oak anywhere, it’s rife everywhere else.”
Taz stretched his rubberized face. “I did wonder about that,” he said, snipping at the blackberry, “but I don’t catch it, I played in it enough when I was young, I guess I developed resistance.”
“Strange again,” James said, “I don’t get it, either.” He paused, wrinkling his face. “I have to wonder how it is they don’t have it here.”
“Lonicera,” Taz said again, seemingly mesmerized by the word. “Ambrosia chamissonis.” Then he shaped his mouth into a pucker and intoned “foliage,” repeating it several times as he struggled to lower the timbre of his voice. Pausing and glancing shyly at the older man he asked, “What about animals, does the weed rule apply to animals?”
Thrustin
g his bearded chin out, ready to pontificate, James hesitated, wondering again if Taz were making fun of him. “Sure,” he said tentatively. “You call an animal you don’t want a pest or a nuisance, or vermin, but they’re only pests because we don’t want them around, there’s nothing inherently bad about them.”
“So, the feral hogs aren’t bad? People say they’re dangerous, they’re cannibals, and they’ll eat small children or attack you at night if you’re alone.”
James was startled. “We don’t want them around because they’re destructive and maybe there are too many in one place, but they’re just wild pigs, we eat pigs, don’t we, and we even use their organs in surgery, so how can they be bad?”
“So, deer and raccoons and skunks are okay, too?”
“Of course, but you don’t want a skunk in your bedroom, or raccoons in your attic, do you?”
“What about rats,” Taz asked earnestly, “what if this place was overrun by rats and mice and maybe dangerous animals like . . . like mountain lions and bears?”
James stopped working and stared at the boy. “The same logic applies, if they’re a nuisance or dangerous you get rid of them if you must, but they’re not by their nature bad, they’re just inconvenient or a health risk or they damage your crops and garden, but they’re not evil, they’re just invasive and unwanted.”
“So, what about people?” Taz continued, his face frozen for the first time in a pained expression.
“People are never vermin or pests, and I’m always hesitant to call them bad or evil,” James said, surprised by the turn the conversation had taken. “Even the people running our country today. They’re misguided and dangerous. But evil? I’m not sure what the word means. You can’t put plants and animals and people in the same bag anyway.”
“Why not?”
“That’s a valid question,” James acknowledged, “and the answer depends on many things, including your belief system, but purely for the sake of peace, prosperity, and the survival of the species, we decided in this country, a very long time ago, that human beings deserve special treatment. A hard-core environmentalist or a nihilist might argue otherwise.”
“Or a white supremacist,” Taz interjected. “So, like, if immigrants are humans and are not inherently bad, maybe just unwanted, then why do we treat them like animals?”
James nodded in somber agreement. “If you can find the answer to that one,” he said, impressed by the boy’s reasoning, “you will have done humankind a great service, especially if you can somehow ensure that people will not be treated like animals, and animals will be treated humanely. That sounds contradictory but it’s not, it’s paradoxical.”
Nodding thoughtfully, Taz went back to snipping the blackberry, the rubberized goofiness returning to his features.
Getting the graph paper out, James began adding details to the map. He drew in the eucalyptus grove, the buddleia and ceanothus, the flowering maples and the fruit trees, the lawn and the wood chip trails and the overgrown paths, the shack and potting shed. “Speaking of good ideas,” James said, trying to sound avuncular and optimistic, “any idea what you’ll do when you finish high school?”
Taz stopped snipping and the serious expression returned. “I might go to the Valley.”
“Which?”
“There’s, like, only one valley where I could find work.”
“Got it,” James agreed.
“I’m learning to write code for gene-splicing, but social would pay more.”
“Social?”
“Media,” Taz said. “I might just stay here and take care of Grandma.”
James wondered aloud if Taz’s grandmother was ailing. Taz smiled. “She’s never sick, she’s stronger than I am, but she’s pretty old, like, maybe your age.”
James laughed but followed with a rusty-sounding scoff. “I’m not old,” he protested. “You look at me and you see a seedy old guy with gray hair, but inside,” he added, tapping his breast, “I’m a little boy, I’m younger than you are.”
Taz tried to hide his nervous smile by covering his mouth with one large gloved hand. “That’s—that’s so weird, it’s the kind of thing my grandma says,” he stammered. “She’s, like, a little girl trapped in an old woman’s body, she said it a couple days ago.”
“Well your grandma’s a wise woman.” James tried another tack. “Don’t you want to live in your own place and bring your friends over, you know . . .”
Taz seemed not to understand. “I bring my friends over,” he reasoned. “There’s plenty of room and she doesn’t mind, she likes us. She’s, like, really mom, really cool.”
“That’s not what I mean . . .” James scratched his beard, trying to remember how he had felt at age seventeen or eighteen. It seemed to him now that his dream back then was to be independent, to leave home, to go to college, to work, and have a girlfriend and maybe get married, buy a house or travel the world. Clearly Taz was different. “The times are a-changing,” he remarked. “I guess the times changed a while ago and I didn’t notice. Maybe you’re just realists and I’m a dreamer, that’s what my wife used to say.”
Taz seemed puzzled. “Grandma’s going to live another twenty-five or thirty years probably,” he calculated aloud, staring blankly. “People live a long time, especially her demographic, and she even runs every day and never smoked, so I don’t see the need for me to rush into anything, but I am kind of, like, tempted by the Valley.”
“New York, Chicago, the city? What about college?”
Taz shook his head. “They sound kind of scary and besides, I couldn’t afford college, I’d, like, wind up with too much debt and what if I couldn’t find a job? You went to college, right?”
“Yes,” James said. Waiting a beat, he tried to find a diplomatic reply. “Now I’m an old geezer living in my car, so what’s the point of college, I see what you’re thinking.” He paused. “What you don’t see is what happened between college and my living in the car, and that was not all bad, believe me. Stuff happens. It’s not a reason to skip college, education is important.”
Taz nodded sympathetically. “I might go to the community college, I’m already, like, taking some courses there. I like it okay as long as people leave me alone.”
“The other kids give you a hard time?”
“Sometimes,” Taz said. “They call me the Martian. They call my mother the Squaw. We used to get into fights. But I’m, like, a pretty fast runner now, and I’m taller than most of them and have longer arms, so it’s okay, besides I do home schooling as of last year, except for my computer lab courses.”
James began to ask about Taz’s family, but something told him to hold off. Picking up the pruning shears, he clipped the shrubbery back, widening the path they had made. Turning around and slowly working his way west until he came upon a thick, thorny stump, he pulled up short and shouted, “Eureka!” Taz loped over and stared, his mouth dropping open.
“What is it?”
“Rosebud,” James said.
They made fast progress freeing up the survivor roses and watering them with a series of long coupled hoses dragged from the wellhead near the lawn. Judiciously pruning the overgrown bushes, they resized the cuttings and pressed them into moist soil mixed with sand in a tub rescued from the potting shed. The new moon would favor the formation of roots; they grew faster during a waxing moon, James explained. “Like your hair,” he added.
“I’m going to google that,” Taz said skeptically. “I think you’re pulling my leg.”
“Nope, it’s the Gospel truth,” James said. “We can propagate the buddleia and fuchsias and abutilon, too, as long as you remember to water them regularly because they have to stay moist.”
“Abutilon . . .” Taz repeated dreamily.
“Flowering maple,” James said. “Beverley likes shades of pink, so those are the ones to take cuttings from, though they might not reproduce true.”
Shouting and waving her hands, a dismayed Beverley found them breast-deep in what had
been Mr. Egmont’s rose garden. It was now a graveyard of rose stumps in a forest of raccoon and skunk trails through twining curtains of raspberry bramble, coyote bush, nettle, and climbing crabgrass. James pointed triumphantly to several rosebushes still alive against all odds.
“Count down four from the hip,” he repeated to Taz, touching each of the nodules on the stem and unintentionally snagging his finger on a thorn. Drawing back the finger, he sucked the blood off, cursing under his breath. “Snip at a forty-five-degree angle, if you can,” he said with his finger in his mouth, “like this. . . . Then remove the cross branches to create a bowl . . .”
“Well I’ll be!” Beverley exclaimed. “I guess Number Three ran a leach line under here, too. Or maybe the roots found our aquifer. We have the best water on the coast right here, that’s what Number Three said when he found it, here and up on Five Mile, from Narrow Rocks. Now that the word’s out, I’m surprised no one wants to buy me out and pump it dry.” She turned sideways and shuffled in among the roses to get a closer look. “Any pink ones?” she asked. “No wonder the deer keep trying to jump the fences.”
“I count six survivors,” James said, pulling out the map and marking the spot with an X. A drop of blood fell from his fingertip onto the paper. He blotted it. “We’ll take a few more cuttings and see if we can propagate them.”
Beverley tapped her wrist. “Not now you won’t,” she said, “I’ve been looking for you, dinner is on the table, I’m as hungry as a hog, and they don’t like roses, the deer do.”
SIX
Bristling with burs and twigs on their pants and sleeves, Taz and James filed in and out of the washroom, their arms gangling and legs shambling as they bumped into each other along the narrow hall. Crowded at the small table in the corner of the kitchen, James closed his eyes and took a deep breath, nosing the air. The candy scent was divine, he said, wondering aloud what she had made, and amazed to be so hungry again after their copious lunch. As if in answer, the kitchen timer rang, the men set down their empty water glasses, mopped at their brows, and found their knives and forks.