His repeats his command, and points to the tools and boxes in the garage.
Lenny says, “Why should I clean it? I didn’t do that.”
“B-Because I’m your father and I said so.”
Tired and irritable, he says, “I don’t want to.”
His father puts his hands on his waist and stares. His body sways. Even in the dusk light Lenny can see his red face.
His father says, “All you do is hide up in the tree. You do b-bad tae kwon do and hide away from everything. This world is too hard to hide from. You have to face everything.”
Lenny wants to retort, You don’t face everything. You just get drunk every night. But Lenny keeps quiet. His father says, “Come down right now.”
“No,” Lenny replies.
“You stupid little b-boy, talking back to me? You show me no respect? I will b-bring you down and show you respect.” He makes a motion toward the tree, but then stops. Lenny sees him calculating whether or not he can climb it. He looks up at Lenny, and says, “You think you can be disrespectful like your mother? You learn b-bad things. Your mother is making us lose our family. She is taking everything from me—”
He stops. He turns and goes into the garage, and Lenny relaxes, thinking his father is going to fight with his mother, but then his father reappears, and in the dim light he sees that his father is carrying an ax.
PART IV
Wood Chips
27
Lenny sits up in the tree, watching with disbelief and fascination as his father walks across the front lawn with an ax in his hands. He’s wearing khaki shorts, sandals, and an old tan Polo shirt with stains on the chest, and staggers drunkenly, almost tripping over his own feet. He yells at Lenny to come down, because he’s going to chop down the tree. Lenny’s mother jumps out of the front doorway, screaming at him to stay away from Lenny, and when he turns toward her, swaying, Lenny sees his chance, and scrambles down the tree, leaping to the ground and running.
His father tells her to shut up. He says, “No one respects me. No one! I work hard all d-day and no one gives me a chance! Not even my family! My own family!”
He picks up the ax and swings it back, but loses his grip. The ax slips out and spirals to the ground, sliding across the grass and leaving a pale green trail. He stumbles forward, reaching for it, and when he picks it up, Lenny has moved to the front door, where his mother pushes him inside. She says, “Go to your room.”
But he hurries to the front window and sees his father gripping the ax with both hands, winding back, and then swinging with all his strength. The ax slices deeply into the trunk of the maple tree, and Lenny lets out a small cry. His father twists and pulls the handle, loosening the blade. Lenny says to his mother, “He’s going to kill the tree!”
His father swings again, and the loud chop reverberates through the front yard and into the house. Although Lenny watches, he can’t bear to see the tree hurt like that. He turns away, and hears another chop. He remembers how he had tried to hammer a piece of wood up in the branches as a back rest, but when he saw that the nail had made the tree bleed, he pulled it out and patched it with rubber cement. He imagined the tree could feel this, and didn’t want to hurt it.
Now, after his father’s fourth and fifth chop, he knows the tree will die.
He sits on the sofa, staring at the large stereo with the wood paneling. His mother closes the front screen door and tells him to wash up for dinner. The chops outside continue, though the pace is slowing. After a few minutes Lenny peers out the window and sees his father resting, and there are deep gouges in the tree trunk, the dark bark chipped away and the white fleshy core exposed. Large sweat stains cover his father’s back. The streetlamp flickers on, sending a yellow glow over the lawn. For a moment it’s eerily quiet. A car drives by, slows down, but when Lenny’s father glares at it, the car speeds up.
His father wipes his forehead with his arm, and then continues chopping the tree.
The slow, erratic chops—a physical, visceral sound that vibrates through the yard—imprint themselves in Lenny’s memory, and will be one of the last demonstrations of his father’s strength and animosity. At one point his father takes off his shirt, and in the darkness his thick, sweating body glistens yellow under the streetlamp. His mother pushes him away from the window and leads him to the kitchen, where she sets dinner in front of him. He eats alone in the breakfast nook, listening to the thunks that reverberate through the house.
The rhythm slows, the chops become quieter, and then, after a long pause, he hears a tremendous cracking and a heavy, resounding thud that shakes the house. Lenny and his mother run to the living room, and a blur of maple leaves and branches press up against the front window, blocking out the yellow streetlight. When his mother opens the front door a branch pops into the house, and there’s a thick tangle of leaves blocking her. The bizarre image of a branch sticking through the door and into the living room almost makes Lenny laugh, but his mother angrily shoves aside the branch and pushes her way out the door, yelling at his father in Korean.
Lenny follows her through the branches and threads his way out onto the yard where the tree lies on its side. There are deep trenches in the lawn. The broken stump has white shards sticking out, with strips of twisted and tortured bark still attached to the fallen trunk. His mother says to his father something in Korean about the mess he’s made, and he replies in a tired voice. He moves toward the branches jutting against the house, and chops those. He sees Lenny watching and says, “Go to bed.”
“You killed my tree.”
“Your tree? Your tree? This is my house, my yard. Go to b-bed now.”
Lenny walks through the branches and back into the house. He hears his father chopping some of the smaller branches, the cracks higher in tone. As he gets ready for bed and settles into his room, listening to the rustling and snapping of branches, he falls asleep and dreams of spiraling helicopter maple seeds falling around him.
When Lenny wakes up the house is quiet and still, and he walks into the living room, which is unusually bright. He looks out of the window and sees many of the large branches cut and piled in the corner of the yard. The huge trunk still lies there in the center of the lawn, with long gashes in the grass and large, leafy branches sticking up into the air, but all the branches that were jutting against the house have been pruned back. Wide, green maple leaves are scattered everywhere. The yard seems brighter, airier.
Lenny walks out onto the lawn, his bare feet swishing through the dew-covered grass. He sees the white wood chips sprinkled across the yard and picks one up. He likes the compactness of it, and when he realizes that this chip was once part of his favorite tree, he puts it in his pajama pocket. He finds a larger one and keeps it as well. He begins collecting as many wood chips as he can, stuffing them in his pocket, and when his pockets are full, using his pajama top as a net.
His mother opens the front door and asks him what he’s doing.
“I want to save some of these.”
She said his pajama bottoms are getting wet.
“I don’t care.”
She disappears for a moment, and then comes outside with a plastic bag, and begins helping him collect the wood chips. After she fills the bag she hands it to him, and tells him to go inside and get ready for school. He brings the bag into his room, sorts and dumps them into an empty shoebox. The chips will travel with Lenny for years, handfuls getting lost or misplaced with each move, but one day, in his late twenties, he will pull out the bag, choose an unblemished chip and begin whittling a pendant, which he still wears today.
Over the next few days his father and brother chop the tree into piles of firewood, and one of their neighbors with a gas-powered chain saw comes over to cut the stump and the few larger pieces of the tree trunk. The front yard seems empty. There used to be a birch tree in the other corner, but his father chopped that down when it began to die. Except for what’s provided by a tall oak that borders the next-door neighbor’s yard, they d
on’t have any tree cover.
Lenny has to repair the gouges in the lawn, but his father seems too tired to keep hounding him about the yard work. His father is still in the midst of a job search, and although his mother hasn’t revealed all the details yet, she is about to initiate divorce proceedings. Both of them are out often. Mira spends more time with friends and Lenny has the house to himself.
The mail-order pamphlets arrive during one of these solo afternoons, and he’s disappointed that they’re simply a bunch of mimeographed copies stapled together in a crude hand-made book. Even the staples are cheap and bent, misaligned in the spine. The copies are printed in the same purple ink of school ditto handouts.
However, once he reads the pamphlets more closely he sees that they are step-by-step directions for all phases of planting, growing, harvesting and drying marijuana, with line drawings. The detailed explanations are listed in simple, clear language. On the back of them is the name of the organization, a cooperative in Berkeley, California. Because Sal had paid for these, they are his, but Lenny brings them to the Merrick Library and photocopies a set for himself.
Excited by the arrival, Sal asks Lenny to water the crops while he stays at home to study these. After an initial glimpse, he hands Lenny more cash and says, “Find other catalogs and books. Stuff like this is great.”
Lenny counts out fifty dollars. “About growing?”
“Anything. And keep the change again.”
They’re sitting in his crawlspace, and he pulls a small lamp closer to him. Lenny asks about the trip lines, even though they haven’t seen any more evidence of trespassers.
“Keep them up. Maybe that one time was just some guy wandering around. I’m guessing it was night when he showed up, so maybe he didn’t even notice the plants. But check everything carefully just in case.”
“Come back here?”
He says, “I might be upstairs. You know what? Here’s an extra key for the lock here. You can hang out here if you want. If you ever need to crash here, go ahead. Just make sure I’m not here, sleeping. I’m usually not, but just in case.” He hands over a key to the padlock.
“Thanks.”
“No big deal.”
“Things okay at home?”
Lenny shrugs his shoulders.
Sal finally says, “Okay. Let me go through these. Thanks.” He settles into a cushion, hunching over, and studies the pamphlets.
28
Lenny finds Ed that afternoon packing most of his belongings into the storage room, preparing for his summer off. Ed asks how school is, and Lenny tells him about the stupid test he hadn’t understood.
Ed tilts his head. “I hope you did well.”
“Why?”
“Those are placement tests for junior high school. You’re going to be tracked based on those tests.”
“Tracked.”
“You know: Gifted, Advanced, Regular, Dumbshit.”
“What?” Lenny says, alarmed.
“Yeah, and you can’t get off it. It tracks you into high school, and your GPA gets added points if you’re in the higher tracks so the higher tracks get into better colleges. I got fucked. So, I hope you did well.”
Lenny says that he rushed through it quickly to get to recess.
Ed raises an eyebrow. “Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t know it was important!”
“Oh, man. You’re going to be a dumbshit.” He laughs. “Just because you wanted to go play kickball!”
Lenny feels queasy.
His brother’s goodbye is brief and uneventful. Mira and Lenny hadn’t gone to his graduation, and no one had gone to Lenny’s, including Lenny himself. He never gave his parents the invitation, and he just didn’t care. All these events make the end of the school year feel anti-climactic. When Ed leaves the house he hoists a heavy backpack over his shoulder, punches Lenny in the arm and says, “Catch you later.” Their mother kisses him. Their father shakes his hand, and Ed ruffles Mira’s hair.
Then he walks out of the house and jumps into his friend’s Mustang. They screech off, and that’s more or less the last Lenny sees of Ed for years. The strange thing is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in the house. He was there so rarely anyway, that for Lenny the biggest change is his new bedroom in the basement, where it’s cold and damp, but completely private.
The back door leads directly to the basement stairwell, so Lenny often leaves and enters the house without seeing anyone. Lately, though, his mother has taken over the kitchen table in the breakfast nook for her work and studying, so sometimes Lenny finds her late at night preparing for her realtor exam.
One night he comes upstairs and finds her studying, charts and graphs of home prices in front of her, and she brightens when Lenny appears. She asks him to join her. She shows him her test preparation books, and tells him she likes this because it involves so many different areas, like math, reading, and even art and architecture. The test is in a couple of weeks, and she feels ready. She says, “I never thought I would become a real estate broker.”
“You wanted to be a painter, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Maybe I will go back to it eventually. What do you like to do?”
He thinks about the books, pamphlets and magazines, and says, “I like to read.”
“Maybe you can be a professor.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t give you a lot of advice, but I will say one thing. Find what you love and do it well and keep doing it, and the money will follow. If I had followed that advice maybe I would be a famous painter by now.”
She touches his cheek. “I know you will do well. I can see it.”
“How?”
“Because you never give up.”
She kisses his forehead and tells him to go back to bed.
Sal has to go to summer school, but because Lenny has his days free, he cares for the crops, and he watches the plants grow taller and bushier, those with the premature flowers tagged as male—the tiny stalks and symmetrical knobs indicating their sex—appearing even larger and thicker. Sal wants to wait until the pre-flowering stage when the females begin clustering their new leaves, fully revealing their sexes, and then they’ll decide what to do with the males.
Lenny studies the copies of the pamphlets as closely as Sal, and they debate the idea of fertilizing the females with male pollen to produce seeds for the next crop. Sal isn’t sure if there will be another crop, and he still has plenty of seeds stored in his crawlspace. Although Lenny understands that female plants that don’t make seeds are more potent, he keeps thinking about the future. Sal repeats a few times that growing in the woods is too hard. Lenny wonders about his attic and the backyard. Even though he doesn’t know yet how complicated harvesting and drying is, and he has no idea about selling, it’s the notion that he, a kid, could grow something illegal, coveted and profitable that appeals to him.
A couple of the catalogs advertise seeds for sale, though he isn’t sure how legal this is and worries about his parents getting in trouble. He considers using another address, maybe his elderly neighbor’s, making sure he intercepts her mail.
Lost in thought as he returns home, he’s startled to find a strange Korean man sitting on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. He stands up when he sees Lenny, ducking his head shyly, and asks in broken and barely understandable English something about whose house this is.
He has large bags under his sad eyes, and his teeth are crooked and tobacco-stained. A belt holds up oversized jeans. Lenny asks him whom he’s looking for, and the man says “Yul.” Then he asks, “Are you Won Chul?”
That’s Lenny’s Korean name. He nods his head.
“I am Gil. Your…” He pauses, thinking of the word. “… uncle? I see you when you…” He lowers his hand to his thigh.
“You’re my father’s brother?” Lenny asks, not recognizing him.
He smiles and said he is.
He doesn’t look like Yul, and because his parents had never m
entioned a visit, Lenny is suspicious. He asks Gil to wait here while he calls his mother. Gil sits back down, and lights another cigarette.
Umee hadn’t known Gil was coming, and tells Lenny she will call him back. After a few minutes his father calls, and asks to speak with Gil. Lenny hurries to the front door and opens it, motioning him in and leading him to the kitchen phone.
He speaks to Yul in Korean, and Lenny hears his father’s voice asking curt questions. Uncle Gil replies in a soft, apologetic tone, and after a few minutes, he hands Lenny the phone.
His father says, “Keep an eye on him until I come home.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just don’t let him touch anything.”
“How can I do that?”
“Just do it,” his father says. “I will be home early.” He hangs up.
Lenny turns to his uncle, and they stand there awkwardly for a minute. Lenny offers him a drink, which he doesn’t understand, so Lenny motions drinking with his hand and Gil grins. “Yes, yes. Thank you.”
Uncle Gil originally came to the U.S. on a tourist visa, which had expired years ago, and he’s here illegally. He’s in town now to ask his brother for a job.
Lenny doesn’t understand much of what’s going on, because unlike the conversations his parents have, which are often sprinkled with English, Gil and Yul speak quickly and without the same inflections. When Lenny asks his mother she tells him that his father is angry at this surprise visit and burden. “Your father always had to take care of Gil when they were younger, and he didn’t like it.”
“What can Gil do, if he’s here illegally?”
“Many Korean storeowners can hire him off the books.”
“How long will he stay with us?”
“Not long,” she says. “Your father won’t let him.”
Gil smokes a lot, and Lenny often finds him sitting on the back steps, mashing out a cigarette in an old ceramic pot that quickly fills up with butts and matches. His English is limited to a few words, but they manage to communicate through gestures.
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