by Jon Sindell
Del
By Jon Sindell
Copyright 2009-2012 Jon Sindell
In this story by the author of The Mighty Roman, first published in the magazine THEMA, a young big–city gardener must rely on a simple good nature to deal with life’s thorns. Watch for the subtle Peanuts reference (not the Charlie Brown football stunt).
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Del
The birthday gift for Loogie tipped the sled downhill, having come two days after Jack’s reprimand.
“It’s his birthday,” Del explained with an innocent gaze directed at me and away from Tess.
Tess tweezed Del’s chin between finger and thumb and searched his face for recognition of the wrong he had done and consequent remorse. Finding neither, and finding herself unwilling to make further allowance for Del’s simple wit, she wrung the handle of the landscaping rake, engorging thick arms. “That’s the point, Delmore. His birthday. Ed Loogie? Little Boss Man? Public Enema Number One?” Tessie leaned in on Del, the sharp peak of her short hair thrust forward like the point of a conquistador’s helmet.
Del’s smile confirmed his comprehension that our crew did, in fact, refer to Ed Lugo by various names.
Tessie toppled the rake’s handle, which flopped near Del’s feet. “You’re hopeless,” she muttered in a disgusted tone of irrevocable judgment. Del picked up the rake like the sword of a fallen comrade as Tess clomped away to smoke in the privacy of a eucalyptus stand.
“Girlfriend trouble,” Del surmised incorrectly. “We should cut her some slack.” He set the handle of the rake atop his shoulder and marched off to do Tess’s work for her with a stride as purposeful and a countenance as blithe as a small boy marching with a broom-handle rifle.
“Wha’d Wilbur Piglet get Loogie?” drawled Badger Jack, gazing dreamily through
frog-slitted eyes at a skinny joint tweezed between long nails. Jack used those nails sometimes to claw into the earth seeking earthworms for fishing trips to Ocean Beach, where he’d set three poles into the sand and pound beer while I bobbed in the water waiting for waves. Like a world leader or maybe a Mafia don–one with long, stringy hair like dirty straw–Jack declined his head to await my answer.
“A rake for his keychain,” I reported.
Some deeply interior prompting twisted a smile on Jack’s florid face. “Cute, cute. bleech!” he said, his chronic cough punctuating his words.
“Cute enough to screw us with his brown-nosing,” sneered Tex, a thirtyish black guy from down in San Bernardino who was rake-thin and reptilian in movement and called himself Tex to mess with folks’ minds. “Tessie’s right: we should nuke him.”
It began the next day, the first day of May.
Tanisha, a stout young single mom with painful knees and dreadlocks bedecked in multicolored beads, needed someone to clock her out at quitting time so she could cut out early to avoid a late charge at child care. As Jack, Tess, Tex and I drew cards for the right to risk the offense–a firing one–Del gaped at us with the fish-mouthed dismay of a fourth grader spying a teacher and principal wildly necking.
Tess aimed harsh beams at him. “Well, Delmore? What would Jesus do?”
Del was oblivious to the sarcasm and pleased to be asked. “I’m not sure. But I could call my uncle in Watsonville. He’s a pastor.”
“I thought you were a Buddhist,” Jack chortled.
“My mom’s a Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist atheist, and Lutheran on my father’s side.”
“And Hindu-Muslim too,” chortled Tex, sliding his hand across Jack’s thick paw.
Del perceived the teasing but not its sharp edge, and chuckled as if being gently ribbed. He was Japanese on his mother’s side, but his eyes were as round as chocolate kisses.
“What, no Jewish relatives?” I added. I knew I shouldn’t pile on, but the fellow-feeling I shared with the crew was like that which filled me during post-surfing bonfires at the beach.Del, like a baby, mirrored smiles, but his was a funhouse mirror which distorted wry grins like the one I flashed now into guileless smiles full of trust and hope. “I don’t think I have any Jewish relatives,” he mused.
Resigned to defeat, Tess turned from Del and promised to clock Tanisha out.
The next day, Jack cued the Shakespeare meme. “Hey, Hamlet,” he chuffed, pausing to check for the reflexive merriment of the others, “better tend your unweeded garden gone to pot.”
Explanation: In the Shakespeare Garden a few weeks before, a young blade showing off for his lady-love had declaimed, “`Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed/Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.” Del, pruning nearby, had filled with personal and institutional shame and had pocketed his shears, dropped to his knees, and pulled every weed in the garden (there were few).
The affection implied by the conferment of a nickname made Del glow like a little brother hanging with his big brother’s friends. Lanky, lean, and plain in his movements, Del loped stiffly off to cull an overgrowth of spent nasturtiums in a planting bed along Chain Of Lakes Drive. Tess and Jack looked after like hungry coyotes whose prey has run off.
Three days later, Tanisha found a football in the shrubs that fringed the long meadow by 41st and JFK. Jack lofted a long pass towards Tex striding down the meadow, and the misty grin with which he followed the converging vectors of spiraling ball and racing receiver suggested that he apprehended not Tex, but Patrick Callaway of St. Ignatius High streaking under the last minute pass that beat Sacred Heart in the big game fifteen years before. Today’s pass was a tad overthrown, but Tex stretched bony fingers and settled it in, lending credence to his claim that he, too, had been a football star in high school, though like all of his claims, this was offered without details, with a menacing gaze that warded off questions. Tex took off back towards us in a stylized zig-zag, and I raced to intercept him. It wasn’t hard to do, for I was twenty-three and long-legged fast, the erstwhile White Rabbit of intramural football fame at S.F. State before stepping off the college carousel one year earlier. Tex bent over heaving like a man much older than thirty-two, and looked at up me with drug-haunted eyes.
Tanisha’s eyes filled with compassion for a sinking brother. “How `bout some field goal kicking?” she called with a clap.
Tessie called for the ball and set it for a place-kick. “Let’s do it, Charlie,” she told Del with a grin.
Del brightened at the prospect. He backed stiffly from the ball, rubbed his hands eagerly, pressed his arms to his sides and rushed the ball and unleashed his back leg. Tess removed the ball as Del’s leg whipped through, and Del slipped backwards onto the grass.
“Man,” laughed Tanisha in spite of herself, “you are the Charlie Browniest!”
Del reflexively smiled because he loved Peanuts; but emerging comprehension of the nature of our feelings darkened the smile. I lowered my head when Del looked at me, and noticed a divot caused by Del’s boot. I knelt to pat the uprooted patch back in place as Del, lying on the grass, watched me with eyes that widened like a dark flower blooming.
Del began to distance himself during breaks, often gardening while Jack and Tex and sometimes Tess and I toked, or Tess smoked cigarettes, or we all dipped battered fish which Jack had caught into Papa Jack’s Tartar Sauce Supreme, or Tanisha showed off her pixie Chyrelle in rainbow braids smiling out from behind the glossy green leaves of the lemon tree Tanisha had planted to consecrate her purchase of a condo with a fenced-in yard for peaceful play. I raised my face to the sky and breathed in the sce
nt of flowers with eyes closed, testing myself to see whether I could identify the changing blooms of the passing days by smell alone. One late May day I detected rhododendron odour, opened my eyes, and noticed Del pruning. He had lifted his face to a snowy mass of pink-fringed rhododendron blossoms, and his face was illuminated: golden and burnished. A few days later I watched him pat a young fern into place and received emanations of peace like those I’d feel when bobbing in my wetsuit gazing at the sunset.
“Bastard’s working off the clock again,” Tex sniped.
“Trying to get in good with Loogie,” said Tess, scrinching her ball of clay of a nose. Tess had thrown a thick arm around my shoulders on my first day and had been good to me like a big sister since. But her gaze right now was that of an insistent big sister whose side you must take in a personal conflict.
“Actually, T, that’d get him in bad with Lugie–allowing dudes to work off the clock could bring a union grievance.” I’d learned this much, at least, in second sophomore year as I avoided the science prerequisites I would need to major in environmental science. The Gang Of Three grinned through slitted eyes like a lolling mob of cartoon gators as a heedless young antelope approaches the river.
Del was heedless of them, he was heedless of everyone in the park. When pruning he’d stand back to gaze at his subject,