Freddie could scarcely believe such a story. To him it sounded like something out of Communist Russia. He was delighted the night Chemo came back to work.
“Eugene, you’re fired,” Freddie said. “Go pull your groin someplace else.”
“What?” said Eugene, cocking his head and leaning closer.
“Don’t pull that deaf shit with me,” Freddie warned. “Now get lost.”
On his way out of Freddie’s office, Eugene sized up his towering replacement. “Man, what happened to you?”
“Gardening accident,” Chemo replied. Eugene grimaced sympathetically and said good-bye.
Freddie turned to Chemo. “Thank God you’re back. I’m afraid to ask.”
“Go ahead. Ask.”
“I don’t think so,” Freddie said. “Just tell me, you okay?”
Chemo nodded. “Fine. The new band sounds like vomit.”
“Yeah, I know,” Freddie said. “Geez, you should see the crowd. Be careful in there.”
“I’m ready for them,” Chemo said, hoisting his left arm to show Freddie the new device. He and Dr. Rudy Graveline had found it on sale at a True Value hardware store.
“Wow,” said Freddie, staring.
“I got it rigged special for a six-volt battery,” Chemo explained. He patted the bulge under his arm. “Strap it on with an Ace bandage. Only weighs about nine pounds.”
“Neat,” said Freddie, thinking: Sweet Jesus, this can’t be what I think it is.
A short length of anodyzed aluminum piping protruded from the padding over Chemo’s amputation. Bolted to the end of the pipe was a red saucer-sized disc made of hard plastic. Coiled tightly on a stem beneath the disc was a short length of eighty-pound monofilament fishing line.
Freddie said, “Okay, now I’m gonna ask.”
“It’s a Weed Whacker,” Chemo said. “See?”
15
George Graveline was sun-tanned and gnarled and sinewy, with breadloaf arms and wide black Elvis sideburns. The perfect tree trimmer.
George was not at all jealous of his younger brother, the plastic surgeon. Rudy deserved all the fine things in life, George reasoned, because Rudy had gone to college for what seemed like eternity. In George’s view, no amount of worldly riches was worth sitting in a stuffy classroom for years at a stretch. Besides, he loved his job as a tree trimmer. He loved the smell of sawdust and fresh sap, and he loved gassing yellow jacket nests; he loved the whole damn outdoors. Even Florida winters could get miserably hot, but a person could adjust. George Graveline had a motto by which he faithfully lived: Always park in the shade.
He did not often see his wealthy brother, but that was all right. Dr. Rudy was a busy man, and for that matter so was George. In Miami a good tree trimmer always had his hands full: year-round growth, no real seasons, no time for rest. Mainly you had your black olives and your common ficus tree, but the big problem there wasn’t the branches so much as the roots. A twenty-year-old ficus had a root system could swallow the New York subway. Digging out a big ficus was a bitch. Then you had your exotics: the Australian pines, the melaleucas, and those God-forsaken Brazilian pepper trees, which most people mistakenly called a holly. Things grew like fungus, but George loved them because the roots weren’t so bad and a couple good men could rip one out of the ground, no sweat. His favorite, though, was when people wanted their Brazilian pepper trees trimmed. Invariably these were customers new to Florida, novice suburbanites who didn’t have the heart or the brains to actually kill a living tree. So they’d ask George Graveline to please just trim it back a little, and George would say sure, no problem, knowing that in three months it’d shoot out even bushier than before and strangle their precious hibiscus as sure as a coat-hanger. No denying there was damn good money in the pepper-tree racket.
On the morning of February tenth, George Graveline and his crew were chopping a row of Australian pines off Krome Avenue to make room for a new medium-security federal prison. George and his men were not exactly busting their humps, since it was a government contract and nobody ever came by to check. George was parked in the shade, as usual, eating a roast-beef hoagie and drinking a tall Budweiser. The driver’s door of the truck was open and the radio was on a country-music station, though the only time you could hear the tunes was between the grinding roars of the wood chipper, which was hooked to the bumper of George Graveline’s truck. The intermittent screech of the machine didn’t disturb George at all; he had grown accustomed to hearing only fragments of Merle Haggard on the radio and to letting his imagination fill in the musical gaps.