Construction News

i’m going to post the chapter in its early stages, as it moves between outline and note to flesh and blood interactions. it’s totally unfinished, just the stuff i can grab out of the aether and put down before it dissolves. as you can tell, in the latter stages it’s just notes, and just the construction notes, at that. what has to happen to establish the characters and set up the action is a whole nother issue, for which i basically don’t have any notes.

when i’m done writing the chapter, i’ll post it in chapters.

* * *

Construction News Chapter Three

Thing one tries to scam the old couple

The tree is damaged, the arborist is called

A bulldozer breaks

Another meeting

* * * 

It was Thing One at the door. ‘Altman’s downstairs,’ she said curtly. She’d torn herself from her work and stomped thru the kitchen, living room, and foyer - half the house - fretting over how rapidly she was losing the thread of what she’d been doing and growing wrathful at the interrupter, whoever it might be. And of course it was Thing One. The imperious way he rapped on the screen door and shouted through the house, the smell of clothes lived and slept and peed in that hit her while she was still in the living room.

He stood in the door fidgetting, his hands scratching the air by his sides, rapidly shuffling his feet and slouching in front of her, his eyes darting. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear, his mouth barely moving. She came closer to the door. The draft sucked his smell past her in waves. He looked her in the eye and repeated himself, louder. ‘How’re you doing?’ he started, intently examining her. She backed off and turned to go, so he hurried. ‘I, um, I just thought you might be interested in something.’ He scuffed his foot against the door and hung his head. ‘I guess you don’t want to know. I’d better go see your husband. I just thought,’ he broke off. Velha waved him off. She had heard his speils before, and didn’t feel like wasting her time.

He tried again. ‘You see, I’ve got some kitchen equipment.’ He watched her narrowly. ‘A set of pots and pans, they’re in great shape, no scratches.’ He warmed up. ‘I’d almost swear they came fresh out of a box. I’ve never seen anything like them. A whole set.’ He started to wheedle. ‘I thought you’d want to know. I’m nore than ready to put them aside and bring them around to show you at your convenience.’ He stopped speaking, and stared at her intently.

Velha felt the pressure of his gaze. It was like thick gauze laid over her face and noxious liquid poured on, for her to breathe the fumes and pass out. Nasty fumes. She fanned her face. ‘Sure. Bring them by. I’ll have a look.’ She moved off and snuck away from him.

Later. He’s talking about the pots. ‘The finest steel surface, really heavy and well-built, solid handles. Pots I’d be proud to own, if I had somewhere to put them. But I don’t, so out of the kindness of my heart I’m coming over here trying to find them a home worthy of such fine quality.’ She was thinking, Yeah, why are you wasting my time telling me this, why don’t you show me, but all she said was ‘Yeah.’

Thing One was back, standing proudly in the middle of her porch, surrounded by a 7 or 8 hideously scratched, bent and broken pots and pans made of the cheapest non-stick aluminum. She laughed shortly. ‘I think I have enough pots and pans in my kitchen for now, thanks.’‘But you said you wanted them!’ he protested, spreading his hands. He was indignant. ‘I went to a great deal of trouble getting these, I’ll have you know. I had to fight off somebody who saw their outstanding quality and wanted to make a buck off it himself. No way, I told him. They belong to a great lady.’ He moved his hands and feet as if he were dancing, shuffling along the floor, manic and panicky at the thought of losing a sale.

She smiled at him warily. She considered Thing One too crazy to understand her point of view, so it would be useless to argue. He would simply use any argument from her as a chance to prove her wrong. And she couldn’t handle the stress of a pointless argument. ‘I’m afraid I can’t use them,’ she said, backing into the shadows. ‘Sorry.’ She could hear him cursing as he packed it up.

The first thing that happened out the back was a crew of Mexicans pushing a giant mower-digger metal box that made a lot of noise. A high pitched whine with frequent chokes on the large things it passed over. they were cutting a line for the silt fence. A guy came along with metal rods that he pounded into the dirt. Another guy came along with a roll of black netting. Another guy came along with pins to fasten the net.

They were putting the silt fence along the back yards half a dozen feet inside the neighbors’ property lines.She watched them push the mahine thru her trees in the back, running the fence just this side of her big pecan tree.

She made a note to tell Forman that he needed to remember that it was her tree, and the bulldozer guy hsouldn’t be thinking it was their tree. She wondered if she shouldn’t have a word with the bulldozer guy herself.

Later she did have a talk with him, and he looked conscious ad assured her that he revered her tree.

wondering if it was as haphazard as it looked, 

A big flatbed semi came rumbling around the corner. She saw it from the living room window as she was getting coffee – a big blue cab driven by a big burly guy, then nothing, as the bed passed beneath her vision, and then a huge yellow arm and a huge bubble on treads, then nothing. It was strange to see this parade past hwr house, and even more strange that it was destined for her back yard.

A cat, she knew that much. She looked it up. looked like a spider designed by someone who was real good in 2-D. Sides and corners were angled rather than tapered, teh whole thing looked deflated.

the guy who drove the spider shovel walked out to his truck, wearing a white cowboy hat. He climbed in with assurance and powered it up, and then blew his cool by not being able to figure out the controls. It lurched forward, and then the guy did slow donuts around the lot, while he concentrated on figuring out the switches and joysticks.

The shovel moved three feet, with a great lurch that sent the arm whanging to the ground. he extended the arm with a jerk, and then somehow got the jaws of the shovel stuck opening and closing. It took him a full minute of snapping jaws to get it to stop. Unless he was really sitting in there making the daamn thing chew. The clangs were deafening even across the hundred and fifty feet that separated them. The learning curve on one of those machines must be staggering. He was extending and retracting the arm the next time Velha looked up from her work. Every now and then he grabbed the stick and swivelled around violently, the body tuning on the treads, the arm and shovel whipping around and rattling to a halt. Maybe he was sitting in his air conditioned cab with the CD player and nipping on a pocket flask. He certainly looked unsteady.

He inched the spider to the side of the artificial hill about 30 feet from her trees. Dangerously close, given his apparant expertise. His treads were parallel to the hill property line, but the spiderlike body faced it, and the arm was beginning to make clawing attenpts, over and over, without actually taking any dirt out of the hill. Practicing. eventually he took a few desultory shovelsfull of dirt and deposited them on the other side of his cab.

Then he inched it further along, and came upon a slab of concrete. This captivated him for the longest time. He painstakingly positioned the shovel in front of him and pointed down with it, and then pounded the slab twenty or thirty times. Each impact travelled thru the earth to Velha’s house and made the dishes rattle on the sideboard.

Sickening crunch of breaking limbs, cracking logs. Once in awhile a really big thump sets the glasses clinking.

She got so nervous when the house shook. Whenever the ground wasn’t steady under her she freaked out. Riding the roller coaster was hell for the old lady. Riding a bike was out of the question. She even went barefoot most of the year, to have maximum contact with the earth. Perhaps her connection to life energy was so tenuous that she had to take extreme measures, where normal people have energy to spare.

The old lady tried to express her anxiety to Forman when they went out on their after-lunch dog walk. He was still hanging out in his car. The A/C wasn’t on in the trailer, some malfunction they had to get a guy out to fix. The passenger seat was covered with a stack of thick books, his laptop balanced on top, a monster drink cup in danger below.

He was anxious himself. Velha started asking for assurances that they knew what they were doing when they put the silt fence between her trees instead of to one side. He ignored her fears and responded by telling them how far behind schedule he was, and then told a joke about the electrician that came out to hook up the trailer and didn’t have the pieces, so had to go to Home Depot and pay retail. Then he launched into a complaint about the engineers and the wisdom of hooking up new 8″ pipes to existing 6″ pipes. He cursed some civil engineer who drew up the plans without ever visiting the site.

Clearing ex trees, digging holes and filling dumpsters with debris and a little dirt from what look like exploratory holes.

Digging up a storage tank, one of the ones that was supposedly already dug up. it was filled with sand instead, looks like.

Tuesday 5/30

The contractors have red t-shirts on today, a bunch of fat waddling trolls. The big claw tractor is out there digging up mounds of dirt and making a hill in the middle of the field. I guess they’re digging up the storage tanks, of which there are said to be 2. i was trying to sleep, and they started at 7:30 cranking up and revving the tractor and bringing in dump trucks. The red guys just sit in their trucks, white t-shirted spanish guys are out there relaying orders and making adjustments.

The tree is damaged, the arborist is called

The bulldozer lurched down the hill, sliding in the dirt. Velha heard the engine whine as it struggled to move, and looked up just at the moment when the bulldozer slid into the tree, its metal treads grinding into the trunk. She could see the tree shudder and lurch. Then a moment later, the heavy machine got a purchase and surged up the hill away from her tree. She hurried out to inspect the damage. A huge gouge in the trunk and inches ofinnertree wehad been savagely ripped away by steel treads powered by somebody who saw trees as obstacles. The wound was weeping sap, bleeding. The leaves said shock as they rustled, and the branches were stiff with pain. It wasn’t until she came around the tree trunk that she noticed more gouges on the trunks from where the digger that had made the trenches for the silt fence had squeezed through the space between the trees. She had wondered what they were doing isolating her pecan from the rest of the trees in her yard, but she could see yhow it made a straight line a few feet into their property and one tree was in between the two. She hoped it didn’t mean they would be less than careful with her precious plant. She looked around. The bulldozer had crushed all the periwinkle and ivy, but they’d grow back without any trouble. They’d scraped the trees putting in the silt fence, and now the bulldozer had seriosuly damaged her pecan tree. She stalked up to the basement to tell Atman about it and get him to coat the trunk with pitch, and went upstairs to look up the phone number of the city arborist to complain. Her fingers shook as she thumbed through the blue section looking for the right entry.

She got a black lady downtown. ‘City arborist.’

The words poured out of the old lady. She was shaking with anger.

‘I’m going to pass you to his voicenail. You tell him this, that you are concerned that construction activities are endangering the safety of a mature tree on your property. Tell him that, and tell him where you are, and give him your phone number.’ Velha felt weak. She stood at the phone composing herself, and trying to remember what the woman was saying. Her voice was so kind, that’s what she mostly thought. 

Hello, this is Velha Cobble at 295 Ahr Street. I have a concern about my old pecan tree in the back yard because the construction guys are bashing into it with abandon and they’re going to kill my tree. Oh help me if you can. They’re out there now and they’re awfully close to it. It’s the big new complex out on Bissey Street. Near the corner of Main. I don’t know what it’s called.

Dumptrucks everywhere, four or six. They come in down name street, past the house, and then down the side street. Their transmissions bump like that one did that day that broke. Lots of downtime as trucks sit idle and claw guy discuss things with the foremen.

Think of the life of a shovel operator. Picking up dirt and loading trucks, digging holes, pulling out trees. Destruction. What’s his worldview like if all he does is tear things up and clear them out? This is the guy who’s going to drown in the creek.

7 bucketloads per dumptruck. Where do they go? They hit the highway. They make such noise as they go by the house.

A bulldozer breaks. The service truck, a guy in between the treads. Everybody goes home early. 

The arborist arrives and pronounces. Husband knows him somehow. We sat on the porch and had to stop readiing to each other whanever one came by. They’d cruise by empty, foot off the gas to brake at the corner, the exhaust systems sounding like a dragon with a sinus problem. Then they’d turn the corner, sometimes at the same time as a full one was coming around the corner. Sometimes there were two empties and a full one passing at the same time. And we had to pause every time.

Another meeting

Wednesday 5/31

We’re having a meeting with all available residents and the foreman. They’re supposed to be going over what we can expect when. Meeting 5:00. us, nextor wife, nice gay guy, hippie mom late, the star crossed girl. Each had their own concerns to press.

(Star crossed girl wanted to know what she was getting because she didn’t need grading. She also wanted them to reroute the trucks off of name street, but the site engineer already filed the route with the city. She was vehement. She thinks they’re going to block her access to her house and run her out of busness. She was very erudite before her mom showed up, then she lapsed into passivity. Besides, she’d already been dismissed because she didn’t own the house.)

Gay guy wants grading, so does family next door. Hippie mom wants trees taken down, family next door wants stumps removed, we told them we wanted a pool.

The drainage issue - there’s a pond, that can be solved by gravity drainage. We have trees, so we can’t build up too much. If they can’t change grade then they’ll put in cachment basins. There’s going to be a ramp starting in gay guy’s yard and going up, with a wall running arbout 2′ so there’ll be a ramp down to our property as a driveway. The corners of the property are going to remain the same, and the retention box will be 6′ deep. Still don’t know how many cubic yards.

Our property is 176′ by 52′. The plat shows that our chain link fence, as well as everyone else’s, lies to the left of the property line by some feet. That’s going to cause problems when everybody goes to put their fences back up.

The money will be paid after alley construction starts. They had originallly tied the alley to the critical path, but because everyone wants something else, they’ve detached it, and now it will be some time down the line. Developer’s having a meeeting with us next week to decide how we want our back yards done. People who want trees down in their yard have to get permits right away before the equipment is gone.

There’s a month left for the earth moving. Then they’ll drive piles (they called it something eco) vibro pier gravel thing, for ten days (500 some piers), and then it’ll get quiet as it goes vertical.

It’s going to be leed certified

15 trucks in and out, the landfill about 20 minutes away.

There’s a big black plastic sheet out on the right side of the property, 40′ long at least. Dirt is piled up. it looks wet. For the last year or two black seepy stuff that smells bad used to come flowing out of the property and across the sidewalk. Had to keep the dog away from it.

end of chapter

so i finally finished chapter two. it took weeks. there were whole days at a time when i didn’t work at it at all, and only put up daily posts of construction news as a sop to my rising guilt.

and hen near the end, the file corrupted and i thought i’d lost it and would have to start over. but i felt pushed rather than discouraged. so i went into the bowels of my computer and dug out an earlier version, and sat right down and fixed it and posted it.

so there it is in all its awkwardness. but that’s why they call them drafts. the important thing, i’m remembering now, is to get it down. you refine it later.

i remember writing splat, how i had a picture in my mind of how the chapter was supposed to go, and not just the chapter, but all the little bits and pieces. but as i was writing it, i always found that the things i wanted to say didn’t come across. my fingers would settle for something less complicated than what was running thru my head. a translation problem. but the important thing was to get the chapter down, and when i went back to edit it it and maybe make it closer to what it had been in my head, i usually found that the writing was fine, and didn’t need anything. it said what i wanted said in a different way. like when i set out to make a painting.

maybe that’s just me being in love with my own writing. but that’s not it at all. most of the time i’m staring out the window as i write, thinking other thoughts, and the words pour thru my fingers with minimal input from me. i can bear to appreciate the results because i put the writing on the fairies. they did it. or my ex dad, who was a closet novelist. maybe i’m channeling him. it’s not me writing this stuff. (see disclaimer)

i haven’t read both chapters one and two together yet, to see how it flows, to see whether i’m already repeating myself. but that’s part of the editing process, and for now i feel i should be moving on. i’m more interested in what’s going to happen next, and how i’m going to get to the end from here, than in what has already been written down.

It rained last night, long and hard. A lightning strike occurred very near us, maybe on the construction site, with the drill raised so high in the air like that. The ground is very muddy this morning, no damage apparent to the equipment.

Construction News Chapter Two

Velha was having a dream about something, with Altman dozing beside her. They were spooned together under the covers, the windows open, the early morning light turning the grays of night into a spectrum, one color at a time, yellow first, then red. Altman would be getting up soon, to take his first cup of coffee sitting in bed. Velha would consider sleeping on, might get up and have coffee, but might want to have one more dream before rising. Or a few. He would sit propped up on the pillows, sipping coffee, looking at her stretched out next to him, thinking lascivious thoughts and wondering what she’d do if she woke up while he was messing with her.

A chainsaw started up out the back.

Velha grunted and rose on an elbow. ‘It’s too early,’ she protested, and got up to stumble to the bathroom. Then she headed back down determined to go back to sleep. Altman went to turn on the coffee maker.

A bulldozer started up. Its engine revved. Velha ignored it, willing herself down into dreamworld. Altman sipped his coffee. The bulldozer moved. Now there were crunching sounds. Velha fought to keep hold of the feelings of sleep. A dumptruck came down the block with a load of gravel. The house shook.

Beep beep beep. Velha groaned and turned over. Altman rubbed her hip gently. The truck spilled its load with a great scree sound, followed by a loud clank as the driver made damn sure all the rock was dumped. Then the bulldozer came over to spread the gravel. Altman heard the sound of a hundred rainsticks as the rock was scraped over the dirt of the entrance. Then the bulldozer went up to get more gravel. Beep beep beep.

The old lady slept stubbornly on. She kept trying to conjure up a dream image and ride it into subconsciousness, but the beeping kept jerking her back this side of wakefulness. The old man sipped his coffee and thought about the things he wanted to do that day. He was already used to the bulldozer.

Suddenly there came a very loud banging sound, rapid and repetitive, the sound of a petulant giant stomping his foot. Bambambambambam. It stopped, then started up again harder, furious banging that shook the house.

The old lady sat up, wide awake. ‘Damn them,’ she said. ‘They’re doing it on purpose.’ The old man got up to get her a cup of coffee.

They found on their morning dog walk that the scree marked the arrival of the long-expected driveway package. The trouble was that it consisted of huge window-breaker gravel when Forman had ordered baby-chokers, and the trucks were having trouble driving on it.

‘We’re already behind schedule,’ he muttered, gazing off into the distance. ‘This is only the first week.’ Men in kakhis and polo shirts in various pastel shades stood around in their sunglasses, holding clipboards, talking on their cellphones. ‘As soon as the corporate types get back to the office, things will speed up,’ Forman said sourly, ‘but we’re still behind.’ He shook his head seriously. ‘I’m going to kill somebody before this is over.’

‘I think he likes being pissed off,’ Altman observed as the dog pulled them around the corner.

The old lady tried to work as usual during this first day of activity. But she was very disturbed by everything happening out back. Mainly by the noise, at this point, since she couldn’t see anything thru the trees, and couldn’t imagine anything different. From her window, Velha was accustomed to gazing on a vibrant green screen decorated in a purple trunk motif with lots of squirrels chasing each other.

A big semi brought in a crane on treads to help with the trees. A Mexican crew surrounded one of the trees on the northeast edge of the property and threw ropes up into the branches. Beep beep beep. The crane put tension on the ropes while the Mexicans got in close and decapitated the tree.

There came the torturous scream of a chainsaw. Velha could tell by the pitch that they were bearing down, severing tendons and vessels. They were probably swearing at the poor thing they were killing, too.

She heard the beep beep beep of the crane pulling at the branches. The heard the groan of the tree being tugged groundward. Then a sharp crack, and a big choof as the tree walloped the dirt. Plants for blocks around shuddered and wilted with the shock. Velha thought she would go crazy with the noise of the trees’ screams.

All day the trees came down. The engine noises and crunching of the crane and bulldozer moving into position, then silence. Then mad angry chainsaws attacking, then crack and whoompf, then silence. Then more chainsaws, little ones cutting up the limbs. And bulldozers scooping it all up into dump trucks, which then crunched over all the gravel at the street entrance, and rumbled away down the block, shaking the house.

A big semi brought in what looked like a mobile home during the morning. Velha looked up from her work and peered thru the trees at a big white box gleaming in the sun, sitting on the very northwest corner of the property. Workmen were sticking it up on blocks and running electric lines up a nearby pole. During their after-lunch dog walk, Forman gave them a tour of the construction trailer, and told them that it still needed a big portable chemical tank to go under it, and phone service, and complained that hookup was going to be delayed because the phone company couldn’t get there until next week.

Everything was strange all of a sudden. It had always been so private back in the back yard. The old couple’s house was one down from the corner. The corner property ran along Side Street, and the whole back yard was solid trees. The old couple’s back yard was garden and trees. And down at the other end of the block, Maggie’s back yard was mostly trees, too. But the back yards between them were exposed to deadly solar radiation. The Nextors and that nice gay couple had no shade at all, and their ground parched up and died every summer, so there was nothing back there. Onlygrass, because it’s a noxious weed, and kudzu and knotweed, but nothing ornamental, nothing useful. Just a collection of cars in the gay couple’s back yard, and half a dozen huge big stumps in the Nextor’s yard, from when some northerner bought the house and figured that since trees were a bad thing where he came from, it must be the same way here. Velha figured that he mustn’t have realized until it was too late. We need all the shade we can get here in the South. And the closer to the sun the shade occurs, the better.

So old trees is what you want. Sixty, eighty foot tall trees. With 120-foot dripline circles under the canopy. Not as far back as the Civil War, of course, because all of Atlanta’s trees went to build battlements for the seige wall there at the end. But the largest oaks on the block sprung up soon after the utter ruin of the South, and all the other trees grew up in their shadows. A mini forest. Pretty much every block in Atlanta had a mini forest between the streets. That’s what makes this city special. It’s green. Like the forest moon of Endor.

At the moment, the trees she looked out on resembled frightened children. They shiverered together, standing around nervously while little people with loud electric knives ran around hacking them to death, mowing them down. Velha couldn’t accept that these people belonged there. She felt indignant seeing them appear in the brush next door, like they were tresspassing on her land, even tho it was her neighbor’s land, and her neighbor rented the house out and moved to California years ago and couldn’t care less.

She thought of the whole abandoned, overgrown property as hers, because she carerd for it and used it. She tended it, as much as a kudzu-overtaken back parking lot could be tended. She watched over the homeless people who slept in the old gas station and the warehouse next to it. She communed with nature there, her own private jungle of growing things in the midst of a city. She did her rituals there. She harvested medicinal kudzu root every year. This land was her land, and whatever patriotic spirit she has was tied to her love for this land out her back windows. For someone to sell it out from under her and desecrate it like this, it was like being violated.

Right before lunch a dumptruck broke down at the entrance to the property. It was the same truck that made so much noise that morning. Every time it came back across the entrance, it did the same bambambam as it slowly inched over the gravel. It tried to get onto the site one last time, and after a ferocious banging that went on for thirty seconds, the engine sounding more frantic and angry every moment, it broke down right there in the entrance. Busted a transaxle. It took hours to repair, the company sent out a truck, and the dumptruck driver paced up and down while the mechanic tore his truck to pieces right in the entrance. Nobody got through until it was fixed. The rest of the trucks went home, and the bulldozer operator continued to pile up the ex trees that the Mexicans continued to carve up. It gave Velha a certain satisfaction to see the truck lying there dead. That’s what you get for waking people up, she thought.

The Mexican crew spent their lunch in the shade of the old couple’s tall trees, away from the gringos sitting in their trucks or soaking up the A/C in the trailer. Lunch was short, but it was a blissful silence. Velha could hear birds again. She watched two squirrels scrabbling up her big pecan way down at the back of the yard. She sighed and was happy again, and got up to go pee and get another cup of coffee.

By the time she returned to her desk, the crew was back to work taking down the trees. She sat at her computer and watched out of the window in the spare bedroom as little men appeared one by one on the neighbor’s patio, looking up at the canopy. The old lady was suspicious, but was in the middle of a complex search on the internet. She resisted the impulse to go downstairs and get Altman to find out what they were doing out there. Find out if they were supposed to be there in the back yards. Find out if they were fixing to damage anything but the trees they had permits to assassinate.

The Mexicans were all standing around on the patio watching one of their own throwing a weighted rope into the branches. He missed the first try. They lit cigarettes and talked in the shade of the woods. The thrower missed the next try. They talked and joked around. They acted like they were related, but Velha didn’t know many Mexican work crews, so she was only guessing. The thrower missed again. He was the stockiest of them, probably the alpha male. So he did the work and they admired his skill. Actually, they seemed to be taunting him. But he kept throwing, saying nothing to them, softly cursing.

The crew were having fun. Someone started singing a Spanish song and they all joined in. The old lady watched them pair off and dance while they sang, holding the tips of each other’s fingers like Greeks and other manly men. Or brothers and cousins. Or guys on a work crew whiling the time away under the trees, while the silly bosses strutted around in the hot sun up on the street. The thrower missed again. They sang another song. The thrower tried another time. The boys shared a joint. The thrower tried again.

Finally he hooked a limb. It was sixty feet in the air. The boys cheered. Then they got to work hoisting up larger ropes. A guy came down to the base of the tree, carrying climbing gear reverently, like it was a torreador’s costume. The chunky thrower slipped it on, looking very macho as the straps went around his crotch. He couldn’t appreciate the effect because he couldn’t see over the curve of his belly, but it felt impressive. The boys were impressed. He got to go up into the tree and do all the cool stuff. They were just helpers.

It took three of them to hoist him up to where he began using his ascenders to climb. They reverently latched a chainsaw to his harness and backed away. He climbed slowly to about fifteen feet and clambered onto a low branch. The branch was three feet thick where it joined the trunk, and eighteen inches thick along most of its length. The guy walked out to the end of it, his ropes swaying from the high branch. Then he whipped up his chainsaw and pulled the starter.

Velha hated that noise. It set her teeth grinding and pulled her stomach into a knot. The guy started sawing off chunks of limb, which slammed to the ground. He worked his way back to the trunk, cutting off eight feet of life at a time. Velha felt sick hearing pieces of the limb thumping to the ground, again and again. The house shook.

As they tied the tree to the crane and started sawing at the base of the trunk, Velha felt vicious anger overcome her. Like dogs howling as a siren passes, she found herself screaming with the chainsaw as not more than 75 feet from her, it killed the largest tree on the block. The motor stopped suddenly and the tree crashed to the ground. It sounded to Velha like the men were surprised.

She peered out the back window. The tree was lying on the hill, its sawn trunk six feet thick, the gleaming yellow disk of the cut facing her, weeping. She noticed that it was the size of a dining room table. She noticed a large, dark brown cavity in the core of the tree. She noticed that its top was lying in the street. It had obviously fallen in a direction that neither the crane and ropes nor the angle of the cut had meant it to go. Defiance in death. Maybe it crushed Forman’s car, she thought bitterly. The fact that the tree was rotten to the core didn’t make her any less angry. She felt it should have been left to die and fall on its own schedule, home to birds and bugs and squirrels for years to come.

She was interrupted by the doorbell. It was Thing One, looking for Altman, who was always downstairs in the basement at this time of day. She answered the door with some irritation. He stammered, ‘Oh, is he downstairs?’ He looked annoyed, as if he were inconvenienced by this, as if it were her fault that her husband spent all his time in the basement. She must have told Thing One a thousand times to check down there first, but he came to the front door every time, and no matter how much annoyance she showed, he never learned.

She asked Altman what Thing One had wanted, when he came upstairs for lunch. They sat in the kitchen over a ham sandwich and sweet tea. Atlman ran his fingers thru his beard. ‘Oh, I didn’t pay any attention to what he wanted,’ he said. ‘He’s always going on about Thing Two. Something about a stash of clothes and things that got tossed while he wasn’t looking.’

Thing Two worked restoring a house down the block. He was just as homeless as Thing One, but he was a skilled carpenter, and earned his spot on the front porch. Thing Two was banned by the owner of the house from coming onto the property, but actually spent many hours a day hanging out discussing philosophy with Thing Two. They’d been cohorts since the ’80s, but you’d never know it by the way they talked about each other behind their backs. It annoyed Velha, the way they went on.

Actually, almost everything annoyed Velha at the moment. Starting with the wholesale destruction going on in the back. And it was possible that she was the only one annoyed by it. Her husband was enjoying the disruption. He was excited by the idea of having a new building, new residents. It gave him something to look forward to every day. The neighbors on the corner didn’t even know anything was going on. They slept all day and partied all night, and never paid any attention to their surroundings. The rest of the neighbors went to work in the morning and came home at night, and never heard the scream of the chainsaw or the banging of the dump trucks. Only her. Only Velha to mourn the passing of the trees, to think vengeful thoughts, to care.

Along the block, the neighbors were coming home after work. Actually, the kids in the house on the corner were just waking up after a day resting up from the party of the night before. Or something. The Nextors weren’t home yet, and most of the time they weren’t consistent about their comings and goings. Their movements puzzled the old lady. The nice gay couple were home by this time; they made table saw noises whenever they were home, and Velha assumed they were hard at work renovating. Or something. She got a great deal of satisfaction out of speculating what everyone was up to. The only neighbor Velha was sure of was Maggie.

Maggie had a job cooking for the homeless all day in a shelter downtown, and would often stop by and sit on the front porch to tell her about her day. Two hundred dinners plated, pot roast and potatoes and salad. Dessert provided by Kroger because a bunch of fruit jello packs expired. A fight in the dining room. Velha didn’t envy Maggie her job, but it seemed to give her the kind of satisfaction working in an office or a store couldn’t. So Velha listened politely and asked interested questions. But chats with Maggie about her work always left her fatigued, as if she’d washed 200 plates by herself.

This night, Maggie just drove by with a wave, looking tired. It was later than she usually got home; undoubtedly there had been some crisis, because Maggie had the closing procedures down to a science, and never wasted time getting home. Velha waved back and returned to her cookbook. Now that the construction noise had stopped, she was happy, and doubly enjoyed the sounds fo the birds and the wind thru the leaves. She’d decided to make something special for dinner, and was leafing thru the book trying to decide what to do with some of the baby eggplants and green tomatoes Thing Two had brought her from his garden.

Maggie got out of her car, a banged up 20-year-old Volvo, and dragged herself inside. The house was quiet, empty, cool, and smelled of the spaghetti she’d had in a crockpot all day. She checked the mailbox; there was nothing but junk, which she was delighted to chuck in the trash. She poured herself a glass of wine and went to change her clothes and take a bong hit.

Maggie walked into the kitchen to stir the pot, and glanced at the clock. It was almost eight. The kids were due any moment. The sauce was sticking. The sun was going behind the trees. She’d drunk most of her wine. She wondered if she should call them. She stood at the sink and loaded dishes into the washer. She stirred the pot again.

Barney came in, rapping loudly on the screen door and hallooing thru the house. He walked over to Maggie and gave her a big hug. They’d known each other for a long time. Barney was her ex. Not Star’s dad, but her most important relationship since, and her last serious thing. She’d practiced catch-and-release since then.

Barney brought a large satchel in with him. ‘I’ll go thru this later,’ he said with a wink, and took it into the back room. Maggie wondered if he was going to want to stay the night. He never said he did, but she couldn’t be sure. They hadn’t been broken up all that long, and Barney didn’t think it should make any difference.

The kids showed up a few minutes later, Star and Gordon and a pair of roustabouts that seemed to be living rent free on the couch. Weezer and Slim Jim. They all came barging thru the screen door laughing and shoutung. Maggie felt a thrill as they walked into the house. She loved having the kids to dinner, and not just because it was the only time she ever saw Star. They sprawled around a large wooden table in the middle of the kitchen, their feet up, their chairs back. The kitchen was suddenly loud and crowded, the way it should be.

Maggie’s kitchen was your typical earthmother den. There wasn’t a matching dish, glass, or fork anywhere; everything came from the thrift store except the pieces Star had made and decorated when she was at pottery camp, years ago. The windows had plants and old-fashioned crystal baubles hanging in them, there was a handmade rug on the floor, a bunch of assorted chairs and stools, a wobbly handbuilt kitchen table. On the counter flour and sugar cannisters contested for space with a juicer, a pasta maker, a bread machine, and a cookie jar, none of which were ever used. The walls were grimy with years of cooking on an old industrial stove rescued from a failed restaurant. The pots and pans were all hung from the ceiling on hooks. There was a collection of kitchen knives on a magnet strip. And cookbooks. Maggie’s passion was collecting cookbooks. Everything from LaRousse to the Joy of Cooking to hand-printed volumes of society lady heirloom recipes.

Maggie stirred the sauce and got out the plates while her guests settled down. Weezer and Slim Jim never said anything, except to laugh at Gordon’s jokes, and she hardly noticed them except for how much they ate. Gordon was unfailingly polite, Yes M’am, No M’am, but his jokes were always racist or sexist, and Maggie found them a little hard to take.

But Star seemed so happy now that she was living with Gordon. She looked so bright and excited when they were together. Animated. She didn’t show any of the sullen teenage behavior that was so hard to live with at home. It was nicer being around her, too. She didn’t make scenes or take her anger out on her relatives as much. Maggy could relax and play like Star was still her loving preteen daughter.

Star was so beautiful. Maggie always wondered where she got it. They shared faces, but while Maggie looked like an ageing hippie, with long graying hair and deepening crow’s feet, Star looked like a model, with a body that would stop a bus, beautiful long brown hair, huge doe eyes, a brilliant smile. When she chose to show it. Mostly she scowled when she was around her mom.

Maggie caught herself beaming at her kid, and knew that Star would have a fit if she caught her simpering, so she busied herself dishing out dinner and handing the plates around. Everybody thanked her and praised the food except for Weezer and Slim Jim, who just shoveled it in and reached for more.

‘I guess you all noticed thar the construction has started behind us,’ she started conversationally.

Gordon exploded. ‘Damn them to hell,’ he thumped his fist on the table, making the plates jump. ‘Yes ma’m, we surely did notice. We were up pretty late last night, and that damned noise woke us out of a sound sleep.’ Maggie saw her daughter looking protective and concerned. ‘Why didn’t they let us know ahead of time?’ he whined. Star patted his knee under the table.

‘We had a meeting with the developer last night,’ Maggie started.

But Gordon was working himself up. ‘They can’t just start making noise at 7 in the morning and get away with it.’ He looked too upset to eat.

Barney put his fork down and leaned across the table at Gordon like a high school teacher fussing at a student who didn’t listen. Gordon sat back and picked up his fork. ‘I have news for you. They have a permit to make noise until the building’s finished.’

The kids acted shocked, and protested that they hadn’t heard anything about construction behind the house. Maggie smiled to herself. Those college kids, she thought always with their noses in a book. ‘Well,’ she explained, ‘here’s the good part. The guy who’s building this big condo complex must have buckets of money, because he’s offering to improve our land just to show his appreciation for all the trouble.’

‘Is he?’ Gordon was suspicious. He sat up straight and stopped shovelling food into his mouth. ‘What if we don’t want nothing done to our back yards? Are they giving out money instead?’

‘I suppose since you’re renters, they’ll get in touch with Miss Richards out in California, and work it out with her.’

He paused a moment. ‘All’s I’m saying is they better not wake me up with the noise again, or I’ll do something about it.’ Star looked at him with admiration. ‘I’ll fuck up their machines. I’ll wreck the site.’

Barney snorted into his napkin. ‘Oh, like what do you know about construction, you think you can go fucking up a jobsite?’ Barney had spent more than a couple of years working construction, and he sensed Gordon bluffing.

Gordon looked superior. ‘I know lots of ways to screw up an engine, and hasn’t an ignition lock been made I can’t break.’

Barney sniffed and continued eating.

Dinner went down fast. Seconds and thirds. As if they never ate except when they came over. Star looked like she was losing weight. For all Maggie knew, they were on a steady diet of mac-and-cheese whenever they didn’t eat at her house. For all she knew - they actually called out for chinese or barbeque when they didn’t eat at her house. They never cooked.

Dinner was over. Barney sat back and picked his teeth with a pocket knife. Gordon whipped out a full bag of weed and began to break up buds. Maggie poured herself some more wine. The kids all lit cigarettes. She turned on the ceiling fan. Except for incense, pot, wood fires, leaves, and barbeque, Maggie didn’t like the smell of smoke, particularly cigarette smoke. She’d been vehemently against it all her life, and had done some demonstrating in the ’90s, so of course her kid would take up the filthy habit. Maggie felt that little subtle negative feeling. She identified it as disapproval. Of her kid? Of all the good her struggles had done? Of anyone who would do such a thing? The feeling puzzled her. She leaned with her elbows on the table, her hands absently cupping her breasts, massaging the soreness where nobody was likely to notice.

The after dinner joint went around. They all smoked. Maggie had hid her smoking from her daughter when she was young, but some time around thirteen Star started smoking weed, and by fifteen or sixteen they would get high together and discuss the world’s problems. It brought them closer. Bonding thru chemistry. It was certain that they couldn’t talk to each other without being high. Godon and his friends didn’t think anything unusual about smoking in front of Star’s mom, either. But she felt sure others would object.

‘So, how’s everything going over there?’ Maggie asked her daughter, who shrugged and looked away.

‘Fine.’ She didn’t want to talk about it, and Maggie knew if she was pressed, she’d just get up and leave.

She never wanted to talk about it, and it drove Maggie crazy. She wanted to be close to her girl, like they used to be. But she had turned into a stranger. Maggie felt like she knew the old woman down the street better than she knew her own child. She wanted to throw something at her, to shake her, to wake her up. Star always seemed so lackadaisical.

But then, so did every teenager. She was just being a typical kid. Including deciding to drop out of school and get her GED, later. Including sleeping all day and partying all night. They were just being kids. Waiting to grow up. How could she tell them how different it really was?

Well, she couldn’t. She knew that much. She remembered what she’d put her mother through. So she had it coming, that was one way to look at it. Karma. Fine, bring it on, she thought. Then another thought hit her. Just don’t make it too bad, she added.

Outside, the old couple was venturing out on the last dog walk of the night. They turned to go down to Main Street and walk about the block counterclockwise. The old man remarked as they passed the Nextor’s house, ‘Sure do put out a lot of trash every week.’

Three trash cans were filled to overflowing on the sidewalk. ‘I wonder how they manage to use so much stuff if we never see them coming back from the grocery store.’ The old lady mused. ‘Maybe they get it delivered while we’re asleep.’

They spotted a dog standing in the street on the other side of Main Street. A brindled part-pit bull mutt. The old man recognized it. ‘It’s too far away to catch,’ he muttered, speeding up. Their dog surged forward eagerly and yanked Altman down the sidewalk toward a new friend. Velha dragged behind.

The other dog disappeared, so they circled back by the construction site. There were the remains of several trees, piled roughly in the middle of the lot. Their limbs had been stripped and cut into logs. A chipper sat hulking near the small branches. The air was pungent with the smell of freshly ground-up growing things. Velha inhaled deeply. The old man started humming. They entered the lot and walked around the pile of ex trees, Velha muttering, ‘What a shame.’ The old man hummed louder. They circled around the trees slowly. The dog happily peed on every third branch.

In the middle of the night, they were awakened by the sound of a cat screaming, a short snarl, and frantic rustling in the leaves. The old man muttered threats. The old woman said a silent prayer. The rustling stopped.

The chainsaws started up at 7:15 the next morning, cutting up ex trees and hauling them off with a bulldozer and dumptrucks. The chipper whined and spat. Vehla stayed in bed, depressed and weary while Altman took the dog on his morning walk. But she couldn’t sleep, and kept getting up to go look and see what they were doing. The bulldozer kept coming close to her pecan tree and it worried her.

This morning there was a bulldozer working at the back of the property, stripping the artificial hill that had been built up years ago when they leveled off the lot for a service station. The dozer was scraping the little bank clear of bamboo and treelets and kudzu. It was good he was scraping it all away, because that’s the only cure for kudzu, but he was making her nervous because the bulldozer kept slewing close to her trunk.

She kept trying to sleep right up to the moment when the bulldozer went up to the last remaining tree on the site and pushed it over. She rushed to the back window to make sure it wasn’t her pecan, and was just in time to see the bulldozer come along her back property line and push over one of her small trees, right next to the pecan. She screamed with anger and rushed down to get Altman to go out and yell at them. But it was too late. There was twenty years of shade, gone in a moment. Now there was a big patch of red dirt where it had been green just moments before. She cursed them.

A big truck and trailer came and took the shovel and crane away, leaving only the drill and the drill’s crane, a bunch of atttachments and containers. The fence gate swumg open in the night with the wind from a storm.

They’re digging out the rest of the stream. They still haven’t replaned the ramp. Guys are mostly standing around. The new contractors are in yellow tshirts.

Foreman wears bright tshirts, so that if anyone hits him it’s going to be on purpose.

They’ve just offloaded a dumpster.

Now a yellow shirted guy is attaching a shipping container full of tools to the terex crane and they’re moving the box. It’s starting to swing. They just are leaving it right in the middle of the clear area. I guess they can just pick up and move shit all they want, and it’s not any more work than rearranging wooden blocks on the floor. Well, I guess no they’re not leaving it there. They’ve picked it up and are moving it down the far end of the cleared area that ’s not the hole. Now they’re putting it down again. Now the guys are on top of the other box and the hook is swinging back to them. and they’re moving it.

The dumpster driver is waiting while the spider (shovel) fills it with a pile of concrete they stashed against the east side of the site.

Slowly walking the container west. They’re both now right up against the pile of dirt next to the big hole. Is there any room to get around them? Are they going to leave them there?

That compressor and ramming sound is from a couple of mexicans putting in fence posts and unrolling chicken wire. Ran the line right down the silt fence line.

Now how’ s the tenant going to get his car out? Turns out they’re leaving room.

The bulldozer guy got in his thing after lunch and tested his bucket by repeatedly clanking it for two minutes.

Now he’s out in the street, and I can see white blinking lights across the street, so I woner what he’s going to be transporting onto the site.

well, now i have a really good excuse for not posting chapter two. fucking microsoft word craps out on me all the time these days, and this time it recovered my chapter two and plotting documents, and i saved plotting as chapter two, overwriting all my efforts.

so i’m going to have to start over again with the chapter. oh boy.

i think i’ll take a nap and read, and waste another day not writing.

it’s too hot to write. i’m not sleeping or eating, and can’t concentrate on anything. i’ve been spending my days napping, reading, researching, doing jigsaw puzzles. anything but working on my story.

and why is that? partly, it’s the pressure of writing in public. but, of course, nobody’s reading this, so that’s an imaginary pressure. partly because so much shit is going on in my life right now that i don’t have time. but mainly because its so damn hot.

at the beginning of this story, everything happens so slowly because i’ve got to set up all the characters and the action, introduce everything, make people out of sketched figures.

and, really, i don’t actually know where all this is going, and in the early stages of writing, that means floundering. basically, i’m stuck in the middle of chapter two, fleshing out maggie the hippie’s extended family. and i don’t know how much to tell now and how much to leave until later.

so, excuse me while i flounder, but i am actually almost thru with chapter two, and intend to post it any old time now.

in the meantime, i’m researching velha’s growing obsession with earth energies, ley lines, and crop circles. and that’s cool. may be boring to you, but it’s fascinating to me. i’ll post links to the research soon.

Meeting today with the neighbors, who will all blame us, let’s see. Didn’t happen.

Can’t see the big huge thing, they’ve moved it. Engineers are out looking at the water. The bulldozer is filling dump trucks. Today they’re coming down the ramp and lining up, then backing in around the hole, which is now larger in extent, and getting loaded, then going out the main street side.

husband saw them taking the big thing out of here in two trailers. Could they have dropped it by too early?

Nope, it’s still here. They dug, and fucked around in the hole, and filled dumptrucks and played tag. There are now bunches of orange earth movers in this place. And after 3 everybody went home, i mean foreman, and then these guys showed upwith more heavy equipment. I was taking kid to health food store and we saw one on main street with his signal on, in the right lane to take a wide turn into the alley, carrying a big screw. Maybe that’s the thing they took away yesterday, because we saw it then we didn’t. while the drill thing didn’t go away when i didn’t see it. It’s aimed down into the watery pit, which has water over half of it now.

They brought the core, and they brought a terex to lift the heavy drill bits or something for the drill thing, and they rolled the terex off the trailer and they’re only now painstakingly getting the terex around to pick the screw off the trailer, and then the red semi and the white semi will be out of here with their trailers. In the meantime another truck has come in with a big bulldozer fork and two railroad containers with tools in them.

I watched the driver of the white truck, that brought the terex, move a bulldozer it seemed like aimlessly, as if waiting for something, or someone to get back to him. Then he moved that out of the way, and then he got in the terex and moved that out of the way, and the red truck backed up and then went forward, further into the site, and then went around the north end of the hole, so i guess the backing up was so it could get around teh spider shovel which is at the east end of the hole. The new semi with the fork and boxes is yellow, lemon as opposed to caution yellow. I guess he’s waiting for the red truck to get out of the way. Nope. He waited halfway down the hill, where the leaking stream has made the piled up dirt ramp soggy, and trucks going by all day, it’s pitted and rutted and very wet looking.

The yellow truck followed a big forklift down to the old part of the alley at the edge of the site. Eventually there was space to roll it in, and the big terex unloaded the containers. Now there’s another truck going in there, a pickup with an articulated trailer that rides up over the car to a hitch in the middle of the bed. It’s got blue and orange what looks like electrical boxes. Generators and gas tanks.

I’m going out to catalog the equipment so i can remember. i’ll get pictures, too.

Maybe no meeting. It’s after 6 and the gay guy never called.

The terex, a small cat bulldozer, stuff i took pictures of. it’s all there, even the numbers.

The dug out place is much bigger. There were souvenir hunters with metal detectors digging away at the rubble. One of them suggested the other’s hands might fall off because of the crap, all bubbled and burnt and corroded. Car batteries. The rubble part must have been from when it was a gas station. What kind of crap is dumped in the back of a gas station? Did they toss shit in the gully and then cover over it when they made it into a uniform warehouse?

They’d uncovered the stream, traced it to where it left the excavation hole and left the middle covered. Big ceramic pipe, broken where the equipment hit it. The dirt ramp down into the property is soggy and muddy, as if they broke the pipe when digging around my trees, and then pushed dirt over it and the water’s been seeping upwards since.

The hole they started digging before is now deeper. The alleyway they scraped down to below the roots is now just as tall above them and evenly sloped. The dumptrucks have stopped because it’s after 3, but the crane and shovel and the bulldozer and the other bulldozer, the baby one, are running around refining holes and flattening slopes.

The neighbors are meeting tomorrow on the front porch. The nice gay guy doesn’t like that they’ve only got a day to get plans drawn by whom for the dirt in their backs.

They struck water in the vault, a level surface carved out of the lot, with a pit dug into that. The water pooled in one place, bubbling up with crusty foam. The deep place it’s flowing, cool. I enlarged the hole. Got a whiff of sewage but is clear. Underground stream in clay pipe. Foreman is getting engineers out tomorrow. Won’t delay but that corner because there’s so much else to do.

The dumptrucks are now coming in at the blvd end of the alley, and you can’t get out the side st end because they’re filling in the alley ramp.

The spider shovel builds its own pile of dirt to sit on top of and do its thing.

10 pm. We hear an engine down the back. I think it’s the dumpster people, but it doesn’t quit, so we go to the window to find a big hauler unloading a massive piece of equipment. We hear chains, then the cab drives forward as if he’s trying to get out at the side street end of the alley. Then a guy walks back to the machine and gets in. it’s three stories even folded up for shipping. He drives it off the trailer. It looks like a moon lander. Slowly it crawls across the floor of the excavation. He parks it on the far side, then they back the cab up and reattach it to the trailer, and they back out of the alley and back onto main street.

they’re tearing up busy street, they were working on main street toward the lofts and traffic was backed all up all day. Had to go thru the krog st bridge to get anywhere fast.

Now they’re loading up a dumptruck with dirt from the far side of the hole, and coming to dump it on the cut they made for the alley. Some guys spooned a bucketfull of dirt and took it away before they started. Testing, i suppose.

The roller machine broke, and they had to call a service truck, a black pickup, and then another truck with some sort of refill bottle, and get the small bulldozer over to hoist up the roller with a chain, and then they did stuff, did some hissng stuff, and clanking stuff, and then it was fixed. The repair guys had clipboards for the guy to sign, and he’s this big fat dude in a tucke in t-shirt and on his cell the whole time.

Husband spots foreman crossing the street watching a hooker walk by with exaggerated movements. He sashays down the street mimicking her.

I sent husband out to see why the arborist was there (because i’d emailed him that they were starting the alley. He came out and saw where they’d made their cut four feet from the tree and sliced off a couple of roots. He was unconcerned about that, but looked askance at the idea of putting dirt on the yards, or cutting the other neighbor’s trees (and foreman said the fees would be prohibitive anyway, even if the construction crew took them down for her). no dirt without plans and drawings being filed. By the neighbors. And that nice gay guy is going away on a self-improvement seminar this weekend.

Arborist wants plans and drawings about new dirt on land, on penalty of having city shut down the construction for transferring dirt without city oversight. More trouble for the neighbor because they’re expecting to have earthmoving equipment here this week only.

He’s all upset because it’s going thru the city, and he wanted it all under the table.

They’re fixing to cut checks for neighbors in the next few days, arrangement had something to do with the soil transfer, they now have to write that out of things people have to sign, so there’s a delay on the checks.

Neighbor thinks it’s all our fault for getting the arborist here without neighborhood consensus.

I went out to the cut and was astonished to see that the alleyway was originally built on rubble. I found an old stocking in the rubble. From the 20s? my trees are growing on rubble. Only the hill to park is real dirt.

Early in the morning we realized they were doing the alley.

Late in the morning they were talking about the dirt.

The tenant put his trailer in our back yard, and later at night his truck. Maybe it’ll be blocked in for months.

Interesting low key amiable chat with foreman at the back fince. Pointed out the twisty tree and said sign of water, where’s the spring? He said the guy at the end of the alley said the stream pipe runs right under his house. Another bad sign, a road aimed right at him,and water.

More carving out edges. They’ll be going along the back soon.

The bulldozer operator and foreman and some other guy in workclothes stood around the back looking into the yards for awhile, then the other guy started clipping the silt fence. They’re going to start moving dirt onto the backyards this afternoon. People need to get their shit out of their back yards now. Like our tenant. Who said he’d sue if they covered his trailer.

Talked to foreman on our way to the library. They’re not going to take the dirt across the fence until Monday or Tuesday. They had to move the trailer at 6 this morning or face a $2000/day fine from the city. But he thought he could park it in the street since 6 spaces of onstreet parking had been permitted them by the city. He had to get bellsouth and ga power back in to run more lines across the street. He’s going to try to tap into the next house’s electricity and pay his bill. His water, too. The guy who owns the house at the end of the alley also owns the house next to it. He uses one as an office and rents to a painter guy, and the other house is rented out. He lives in roswell.

The specs on the dirt for the backyards have changed. They were 2000′, now it’s 500′. That one neighbor wants to build an extension on to the back of his house, wants to run dirt underneath to build up the surface. This would leave pits on either side of his house for water from our streeet to collect in. I told him he needed to get people to sign something because they were litigious round here.

The big standpipe upon the street is the water connection, for hydrant. They dug it out yesterday and we could see where the pipe had been shut off and severed.

They’ve changed the plan for the alley. Not modular wall now, but curb and gutter.

He’s going to get a trucker to haul the contaminated dirt out to buford, where he can avoid a dump fee? He’s paying 65/hr to the guy, he figures 3 hours’ work.

They’ve started carving out the edges. They had to move the trailer into the street, and they guy at the end of the alley on side street is letting him use the side alley between him and the church.

Husband took nuts around to Foreman. On our dog walk later, we found a tin of candy perched on the largest rock behind our trees.

Nothing much continued to happen at the site. A few desultory dumptruck loads and quitting at 3.

Foreman must be sick. Nothing much happened. Noises with the bulldozer, but no trucks

it’s hot again. it was 89 at ten o’clock, and there’s no rain coming, and no hurricanes coming, and so i can’t sleep. so i’m up working.

and even tho i’m still technically blocked, in that i have no idea where i’m supposed to be going with this story, i’m still at the introductory, chapter two level, and so there are things that need to be said now, and things that can wait, and my major difficulty is in separating the two.

so i don’t ramble. and go off on tangents. and indulge in bad writing. but i backed off a bit and tried a different approach, and now i’ve got a bunch of chapter two written. but of course it’s not coming out the way the outline is, because i’ve already learned more about my characters and the situation than i knew when i wrote the outline, and i’m going to be learning a whole lot more as the story progresses, and it’s just a general idea, that outline i wrote. as it turns out.

i’m pretty tired, because i figured it would be better to burn up whatever useful brain cells i have in this heat turning out product, rather than sitting here typing to an audience who, let’s be honest, probably won’t notice. because nobody reads this blog.

and that’s cool. it leaves me freer to say what i mean rather than what someone would like me to say. i had a radio show once, in college, for several weeks. it was very eerie because it was just me and a turntable and a pair of headphones, talking to myself and playing my favorite music. i was sure there was nobody listening. and i had a fair chance of being right. a college radio station at 4 in the morning. i ask you. i didn’t become a radio personality only because i had a nasty habit of sleeping right thru my shift.

it’s cool how you can hit a wall and turn around like a ninja and suddenly there’s no wall. you kind of sidle up to the wall whistling, and catch it off guard.

but it’s one thirty and my creative stream dried up. i’m going to go to bed now. i’m looking forward to getting up with the start of the construction vehicles, and coming into the computer room to continue messing wtih the old lady and her day.

They didn’t turn on the machines until 10. Must have been some meeting. And that engine is to take away the bulldozer. It’s quiet again. The bulldozer came back again and worked around for awhile. It must have been broken. In the 90s all this past week, and nobody’s working on the site. It rained after 3, and they went home.

Almost the last of the dirt is being dug. They crudely, Forman and the engineer, staked the alley boundary. They explained that they were staking the height rather than the line, and were marking out the level of the finished hole. Except i think they’re digging deeper in the middle already. On the way to jonesboro i was certain i was dricving alongside one of our dumptrucks, but i went down 85 instead.maybe Monday.

so it seems like a block, because you work your head around how you’ve got it set up, and it just doesn’t work. and you can either beat your head on it and rewrite it to death but it still just doesn’t work. or you can distract yourself with something and let it resolve itself.

or as i like to insist, let the fairies do it.

i sat and worked my fingers to the bone grinding out paragraphs, dialog, thougts, actions. it was all crap. i’m floundering. it’s frustrating.

so fuck it. i turned my attention to other things i’m interested, seeing as i’m doing daily research on my story. that day i figured, what the hell, we haven’t seen this year’s crop of circles in the grain. then that led me to ley lines. then that led me to earth energy grids. and that led me to a map of atlanta, and the strange energy vortex i can see like the vapors coming off the building in ghostbusters.

and i realized that this was also a topic of intense interest to the old lady, who has a keener interest than i do - i’m too lazy.

so, the old lady figures out that the construction site is on top of an energy node, and that the excavation, and her potent curses, were magnified. so getting your wish becomes her test. which she fails to pass, i need to tell you now.

her lesson is a philosophical one, as befits a crone. different than the emotional life lesson maggie learns, or the material life lesson star gets.

so now we have the construction site as a character itself, with a personality. evil, like stephen king? evil like poltergiest? mischevious, like fairies? just your average everyday crack in the world?

how does this sit with the reader, that’s what i want to know? the old lady is turning out to be an activst from the 1960s who never gave up the march, an student of strange things, and she finds what she seeks.

which gives the interesting situation of a flesh and blood character interacting with a building site. it’s not unheard of. i once wrote a short science fiction story about a guy who got messages verbally from the neighborhood mailboxes. of course, he’d done a lot of acid. acid really rips the veils. he’d be able to hear the mailbox thinking. imagine that.

anyway, i spit out a whole lot of observations, and conditions, and things that now had to happen in the story, and i’ll work it all in as i go along. it was information i didn’t have yesterday when i was so blocked, and it came out like an inspiration. and it makes a difference in the story.

i’m still blocked, just not there. i know, can feel, a piece of knowledge, about what’s going to happen, to whom, and it’s just under the surface, bubbling up slowly. i can’t grasp it yet, however, and so time for some more distraction. i could start on that painting downstairs in my studio. i could start on that kimono i’ve been promising my honey to make him, or that silk-painted sarong for a friend of mine, or even matting and shrink-wrapping more prints for the local shop.

something.

Digging and hauling, diggind and hauling.

well, i’ve got to confess i’m having one hell of a time getting chapter two going. i’ve got all sorts of parts of it written, but i hate the sight of it.

i’m not introducing the characters, i’m just jumping in to fully developed inner traumas. wereas, in snappy comedy crime fiction, for example, nothing is turgid, nothing boils. everything’s terse and distilled.

i guess i’m just having trouble putting what i think into words. i see the scene, i have some idea of the dialog, but when i put it down, i type out the most absurd way of putting it. like that last sentance, for example.

here it’s a full moon. so i’m all confused. and i’m pulling on too many threads to make sense of the whole thing. so i have to wait until i can put thoughts into words with a bit more precision. especially if i’m trying to sketch characters.

speaking of which, i’ve started a new painting, downstairs in the art studio. it’s of my husband, sitting in a pub on a cold spring day sipping a cup of coffee. very rembrandt, the composition. and it’s very dark. so you’d think it would be an easy painting. and it goes very well at first. but then i realize i’ve drawn the face too small. so i smudge it out and start over. and now it’s too big. so i walked away and came up here to work on the second chapter, but got just as frustrated with that. so now i’m doing something that’s not really a waste of time, because i’m writng down all my frustrations, albeit incoherently, and mostly deleted. at least i won’t have to delete this post tomorrow, like i’m going to have to scrub the face and start over.

sometimes when you make a mistake, you pretend not to notice until it’s too late, and then go barging ahead over it.

sometimes you make a mistake because you just can’t give up doing it the way you know doesn’t work

sometimes the mistake is because you didn’t wait, or didn’t act at the right moment. or because your heart wasn’t in it.

ego, timing. stupidity.

oh well. so i’ll start on that fabric project i’ve had sitting on a shelf for awhile. i’ll put in a movie. i’ll read a book (horatio hornblower, crop circles, plotting, big trouble by dave barry). i could always take a nap. naps are good. you can sleep all day long if you take enough naps.

or i can do a rain dance. anyway, never mind. my strategy for writer’s block is to start over, but i’ll give it some time and let it sort itself out this time.

The trucks all day. 7 loads and they’re off. I spent much of the day, and the past few days, drawing the backyard and marking off the shade. I’ve got bricks marking the rain line, and swales of raked gravel and weeds for paths and shade lines. Bought a bunch of sun plants (crocosmia, centaurea, aster, hens and chickens and stuck them in the sun part of the south side of the back yard, and have been watering everything once a day. The last few days have been cool, but it’s going back up into the 90s in the next few days, with no rain in sight. I keep buying plants that need water, tho. Put suzie’s two little azaleas down in the back of the alley beside the house, moved the hostas from the back semicircles into the shade beside the house, and moved the rescued ferns to where the other ferns are in the semicircle. Going to put a rock garden on south side of the back semicircle. I’d like a water garden there, too. Perhaps i can do both…

Construction News Chapter One

‘Wait. Slow down. I’m fixing to drop it.’ This was whispered loudly in the dark, the hiss rising above the noise of tennis shoes crunching thru the kudzu.

‘Don’t drop it.’

‘It’s heavy. It’s slippery. I thought I felt him move.’

“You say that every time. Don’t drop it.’ They continued to crunch thru a kudzu-infested ex industrial back lot. In the dark. There was no way to see if they were stepping on broken concrete, into holes, or on twisted rebar. It was a faith walk, like going barefoot over coals.

‘Where is it?

They stopped to peer into the darkness. ‘Over here.’

‘Are you sure?’

This was answered by silence. A police car sped by with his lights on but no siren. It was way after peoples’ bedtime, and the cop could speed by if he wanted to.

There was a light thud, as the body dropped to the ground, a grunt and a dragging sound as sheet metal was lifted aside. Then the sound of a shovel hitting dirt.

Pock scree pock scree. It was almost deep enough. Just a couple more inches deep and a little bigger around.

Then they made stuffing a body in a hole noises for awhile. Then they said some words over the grave. They weren’t nice words. Then they went home.

A new food source communed with the worms.

That night, the old man and the old lady made love. The howling outside roused them in the night and they reached for each other with passion. It never ocurred to them to ask why they suddenly got horny for each other. At their age, you don’t question these things.

The old lady woke with a smile on her face, and reached for the old man. But he was already dressed and out walking the dog. Oh well. She lay there looking out the window at the huge old pecans in her back yard. She listened to the birds and the whine of a table saw. Then she got up and put on the same clothes she’d worn the day before, and wandered to the kitchen to make herself some coffee. Stumbled is more like it. These days her feet hurt when she got out of bed in the morning, as if she’d been clenching them all night. Maybe she was dreaming she was a bird.

The old man came back. The screen door slammed, the dog came bounding into the kitchen to nose her feet and whack her with his big fluffy tail, the old man came clumping into the kitchen at a deliberate pace, appearing out of the shadowy hall like a ghost, his white beard and thin scruffy hair shining out like a haze around him. He bent over the back of her neck and nuzzled.

Altman reheated his coffee in the microwave. ”Remember that piano Thing One tried to sell us for a hundred dollars a couple of days ago?’ he leaned on the counter waiting for the bell. ‘And I tried to tell him it would cost four times that to get it to play? Well, I passed a piano below the apartments this morning with the dog.’ The dog looked up hopefully but Altman ignored him. The bell went off.

Velha looked up hopefully. ‘Ivory and ebony?’

‘Plastic.’ She shrugged and had more coffee. They sipped in silence.

It was a comfortable kitchen. The whole family were artisans, and the kitchen was custom built after long dinnertime discussions where drawings were waved and tape measures were whipped out. Shelves so Dad could get stuff down for Mom, counters Mom could work at comfortably, seating for the whole family, and friends, and animals, and plants. Capacious pantry space. Storage. And room for dad’s art and thingies. Years after the kids were gone to their own homes, there was still enough room for them all.

‘How are the animals?’ she asked. One was sick.

‘Daisy was still pretty sore looking when I passed by with the dog. She wouldn’t let me get near her yesterday. I’ll spend more time with her this morning. 

There was a sound at the door, and the dog went insane trying to kill someone thru the screen.

It was Thing Two. There were two homeless guys in the neighborhood. Everybody called them Cat in the Hat names; hardly anybody knew their real names. And they fit the characters. Thing One was originallly froom New York, an addict and conman of a certain audacious stamp, Thing Two was from deepest Geotgia, and had different social pathologies, but the effect on third parties was often the same.

Thing Two hardly ever showed up at their door. Only when he wanted to borrow money. And he always paid it back, so Altman usually gave him what he had, crumpled dollars from his wallet. He only wanted to borrow money when he was in a bad way.

Thing Two was hangdog. His skin sagged off him, and his kinky gray hair made him look like a detention camp survuvor. The bones of his face could barely hold his huge, staring eyes. He looked like jekyll or frankenstein.

He stared at his tennis shoes and the scruffy pants he’d slept in, or rather, had not slept in. He smelled of night sweats, beer and piss. It humiliated the last shred of his pride any time he had to go to someone’s door to ask for money, and here he was doing it again. He was the lowest scum on earth. You could see that he meant it. Thing Two suffered the tortures of the damned on a daily basis.

Altman was willing to lend him money as long as he continued to pay him back. That made the deal self limiting. With a beer in his hand, he could be productive and get some work done, and get a paycheck, and he always seemed happier. He was so very miserable when he was ragged.

Like he was then, sitting on the front porch, his dishevelled head in his grimy hands, everything even his shirt the same gray color. Heavy dark lines in several layers around his eyes. Velha brought him water and some fruit from the bowl. He ate it while she watched to see he didn’t leave half of it behind something. He was telling the old man about how the universe is infinite, and that meant his existence meant nothing. A moan escaped him.

He looked as if he was going to go right home and commit suicide. He’d been in and out of institutions, according to his buddy Thing One. Altman was taking it all very calmly, as if it was completely normal to be in this kind of a fix if you were on Thing Two’s path.

The old lady went back to the kitchen, reheated her coffee, and headed for her computer.

Hours later they broke for lunch and a walk around the neighborhood with the dog. They noticed a black Ford truck parked on the street along the west side of their block, Side Street. The truck was sitting at the edge of the soon-to-be-ex vacant lot, parked  in the shade across from the only house on the next block of abandoned industrial buildings. The old man remembered passing the truck when he was out with the dog around 7:30.

The windows were down, so they slowed as they passed the truck. They spotted an elbow, and then someone flicked their cigarette out the window and looked down to see them passing.

‘Oh, hey, sorry,’ the guy started apologizing, and got out of the truck. ‘I was on the phone. I didn’t. Sorry.’

The old man waved it away. He liked the look of the guy. He belonged in Grant Park. Something bohemian about him. Maybe it was the biker tattoos or the double earring holes. The old man sniffed the air and introduced himself.

The guy shook his hand. ‘George Forman,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge of this project here.’ He was a big construction kind of guy, with a clean tshirt and new work boots. His cab was his office, a laptop sat open on some email. He towered over them, like Hulk Hogan in jeans.

‘Wow,’ the old woman said, ‘they’re really going ahead with it.’

They stood and looked out over a vacant industrial lot that filled the northwest corner of their block. An abandoned store, an abandoned warehouse, a shipping container left in back years ago. 3.8? Acres of kudzu. ‘Full of rats,’ he nodded solemly at the old couple.

They looked concerned. He wondered if he ought to be discussing this. Area residents could be skittish. ‘We’ve already had the city out here about it,’ he added hastily, in case they were imagining a stream of rats heading out of the weeds toward their houses.

He needn’t have worried. They were in fact thinking that their animals might appreciate a rat hunt. The old man was already hearing little rat screams in his head.

‘Yep,’ he continued, ‘came out here and poisoned them last week. Sure you didn’t see any rats in your back yards?’ he asked only partly as a joke. The couple exchanged disappointed glances.

‘Yeah, nothing to worry about, because they’re all dead by now. We’ll just clear them out with the rest of it.’ He waved expansively. He liked the old couple. He could tell that they weren’t as excitable as some residents he’d met in his day and a half vigil. A day and a half waiting for his entrance package to arrive. That’s one bulldozer, and a couple of dumptruck loads of gravel. A long time hanging out in the shade, away from the office. Waiting.

His phone rang, and he climbed back into the truck after it. He waved as they moved on.

‘He’s nice, I like him,’ Velha said as they got to the end of the block.

Altman tugged the dog away from a discarded pork rib. ‘Too bad about the rats.’

Thing One was waiting for them on their front porch. He had some business to talk over with Altman. He sat tapping his feet on a rocker, looking very impatient. He was always energetic and zippy and it annoyed the old lady. Same cadaverous build as the other homeless guy, same grimy skin and stubbly cheeks.

Velha couldn’t wait to escape to the back room, but he caught her and asked for a glass of cold water, and the way he said cold meant he wanted a tray of ice cubes in a big plastic drink cup they had at the top of the shelves. She noticed the slight - he treated her like a waitress, always leaving a mess, gladly taking more than he was given and complaining about the quality of the service. Velha begrudged Thing One.

One obvious difference between Thing One and Thing Two was the look in their eyes. Thing One was shifty, Thing Two was miserable. And their outlooks on life. Thing One was still trying to get a free ride. Thing Two was buried by guilt and responsibility. They were both sorry fucks. But the old lady felt compassion for one and none at all for the other.

The old man came back to tell her how it all worked out with Thing One, who’d been out front pattering like an old fashioned taxi driver, trying to argue him out of more money for a job he’d only half completed and that needed redoing. He didn’t seemed phased by the issues. He had to have money now.  So the old man had gone back to the bedroom and fetched the change bowl he filled from his pockets every night, and gave that to him.