Construction News

Velha sat looking up medicinal plants that thrive in full sun. She was making a list, more of a chart, with plant heights and widths and water requirements. She sat gazing down at the back yard thru the window, looking at the rows of bricks she’d used to mark the slope. She was thinking that she was going to need to build some terracing going down the yard. She’d started raking off the gravel that had paved her yard for so many years. She hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of it, and the ground was hard as cement unless it was raining, so she’d gotten out there the last time it stormed and worked over it with the metal rake. The rain had been warm. There was still gravel everywhere, and sand was accumulating at the bottom of her yard every time it rained. She’d need to do at least three terraces. What could she use to build them?

She was also fantacizing a row of azaleas along a newly constructed gravel path. Maybe a fish pond. All the tall flowering bushes, especially the fragrant ones. And how best to jungleize the property line so she wouldn’t have to look at concrete and car bumpers?

Kudzu. There’s a thought. She considered it. They had problems with kudzu back there already. All that had to happen was for a rootlet to find its way thru the ground to the barest crack in the new concrete. It would be a matter of weeks before whatever landscaping they were planning to install would be sporting shiny new tendrils of invasive omnivore. Looks like she didn’t have to do anything to fix them in that area. It’d happen anyway. A little instant karma. There was a god.

Satisfied, she went back to working up a plan for her new sun spot out back. Where am I going to get that much cow shit? she wondered.

Men in pastel button down shirts and kakhis were hovering around the site this morning. Noting things on legal pads, standing around talking on their cellphones. They looked important. They acted important. Forman was there pointing things out, but they were ignoring him, and walking around the site like ir was the Moon.

Velha looked up pictures of the surface of the moon, and stumbled upon a conspiracy to fake the moon landings, where she spent almost an hour following links and weighing evidence. Then she followed a link to the 9/11 Conspiracy.

They’d found a bunch of old tanks buried in the ground, and these were either the guys from the office or the guys from the EPA. Mostly likely the office guys. They didn’t look like they were used to getting their hands dirty. They peered at one tank and kicked the side of another.

Ah, there was the EPA. A big, beat up, red waste disposal hauler come to suck whatever it was out of the biggest tank and go off and test it. A short hauler drove up into the site and let the bulldozer load up two of the tanks side by side. Once the tanker truck was gone, the crane and shovel spent a good twenty minutes pounding the empty tank until he had it folded it up into a little wad of iron small enough to put on the back of another hauler.

The bulldozer was running around like it was a school recess, digging up this, shovelling that, running around doing whatever he wanted, as long as he was filling dumptrucks. He cruised around like a male dog. Every time Velha looked, the guy with the cowboy hat was plowing dirt and raising earth and concrete in some wildly different part of the lot. What a sandbox.

She turned her attention back to her study of a new crop circle. It appeared two nights before, in England, and the field researchers were just getting details it up on the website. It was very elegant, and she was studying it for meaning.

It kept trying to say something to her. She thought if she could just wrap her mind around it, she might understand. She was right up next to the monitor, staring. Her eyes felt hot and stingy. The circle had something to do with energy, patterns of obstacles and flow. It was somehow relevant to what was going on in her life. It gave her a signpost, if she could only grasp it. It was an energy. It had intelligence. If she could learn to swim in it, she could bring anything to pass with a whisper.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes as the insight faded. Her back was stiff. She spent her days studying all these wonderful truths and mastering strange systems of esoteric knowledge and perfecting her immortal soul, but she was really just a little old woman sitting in the spare bedroom, who got tired.

She sat gazing into her back yard, the formerly intact green screen now slashed with vistas of red dirt. The buldozer was continuing to scrape the bank. It was at what looked to be a steep angle, pushing dirt up the hill sideways. She typed in another search term. Earth energy.

Velha sat and thought about the life of a shovel operator. Shovelling up dirt and loading it into dumptrucks, digging holes, pushing over trees. Destruction. What’s his worldview if all he does is tear things up and clear them out? Does he vote Republican or Democrat? Does he vote? Would it matter?

Velha counted seven scoops of dirt to a package of Kellog’s Raisin Bran. Floating thru her head this morning it was commercials from when the kids were little. The dumptruck driver sat there facing forward while his truck shook and rocked and sunk into its springs, and the bulldozer made nasty banging sounds really close to his chrome trim. Then the bulldozer beeped his horn and the truck moved off, the netting rolling automatically back to cover his load as the next truck pulled up.

She wondered where they went. She could see them turn down Bissey Street and get in the right lane to turn onto Maine heading for the highway. She could hear them pass by the other end of Ahr Street, shifting gears and gaining speed as they climbed the rise up Maine toward the entrance ramp. Where they went after that, she didn’t know, but a powerful urge rose up in her to follow them and see what they were doing with her dirt.

She figured maybe fifteen trucks going back and forth all day long, a twenty minute drive to the landfill, maybe a twenty minute wait in line at the dump, and drive back to wait in line to get more dirt. All day.

The old couple were surprised to see several women driving the dumptrucks. They went for their dog walk that morning past all the trucks lined up waiting for the bulldozer guy to get there. They were drinking coffees and cokes and standing aorund smoking cigarettes, talking and joking.

The couple stopped, and everyone came up to pet the doggy. The old man muttered something and the dog stood stock still and allowed the touch. Then he went and lay down behind Altman, traumatized.

Velha was talking to the women. ‘About how many trips do you make every day?’

‘Bunches,’ said the stouter of the two women, a blonde in cutoffs and a wife beater.

She was hoping for a number. ‘Do you have time to read or do other things?’ she’d asked. Maybe they had knitting or mending. Maybe they sat there listening to the radio and snapping gum. Maybe they sat there with laptops and cellphones. The driver frowned at the question: Of course not. ‘Well, that sucks,’ she said consolingly. She was thinking about suggesting talking books, but didn’t.

The other woman, a skinny blonde with bad teeth said, ‘At least we get paid by the hour.’

Altman spoke up. ‘That’s always good. Especially with the traffic.’ He sidled up to her and they fell into conversation. Velha began chafing to move on.

During their after-lunch dog walk, they met Thing One as they rounded the corner. He saw them first and headed across the street to intercept them, wiping his hands on the bottom of his t-shirt. His head moved constantly. He watched everything as he crossed the street. The sky, the corner, behind people’s fences, down their driveways, in their windows. He began saying something as he approached, tho it took them awhile to hear him because they were both a little deaf. Or inattentive.

‘The finest steel,’ he was saying, ‘really heavy and well-built, solid handles.’ He was posing in front of them, his hand gestures as expressive as Vanna White’s, his demeanor serious, yet assuring. ‘Pots I’d be proud to own, if I had somewhere to put them.’ he cackled merrily. ‘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.’ If he’d had a hat, he would be clutching it to his chest.

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,’ and went on, dragging the dog.

She was sitting in her chair with a glass of tea, thinking how nice and cool it was for late June. There was a wind coming thru her end of the house – cross ventilation, the miracle of old house construction.

The bulldozer lurched down the hill, struggling in the dirt. Velha heard the engine whine as it tried to move, and looked up just in time to watch the bulldozer slide into her pecan tree, its metal treads grinding into the trunk. She could see it shudder and lurch in pain.

A moment later, the heavy machine got a purchase and surged up the hill away from her tree. She rushed out to inspect the damage, furious. There was a huge gouge in the trunk, and inches of inner tree had been savagely ripped away by steel treads. By somebody who saw trees as obstacles if he looked at all.

The wound was weeping sap, bleeding. The leaves said Shock Shock as they rustled, and the branches were stiff with pain. It wasn’t until she came around the tree trunk that she noticed other gouges on the trunks from where the silt-fence digger 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 didn’t say anything because she could see how going behind a couple of trees made a straight line along the yards, and there was probably some really good reason why they couldn’t run the line around her trees instead.

She worried that it would give them subconscious license to destroy them, having her trees on their side of the silt fence, in no man’s land – the easement. What did the guy think when he hit it? Oh well, it’s coming down anyway?

She stood in her back yard and looked around. The bulldozer had crushed all the periwinkle and ivy in the back of her yard, but they’d grow back. They’d scraped the smaller trees putting in the silt fence, and now her pecan tree was seriously damaged.

As she watched, standing not twenty feet away, the bulldozer began planing the ground right next to her pecan. She could feel the ground shaking beneath her feet. The clanking of the treads ripped thru her skull. Suddenly she was frightened of falling.

The dozer proceeded safely past her pecan, and she breathed a little. Then it swerved and plowed into the smaller tree right next to it. With a shudder and a crack, the tree was on the ground and there was a big gaping hole in the screen of trees in her back yard.

She stalked up to the basement to tell Altman about the damage so he could go out and coat the trunks with pitch, and went upstairs to look up the right phone number and complain. Her fingers shook as she thumbed through the government section looking for the right entry.

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

The words poured out of the old lady. She was shaking with anger and betrayal. They said they’d take care of everything.

The woman’s voice was soothing. She told Velha exactly what to say. ‘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, trying to remember what the woman had said. Her voice was so kind, that’s what she mostly thought.

‘Hello, this is Velha Cobble at 295 Ahr Street.’ She spoke slowly and precisely. ‘I have a concern about my old pecan tree in the back yard because the construction guys are bashing into it with abandon. They’ve just plowed up a different tree.’ Then her courage broke and she started to blather. ‘Oh help me if you can. They’re out there now and they’re awfully close to my big old pecan that they’ve already damaged.’ She walked to the window, hoping the sounds were audible thru the phone, trying to convey the urgency of the situation. ‘It’s the big new complex they’re fixing to build out on Bissey Street. Near the corner of Maine. I don’t know what it’s called.’ She trailed off. ‘Please stop by the site if you have a moment.’ Help us, Obi-wan; you’re our only hope.

She had no hope of the arborist coming out so late in the day. She sat out with her husband on their porch in an old metal glider, having tea and cookies. The couple loved their porch. It had various hangings (devices) that Altman put up in specific places, and Velha was growing a pile of orchids on the big table because she could.

They would normally be discussing their day, but dumptrucks cruised by every thirty seconds. Empty, they rumbled loudly off the highway and down Ahr Street, one after another, taking their foot off the gas to brake at the corner, their exhaust systems sounding like dragons with lung cancer. They revved to turn the corner onto Cyde Street, sometimes at the same time as a full dumptruck rounded the corner heading back to the highway. Sometimes there were two empties and a full one passing in front of the old couple at the same time. They had to fall silent every time. The house shook.

She returned to her work noticing that the bulldozer was idle. The driver was out of the cab, talking to some red-shirted manager (all the managers wore red that day) while the dunptruck drivers sat in the shade of her tree.

She called the arborist. Every fifteen minutes until he picked up his phone.

‘Arborist,’ he answered.

He’d received her message, so Velha had only to restate the case. ‘And then they came along and took down my little tree.’

‘How little? Under eight inches doesn’t need a permit.’

‘It was on my land.’

‘What?’

‘The easement is ten feet into my back yard.’

He paused. ‘What’s your address again?’

They spoke about tree damage, but that was already done. He sounded more concerned about the planned grade changes and the prospect of covering the roots with more dirt. She felt sure he’d be out in the morning.

Velha looked up grade changes and followed the links to tree wells. She was somewhat reassured that it wouldn’t kill the tree to dump more dirt on it, as long as it was done judiciously. Gravel-filled wells around the tree trunks held promise, tho the anti side was very adamant. She went from there to how to build fish ponds, and the rest of the afternoon was spent fantacizing about her back yard.

After awhile she noticed that the noise out back had ceased. The bulldozer had stopped, and it was still only mid-afternoon. The dump trucks still idled on the lot, the drivers now lying in the cool shade. Then a service truck drove up, a white pickup with lots of cabinets and tools on the back. She saw a guy spread himself out on the treads, stretching out his legs to balance his reach into the engine. After that, everybody went home.

Thing One was back, standing proudly in the middle of her porch, surrounded by seven or eight hideously scratched, bent and broken pots and pans made of the cheapest non-stick aluminum. She laughed shortly. ‘I think I have enough cookware 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 someone 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. Thing One was too crazy to understand her point of view, and it was useless to argue, because he would use anything she could say as an opportunity to prove her wrong. 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 she fled to the spare bedroom.

The neighbors arrived on their porch at four for another meeting with Joe DeVeloepr and the bean counter whose name nobody remembered. The men were late. Velha and Susan Nextor sat in rocking chairs while Star occupied the glider. They were drinking sweet tea and talking about money.

‘We want to know what they’re going to do for us, since we don’t need any of the improvements everybody else is getting. That’s why I’m here,’ Star said confidently. ‘We think we’re entitled to some extra cash for the inconvenience, and Gordon’s studying too hard to come to the meeting, so I’m going to handle it.’ She looked brash. Velha admired her attitude.

‘It’s the noise,’ she went on. ‘It’s gotten so bad that we can’t study.’ The women made sympathetic noises.

‘My kids are having trouble sleeping,’ said Mary Nextor. Velha wondered if they slept during the day. Maybe they were vampires.

Guy appeared in the yard, on his cellphone. He paraded past for a few minutes, finishing his call, then came up on the porch and squeezed in beside Star, who looked annoyed. She was planning to sit next to the developer and use her charms on him. Guy enquired minutely about the tea when it was offered, and politely declined, then launched into a description of all the herbal waters he and Fred had been experimenting with. Echinachea and mint water. Rosemary and lime.

‘Now, there’s a pucker drink,’ Velha laughed. ‘How about basil, oregano, and mint?’

He countered with, ‘Our last discovery was iced coffee and rosehips.’

‘They drank that hot during the Depression.’

‘Oh.’ He looked offended.

‘I know, how about foxglove and verbena with a pinch of nightshade, for the kick?’ only Altman thought it was funny. Guy looked at the pitcher with suspicion.

‘Another thing is, is that we want them to keep those dumptrucks from coming down Ahr Street at all,’ Star said.

‘Yeah,’ June Nextor agreed. ‘Why do they have to come by all day? Why can’t they just go down Maine and come in from Bissey Street?’

Guy started to explain. ‘They’re replacing the sewers all along Bissey at the moment, and they’ve started replacing them along Maine Street too. That’s a major intersection over there,’ he continued, pointing northeast behind their houses. They knew that. ‘It’s to reduce congestion. It’s only for awhile.’

‘How long a while?’ Star was suspicious.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A couple of months.’

‘How long an eternity are a couple of months of no sleep?’ Star flung herself back on the glider. It slewed around like an amusement park ride. Guy looked uncomfortable. ‘They’re going to completely block the rear access to our house, and we got stuff going on.’ She ran her hand thru her hair and looked distraught. ‘It’s vital that we have the alley open right away.’

He shrugged elaborately. ‘Talk to Joe.’

It was the first thing Joe addressed, after gulping down half a glass of tea while he caught his breath and said hey. He and the beancounter sat on the bench under the mailbox. ‘The alley won’t even be closed at all down on the Maine Street end,’ he said. ‘The only houses affected will be past Guy’s house up to Cyde Street.’ The Nextors, the old couple, the kids.

Star jabbed her finger on the Cyde Street end of the map. ‘But this is where we live. You’re in the middle of breaking up part of our driveway right now. We can’t get in, back in the back, and it’s very inconvenient. We’ve got to have that alley open.’

‘It’ll only be closed until we finish building the driveway.’

‘And when will that be?’

Joe mumbled something and before she could ask him to repeat it, rose to greet Maggie, who was rushing from her car. Star smiled grimly and sat back in the glider, sipping tea.

Maggie had skipped out on closing entirely. She’d locked up the fridge and pantry and left two of her most competent and trustworthy homeless helpers to do the dishes and lock the door behind them. She was wondering if she shouldn’t go back and check on them when the meeting was over, and sipped absently at her tea and tried to concentrate. Then she started wondering what Star was doing there. And then she wondered if she was getting enough to eat. And then she wondered what kind of choices she was making. Maggie wasn’t listening to a thing Joe was saying.

The map was unrolled. Everyone leaned in and started pointing at their properties. They particularly pointed out Ahr Lake, between Guy’s and Maggie’s yards, the spot in the alley that collected water, mosquito larvae and rats all year round. It was the dog’s favorite section of walk. Except for the mosquitos, the old couple enjoyed the lake too. Velha would take her shoes off and squish thru the cool mud. Altman would gaze at all the bugs making their livings in or near the water.

Nobody else remotely liked it. Guy was in the middle of saying that what they needed was a load of dirt on their yards to create a slope so the water would collect somewhere else.

Velha and Altman were looking at the topgraphic lines that showed the dip in Maggie’s yard okay, but showed everybody else’s yards sloping gently to the back of their yard and their trees. Their yards only needed the meerest enhancement of the slope. It sounded like Guy was talking about lots of dirt.

Maggie pointed to a circular object drawn in down at the corner of Guy’s and Maggie’s yards. ‘That’s going to be the drain?’

Joe nodded. ‘Into the pipe that runs from Cyde to Maine,’ he pointed west to east. ‘We’re putting in a catchment basin. Eight inch pipes. That should stop your drainage problem.’ Then Guy, Maggie and Nancy looked at each other.

”But we still need the dirt,’ Guy hastened.

Nancy agreed. ‘And my stumps removed.’

‘I want my treees taken down and a big hole filled in,’ Maggie added.

‘We want a pool,’ Altman said. Everyone turned to look at him, the developer with real concern on his face. He couldn’t tell if the old man was smiling under that beard. Finally, Joe decided to laugh.

Velha felt like asking why Guy needed so much dirt. But it would be impolite to pry. Maybe he wanted his yard the same height as Maggie’s, which was higher ground, except for the dip.

‘We can fix it, whatever it is, the answer is yes,’ Joe said with enthusiasm, something he’d picked up at a motivational seminar. ‘We can put a swale from their trees,’ he nodded at the old couple, ‘to the drain in the alley by your yards,’ he nodded at Maggie and Guy. ‘Those two improvements will collect all the water that comes off your yards, and we’ll just channel it away.’

Guy was frowning. ‘What’s a swale?’ The developer turned red explaining that a swale was a kind of shallow trench used for drainage, very unobtrusive – it went right back to Capability Brown in the 1700s – they’d called it a haha.

But Guy was scowling. ‘Do you mean to say a ditch?’ When he thought ditch he thought gully. He reared back and sneered. ‘I ain’t having no ditch in my back yard, I’m sorry.’ He looked around at the others. ‘Way trashy.’ His eyes fixed on Velha. ‘The solution to our problems is dirt, and if we can’t all do the same thing, then we’re going to have drainage problems, right?’ He looked away and shook his head. ‘But I guess we all got to do what we got to do.’ He sighed like he was losing his faith in humanity.

The bean counter spoke up. ‘What do you think would be a good solution to the problem?’

‘How would I know?’ He stared at the developer. ‘That’s what we’re all hoping you can tell us, I’m sure. We don’t know anything about construction.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you this much. We’ll do whatever it takes to make you folks happy. We want to start out our relationship right.’

Maggie smiled shyly. ‘Can you tell us when the alley will be useable again? I’ve got storage in the back and I need to get to it at all different hours.’ She looked apologetic. ‘Catering jobs,’ she shrugged.

Joe looked at her. She looked back. They decided right there that they liked each other. ‘I’m afraid we already talked about that, and I’m pressed for a business meeting, so if it’s okay with you I’d like to bring you up to speed after the meeting.’ She nodded modestly.

‘We’ve already arrived at a better solution on the alley,’ he continued, beaming at them. ‘We’re going to start the ramp at the basin, so all the water that used to come down the hill onto your yards will run down the gutter we’re putting in. There’ll be a wall between it and you, just a little one.’

He waved off questions of exactly how high. ‘We’d have to ask the engineers, and they talk funny.’ They laughed politely. ‘Anyway, we’re going to build you each a little ramp and curb cut, so you’ll all have access to the alley.’

‘I think I heard Maggie ask when the alley would be open again.’

Joe shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you the honest truth. We had the alley tied to the critical path, but y’all’re still in the thinking-about-it phase, so what we’re going to do is, is we’re going to detach that part of the project from the rest of it, and deal with the alley when you’ve got your minds made up.’

‘When do we get our money?’ Susan Nextor asked.

The developer beamed at her again. ‘We’ll bring around the checks just as soon as we start on the alley. Why don’t we meet next week and you can each tell me what you want done back there. But,’ he nodded at Maggie, ‘people who want trees down in their yard have to get permits right away, before the equipment is gone.’

Guy asked, ‘And how much time does that give us?’

The developer consulted with the bean counter, but neither of them were sure. Maybe another month. No longer.

Star looked pained. ‘Can you stop the dumptrucks from coming by?’ she whined. ‘They make so much noise.’

Joe had a ready answer. ‘Can’t change it,’ he said brightly. ‘The plans were filed with the City months ago. By the time we could get it changed, they’d be gone anyway.’ Star rolled her eyes, collapsed back in her seat, and lost interest.

The construction guys stood up together, like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and unstuck their pants from their legs. Everyone rose.

Velha asked, ‘What’s the next stage?’

Joe turned back, like a salesman with one foot in the door. ‘It’s the latest thing (plasma torch) in soil stabilizing. It’s called a vibro pier. It’s going to go down 20 feet and hold up the whole building, and all it is is just compacted gravel. It’s even earthquake rated. Yeah, and we’re going for LEED certification. That’s green,’ he nodded reassuringly to the crowd. ‘Green is good.’

Guy made a call and began wandering thru the yard talking. Mary Nextor darted home to the kids. Joe and Maggie wandered off down the street to chat.

The old couple had dinner and took their last dog walk. They stopped to examine a big black plastic tarp, maybe forty feet long. They were on the northeast side of the lot, on Bissey Street. Dirt was piled up under the plastic. The dirt was much darker than the other dirt, more like strong coffee than cheap powdered hot chocolate. It looked wet.

Velha went up to the pile and sniffed, and came away, her nose wrinkled.

‘Don’t you remember how I’ve been pulling the dog away from that black seepy stuff? It’s been coming from under the dirt for years.’

‘I thought it came from the restaurant dumpster.’ But when she looked, she could see the stains continuing back into the weeds from the dumpster at the edge of a diner. ‘It flows across the sidewalk I remember. And it stinks.’

They walked in silence around the corner onto Maine. ‘Did you notice on the map where everybody’s surveyed property line runs to the left of everybody’s actual fences? By a matter of feet?’

‘I sure did.’ He was walking along, whistling under his breat.

‘I like seeing our house and our yard on a map,’ she said. ‘I look at it and I can see how it’s going to look in a couple of years as if the new plants are already drawn in.’

He was thinking about the property lines. ‘It’s going to cause trouble when everybody moves their fences.’

‘I don’t think they could draw a straight line when they built up this area back in the ’20s. The fence lines lean, the back lines curve. Guy’s slants north and ours slants south.’ (Plans.jpg to geocities page)

‘Maybe it’s strange gravity. It sure looks straight when you’re back there.’

‘It’s not straight on the survey map.’

‘Hmm.’ Altman had a few instruments he could use to investigate.

Velha said, ‘I’ll have a look back there tomorrow.’

‘It could be, back then they didn’t use surveys, and just put up their side fences wherever they thought their lines were, and maybe the gas station just built the hill any old way, and people built their back fences around it.’

‘Do you think?’

Well, it seems pretty casual.’ And it did. The bend of the alley into the middle of their back yard was a shining example of casual. The side fences were clearly built around the alley.

‘I wonder how long it’s been since the alley ran straight thru to Cyde Street.’

‘Probably about the time backyard deliveries became rare.’

They turned the corner on Ahr and headed home. The dog peed on every inch of the short commercial corner, the workshop, the WIC store, the sandwich shop.

They passed Maggie’s house. It was dark. ‘I thought it was interesting how Star was so quiet after her mom joined us.’

‘She’s still just a kid.’

‘What did Thing Two want?” she asked as they walked up onto their porch, the dog giving Altman an assist up the stairs.

He shrugged. ‘He was just trying to sell me some siding. He’s got some source he can steal pieces of siding from, and he’s been going around telling me I should replace various boards with his top quality stuff. But he brought me the cheap plastic stuff instead. I told him if he can find redwood, I’ll buy it from him.’

It was Thing One at the door. ‘Altman’s downstairs,’ Velha said curtly. She’d torn herself from her work and gotten up, which hurt all her joints, 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, whomever it may 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, his eyes darting. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear, a grimy hand tugging at his beard, 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 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 want to waste her time.

He tried his next angle. ‘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 know you like to cook, and I thought that since you were such a good neighbor,’ he looked her in the eye and grimaced reassuringly, ‘I thought I’d give you the first look. I’m nore than ready to put these choice wares aside and bring them around to show you at your convenience.’ He stopped speaking suddenly, and stared at her intently.

Velha felt the pressure of his look. 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, too. She fanned her face. ‘Sure. Bring them by. We’ll see.’ She moved back into the shadows and snuck away from him.

Notable out the back this morning was a crew of Mexicans pushing a giant mower-digger machine all around the edge of the property, where nice looking young surveyors had come by yesterday and put down stakes.

The surveyors hadn’t made hardly any noise except to belllow out ‘Good’ after a reading. These guys’ machine was making a lot of noise, a high pitched whine with frequent loud chokes as the machine ate the large things it passed over and thru. They were clearing a line for the silt fence and cutting an eight inch trench into the ground at the same time. Ten feet this side of the property line, right between her trees.

Velha watched bewildered as they pushed the machine thru the space between her trees, running the fence just this side of her big pecan and another, smaller tree that was beginning to fill out nicely. A short swarthy man in a white t-shirt came along with metal rods that he pounded into the trench with a big mallet. Another little guy in white came along with a roll of black netting and laid it along the rods. Another little guy in a white t-shirt came along unrolling a wire fence in front of that. Velha wan’t sure it wasn’t the same guy, and had to keep checking. Last was a tall, thin as a rail and really young guy, his white t-shirt hanging off his bones, coming along with pins to fasten the net.

Velha watched their progress with annoyance. She was busy pouring over websites that sold medicinal plants, going through online catalogs and taking notes. Drooling over plants she wanted to try in the sunny new soon-to-be-part of the yard. Their progress distracted her. What she was doing was important.

For some reason lost to the mists of time, the alley behind their houses didn’t go all the way thru from Maine to Cyde Street. Years ago the owner of the corner house put up a fence and built his own entrance up a steep hill, and now the alley started at Maine Street, behaved itself until Maggie’s, and then curved thru the other back yards, and ran out in the middle of Velha’s yard. There were trees down the back, and gravel behind the house. But it could be beautiful.

Since before they bought the house, the back yard had been mostly used as a parking lot, and was inches deep in gravel and stained with ancient car fluids. But not for long. She rubbed her hands in anticipation. Practically the only part of her back yard that got any sun at all, wasted for 60 years. It had always bothered her that the driveway got more sun than the rest of her yard, and now this realization left her weak with excitement.

It was going to break her back to rake off the gravel and prepare the soil for plants. She thought greedily of the million and one flowering things that love sunshine even in the South, and contrasted it with what she’d always had – mostly leafy plants that thrive in the deep shade of a house surrounded by 110-year old trees.

She was coming into hundreds of square feet of what amounted to full sun. She was so excited she could hardly contain herself. She went off to find Altman to help relieve the stress.

At various times thru the morning, she stood at the back window drawing charts of the patterns of sun and shade passing thru her back yard. She was studying the patterns patterns. It surprised her to realize that she’d never done this in all the years she’d lived there. Her backyard had been a source of sadness to her, wasted space that she ignored and forgot. She had a chance to take back the whole area now that they were moving the alley to the back of the properties, where the map said it ran.

The kids were gone now. Nobody parked back there anymore. There was nothing to stop them from turning it into a proper garden except the sheer effort it was going to take. Maybe she should hire Thing Two for the hard stuff. she was getting too old for tat kind of work. And she didn’t want Altman working in the hot sun. But she’d have to watch over Thing Two like a hawk, and she couldn’t pay him a penny until the job was done. Something as simple as raking he might be able to handle; maybe a little tilling. He’s not touching anything he can kill, she promised herself.

She decided to tell Forman that he needed to remind the bulldozer guy that it was her tree, and he shouldn’t be thinking it was their tree. As she stalked over to the construction trailer she wondered if she shouldn’t have a word with the bulldozer guy herself. In paranoid moments she wondered if they were planning to take her tree down anyway and just not tell her.

‘You’re not going to take my tree down,’ she stated with the barest question in her voice. She felt cold standing in the air conditioned trailer.

To Forman she sounded like his mother. ‘No m’am,’ he assured her. ‘I like that tree.’ The all liked it. It was shade on a construction site, and everybody knows the value of that. It was, however, inconvenient, being on their side of the silt fence like it was. It would have been better to have an easement that was clear, but there were ordinances about tree removal.

A big flatbed semi came rumbling to a stop out front of their house. She saw it thru the living room window as she was getting more coffee – a big blue tractor-trailer driven by a big burly guy, then nothing, as the flatbed passed beneath her vision, and then a huge yellow arm folded up and a huge bubble cab on treads, then nothing. It was like a circus parade past her house. It was some yellow elephant, or giant spider, coming to play in her back yard. They rolled it off the flatbed in the middle of the ex field.

A Cat, it said so on the side. Designed by someone who was good in 2-D. The sides and corners were angled rather than tapered, the whole thing looked squashed and ungainly. She looked it up.

The guy who drove the spider shovel walked out to his excavator wearing a white cowboy hat. He climbed in with assurance and powered it up, and then blew his rap by fucking up on the controls. The machine lurched forward, and the guy did slow donuts around the lot while he concentrated on a survey of the switches and levers.

He stopped suddenly, and the cab gave a great lurch that sent the arm whanging to the ground. He stopped and extended the arm with a jerk, and then somehow got the jaws of the shovel opening and closing rapidly. It took several minutes of jaw snapping to figure out how turn it off.. Unless the guy was really sitting in there making the damn thing chew.

The clangs were deafening even across the hundred and fifty feet of yard separating them. Only a hundred and fifty feet. Velha looked up into the canopy of her back yard, and imagined a parking deck peeking thru gaps in the leaves. And oh the joy of truck deliveries. She resumed her study of fast-growing trees on the net. She even entertained thoughts of bamboo.

She watched the guy manoeuver the crane and shovel. The learning curve on one of those machines must be staggering, Velha thought. There’s like eight different levers and a bunch of buttons and switches and dials. She’d soon know for sure because she and Altman would go out and inspect it thoroughly, later.

The guy was extending and retracting the arm the next time she looked up from her work. Every now and then he grabbed the stick and swivelled the cab 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 A/C on, playing the Allmans and nipping from 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 apparent expertise. He was up on the hill, treads parallel, but the spiderlike body loomed over the side and the arm reached out to claw at the dirt side, over and over, without actually taking any dirt. 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 the claw, and then raised the arm and lowered it and pounded the slab twenty or thirty times before taking a break. Each impact travelled thru the earth to Velha’s house and made the dishes rattle in the cabinets.

All day it was like that. Sickening crunches, shattering limbs, cracking logs. Breaking rocks. Once in awhile a really big thump set the jars clinking, until Velha got up on top of the cupbourd and separated them, muttering all the while.

She got so nervous when the house shook. Whenever the ground wasn’t steady under her she freaked out. Riding the roller coaster would be like going to hell. Riding a bike was out of the question. Even climbing up on the stool to stop the jars clinking gave her vertigo. She even went barefoot most of the year, in order to keep in maximum contact with the ground. Maybe her connection to life energy was so fragile that she had to take extreme measures, when normal people have energy to spare. Maybe she was just weird. And how did she come to be such an old breakable thing?

The old lady tried to express her anxiety to Forman when they went out on their after-lunch dog walk. He was back to hanging out in his truck. 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 the edge, a monster drink cup in danger below.

He was anxious himself. He kept reaching up to scratch his bald head. Velha started asking for assurances that they knew what they were doing when they put the silt fence between her trees instead of in front of them.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He told them how far behind schedule he was, and then berated the electrician who came out to fix the A/C and didn’t have the pieces, and had to go over to Home Depot and pay retail. Then he launched into a complaint about the engineers and the wisdom of hooking up new 24″ pipes to existing 18″ pipes down at Maine Street. He cursed the civil engineer who drew up the plans without ever visiting the site.

Somewhere in his manner Velha got the assurance she was seeking, that he was aware of the sloppy ways of the bulldozer guy, that even tho the guy was in fact an idiot, he was under control. They knew what they were doing, they respected how important the trees were. Everything will be alright, don’t worry your little head about it.

After lunch, when the bosses went to Daddy D’s, a barbeque joynt, and the Mexicans reclined under the shade of her trees eating from their lunchboxes, they went back to clearing ex branches and roots, digging holes and filling dumpsters with block and debris and even a little dirt from what looked like exploratory holes. She wondered about the aimless digging. Still getting in touch with his inner Tonka?

Finally, it made sense. They were being random on purpose. They struck a storage tank. Oddly, when they spoke to Forman later, it turned out that it was one of the storage tanks some company was paid to come out and dig up and dispose of, last year. They’d filled it with sand and left it there. If they’d reported it to the company, they’d neglected to tell him, and he was red-faced and agitated when they saw him on their dog walk. They’d never seen anybody digging up anything back there, but they didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so they didn’t say anything.

Velha was up at 7:15 the next morning, with the first cough of the excavator. She glimpsed it thru mostly closed eyes as she bumped her way to the bathroom. They’d found two other storage tanks after that first one yesterday. Already the big yellow spider thing was digging up a bunch of dirt and making a hill with it in the middle of the ex field. Dumptrucks were lining up on the property and the bulldozer was shoveling in branches, concrete chunks, dirt, and the trash accumulated on the site over the past thirty years.

As she sat in the bathroom yawning, she thought of what the neighborhood was like in the ’70s, when they first moved here. She remembered a time when prosperity was supposed to last forever but instead they had stagflation. The gas crisis. Vietnam. Work was hard to come by but rents were low. Everybody was just getting by. Life seemed slower then. She remembered the bicentennial celebrations and Jimmy Carter. She and Altman were raising their kids in a city full of desperately poor people, in neighborhoods around the center of the city that had been abandoned by those who could afford to leave. Most of them were paying rent, their neighborhoods were redlined by the banks so they couldn’t get a mortgage. The houses sat there and deteriorated.

Those ex buildings on the construction site – the gas station, the warehouse – they were barely getting by in those days. Nothing coming in or going out. The men sat around all day in the heat because there was no option. There was nothing to do, and it was too hot to get out there and hustle, and wasn’t nothing going on but the rent anyhow.

Velha went back to bed. But it was unsucessful because of the banging and creaking and that damned beep beep beep. So she sat up and had a cup of coffee with Altman, who was on his second and impatient to tell her his dreams. Which were weird, with nervous voices shouting in confusion from the underworld.

She sipped her coffee and snuggled closer. ‘I’m worried about the trees. Those construction guys are so careless.’

‘I spoke with them last night.’

She knew he wasn’t talking about the construction guys. Or another dream. He’d been journeying. ‘Is it a full moon?’ she asked mildly.

‘They’re afraid. They expect us to protect them.’

‘I need to confront Forman about the damage,’ she said, wishing he would offer to do it for her. Lately she’d been reluctant to go out in public, to do anything around other people. Velha resolved to speak to Forman about it hersef. To gather her courage and demand attention. Why was she reluctant to speak, to challenge authority? Some idea drummed into her at an early age – people in charge mustn’t feel threatened, don’t question authority. She knew that when she was younger she would have fought that idea to the death, but these days she didn’t have the energy. She felt like a coward at heart. She avoided confrontation and insisted she’d rather use indirect methods. ‘I’m working up a spell of protection. When’s full moon?’

‘Tomorrow.’ This answer frustrated her. She wanted to know the very minute, but he knew she would forget it in five minutes, and besides, he had an instinctive sense of timing where she relied on precision. She’d draw up an horary chart later.

They drank their coffee for a few minutes. ‘The foxgloves are in bloom, I must collect them soon.’ She thought about harvesting, tying into bundles and drying at the peak of flowering. Not that she had a need for digitalis. And she couldn’t in good conscience sell it to the health food store, because the city was a polluted place, and her plants were peed on by hundreds of dogs a week. So she triple washed it and turned it into concoctions along with all the other things in her garden. It was one of her ongoing passions, plant pharmacology. It was one of the things she had in common with Thing Two.

The old man rubbed his skull. ‘I remember how you hung them upside down in the kitchen last year.’

‘I was thinking about that. Maybe I should dry them in the spare room, over the washing machine?’ He looked at her. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘the back hall. Fine.’ Velha sighed. ‘You know, I wish there were some way to just stop all this destruction, the noise all day long, the house shaking. I think I’m seeing cracks in the plaster. I don’t know if i can take it.’

‘Well, it’s not too late to stop it.’

‘It’s too late for public hearings. We’d have to sue them to get them to stop.’ She began thinking of all the grounds for lawsuit.

‘Sabotage.’

‘Oh. You mean stop it stop it.’

‘What if they found something unexpected, something that’d make them call everything to a halt for weeks. They’d have to get in experts to painstakingly investigate it.’

‘CSI Hardhat.’

‘Something totally out there, like evidence of an earlier civilization. Something so they’ll have to abandon the project and build a museum right there.’

‘What, are you going to conjure a gravesite?’

‘I thought I’d use my Incan statues as a starting point for something.’

‘How is this going to stop the project, anyway?’

‘Maybe we can somehow cause them to dry up and disappear. You know, magic.’

‘They’ll just give up and go away.’

‘We could slow them down considerably.’

‘What about ethics?’

He paused. ‘Wiseman’s Handbook says it’s not good to wish bad things on anyone. Curses and evil spells are to be avoided at all costs. Simply wish that they get what they want and leave you alone, or if you’re the unforgiving type, that they get what they deserve.’

‘But I just want to kill someone for damaging my trees.’

‘I notice you’re pretty mild when it comes to expressing that, say, to Forman.’

‘I don’t want to bother him with things that look foundless when I’m standing there talking to him.’

‘Hmm. So your reasons for wanting to sabotage the construction are what?’

She thought. ‘Because they’re stupid and lazy and sloppy and don’t respect living things, and I’m opposed to everything they stand for. Wiping out what is already there and putting up cheap substandard atrocities for profit is a heinous crime that should be punished.’

‘Wow, you need your sleep, don’t you? How about if instead of raping the land they’re making it possible for hundreds of people to call our neighborhood their home, our wonderful peaceful part of the old city? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?’

‘I guess I’m just mourning the loss of the vacant lot. It was like it was mine.’

‘But look at all the space you’ll get for your garden once they move the driveway.’

He looked at her and traced a finger along her thigh. ‘Are you ready for our morning exercises?’ She smiled at him and swung out of bed. She sat cross legged on the rug in front of the floor-length mirror, waiting for him.

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.