A Town of Empty Rooms (14 page)

One afternoon, he waved to her. “Can you spare a moment?”

He was artfully posed with a hammer against his hip.

“Well, Miss Serena,” he said. “I've been wanting to ask you a favor.” He pointed to the tall, grand pine standing in her yard. “Take a look at your tree.”

She looked up at the pine tree towering into the blue sky. It reminded her of a tree that had grown in her parents' backyard — that was not a pine, but a tall, strange palm that swung over their own small stucco house — that tree, too, had been startling in its grandeur. Sometimes now, in the evenings, she came outside and sat under the pine tree, looked up at the way its branches stretched out against the dark sky. They had a small, broken house, but that tree rose and rose out of the sparse grass of the yard, perhaps fifty feet high into the white morning mist.

“What about it?” she asked.

“It's leaning. During a hurricane, it could fall on my shed. Smash it.”

She stepped back and examined the tree, its green needles hard against the bright blue air. The tree shot up into the sky, perfectly straight.

“I don't think it will,” she said, slowly.

“You need to cut it down,” he said.

An insistence in his voice, an assumption that she should listen and obey him, made her mind slam shut. She tried the folksy, wheedling tone he had assumed a moment before. “Mister Forrest, sir, it looks like a nice tree to me.”

He was not fooled. In fact, this attempt at banter galled him; he knew what she was doing.

“I don't want to say this, but — ” he laughed.

“What?”

“Y'all want to destroy my shed,” he said, in an almost cheerful voice.

“No, I don't,” she said. “I really don't.”

The air suddenly was perfectly clear, the sky a deeper, closer blue, and Forrest himself so precise and white-haired he resembled a doll. Her heart began to march.

“Why,” she asked, trembling, “would I want to destroy your shed?”

“You tell me,” he said. “
You
tell
me
why you don't want to think about me. This is my shed. I worked on it for months. Years. It cost me almost nothing. You don't know what the hurricanes do here.”

She took a deep breath. She walked over to the tree and banged it with her hand. Then she faced him. “I'm not cutting down the tree,” she said.

He blinked and stepped back from the fence. She was aware that it was a flimsy wire fence, no protection against anything.

“Well,” he said, and reddened. “Well, Miss Serena. Are you sure about this?”

She paused. “I'm not cutting it down,” she said.

“Then I'm sorry to say that you just lost the best neighbor you ever had.”

These words had the ringing, solemn tone of a statement that had been made before.

“What?” she asked, stepping back.

“You don't care about my property. You want to see it smashed. Ruined! Gone!”

“I do not!” she said. Her hands were shaking; he saw this and smiled.

“Then cut it down,” he said. He looked more animated than she had ever seen him. It was as though he had deciphered the nature of humanity — that everyone was out to take down his shed, and then him — and he had finally found some clarity! “Until you can do that, stay away. Keep the kids off my property.” He snapped his fingers at his dogs. They looked up and barked, as though they were aware of a sound neither of the humans could hear.

“Come on, boys,” he said, sweetly, to his dogs. He turned around and went into his house.

 

 

 

 

SHE HELD THE DISCUSSION IN her head the rest of the day, reliving it over and over, a banal, hopeless type of rehearsing — it was as though Forrest would utter something new in it the fifteenth time she went over it, or she would have figured out the right thing to say, or she would shoot him down with the perfectly phrased retort that would make him step back and say, “Yes, what was I thinking? Leave the tree alone.” Perhaps she could have been calm or jokey or beguiling or authoritative or anything else, but she could not decide upon any other way she could have responded. She didn't know what made him so mad about it. But she did not want to cut down the tree.

She knew what Dan would say when she told him, and so announced it quickly, almost blasé, when he was brushing his teeth — by the way, Forrest had told her they were not on speaking terms and they were supposed to stay off his property.

He dropped his toothbrush. “No. He didn't say that.”

“Yes, in fact, he did.”

“Was he kidding?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He blinked; he looked bereft for a moment, as though his careful
idea that everything could work out, everything could be simple, was ruined.

“What did you do?” he asked. “Maybe he's right. Maybe it could fall on them and then — ”

“The tree's fine. Look at it. Something else is going on. I don't know what — ”

“I'll tell him we'll think about it.”

“But we're not going to — ”

He stood, staring at the curved porcelain basin. He seemed to be contemplating something deep; then he said, in a flat, knifelike voice, “What if this gets Zeb kicked out of Scouts?”

“Why should this get us kicked out of anything?”

“This is not how you deal with people,” he said crisply. “We have to fix this now.”

The next morning, he went to talk to Forrest. He came back a little pale. “He said he made a nice and friendly request and that down here people think about each other.”

“Really? They do that? Cut down trees for no reason?”

They looked at each other.

“We need to do the right thing,” he said.

The houses sat side by side across the wire fence; she told the children that they should keep a distance from Forrest. “Let's not go over to his house anymore,” she said. “He's in a bad, uh, mood.” They had seen the discussion, the fragility of the adult masks in the chilled fall afternoon; now they were interested in knowing the precise boundaries of engagement.

“But he's nice at Scouts,” said Zeb.

“Well, I bet he will be nice there. Just be careful.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast cereal, and she was telling them that another human was dangerous; they nodded and absorbed this, and it was suddenly deeply sad.

Whenever Serena went into the backyard, whenever she backed the car out of the driveway, the two muscular, wolflike Akitas began to bark. They pressed up against the low wire fence, their mouths wet and black. “Shh,” she said to the dogs, trying to soothe them, even once
secretly slipping them a piece of bologna, but they continued, and she saw Forrest Sanders in his shed, chopping some wood, letting them.

She looked up articles on the Internet —
How do you tell if a tree might fall?
She printed out photos of trees that appeared dangerous, none of which resembled the pine, and left them in his mailbox. Zeb tried to make friends with the dogs. “Here, boy,” he said, approaching them, absurdly, beautifully hopeful. He tried to whistle, a low, moist breath. The dogs stood up, paws on the fence, their barks puncturing the air. Rachel ran away from them, her hands over her ears. Worried they would hurt her flowers, the girl spread Kleenex over some of them so that they would not hear.

At the Scout meetings, Forrest's enthusiasm for the other scouts' achievements seemed to be knocked up a notch. “Would you all believe that Carson McNulty collected eighteen different leaves on his nature walk last week! Let's all give him a big hand!” She believed that he was taking a circuitous route in the church social hall, walking a wide circle away from them, with Dan following him, carrying various ceremonial doodads. During a meeting, Forrest posed in his beige uniform, pale and worn out over the years but lavishly adorned with badges. He walked grandly through the expanse of boys, as though they were awaiting his opinions on their projects, badge progress, necktie knots. In actuality, Serena noticed, the boys and fathers did not really talk to him; they nodded and smiled when he came by, and occasionally asked him questions from the Cub Handbook, but they were all involved in their own projects, and the conversations quickly melted away. Forrest was trying — he thrust himself into conversation after conversation, with plenty of backslapping and high-fives to the boys. She watched him circle the room, and in his walk there was the floating intensity of a hawk, a bright hunger in his eyes. He smiled at Zeb at the meetings, and he gave extensive instructions to Dan, who was helping to organize the loud, chaotic pack of boys, but Forrest did not acknowledge her at all.

IT WAS A PURE, GLORIOUS day in mid-October, and Serena watched Zeb and Rachel toss rocks toward the pine tree. Each rock flew through the air and chipped off a small piece of bark. They had the cavalier, crooked aim of small children. The rocks were small. They flew toward the tree. One. Two.

A rock flew over to Forrest's side of the fence.

The three of them stood and watched the rock slowly arc through the air.

“Oh, no,” Rachel said with an utter calm, as though she had predicted this all along.

The rock flew through the blue sky and fell into Forrest's bed of Gerbera daisies.

Serena hoped, for a moment, that he had not seen anything, but that was absurd. That was his job, to notice and address injury done to him. He was hammering away at his shed but had taken note of everything — the way the child threw the rock, the speed with which it tumbled through the air, the spot where it landed. She thought she heard him cough, and then she thought she saw him nod at the dogs.

Did he nod at the dogs? Or did he just look at them? What did they sense from him, so that they felt suddenly unrestrained? In a single, floating leap, they were over the fence.

 

 

 

SERENA COULD SMELL THE DOGS. They smelled dark and wet, and one of them bounded toward Zeb. She heard a high-pitched shriek from Zeb; he was trying to run, a spastic crooked run, and the dog ran around him, its tail whipping against his arm, and then ran off. She lunged toward Zeb, grabbed him by the hand, and hoisted Rachel under her armpit, like a football, and ran to the house. The dogs were barking, as though they were shouting, the sound so loud she could feel it vibrate in her throat, and she felt wetness, a dog's tongue, on the backs of her legs. “Stop,” she called to them, but they did not. She heard the guttural growling in their throats, and Forrest did not call them. She and the children were at the door. She grabbed the knob, her hand
shaking, pushed the children inside, and shut the door. Forrest stood there, watching.

“Get your dogs!” she screamed.

He whistled. The dogs turned and leapt back onto his side of the yard.

She closed the door to the house, the children inside, and ran down to the fence. “What the hell was that?” she said.

“They were playing.”

“They were not.”

“How's Zeb going to get his animal care badge if you don't understand dogs?” He had his arm around a dog and was scratching its furry neck. He had a talent for making himself resemble a Hallmark portrait. “Man's best friend. Dogs play.”

“No. No.” She was shaking. “Tell the truth, Forrest. You wanted them to scare us.”

The dogs' tails bounced in the air; suddenly, they were transformed back into pets. She stepped away from the fence. He was petting his dog. It whimpered and rubbed against him.

“Dogs play,” he said, and went into his house.

 

 

 

SHE RETURNED, TREMBLING, TO HER house. The children's faces were damp with fear and a kind of outraged excitement. “They would have chewed off our legs first,” said Zeb. “After they ate them, they would eat our arms.”

“They would eat our heads,” said his sister.

They looked at her to check the validity of these statements; Serena took a breath. She cleared her throat a few times, pretending to cough, as she was afraid to hear how she would sound, and when she spoke, it was a cool voice, utterly false. “Enough,” said Serena. “We're fine. Let's go — get dinner. Let 's get out.”

She drove down the streets until the children shrieked with joy at the radiant yellow sign for Golden Corral's all-you-can-eat buffet. The expanse of food, the pretense of order, was calming. Everyone here
was just interested in shoveling as much fried okra or pot roast or corn bread as possible onto a plate. She was grateful for it, the feeling of distraction and abundance. Mostly, the children made repeated visits to the dessert buffet. The desserts were set out on glass shelves, lit up: brownies with icing dark and artificial as an oil slick, whipped cream rising in buoyant waves off the banana pudding.