Solomon's Oak (24 page)

Glory said, “It’s called ‘I’m That Sparrow,’ by Chaz Bosarge. Lorna sang it at my husband’s memorial service.”

Some songs invited dancing, others clogging. The song Lorna belted out demanded a witness. By the end, Joseph was too choked up to look Glory in the face.

She touched his arm. “I’m sorry my sister called you Senor Gardener. I’d say she means well if it were true, but I don’t think that’s the case. If it helps, you dancing with me will have her digesting her pancreas for months. And thanks for what you said about Juniper. You see things in her I don’t, at least not yet. She admires your pictures, and there isn’t much she does admire. Any chance you might give her a photography lesson sometime?”

“It would have to be soon. I’m out of here in April.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

He found his composure before he looked at her. “My cabin. As soon as the rainy season ends, they’re taking a bulldozer to it.”

“That’s criminal.”

“Nah, it’s inevitable. Place is falling down anyway.”

“And you’re all right with it?”

“What else can I be?”

“Right.” She hesitated a minute. “Look, I don’t mean to sound crass, but if there’s anything there you might be willing to part with, like old floorboards, cupboards, or an old woodstove, I’d love to buy them from you. I’m trying to fix up my barn for parties.”

“Sure. Come by after Christmas. Tell Juniper I’ll give her a camera lesson if she keeps out of trouble.”

“Joseph,” Glory said before she gathered her family to go, “are you ever going to cash the check I sent you?”

He smiled. “Outlook doubtful.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “Merry Christmas.”

She left him standing there. He watched the family make their way across the parking lot, Halle’s spiky heels tap-tapping like a woodpecker.

Lorna stood next to him not two minutes later. She marched him over to a picnic table. “That one is off-limits, José.”

“Why?”

“I never saw two people more in love with each other than Glory and Dan. Her sorrow runs deep and she’s vulnerable. Take advantage of her and I’ll shave off your eyebrows.”

“Just so you know, she asked me to dance.”

She tsked. “I am going to tell you something you don’t know about Glory Beatrice Smith Solomon. She is blind to that jealous sister of hers. I swear, Halle is so envious of what Glory had with Dan that when she chews gum, her teeth squeak. No trips to Europe or diamond wristwatches can make that go away. Glory, bless her heart, confuses her sister’s remarks with disapproval. No matter how many times I tell her Halle’s jealous, she doesn’t hear me. And that Halle! Bosses that poor husband of hers around so much, you watch, someday she’s going to lose him. I ought to know. I have sisters and ex-brothers-in-law coming out of my cornucopia.”

“Glory’s fortunate to have you as her friend.”

Lorna straightened Joseph’s jacket. “Are you going to push her into something she isn’t ready for, such as your bed?”

“Furthest thing from my mind.”

“Tread carefully, Joe Camera. I may be a
vieja
, but I can
vapulear a alguien
as good as the next person.”

He had no doubt that she could kick his ass. “
No te preocupes
, not to worry. I’m headed back to New Mexico. I have nothing to keep me here.”

Lorna laughed. “How the heck can you be Penny’s grandson and so seriously deluded? You’re not going anywhere. You’ve just arrived.
Feliz Navidad
, Joseph.”

“
Y próspero año
to you, Lorna. You sang the
culo
off that song.”

“I sure did, didn’t I?” She walked away.

Just before Joseph got out of bed on Christmas morning, he experienced a brief glittery moment when he wondered if during the night he’d crossed from the mortal coil to the hereafter. Until he moved his body, the pain was absent. He could pretend the shooting never happened. Though this phenomenon had occurred enough times for him to no longer be surprised by it, he still expected that when he opened his eyes, he’d see Rico sitting on the foot of his hospital bed.
Hey, amigo
, he’d say.
Some people will do anything to get out of work.

The last time he’d seen his friend, Joseph lay on a hospital gurney hooked up to three IVs and a heart and blood-pressure monitor. All around him piles of bloody gauze turned from bright red blood into mulberry dark stains. Rico had been examined, treated, and released. He had a through-and-through in his biceps and a grazing flesh wound from a bullet that had glanced off a rib in the lower left quadrant of his belly that was pronounced “superficial” and covered with a large Band-Aid. He patted his shirt pocket where he’d tucked his prescription for antibiotics. “Joe, all I have to do is flex my arm and show this bad-boy scar. Fidela will swoon at my bravery, make my favorite dinner, let me have the television remote, and later, when the boys are asleep?” Rico clicked his tongue. “You, on the other hand, will have to take off your shirt, turn over, and explain your injury. Women don’t have that kind of patience anymore.”

“What do I care?” Joseph remembered saying as he floated in and out of the drug-induced state that kept him free of pain until he was rolled into the OR. “After Isabel, I’m off women.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do so.”

Rico laughed. “Isabel would have made a terrible old lady. That is how you find the perfect woman. You look at her and think, fifty years from now she is making you a tuna fish sandwich and begging you to take her to Sandia Casino. If that makes you smile, you have found your soul mate. Someday soon you’re going to need that heart, buddy. Tell them to fix it, too, while you’re under the knife.”

The orderly arrived and pulled up the side of Joseph’s bed until it locked. He knew it was serious when they did not remove the board from the paramedics’ gurney. His neck was immobilized in one of those collars that reminded him of his high school football uniform. They only wanted to move him once, transferring him to the OR table.

The surgeon hadn’t said much. “Son, I will get you through this surgery, but I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Your chances of walking are optimistically twenty-five percent.”

Joseph recognized the accent, Texas Hill Country. With surgeons and airplane pilots, you wanted a fearless Texan in charge. “I don’t want to be Christopher Reeve. Something like that happens, accidentally shut off a machine.”

“You have an advance directive?”

“No, sir. But I’ll sign one now.”

“Doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid.” The surgeon plunged a syringe into the IV tubing, and a small amount of clear liquid made Joseph’s head swim. The surgeon called out to the techs standing by, “Fentanyl on board. Let’s roll. Guess I’m going to have to save your life. I’ll do my best with your legs.” He turned to Rico. “You family?”

“I am. How long will the surgery take?”

“However long it takes. Give the nurse your name and phone number and we’ll call you as soon as he’s in recovery.”

“Go home,” Joseph told Rico. News cameras were trying to angle their way into the ER, and too many people were rushing around as it was. “Go kiss your wife and show the boys your war wounds.”

“Nah, I’m staying. I want to be the first person you see when you wake up.
Hasta la vista
,
compañero!
”

See you later, partner. As if Rico considered their bond intact.

At discharge Rico had been ordered to see his family doctor in a week. They gave him his X-rays in a manila envelope. Any shooting put a cop on desk duty for a while, but Joseph knew Rico would find a way around that.

Joseph’s surgery lasted four hours. The bullets were delicately removed and saved in a plastic evidence baggie. He was put into traction and parked in the ICU until he stabilized. The first two days post-op passed in a blur—he remembered his mother’s face, the priest she dragged into the room to pray over him, his co-workers allowed in for a few minutes every hour. Joseph concentrated on moving his toes when ordered to, though he wasn’t always sure he succeeded. Every time the doctors ran the tuning fork over his soles and whispered to each other, Joseph pictured Grandma Penny’s cabin by the lake. Blue water. Horsetails. Pollywogs. The feel of the wind, the lap of the water.

When his head had cleared enough for him to become aware of his surroundings, three of his cop friends and the captain came into his room with the look on their faces that meant they’d been waiting to tell him the terrible part.

Joseph swore under his breath. “Tell me everything,” he said. “I have to know.”

Christmas morning and no
canciónes
, no Christmas carols or hymns. Joseph moved his legs and the pain bracketed his spine like the metal teeth on an animal trap. He sat up, waited for things to adjust, then hobbled into the kitchen to nuke a bowl of instant oatmeal so he could take his pain pill. In exactly forty-one minutes, the time it took to fully kick in, he called his parents. “Happy Christmas, Mami,” he said when she answered.

She started crying and handed the phone to his father, who said, “Your mother misses you,” which was code for when are you coming home? This foolish idea of staying in a falling-down cabin all winter with no heat? Bah.

Feliz Navidad
.

Ya’at’eeh Keshmish.

Merry Christmas.

Good-bye.

He didn’t want to make the call, but it would be cowardly not to call Fidela on Christmas Day. He pressed the speed-dial number for his friend, wishing for the millionth time Rico would answer.

In Albuquerque, if you left your tree at the curb with trash, the city would pick it up for a few bucks. The collected trees were ground up, made into mulch, free for the taking. Maybe the newly elected governor, Schwarzenegger, didn’t have the budget, because in the weeks after Christmas, in Joseph’s daily meanderings from the Butterfly Creek to the Woodpecker to the Chevron station, he saw tree after tree tossed into what had formerly been an open meadow, a farmer’s field, the beginning to the oak forest where he’d saved Juniper and received a ration for it. After the fifth tree, he stopped, took out his camera, and began taking pictures. Some still had tinsel on their branches. One was strung with lights and had a few broken bulbs. When possible, he propped them up, but mostly he photographed them as they lay, symbols of America’s favorite holiday, abandoned. Why cut down a tree to throw it away?

OFFBEAT WEDDINGS INCREASINGLY POPULAR

Los Angeles Times—January 5, 2004

When Central Coast carpenter Dan Solomon died unexpectedly last year, his widow, Glory, faced surmounting hospital bills in addition to their mortgage. Her passion for rehabilitating death-row dogs and finding them families looked as if it might have to end.

The Solomons’ ranch is known for the unusual tree growing there. Specifically, a white oak, the only one in the state, estimated by UCSC horticulture professor Jane Frederick-Collins to be two hundred plus years old.

Last October a visitor knocked on Mrs. Solomon’s door with an unusual request. Would she permit a band of modern-day pirates to use the chapel on her property for their wedding ceremony?

The stone-and-oak chapel her husband built on a whim has quickly become a coveted locale for couples planning unconventional nuptials. …

Joseph studied the picture accompanying the article. The photographer had imposed a tic-tac-toe grid over the shot, dividing it into nine squares. Where the lines met were the “points of interest.” He had posed Glory just right of center. Behind her, the chapel, slightly out of focus, looked like a scene from a fairy tale. Her long silver hair lay across her shoulders. The story this photograph told was this: You cannot own this magical place, but you can rent it, make memories, and take them with you when you go on home.

“What’ll it be today?” Katie Jay asked Joseph.

“Tuna sandwich, please.”

“Excuse me while I get my nitroglycerin.”

When the rain let up, Joseph drove to the Chevron station and gassed up his car. At the market, he grocery-shopped for paper towels, toilet tissue, a six-pack of Coke, and birdseed. Two hours from sunset, he headed to the Solomon Ranch intent on photographing the damn oak tree once and for all. He parked his car by the house and knocked on the front door. No one answered, but the dogs started barking. Maybe Glory was in the barn. Around back of the house, a few brave chickens doddered in the rain, but most of them were in the coop staying dry, and who could blame them. The two horses he’d seen on Christmas Eve when he escorted Juniper home crowded the fence, hoping for handouts, and he wished he had apples. The little brown dog in his kennel sat on top of his doghouse, howling as if rain falling meant the end of the world. “If you don’t want to get wet, go inside,” he said.

The dog only barked louder. He was pretty worked up.