“With the truck. I took out the shrubs up by his house. And his mailbox.”
“No shit?”
“I got pissed,” Jack says. “I got a little pissed.”
“Well,” Butner says, holding his can out, “it’s about fucking time. You grew a pair. Congratulations.”
Jack sits there, congratulated, while Canavan pulls his rig—a fourteen-foot panel truck he bought from U-Haul and cut the back door off of, so it’s an open box with a trailer behind—back past the greenhouse, toward the pile of branches and limbs they chip once a month. Maybe he’s just here to make a point. He’s a free man: He can drive by the lot whenever he likes. The truck and trailer are both loaded with maple. He’s painted the truck dark green, hired a kid from Kinnett to logo the side. AN HONEST TREE, it says, in block letters. SERVICE is outlined, but not painted fully in. There’s a picture of a guy with a chainsaw next to that, and it’s a pretty good likeness. The arms are a little out of proportion, but it looks like Canavan. Canavan’s actual arms may be out of proportion. He says he didn’t mean for it to look like him, acts like it was some big screw-up, but Jack’s pretty sure he secretly likes it. Likes driving a truck around with a life-sized painting of himself on the side. He’s got his other trucks, new pickups and a flatbed, perfect condition—but he drives this thing most of the time. Jack and his bumperless dump truck, Canavan and his cut-up U-Haul. They’re the goddamned same person. Jack chews on which one of them he ought to hate more.
Canavan starts unloading the wood by himself. It looks like he might have as much as two cords, plus the branches. Jack can’t figure out why he wouldn’t have brought somebody with him to help. There’s no way he loaded all that alone. “I’m not going over there,” Butner says.
“Nobody’s asking you to.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
What Jack intends to do is just sit a while longer, get his bearings, and then he can give him a hand. He can apologize for the tomatoes. Tell him he’s got some replacement plants for him. Tell him the maple looks good. But not yet. Let him go for a while. He’s in a good rhythm, anyway, and pretty soon he’s got most of it off the trailer. There’s still more in the truck. He pulls a chainsaw out of the cab and starts in on some of the smaller branches, sizing them down for the chipper. The gas-oil smell of the engine drifts over.
“Maybe I should go help him,” Jack says.
“We covered this already,” says Butner. “Fucknut can cut every damn inch of it himself, as far as I’m concerned. It’s enough, him just fucking showing up here in the first place.” He looks around. “Hey, where’s the little man?”
Jack looks at the lineup of buckets, and Hen’s not there. He’s not at the hose spigot, and he’s not in the greenhouse. He’s not anywhere. Jack’s up and out of his chair, imagining, what, the sound of air brakes locking up out on the highway, Hen disappearing under the bumper of one of the medical supply trucks that drive up and down. Or drinking diesel out of the pump over at the Shell. And Beth will have been so right about him, about everything. She’ll make him explain it again and again to her:
No, we were just sitting there. Yes, I was watching him. I don’t know how.
She’ll make him explain it to everyone at the goddamn funeral.
And he’d just started speaking Spanish.
But Jack comes around the mulch bins and of course there he is, Hendrick, right there, because where the hell else would he be, except fine, unscathed, squatting at the foot of the cedar pile—he’s lining up long pieces of cedar, each at a ninety degree angle to the last, a staircase, a calculator, a Spanish-to-Hendrick dictionary. He’s choosing each piece carefully, examining it, touching it to his lips, then laying it in place. And he’s whispering. At first Jack can’t pick it up over the noise from Canavan’s chainsaw, but when he leans in, he recognizes it—it’s the lead to one of The Weather Channel storm retrospectives. A show about the history of weather. They’ve seen it twice this week. Hendrick chooses another piece, looks up, and says,
The remnants of Tropical Storm Allison march toward the city, dumping as much as thirty inches of rain in two days.
Jack’s heartbeat starts coming back down. He’s listening to the trucks on the highway headed east and west without having to run over his son to do it, so it takes him a few beats to register that there’s something else now, another something, a new thing wrong—that Butner’s yelling for him, that the chainsaw motor has stopped. He looks up, and across the yard Butner’s standing over Canavan, who’s on the ground in a pile of branches. Butner’s waving, yelling something Jack can’t hear. He picks Hendrick up and starts over there. Hen keeps right on through his litany. How much of this has he got memorized?
Let’s go to Jim Cantore in the Weather Center for a look back
, Hen says, over Jack’s shoulder.
Jim?
Probably all of it. He probably has the whole thing. As they get closer, Jack can see how much blood there is, and he starts to hurry.
Canavan has put the chainsaw all the way through his leg, Jack thinks at first. His jeans are soaked in blood and he’s sitting there in the leaves, both feet out in front of him. There is blood down in the dirt next to where he’s dropped the saw. Everything smells like sawdust and saw oil and sweat. He looks sick. His leg’s still attached. So not all the way through. His face is pale, and he’s not screaming, not grabbing at his leg, not doing much of anything. He’s staring at his truck, at the painting of himself there on the side. “Call an ambulance,” Butner says. Gently, almost. And that’s what Jack does. That’s certainly what’s called for here. He puts Hen down and pulls the phone out of his pocket. It’s the first time in his life he’s ever called 911. Hen’s staring at Canavan’s leg, whispering
At three-thirty a.m., the storm drains in the downtown neighborhood of Campus Reach fail. And at Mercy Hospital, nurse Gloria Arroyo prepares her patients for a possible move to higher ground.
He’s even got the intonations down. It takes five rings for anyone to pick up, and when they do, the line’s bad. Jack can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman on the other end. He can’t tell for sure if he’s even connected. He just starts saying his name and address. “Jack Lang,” he says. “Patriot Mulch & Tree, 7144 Highway 70, Whitsett.” He says that three times. Canavan looks like shit.
The phone goes perfectly clear, and the voice on the other end says, “Sir, what is the nature of your emergency?”
The nature of his emergency. Jack bites on the inside of his mouth. He says, “Somebody cut himself with a chainsaw. Terry Canavan. Somebody we work with.”
“Does anyone there know first aid?” asks the voice.
“I do, a little bit,” says Jack. “From Boy Scouts.” He feels absurd. He remembers learning how to carry somebody out of the woods, how to boil water to purify it. He remembers that if one kind of bear charges you, you’re supposed to throw yourself on the ground, and if it’s the other kind, you’re supposed to run. He doesn’t remember which is which. He remembers a kid at Scout Camp actually getting his eye poked out because he was running with a stick. Jack Lancaster. The kid who poked his eye out. The mothers must have loved that story.
“If you can put a clean cloth over the wound and elevate it, that would be great. Can you do that for me, sir?”
Jack says to Butner, “Can you put a clean cloth on it and elevate it?”
“Where the hell is a clean cloth?”
“Hang on,” Jack says to the 911 operator, and puts the phone on the ground. Hen picks it up and says, “Patriot Mulch & Tree.” Jack pulls Hen’s shirt off over his head. He gives it to Butner, who presses it against Canavan’s shin. Canavan wakes right up after that, comes out of his trance screaming and kicking at Butner with his good leg. Hen says into the phone, “At Bob Dunn Ford, We’re Dealin’.” Jack gets a log off the back of the truck, rolls it over to Canavan, and he and Butner elevate his leg. There is a lot of blood. A lot. Hen’s shirt soaks through. Hendrick says, “We’re the Little Cheaper Dealer.” A cartoon chick, the Little Cheaper, pops up on the screen during that ad, and Jack half-expects it to appear here, now, in the yard. Butner wipes his hands on his own jeans, on Canavan’s jeans. Canavan goes quiet again, lays back on the pile of branches, groans some. Jack wonders if he’s going to pass out. He takes the phone from Hendrick and says, “What if he passes out?”
“Try to keep him awake for me, sir, OK?”
“But what if he passes out?”
“Sir, just try to keep him awake, and somebody will be there in a few minutes. We’ve called fire and ambulance for you.”
“Nothing’s on fire,” Jack says.
“Sir, fire is generally our first responder.”
Butner’s got Canavan sitting back up, is behind him now and holding him, his arms around his chest. Hen’s squatting next to Canavan, shirtless, rocking, whispering. Things seem blurry. Jack stands there and holds his phone. Beth will find some way to make this his fault. The line goes bad again, and he takes a few steps in each direction to try to get it clear. The voice on the other end says, “Sir, they’re about five minutes out now, OK? Sir?” Then the line goes dead. Butner shifts behind Canavan some, trying to make him more comfortable, and blood spurts up and out of the gash in his shin. It hits the back of the trailer, the license plate, drips down. Butner gets up and takes his own shirt off, tears it into a long strip, ties it tightly around the cut. As he’s doing it, Jack sees bone, sees where the saw has cut well down into the bone, sees the stark white of it, and that does it for him: He turns around and vomits. Hendrick says, “Side effects may include nausea and diarrhea.”
He wipes his mouth off and stands up, tries to do something, to find something to do. He’s dizzy. Do something fatherly, he thinks. Act like you own the place. He pulls Hen back away from Canavan and Butner a little bit, runs over to the office, where they’ve got a first aid kit. He brings that and a bottle of water back, tries to hand the water to Canavan, who waves it off.
“You gotta drink,” Butner tells him, and opens the bottle, pours some water in Canavan’s mouth. He spits it back out again, but then motions for more. Butner pours, Canavan swallows. Jack tries not to look at Canavan’s leg, at the little pile of shirts soaked in blood. He opens up the first aid kit. There’s only ace bandages and gauze. Nothing that would really do anything more than what they’ve already done. He hands the gauze to Butner. “They said they’d be here in a minute,” he says.
Canavan says, “You called somebody?”
“I called 911,” Jack says, showing him the phone.
“Oh,” Canavan says. “OK.”
Butner puts the gauze on Canavan’s leg, and Jack takes one of the red tie-downs from Canavan’s trailer, hooks one end through Hendrick’s belt loop, starts tying him off. He doesn’t want to lose track of him again. “Listen,” Jack says, finishing the knot. “I’m sorry about your yard.”
“Don’t apologize for that,” Butner says.
“Why not?”
“His leg’s cut. He’s not dying. Get your shit together.”
“Thanks,” Canavan says.
“How’d you do it?” Jack asks him. “What happened?” It only now occurs to him that Butner might have done it, might have walked over here and taken the saw and sheared his leg right open. It is vaguely possible that Butner would be capable of something like that, Jack thinks.
He was always real quiet, a good employee.
“I’m not sure,” Canavan says. “I was cutting all this to length, and I guess the saw jumped on me. Should have been wearing guards. Stupid.”
“It could have happened to anybody,” Jack says.
“I was hurrying,” says Canavan. “That’s all. I’m sorry.”
“You’ll be OK,” Jack says.
“How much of this am I going to have to listen to?” Butner says. “You two should be clusterbombing each other’s houses. Instead you’re asking each other to dance. Fucking pussies.”
Jack wonders whether Beth’s at school or at Canavan’s house right now. Maybe she’s taking a bath. Or she’s at the grocery, buying a sweet little dinner for two. “I pulled some tomato plants for you,” he tells Canavan, because otherwise he’ll have to ask where Beth is. “From the greenhouse. I’ll drop them by.”
Canavan nods. He’s sweating pretty hard. “OK,” he says. “Thanks.”
Hendrick leans against the radius of the tie-down, playing with the circle it gives him. He’s making airplane noises, arms out, when the fire truck pulls into the lot, bouncing through the pot-holes. There’s no siren, but the lights are going. The driver hits the horn on his way in, and that about does it for Hendrick. This is enormously exciting. He starts turning in circles, gets himself tangled, and Jack spins him back in the other direction, wonders what the Spanish word for exciting is. Some of the firemen are off the truck before it stops. They take the whole scene over right away. Two of them know Butner. They talk with him while two more firemen look at the shirt tied around Canavan’s leg, hold fingers up in his face and ask him to tell them how many there are. He gets it right, mainly. Everything seems much more professional now. The firemen get him laid down on what looks like the kind of board that beach patrol lifeguards carry, and one of them pulls some bandages out of a big black first aid kit and ties a tourniquet around Canavan’s leg just under the knee. That same summer at Scout Camp, a kid tied a tourniquet around his penis and couldn’t get it undone, had to go to the infirmary to have the nurse do it. Hendrick spins himself into the tie-down again. One of the firefighters who’s talking to Butner says, “Is that kid on a leash?”
“No,” Butner says. “He’s autistic.”
“He’s what?”
“Like Ronnie Dorchester. Remember him? Tenth grade?”
“I think so,” the fireman says. He’s wearing his helmet backwards. He says, “Is he this guy’s?” He nods at Canavan.
“No. He’s his. The guy who owns the place.”
“Kid like presents?”
“Sometimes,” Butner says. “Depends.”
The fireman takes his helmet off and walks over to Hendrick, holds it out to him. Jack runs his tongue across his teeth: What’s possible here is that Hen takes it, and everything goes well. He could also launch into orbit, throw himself on the ground, scream for seven hours. The other firemen are still working on Canavan. Hen blinks a few times, takes the helmet, and stands still. He holds the helmet out in front of him. Then he puts it very gently on the ground. The fireman turns to Jack. “I’ll tell the chief it fell off the truck,” he says.