Then came the trucks. They rolled in on a windy Saturday morning. There were three of them, white dump trucks with blue block letters: WATTS LANDSCAPING. Each had been loaded with sod and landscaping accessories, including a number of boulders and bags of what I found out later were decorative wood chips. A group of Mexican men, five in all, parked the trucks at sharp angles at Mr. Reuter’s house. They worked in an assembly-line sort of way between the trucks and the front lawn. Cars took care to move slowly past the equipment, which created a sort of barricade around the driveway and into the street. Some of the drivers even pulled over to investigate further the work that was being done.
The curiosity spread. As the hours passed, a fleet of neighbors emerged from their homes to witness the transformation of Mr. Reuter’s yard. My own parents, if they hadn’t been working, would have been among them. I imagine that some of the witnesses must have worried that the Mexicans, yelling their Spanish at each other between heaves, were moving in.
As for me, I chose to watch from my living room, parting the blinds with my fingers.
The next day, my parents left again for work, and — wouldn’t you know it? — the trees arrived. Three huge supplanted palm trees rolled in on the towed trailers of a new armada of white trucks followed by green-and-yellow John Deere machinery. This time, the news spread even more quickly, and neighbors and passersby came together in the street. Even I had to go outside to watch. People who had heard about the activity the day before also came, anticipating more action today. What you had then was a group of people from all over town, the largest assembly I’d seen of them, and yet the only sounds came from the machinery.
A John Deere drilled a hole within my circle for each tree. Another, with an extended mechanical arm, plucked one of the palms from its trailer bed and hinged it toward the hole. The machine tilted its pull on the tree until, slowly, accompanied by the eerie creaks of the pulley, the palm stood upright in the air. It hung there for a moment like a specter, swinging perilously in the wind, and the people beneath it had no choice but to fear and worship. Carefully, the machine lowered the bulbous root of the tree beneath the ground. This process was repeated twice more, and each time it happened, the crowd held its breath as the tree, like some monster, stood unaided for the first time. We half expected a roar from the trees, and when — as the workers began to hose down the bark — no roar came, we ourselves supplied it.
XIV. THE TALLEST TREES IN THE ANTELOPE VALLEY
They still own the record. The tallest of the three clocks in at over fifty feet. You can see them from the 14, if you’re riding through the high desert: Three pineapple tops watching over everyone on the east side of town.
I ended up telling my dad one night about my involvement in their planting. He came to me after I’d snapped at my mother, and asked very seriously why we weren’t so close as we’d been when I was younger. The question was a simple one, and he said it with this grainy, soft voice like I’d never heard. We were in my bedroom. I sat on my bed, and he’d chosen to sit on the carpet. It’s amazing how powerful that memory is for me, a grown man sitting on the floor, asking for something he felt was important. He wanted to understand why things had changed. I didn’t have my complicated Pester/Foster analyses at hand, so I just said, “I don’t know.” Then I felt as though I owed him something more, so I told him the story.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you your money.”
But he wasn’t listening. It wasn’t about the money.
XV. THE LAST TIME I SAW MR. REUTER
He’d lost his hair. I hardly recognized him. I saw him only for a moment — I was coming into the house late one night, much later than my curfew. I was expecting a fight when I got home. And before I turned from the sidewalk toward my door, a light came on across the street. Mr. Reuter stood on a short stepladder, arms shaking above his bald, bespectacled head, installing what I found out later to be a motion-sensor light on the rim of his garage. I’d been under the impression, like others, that maybe he’d moved away. It was a shock to see him bald — it was a shock to see him.
This was a couple of years after the trees had been planted. In that time, rumors had spread that Mr. Reuter was ill and had spent the last of his money creating a living barrier between his house and the rest of the town in an attempt to die in peace.
I crossed Comstock Avenue that night. It must have been January because you could see ice gathering over the windshields of parked cars. He stood on that stepladder and I didn’t want to startle him. From a short distance, standing barely in the driveway, I asked if he needed help.
MY UNCLE’S TENANT
My mother’s brother Gaspar owned a scattering of apartments and trailer parks in Los Angeles County. His drinking — vodka, mostly, from a bottle with an Armenian label I should’ve learned to read by now — brought out the gossip in him. At my sister’s engagement party, before she and Patrick called off the wedding, Uncle Gaspar cornered me and shared a story that took place at one of his trailer parks, the one in my hometown. “My tenant,” he said, “a long time back. More of an employee, actually. Name was Phil. Told me ev-uh-ree-thing.”
“I know Phil,” I said cheerfully. I was putting on that exaggerated enthusiasm you put on when someone you care about has had too much to drink and wants your attention for an unspecified amount of time. I said I knew Phil, but what I meant was this: When I was thirteen, this gangly white man who could pass for anything between twenty and forty occasionally accompanied Gaspar to my house. My uncle, who lived with all the other Armenians an hour away in Glendale, every now and then spent a weekend in the desert to check on his properties. Sundays he’d swing by our house on the way back to the city, and a few times — maybe a total of four or five Sunday evenings — he’d bring along this kid, this man, whose name I’d forgotten until my uncle breathed it, vodka-drenched, back into my life.
I began to remember how my uncle would sit on the floral sofa alongside my mother, and how Phil would settle into my father’s favorite red chair. As far as I can remember, my father and my sister were never home during one of these visits. It was always just the four of us, Phil and Gaspar and Mom and I, and all we did was talk and eat, eat and talk. One topic of discussion I remember was the unresolved election between Bush and Gore — Phil wanted to leave the country if one, I can’t remember which, came out the victor — which is how I knew these visits occurred when I was thirteen.
Phil’s baggy clothing underlined the gaunt, ghostly look he already had. He would shovel my mother’s cooking so belligerently into his bony face that he reminded me of a character in one of the novels I was reading at the time, a man who had been rescued many days after a shipwreck. As for me, my job was to get a fire going in the fireplace, and I’d kneel on the bricks, stuffing swaths of paper towels or newspaper or catalog pages into the nooks and crags of the logs. I’d strike a few matches until the fire finally caught and the smell of woodsmoke filled the house. I’d brush the soot from my pants and wash my hands. Then I’d collect my payment, a small dish of desserts my mother had baked and arranged for our guests — one or two honey-dripping pieces of rolled baklava, maybe, or a few powdered khurabia cookies — and sit on the hardwood floor, devouring the sweets and watching the fire I’d made consume everything and anything I allowed it to.
That Uncle Gaspar had forgotten I’d met Phil — on numerous occasions — didn’t surprise me. Those visits happened, after all, a long time ago. Plus, Gaspar had just tried to light the filtered end of his cigarette. I knew then he would tell me the truth. This far down the bottle, he couldn’t invent a story to save his life.