Tao is standing between the yard boy and Mrs. Wilson with an oleander flower in his mouth. It is pink. Tao’s hair is golden. His eyes are blue.
The yard boy removes the flower from the little boy’s mouth. “Poisonous,” the yard boy says.
“What is it!” Mrs. Wilson cries.
“Oleander,” the yard boy says.
“Cut it down, dig it out, get rid of it,” Mrs. Wilson cries. “My precious child!” She imagines Tao being kidnapped, held for an astronomical ransom by men with acne.
Mrs. Wilson goes into the house and makes herself a drink. The yard boy walks over to the oleander. The oleander trembles in the breeze. The yard boy stands in front of it for a few minutes, his clippers by his side.
Mrs. Wilson watches him from the house. She sips her drink and rubs the glass over her hot nipples. The ice clinks. The yard boy raises the clippers and spreads them wide. The bolt connecting the two shears breaks. He walks over to the house, over to where Mrs. Wilson stands behind glass doors. The house weighs a ton with the glass. The house’s architect was the South’s most important architect, Mrs. Wilson once told the yard boy. Everything he made was designed to give a sense of freedom and space. Everything was designed to give the occupants the impression of being outside. His object was to break down definitions, the consciousness of boundaries. Mrs. Wilson told the yard boy the architect was an idiot.
Behind the glass, Mrs. Wilson understands the difficulty. Behind Mrs. Wilson’s teeth is a tongue that tastes of bourbon.
“I’ll drive you downtown and we can get a new whatever,” she says. She is determined.
She and he and Tao get into Mrs. Wilson’s Mercedes SL350. Mrs. Wilson is a splendid driver. She has taken the Mercedes up to 130, she tells the yard boy. The engine stroked beautifully at 130, no sound of strain at all.
She drives past the beaches, over the causeways. She darts in and out of traffic with a fine sense of timing. Behind them, occasionally, old men in tiny cars jump the curb in fright. Mrs. Wilson glances at them in the rearview mirror, seeming neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. She puts her hand on the yard boy’s knee. She rubs his leg.
Tao scrambles from the back into the front seat. He gets on the other side of the yard boy. He bites him.
I am living in a spiritual junkyard, thinks the yard boy. I must make it into a simple room with one beautiful object.
Sweat runs down the yard boy’s spine. Tao is gobbling at his arm as though it is junket.
“What is going on!” yells Mrs. Wilson. She turns the Mercedes around in the middle of the highway. An ice-cream truck scatters a tinkle of music and a carton of Fudgsicles as it grinds to a stop. Mrs. Wilson is cuffing Tao as she speeds back home. Her shaven armpit rises and falls before the yard boy’s eyes.
“Save the oleander!” she yells at both of them. “What do I care!”
In the driveway she runs around to Tao’s side of the car and pinches the child’s nose. He opens his mouth. She grabs him by the hair and carries him suspended into the house.
The yard boy walks to his truck, gets in and drives off. The world is neither nest nor playground, the yard boy thinks.
—
The yard boy lies in his room thinking about his girlfriend.
Open up, give in, allow some space, sprinkle and pour, he thinks.
—
The yard boy is mowing the grass around Johnny Dakota’s swimming pool. Dakota is into heroin and intangible property. As he is working, the yard boy hears a big splash behind him. He looks into the swimming pool and sees a rock on the bottom of it. He finishes mowing the grass and then he gets a net and fishes the rock out. It is as big as his hand and gray, with bubbly streaks of iron and metal running through it. The yard boy thinks it is a meteorite. It would probably still be smoldering with heat had it not landed in the swimming pool.
It is interesting but not all that interesting. The possibility of its surviving the earth’s atmosphere is one-tenth of one percent. Other things are more interesting than this. Nevertheless, the yard boy shows it to Johnny Dakota, who might want to place it in a taped-up box in his house to prevent the air from corroding it.
Johnny Dakota looks up at the sky, then at the piece of space junk and then at the yard boy. He is a sleek, fit man. Only his eyes and his hands look old. His hands have deep ridges in them and smashed nails. He once told the yard boy that his mother had died from plucking a wild hair from her nose while vacationing in Calabria. His father had been felled by an incident in Chicago. The darkness is always near, he had told the yard boy.
Johnny Dakota usually takes his swim at this time of the morning. He is wearing his swim trunks and flip-flops. If he had been in the pool he could have been brained. Once his mother had dreamed of losing a tooth and two days later her cousin dropped dead.
Johnny Dakota is angry. Anyone could tell. His face is dark. His mouth is a thin line. He gives the yard boy two twenties and tells him to bury the rock in the backyard. He tells him not to mention this to anyone.
The yard boy takes the rock and buries it beneath a fiddle-leaf fig at the north end of the house. The fig tree is distressed. It’s magnetic, that’s the only thing known about this rock. The fig tree is almost as upset as Johnny Dakota.
—
The yard boy lies in his room. His girlfriend is giving him a hard time. She used to visit him in his room several nights a week but now she doesn’t. He will take her out to dinner. He will spend the two twenties on a fantastic dinner.
The yard boy is disgusted with himself. The spider’s web is woven into the wanting, he thinks. He has desire for his girlfriend. His mind is shuttling between thoughts of the future and thoughts of the past. He is out of touch with the sharp simplicity and wonderfulness of the moment. He looks around him. He opens his eyes wide. The yard boy’s jeans are filthy. A green insect crawls in and out of the scapular feathers of the plover.
The yard boy goes downstairs. He gives the plover to his landlady. She seems delighted. She puts it on a shelf in the pantry with her milk-glass collection. The landlady has white hair, a wen and old legs that end in sneakers. She wants the yard boy to look at a plant she has just bought. It is in a big green plastic pot in the sunshine of her kitchen. Nothing is more obvious than the hidden, the yard boy thinks.
“This plant is insane,” the yard boy says.
The landlady is shocked. She backs off a little from the plant, a rabbit’s-foot fern.
“It has seen something terrible,” the yard boy says.
“I bought it at that place I always go,” the landlady says.
The yard boy shakes his head. The plant waves a wrinkly leaf and drops it.
“Insane,” the landlady asks. She would like to cry. She has no family, no one.
“Mad as a hatter,” the yard boy says.
—
The restaurant that the yard boy’s girlfriend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of hot sauce on each table. The girlfriend doesn’t like fancy.
The yard boy’s girlfriend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days, actually. He knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.
—
The yard boy’s landlady has put her rabbit’s-foot fern out by the garbage cans. The yard boy picks it up and puts it in the cab of his truck. It goes wherever he goes now.
The yard boy gets a note from his girlfriend. It says:
My ego is too healthy for real involvement with you. I don’t like you. Good-bye.
Alyce
—
The yard boy works for Mr. Crown, an illustrator who lives in a fine house on the bay. Across the street, someone is building an even finer house on the gulf. Mr. Crown was once the most renowned illustrator of Western art in the country. In his studio he has George Custer’s jacket. Sometimes the yard boy poses for Mr. Crown. The year before, a gentleman in Cody, Wyoming, bought Mr. Crown’s painting of an Indian who was the yard boy for fifty thousand dollars. This year, however, Mr. Crown is not doing so well. He has been reduced to illustrating children’s books. His star is falling. Also, the construction across the street infuriates him. The new house will block off his view of the sun as it slides daily into the water.