brought him a canvas camp chair, warmer or at least softer than his metal one, and I bundled him into it, layering him up with the musty coats I found heaped behind the door. “At least bring me my briefcase,” he said, once I’d stoked the fire high and hot. I found it beneath the cot, stuffed the scattered papers back in, dropped it in his lap.
Rudy spent all morning up in the tree, pruning branches and lowering them down to me with the Port-a-Wrap. He didn’t even come down for bathroom breaks, but delighted in pissing from the heights, calling for Aldi and me to look out below, but what he really meant was look, and I didn’t.
We didn’t generally work in the winter. In the winter, Rudy would all but disappear and I’d try to get by on what we’d made over the spring, summer, and fall. I wasn’t used to working under so many clothes, two pairs of socks, heavy gloves, woolen long underwear, heavy coveralls, a wool hat under my hood, a hard hat on top of that. I could hardly move. I was cold and overheated at the same time. I dragged brush, used the 346 to cut it to firewood length, saved the skinny ends for the chipper. Aldi rustled his papers and asked for Natural Ice, which I brought him from the cab of Rudy’s truck. He watched me, his eyes watering against the woodsmoke. “Are you a man or a woman?” he asked.
“I guess that’s supposed to be a joke,” I said.
“I mean, if I didn’t already know,” he said.
“I’m working,” I said.
“I can see it,” he said. I kept dragging brush, throwing my saw forward to start it, but I felt strange. Not bad and not good, just strange. I felt strange and then it occurred to me that Aldi admired me. That his question, awkward and rude, was an attempt at flirtation. Worse, I knew how I should feel about it, but I found that I didn’t. I didn’t know how I felt about it. I kept working, but when he looked at me, I looked back.
At lunch, if it could be called that—Natural Ice, cold hot dogs, and potato chips, to which I added acorn patties I’d hurriedly wrapped in foil that morning—we leaned in close to the fire.
“I saw a save-the-whales documentary once,” Aldi said. “There was this little kid who said, Why would anyone want to harm the whales? The whales are so friendly. But that doesn’t seem to capture it, does it? Now, who do you think told that child that whales are friendly?”
“Whales? Friendly? That’s a laugh,” Rudy said. “That’s just the kind of ridiculous eco-hippie nonsense we can do without.”
“Certainly whales aren’t friendly,” Aldi Birch said, but he directed his comments to me. “Friendly doesn’t really come into it. Or more to the point, why should we care if they are friendly or not? Is that what we want from whales? Friendship? It’s like asking if this white oak here is friendly. It’s not friendly, in fact it will likely fall on me. When I die, it won’t shed tears. It’s not friendly. It’s over one hundred years old, is what it is.”
“If it’s a day,” Rudy said.
“Now you’ve pruned it, you could just leave it at that,” Aldi said.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Aldi,” Rudy said. “We’ll take care of it.”
“The fact is,” Aldi said, “I don’t want that oak to go. If that oak goes, I might as well go with it.”
“Aldi,” Rudy said. “I respect your feelings on this. You know me. You know I don’t like to drop hardwoods. I don’t. As a rule, I won’t do it. But that oak is going to go anyway, and it’s going to take out your garage right along with it, broiler chicks, woodstove, all of it. One more big storm. Sorry, old man, but you can see as well as I can. It’s coming down one way or the other. We’re just its guides.”
“That oak has been there all my life,” Aldi said. “Used to shade out my granddad’s barn, now it shades that garage. I remember when the hollowness came to it. It was a lightning storm, and the water’s just poured in ever since.” He looked at me again, as I realized I had been waiting for him to do. “I was your age, maybe a little older.”