After that evening, Rudy and I kept showing up to work, but Aldi stayed inside his garage. Sometimes the curtain at the side window moved. Sometimes we’d even see his face. But when he looked out at us, it wasn’t the look he’d give to a stand-in son, nor to the object of his surreptitious affection. He watched us as if we were the enemy.
The oak had begun to look shorn, bare, vulnerable, a naked thing against the sky. Aldi’s garage was exposed now, bright beneath the unforgiving winter glare, somehow huge now that the oak had shrunk.
One day, Rudy lowered the final branch. The saw shrilled down to silence. He descended, unclipped. We loaded our equipment into the truck.
“We’ve got to tell him,” I said.
“I know it,” Rudy said. “But I don’t want to be the one.” So I knocked on Aldi Birch’s door. I didn’t expect him to answer and he didn’t answer.
“Tomorrow is the day, Aldi,” I called. “Tomorrow we’ll fell it. I promised we’d tell you.”
Nothing.
“Do you want to say a few words?” I tried again.
Aldi opened the door and walked up to the oak. Though diminished, it was still massive. Aldi leaned his head against its trunk, laid his palm flat on the bark. “It’s like she’s already gone,” he said. “What is there to say, anyway? So long, old friend. So long, self. The older I get, the less people there are that are older than me.”
He had lived his life in a landlocked state, but Aldi walked back toward his garage like he hadn’t yet found his land legs. Rudy worked his hard hat around and around between his fingers. He spat out his ponytail. “Aldi,” he said. Aldi stopped. He stood on the threshold without turning around.
“You know I’m good, Aldi, the best around,” said Rudy. “But still.”
“What is it?” asked Aldi, not turning.
“Still. Just. Maybe no need for you to be in that garage when we fell the thing. Just plan not to be home tomorrow,” Rudy said.
“You’re going to drop it on my garage?” asked Aldi.
“I want it safely done,” Rudy said. “You can understand. I just want some insurance.”
“Insurance,” Aldi said.
“This isn’t entirely risk-free,” Rudy said. His voice was high and uncertain, the voice of a boy. “Look, I’m leveling with you the way I wouldn’t with most people, Aldi. It hasn’t happened yet, a tree doing major damage, but still. This isn’t about you. I wish you would stop taking it so personal. I’d tell the same thing to anyone.”
“Tell them what?” Aldi asked. He still had his back to us.
“Tell them to stay the hell out of the way,” Rudy said, but Aldi still wouldn’t look at him.
Rudy’s hard hat slipped from his hand and bounced once on the frozen ground. I had never seen him lack confidence in a job, not even when we had felled acres of yellow pines, notoriously unpredictable and deadly. Then, he’d just been irritated, but now he was sick.
Aldi reached for the doorknob.
“Wait,” Rudy choked, and moved fast. He reached into the back of the truck and tore the corner off the box of Natural Ice, turned it over to the blank side. He reached for the pen he kept in his pocket. He bore down hard with the nib on the cardboard, his face clenched and sweating into the cold air. Something was glittering at his temples, could have been tears. When he had finished, he read aloud, “I Aldi Birch have been told ahead of time that I should not be on the premises when this motherfucking white oak goes so help me god I have been warned by my friend Rudy Gibbs that the thing might do some damage, and I will not hold Rudy, my friend, accountable should an accident occur, because he fucking well told me ahead of time.” He held the cardboard out to Aldi.
“Sign this, please,” he said, doing his best to close up his face, to steady his broken voice. “Liability.”
Aldi, ghastly white, signed it, then slammed the door in his face.
* * *
The next morning, as Rudy and I rolled up out of the darkness, we could see the crooked gesture of the ancient oak on the long approach, a giant middle finger shoved up into the sky, black against the rising sun. It looked as big as if we hadn’t spent a week and a half shearing it down, as if we’d never touched it at all. At Aldi’s place,