for? I asked. It’s going to be summer soon. You’ve got no ambition, he said. We took down a hickory, pried apart some pallets, and built a duck shed.
That summer, Rudy hired my boyfriend to run his ropes. Who’s Rudy? I asked. Just one of these assholes, said my boyfriend. A tree trimmer. I saw him up in a maple on the way into town, so I asked if he needed a hand. It’s not forever but it’s a job.
When my boyfriend came home from work each evening, I was desperate for company, but he wasn’t much for chatting. Me, I could talk all night. We would get in bed, and I would begin. When I began talking, the raccoon crept by, and when I finished, the woodpecker hammered its spring-loaded head into the ash tree outside our window. I jiggled my boyfriend’s arm to keep him awake.
We almost made it to September.
The night my boyfriend quit working for Rudy, he was finally in the mood to talk. He’d come home with a cut on his face, but he didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to tell me the story about Rudy’s balls. “It’s not that I’m sensitive,” he said. “The guy’s a mess and that story proves it. I mean, what the hell kind of man trespasses on coal company land to hide out and cure himself with whiskey and duct tape? Just ask yourself that.”
“But what are we going to do for money?” I asked.
“We’ll think of something,” he said. “What about your aunt?”
“They’re about to foreclose on her house,” I said.
“What about your college degree?”
“What about it?”
“There’s a college in town, maybe you could I don’t know be a professor or something,” he said.
“You can’t do anything like that with a college degree, the only thing you can do with a college degree is get another degree,” I said.
“I could go back up north to work,” he said. “Plenty of money up there.”
“And leave me alone here again? I’ll die.”
He told me that I wasn’t going to die, and so I said, Okay but I want to die, and he said, No you don’t, and I said, Okay but I want to kill you. He opened his eyes then, but he didn’t say anything, so I told him that I was going back to Seattle. He told me not to leave, and I told him to give me one good reason.
“It’s not right that you should go,” he said. “I’ll go. I’ll find someplace else. I’ll go in the morning.”
That was how he outsmarted me.
* * *
After my boyfriend left, I packed up, too. But I’d spent all the money from my uncle on that infernal slope. I couldn’t even pay for a bus ticket home. I went to the bar and stood under the air vent. I charged my phone and called my aunt, ended the call before she picked up. I didn’t want to admit defeat. I knew she’d made some outlandish equation that if I would just get married all her struggles would be worth it. But now I was alone with a leaky camper, a flock of ducks, twenty acres to care for, little firewood, and no income to speak of. My aunt’s number blazed up on my phone’s screen. She was calling me back. I canceled it. The air vent blared. I went through my contacts, the guys my boyfriend had known, who’d been up north with him, or worked construction in town. Called Frank. “You know I can’t hire you onto my crew,” he said. “Why don’t you try Rudy? I hear he’s desperate. Your man left him high and dry.”
“Why can’t you hire me?” I asked.
“I’ve never seen a woman could work a full day like one of my men,” Frank said. “The economy’s too hard right now to do it out of sympathy. Besides, what would my wife think?” To be helpful, I told him that his crew was primarily made up of pill heads and drunks, that I could work circles around them, and that, as far as I could tell, he had never asked his wife what she thought about anything before, so why start now? These people believed strongly that the world was coming to an end soon because of solar flares and the shifting of the poles, not that they ever mentioned climate change, relentless war, or industrial capitalism, but he had hung up.
So I shifted my bike down to its lowest gear