agree long enough to get rid of it. Perley had begun school and become secretive and pale, chatting to himself and laughing at nothing, spending hours alone in the woods, yet insisting each morning on hiking down the driveway on his own to get on that school bus. Nothing could stop him. Karen and Lily were at odds over it. As usual, no one listened to me.
As usual, my wild foods were keeping us alive. I worked all day with Rudy, then came home to send Perley up into the oak trees. He’d shake the branches so that the acorns rapped my hard head. We aimed to collect at least a hundred gallons that year.
Karen and Lily, absorbed in Perley and in each other, for once didn’t object, when I mentioned that Rudy might tend his trees out on the pipeline. “As long as he doesn’t think he’s going to live out there,” Karen said.
“Of course not,” I said.
“I don’t care to see him sweating out his hangover at my breakfast table,” Karen said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only temporary.”
As for my Best Practices Binder, I was the only one who ever brushed aside the cobwebs and mouse shit, opened the cover, and added to it: acorns, buckets, chain saws, fruit trees.
* * *
Rudy spent a week putting in a deer fence, sinking locust posts and stringing wire. When it was finished, he moved his infant fruit trees in by the bucketful. They didn’t look like much, just some sticks with felted ears poking out, but Rudy said they’d get bigger. He said that planting them in the fall was best. The roots fortified over the winter to flourish when the spring came. There were Magness and Potomac pears, Lodi, Ginger Gold, and Idared apples, North Star cherries, Fellenberg plums, Saskatoons, even two varieties of peach tree, which did not do well in our climate.
“You’ve got to try,” said Rudy. “You never know. You mind if I sleep over tonight?”
“You can forget about that, Rudy,” I said.
“I mean in my nursery,” he said. “I’ll sleep out. I’ve got my sleeping bag and a piece of waxed cardboard. Jesus. Get your mind out of the gutter.”
* * *
At seven thirty the next morning I was wrenched awake by what sounded like a fifty-car pileup in the sky. That or the end of the goddamn world bearing down on us, before it faded out to nothing.
On the other side of the partition, Karen and Lily’s light came on. I already had my feet on the floor, was feeling around for my rubber boots and my overalls when I heard Perley’s sleep-voice croak, “It’s Madcoil. He’s attacking the Holt,” which was from one of his comics.
“Go back to sleep, Perley,” I said to the wall. “I’m going to take care of it.”
“Take the .22,” said Karen. I lowered it down from the rafters and slung it over my shoulder. What would I do with it, anyway? Surely not aim it at someone. Surely not shoot.
Outside, tanagers and cardinals began to call one another. There was nothing else to hear. Our hills were honeycombed and hurt beneath the surface. Light crept into the sky. There was nothing else to see. I climbed up through the garden and headed out past my old camper, now used for storage, through the woods to the pipeline easement. Rudy stood in his nursery wild-eyed. He wore a large gold-colored chain around his neck, with an enormous pendant representing Greek drama, the twin smile and frown gleaming up at me.
“Fucking helicopter,” he said. “Scared the living shit out of me. Came down almost on my head. Like I say, they’re always watching.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Must be the fucking pipeline company,” Rudy said.
Then the roar again, the whining blast. Rudy covered his head, I let go of my rifle and clapped my hands to my ears. We dropped to our knees, gaped upward to see the helicopter beat over the ridgeline again, blazing yellow like it was bringing the sun with it. It pulsed down low over the trees only a hundred feet up, maybe less, like it planned to land on us, or drop something, bombs, propaganda, who could say? It was so close I could almost make out the company man inside with his fly eyes. The trees waved and dipped to the propeller. We cowered, our teeth clacking in our heads, and the helicopter didn’t land, it didn’t drop bombs or any kind of paper. It tracked the