he met me at the bottom of the driveway. The back of his truck was empty of buckets, but his ponytail was brushed and his cheeks shone above his beard. He wore his bling. “Two problems I can see with our new business,” he said.
“What are they?” I asked.
“One, none of these fucking idiots knows that fruit tree stewardship is what’s standing between them and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.”
“Two?” I asked.
“Two is volume and efficiency. We just aren’t hitting enough people. You know cartoons where one character is hungry and the other character turns into a giant hamburger? That’s how I feel about people’s yards and fruit trees right now.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.
“I’ve done some figuring,” he said. “We do between one and four tree jobs a week. Sometimes we have whole weeks off when we don’t have any work.”
“And that’s the way we like it,” I said.
“But it’s inefficient,” he said. “If we were quick, we could be planting between eight and ten fruit trees a night.”
“Rudy, I sleep at night,” I said.
“We ought to be working at night,” he said. “We could be getting a lot more trees in the ground. It’s bad business not to.”
Between Karen, Lily, Rudy, and me there was a magnetism. We women pulled away, and Rudy pushed closer. We were in orbit. Once you save someone’s life you are bound to that person, or I have heard that. Karen had breathed life back into him, had nursed him back to health, Lily had drawn the curtain so he could stay on the Land Trust overnight, I’d been the one person who put up with working for him all these years, who listened to his side of the story. Each winter Rudy’s plans for self-improvement failed. He hibernated for months, stayed drunk, and crawled inside himself. Each winter we were the only ones who knew whether or not he had frozen to death or, worse, flipped the coin and decided against the world. Rudy had chosen us as the only people he relied on or cared to know. I’m not saying that’s friendship. I’m saying that in late October, I became an illicit fruit tree planter, stealing out at night with Rudy to shove saplings down into the soft sod of people’s front yards while they slept.
Like anything, illicit fruit tree planting has its best practices. I duly noted it all down. Our shit pile from two years ago had lost its sewage smell and was growing a healthy colony of mushrooms. Rudy and I shoveled the truck bed half full of it, balanced the buckets on top, and headed for town. There, wielding shovels, we opened abhorrent lawns, filled deep holes with layers of human manure, stuck the tiny trees in, and mounded the soil back on top. I buried the end of the garden hose, and Rudy followed the hose back into the bushes along the house, found the tap, turned the water on. While we let the roots flood, we went on to the next yard.
We waited for hours sometimes, watering those fruit trees in until the soil turned to soup. While the moon rose and set, Rudy and I watched the sky, or napped on the edge of lawns, irrigating, pressing the earth down again where the water bubbled up. We didn’t speak. We turned off taps. We coiled hoses. We slunk away before dawn.
At first I told myself that I went along with Rudy to keep an eye on him. I told myself the fruit trees were Rudy’s only plan for staying out of that icy bed on the coal company land, the bed that tipped him toward the grave. At first I did it to mitigate his recklessness, to influence his excesses. But that can’t account for the peace and thrill I felt, stalking the streets with our headlights off, turning yard after yard to orchard.
* * *
It was a small county and an even smaller town, and people knew me, and people definitely knew Rudy, and soon enough things were bound to get complicated.
“What a view, there’s the sheriff’s deputy,” Rudy said one afternoon when we were up in the nursery shoveling manure. I leaned on my shovel, but Rudy kept right on working. The deputy parked his car at the bottom of the driveway and marched straight up the pipeline easement. Rudy and I did not confer. Rudy did not stop shoveling, but watched sideways as the