Karen waited until Perley was asleep before turning on me. Lily fretted beside her.
“Man internship? With Rudy?” Karen said. “So now being a man means someone who can’t stay out of jail or stay sober?”
“I just think you should consider exposing Perley to a positive male role model,” I said.
“Where do you pick this shit up?” asked Karen. “Positive male role model? Internship? Best practices? Is everyone like this where you come from? You think we’re a fucking nonprofit out here? Anyway, you don’t think that Rudy is a positive male role model.”
“And you don’t think that people should go to jail for planting fruit trees,” I said. “So don’t act like you suddenly have respect for the law.”
“Perley says he likes school,” said Lily. “He even has a friend. The kid from down the road. Bexley.”
“Bexley and Perley aren’t friends. They’re foes,” I said. “Bexley calls him a faggot bastard because he doesn’t have a dad.”
It fell on them like a blow from my hand.
“We’re taking him out of school immediately,” Karen said.
“But Perley wants to stay in school,” Lily said, her eyes wet.
“We don’t have to do everything he wants to do. We’re his parents. We have to make decisions,” Karen said.
“It’s true that I don’t think Rudy is a positive male role model,” I said. “But I do think that maybe just getting Rudy and Perley together might help Perley fit in.”
“I don’t want him to fit in,” Karen said. “I want him to tear everything apart and start over.”
“Rudy is unbearable,” I said. “Yet he is highly skilled and actually strangely sensitive. Also, he is reliable.”
They sat with it for a moment. They looked at each other.
“He can pick him up and drop him off at school as long as he’s sober,” Lily said.
“He can teach him about trees, he can teach him to use a goddamn chain saw, for all I care. But that doesn’t make him a ‘positive male role model.’ This isn’t Focus on the fucking Family,” Karen said.
* * *
Though our fruit tree business was essentially finished, Rudy kept the nursery going. As winter approached, he mulched the trees eight inches high, swaddled them in yards of burlap. He put a sign down at the mailbox: COME UP AND GET YOURSELF A FRUIT TREE! EXPERIENCE THE TRANSFORMATIVE WONDER OF FRUIT TREE STEWARDSHIP. GRATIS! Lily planted two Idared apple trees at the top of our garden, but other than that I don’t know that he had any takers.
Rudy’s request to roll out his sleeping bag in the nursery remained unchallenged and spread beyond weeks into more than a month. As it got colder, I lent him my wall tent with its miniature woodstove, and he built a platform for it, on the far side of the pipeline easement, next to his trees. I knew that feeling, the feeling of proximity after being alone for so long. Rudy didn’t live with us, he lived four hundred feet away from us. To people for whom togetherness was an unfathomable riddle, to people who hovered but never drew near, to Rudy, four hundred feet was downright cozy.
7
PERLEY
My motto is excellence and at first I excelled at the man internship because Rudy excelled at letting me do whatever I wanted as long as he could talk a lot and drink from his cans. His truck was even louder than the school bus which I didn’t have to get on that special day when my teacher heard Rudy’s truck coming and said, Jesus, just get a friggin muffler. Rudy didn’t get out just honked his horn and said, Hop in, twerp.
Bexley said, I thought you didn’t have a dad, and I said, He’s not my dad, he’s my friend. He has oh about ten chain saws, how many does your dad have? I didn’t let him answer I just got into the truck, real cool like a dog with a bandanna.
About that, Rudy said on the way home. Do you ever wish you had a dad?
I wish I had a chain saw, I said. I wish I had a wizard chiseled from the very stone. But do you wish you had a dad? asked Rudy. My dad was a turkey baster, I said. Oh hell, said Rudy. Don’t make me puke. I wish I could fight really bad, I said. I could teach you to do that, said Rudy. Like ninjutsu, I said, or like elfin fighting skills from the back of a wolf. Rudy said,