Inquiry: Tree Service
On American limbs
One night last fall I was tired and smelling of retail death, a thing reeking and always trapped in the armpits of our t-shirt uniforms. The dead tree next door was in the process of being felled by a guy with out-of-state plates who was already hanging a fatal distance in the air, tied off to the thing that he was actively cutting down.
Wanting to look tough and play the part honestly, I ran inside and grabbed the closest Bukowski, Women, which is a sad and flagrant book. I went about reading some of the Tammie parts. I mouthed those ugly words and breathed in the chainsaw fumes slowly, trying to move the words out and down among the grass where mason bees hummed around my Crocs. I wanted to save some watching for later, so I faced away from the tree and kept my face towards the pages.
He was just doing the preliminary cuts, but I admit the Paula Abdul and Tears For Fears songs coming out of his jobsite radio sorely ruined the mood: distinctly not chainsaw music. With the sound and setting sun in my eyes, everything took on that patina of real cheap tequila. But back in the kitchen, I had found only a down-on-its-luck lime which I cut too big a wedge from and shoved into a non-alcoholic beer. Lime juice was stinging my thumb that I’d just caught with my boxcutter earlier that morning, opening the box that the lime had arrived in.
All summer long, the logger has worked his way around our near-levee neighborhood. We all take turns, watching him work. Hanging up there. Some of the boldest among us set out lawn chairs, koozies in hand.
When he finally got to our corner, I stood in the backyard and pointed up to some honey locust limbs just then being cradled by our roof. The pods slapped the shingles at the mere suggestion of a breeze. “That’s the priority,” I said and continued pointing, as if he could miss them. He said that was bad for the roof, which I could tell just by standing there.
I’d discovered early on that having something drag all night across the roof above your head can lead to great psychological distress, not unlike reading too much Bukowski. In our last house, we had multiple raccoons living and thriving directly above our pillows. The guy in the apartment across the street got drunk enough to come over and tell us that he’d watched one of the raccoons carry an entire plastic shopping bag up our downspout and into the attic. He drunkenly emphasized that the raccoon up there was “huge.”
Believe me when I say that we tried to take care of these limbs ourselves. At various points, both Sara and I had scaled the roof or hung out of the attic window, both of us doing it while the other was gone, and each of us with the same extendable chainsaw.
It stretches about 8 feet. On a single charge, it runs for about seventy five seconds.
We hacked away at what we could, but the worst of it was just out of reach.
-
He said he’d be over early, and when I came home from work, I found a heap of limbs and branches already laying in the yard. He’d gotten it all down by noon. My shift had started at 3 a.m., but “Seven Spanish Angels” was coming out of his truck. It’s quintessential American pop music, and in this instance, I took it as an omen.
Look to the chorus:
There were seven Spanish angels
At the altar of the sun
They were prayin' for the lovers
In the valley of the gun
When the battle stopped and the smoke cleared
There was thunder from the throne
And seven Spanish angels
Took another angel home
As we don’t get visitors often, I decided to help him load his trailer, and worked with him all afternoon, picking up. Here was a guy who's used to being stuck up in a tree, being talked at, so mostly I listened. I’m afraid this is how I’ve chosen to spend my life: studying the pure art of Midwest conversation, mostly in silence, and usually from a few houses over.
Strangely, I never found a good time to tell him that I’d spent most of the previous night collaging baseball cards. He was carrying on his person a variety of saws and sharp implements made exclusively for separation, and there I was, having trouble getting through some 1989 Upper Decks with a rusty X-ACTO knife.
I tried when I could to keep the conversation local. We talked about the levee and the explosion and what the town square used to look like on a Friday night. He told me about his deployments, his back surgeries, the highways in Alaska. He even told me that he and his buddies used to shock blue catfish by sticking a hand crank phone out of a boat and turning it in the water of the quarry lake.
When things drifted towards anything past the interstate, I’d try to steer it back, ask some more about Alaska or how the next town over got all that money to build a new football field. At one point he decried the current state of Facebook Marketplace. We got a good fifteen minutes out of that.
I survived mainly by non-committed affirmations, complaining about the town lawn mowing ordinances, and asking questions about that conversational mine best known as the “Great Big Local Past.” For some reason, it’s safer. Something about distance, and it all being settled back there.
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At one point my neighbor ambled over, looked at him up in the tree and declared that he looked like that guy straddling an atomic bomb in that one movie.
He said he was waving a cowboy hat and riding it down to the ground. They couldn’t think of the actor’s name.
I waited for as long as I could, then said it.
“Slim Pickens. Dr. Strangelove.”
“That's it…Surprised you know that one,” my neighbor said.
“Is that the one where the general goes crazy or something?” the logger asked. “Because that’s a good one.”
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Later the two of us were running rakes, almost done picking everything up, and I finally said what I’d been working towards all afternoon.
“I bet all this is kind of boring,” I said, and gestured with my hand past the pile of limbs on the trailer. I tried to convey scale. I meant all of it. Post-military life. Iowa.
I meant the 21st century world in an honest and genuine sense.
He waited a beat, then said “I’m embarrassed to say this, but you know, there’s just no thrill like hunting a human.”
I didn’t want to lose him now, so close to the end, so I nodded along.
We were nearly through with the work.
Eventually, I said “Sure. I bet.”
It was quiet after that. We just pulled the rakes.
-
I’ve tried desperately to shake this conversation going on a week now.
I used all the usual suspects, too. I spent the holiday weekend wholly absorbed in the grocery store. Pumpkin season looms. Fucking pumpkins.
I chased that with a Grateful Dead cover band playing a street dance in Anamosa. Hell I even tried seven innings of a semi-professional baseball game. (It was the Kernels versus the Timber Rattlers. We rooted for the corn.)
None of it’s worked. Right now, I’m sitting in the yard and still thinking about the logger. About his war. About ours. How we couldn’t make it a full week into school without a mass shooting. That’s our new American calendar: drifting between mass shootings in malls and churches during the summer, and in schools for the fall and spring.
I’m sure glad they banned all those books, though. Especially this one by Jodi Picoult, which, (checks notes), “follows the unfolding of a school shooting, including the events leading up to, and the aftermath of the incident.”
-
There’s a new light coming through the trees and I can feel my face burning in it. I’m listening to Tony Rice records on YouTube. I’m sitting on an inherited beach chair and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Charles Bukowski on it.
I watch as a hummingbird skips the trumpet blossom, heads straight for the bargain-brand grape jelly. I don’t blame it. America will eat you too, little bird.
Greg Brown taught me that.
Across the fence, a potty-training neighbor dog is finally getting it right. A kid just rode by on a bicycle, clutching a TV to his chest. Soon, I’ll go inside to cut up a can of chicken for a cat with no teeth, and a separate can for a cat with three legs.
Everything is going according to plan.
I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.
Each week, a roundup of our work is gracefully collected by Julie Gammack, and published here:
Awww. Greg Brown. I worked at The Mill about three different times in the 1980's. Greg was the soundtrack to those days.