Last Ditch (5 page)

"Okay,"
sighed George. "What the hell. We been to Rome; we might as well see
the Pope." He
opened the door and slipped out onto the pavement. "What's for lunch
anyway? And where's that cold beer you was runnin' your gums about?"

Norman
grinned, reached into the
backseat and
lifted Harold out by the front of his coat.

Ralph
stayed
put. "Ain't been here in a long time," he said to nobody in
particular, running his eyes over the front of the house.

"Let's
go,
Ralphie," Norman
growled. "Time's a-wastin’"

Ralph
didn't
move. He sat there staring at the house in silence.

"The
hell
I will," he said finally.

The
idea of
Ralph being anything but agreeable left everyone openmouthed with
wonder.
Everybody but Norman.
Norman wasn't
about to take no for an answer. He bent at the waist and leaned into
the car,
reaching out a big paw.

Quicker
than
I'd ever seem him move, Ralph popped open the far door and hopped out,
very
nearly slamming the door on Norman's
hand. He leaned hard against the door, pointing a grimy finger in my
direction.

"You
got
no goddamn respect, Leo. You had any goddamn respect you'd leave things
the way
they was, not be changin' everything around all the time. Your folks
wanted
anything different they'da changed it on their own, you hear me? You
got no
goddamn respect"

I
figured he
meant all the changes to the house. After twenty years as a rental, the
place
had needed major work, so the trust had arranged for it to be
completely
renovated, from top to bottom. Inside and out They'd gutted the place.
The
original house was a dimly lit place of heavy drapes and dark wood, a
place
where the silence was punctuated only occasionally by the sounds of
clicking
heels and closing doors. Now, everything inside was light and open
spaces.
Outside, the jungle of shrubs and vines which once totally covered the
exterior
of the house had been hacked into submission and the bricks sandblasted
back to
their original rust color.

Ralph
started
toward the street shouting as he walked.

"Ain't
nothing the same anymore. Can't nobody leave nothing alone." He stopped
and shook a fist at me. If he'd had. fangs, they'd have been bared.
"You
do your own goddamn yard work. You want everything different, you do it
yourself. I ain't havin' no part of it"

He
turned on
his heel and headed for the street.

"Ralphie,"
George yelled. "Come on back here."

But
it was no
good. Ralph kept waving us off and walking until he rounded the corner
on Terry
and shuffled from view.

"How
much
did he drink last night?" I inquired.

"No
more'n
usual," said Harold.

"Maybe
a little
less," confirmed, George. "Maybe that's it. Maybe he's parched. A
man'll do weird shit if he's parched."

"Sure
got
a bug up his chimney," said Norman.
"You want I should bring him back, Leo?"

"No,"
I said. "We'D leave the slave labor to Judge Brennan."

BY
THE TIME we
broke for lunch at one, we'd made serious progress on both the yard and
the
cooler. In the yard, the old cedar fence that ran along the cliff had
been
pulled down board by board, the rotting posts torn from the ground and
added to
the substantial blaze which Norman lovingly tended in the rear corner
of the
yard.

Harold
yelled
across the yard, "Leo, we need more suds."

I
turned off
the Weed Eater, smeared my sweaty brow with my bare forearm and
strolled over
to the cooler. All that remained was the sixer of Bud Light I'd told
Rebecca
not to buy.

"It's
not
empty," I called.

"Nothin'
but Light shit."

"Well,
have a Light. I'll get some more of the other out of the fridge as soon
as I
finish this section." "I'll wait," he said.

I
made a
disgusted face. "What? One light beer's gonna kill you?"

From
behind me,
George piped in. "Light beer's like screwing in a canoe."

Normal
nodded and grinned. I was
supposed to
bite, so I did.

"How's
that?" I inquired.

"Fucking
w-a-a-a-y too close to water," they said in unison.

They
yukked it
up, hooting and hollering as they stomped about.

"Let's
break for lunch," I said and headed inside for beer.

The
tray of
cold cuts Rebecca got from Safeway was a big bit. What the catering
manager had
assured her would be ample for a party of eight disappeared, right down
to the
paper doily, in about twenty-five minutes.

George
belched
loudly into his fist and said, "Ralphie don't know what he's missin'.
Poor
bastard."

"He
hates
missin' a free meal," Harold agreed.

"A
free
anything," Norman added, tilting his head back and swallowing the last
pickle slice whole, like a gull downing a herring.

"Sure
had
a burr under his saddle," I said.

George
pounded
on his sternum with the top of his fist.

"I
think
maybe it was just too much for him. You know, seein' the house lookin'
all
different, you know, with other people livin' in it and all."

"I'm
not
other people," I protested.

"You
know
what I mean. He and your old man were real tight, and you know
Ralphie's the
sentimental type."

"Really,"
I said. "I hadn't noticed."

George
nodded
solemnly. "Oh, yeah. Couple of weeks ago we snuck into that new theater
up
on Seventh and Pike, the one with all the screens." He pointed at
Harold.
"You ask Harry, halfway through The English Patient Ralphie boy was
blubbering so hard we had to get the hell out of there before we got
pinched."

"Snot-nose
kid behind the candy counter wouldn't give us no more napkins," Harold
added.

"What
are
we gonna burn next?" Normal
asked, eyeing the redwood benches beneath us.

"That
thing," I said.

I
pointed to
the right rear corner of the house, where the partially collapsed
remains of a
small greenhouse listed precariously to starboard. Right after my
parents moved
into the place, my mother had gotten into a screaming argument with the
landscape contractor and decided that henceforth, landscapes be damned,
she was
going to propagate and plant her own shrubbery. The old man, as I
recall,
thought the idea ridiculous, but after a couple of weeks of listening
to her
gripe, he'd relented and called in a crew. I could still hear his voice
as he
spoke to the foreman. "What the hey," he'd said. "Who knows,
maybe it'll keep her out of the house." The foreman had nodded
knowingly.

Twelve
years
later, during my sophomore year at the University
of Washington,
she had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died while repotting tuberous
begonias. The doctor said she never knew what hit her. If the peaceful
expression on her death face was any indication, I suspect he was
correct in
his assessment

I
never went in
there again, and, to my knowledge, neither did my father. Instead, for
months
afterward, whenever I came by to see the old man, and he wasn't there,
which,
of course, was most of the time, I'd slip out into the backyard, kick
up a few
stones and pitch them at the squares of glass, shattering the
individual panels
one at a time, until the wooden frames stood open and empty, and the
native
sword fern and bracken began to reclaim the littered ground around the
railroad
tie foundation. If the old man noticed, he never said a word to me.

Sometime
back
in the late eighties, while the place was rented, a freak windstorm
tore a limb
from the huge oak at the north end of the yard and dropped it onto the
side of
the little building, crushing half the roof and demolishing the whole
south
wall. Since then, it had stood as a ruin, a skeletal and deformed
reminder of
the impermanence of even the most artful joinery.

Despite
its
seemingly decrepit state, the remaining structure fought us every step
of the
way. After failing to push it over by hand, we attached ropes to the
upper
comers of the nearest remaining wall. George and Norman manned one
rope, Harold
and I the other. On the count of three we commenced our "dragging
stones
for the pharaoh" impression. All we lacked was a bald guy with a drum.

When
I'd
planned the job, I figured it wouldn't take much to pull the rest of it
down.
In my mind's eye, I'd imagined the moment when it came clattering to
the ground
and figured our biggest problem would be keeping out of the way as it
fell. It
didn't work out that way.

Instead
of
collapsing before the might of our combined muscle, the old frame
seemed to dig
in its heels, to grit its jagged glass teeth, as if somehow determined
to
resist us for all it was worth. It came down incrementally, inch by
stubborn
inch, groaning and popping as each handmade joint fought for its
integrity,
never giving in to gravity, forcing us to pull it all the way .to the
ground
and then to jump up and down on it as it lay there. I think my mother
would
have liked that.

I
issued each
of the fellas a pair of leather work gloves and a hammer. It took an
hour to
break the sash into pieces and feed it to the fire and another hour of
raking
through the debris to fill the wheelbarrow nearly to the top with
shards of
broken glass and yellowed window putty.

By
three-thirty, all that remained was the raised bed on which the
greenhouse had
once stood, a twelve-by-twenty-foot altar edged by ancient railroad
ties. We
were leaning on our rakes and resting on our laurels when Harold
pointed to the
raised rectangle which had once been the floor of the greenhouse. "How
come nothin' grows in there, Leo? You'd think with all the years it
would have
growed over like the rest of this shit here."

"
'Cause
it's not dirt," I said. "It's cedar sawdust. They wanted to put in a
concrete floor, but my mother insisted they fill it up with cedar
sawdust. She
-said it would be easier on the legs and back and keep the bugs away
besides."

"I
remember," George said. "Ralphie got it for her from that old shake
mill down by where he worked on the docks. A whole dump-truck load. Got
it
free, too. Your old man said he'd be damned if he was gonna pay good
money for
sawdust. Said the next thing you knew, they'd be charging us for bark."

Harold
nudged
me with the handle of his rake.

"Wasn't
there some talk of schnapps?"

"Rebecca's
bringing it" I checked my watch. Three-thirty. "She should be along
any minute now."

I
thought I may
have detected rumblings of mutiny among the troops. I had a few more
things I
wanted to do, but they were right. It was time to quit. They'd put in a
better
day's work than I could have hoped for. A day of manual labor and a
couple of
six-packs each had made them dangerous to themselves and others. They'd
had
enough.

Except
for Norman. "What are we
gonna burn next?" he wanted to know. I didn't like the way he was
looking
at the rest of us, so I decided to humor him. I pointed to the
foundation.

"The
railroad ties," I said. "I've got a little earthmover coming in
tomorrow. One of those little Bobcat front-loaders. He's going to
spread the
sawdust over the rest of the yard and then turn the whole thing over so
we can
plant grass." I reached up and clapped Norman on the shoulder. "Tell
you what,
big guy, if you're still rip-roarin' and ready to go, why don't you see
if you
can pry the ties off the sides."

"And
then
burn 'em?" he leered.

"Yeah,"
I said. "Then you can burn 'em."

He
lit out
across the yard just as the back door opened and Rebecca stepped out
onto the
patio. She'd been home long enough to change into a pair of stonewashed
jeans
and a gray Husky T-shirt that said WOOOF across the front in big purple
letters. She came down the four brick steps and stood by my side. She
surveyed
the yard.

"Wow,"
she said. "You guys have been busy. The place looks great. It looks so
much better back here with that eyesore gone."

Normal
returned from the garage
with a
five-foot metal pry bar which he jammed into the sawdust directly
behind the
ties.

George
and
Harold wandered over to pay their respects. After the standard small
talk, they
began to shuffle nervously about until George finally took the lead.
"Ah,
Miss Duvall. You didn't by any chance ... I mean, Leo said you was
going to ...
I mean ... he said that when you got here . . ."

Rebecca
arched
an eyebrow my way. I gave her the nod.

"It's
on
the kitchen counter, George," she said.