Redneck Dog Pen
I'd been loading the last of the dog pen wood pallets onto the trailer for transport to burn pile number ten and swinging the sledge and prying off with crowbar the 2X4s and 1X4s and 4X4s and scraps of plywood that comprised the framework onto which chicken and hog wire were attached and I should mention the maple and oak and poplar trees, forty feet higher than they needed to be as vertical support posts, living crucified with nails and staples and also having accepted over time the grafting of hog wire into the history of their trunks. Fucking redneck dog pen. Oops, my bad, there I was just giving description and a little bit of my anger came through. I've already expressed a lack of enmity for this man who rented from me but his landscape maintenance I have to tell you has just about got me fit to be tied, oh hell, not just about. I extracted as many nails as I could from the trunks of these trees but don't have a pry bar big enough to yank out the one or two, foot long spikes; what was he thinking?
I'm a tree lover, I admit it, shoot me.
I looked into the bucket into which I threw the nails and thought about a future where I drove them into the renter's forehead. I guess that doesn't really describe a lack of enmity. Except for that bit of remaining tic-tac-toeing of metal grown into the trees there's about 50 feet of hog wire unattached or snipped away from all support that still needs to be yanked from where it is buried in the ground, probably attached to rotting 1X6s. I about felt my groin ripping trying to pull it out by hand so I'll one of these days hook a tow rope to the Jeep and pull it out with that.
I tried to calm myself the next day by raking about a quarter acres worth of leaves and twigs into piles. Around 1:30 in the afternoon Danny Claypool comes driving up on his red four seater golf cart with a half empty Coors Light in the cup holder. I'm writing this now back at the manicured grounds of Mt. Pleasant, in Virginia. There's a local mystery drunk who tosses his empty Coors Light bottles onto the strip of ground bordering the front of the property here. That's what I'm thinking about in N. Carolina raking twigs looking at the Coors bottle in Claypool's cup holder. Claypool's corn growing in my garden has benefitted by rain in my absence and is now about waist high, back dropping the two of us. He wants to know how I'm doing and you know, I'm just doing, I don't know what to tell him. We had about twenty minutes of bonding that first time out, some 6 weeks ago and he is wanting to rework a few of those topics, what is was like in New Orleans, how much it costs to live in New York, how much junk the renter left laying around. After about 90 seconds of that there is a silence during which I feel a little uncomfortable as Claypool stares vacantly at the leaf dust and bits of twig stuck to my sweating naked rib bones.
I want to apologize for planting that corn without asking you. I should have ask you first.
You should have ask me first, that is true.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that.
Well I got to tell you, planting the corn didn't bother me anywhere near as much as you watering it hooked up to my well.
That was dumb, I shouldn't have done that.
Well Danny, I don't really have the energy to be pissed off about these things forever and I've got a lot of work to do here so let's just forget about all that. You can finish out the corn this year but as for the future I don't want you doing anything in this garden without my permission.
That's fair enough Jim, I won't. I hope you're not holding this against me. I tell him I'm not. He's looking all sad and dopey like an old hound dog into who's face you are waving a chewed up leather shoe. I try to mean what I say but just in case I am not able to live up to my magnanimous pretensions, I have plenty enough nails to pluck from the lovely wounded trees for insertion into another thick skulled forehead.
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