Taking Care (14 page)

Her obstetrician had told her at the time that he had never seen a more perfectly shaped head.

The Wilsons’ surroundings are splendid. Mrs. Wilson has splendid clothes, a splendid figure. She has a wonderful Cuban cook. The house is worth three quarters of a million dollars. The plantings are worth a hundred thousand dollars. Everything has a price. It is fantastic. A precise worth has been ascribed to everything. Every worm and aphid can be counted upon. It costs a certain amount of money to eradicate them. The sod is laid down fresh every year. For weeks after the lawn
is installed, the seams are visible and then the squares of grass gather together and it becomes, everywhere, in sun or shade, a smooth, witty and improbable green like the color of a parrot.

Mrs. Wilson follows the yard boy around as he tends to the hibiscus, the bougainvillea, the poinciana, the horse cassia, the Java flower, the flame vine. They stand beneath the mango, looking up.

“Isn’t it pagan,” Mrs. Wilson says.

Close the mouth, shut the doors, untie the tangles, soften the light, the yard boy thinks.

Mrs. Wilson says, “It’s a waste this place, don’t you think? I’ve never understood nature, all this effort. All this will She flaps her slender arms at the reeking of odors, the rioting colors. Still, she looks up at the mangoes, hanging. Uuuuuh, she thinks.

Tao is standing between the yard boy and Mrs. Wilson with an oleander flower in his mouth. It is pink. Tao’s hair is golden. His eyes are blue.

The yard boy removes the flower from the little boy’s mouth. “Toxic,” the yard boy says.

“What is it!” Mrs. Wilson cries.

“Oleander,” the yard boy says.

“Cut it down, dig it out, get rid of it,” Mrs. Wilson cries. “My precious child!” She imagines Tao being kidnapped, held for an astronomical ransom by men with acne.

Mrs. Wilson goes into the house and makes herself a drink. The yard boy walks over to the oleander. The oleander shakes a little in the breeze. The yard boy stands in front of it for a few minutes, his clippers by his side.

Mrs. Wilson watches him from the house. She swallows her drink and rubs the glass over her hot nipples. The ice clinks. The yard boy raises the clippers and spreads them wide. The bolt connecting the two shears breaks. The yard boy walks over to the house, over to where Mrs. Wilson stands behind glass doors. The house weighs a ton with the glass. The house’s architect was the South’s most important architect, Mrs. Wilson once told the yard boy. Everything he made was designed
to give a sense of freedom and space. Everything was designed to give the occupants the impression of being outside. His object was to break down definitions, the consciousness of boundaries. Mrs. Wilson told the yard boy the architect was an asshole.

Behind the glass, Mrs. Wilson understands the difficulty. Behind Mrs. Wilson’s teeth is a tongue that tastes of bourbon.

“I’ll drive you downtown and we can get a new whatever,” she says. She is determined.

She and he and Tao get into Mrs. Wilson’s Mercedes 350 SL. Mrs. Wilson is a splendid driver. She has taken the Mercedes up to 130, she tells the yard boy. It is 130 that the engine is capable of, nothing more. The engine stroked beautifully at 130, no sound of strain at all.

She drives past the beaches, over the causeways. She darts in and out of traffic with a fine sense of timing. Behind them, occasionally, old men in Gremlins jump the curb in fright. Mrs. Wilson glances at them in the rear-view mirror seeming neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. She puts her hand on the yard boy’s knee. She rubs his leg.

Tao scrambles from the back into the front seat. He gets on the other side of the yard boy. He bites him.

I am living in a spiritual junkyard, thinks the yard boy. I must make it into a simple room with one beautiful object.

Sweat runs down the yard boy’s spine. Tao is gobbling at his arm as though it is junket.

“What is going on!” yells Mrs. Wilson. She turns the Mercedes around in the middle of the highway. A Good Humor truck scatters a tinkle of music and a carton of Fudgesicles as it grinds to a stop. Mrs. Wilson is cuffing Tao as she speeds back home. She is embarrassed at his rudeness. Her shaven armpit rises and falls before the yard boy’s eyes.

“Save the oleander!” she yells at both of them. “What do I care!”

In the driveway she runs around to Tao’s side of the car and pinches the child’s nose. He opens his mouth. She grabs him by the hair and carries him suspended into the house.

The yard boy walks to his truck, gets in and drives off. The world is neither nest nor playground, the yard boy thinks.

The yard boy lies in his room thinking about his girl friend.

Open up, give in, allow some space, sprinkle and pour, he thinks.

Outside, the garbage men are picking up the trash. They whistle and bang the cans about. The trash from the house where the yard boy lives contains the discards of the righteous. Tea bags, lime rinds, Charmin tubes, wilted flowers. The garbage men whoop to the truck that carries them off as though it were a horse. Sometimes the yard boy has bad dreams in this room. Sometimes he dreams of demons with eyes as big as saucepans and bodies the size of thumbs. But mostly he has good thoughts about his girl friend. He believes that her mind has the same energy, speed and pattern of his mind even though she isn’t a spiritual materialist.

The yard boy is mowing the grass around Johnny Dakota’s swimming pool. Dakota is into heroin and intangible property. As he is working, the yard boy hears a big splash behind him. He looks into the swimming pool and sees a rock on the bottom of it. He finishes mowing the grass and then he gets a net and fishes the rock out. It is as big as his hand. It is grey with bubbly streaks of iron and metal running through it. The yard boy thinks it is a meteorite. It would probably still be smoldering with heat had it not landed in the swimming pool.

It is interesting but not all that interesting. The possibility of its surviving the earth’s atmosphere is one tenth of one percent. Other things are more interesting than this. Nevertheless, the yard boy shows it to Johnny Dakota. Johnny Dakota might want to place it in a taped-up box in his house to prevent the air from corroding it.

Johnny Dakota looks up at the sky, then at the piece of space junk and then at the yard boy. He is a sleek, fit man. Only his eyes and his hands look old. His hands have deep ridges in them and smashed nails. He once told the yard boy that his mother,
whom he loved, had died from plucking a wild hair from her nose while vacationing in Calabria. His father had choked on a bread stick in a Chicago restaurant. Life is ruthless, he had told the yard boy. The darkness is always near.

Johnny Dakota usually takes his swim at this time of the morning. He is wearing his swim trunks and flip-flops. If he had been in the pool he could have been brained. Once his mother had dreamed of losing a tooth and two days later her cousin dropped dead.

Johnny Dakota is angry. Anyone could tell. His face is dark. His mouth is a thin line. He gives the yard boy two twenties and tells him to bury the rock in the back yard. He tells him not to mention this to anyone.

The yard boy takes the rock and buries it beneath a fiddle-leaf fig at the north end of the house. The fig tree is distressed. It’s magnetic, that’s the only thing known about this rock. The fig tree is almost as upset as Johnny Dakota.

The yard boy lies in his room. His girl friend is giving him a hard time. She used to visit him in his room several nights a week but now she doesn’t. He will take her out to dinner. He will spend the two twenties on a fantastic dinner.

The yard boy is disgusted with himself. The spider’s web is woven in the wanting, he thinks. He has desire for his girl friend. His mind is shuttling between thoughts of the future and thoughts of the past. He is dissatisfied. He is out of touch with the sharp simplicity and wonderfulness of the moment. He looks around him. He opens his eyes wide. The yard boy’s jeans are filthy. A green insect crawls in and out of the scapular feathers of the plover.

The yard boy goes downstairs. He gives the plover to his landlady. She seems delighted. She puts it on a shelf in the pantry, just above the pie plates. The landlady has white hair, a wen, and old legs that end in sneakers. She wants the yard boy to look at a plant she has just bought. It is in a big green plastic pot in the sunshine of her kitchen. Nothing is more obvious than the hidden, the yard boy thinks.

“This plant is insane,” the yard boy says.

The landlady is shocked. She backs off a little from the plant which is a rabbit’s-foot fern.

“It has seen something terrible,” the yard boy says.

“I bought it on sale,” the landlady says. “At that place where I always go.”

The yard boy shakes his head. The plant waves a wrinkly leaf and drops it.

“Insane?” the landlady asks. She would like to cry. She has no family, no one.

“Mad as a hatter,” the yard boy says.

The restaurant that the yard boy’s girl friend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of tabasco sauce on each table. The girl friend doesn’t at all like fancy food, although she doesn’t mind accepting a bowl of chowder and a few glasses of wine.

A few booths over, a middle-aged couple are having an argument. They both have sunburns and wear white skirts and Haitian shirts. The argument seems to be about monograms. They are both yelling and one woman picks up a handful of oyster crackers and flings it into the other woman’s face. The oyster crackers stick all over the woman’s damp, sunburned face. The yard boy knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.

The yard boy’s girl friend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days actually.

The woman that has been hit with the handful of oyster crackers walks past, an oyster cracker bobbing on her widow’s peak.

The yard boy miserably eats his pompano. When they are finished, his girl friend goes to the cashier for some toothpicks. While she is gone, another girl comes up with a baby.

“Would you watch my baby for me while I go to the ladies’?” she asks.

The yard boy holds the baby. The girl leaves. The yard boy’s girl friend returns. They don’t talk about the baby or anything. The girl friend sighs and crosses her legs. An hour passes. The restaurant is about to close. The yard boy and his girl friend and the baby are the last patrons. There is no one in the ladies’. The yard boy calls the manager and the manager calls the police. The baby chortles and spits up a little, not much. The police let the girl friend go first, and a few hours later they let the yard boy go.

The yard boy gets into his truck and drives off.

Life and the world are merely the dance of illusion, the yard boy thinks. He smells baby on his sweater.

The yard boy’s landlady has put her rabbit’s-foot fern out by the garbage cans. The yard boy picks it up and puts it in the cab of his truck. It goes wherever he goes now.

The yard boy gets a note from his girl friend. It says:

The yard boy works for Mr. Crown who is an illustrator. Mr. Crown lives in a fine house on the bay. Across the street, someone is building an even finer house on the Gulf. Mr. Crown was once the most renowned illustrator of Western art in the country. In his studio he has George Custer’s jacket. Sometimes the yard boy poses for Mr. Crown. The year before, a gentleman in Cody, Wyoming, bought Mr. Crown’s painting of an Indian who was the yard boy for fifty thousand dollars. This year, however, Mr. Crown is not doing so well. He has been reduced to illustrating children’s books. His star is falling. Also, the construction across the street infuriates him. The new house will block off his view of the sun as the sun slides daily into the water.

Mr. Crown’s publishers have told him that they are not
interested in cowboys. There have been too many cowboys for too long.

The yard boy is spraying against scale and sooty mold.

“I don’t need the money but I am insulted,” Mr. Crown tells the yard boy.

Mr. Crown goes back into the house. The yard boy seeds some rye on the lawn’s bare spots and then takes a break to get a drink of water. He sits in the cab of his truck and drinks from a plastic jug. He sprinkles some water on the rabbit’s-foot fern. The fern sits there on the seat, dribbling a little vermiculite, crazy as hell.

The fern and the yard boy sit.

It is not a peaceful spot to sit. The racket of the construction on the Gulf is considerable. Nonetheless, the yard boy swallows his water and attempts to dwell upon the dignity and simplicity of the moment.

Then there is the sound of gunfire. The yard boy cranes his neck out of the window of his pickup truck and sees Mr. Crown firing from his studio at the workers across the street. It takes the workers several moments to realize that they are being shot at. The bullets make big mealy holes in the concrete. The bullets whine through the windows that will exhibit the sunset. The workers all give a howl and try to find cover. The yard boy curls up behind the wheel of his truck. The little rushy brown hairs on the fern’s stalks stick straight out.

A few minutes later the firing stops. Mr. Crown goes back to the drawing board. No one is hurt. Mr. Crown is arrested and posts twenty-five thousand dollars bond. Charges are later dropped. The house across the street is built. Still, Mr. Crown seems calmer now. He gives up illustrating. When he wants to look at something, he looks at the bay. He tells the yard boy he is putting sunsets behind him.

The yard boy and the rabbit’s-foot fern drive from lawn to lawn in the course of their days, the fern tipping forward a little in its green pot, the wind folding back its leaves. In the wind, its leaves curl back like the lips of a Doberman pinscher.

The yard boy sees things in the course of his work that he wouldn’t dream of telling the fern even though the fern is his only confidant. The fern has a lot of space around it in which anything can happen but it doesn’t have much of an emotional life because it is insane. Therefore, it makes a good confidant.