CAUTION Men in Trees by Darrell Spencer

Author:Darrell Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3746-3
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2010-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

So it's Archie Cohen in Bobby's face in the heat, and now it's Bugsy Siegel in his family room. From where he sits at the dinner table, Bobby can see city workers in the front yard. They're trimming trees away from power lines. Three crews are working the street. A wiry kid, roped to the trunk of the biggest tree in Bobby's yard, swings from limb to limb, tying off branches, then cutting them, and an older guy, maybe Bobby's age, waits on the ground and feeds branches into a mulcher. His sideburns look like roman numerals. He has long hair pulled into a ponytail and wears a long beard. The sixties left him behind. They've set up their sign in the street. It's orange, shaped like a stop sign, and says CAUTION: MEN IN TREES.

Bobby's on the phone, making one last bid to a tool company for a string of billboards along the Boulder Highway. The tool people want an extra month free. Bobby won't budge on the offer he's made. "This deal's on its feet and it's walking out the door," he says. He retracts the pen he's been figuring with and pokes at the peace sign he tattooed on himself one night thirty years ago. He hadn't been drunk, just bored. It's on his left hand, covering that web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. Over the years it's gotten blurry. Growing up in Vegas, Bobby hadn't given a rat's ass about the peace movement. He'd just done whatever he had to do to keep his own ass out of Vietnam.

How about a billboard on The Strip for the money they're paying? The tool company wants to know.

"You're burying me," Bobby "Best Buy" Book says. "You're shoving your hand into my pocket, filching dollar bills and taking a squeeze at my balls while you're at this form of highway robbery."

Alice, coming through the back door, walks her twins in and signs, "Hi, Dad." The twins sign it, too. They're girls, just turned five. They're barefoot, two grimy look-alike faces and four identical feet, twenty exactly-the-same sooty toes. Alice holds up their shoes she's had tucked under her arm and shrugs, What's a mother to do? The girls have on mismatched tops and bottoms, and together, standing so they seem stuck to each other by Popsicle juice, they come across as toss pillows. They've smeared chocolate around their lips. Bobby gives them a baby-wave, his fingers tapping out a message on a telegraph.

"Where's Mom?" Alice signs.

Bobby nods toward the family room where Polly is setting up to watch Bugsy. Dinner itself will be catch-what-you-can. Alice herds the twins into the hallway.

Outside, the kid in the tree rides the limbs. He cuts one free and lowers it to the lawn, then lopes up the trunk to a higher branch. The old guy below him shoves the limb in the mulcher, and it's eaten up. The kid lassoes a branch, swings through the tree, and ties it off at three different angles.

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