Bull Head (20 page)

He sprinted toward Bojan's yard. Blue light flickered inside the house, but the porch was dark. Bojan sat staring at the TV in his living room. In the garden, Bacon Face dug furiously, dirt flying out behind him.

“Git. Go. Git now.” Sonny pointed home and the dog bolted, his ears flattened, glancing back over his shoulder. Sonny kicked the dirt back into place and pulled away the loose roots, stuffed them in his coat pocket, and walked backward, careful to cover
his tracks by smoothing out the soil and covering it with snow. He leaned against the tall pine to catch his breath and surveyed the garden. A crowded clothesline ran overhead from the tree to the porch. Wool socks, black briefs, nylons, a bra, towels, a pair of panties, a flannel nightie fastened by wooden clips. He heard a faint buzzing in the air. Milica moved past the kitchen window, her long grey hair loose on her neck. She entered the living room and handed a cup to Bojan, kissed the top of his head.

Something scurried across Sonny's neck. He swiped it away and placed his palm on the tree. It vibrated faintly. The bark was pockmarked with pitch tubes and frass and boring dust. More frass lay at the base of the tree. He slipped his pocketknife blade into the bark and sliced off a section the size of his fist. It fell away easily. He turned it over. Hundreds of round black beetles crawled over and amongst one another, gnawing into the wood. “Sweet Jesus.”

There wasn't much old growth left, but Bojan's property was chock-full of second-and third-growth lodgepole and jack pine. Sonny checked them anyway, cutting away the bark and listening for the sound of chewing. He worked quickly in the dark, the snow falling thick around him, and checked one more tree. Satisfied there were no other vermin, he made his way to Bojan's house and knocked on the door.

Milica answered it, her hair now tied and held in place with a yellow pencil. Sonny fiddled with the doorjamb.

“Sonny. What a surprise.” She looked past him into the darkness. “It's snowing. How beautiful.” Her fingers were slender and clean against the grain of the door, the nails trimmed short.

He removed his cap and nodded.

“Come in. I'll get Bojan.”

Sonny nodded again, wiped the soles of his boots on the mat. He heard Bojan from the living room, his voice moving closer until he stood in front of him.

“Are you here to bestow upon me an apology?”

Sonny held up the bark. “You've got beetles.”

Bojan studied the bark, turning it over in his hands. Sonny stamped on a beetle that fell to the floor.

“If you're not careful, all the trees on your property will get infected one by one, and then they'll jump over to my place and spread across the valley.”

“These little insects?”

“I'd be happy to fell that tree for you.”

“Slow down. You are like a house on fire. Do you think I came over on the first boat?” Bojan's fists hung clenched at his side, the bark dangled from one of his hands. “Milica, can you believe what we are hearing? He wants to cut down our majestic tree.” He pushed the bark toward Sonny.

Sonny turned it over to prevent the beetles from crawling on his hand.

“This is a dirty trick of yours to get more firewood,” Bojan said. “Cut down your own trees. There are plenty of big ones left over there.”

“This is serious—”

“Serious? Serious is what I was talking about this morning.”

“That tree—”

“I have had enough. Now you must go back to your house and leave us alone.” Bojan opened the door and motioned for Sonny to leave.

The door slammed behind Sonny. He stood in front of it for a moment, then turned and walked down the steps. Milica stood at the kitchen window. He tipped his cap to her but she did not respond.

At home, he shoved the bark in the woodstove and listened to the wood pop and fizz, the remaining beetles incinerated with a faint hiss before he shut the door and turned the damper tight.

Sonny slept fitfully and woke bone tired. He started a fire. The day was overcast and moody with bruised clouds, a skiff of snow lay on the ground. Milica's laundry line hung empty, her footsteps marking the snow below it. He sipped his coffee and tried to read. Each time he flipped the page and came to a picture of a tree, he wondered if it, too, had colonies of pests beneath its bark, eating away at its soul until it was too late and the tree had to be cut down, its long history ending in a heap of flames and ash.

He tossed the magazine into the fire, got up, and went outside to split wood. Sonny enjoyed the heft of the axe, smashing it down on a log, the fresh smack of wood in the air. It gave him a sense of purpose, the chopping and stacking and bringing in wood for the winter, and then later, during the cold months, the firewood keeping him warm. There was a satisfying self-made value to it that he hadn't been able to experience since he retired from logging.

Sonny selected an armful of dry wood and carried it to Bojan's house. He knocked on the door. There was no answer; he stacked the wood on the porch beside the door, and carried over three more armfuls.

“I'm saving my best just for you.” Lorne handed Sonny a bowl of beans as he sat down with Terry and Neil. They had empty bowls in front of them and a fresh pitcher of beer. Sonny waved him off.

“I'll take it, if it's okay with you, Sonny.” Terry stroked the ends of his moustache.

Sonny nodded.

“Hell, it wouldn't matter if it was moose steak and fried onions,” Neil said. “He's not eating it. Not unless you threw on a dress and cooked like Norma.”

Sonny glared at Neil.

“How's your neighbour?” Lorne said.

“Beetles.”

“Christ,” Terry said between mouthfuls of beans.

“What's he going to do?” Lorne said.

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

Sonny kept his head down, drew lines along the glaze on the wooden tabletop. “Too many of them crawling around town.”

“Beetles?” Terry said.

“Goddamn strangers.”

“It's a bit late to do anything about that, except blow up the ski hill or hope it don't snow for a few years and chase them all away.”

“Can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” Sonny said, wiping the tabletop. “That tree can't stay.”

Sonny lit a few matches, snuffed them out; the smell of sulphur hanging in the air. He laid his palm against the windowpane. Bojan and Milica carried a cooler out of their house together, one at each end, stacks of blankets and pillows and two rolled-up sleeping bags on top of it. In the backseat, Bojan stuffed his shotguns beneath the blankets, walked back to the house, and locked the door. Sonny laughed quietly to himself; his own front door didn't have a lock. When his father had built the house, he'd declared that installing a lock would make his family prisoners of their own house. Milica climbed into the truck, slid across the seat close to Bojan. He lifted his arm over her shoulder and pulled her in close. She leaned her head against him, and they drove off. Sonny tapped on the window; his reflection stared back at him.

Terry and Neil stopped by the next morning.

“When they coming back?” Neil said.

Sonny set his axe down. “Couple of days. Maybe three.”

Terry flipped open the tailgate and dragged out an electric chainsaw. He held it up above his head and grinned.

The men laughed. Sonny went into the shed and carried out his Husky
365
, the filed teeth as sharp as the day he bought it, a gleaming twenty-eight-inch bar.

Neil and Terry unhooked the clothesline. Sonny yanked the choke, lowered his head, and listened for the saw to burp. He reduced the choke by half and pulled the cord twice before the saw started, the sound leaping out as he set it in the run position.
He cut out a V-shaped notch near the base of the tree and tossed it aside. The gap gave the tree a grim, toothless smile. Beetles shot out and scattered around the base. He worked along the side toward the back of the tree and made a clean back cut, letting the saw's weight do its work, slicing through a mess of beetle carcasses that flew out with the woodchips and sawdust, and stopped short of the face cut.

He paused. After hundreds of years, the towering pine stood with a thin hinge holding it upright. A beetle's head was jammed inside a pitch tube, its feet wriggling behind it in the air like some grisly cartoon. Sonny pressed his palm against the tree and pushed the trunk lightly, backing away as it began to fall. The tree crashed heavily, a tremendous echo across the property. Beetles ran frantically up and down its broad body. Neil hollered and clapped his hands. The men limbed the tree and bucked it into logs. Their saws whined in the air, and when they were done, they loaded the truck and checked the ground, crushed any stray beetles, and dumped their carcasses in the flatbed.

They drove the deactivated road looping up the mountain, past the remains of the boiler and tipple ruins, the mountainside around them pitted with holes and greening stumps left behind by miners and loggers, soon to be covered in snow that tourists would be skiing on. They stopped at a slash pile. Neil and Terry unloaded the tree; Sonny leaned against the truck and gazed across the valley toward his home, huddled against the bend of the river. Neil sprayed the pile with lighter fluid and lit it. Flames shot up and the wood began to crack and burn.

“What a waste,” Terry said.

Sonny glanced toward the fire. As the lames flickered and
swallowed up the great tree, it shrieked like a dying animal. He turned away. His house sat below, small, surrounded by the woods beside a small meadow cleared by his father. Bojan's red metal roof glistened like a bright puddle of blood. A small gap where the tree they had felled was marked by the white stump. Sonny felt no joy in the aftermath. The pine had been standing long before anyone had first seen it, long before his father or the Kootenai. Sonny didn't need to count the rings. It took hundreds of years to grow, minutes to fell. Although he had lived here all of his life, the land had not softened; it was as hostile as the day he was born. He felt tired, a deep fatigue that a nap could not fix. He couldn't sleep most nights and thought if he did, he'd never wake up again. That would be all right with him.