Love & Darts (9781937316075) (21 page)

Marie looked at her husband who
was walking awkwardly, trying to prevent more mud from getting
inside his sock. “Those boots are probably forty years old! You’re
surprised they’re falling apart?” She pulled the hat over the tops
of her ears and looked at her own boots. Three hundred muddy
dollars.

They got away from the tinny carol.

It was the eighth year of their
marriage. Five years before Dan might have said, “Why didn’t you
put Squally on the leash? They don’t want our dog running wild out
here.” But he just kept walking between the trees, swinging the
handsaw and whistling fweeeet! when Squally got too far
away.

The smell of gingerbread was gone.

Dan could not resist. “The kids
should be here.”

“They’re too little and they’re
both sick, Dan. Why make sick kids ride three hours back in the
car, cold, dirty, and wet?”

“Don’t you believe in tradition?”

She shook her head. “It was a
tradition for your family, Dan. Not mine.”

Christmas trees ran in different-sized rows in all
directions.

He whistled for Squally again and
grabbed the leash out of Marie’s gloved hand. He knew what she was
probably thinking—that an artificial tree like her mom’s would be
fine. But her mother’s tree looked like a department store display.
It was an eyesore of enormous bows, doves, angels. “Shake that
self-righteous head all you want, Marie. But there will be no fake
trees in my house. Ever.”

She watched him clip Squally’s
collar and wrap most of the length around his hand. “Fine. But who
was seven months pregnant last Christmas on the floor with the
watering can getting needles in my eyes trying to keep that
twelve-foot monstrosity alive, Dan? That thing drank a gallon of
water a day. It filled two vacuum bags with needles in the first
week. And was it you under that tree trying to keep it alive for
six weeks? No, it was not.”

“You always exaggerate.” Dan kept
Squally close, swung the old oiled saw absentmindedly from his
other hand, and walked into one of the rows of blue spruce. “That
was not a twelve-foot tree. We don’t even have twelve-foot
ceilings.”

Marie waited in the lane until Dan was a good twenty
feet ahead. She watched the distance increasing between them.

Squally barked, calling Marie
forward into the row. It was that familiar friendly yip, the same
sweet, clipped bark Squally used to announce that the baby’s bottle
had fallen out of the stroller, clattery plastic on concrete,
rolling down the sidewalk. Still irritated with her husband, Marie
picked her steps carefully in his footprints, keeping her boots as
clean as possible.

They moved silently between the trees.

Marie could stop, scream, demand
the keys, cry, insist on leaving, go sit in the car, take the dog
off the leash again. But she didn’t. She caught up to him. “Well,
it was nine feet anyway. A nine-foot freaking monstrosity that put
me into debt just to decorate.” She pulled Squally’s leash back
into her possession.

The dog meandered along the full demonstrable
generosity of leash length.

Dan’s left foot was soaked inside
the boot. He lifted his toes to protect them from the worst. This
compensation added complexity to his gait. “Well, nobody died and
made you Martha Stewart, Marie. You could have just spread out the
decorations we had instead of drenching every single branch and
then filling up the whole storage space with that overpriced
tacky-ass shit.”

“It’s not tacky. It’s Radko.” She
kept following Dan, giving Squally a tug. “Isn’t there a Christmas
tree farm closer to Chicago, Dan? Driving three hours is
ridiculous.”

“Every tree my whole life has come from this farm. I
don’t care if I have to drive ten hours; every year, every tree, as
long as I can manage it, will come from this tree farm.”

“And I’m self-righteous?” She
tried not to think permanently-disabling thoughts about her
husband. Why did they go through this every year? For what? For a
Christmas tree? It was fine before the kids were born, kind of
quaint, but now? They worked overtime all week. They still had a
ton of shopping to finish, mostly to keep from hearing some litany
of dissatisfaction from his mother. The old boots? The traditional
tree farm? He was unbearable when he got like this—a nostalgic
romantic who just would not let things go.

Marie unclipped Squally and watched the dog’s silky
coat ripple as she ran full force after a cardinal. “All this
back-to-your-roots stuff gets old. There is no reason for us to
drive all the way down here every year when the trees they sell
right by us come from a bunch of farms just like this one. Your
hick-ass, Puritanical bullshit only goes so far, Dan.”

Dan shouted toward the sunset. “Squally!”

The dog disappeared into the darkening evening.

Marie pulled off a glove and felt the nearest
branches.

 
An old man in insulated
coveralls walked up to them from an adjacent row. “Finding
everything, folks?” He kept a straight face and noticed Marie
touching the trees. He forgave her unconsciously.

She winced and did not look at
him. “You have any that don’t drop needles?” It was caustic but not
quite rude.

He ignored the tone. “We sure do.
Scotch pine will do pretty good that way. I salvaged a few during
the blight. Care if we drive out to the rows? It’s too far for me
to walk anymore.”

Dan nodded his interest in the man’s suggestion and
ostentatiously took his wife by the hand.

They followed the old man to his truck, which was
parked at an angle on a nearby rise.

He turned to Dan. “My eyes aren’t
so great with the light this low. Mind if I ride and you drive?
It’s a four-on-the-floor.” He was not asking. He had already walked
around to the passenger side and was helping Marie up into the
truck. He closed the passenger side door and settled himself
against it.

“It’s been a while since I drove a
stick.” Dan put the saw in the bed of the truck, lowered the
tailgate, and whistled.

“This old beast has had more
clutches than I’ve had chicken dinners. Don’t worry about grinding
the gears. She can take it.”

 
Squally came running and
jumped up into the bed of the truck, an old pro at a new trick. She
settled down to drowse on a tarp between the spare tire and the
saw. Dan got into the driver’s seat.

The old man watched Marie
struggling to get comfortable between the two men and with the
gearshift rising out of the floor of the truck. He said, “Now, I’m
sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Marie.”

Slowly, emphasizing every single
word, the old man said, “Okay. Now, Marie. I realize that this may
not be the way you are used to riding. But I will tell you that
most hick-ass women are not as Puritanical as you might
think.”

Marie flushed. “Excuse
me?”

“There’s not a one of them that doesn’t know how to
ride in the middle of a pickup.”

Marie was nervous but trusted the laugh lines rooted
deep at the edge of the old man’s eyes. “I don’t understand.”

The old man looked out to the
horizon and gave his instructions casually to the window. Letting
his words make fog on the glass, he said, “Well, and I mean this
with the utmost respect, dear. But you have got to straddle that
thing and lean up against your husband so he can get to that
shifter.”

Marie’s head snapped. She looked at Dan with wide
eyes.

Dan shrugged, mouthing the words, “I don’t know.
It’s his truck.”

Marie managed to convince her
designer jeans and her yes-I’ve-had-two-babies legs to straddle the
gearshift. She let her left thigh rest against Dan’s. She kept her
right thigh from ever touching the old man’s coveralls.

“Good. Now, Dan—wasn’t it
Dan?—just ease her back off this little embankment and take us up
this lane about two hundred yards.”

Dan put his hand over Marie’s, who tried to hold
onto his fingers with her gloves. He squeezed and let go. In
the bed of the truck, Squally stood up, turned around twice, and
lay back down again, contented by the truck’s motion.

The old man looked at Marie and said, “You got any
kids, Marie?”

Of course she had kids. Who
doesn’t have kids? She pressed her thigh against Dan’s, encouraging
him to relax and stop grinding the gears. “Two. The oldest is
twenty-seven months. And the baby was born at the end of
February.”

“Good thing you didn’t bring them.
They’d catch their death out here today at those ages.”

Marie leaped to the defensive.
“Well, it was a tradition in Dan’s family. So we would have brought
them if we lived any closer.”

“Bring them in a few years after
they know all about Santie Claus. Then they’ll never forget it.”
The old man nodded, agreeing with himself. “Go ahead and put it in
third, Dan. Nothing to worry about out here. If you hit a deer, you
won’t even feel it. Truck’s high-gauge steel. A regular tank. Drive
as fast as you want. Hell. Open her up. We’ll come back for the
tree. Take us up to my property line at that strip of
oaks.”

Dan pressed his forearm against Marie’s thigh while
dropping the truck down into third and then fourth.

They passed well-maintained
signage: Norway Spruce, Serbian Spruce, Concolor Fir, West Coast
Noble Fir. The old man wasn’t looking at the signs that marked the
rows. He scrutinized the fence line as they bumped past it. Then
all three—and Squally probably, too—watched the rushing fence
posts. Keeping a keen eye out for any having fallen.

The old man turned back to Marie. “What
tradition?”

Marie looked to Dan for approval
to tell his story. Dan nodded, paying attention to the drive,
loving the speed, loving the sound of frozen grasses shattering
under the chassis.

“Dan used to come here, to your
farm, every year when he was little. With his dad.”

“Wasn’t my farm then. I got this
place five years ago in a foreclosure settlement.”

Dan looked over. “Foreclosure? I thought you worked
for the Loftons.”

“Nope. At the worst of the blight
this place just about got bulldozed for a housing development.
Instead the Loftons held on as long as they could. Let the
developers fish someone else’s place over on 114. By the time
they’d fought that fight they were so overextended that they
couldn’t make the property taxes. I got the place real cheap from
the bank.”

“But you always farmed around here?”

“No, ma’am. Not me. I was in real
estate in Dayton for thirty-four years. I was married right after I
got back from Korea. We had three kids: one smart one who can’t
keep a job for all his politics; one dumb one who can’t keep her
mouth shut but to say yes to any man dumber than her who comes
along; and one who drives an old school bus from one art fair to
another every summer and somehow manages to make a living painting
hearts, flowers, and smiley faces on tiny wooden beads. Could have
been a god-damned surgeon with steady hands like that—but nope, has
to paint blessed beads.”

Marie looked back into the bed of
the truck to check on Squally. The happy mutt gave a cinnamon wag
while watching the fence posts zip by under the dark blue broken
clouds.

“Don’t ask me why I did any of it.” The man in
coveralls rubbed the inside of the windshield with his sleeve and
turned on the defrost blowers. “After I retired I had a
charter-fishing boat business in Florida.

“But even in a subdivided paradise
my wife hated me and made my life a living hell for as long as she
walked this earth. No American Dream for me, Marie. Not for me.
Even though I edged my sidewalks clean and pretty in three damn
states.”

The oak trees held onto dry brown
leaves. They all stared into the darkening woods. Dan downshifted
and the truck stopped at the property line.

The old man cracked the window
again. “I guess I could have divorced her somewhere along the line.
Or she could have divorced me. Or something. But that’s not what we
did. We stuck it out. Did the best we could.”

Marie said, “Sounds like you did great.”

The old man laughed. “Some old
milk slogan used to say, ‘Good as any, better than some.’ That was
us. Good as any, better than some.”

Marie was worried. “So you’re all
alone now? You’re way out here by yourself?”

“No, no, no, sweetie. I moved up
here with my girlfriend. Buying this place was her
idea.”

Dan sort of snorted. “Girlfriend?”

“Sure. In Florida, after my wife
died, I’d get real bored. Go down to the marina and tinker around
on that damned charter boat and end up at that little bar they had
there. Me and the other geezers all afternoon. Talking about
mangled manatees. What to do about oil leaking into the channel.
Whether to charge fathers for little puking kids losing rods
overboard—shit like that.”

Marie reminded him. “But what about this
girlfriend?”

“Elaine? She never lost a rod. She
wears a fishing belt. She’s no fool.”

“I mean, how’d you meet her?”

“Oh, she ran a bait shop on the
landing and sold beer and candy and cigarettes, too. She ran the
deliveries to the bar in a motorboat. Somehow, I got to helping her
unload that motorboat on her runs.” The old man sat up
straight.

The light was gone. The day was
over.