The Language of Trees (10 page)

Someone swings and clips Grant's left cheek, numbing one side of his face. Bodies are falling, arms and legs entangled. Grant can tell this is a desperate fight, not a fight over money or property. A fight fought in order to exhaust the sense of desperation, which means this fight is more dangerous. There's nothing at stake. The goal is only to hurt and get hurt. Grant manages to slip out and push Lion back into a table, holding his arms. But Rory won't quit. “Where's your goddamn junkie girlfriend now?” Rory yells, spitting his words through blood.

“Motherfucker, I'll kill you,” Lion yells, nostrils flaring. Grant can feel the pull in the air between the two boys. He's using all of his strength to keep Lion back, but Lion wriggles out of his arms, scraping across the floor for the gun.

Sean jumps in and grabs Lion's collar. Grant kicks the gun aside with his foot while he gets a good grip on Rory's neck.

“It's over,” Grant manages, with his mouth full of rocks. He has done this more than once. Working at Hallandale Arts has provided ample practice. And when he was younger he knew a thing or two about this kind of fighting.

 

“S
OMEONE GET ME A
Kleenex,” says Rory.

“I got it,” says Georgia, pulling a pack from her apron. “Allergies,” she explains. Now the way Lion responds, staring at Grant with his head slightly bowed, you would think Grant had some kind of power, some kind of reputation in town. Whatever it is, it is working to Grant's advantage.

Grant knows he must tread carefully. He doesn't want to drive things to the critical point where somebody has to make a decision he'll regret, just to save face. Thankfully, Rory breaks the silence. “Man, Lion. If I didn't already owe you,” he says. “Listen, whatever I said, forget it.”

“You don't owe shit,” Lion spits, his skin dark and glistening.

“Let him owe what he owes. It's over,” Grant says.

“Let him fight, asshole,” Lion yells at Grant, his once warm eyes now inky black. “Stay the fuck out of it.”

Grant doesn't flinch.

“This is my goddamn bar,” yells Sean, louder than Grant has ever heard him. “I call the shots.”

“Nice pun,” notes Grant.

“You fat shit,” says Lion. “Hit me,” he orders Sean. Sean lets him go.

“Zebra,” Rory hisses.

Wrong move. Lion reels a punch, missing Rory by a mile. Sean grabs him again and has got Lion's hands behind his back.

“You've really lost it this time, Williams.”

“My arms,” Lion winces. At once, tears are streaming down Lion's face and into the neck of his torn gray sweater. It's difficult for Grant to watch this man crumble, sobbing for all to see. He wants to protect him from being seen like this, more so even than he wanted to protect him from being punched. It's even more difficult to watch given that he has a child at home. He shouldn't be baring his soul in the middle of a bar. Exposed like this.

Sean releases Lion, who drops to his knees. Rory holds his hand out to Lion. When Lion shrugs him off, Rory turns to Grant. “It's okay. He's not himself since his girlfriend split,” Rory explains.

Grant keeps his eyes on Lion as he grabs the phone book from the corner and calls Leila Ellis. She answers expectantly. He doesn't want to disappoint her. He can hear her voice drop off when she realizes he's not calling about Melanie. Grant tells her he thinks it's best if Lion stays at his place. “Let Rory bring him home,” Leila urges. “They have this love-hate sort of thing. It'll be fine. He has to be at the apartment in case Melanie comes home.”

“He's had a couple too many. He needs to dry out.”

There is silence on the line. “But he doesn't drink anymore,” Leila finally manages. Grant doesn't know that the floor under Leila has just slanted backwards and she is falling off the earth. “If I could just talk to you in person,” she says. She grabs hold of the counter and glances out at the lilacs waving in the breeze. The tree is almost twenty feet tall; it might just take over both her own house and Clarisse's. “He has been sober for years. He's never slipped,” Leila whispers. Her hopeless tone brings Grant back to those days when she'd call in the middle of the night, pleading with Dr. Shongo to come quick because Luke was sick. Dr. Shongo would never tell his wife where he was
going on these late night calls. Whenever Leila called, he would run out, saying on his way out, “People need me.” Nothing else. Emily Shongo's face would grow pale and she'd storm out of the room. Grant always wondered why his father never said it was Leila who had called. Dr. Shongo always told his wife who was calling whenever anybody else called in the middle of the night.

“I'll bring Lion back in the morning, Leila.”

“I guess it's better that Melanie doesn't see him like this.”

“He'll be good as new.”

“I put my faith in the hands of your father for a long time,” she says. Grant hesitates. “I'll have to trust you, too,” she says, and hangs up.

While Lion is still crying softly, muttering to himself, Grant slides him into his car. Lion calls Grant a motherfucker a few more times before passing out. One of Grant's front lights is out and he relies on the moonlight to show the way home. It is a full moon tonight. He glances out at the lake just in time to catch a glimpse of something breaking free from the net of dense fog and rising off the surface of the water and into the low clouds.

T
WICE A YEAR, MEN
who live along the lake put on their bathing suits and high water boots and wade out into the freezing water to set out the docks in front of their shorelines. This ritual—the docks go into the lake by Memorial Day and out by Labor Day—was created in response to the ferocity of bad winter weather more than anything else. The fact is that nothing can be sustained in the icy water throughout the winter, not even the metal sections of a heavy dock. And so they are taken apart each season, the individual sections dragged up from the shoreline, only to be returned again in May. Then, men can again fish off them, women can sun themselves, boats can be hoisted up to them, and children can run across the slippery surface in their wet bathing suits, inevitably sliding off and into the cold water, resurfacing in tears, and with their first real bruises.

Usually the water is so cold, so choppy, nobody in his right mind wants to do the job. It's not a thing one can do alone. Some docks require several men to drag all the sections into the water and fit each of them together. That's why being neighborly on the lake is a necessity. A person can't see a thing be
neath the water, not the bone white stones under his feet, or the metallic flash of a sunfish. There's no time like the present to put the dock out, but Grant needs another man, and though Lion Williams would not be his first choice, he decides to put him to work.

 

L
ION
W
ILLIAMS HASN'T WOKEN
up with a hangover in five years, not since he stopped drinking Jack Daniels and smoking pot. But when Grant nudges him at 7
A.M
., Lion is caught angry and off balance. It's not the fact that his tongue feels like leather. He welcomes the punishment. He's more worried about his girlfriend, who has now been gone for three days. To add to the feeling, he sees water when he looks out the window of the cabin. Gray water everywhere. Miles of it.

Lion knows he will die in the water. He's always known it ever since he was three and his cousin threw him into the pool at the YMCA. He sunk right to the bottom and didn't come up. That's why he's whispering to himself, trying to count down from one hundred. He is convinced that all the evil in the world ends up in the water eventually. He is already cold, and may freeze if his lungs don't explode first. He has read books on drowning. He figures if it's going to happen, he should at least know how. As soon as the body gets stiff from fear it begins to sink. After two minutes a person becomes unconscious. The heart beats for several minutes thereafter. A person might not even rise to the surface before he dies. People die while they're sinking, all swollen like those baby birds that wash up on the shore after falling out of nests from the trees that line the lake.

He needs to get back home. Lucas, he needs to see Lucas. Where the hell is his car? He peers out of the other window and into the woods, the sunlight burning into his bloodshot eyes.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” he tells Grant. “You kidnapped me. And now you want me to do work for you? Are you kidding me, man? Where the hell am I?”

He swings his long legs off the bed, and rubs his stubbled chin, pushing the thin flannel blanket off of his legs and onto the faded yellow shag carpeting. “Look, I gotta find my wife,” he mutters. “I gotta see my son.” But Grant doesn't listen. Lion can smell bacon cooking. Grant mentions something about breakfast and Lion's car being left at the bar. Lion watches Grant lumber back into the small kitchen with its dark oak paneling. The whole house smells like grease. Grant doesn't seem to care about what is going on in Lion's world. It makes Lion want to spit.

“Make the damn bed and then I'll feed you,” Grant calls in.

“I don't want your food,” mutters Lion.

He really wants to hate Grant Shongo. Really wants to detest him with every aching fiber he has. Lion gets up and stands in the doorway watching Grant flip flapjacks into the air. The place is pathetic. Small, with an old brown couch and a bunch of wooden Indian statues everywhere he looks. He doesn't know why the guy's long hair bothers him.

Lion clears his throat. “Man, take me home. Or I'm gonna walk.”

“Sure you know your way out of here?”

Lion looks out at the lake. He is trapped. A hostage.

Grant points to a seat at the bony oak table where elbow-worn circles mark the seating. There's a red and black woven placemat, a fork and knife to the left of a white plastic plate. Staring at his reflection in the empty plate, for a moment Lion has the feeling that the bottom has fallen out of his life. When he started smoking pot, that's how empty he felt. Empty and lost. All he could see in his future was a one-way ticket to a
particularly unattractive destiny on the streets of Los Angeles for the rest of his life. He had nothing. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing to give. He couldn't feel the
Lion
inside of him. He was a nowhere person, stuck between black and white, devil and saint. He hasn't felt that way in ages, not since meeting Melanie. When he got her clean he became a hero and his destiny completely changed.

All Lion wants to do is to sting Grant for helping him. No matter what, they'll never be friends. Grant's like all the other “normies,” which means he'll never know what it takes to wrestle addiction to the ground, which means he'd never understand who Lion is at the core. He doesn't tell Grant that every once in a while he answers a stranger's desperate midnight phone call. Without thinking twice, he'll haul himself out of bed and drive through the rain, the snow, to the other side of town, to the opposite end of the state, in the direction of someone else's nightmare. Hitting bottom is life or death, and it doesn't matter where you live or how much money you make. Hitting bottom is all about one thing: Truth. He's got antennae for it. Grant doesn't know how an addiction changes you, the deep oceans it sinks you to. Grant probably lives in a trance, never knowing what's wrong or even how to see inside himself. But Lion can tell Grant has bottomed out.

There are telltale signs: he sleeps on a tiny twin bed without sheets or pillows. Piles of wood shavings litter the porch. There are empty ramen noodles wrappers all over the counter. And a goddamn big gray wolf is tied to a tree outside. The damn thing looks ferocious, licking his chops and eyeing Lion like Lion is his next meal. The guy is definitely off balance.

No, addicts are the strong ones, Lion believes. Once they learn to focus their energy in another way, they can do amazing things.

But he'll just let the guy think he's so superior.

Lion tries to think about Lucas, and that brings him back.

Lucas, the miracle. How is it that this new person has become his compass? His true north.

Lucas needs him. Everybody's got to be needed.

Lucas is a beautiful child. People in the mall do a double-take to try to get a good look at him with his coffee-milk skin and light blue eyes. He's got old eyes, deep and glassy. He looks at you like he has seen it all before, Lion has tried to explain. Like Lucas just
knows
.

Lion's love has everything to do with who Lucas is, and what that love has made him. Lucas is trusting and Lion wants him to stay that way, the way Lion used to be before he hit the streets of Long Beach on the afternoon of his fourteenth birthday. He had to make it on his own. He had to learn how to talk, how to deal, how to blend in and how to stand out. He made up a whole new person, and slipped him on like a new suit.

Years later, when Lion got sober, he had to unlearn all those things. He hadn't counted on the fact that those different selves were harder to take off than to put on.

Lion won't let that fate come to Lucas. At least the boy does take after Lion in one way: he has the same long legs and spindly fingers. And he doesn't like vegetables, especially peas and cooked carrots. Lucas spits them out every time Melanie tries to disguise them as something else. Even after she bought the special Goofy bib and fork for him, even when she makes the one-eyed Grinch face, Lucas still spits out those vegetables. He can't be fooled, and Lion admires him for it.

They're night owls, all three of them. If they were birds, they'd be a family of owls living in a tree. When Lucas wakes up just before midnight, Melanie brings him into their bed,
and she sings songs to him that she makes up. Lucas makes his gurgling laugh that sounds like some kind of frog so you know he's happy. Lion loves to hear Melanie whisper to him about Felf the Elf and Punchkin the Munchkin. She doesn't tell him scary stories that will make his head ache for the rest of his life whenever he finds himself alone. Lucas doesn't even care that her songs make no sense. He starts pulling at his tawny curls and kicking his little feet, and when Lion sees that bent right pinky toe moving back and forth he knows everything is perfect.

The food smells good. Lion's mouth waters, despite himself. He takes a bite, but he doesn't look up. He is thinking of Melanie. Worried. Is she eating breakfast somewhere far away? Has she just come home, expecting to surprise him, sorry, and full of kisses? He won't tell Grant that banana pancakes are Melanie's favorite, that warm bananas melting in her mouth are one of her favorite things on earth.

 

“H
OW ARE THEY
?” G
RANT
asks. He doesn't want to hover but he can't help it. Despite the dull memory of alcohol, he's ready. The ritual of cooking, of caring for someone other than himself, has awakened a part of him. It's true he feels somewhat anxious. The place has become a fortress, a sacred territory all his own, but the company, however belligerent, is better than the isolation. Grant could build a house today. He's already cleaned up the living room and ripped three old screens away from the porch. They're lying in a curled mess across the yard. Every so often he steals a look into the living room to make sure no coal footprints have appeared.

It's too bad Lion smells like beer and smoke. Grant would offer to wash his clothes but he doesn't want to mother him to
death. He's about to suggest a shower when Lion stops chewing and looks up.

“Kind of rubbery,” says Lion. “Like a tire.”

Grant folds his arms across his chest and smiles. There's a sulfur spring near an old Boy Scout camp on Tichenor Point where surly campers were dunked. He and Lion might have to take a field trip there.

“What are you looking at, man? You're making me nervous,” Lion says, flatly. “I hate people staring at me.”

“Sorry,” says Grant, looking down. He sighs, all the while keeping his eyes on the ground. Grant waits for a reaction, some sign of life from Lion. Nothing. A waiting game. A minute of silence passes.

Lion tries to hold back but he cannot stop himself. Lion is hungry after all. He hasn't eaten since early yesterday.

“You don't have to stare at the floor,” says Lion, biting into the pancake. “Just don't stare at me.”

“Okay, okay,” says Grant. “At least you're human. I wasn't sure.”

“Not really,” Lion tells him, swallowing. “Not much.”

“Where'd you get so tough?”

Lion keeps his eyes on his plate. “You a full-blooded Indian?”

Grant picks up his fork to spear a section of pancake. “Half. My father was Seneca, my mother was white. Why?”

“Just heard you were a full-blooded Indian.”

Grant shakes his head. “No.”

Lion raises an eyebrow at Grant. “You wish you were?”

“What?”

“You know. Pure.”

“I've had some time to get used to it,” Grant tells him. “All Indian, all white. Doesn't make you pure. Or strong.”

Lion nods. “You'll say that.”

“It's what I believe.”

“Well, I ain't pure-blooded either. White mother. Black father. He liked banana ice cream. That's all I know about him. And he didn't like kids. He was going to college. He thought he was too smart for her. She always talked about his wristwatch. Like she was real impressed that he wore a watch. Like that meant something. But, anyone who doesn't want to know me I don't want to know,” Lion says, rubbing his temples. Suddenly, the wolf attacks the glass door with his tongue, licking it with too much enthusiasm. “Holy shit, get that thing away from me!” yells Lion, jumping up from the table. The wolf has been waiting outside on the porch, ears pricked up, pacing back and forth, penitent, drooling, watching Grant and Lion through the sliding glass doors.

“He's friendly,” says Grant. “He was injured. He's staying here for a while until he gets better. He's tied up, don't worry.”

“Man, is your head on right?”

“Perfectly fine. Your head okay?” Grant says.

“Yeah, except my eyes are on fire,” says Lion, blinking.

“Aspirin's in the cupboard. Help yourself.”

Lion shakes his head. “Nah, I'm all natural, man. Can't believe you're keeping a wolf as a pet. What's his name?”

“He doesn't have a name yet. He isn't mine.”

“Yeah, right,” says Lion impatiently. “Listen, lost my cell phone last night. You got a phone?”

Grant ignores him. “The phone is right there. But it doesn't work. Finish eating and then you can help me set up the docks. And then I'll drive you to Kelley's to get your car.”

“You're bribing me, man,” says Lion. “What do you mean, the docks?”

“The boat docks. See out there,” he says, motioning toward
the water. “Everyone is putting the docks out today. It's tradition.” Lion peers out the window. Groups of men are gathered at the shore all along the lake, moving pieces of metal and wood.

“I ain't going outside with that goddamn wolf. And I ain't going in the water,” warns Lion.

“Why not?” asks Grant.

“You got to get someone else. No way I'm going.”

“Well, can you help me get started at least?”