Baby Geisha (12 page)

Scruffles licked his chops. Coneylicious. Fortified for impending night, it was back to the city in the morning with red reishi and my Frankenweenie.

JACKPOT (II)

This was the most in-demand tree. Every man with a machete had for centuries been dying to cut it down or to hack it up a little bit. The people who had historically succeeded in chopping it kept branches in their houses as trophies to show they dominated something super old. These guys, according to the sign chained around the trunk listing violation penalties for petting the tree or even looking at it wrong, were called Tree Poachers. There were guilty female culprits, too, though most women smuggled smaller pieces home to boil in tea or to chew superstitiously.

Most people in town respected the tree and, for the most part, went about their daily business in kindhearted ways. But there was something about the tree that brought out humanity's sinister side. It had the power of something 800 years old. At 200 feet tall, it would have made good lumber except for its numerous burls. From under it, one could barely see the sky, though bald spots were apparent since many of the tree's main arteries had been severed in the last century. The tree was stubby with sappy branch wounds whose fresh scent disguised the stench of its stagnant swamp surroundings.

This conifer, lodged in dank Mexican jungle, even looked swampy with drooping needles and twigs sagging off bigger branches like water-logged churros. Dry to the touch, the tree shed soft papery bark whose feathery, drenched appearance made it look like it had eternally soaked in standing water. The tree looked more like a pathetic willow than Mexico's most revered pine.

Tourists came daily to snap photos of themselves standing with the tree. Local bums loved loitering in the town square, but the grass was boggy and the town-elected Tree Patrol issued pricey vagrancy tickets. The tree-saving movement here was ironically impassioned. Sappy stumps where branches should be, they said, made the tree susceptible to swamp rot. Shop owners, who comprised the movement's majority, were especially invested in the tree's survival since tree memorabilia was their livelihood. But even the most avid tree guardians were compelled to midnight tree slashing. No one knew why the tree provoked the town's sadistic streak.

 

Huevito and Florencita were a married couple who some nights had no better idea than to go to town with their machetes to splinter up the very thing that put their landscape on the map. In this village, their birthplace, they lived four blocks from the tree but only two blocks from the iron railing that protected the tree and its root system.

The lovers wore ski masks when sneaking over the fence in the wee hours. They'd pass a bottle of aguardiente back and forth, and start stabbing. Huevito cut all dangling burls or branches off. Since one of his household pastimes was machete sharpening, one or two hard chops with his fine blades sliced nubs clean off. He got running starts and twirled like a samurai. His performances inspired Florencita, who stood way back to appreciate his interpretive dances.

She, on the other hand, had spent many an evening carving pictures of skulls and naked ladies onto the tree's bosom as if tattooing an old friend. Huevito rarely complimented her on this art. She deliberately didn't nickname the tree, because she didn't want to fall in love with it. She and Little Egg had TP'ed the tree as kids. Their adult romance had blossomed in this tree's presence. In their living room, they kept a shrine's worth of vivisected tree parts. She was attached enough.

Huevito, dubbed Little Egg by his father because he was the
last of four boys and a whole foot shorter than them, cut the tree because it made him feel bigger. For example, he couldn't be a masseuse with such small hands, and he couldn't be a professional wrestler. Worse, he was never trained as a tree pruner, his childhood aspiration.

Florencita loved his smallness, and the tree made her feel like fucking Little Egg because it complemented Huevito's pugnacious side. She thought of Little Egg as scrambled or sunny side up, while under the tree he became hard-boiled. Flo normally succumbed to tedious housework, so to her the tree symbolized everything besides cooking and cleaning. She had never done ladylike things, like erotic dancing, because most men thought she was a dogface. And this was slightly true; Flo had a large, lumpy nose, missing front teeth, and lard rolls ruffling her midsection.

 

On Easter Sunday, Florencita got fed up with washing laundry, dishes, and their horse, Feo, whose hooves got so caked with swamp mud on rides that he could hardly gallop. Since the first day of spring, Huevito and Feo had been out with the metal detector, combing the countryside for submerged weaponry. He coveted gold, copper, silver, any metal really, especially in sword form. Chances of discovering metal were slim because there had been only one significant battle here and the loot was way raided. Metal detecting and horse bathing were not generating major income. When Huevito came home with a mud-encrusted horse and two rusty coins that were not only
not
antique but also too disintegrated to buy groceries, Flo waved her finger at him, “Get a real job!”

“Why don't you?” Little Egg snarled, polishing the coins with his t-shirt.

“This swamp stinks,” Flo said. “And there's no work here.”

“I'm hungry,” Little Egg said.

It was going to be one of those days.

But that night, Little Egg grabbed two newly sharpened machetes while Flo got out a paring knife, a switchblade, and a slender sword Huevito affectionately called her Lady'chete. Stealthily, they tiptoed over to the tree's iron railing, upon which hung a sign hand-painted in cursive:
Forbidden to Cut Parts of the Tree
. They'd memorized the way each letter looped righteously upwards. Pausing to read, then hopping the fence, was a ritual that made Flo and Little Egg reverential but devilish, apologetic but elated.

Sphinx moths flitted about like teeny dollar bills. Stray cats squatted on every branch, hissing at each other. Little Egg and Flo arranged their knives on the ground as if hosting a yard sale. Each blade glinted in full moonlight from different angles, reminding Flo of diamonds and Huevito of power tools. Flo leaned over to kiss Huevito as he fondled the biggest machete.

Huevito used his blade gorilla-style, but watching Little Egg whittle fresh growth this time wasn't doing it for Flo. She observed her husband flying around like an enraged ape and realized that her sultry hatch marks weren't cutting it, figuratively speaking. Her small marks weren't as boldly gestural as his war dance. Her routine would be more radical, she concluded, if she physically ignored the tree and cut it, instead, with her mind.

“Huevito,” she called. “Watch this.”

Flo picked up Lady'chete and ran it along the tip of her tongue. Little Egg was too turned on to tell her to stop, even when a little blood pooled in her mouth. He picked up a tree branch and fingered its frothy pine needles. When the licking was over, Flo put the sword down and took off her sneakers before stepping barefoot on it.

“No!” Huevito said, half-heartedly. “Don't…”

Arms out, she looked like a tightrope walker. The mud helped the blade stand erect.

Little Egg imagined, in close-up, the shiny blade making
provocative slices on his wife's feet. It dawned on him that he had been cutting the tree all these years because he enjoyed seeing it suffer. A revelation. For a split second, Little Egg cared more for the tree than for Flo's feet.
Maybe all along
, Huevito thought,
I loved the tree more than my wife
.

“Ouch!” Flo yelled, jumping off the Lady'chete. She looked down and saw her right foot bottom gashed the long way. “Help,” she said, as she began to sob.

Huevito took his shirt off and tied it around her foot. Coins began to rain down from the tree's expansive canopy. Flo and Huevito let them accumulate before deciding whether or not they should start rolling in cash, but it appeared that these were only wooden nickels. Florencita sobbed more. They made umbrellas over their heads with their arms. Little Egg yelled through the downpour, “Fill your fanny pack just in case!”

“You fill it,” Flo sniffled. “My foot hurts.”

Little Egg grabbed her pack and shoveled coins in. When it bulged, they hobbled home.

 

The next morning, Huevito attributed the windfall to his tree-maiming epiphany, while Florencita wondered if the tree had tipped her for seductive dancing. They debated over fresh ham and eggs Huevito had purchased earlier with the wooden nickels. They had covered the wound with cotton and tied it shut with string in lieu of paying for stitches, and her foot was propped up on a chair.

“Let's cut back on tree cutting,” Huevito said.

“But it might make us rich,” Flo said.

“To thank us for not cutting it,” Huevito said.

“Or because it finds me sexy,” she said.

“Either way,” Flo said, “we should get out there in case it rains again.” Later that day, to prepare, she put on her best lingerie—a faded tiger-striped camisole with shot elastic—under her
sweat pants. She planned to buy new dancing underwear with the coins this time, wooden or not.

 

It was midnight when Little Egg and Flo went to coax more coins out of the tree. Flo hopped on one foot, using Huevito as a crutch. She'd spent all day mentally choreographing a blade dance that involved zero stepping on sharp edges. Huevito lifted her over the railing, and Flo stripped. Perched on one leg like a flamingo, she twirled her Lady'chete baton-style and sliced figure eights above her head.

Little Egg watched impatiently. He wanted coins but didn't believe this was the way to get them, plus he wanted her to stop for romance under the tree.

Any day now
, Flo thought, breaking a sweat.

“Give it a rest,” Little Egg said, irritated. He picked up his own machete and lopped off a couple of branches out of sexual frustration.

It was then that metal coins poured down. Flo saw Little Egg hacking and felt confused, but it seemed to work so she started in too. They took turns hewing, like loggers alternating axes. Some coins were Easter egg hued. Half piñata, half piggy bank, the tree rained coins until the whole thing crackled and fell over, taking out a corner store and an electrical pole on the way down. Stuffing a few sacks full of coins, Flo and Huevito limped home as Tree Patrol sirens sounded at the other end of the town square. Home, they spilled the coins on the living room carpet and counted, forgetting that they'd just felled this money tree.

 

In the morning, the community assembled around the stump. The Tree Patrol Commissioner gave a tragic speech and women cried into their handkerchiefs. Men with chain saws started clearing debris.
Let's punish who did this
, a shop owner said. A mob formed to march door-to-door. Huevito and Florencita rode the bus one town over to the swap meet, to buy Flo new underwear with their nickel cache.

“The tree will open up to me,” Flo said to Huevito, as they leafed through piles of panties at the open-air market.

“The tree is dead,” Little Egg declared solemnly. When Flo heard that, she added the sassiest panties—red ruffles—to her purchase pile.

 

The couple danced and cleaved the stump with machetes nightly. Nothing worked. They were fighting constantly about how to get more coins, or how to at least rejuvenate their beloved. Finally, three weeks after the tree's debris had been cleared, Florencita got stinking drunk and snuck out alone to dry-hump the tree stump in her red ruffles. It even seemed ridiculous to her, but the tree had been her first tipping client. For the first time, she felt like a real stripper.

A couple songs into her lap dance, coins started flying at her not from above but from the side. She shined her flashlight and found Little Egg, tossing coins from behind a rose bush.

“You hit the jackpot, baby,” Florencita yelled.

As soon as she said this, more coins started flying from the sidelines again. The Tree Patrol shined spotlights on the couple and began a coin-hurling contest.

“Surrender,” they yelled through a bullhorn.

“It's my stump!” Flo yelled. She hurled coins so hard they sliced the police. Tree Patrol crawled away, injured. Flo wanted coins, but only from her deceased tree.
The one I cut down
, she thought,
mi amor
.

From then on, people threw coins at Florencita everywhere she walked, and called her a tree slut. She couldn't blame them. In the end, it was the deceased tree that made all the money, which it stored in its bank account also known as Swamp Mud. When the scandal blew over, though, Huevito took Flo instead of Feo to rob the mud bank with his metal detector. Flo vowed never to wash that muddy horse again.