SmokeLong Quarterly

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance. —Confucius

In this neighborhood the houses are built close together and properties are separated by six-foot-high wooden privacy fences but some things can’t be kept private. Sounds travel easily through the canyon. Arguments are like smoke—the way it clings to rough surfaces and blackens the exterior stucco.

The next door neighbor is a pudgy, middle-aged man with short-cropped hair graying at the temples. Dressed in a white sleeveless undershirt, he sits for hours beneath a sun umbrella on his patio with his caged finches. Their sharp twittering never changes no matter what tune he whistles.

His wife is shy and never smiles. When she isn’t at work, she spends hours in the backyard hunched over her plants. Once she asked me to keep an eye on their place while they were on vacation. She wanted me to remove the advertisements that canvassers left wedged in their door and rearrange the shoes on the front step so it would look like someone was home.

A tinny tap, tap, tap draws me to the window. The husband has dragged a stepladder under the lacy green canopy of the fifteen-foot-tall mimosa tree that his wife nurtured from a sapling. He’s three feet off the ground whacking the tree with a chef’s knife. Chunks of bark fly everywhere. He came prepared with a pair of safety goggles over his thick glasses. As the knife sinks deeper in the soft wood he pounds the knife’s spine with the backside of a hatchet. Blow after blow the spine begins to shine. He stops periodically and reaches into his back pocket for a white handkerchief to knock the woodchips off his goggles and dab sweat from his reddened face. After chopping for an hour he finally takes a break, but he returns almost immediately dragging a small exercise trampoline. He sits down on the trampoline in the tree’s shade and finishes his Diet Pepsi. Then he resumes pounding the knife now lodged deep in the wood. A couple times he climbs down, walks around the tree, and grabs a hold of one of the low branches. He jostles the tree and finally hangs free, lifting his feet off the ground. It isn’t too long before the treetop yields with a crackly sigh. He’s cut clean through four inches of wood in less than two hours.

Any part of the canopy, with its powder-pink flower puffs, that doesn’t fit into the trashcan he throws over the back fence into the canyon. He finishes the job early next morning using his trusty chef’s knife to cut the remaining tree trunk so that it’s flush with the ground. The six-foot trunk is then sidelined beside the garage where several triple-thick trash bags are also waiting for the next trash day.

It’s been six months since I’ve seen or heard his wife. During that time he’s lost nearly thirty pounds and wears cargo shorts and graphic tees when he struts around his backyard. Contact lenses have replaced the dark-rimmed glasses and his jet black hair is slicked back in a pompadour.