mi amigo
by Kevin Sterne
That was the summer I was trimming trees to be ornaments. Cutting away new growth and old growth, shaping honey locust and hackberry and maple away from windows and sidewalks, alleys and the neighbor’s property line. People’d call and complain about their Tree of Heaven—express their fear of it one day falling on their house and crushing their sleeping children into oblivion. I’d stand under it with my ladder and pole saw and cut away until they were happy and felt their families were safe. I always defended the tree (said it was growing naturally and this is a city) then gave in, became obedient. Because money feeds the beast.
I'm not one of those “tree hugger” types either: I was happy to have the work, and I loved working that woodchipper. It’s exactly like in Fargo. And early on, a branch hooked my safety net and tugged it clean off me. The vests secure by Velcro so they’d snap off when this happened. Mine went right through the machine’s innards. Came out looking white as skulls. It was a dangerous job if you weren’t paying attention.
You couldn’t be stupid and I’d read books on break because life's a funny thing. I got a degree in writing and tried for years to get something steady that paid regularly that wasn’t teaching. When I was 18 I thought you could make a living with an English degree. People said it’d be hard but I was young and didn’t know hard. I thought I could be happy and that’s probably called privilege. Later I’d have a boss from Poland who asked me why I’d pay money for a degree in a hobby.
We worked in a big American city by the Great Lakes, divided into neighborhoods, full of trees. I drove south to work, he drove east. Where I lived, people went to gay and lesbian bars on the weekend. There was a marijuana shop down the street. There were thirty racks of Old Style and champagne in the streets when the president lost and the new president won. Every morning my foreman Roy would tell me the importance of saving money and getting ahead in America. He’d say Fuck taxes. The US take all your money. He didn’t believe in voting and didn’t trust the big company we worked for. Said no to the stock options or the 401k plan or even the savings plan. He saved his money, he said, in the bank, but I'm 90% sure it was stuffed in worn out tube socks.
Our narcissism was a response to capitalism. We bonded over this and 94.7 classic hits. Aerosmith's “Dream On” played every morning, usually on the way to the first job. In the afternoon we’d catch two Queen songs back-to-back. “We Will Rock You” fed into “We Are the Champions.” We’d sing along, clap on our thighs, bob our heads. We drove two hours in a day, listened to a lot of Freddie Mercury. Roy behaved like a boy: energetic, flippant, serious, immature. He didn’t know Freddie Mercury was gay. His bottom lip would tuck under his top lip sometimes when he was thinking hard about something, or when he was listening. It was endearing. His eyes were soft, but heavy, like a boxer’s. He worked hard and liked to. I appreciated this about him. I worked hard too, but I didn’t like to. He’d come to the US when he was 14 and lived undocumented for four years in California. We talked in the truck on the way to work. Roy said his neighbors liked to drink and fight. He spent his weekends working on his Ford F150. I tried to keep up with writing, thought about writing something new every morning: story, poem, a thought, but mostly looked at my phone in the truck while eating a hard-boiled egg.
We changed in the locker room every morning, Roy and I. Like high school. Stripped and pulled on work pants. Roy had chainsaw safety pants, mine were standard, Cintas issue. Our lockers were two away from each other. That day we took down 21 Sycamore trees on a property in the new money part of town. Developers bought by the city block, huge swathes of city and bulldozed them. In this case, a tile and flooring studio that would be demo’d and replaced by a 15-years-more-modern tile and flooring studio for the nouveau riche.
It's gotta come down. We're demoing everything, the demo guy yelled from a truck. Trees are first to go. Need them out of here today.
They were perfectly good trees, Sycamores, planted with the building. Babies in tree-years. This is the type of work that broke me down, made me question why I was doing this. The only answer I had was that it was steady and I needed something steady, something that would keep me steady. The trees came down. Roy cut them with his chainsaw. I manned up, dragged the limbs and fed them in the woodchipper. We ground the stumps down to nothing with the stump grinder and filled in the holes with big green shovels made of stiff plastic. We did this for ten hours, twelve hours, til Roy was ready to leave.
We drove back to the shop listening to songs by Kansas, Journey, Boston. We changed in the locker room under fluorescent lights. As I was leaving I heard him in the shower, singing: We are the champions, my friend. I went home and, for the first time in a while, I did some writing. My body was spent but my mind was restless. It wasn't much, just these two characters talking in a truck, a scene. First person.
Crawling back to the shop in rush hour traffic, he told me about his friend he’d immigrated with who had taken a male lover in California. Out on the street a sports sedan tried to cut in front of us and Roy laid on the horn. Pinche puto! I asked him what that meant and he told me.
Roy said he and this friend had fought over a girl once, back in Mexico, before they came to the US.
I imagined the fight was loud, bloody, and ended with a guy in the dirt.
Something change in him, Roy said, in California maybe he like it. Me on him, you know?
I looked at his eyes and wondered if they’d always been that heavy or if they’d become that way with time. From what he’d been through.
I respect him but I don't want him to come in my house, you know?
I don't know. Honestly. And I wonder if this is where two cultures hit a wall. Not language, but belief. Or that I went to college and I pay taxes to a country that unfairly targets specific groups of people. Presidents try to keep people like Roy out of this country so he can keep people like Roy happy. But they’re not like Roy because everyone is different and alike. I’ve laughed with people who dump their spent cigarettes into empty beer bottles and probably go home to be someone else. I’ve known beautiful people too, sad ones, religious ones. Each human is a different tree. Every ring is love. Have you ever tried counting the rings in a tree, like really tried?
It takes a long time, but it’s worth it, to focus with all your effort on something other than yourself.
Customers look over the job we do and say things like you’re an artist. But they don’t understand art or maybe they do, but differently than me.
It was already a good lookin’ tree.
But you made it better.
Thank you.
It’s just a tree, but it’s all about being better. We’re just people, but nothing is that simple.
I write a lot more now. I have these two characters I’ve been working on, both poor, one educated, one experienced.
Kevin Sterne is a carpenter from Chicago. His story collection is All Must Go. He's the winner of the Phoebe Journal 2020 Fiction Prize. He loves trees.