In the Weeds

by Daniel Browne

  “Look,” I said, “we’ve done everything that’s been asked of us. But if we miss the growing season, we have to give Martin Gollick his money back, and all of it was for nothing. There’ll be plenty of time to make friends once we have plants in the ground and people can see we’re for real.”

  Seth turned to Elliot. “Is that the consensus of the team?”

  Elliot drummed his fingers on the armrest. “One of the reasons we got into this was to be our own bosses, right? So why do I feel like I’ve got a hundred bosses all of a sudden?” The drumming stopped. “I’m with Will. We don’t work for the chairman of CB3.”

  “So if my guys show up on Monday morning, you’ll be ready for them?”

  Elliot caught my eye. I nodded. “Shovel ready, brother. That’s us,” he said.

  Our confab was interrupted by a staccato honk. We looked up, and lo and behold, there it was: the green light.

  Vegetable Unity

  The truck arrived at 7:30 Monday morning, bearing a ton of gravel. Actually, it was closer to twenty tons. The plan was to cover the handball court in a layer of gravel and then top that off with soil. The point of the gravel, apparently, was to allow water to drain. I wasn’t sure where it came from, only that it was relatively cheap: $200 for the truckload. I tried to imagine what it was like to make a living hauling huge amounts of tiny rocks from place to place. How did one break into that business? And what was the motivation? Was there a hidden appeal to it, or was the money better than the retail price suggested? Maybe the gravel business was a family legacy, like owning a restaurant or palm reading. “I’ve got gravel in my blood”—doesn’t that sound like something a gravel supplier might say? I wanted to take a good look at the truck driver, but he never got out of the cab. He just backed the truck up to the opening in the chain link fence and tipped the bed back, letting the gravel fall out in a giant heap. The racket caused a few of our next-door neighbors to poke their heads out of their windows, their statement hairdos pillow-flattened. A cloud of rock dust settled on our clothes and skin.

  Seth’s “guys” were a band—an actual band called Ambrose Fierce. Their front man, Vic, said their biggest gig to date was opening for Ryan Adams, so I had them pegged for one of those Americana-type acts, moonshine stills and black lung. Not that they looked the part exactly. Vic had a shaved head, an assiduously manicured beard, and round specs—a professorial skinhead. Ash was a tawny beanpole with lank black hair that fell to his shoulders, pockmarked cheeks, and a peach fuzz mustache. Craig arrived by skateboard; it was hard to believe a single plank of wood could support his bulk, which was rendered even heftier by the bolts in his ear, the studded leather wristband, and the most serious-looking wallet chain I’d ever seen. Roman must have been the drummer; he was utterly nondescript, just your average Brooklyn dude in Converse and jeans. He happened to be wearing a Creedence T-shirt that first day, and whenever I thought about the guys after that, I always pictured him with a face like John Fogerty’s, but that was probably my mind playing tricks.

  Sizing them up and then sizing up the gravel pile in front of us, I admit I had my doubts. Craig looked like he’d tossed some rocks around in his day (possibly under the auspices of the justice system), and Vic had the arms of a man used to lugging around his own amp, but I was pretty confident I could bear-hug Ash off the ground. As for Roman, his build was part and parcel of the overall impression he made—there wasn’t much to him.

  Seth showed up at eight to drop off the shovels and wheelbarrows. He had a meeting with a prospective client—an assisted living facility in Jersey—so he wouldn’t be joining our little work crew. He didn’t seem too broken up about it, and neither was I. Just helping Vic unload the wheelbarrows from the back of the van had left him damp and panting.

  We each took a shovel. I wasn’t familiar with the optimal procedure for spreading gravel over a handball court, so I hung back to watch the band, figuring I’d follow their lead. There didn’t turn out to be much technique involved. The four of them—along with Elliot, who dove right in without a moment’s hesitation—just started flinging gravel into the wheelbarrows. When one of the barrows was full, Ash or Roman would wheel it over to the other side of the handball wall and dump the contents. I was genuinely surprised they didn’t have a more sophisticated game plan. It seemed to me it would take weeks to get the job done like this. I thought about saying something, but who wants to tell a bunch of indie rockers shoveling gravel in the sun that they’re doing it wrong? Besides, this was the chance I’d been waiting for.

  As a kid, I never spent much time skipping stones or digging up worms. I needed to stick close to the living room to confirm that Charles was still in charge. Part of the initial appeal of the farm had been the promise of shedding my old softness once and for all. The time had finally come to get out of my head, roll up my sleeves, and do some real work.

  One catch: gravel is heavy. I attacked the pile with brio, but I could barely lift a shovelful. Worse, I was the only one who seemed to be having this problem. Elliot was just as much of a sedentary, Rita’s-fed creature as me, but he had the advantage of size. He would have found himself on the low end of the seesaw with any of our crew except the hulking Craig. And there he was, throwing gravel over his shoulder like there was a treasure chest buried underneath. Even scraggy Ash was unfazed; he’d wrapped his T-shirt around his head, and now his ribs showed with every heave of the shovel, yet he didn’t seem to break a sweat. Meanwhile my T-shirt—a piece of Vivienne campaign swag, which I had no intention of removing—was already heavy with my own spent fluids, and I felt a tremor in my knees every time I tried to pry my shovel out of the pile and maneuver it over to the nearest wheelbarrow. By my count, I was adding one shovel-load for every five of Elliot’s. I reminded myself that every little bit brought us closer to our goal. Still, I hoped the others were too intent on their own labor to notice.

  That hope was in vain. After about an hour, I caught Vic watching me with a look that could have been forbearance or pity or concern but was most likely a combination of the three.

  “We need someone to spread out the gravel on the other side,” he said, “make sure it’s all in one even layer.”

  I wanted to say, “Nah, I’m good,” and tough it out with the others. But by that point a sharp pain had flared up under my shoulder blade, and it forced me to be honest with myself.

  “I’m on it.” I said, ignoring how parched my throat felt.

  Compared to shoveling gravel, spreading gravel was a relatively cushy gig but not without its trials. For one thing, it was tedious, not quite strenuous enough to distract from the total lack of stimulation. The best I could do was commit to making the most perfectly even layer Vic had ever seen, painstakingly inspecting my handiwork for any one piece of gravel stubbornly lying atop another and then pressing it down with the back of my shovel.

  Then there was the cloud of grit that hung in the air as Elliot and the band continued to hack away at the pile and dump new loads of gravel on my side of the wall. It formed a grainy crust on my skin, which was only getting sweatier as the sun rose. It was also doing a number on my shoes, a pair of pricey trainers. When I peeked around the wall, I noticed that all the members of Ambrose Fierce had on work boots (professional attire for both construction workers and rock bands, conveniently enough). Elliot was in the same tortured boat shoes he always wore.

  When noon came and Vic passed out Gatorades from the corner store, I accepted the neon blue Glacier Freeze as my due and guzzled those cold electrolytes with the same gusto as my comrades. My contribution may have been less noticeable than theirs, but my thirst was no less real.

  It took us three days to cover the court with gravel. On the second day, Sasha the art teacher and her cartoonist friend Xander came down to help. On the third, Kat showed up, even though we’d told her we’d let her know when we needed her. She came in her idea of workwear: hiking shorts, white T-shirt, suspenders.

  “Sorry to interrupt your man
ly bonding, but I was going crazy at Vivienne’s place.”

  I said there wasn’t much for her to do at the moment, but she just took my shovel from me and got to work, spreading gravel far more efficiently than I had managed. To keep my dignity intact, I volunteered for a Gatorade run. By the time I came back, the work was all but done, and Ash and Kat were playing handball, trying to anyway, with a sun-bleached tennis ball they’d found. Kat whooped as she took a slap at the ball. My first reaction was an adolescent pang of missing out, but I reminded myself that Elliot and I were in charge here. Probably best not to be seen slacking.

  A trio of guys had been watching us from across the street most of the morning. They looked to be Latino and in their late teens or early twenties, and though they were dressed head-to-toe in basketball gear—jerseys, loose-fitting shorts, hightops—they didn’t give off an athletic vibe. They must have been waiting to approach us and saw Ash and Kat’s goofing off as their opening. Elliot and I met them at the fence.

  “What’re you doing to the handball court?” the baby-faced one in the Sprewell jersey asked.

  Elliot blotted his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt. “We’re turning it into a farm.”

  The way the three of them looked at each other, he might as well have said we were building a UFO landing strip.

  “A farm? Like with chickens and cows?”

  “A vegetable farm.”

  “Vegetables?” This apparently didn’t sound any more reasonable than chickens and cows.

  “You gonna have tomatoes?” asked the one with the Oakley jersey and the tribal tattoo on his calf.

  Elliot said we would.

  “I hate tomatoes.”

  The third musketeer was wearing an Oakley jersey, too, but it was from Oak’s pre-Knicks stint in Chicago. Clearly, this was the free spirit of the group.

  “Yo, who’s this for, anyway?”

  Elliot pointed to the school and gave him the Cliff Notes.

  “You mean that retard school? Man, retards don’t even like vegetables! Everyone knows that.”

  I was about to challenge him, but then doubt snuck in. There couldn’t possibly be any truth in this bit of folk wisdom, could there? Edgar said it was mostly the “special kids” who came to help him with his garden, but maybe he wasn’t dealing with the ones on the far end of the spectrum. I’d have to Google it when I got home.

  “So no more handball?” Baby Sprewell asked.

  “Not here.”

  “But when you’re done growing the vegetables, you’re gonna put it back the way it was?”

  How he could see that as a realistic possibility after watching us move twenty tons of gravel was beyond me. Our hope, Elliot told him, was that the farm would be a permanent addition to the neighborhood.

  “Damn, son. Do you know how many girls I felt up in this handball court?”

  I hadn’t realized we were dealing with a romantic.

  “You know there’s another court six blocks from here, right?” Elliot asked.

  The tattooed Oakley scowled. “We can’t go over there, man. That’s Borinquen Plaza guys that play over there. We’re Tompkins Houses.”

  This tidbit would have been helpful to know when Jack first told us about the other handball court. I guess he wasn’t up on the territorial claims of the local residents. He’d said himself he hadn’t been out to the Triangle in decades.

  “Well, I hope you’ll give us a chance,” Elliot said. “We think this is going to be a good thing—especially for the kids.”

  The free spirit shook his head. “It’s all about the kids, right? Whatever, man.”

  He and the other Oakley walked back to their post on the other side of the street. Sprewell lingered.

  “Hey,” he said in a low voice, “you guys hiring?”

  We told him to check back in a week or two.

  * * *

  Next came the soil. Winston had arranged a donation from the Bronx Zoo. Or maybe it was Jack with Winston acting as his agent. We could never be sure when Jack was taking a personal interest in our fate. In any case, the soil arrived in the back of a Parks Department truck. Like Natty Bumppo, Seth let a handful of it run through his fingers and declared it would do the job. As we got to work with our shovels, we uncovered a few miscellaneous bone fragments. “I think we found Jimmy Hoffa,” Vic said. Winston later told us remains sometimes found their way into the mix with the rhino and elephant dung, but it was nothing to worry about. I was inclined to take his word for it and never think about it again.

  Elliot, on the other hand, was tickled. “Now, that’s what I call terroir!”

  It was a relief to switch from gravel to soil, but my place in the pecking order didn’t change much. While the rest of the guys shoveled and carted, my job was to tamp down the dirt with a rake and pick out any debris. As the soil bed took shape, Kat planted sets of stakes at either end and stretched a length of twine between each set, setting up the rows. Then I drew the edge of a hoe down the middle of each row to create the furrow. It was satisfying work; I was literally making my mark. I didn’t even mind much when I noticed Kat trailing me, straightening out and tidying up my impressionistic furrows. Teamwork and all.

  We’d been in construction mode for about a week when we got a visit. The delegation was led by Miss Marcella, the head of the teachers’ committee that had been working with Elliot on the curriculum. She was joined by Sasha, who had volunteered for the committee after meeting us; our old buddy Edgar; and Sal, a teacher from the District 75 school. Miss Marcella was an imposing figure, her burly arms crossed, shrewd eyes cast in shadow by her enormous straw hat. But it was Sal who first commanded my attention. Specifically, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the gold Playboy bunny medallion that nested in the graying chest hair sprouting from his discolored tank top. His acute stoop gave the impression that the medallion had some heft to it. This guy was a teacher? A teacher of kids with special needs?

  “Where’s the rest of the committee?” I asked.

  Miss Marcella’s cheeks puffed up with stifled amusement. “It’s final exams week. You’re not dragging them out here to look at a pile of dirt.”

  “I understand. But there’ll be time between the end of exams and summer break, right? Because we’d love to have some kids take part in the first planting. Think of it as a dress rehearsal before everyone comes back in the fall.”

  Miss Marcella yawned. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  Sal scratched his chest hair. The glint of the sun off his medallion made me squint. “Personally, I don’t know why I’m here. As usual, we weren’t consulted until the last minute. Our kids were not taken into account.”

  Miss Marcella wasn’t having it. “When it was going to be on the roof, you complained. So they moved it off the roof, and you’re still complaining. It gets old, you know?”

  “I bet they only did that because the Schlossers’ lawyers told them to. Wouldn’t want Daddy Warbucks to get caught with his ass out.”

  Vivienne had convinced me the Schlossers wanted the farm on the ground so their benevolence would be visible to passersby. It hadn’t occurred to me the real issue was liability, but what Sal was saying had a plausible ring.

  “You’re not happy unless you can take over the whole thing,” Miss Marcella said. “Isn’t that what happened last time?”

  Elliot and I exchanged a glance. Last time?

  Sal sucked his teeth. “See, the way I remember it, you decided you couldn’t fit any outdoor time into your busy testing schedule, so you left it for Edgar to take care of. And he didn’t want to see all that work go to waste, so he came to us.”

  Edgar had become intensely interested in a stray piece of gravel by his toe.

  Miss Marcella’s chin quivered. “I don’t have the luxury of ignoring test scores.”

  Did she mean to suggest that teaching mentally disabled students was a luxury? I wanted to believe she didn’t, but it sure sounded that way.

  “Come on,
guys.” Sasha said. I suspected she typically reserved that tone of voice for first graders. “We’re all on the same side, right?”

  For a moment, it looked like Sal and Miss Marcella might actually be on the same side after all, united by their contempt for Sasha. Time for a full-bore Elliot charm offensive—a kamikaze mission, most likely.

  “Sasha’s right. Let’s forget about last time. Will and I weren’t here to help last time.”

  There was no audible scoffing, so Elliot pressed on. “Why don’t we plan to have kids from both schools out for a planting next week and see how it goes? We can do separate shifts or one mixed group, give the kids a chance to get to know each other.”

  “Separate,” Sal and Miss Marcella said as one.

  Elliot turned up his palms in submission. “Fine. Whatever makes sense. Miss Marcella, your group can plant from seeds. We’ll do Unit 1: The Life of a Vegetable. Sasha, maybe you can get them started on a mural or a banner.”

  “I’m seeing Diego Rivera. Instead of Proletarian Unity, Vegetable Unity—all the carrots and beets and pea shoots joining hands.”

  “Sounds fruity.” Sal’s lip curled; he seemed to think there was a pun in there somewhere.

  Elliot wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “Sal, your group can bring over the seedlings from Edgar’s garden, and we’ll replant them.”

  “Hold on. You think you’re taking our plants?”

  “No one’s taking your plants. We just think it makes sense to put everything in one place. That way our gardener can do all the watering, and the burden isn’t on Edgar anymore.”

  Edgar looked up, his forehead creased. “But I can still help out, right?”

  “Everybody’s welcome.”

  Sal shook his finger at Miss Marcella. “I don’t want them eating our squash. Our kids get very attached to things.”

  Miss Marcella snorted. I could tell what that snort meant: Retards don’t even like vegetables. Or maybe I was the jerk for thinking that’s what she was thinking.