by David Downie
These arresting features were topped by a green billed cap bearing the logo of a local radio station, whose call letters James recognized from high school days, KRVL 91.1 FM. Out of the cap’s ventilated sides and back sprang sprays of curls dyed acid green. James stepped closer, squinting up, the figure no longer inspiring in him a bread stick but a giant stalk of celery topped by a totem pole head.
“Did you spot the shopping cart again,” Beverley asked with a toothy smile, fingering her pearl necklace, “and the dead hog?”
“No,” James said. “Neither. The tide must have taken them out.”
“It must have.” Beverley nodded. “Unless it was the ’copter that flew by while you were making sawdust in your RV. We could hear your snores all the way across the parking lot.” She let out a guffaw, then prodded the boy standing next to her. “So, we decided to head you off at the pass,” she went on, “the top of the staircase is what I mean. Did you count the treads? Of course! Seventeen, just as I said. Now, Taz here has come over specially to meet you and learn to use that saw. I know you have your shopping and laundry to do this afternoon, I’ll tell you later how I know that, but I also want you to be aware that you can use my machines if you like, and if you give me your list, I’ll be glad to pick up whatever you want at the market, I’m going in with my pickup truck.” She wheezed noisily then tugged on the wires in Taz’s ears, causing the earbuds to fall out. He caught them with surprising deftness and seemed unperturbed. “Taz, this is James,” she shouted into the wind, “the maestro of the chainsaw.”
James leaned forward to shake. “Nice to meet you,” James said, wondering where the bones in the boy’s large sweaty hand had gone. Taz bobbed his head and mumbled.
“James doesn’t speak Millennial,” Beverley quipped. “Speak up and enunciate! Maybe you need to take that spike out of your tongue.”
“It’s a stud not a spike,” Taz said meekly, “and I’m not a Millennial, I’m a Gen Z.”
“That may be, but James still cannot understand you.”
“I said my real name isn’t Taz,” the boy repeated softly, grinning while coiling up the earphone cables and stashing them in the pocket of a bright blue hoodie hidden by the overalls. “It’s Alexander.”
“That’s a fine name,” James said. “I’ll call you Alexander.”
“Alexander Z Great,” Beverley interjected with a snort.
“You can call me Taz if you want,” he said with the same shy grin, “I don’t mind.”
“If I were you, I’d put on those boots of yours pronto,” Beverley told James. “You never know what you might step on in this parking lot, and I don’t just mean dog dirt and syringes, I mean horns and tusks and hunks of hide, and human ears and fingers chewed on by hogs.” She paused to watch Taz smile a goofy smile. “Now, the coffee is hot, and there are still some cinnamon rolls left. I know you’re hungry for a snack, James, so I could also scramble a few eggs if you like, and crumble in some shredded cheddar, if that won’t ruin your appetite for dinner. Not that you’ll want to drink the gas and that castor oil for the saw, but this afternoon, while you were patrolling the beach, I also bought more of those pestilential fluids. Man does that saw drink fuel!”
Using her banter and arms like a crook, she herded the pair past the RV toward the highway, approving as she went the invigorating strength of the wind and the waves. “A deal’s a deal,” she said, turning up her palm and looking Taz in the eye. As they crossed the Eden’s parking lot, empty except for Beverley’s cherry-red pickup, she reached out then pocketed the boy’s smartphone and headset. “Ever tried getting any work out of a kid with these earbuds attached, let alone talk to them?” she asked rhetorically, opening the deer fence and stepping through. “It cannot be done. You’ll get it back after dinner,” she told Taz. “If you think this is cruel or unusual punishment,” she said, turning to James, “ask his grandmother, she approves. On top of it, a smartphone has five times as many germs as a toilet seat. I heard that on the radio this morning and I will sterilize the thing before he gets it back.”
Taz rolled his large eyes skyward and opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.
“Generation Z, did he say? Who ever heard of it! They’ll all die of septicemia from their cellphones. What’s next anyway? We’ve come to the end of the line, the end of the alphabet. Zzzzzz, as in lay-zee.”
James tugged thoughtfully at his beard, following along, unsure what to say. “Since you seem to have a contractual agreement, I recuse myself from commentary,” he remarked, trying to sound lighthearted.
“You’re a wise man,” she said.
“Better a wise man than a wise guy,” Taz quipped then seemed to regret it, covering his mouth with his hand to hide his snickering laughter, the way Tom, the deputy, had tried to hide his spittle-flecked mustache.
“Watch your manners, young man.” Beverley chuckled, her fingers on her pearls. “I’ve got a new nickname for you, Z Smart Alex.”
“What’s an aleck anyway?” Taz asked.
“Another word to google,” Beverley said, catching her breath, “once you’re home with your darling grandma.”
Taz wrinkled his face. “Can someone, like, translate the ‘recluse’ for me? And why doesn’t he have to hand over his?”
James held up empty hands. “I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have one?”
“I do have an un-smart cellphone,” he explained, “for emergencies.”
“You have a burner, like, like a cartel kingpin?”
James laughed out loud. “I keep forgetting to charge it, and the battery runs out or the credit runs out, I don’t know which, I only turn it on once in a blue moon.”
“A blue moon?”
“Not everyone is an addict,” Beverley remarked. “You can look up the verb form later, even though ‘recluse’ is not what James said just now. But here’s a hint. Since you’re a natural-born Smart Alex you’ve hit the nail on the noggin, as my dad used to say. James is generally as tongue-tied and reclusive as you are, but he chooses his words with care. I suppose it goes with the territory. All the tall skin-and-bones men I’ve known have been of few words, I mean mouse-quiet, reticent, retiring, not to say morbidly shy, solemn, secretive, and private, in other words, reclusive.” She gasped for breath as they neared the cypress. “On the other hand, lawyers and judges and public or elected officials recuse themselves to avoid conflicts of interest, or I suppose I should say they used to. Now it only happens once in a blue moon. You can look that up, too, later.”
“That just about covers it,” Taz said, his goofy smile reappearing as he tilted his eyes heavenward again. “I recuse myself from, like, more of this crazy talk.”
“Well, we know who the wise guy is,” Beverley said, launching a final salvo. “By the way, are we going to play the ‘like’ game today? I’ve already tallied about ten.” She turned to James. “Taz isn’t as bad as some of them, believe me. Why they say ‘like’ all the time I do not know, but it makes me homicidal, so, Taz, you are officially handing over your ‘likes’ with your smartphone, got it?”
The wheelbarrow laden with the chainsaw, handsaw, and other gardening tools stood waiting by the remnant stump of the fallen cypress. Beverley said she was coming right back with the last of the cinnamon rolls and coffee and could scramble the eggs but didn’t want to miss the fun. “Before you do anything, don’t forget to put on your safety glasses and gloves,” she shouted over her shoulder. “James, please tell him what OSHA stands for.”
“I know,” Taz shouted back. “Oh Shit—Had an Accident!” He grinned, his blush a deep purple.
They waited until Beverley had disappeared into the motel office. Then in silence they glanced shyly at each other, the stump, the ground, and the sky. James pulled at his beard and cleared his throat. Taz put on the orange ear protectors, took them off, and looked inside his gloves. Finding nothing there, he picked up the handsaw, looked at James again, and batted his eyelashes.
/> “Tell me something,” James said, tinkering with the chainsaw. “If your name is Alexander, why does she call you Taz?”
Taz glanced away, trying to keep his wide smile and shiny teeth out of view. “I’d, like, let her tell you that. She’ll tell you whether I do or don’t.”
James said that seemed all right, they would humor her. “Do you know how to use the saw?”
Taz shook his head no and wagged it yes in a single meaningless gesture. “I mean, it seems dangerous to me,” he said. “It, like, makes so much noise and smoke. I’ve used my grandma’s saw, but there are no safety guards on this one and it, like, leaks oil all over the place, I could never get it to work right, and I’m not sure I want to make it work.”
“That’s judicious of you,” James said, “a good reason to go on strike until Beverley gets it rebuilt.”
Taz ran an immaculate, manicured hand over his rubberized face and said they had tried that already. The repairmen at the garage in East Carverville had refused to service the saw because it was too old and likely to cause injury. “They also said it’s the best chainsaw ever built, it’s, like, forty years old or something.”
James felt a pang. Turning toward the ocean, he drew several deep breaths, listening to the wind chimes, foghorn, and surf. “When I was your age, it was new,” he said, summoning a sad smile, “and those cottages down there were in perfect condition.” Hefting the saw then letting it drop like a high diver, he heard it roar to life, spewing fumes and spraying oil. He revved it, engaged the blade, disengaged it, and turned it off. “The trick,” he said, “is to prime it, here, it’s not automatic, and if it doesn’t start, drip some gas straight into the carburetor, here. You might also have to dry off the spark plug. Now you try it.”
Taz set the choke, yanked the starter cord, and seemed startled and terrified when the saw spluttered into life. He revved it, then seeing James waving his hands, let go of the throttle and let it die.
Beverley bustled up, breathless, carrying a tray. “I knew he could do it,” she said. “All he needed was a pointer by the maestro.” They each took a mug and a roll and sat on the downed cypress in a moment of bonhomie. Noticing what was clearly a jagged white bone lodged in the roots, James slid his boot over to hide it from Beverley. The last thing he wanted was to talk about cemeteries, bones, and death.
“It sure smells good,” Beverley enthused. “Not the saw or the coffee, the wood I mean, from the macrocarpa tree. I wonder if we could save some of that sawdust and sew it up in bags to scent the rooms.”
Taz and James glanced at each other. “Alexander will make some more of it for you in a minute,” James said. “But you might want to include some dried foliage, too.”
“Foilage,” Taz said, his camel face perplexed.
“Foliage,” Beverley corrected.
“Foliage,” Taz repeated laboriously, as if he were hearing the word pronounced properly for the first time. Then he added, “What’s a macrocarpa tree? If I had my phone I could look it up.”
“Well you don’t have your phone, and you’re not getting it back,” said Beverley.
“Cupressus macrocarpa,” James said, “the coastal cypress.”
“So, it’s, like, just a cypress, right?”
“Right.”
“I’m ready to saw up the macrocarpa,” Taz said, the coffee clearly giving him a rush. “Can I start the chainsaw?”
“Praise Be!” Beverley exclaimed, raising her arms, “if he turns out to have real razzmatazz, I’ll have to find another nickname for him. ‘Smart Alex’ is pretty good, if I say so myself. But hold your horses until we finish our coffee break, you Tasmanian, you.”
Taz spluttered and choked on his coffee, unable to keep from emitting an embarrassed, nervous braying laugh. “You might as well tell him,” he said, momentarily mastering his rubberized expression. “I hear it coming.”
Beverley caught enough breath to coordinate her talking, chewing, and swallowing. “Well, I’m certain James objects, because he’s very serious-minded, but I’ve got a nickname for everyone, at least one, and often three. He’s Taz as in Razzmatazz or the Tasmanian Devil. You remember him, a little whirlwind of activity that this Taz here definitely is not, unless stung by bees or otherwise stimulated by something electronic. I mean that with no offense, it’s a generational plague among Millennials or Gen Zs, as far as I can see, like saying ‘like’ all the time. My grandchildren are worse, meaning they’d starve to death if they had to do more than lift the lid off liquid yogurt, and they’d rather have a recharge for their telephones than a meal. Now luckily, he’s got the happy gene, the serene gene, like Mahatma Gandhi, and that’s a good thing, and he also doesn’t smoke like everyone else his age, as if enough of us hadn’t smoked and croaked in the past so they might learn from our example.” She paused long enough to drink down the last of her coffee. “How many ‘likes’ did he say while I was getting the cinnamon rolls?”
“I didn’t notice,” James said.
“How many ‘likes’ did you just say?” Taz teased her. “I counted a bunch, like, ‘he also doesn’t smoke like everyone else.’” Taz grinned, his face a camel-complexioned version of Alfred E. Neuman on the cover of Mad magazine, way back when.
Beverley looked at him disapprovingly. “I am an equal opportunity name giver,” she segued. “There’s Tom Cat, the deputy you met, and his uncle Harvey-Parvey-Sat-on-a-Wall Murphy, a true Humpty Dumpty lookalike you’re likely to bump into sooner or later. I’m Tater or Bev as in beverage, and I just might have to call you Henry James you’re so literate, or Jimbo because you’re a tough, silent guy, or Paul Bunyan for the chainsaw, or maybe Jim Crow, seeing that you look like a crow in your windbreaker, with your hands tucked behind your back, not to mention your beak. The hair and beard do nothing to hide that nose of yours. There are a couple other nicknames I can think of for you, like Gandalf because you’re right out of The Hobbit, or Ichabod Crane, or Daddy Longlegs, of course, and maybe Dr. Watson or Perry Mason or even Hamilton Burger on a good day, but they’d mean nothing to Taz here.”
“You might be surprised,” Taz said. “I like reruns.”
“Reruns?” Beverley snorted. “We are talking about the icons of classic literature and television! And that is the proper way to use ‘like,’ by the way. I’m glad you like reruns. Congratulations.”
James put his goggles and gloves back on. “If you pick up some bacon or links, and some frozen spinach and granola and plain yogurt,” he said, “I’ll, like, pay you back later. Actually, if you, like, see any fresh local wild salmon, get that, too, I’ll, like, do it on the barbecue.”
Beverley made a face. “Okay, wise man, I see you two are ganging up on me. It would be just like you to take up the cause of the downtrodden, wouldn’t it?” She paused for effect, watching James sink back into silent mode. “For your learned information, it’ll be frozen Norwegian farmed salmon, there is no local salmon anymore, haven’t they told you? Or are they ripping you off at the market because you’re a tourist? You haven’t bought any of that leathery mess from the folks at Yono Harbor, have you? Besides, you must feel like a cannibal eating salmon, as I started to say after lunch, before that phone call so rudely interrupted us.”
James shook his head. It ached with incomprehension. Still puzzling, he picked up the saw, drop-started it, and shouted over the noise, “We don’t want to reenact The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so you’d better give us some operating room.” He revved up, blowing exhaust and oil fumes in Beverley’s direction and watching her retreat.
“I’ll be right back,” she shouted, cupping her hands. “Dinner will be on the table at 5:30 P.M., precisely.”
FIVE
By the time Beverley had driven out of the parking lot in her cherry-red pickup, James and Taz had taken turns sawing the cypress trunk almost to the ground. The older man had carefully removed the bone fragments lodged in the roots, telling Taz they were probably deer or hog bones, he thought, and watching to see how
the boy reacted. But Taz’s face remained expressionless.
Of more urgent concern was the way James felt, his body a bruise someone was pressing on with strong fingers. A quarter hour of cutting had been enough to bring out the aches and bring back the fatigue from that morning. As he rested on the stump, the whining engine still rang in his ears. His arms and shoulder blades vibrated, and his fingers and hands shook.
Gingerly picking up sawed sections of branches, Taz stacked them one by one under a nearby bay laurel tree, clearly interested in aesthetics and economy of movement. “Cool RV,” he commented, glancing into the seaside parking lot through a knothole in an undamaged section of the fence. “It’s just big enough for one.”
“Two would be better,” James said, “but she couldn’t make the trip, and I haven’t found the other one I’m looking for.”
Taz stared at him, then nodded silently. The wind chimes and surf hung between them. A foghorn moaned. “We need one of those grinders to get rid of the small stuff and leaves,” Taz ventured.
James roused himself. “I think it’s called a chipper,” he said, his voice gravelly. He cleared his throat. “It makes a hell of a noise, like that saw. My mother loved to snip everything by hand. She wouldn’t own a chipper. I guess I’ve come around to understanding why.” James stretched his spidery legs out across the stump and picked the sawdust and chips out of his flowing beard. Then he began counting the growth rings of the tree. He got to thirty, about a quarter of the way across, and gave up. “Silence is golden,” he added, whispering, “it’s as worn out an expression as that chainsaw, but it’s truer than ever.”
“I thought you liked the saw,” Taz said, leaning closer. “We could get an electric saw instead.”
