Harry's Trees

by Jon Cohen

  After a long moment—That’s what life is, loving and letting go—he placed his own ring beside Olive’s long-buried ring, pushed the soft earth into place, patted it down and covered the spot with a scattering of leaves.

  He stood, brushed the leaves and dirt off his knees, and turned to the broken branch, which lay across the half-tumbled end of the stone wall. It upset Olive, so he’d pull it into the brush so she wouldn’t have to see it if she ever returned. He tugged at the broken end of the branch. Something caught his eye. On a loose flap of bark on the very end of the branch—the bark was scarred. Someone had carved something, long ago.

  He pulled the piece free of the broken limb. Turned it in various directions. When he held it a certain way, he saw the letter P.

  He looked up at the spot on the tree, where the limb had snapped off. The wound had stopped dripping sap. The healing had begun. He climbed up on the wall, went up on his toes. There was a small piece of dangling bark above the wound—the other half of the carving.

  The two sections of bark were like two puzzle pieces. He fit them together:

  Olive and her lover had carved their initials and drawn a heart around them. Time and insects had worn away the letter of his last name. And what was his first name? Alfred. Albert. Allen. Aaron.

  Harry got back down off the wall. O and her A. It would’ve been A who carved the initials, climbing up on the stone wall in the bright moonlight. O would have stood at the base of the young sugar maple looking up.

  “I’ll put them up high,” he would have said. “And only we will know they’re there. It will be our secret.”

  And the young girl, watching, would have thought to herself: The heart will protect us, too. Drawn around our names, snug, like the ring on my finger.

  19

  Except for the extraordinary part, The Plan was simple. Harry and Oriana sat at the kitchen table in the tree house. It was early morning, before school. Oriana was holding The Grum’s Ledger.

  “Just because I agreed to do it, doesn’t mean it’s not scary,” Harry said.

  “But you climbed this tree,” Oriana said, patting one of the thick branches of the beech that went up through the center of the tree house. “All the way to the top. That’s way scarier than a little gold.”

  “A little gold,” Harry said. “A smidgen of gold. Just a wee bit of gold.” He gave her a look. “Could you please acknowledge this is scary? Just say, ‘Harry, wow. Impressively scary. I can’t believe you’re actually going to do it.’” And yes, he had climbed the beech. But he’d always understood trees. He was a tree man by instinct and profession. By neither instinct nor profession, not even in the wildest of his wild dreams, was he a gold man.

  “But I do believe it,” Oriana said, “and now so do you. You climbed the tallest tree in the forest. And that makes you amazing. And now you’re going to do something even more amazing.”

  Her eyes were filled with such excitement as she looked down at the grum atop his pile of gold. Harry tried not to gulp audibly. He sure hoped he was doing the right thing, bringing a fairy tale to life. But she believed in it, needed it to come true. Helping Oriana through her grief over her father’s death—how could it not be a good thing? But what if I screw up? Harry swallowed again.

  “So, now,” Oriana said, picking up Harry’s phone off the kitchen table, “it’s time to choose.”

  He took the phone from her. “Here’s the deal. Certain things only I’m going to do.”

  Oriana narrowed her eyes. “Because why?”

  “Because I’m the adult. So I handle this next part. I need to find a shipping site, a wheelbarrow, some other stuff. And the cell signal here is spotty. I’ll be using my phone a lot. So I’m going to Scranton.”

  “Scranton? For a wheelbarrow?”

  “Oriana, I don’t want to do anything suspicious around here.”

  “Why’s a wheelbarrow suspicious?”

  “Trust me. It isn’t until it is. People are smart. They put things together.”

  “You could borrow ours.”

  “No! No, no, no. Of all the people I don’t want suspicious, your mom is number one. Numero uno, Oriana. Got it?”

  She leaned back from him. “Okay. Jeez, I get it. Don’t sound so angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m scared. Remember?”

  “But it’s not illegal. You can’t go to jail. The grum doesn’t end up in jail.”

  Harry rolled his eyes. “My story’s different from his story.”

  “But it’s a lot the same,” Oriana said. “The sad part, and now the gold part.”

  “All he had to do was toss his gold into the forest,” Harry said. “But what I have to do—anything could happen.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “You climbed this tree. That was the hard part.”

  Harry wished that were so. He looked up through the skylight into the towering canopy of the beech. The tree was in full leaf now. It looked like a lovely place to spend a year or two hiding from four million dollars.

  Oriana poked him. “So I know what you get to do. What do I get to do?”

  “You get to find a good hiding place for our treasure.”

  A hiding place for the treasure, thought Oriana. That was Oriana Eagle-Dare FeatherTop Frog-a-lina Cinderella Athena Snow Queen Jeffers’s kind of job. “Okay. How big?”

  “Big. But small.” Whatever that meant. He was sure Oriana understood.

  And she did. A riddle kind of a place, thought Oriana. What is seen, but not seen? What has a mouth but no tongue? “I might have a few ideas,” she said. “Should it be high or low? Near or far?”

  “Low and near,” Harry said. “We’re not talking permanent storage. And it needs to be close to the old quarry road, where my car is parked.”

  Oriana pointed at Harry’s phone. “Can I at least see the number?”

  Yesterday, Jeremy Toland’s law firm had transferred the settlement money to Harry’s money market account at Vanguard. It startled Harry, seeing for the first time the number in bold and in his possession. He went to the Vanguard site, then held his phone for Oriana to see:

  $4,013,276.45

  Oriana’s eyes went wide. “That’s, like, all the money in the world.”

  “It’s just magic money. It’s not real. It’ll be here and then—plink and poof—gone.”

  “I bet it’s going to be heavy. I bet it’s going to be amazing. You’ll let me see it, right? I have to see what magic looks like in real life.”

  Harry dropped to his knees in front of her, placed his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Oriana—and I feel really mean saying this, but I have to—it’s one thing to honor your father and carry out his wishes. I get that. I understand why we’re doing this the grum way.”

  “Because you need an adventure.”

  He looked at her. “But I want to make sure of something here. A big something. For both of us.”

  “Okay.”

  “At the end of The Grum’s Ledger the grum gets his lost love back. But when we get rid of my money, that’s the end of our story, Oriana. That’s as far as our fairy tale goes. Your dad won’t reappear when we finish. Beth won’t come back. Tell me you understand.”

  Oriana answered him in her very solemn voice. “I understand,” she said. The thing about grown-ups, she thought, is that sometimes you have to look them straight in the eye—and lie. She knew something wonderful, extraordinary would happen when they got rid of the last piece of gold, she just couldn’t say what. She had lost a father and Harry Crane had lost a wife on the very same day. Who could say what amazingly super-wonderful thing would happen at the end of the gold?

  Harry went off to Scranton. Oriana went off to school.

  * * *

  So, what was so extraordinary about The Plan?

  This: Harry was going to c
onvert his four million dollars into gold coins. But he wasn’t going to toss coins away like the grum. He was going to stuff them into bags and give them away. Had anyone ever done such a thing? Handed out bags of gold? You don’t hand out a box of gold. It had to be a bag. A burlap bag of gold. That’s the proper look. An unassuming bag, something that doesn’t get in your face and shout, “Gold!” They had not worked out all the details—how many bags and to whom.

  But one heart attack at a time, thought Harry. The first heart attack would be pulling the trigger on the buy.

  He drove down to Spellman Heights, a working-class suburb fifteen minutes north of downtown Scranton. He sat in his car with the engine idling, scanning the neighborhood, cell phone to his ear. The street was lined with trim, white three-story houses with heavy porches made of Pennsylvania bluestone cut from local quarries. Across the street from Harry’s car, a pregnant woman swept her front steps. Two houses up, an old fellow leaning on an aluminum walker hosed out a trash can in his driveway. In the rearview mirror, he spotted a middle-aged blond woman coming up the sidewalk with a collie. Cars and pickup trucks lined the street. No one paid any attention to Harry in his dusty Camry.

  There were thousands of gold bullion sites on the internet. They all looked the same, and the traders at the other end of the 1-800 numbers gave identical spiels. It’s what Harry needed to hear, over and over—the dull legitimizing words of everyday commerce. As a (former) bureaucrat who had spent years wading through the molasses of governmental red tape, it thrilled and shocked him that he could obtain gold so easily. It was so damn legal it felt illegal.

  He dialed the number of YourBullionAmerica.com. They all had names like that. GoldVaultNow.com, WealthGoldMint.com, MonexGoldImperial.com.

  A voice came on the line. “YourBullionAmerica, my name is Kevin Purnell, how may I assist you today?”

  Harry hunched down behind the steering wheel. This was it. He had talked to enough of these guys, it was time. “Yes. I’d like to buy some gold bullion, please,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

  “Certainly, sir,” said Kevin the trader. “And how much would you like to purchase?” There was no limit to the amount of gold an American citizen was allowed to purchase and privately own, and there was no report of the transaction to any government agency. No report, no registration, no paperwork.

  Unbelievable—and perfect, Harry thought. He had to be as invisible as Santa Claus. Santa, lugging around sacks of gold. “I was thinking, two hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth?” he said. It seemed like the right amount to start with, to test the system, large but not staggering. Who was he kidding? It was completely staggering.

  “Yes, sir. And will this be in coin or ingot?”

  “Coin,” Harry said, straining to be casual, as if choosing between coin or ingot was like choosing between whole milk or skim.

  “Yes, sir. In coin, we offer Krugerrands, the Canadian Maple Leaf and, our most popular, the one-ounce American Gold Eagle.”

  Should he ask if they had coins with a grum imprint? Harry felt light-headed, like he was strapped to a rocket blasting off for the moon. Steady, boy. Focus. “I’d like to buy two hundred fifty thousand in...” Wingèd gold for Oriana. “American Gold Eagles,” he said.

  “All right, excellent, sir,” Kevin said. “Now, for purchases over a hundred thousand dollars we do require an electronic funds transfer.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Great. Before I take your information, I do want to say we start the shipping process as soon as the wire is confirmed, which means that the order may be received by you within four days of being placed. However, during periods of high activity, shipment of orders can be delayed.”

  “Is this a period of high activity?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”

  Wow. This is not illegal, this is not illegal, Harry repeated to himself. It’s just incredibly secretive. His eyes flicked. The woman walking the collie had stopped on the sidewalk beside his Camry. She gave a wave. Harry wiggled his fingers back at her. Just ordering a quarter-million dollars in gold, ma’am, pay me no heed. She came closer. Harry tightened. She motioned for him to roll down his window.

  Harry murmured into his phone. “Kevin. Could you hold on a second, please?” He rolled down his window.

  “Are you the gutter guy?” the woman said. The collie jumped up on the car door and sniffed at Harry.

  Christ. Was it a gold-sniffing dog? Harry leaned back from the window. “The gutter guy?” he said.

  “Oh, sorry, I thought you were the gutter guy. He’s supposed to come do an estimate at noon.” She pointed to her house. The gutter above the front porch was loose and swinging in the spring breeze. “Of course they never do come when they say they will.”

  The old fellow hosing the trash can in the driveway of the house called out, “He the gutter guy?”

  “No, Pop-Pops, he’s a different guy.” She turned back to Harry and suddenly noticed he was holding his cell phone. “Oops, didn’t see you’re on your phone. Sorry.”

  The collie narrowed its eyes at Harry and sniffed deeper. The woman yanked him back. “Don’t be nosy,” she said.

  Yes, thought Harry, his heart beating like a kettle drum. Be a good doggy, please, and go away.

  “He the gutter guy?” Pop-Pops shouted again. Pop-Pops seemed to have forgotten he was holding a hose. A heavy arc of water thudded on the wood floor of the front porch.

  “No, he’s some other guy. Pop-Pops, you’re getting the furniture!” The woman rushed off to tend to him.

  “I’m back,” Harry said into his phone. Pop-Pops squirted the howling collie as the woman struggled to wrest the hose from him.

  “Will we be shipping your order to a business or residential address, sir?” Kevin the trader said.

  “A PO box.” Harry had set up two boxes. If this first buy went smoothly, he would purchase the gold from different companies and use the post office as well as UPS drop-off sites. Best to mix things up. Keep the Chinese hackers, the FBI, the Treasury Department and whoever else was probably monitoring his every move on their toes.

  “Ordinarily, we ship via registered insured US Mail, but as your shipment is over twenty thousand dollars, we will be using a private insurance carrier.”

  “That’s fine,” Harry said. An arc of water splashed across his windshield. The woman looked back at Harry and shrugged an apology.

  Kevin went on, reading in a monotone from his computer screen. “If you choose to make future gold purchases with us, and if those shipments are over three hundred thousand dollars, we would suggest to you the practicality and convenience of a private armored carrier such as Brinks or Loomis Fargo.”

  An armored truck! Harry imagined two armed guards from Brinks driving up to his tree house in the middle of the woods. “No, no. Don’t need one of those.”

  “Of course, sir. As I said, we ship in any manner that fits the particular needs of the particular client. By the way, shipping is free.”

  “Nice,” Harry said.

  “All right then, sir. Because the spot price of gold changes by the minute, your buy-order must be locked in by 3:00 p.m. today with a bank wire. Will you be remitting payment via a bank wire today, sir, and locking in?”

  Harry paused a minute before he spoke.

  “Locking in,” he said.

  “Excellent. And one last thing before I start taking your information. Because we value your business, I do want to say again we absolutely respect the client’s need for privacy. Therefore, we never put a client’s name on an invoice. I’ll be writing your name, address and purchase information on a five-inch-by-eight-inch card, which I will then staple to your invoice. After you verify receiving your order, the card will be detached and destroyed.”

  A thin trickle of sweat settled in the notch below Harry’s Adam’s apple. Okay,
Oriana, here we go.

  20

  When they were boys, they had adjacent bedrooms, and there was a nightly ritual. Wolf, in his bed, would chatter until he fell asleep, and Harry, on the other side of the wall in his bed, silent, would listen. There was an old shared heat vent in the wall that warmed both rooms. It was Wolf’s portal to Harry’s psyche. When their father abandoned the family and everything changed, Wolf’s words darkened, and his voice, deepened by adolescence, growled and snarled into Harry’s brain. Wolf talking and talking, so that the vent seemed no longer to deliver warmth from the basement furnace, but the unnatural heat of Wolf’s voice.

  Wolf was alarming, even before their father left them. When they were little, he would narrate highly descriptive tales of the monsters that lurked in Harry’s bedroom. “See that weird shadowy lump on the right side of your room, Harry, by your desk? That’s not your toy chest. I know you think it is, but it isn’t. It’s a vampire, and it’s got this big hump like a hunchback, but different. It’s a blood hump, kinda like a camel’s. The vampire stores the blood in there, from all its victims, blood all mixed up and half-scabby and thick like a milkshake. And that’s where your blood’s going. If you close your eyes for even one second, the vampire is going to hop onto the foot of your bed, then skitter up the wall like a spider and drop onto your face. And it doesn’t suck blood from your neck like a normal vampire, it sucks blood from your face. Your face, Harry, with this weird tentacle mouth-thing, sucking on your cheeks and forehead and eyes like a leech. Mom won’t even recognize your body in the morning.”

  Then Wolf would lean close to the heat vent and make wet echoey slurp-slurp-slurp sounds. Not just a few—he’d slurp away for a full five minutes, then suddenly stop and whisper in a spectral voice, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the vampires bite. I mean, face-suck.”

  Wolf filled Harry’s little bedroom with a galaxy of vampires, ghosts, werewolves and monstrous creations Victor Frankenstein might dream up during a laudanum bender. But the really scary part came in the period after their father drove off, and Wolf entered the full bloom of adolescence. He left childish things behind, and all of his soliloquies turned personal. Wolf the bully, the troublemaker, the revenge-seeker. Every night—whispering menacingly into the heat vent, communicating to the unseen Harry as if Harry was the priest on the other side of the confessional screen—Wolf would describe some daily transgressor: a teacher who pissed him off, a guidance counselor, a store clerk, a neighbor. The revenge he would take. Seldom actually carried out, but gorgeous in its unnerving descriptive power. And all of it going into Harry’s brain.