Del Read online

visualizing the future configuration of the tree as the network of branches emerged. “What are you doing?” we asked once as he stared at a willow. “Seeing the future,” he murmured without turning. Naturally, “How’s the future look, Del?” caught on as a catch-phrase: first as a gibe, and then as a thorn.

  Del frequently sought solace at North Lake, whose shallows were thick with reeds, whose meandering margins were fringed by leafy trees and gray-green shrubs, whose waters were frequented by seabirds and waterfowl. Del loved the lake so well that he’d do our muckiest jobs in exchange for extra turns working the lake. And Del flowed when he worked–unlike, say, Tex, whose torpor suggested that he considered labor degrading, and who scowled at the plants as if they were to blame; or Jack, who uprooted plants with a badger-like fury, and chucked beer cans into hollows with the same look of impish contempt he had worn one night near the beach when spraying a building with a bladder’s worth of beer (he looked askance at me when I chose to use a dark stand of trees). Del presented quite a contrast. When pulling up weeds he knelt carefully so as not to damage the undergrowth, grasped the clump at ground level, and pulled gently yet firmly in order to leave no roots in the ground, his face as intent and patient as the time he’d tweezed a splinter from my palm (I never wore work gloves, preferring to feel nature on my hands). He had cultivated intricate trails of branches for the squirrels over the course of his five years with the gardening crew, trails that twisted, turned, and dove from the upper reaches to the lower limbs where squirrels zoomed down to claim nuts and bread crumbs. And Del had groomed the branches that spanned the path into leafy arches, channeling them higher than the heads of the tallest walkers. His artistry enhanced the allure of the lake, which drew in all kinds: middle-aged Russian couples who bickered comfortably as they strolled the lake; trios of middle-aged Chinese women in baseball caps and sweat pants who overtook the gabbling Russians; young white parents who lifted their babes to leaves bright with sunlight; poets inhaling sweet inspiration; vagabonds with the sense to tarry in a beautiful setting; whispering lovers; tittering tweens;–all of whom passed Del without his notice as he weeded, planted, pruned.

  On a May afternoon as the sky grayed with dusk, as Del pruned a tree near a terraced bank that stepped down to an earthen landing, a spry little redhead of twenty-five or so, with whom I was smitten and had spoken once, continued to paint a view to the west. In changing patterns of shadow and light she saw reeds and trees and herons and gulls and the green-blue heads of mallards in the glossy green water. She moved her lips as if silently responding to the continuous subtle changes in the light, the way lily pads respond to the lake’s undulations. With a sigh she lamented the passing of the light, and turned with a smile that offered commiseration. Del’s mirroring smile altered hers into something obscure yet lovely and fair, like an elf’s reflection in murky water.

  At that moment Ed Lugo chunked sideways down the embankment on the far side of the path. Tess and Jack stood within a stand of trees at the top of the hill and watched sideways, pretending not to watch.

  A glimmer in Ed’s serious eyes confirmed his affection for Del: Ed often held up Del as a model worker, and this was one of the reasons the crew disliked both. The crew disliked Ed also for his impeccably trimmed beard like that of a Spanish aristocrat from centuries past, his punctiliousness of manner, his absolute intolerance for any deviation from prescribed gardening procedures or departmental rules, and his habit of spying on us through the trees, which each of us but Delmore took as an insult. There was also the theory, floated by Tess in a flurry of soap bubbles, that Ed had received his position due to affirmative action, a theory flawed for numerous reasons we chose to ignore in deference to Tessie.

  Jack’s detestation of Loogie contained a large dose of career envy. Jack’s first job with Rec And Parks had been the product of the long-dimmed lustre of his football rep, and Jack had moved only laterally since, bitterly watching a succession of newer hires take promotions which Jack considered his birthright as a San Francisco-born Irish Son of the Sunset and football hero. Not that Jack merited promotions: as Tess pointed out, it was only management’s fear of our union that had kept Jack and Tex in place for so long. Jack’s distaste for Loogie partook of the primal as well, for Jack aggressively disliked men like Loogie and Del who lacked athletic talent, strength, and swagger, and wouldn’t share in the beer or weed procured by our Par-tayer In Chief. Once Jack mentioned Loogie’s small hands with a comic creeped-out shudder, and Tanisha added that no speck of dirt had ever lodged beneath Ed’s manicured nails, a profoundly personal condemnation since Tanisha had sacrificed her long nails, expertly decorated with crimson roses on long green stems, upon joining the crew about two years before.

  “Del,” Ed sighed, placing an unsoiled hand on Del’s shoulder and provoking a snort from Jack in the woods, “it is now seven-thirty.”

  Del smiled at the fatherly implication that he ought to get home in time for supper.

  “Ah, Del. It pains me to say this, but you have broken the rules, my friend, by working unauthorized overtime.”

  “It’s not overtime–I clocked out.” Del mistook the anguish expressed by Ed’s arched brow for confusion. “I guess you could say I’m working off the clock,” he added helpfully.

  “Yes,” Ed sighed, “and for that I must issue a reprimand.” He glanced around furtively. “If I didn’t, they all would say I play favorites.”

  “Sure,” Del nodded. “Should I go now?”

  The next morning Tess asked, “How’d it go with Loogie, Boy Scout?” Jack barely suppressed a snigger, and Tex smiled broadly, for “Boy Scout” to them was a damning evocation of an America from which they were estranged. It had been damning in my eyes, too, if I had been the type to damn things at all.

  Del considered making Eagle Scout the greatest of his youthful achievements–his knot-tying skills had bailed us out once or twice–so the assignation “Boy Scout” had always made him smile like a little brother cuffed on the neck. This time, though, the smile was weighted with acute consciousness of the crew’s contempt. “It went alright,” Del said, and this was true, for he and Ed had dealt honestly with each other, and in accordance with the rules. Del gazed at a semicircle of grins linked in one giant grin of derision, and blinked as if a grain of sand had worked its way into his eye from inside. “What do you have against scouting?” he asked in a voice that barely wanted to know.

  Tess indulged in a fruity, “Are you kidding?!” and jerked her gaze at Jack, who snickered at Tex, who threw his broad grin up at the sky.

  But they didn’t answer, but melted away.

  “Scouting’s cool,” I told Del half sincerely. I reached for his shoulder but hesitated for fear he might snap like a wounded animal. The sunlight made my hand a white dove which I allowed to take wing and to light on Del’s shoulder, which was round as a stone polished by the river. He did not shrug, and we stood together and gazed at the water.

  By the summer solstice Del was spending every break at a distance. Honor-bound not to work off the clock, fundamentally unwilling to complain to the union, he spent his time like many another habitue of the park, strolling the trails, feeding the squirrels, gazing at the water of the lakes and inhaling the spicy aroma of the plants fringing the lakes. He usually chose North Lake with its squirrel branch-trails that he had crafted, and its wild beauty like that of a marshland lake. The spry little redhaired girl was there too–Laurel R. Gleason was her name, I’d learned when I’d chatted with her after Del’s reprimand. She had granted me a glittering smile that enticed precisely because it was not overtly encouraging, and I had received the additional gift of a dip into clear blue eyes like a shallow mountain pool, as wide and unblinking as a camera’s lens. Laurel had set up her easel by North Lake every late afternoon in May and thus far in June, and had produced three oil paintings with a westerly view of the lake. The paintings varied in tone, light, and mood, like Monet’s six paintings of the church in Vernon.
Del and Laurel exchanged no words, but communed silently like the herons and cranes.

  Del often gathered fallen leaves and blossoms for compost for the vegetable planters he had built in the back of his shared rental house. I had been drawn to gardening less for the love of plants than for reasons of ecology–Dad and Stepchick had volunteered with me in a community garden when I was in high school and I loved composting, loved the magic process that turned kitchen scraps and moldering leaves into a rich, crumbly black mass with an odour of clean earth that scrubbed my brain clean. After Del distanced himself from us, I had become the go-between for job-related messages between him and the crew, and often chatted with him about the art and science of composting. In mid-summer he wanted to start a new hot pile for an August planting of fava beans and spinach. He knew that I surfed every day–I’d met a cute surfer girl–and he asked with the tentative air of a prisoner seeking help from a guard if I’d bring him a bag of kelp for his pile. I met him outside the park the next day and hoisted a bag full of kelp into the trunk of his Civic, which was pockmarked with rust from years in the fog.