Growing Beans

Ruben’s voice had lost its usual youthful timbre, darkened by a desperate, tired edge. It could have been the phone quality as my speaker and microphone had suffered a not insignificant amount of water and dust ingress at my old job. As did his, I’m sure. Until recently, the two of us were coworkers at a local landscape yard. And like an equally tired-sounding Hollywood plot device, he needed me for one last project.

“You still have a shirt?” he asked.

I sighed. I did, but it was a keepsake that I wanted to be nothing more than that. I was hoping it would remain a memento of complicated, but lukewarm, sentiment in the back of my closet. Growing Beans had company-issued shirts that would not be out of place on employees in a luxury gym. They had requested them all back on my last day, but grudgingly let me keep the one that I had sweat through and had no change of clothes for.

“Yeah, just the one,” I answered.

Relief began to carry his voice back into his normal register. “That’s great. Yeah, come in near closing and we can knock it out. It’s a couple of bird baths and I just don’t have the grip.”

“Where is everybody?” I tried not to entertain the dark curiosity about how the yard fared when I left, but I still didn’t quite see why he needed me.

“Out of state. The parade, you know? They couldn’t send me along because of my injury.”

“Injury?”

“So you’ll come?”

Ruben, ugh. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

“That’s great! I’ll see you soon. 4:50.”

“4:50.” I hung up first. It would not be a long drive to the yard, but I couldn’t wait to be back in the truck, headed home.

And I’m throwing this shirt in the first garbage can I see.

*

You come for the plants, you stay for the view, I thought as I pulled my truck alongside the gate to the yard. It was halfway closed as a passive aggressive reminder to the oblivious and the obstinate that Growing Beans was closing for the day. My shoulders and legs had tensed on the drive up, but began to relax when I realized there would be no customers to fend off. I turned my wheels into the curb and set the parking brake, almost without thinking. Old habits, I thought. The incline outside the yard was a daunting 40 degree angle and if you lost your footing, or if your car had bad brakes, there was nothing to stop you until you hit the cross-traffic at the bottom.

I did miss the view, though. The city sprawled out below, only ever at peace in the early morning. It had the entire sky and mountains at its back and was, in turn, adorned with a veil of mist, a crown of stormclouds, or furious gradients of dusk. A panic attack of a town that, from this distance and height, held fast its charm and glamor.

I slipped on my shirt. Why Ruben had requested it evaded me, but I guessed it would be an easier cover story to pass off that I was staff still if the owner, or the self-obsessed management, happened to be around. I wedged myself through the gate and saw Ruben in the corner of the yard struggling with a steel sculpture water feature, a pallet of upturned stone bird baths off to the side.

The cobalt barn that loomed over the display paddock seemed bigger than I remembered, and it was dizzying standing beneath it. The sentinel knows when a passerby becomes a trespasser.

“Hey man!” Ruben jogged over and I gave a quick hug before seeing the salt stains tapering down his chest. I didn’t mind. It was always an act of camaraderie for me celebrating a hard day’s work with a handshake caked in moist soil. He stood back, his fists set into the sides of his narrow waist, a pose that gave the illusion of broadness to his waifish frame. His jaw jutted out in a smile that would suit a superhero, but the hollows around his eyes belied the brave face he seemed to be putting on.

“You look good!” I said, hoping we moved on quickly from the small talk.

“Thanks, man. Thanks for coming.”

“Of course! I would have just been catching up on my knitting.” We both laughed, but the sound fell into the wind. The eucalyptus trees across from the yard sent faint citrusy notes in the air. With an amicable head bob, he gestured to the pallet.

“So yeah, it’s right over here.” Gauze was wrapped around the ring and pinky finger of his left hand. Or where those two fingers should have been.

“Holy shit. What happened to your hand?”

Ruben made an embarrassed sound before he answered. “Uh, yeah. I was moving a limestone planter by myself–”

I began to cringe as we walked over. “Where was Mauricio? Or Hillary?” I asked.

“Hillary fired Mauricio last week. Right after she sent everyone else out of state for the parade build. It’s just me here until they come back.”

All the old resentments came flooding back. Hillary’s disregard for OSHA regulations. The late summer days teetering on the edge of heat stroke in the yard. The unspoken “or else” tailed at the end of every “gentle reminder.” I did not miss this place.

“Is she here?” I asked, with half an impulse to scream at her all of the things I was too polite to include in my exit interview.

“No, she’s been leaving at four these days,” he said, looking absently into the trees across the road.

“What would we do without you, Ruben?” I said in a derisive impression of her toxically positive affect.

“Stop! It’s like she’s here,” he said. The two of us shivered and laughed again.

“So what do we got?” I asked as we gravitated to the largest bird bath, a brutish, modern specimen with a fluted stem, a piece guaranteed to draw the eye to its gross incongruity. Some millionaire will love it, I thought.

Ruben pointed at the pallet and the group of ten interlocked bird baths. “This is it, I just need help flipping them over and I can do the rest.” He gave me a wan smile.

“Let’s just knock it out,” I said, testing my strength against the density and weight of the big bird bath. They were going to be way too heavy to move alone.

Ruben knitted his eyebrows together, he was looking more tired by the minute. “Are you sure?”

“Vamonos!” I said.

We made quick work of the display and I was sweaty and eager to get home.

“Do you need a ride?” I asked as he closed and locked the gate. He was near downtown, from what I remembered, but I didn’t mind the drive.

He turned, his expression sheepish. “No, not really. I actually live here,” he admitted.

“Where?” I asked. Though there was technically a house on the property, it had been abandoned for years and now housed a local interspecies gang of possums, raccoons, and feral cats.

“There.” He pointed to a culvert in the hill above the yard.

“You’re kidding!” I said. “Can I see?”

“Sure,” he said, sounding like someone trying to sound nonchalant. There was a strange, excited alarm to his voice and he looked again to the trees. “But it’s not very welcoming when it gets dark.”

“It’s all good, I know the way home from here.

*

It was not very welcoming, even in the light. The culvert mouth was enclosed by a makeshift wall of corrugated steel braced with t-posts. Inside was a very humble living arrangement. Under the left curve was a made bed flanked by a nightstand. On the right was a small desk, an oil lamp with a short, guttering flame, a chair, and a dresser, all with a finish of reclaimed wood. The rounded end of the tunnel remained unfurnished and dark, except for a rough porthole skylight. The eucalyptus tree tops leaned lazily into and out of view.

No space for a kennel, I thought. “What happened to your dog?” I asked, realizing only after that I might have opened a can of worms, inviting questions with possibly morbid answers.

Ruben took a seat on the chair and offered me the bed before he responded, “He ran out on me a few weeks back.”

I was gutted. He was a beautiful silver husky, vocal, and playful to no end. To see Ruben and Antone together was to see a fully realized symbiosis of dog and man. “Aw, shit, man. I’m really sorry to hear that. No one’s seen him?”

He hesitated for a second, rubbing the bandage on his left hand. “No.”

The wind rattled the steel against the posts like a choked thunderclap. I couldn’t imagine trying to sleep through that, and I was beginning to regret coming in at all. I couldn’t think of any conversational pivot that could lead us away from more heartache.

“Damn,” I said, feeling ineffectual. “Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

Ruben paused for a long time. I shifted my weight to stand when he spoke.

“There’s a man that watches me at night.”

“What?”

“He climbs those trees every night,” Ruben pointed outside at the wispy tops leaning over the porthole window, “and he looks in to see if I’m asleep.”

I thought I had stood already, but I was still sitting on the bed, feeling too low to the ground for a quick, unclumsy, exit. From the bed, you could see directly into the trees. And, presumably, anything in the trees could see directly in here. It was getting dark outside. While we weren’t personally close, I had no reason not to trust his words. He was a hard worker, no nonsense and easy to get along with. A good man fallen on hard times.

“Fuck, man. Let’s get you the hell out of here,” I said. I meant it. There was barely any space in my studio apartment in the city, but there was room enough to take in this suffering creature, shaking in his chair. I looked out the window and, in the fading indigo light, the shape of a man, curved and dangerous, clung to the top, swaying along with the great lumbering shadows.

Ruben looked down, his hands pressed against the back of his head. “Is he out there?”

“I see him,” I told him, caught between reassuring him that he was not crazy, and scared for my own safety. Those trees are above my truck.

I tried to think of the next thing to do, but the only thought coming to mind, the thought that forced out all other thoughts, was to run like hell for the truck and haul ass off this hill. Ruben’s whimpers were nearly drowned out by the wind outside. “Ruben. Let’s go for my truck.”

“I can’t leave,” he said with a grim finality that caught me off guard. I began to mentally run through each step that would put me back in my apartment. Keys in pocket. Trigger fob as I make it to road. Door open. Ignition. Reverse down hill. Back into traffic. Forward–

“And you can’t either.”

I looked at him and the grim affect to his voice had transmuted into a hard expression of certainty on his face.

“What?”

“He’ll bring my dog back,” he said, “if I give him offerings.”

He turned up the flame in the oil lamp, and the shape in the trees slowly began to climb down. A beacon, I realized.

I eyed his left hand, seeing now a bandage, not dirty from days of use, but a slapdash, careless staunch for a flesh sacrifice.

“And I’ll finally get some sleep.”