Abruptly, behind him, he heard small voices whispering, branches rustling. He glanced over his shoulder.
Catherine, Will, Burt, and Suze were bagging the greenery and dragging the packed black garbage bags along the side of the garage. Catherine cut the thicker stems into foot-long lengths with anvil shears, her hands encased in thick leather gloves, and then the kids picked up the short pieces and stuffed them into the bags.
For an instant, Willard felt an overwhelming urge to tell them to get the hell away from here, to leave the damned things alone, that he would take care of them because that was his job and they had nearly killed his son! He had even worked his way off his throbbing knees, using the loppers for support, and was half turned to face them when something in his brain went snaaaap! and, suddenly reeling for an instant with the same sense of disorientation that had struck him earlier, he shook his head and started to speak.
Catherine and the kids were standing in front of him, stock still. She still held the shears in one hand, an uncut branch in the other. Will had frozen in the act of lifting a filled bag. Burt and Suze dropped the bits of leafy detritus they had collected.
“Where’s Sams?”
“Taking a nap.” Catherine sounded cautious, unsure of whether to say anything more.
“Oh. Okay.” Willard shuffled for a moment. Then: “Thanks, guys. For helping out, I mean. I guess I was a bit…uh…a bit short with you this morning, Will. And you, too, Catherine.”
Catherine nodded. The kids remained like stones.
He was going to say something else, realized that he didn’t quite know what, then knelt again and began sawing raggedly at the next stump. But he threw a quick glance over his shoulder and said “Thanks. Again.”
With everyone helping-even Sams a short while later, after he emerged from the house, wiping sleep from his eyes and dragging his blanket across the filthy concrete until Catherine yelped in horror at the sight and set the grimy thing carefully on a folded garbage bag-with everyone working at cutting, trimming, bagging, and stacking, they finished by late afternoon.
As a thank you, Willard took the whole crew to the nearest McDonalds and let the kids have anything they wanted for dinner.
“Just this once,” he said in answer to Catherine’s reproachful glance. “I was a beast to everyone this morning, and they really did a great job when I finally came to my senses. They deserve it.”
And they all enjoyed it.
By the time they returned home, however, Willard realized that he was in some discomfort. His hands and fingers seemed stiff, swollen, and the skin on his arms tingled painfully. Even though he had showered and changed before the family had gone out to eat, Catherine ordered him into the shower again.
“That looks like a rash coming,” she said, pointing to a line of redness along the inside of his arm, a roughened patch of skin extending from elbow to wrist. “I’ll bet there were some oils or something in those leaves, and you might be allergic. That might be why your fingers are swollen, too.”
She handed him a small pill and a cup of cool water. “Antihistamine. Just in case.”
He stood for a long while under the hot spray, soaping his arms and shoulders, washing his hands thoroughly, rinsing off, then soaping again. As he did, he felt knots in his muscles loosen, but even more importantly his mind- still vivid and fretful-eased as well. When he eventually emerged, he felt slightly weak, as wrinkled as a raisin, and finally, thoroughly clean. The redness along his arms was still there, but fainter. His fingers were swollen and stiff but he could almost make a fist when he tried.
He put on his heavy terry-cloth robe and wandered out into the family room.
It was empty.
“Catherine?”
“Back here.” Her voice came from the bedrooms.
He sauntered down the hall, feeling pleasantly tired and relaxed. She met him outside the door to their bedroom and shunted him inside.
“The kids are down.”
“Asleep already?”
“No, I told them they could play in the boys’ room for a while…quietly.” She reached behind her and carefully shut the door. “And they’ve been threatened with mayhem and dismemberment…all right, with spending tomorrow without any TV privileges,” she emended at the look of surprise on Willard’s face, “if they so much as step foot down the hall beyond Suze’s doorway tonight.”
She smiled, and with a couple of deft movements, slipped Willard’s robe from his shoulders.
“Now it’s your turn to be quiet.” She turned him toward the bed and gave him a little push, just enough that he toppled face forward onto the covers. “You deserve something special tonight, something to make your poor, tired muscles relax.”
She settled herself beside him and began kneading his shoulders and back, the length of his arms, then moved on to the long muscles of his thighs and legs.
From somewhere, he could smell a faint fragrance. Incense maybe. Or aromatic oils. Catherine liked both.
He sighed. He waited a long while before speaking.
“You know, Catherine, I…I think there might be something…wrong with me,” he finally said, his voice little more than a whisper.
Her hands paused, then resumed their tender ministrations.
“What do you mean, sweetie?”
“All day, at least until you guys came out this afternoon, I felt…I don’t know, angry isn’t quite the right word. It went beyond anger. Red-hot fury, at least part of the time. Sometimes it felt as if I weren’t cutting wood, as if I were tearing at flesh, or at least as if I wanted to.”
Again her hands paused. Longer this time.
“Oh, Willard,” she whispered. “I knew you were…you weren’t really yourself this morning. You’re never that short with Will, especially when he wants to give you a hand with something. When he came inside, he was…well, frightened. He said you looked really…different. Scary.”
“I felt scary. And scared. Like all I wanted to do was lash out and hurt and kill.” He shivered. Catherine began smoothing his skin again. Her hands were soft, and warm.
“Thank God those damned…sorry, those bushes were there. I could almost feel the need to hurt drain out of me as I snapped those loppers back and forth. Snap. Snap.”
Catherine leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck. “Shhh. Are you all right now?”
He rolled over to face her. And kissed her back.
“Yes.”
“I can see,” she whispered. And smiled.
The rest of the night passed…well, not quite uneventfully, but Willard didn’t mind.
That was one of the last truly comfortable nights they spent for a long while.
The next day, the sky clouded over. The weatherman on the television predicted rain.
A lot of rain.
5
Rain can be a rarity in Southern California. Particularly in the Los Angeles basin, where two, three, even four years of drought conditions are seldom enough to remind the floods of immigrants from less congenial states that the land their homes and condos and apartments and mobile homes rest on is essentially desert. In spite of seemingly endless vistas of meticulously landscaped emerald green lawns dotted by the false turquoise of ceramic pools, the basin is arid.
Some rainfall during the deep months of what passes for winter in the season-less sameness of Southern California is normal. A day or two, perhaps-three at the most-of light sprinkling is considered within the bounds of normal. More than that constitutes virtually apocalyptic flooding.
It began raining somewhere after midnight the next Thursday. On Friday, fully recovered from the stiffness in his hands, with the rash completely gone, Willard drove to work as usual. The freeways were mushy and slick with
