Chapter One

Mickey scrambled around my garage, lifting one tool after another and setting each one aside as he ruled it out in his search for the perfect cutting implement. I fell onto the couch in the corner and raised the bottle of wine to my mouth. The strawberry soda of wines had a tinny aftertaste from the screw-off cap. I’d grown to regard it as flavor you can only get from a $2 bottle.

A look of EUREKA streaked across my friend’s face then faded with my disapproval. “It’s two in the morning. We’re not using a chainsaw.”

I closed my eyes against the onset of dizziness and waited.

“We have to cut it down by hand?” He pushed some boxes aside and raised an orange handle. “Ax?” He swiped his shirt sleeve across his brow.

My non-reply answered his question.

The same scene, in different variations had taken place for the last six years. Each year Mickey searched for the perfect tool, only to arrive half an hour later at the same conclusion; we just needed a handsaw. I had always let him look though. In previous years it humored me that he hadn’t yet seen the handsaw and pieced together that it was what we used the previous year, and the year before that. But this year wasn’t nearly as funny.

“Handsaw,” I said with my patience at an end.

“Handsaw?” he asked.

I sat up, against the pull of the tattered green cushion. Though it was Mickey who donated the couch to the garage, it was my cushion, as it was the one I had written “Duncan” across the top of with Magic Marker. I raised my leg for leverage. Mickey skittered around the garage while I swigged from the bottle again. Once finished off, I tossed it into the metal garbage can in the corner. The hollow boom echoed through the can.

“Jesus, man. Are you trying to wake up everyone?”

This from the guy who wanted to use a chainsaw.

I grabbed a rope from the cluttered shelf, Mickey found the saw and we headed out to find the perfect Christmas tree.

We drove, looking into each yard we passed. Mickey scanned each one carefully with interest and hope.

“Nope,” he said as we came up on each home that didn’t have a pine tree in the yard. “Nope. Nope. Nope.” He did eventually stop giving the play-by-play on every yard, and unlike any other year, rode on in silence.

“It’s freezing in here,” he said at last.

“The heater isn’t working right.”

Mickey pulled his coat around him, paying particular attention to closing his collar high around his neck. I did the same.

He leaned his head to the window, no longer watching for pine trees, and stared upward.

“Looking at the telephone wires again?”

“Yea, man, how’d you know?”

“You do it every time you think of her.”

***

Rhonda used to hang her head out the window, lay back against the sill, sprawled across the seat with her legs across my lap and her back against Mickey, reclining across the front seat. She looked perfect like that. I followed the line of her from ankles, to hips, to her neck, curved and vulnerable. She peaked at the ivory white chin pointing skyward. I would rest my hand on her denim shin as I drove.

The last time she did it Mickey slid his hand across her belly; he was awed by seeing her that way – her midsection bared with the stretch of her body -and right in front of him for the touching.

She giggled. “Stop distracting me. I’m busy. I have to concentrate.”

“You’re looking at telephone poles,” I said. A question hung in my voice before it got doused in dashboard lights and extinguished by Robert Plant’s voice over the radio.

But she heard the unuttered question anyway. “I’m hanging wishes and memories on every one of them,” she said. “I’m decorating them like we always decorate the trees you bring.” She tugged her shirt back into place then wrapped her arms around her middle.

“I think I want go away for a while,” she said, after a long silence.

Mickey looked to me, and I to him and we both said, “Where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. I want to see the world.”

While Mickey found this all very fascinating and she was in her Own Private Eden, I could not help but think she’d overdone the whole free-spirit trip she was on. But she meant well, and somehow Rhonda had affixed herself, and all of her craziness, to Mickey and me.

“Duncan, my love?”

“Yes, Roni,” I answered, mimicking the soft dream-soaked tone in her voice.

She didn’t answer, so I looked at her. Her long dark hair cascaded out the window of the moving car – a raven’s wing in the breeze – and Mickey put a finger to his lips to quiet me. She’d gone to sleep.

***

“There!” Mickey shouted, jarring me back to the present.

I mashed my boot against the brake. We slid on the icy road before the tires ground to a stop.

The pine sat close to the road at the far end of the deep lawn. I watched the house for lights and movement. When it appeared no one was awake, we headed toward our victim. A six foot tall pine would become this year’s tree.

We approached the tree. I carried the saw and rope then dropped them to the ground.

I dug my hands deep into the base of the tree and pushed the snow away. The branches were weighed down from the first big snowfall of the season and there, on my hands and knees, I was subjected to the icy prickles of frozen pine needles. With every moved branch, I wiggled against the slingshot sprays of fine snowflakes as they infiltrated my jacket collar.

Mickey grabbed the rope and began tying the branches upward, “Shit! Is this how we did it last year? I don’t remember it sucking nearly this bad.”

“Yes,” I said, grunting as I leaned in deeper, trying to find the trunk of the tree under the lazy branches. “It sucked this bad.”

It didn’t though. This year was much worse.

I dug at the base, asked Mickey to hand me the saw and went to work.

Once I’d freed the tree from its roots, Mickey finished tying it off and we escaped the yard unnoticed; the snake-trail of the dragged tree erased our footprints through the yard. We were on our way to do our annual stolen tree delivery.

Lots of times we considered getting one that was already cut, but tree lot owners expect thieves and we didn’t want to pay. That wasn’t the point anyway; the point was tradition. We swore that even if we got out of this shit-town and made lots of money, we would come back every year, swipe a pine and deliver it. Each year we talked about not doing it anymore – the risk, trees don’t cost that much – but we did it anyway.

I opened the gate and drove through, winding down the path, with headlights off. “Is it that lane or this one?” I asked Mickey.

He scratched his head and presented me with a quizzical look and a yawn.

Two wrong turns and a right turn later, we pulled up to the spot.

“I should have visited sooner.”

“Me too,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Mickey opened the back door of the car, climbed up on the door frame and released the tree from its restraints. I pulled my pocket knife and cut the ropes that bound the branches. The tree sprang back into shape.

“Now what do we do with it?” I asked.

“Shit, Dunc, I don’t know.” He pointed to the headstone. “Put it over there I guess.”

Mickey dove into the backseat and grabbed the bottle I’d left. “Whiskey,” he said, smiling like he’d won the lottery. His smile faded though, and I knew why.

“Roni’s favorite.” I said. I thought it was appropriate.

He unscrewed the lid, took a deep breath and drank. He then thrust it at me – his mouth still full, as though he had summoned the courage to pour it in, but hadn’t quite managed to summon enough to swallow it.

“For Roni” I said and slugged it back. “Ok, let’s do this.” I shook off the bite of the drink, replaced the lid and tossed it into the car.

I looked up at the bright white moon, then down at the twinkling snow, stars beneath my feet; I was calmed by the serene quiet of the world. I thought Roni would be, too, in her Earth Child Eden way. A wave of nausea (whiskey and wine?) swept over me. I steadied myself and picked up the tree in a bare spot opening between branches. It scraped against my cheek and my free hand went to the scratch protectively.

Headlights approached and I stopped before I could lean the sad little stolen tree against the stone that read Rhonda Joan Eastwood Daughter Sister Friend.

I squinted the light away, now in the high beams, then dropped my head back and closed my eyes when the cherries came on.

The fear of tickets disappeared though, and a new one set in when I saw who got out of the car.

“Duncan Manning?” he said, shining his flashlight in my eyes.

“Yes.”

“You’re not supposed to be up here after dark.”

He stepped closer, tilting his light down as he got mere inches from my face.

“Hi Cal.” Mickey said.

His badge glowed with the moonlight. He looked me square with his shoulders hunched forward, much like I’d imagine a porcupine would when his quills went up. I dropped the tree to the ground. It exhaled a soft rush of sound as it landed in a drift.

“You aren’t supposed to be here either.” He spoke to Mickey, never moving his eyes away from me.

“We just wanted to visit Roni.” Mickey said.

“Had to carry on a tradition.” I said, trying to clarify what Mickey was saying and hoping he wouldn’t ask where we’d gotten the tree.

“Let me make myself clear,” he said, waving his flashlight toward my face. I held my breath. “You are not to visit this gravesite. I haven’t quite figured out what you had to do with her death, but something. I am going to find out what it was. Now you step away from my baby sister’s grave, get in your piece of shit car and go.”

Mickey backed up toward the car, reaching in slow motion for the handle.

“I didn’t do anything.” I felt the tear-salt burn my eyes. “I loved her.” I looked to Mickey who had lowered his head with my words. A burst of white breath rose with his heavy exhale. “We both did.”