“My good deed for the day,” I observed with a smiling nod at the Boy Scout credo. My voice contained no sarcasm, but Del misread me, and his smile drained–though it refilled quickly when he detected something amiss in my face, as if cheerfulness were a duty he owed me.
The next day was ripe for a favor in return. Dawn, my surfer girl, was out of school early, and the waves were delicious. “Clock me out, Del, just a bit early?” Disappointment etched lines in Del’s face that stung me like the whippy young branches I fought on the job. “F- you,” I said. His mouth puffed out and his eyes pooled with hurt, and he looked like a seven year-old on the verge of crying–which I imagined he had been, for I recognized the expression as that of my own little brother, mama’s little darling, a high school honor student whose face filled with dismay every time I insisted that I was stopping out of college. Del didn’t speak, but lacked the decency to stop broadcasting hurt and judgment with his stare. So I went back to Jack, and he clocked me out.
I resigned as go-between, and Tanisha took over. Not that she approved of Del, but there was something of the social worker in her, or the nurse, or the nun, some sense of higher duty that extended to lepers and management stooges. Kewl, kewl, Del was out of my mind, and Jack, Tess, Tex, and I toked clouds of togetherness which could not be pierced by the awareness of Del, who gathered the fallen leaves of late summer in solitary preparation for a fall squash planting.
“He reminds me of those Chinese coolie-majiggies,” said Tess with a twinkle, “kneeling on the ground in rice paddies like.” Sensing disapproval in Tanisha’s wide eyes, she added, “Hey, I love the Chinese.”
“Sure you do,” said Tex, “they’re not taking your job or house, or all the good schools.”
“The only reason they’re in good schools,” said Tanisha, shaking Cleopatra dreads at Tex, “is they’re in the schools.” Tex turned his face from the dart and noticed Del bagging leaves for compost.
“That boy got the right to take that stuff away?”
Jack’s eyes gleamed as he drew on a joint. “That’s city property, ain’t it?”
Tess pinned me to the tree with her eyes. “What do you think, Professor?”
“I think so,” I said. “I mean, rules are rules, even Del would agree.” That raised three gator grins, but I added an ecology rationale for my own sake. “I mean, those leaves are mulch, they decompose and nourish the soil. It’s important to leave them in place.”
Indian Summer, the best time of the year, when the tourists are gone and the days are warm, and a bright white light washes over the city. Del would never protest a Lugie decision, so he was gone, too. Within days it seemed like he’d never been there, as if he’d been a Sim from earlier game play. Dawn was gone, too, back to Santa Cruz to continue her studies and take up again with her real boyfriend, an ecology major at UC who restored hiking trails and saved sea lions and surely would save the world one day. Laurel had not gone for how could she, when intense white light glittered on brown and scarlet leaves and left golden streaks undulating on the surface of the lake? She was nearly done with a canvas she’d been working on for two weeks when I screwed up my courage and approached from behind.
She had captured the light show perfectly. The clarity of the landscape was beyond photographic, the sharpness of contour and brightness of color richer than life, even better than life.
“Do you like it?” she said, for her keen elfin ears had heard me approaching;–or, maybe, she’d sensed my approach, for she seemed possessed of supernal perception. She studied me closely as I studied the painting, and the intensity of her gaze burned me.
“It’s fantastic,” I said. “It’s–” I sought the right words to express the awe I felt when I gazed at the painting, the desire I had to place it on my bedroom wall where it would catch the light from the airshaft, my affection for the painter herself. But my thoughts were arrested by the sight of a painting leaning against her easel.
It was a portrait of Del. He stood near the artist in gardening clothes, and had lowered the hand in which he held pruning shears as he faced the lake on a late afternoon, as if the beauty of the moment had overwhelmed him and compelled him to stop working. Del stared at the lake through serene eyes nearly closed, and his unlined face, as smooth as gold leaf, radiated a golden hue which softened the air.
“Do you like that one?” asked Laurel. Through water-blue eyes unblinking as a camera’s aperture she observed my same, old, stupid, crooked grin. With a smile turned up at her mouth’s sharp edges, she watched me drift off like dandelion fuzz.
~ end ~
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Now about that subtle "Peanuts" reference:
Laurel R. Gleason = L.R.G. = Little Red-Haired Girl. ;o)
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