Death Among Trees by C. L. Hodge (ereader for textbooks txt) 📕

Doris lifted the phone from between crumpled coupons and tattered spiral-bound notebooks. “Thomas! I need another change-order!” The receiver slammed onto its pale-green base with yellowing number pads which were half-eroded after thirty-years of use. She looked directly at him this time. “It’ll be a minute. They always payin’ in hundreds.” She leaned in to prove her point. “They ain’t got bank accounts because they get paid under the table.” Doris shot a wink.

“I don’t have cash. I am paying with a card?” He said it more to reassure himself that Doris could take plastic. William flipped the Amex from his wallet.

“That’s good. That works.” Her head bobbled like his father’s hula girl on the RV’s dashboard. “I can go ahead and do you now, then. That’s good. Uh huh.”

Half-breeds.

Illegals.

Not long ago in American History some Caucasian girl would have had the same disagreements about Doris. But back then Blacks were not illegals. Not like the half-breeds. Some were, maybe. Just like the half-breeds. William knew it had nothing to do with ethnicity. It had everything to do with skin. Blacks were the minority in the Old South. Once they had fought and won their rights to be equal among the ones warring them to stay hidden in servanthood, a new skin shade became their bullseye. William heard about how, because of the close proximity of Mexico and Cuba, that there was an overwhelming migration of the illegals. An invasion. Their chief aim was only to destroy America.

Some were indeed in the country illegally. Most were not. The majority of the influx who shared in the Capitalist vision had adhered to the law and acquired full inclusion by taking the correct steps. But, half-breeds. Why the name? William shrugged it off as coming from people who spoke only because they knew nothing better.

But Rocco was a true half-breed, and he was nature’s outpouring of a Divine Grace. His life would thrive anywhere his mind would treasure itself. He had a Sacramental esteem about him. Heaven touched Earth when Rocco shared in his Creator’s imagination with others. His precise birth had been predestined.

Santo Domingo wasn’t necessarily on the bulk of the tongues of the world on a consistent basis, but William had been there. It fell into his lap. Just a celestial blip in Earth’s finite timing. Rocco was its offspring.

William backtracked toward his boulder to assemble recent considerations. He envisioned Rocco’s easel, its legs quietly sinking into the mud, and watched his son coat a canvas with all the elegance that enveloped him. He reveled in his creation. Rocco hummed along to bits of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody as he expressed his love for Mother Earth.

No, there was no such thing. The quarrel was not about skin color, for the explanation of a half-breed was a fusion of the spiritual and human element coexisting in seamless agreement.

William’s general consensus was that everyone got along in the town he was thinking of calling home. The things he had heard others say about all the others who were not part of all the others was part of the normal human need to gossip. Chicago had it too, but there were millions of Chicagoans. A high-rise apartment alone, in theory, housed a small town. The Wheeler’s in 208-B thought that the Iranian family above them in 308-B were building bombs. What if one of them decided to flush one they thought was a dud, down the toilet? And they just knew that the smallest Muslim boy was hiding cans of uranium under his bed and its contents were seeping through the floors and the Wheeler’s were going to die just from the vapors.

Living amid a small settlement beheld all varieties of rewards. In this town there were no violent crimes. A traffic jam only occurred while waiting to get to a parking space at the High School team’s Friday night football showdowns in the Fall. The swamp and its trees and wildlife were accessible just by going out the backdoor. The resident farms and gardens supplied ample choices at the local market. The fruits and vegetables were not sufferers on a train for hundreds of miles before they were crated off by trucks for another hundred miles before finally living out their destinies as human sustenance. They would arrive if only they were among the parcel of the goods that made the trip without giving up and caving in on themselves.

As an artist William knew directly that slices of solitude were vital for uninhibited expression. Relocation meant artistic survival for them both. He would gift him the experience and would discover that Rocco would flourish among the trees as they whispered their fragrant encouragement through their squall.

Bathing in the sun, William breathed in God’s creation and smiled to himself, “and it was good.”

William had done what the park rangers had told him not to do upon entering the swamp. He was to stay on the trails on which the directors had long deemed safe for travel, and William had not strayed from them for most of his journey. He had gotten all he needed for the brochure but he envisioned a cover that would entice vacationers to join an excursion to this part of the world. That rare and successful capture now lay embedded in digital asylum inside the Nikon.

He climbed over the chicken-wire fence back onto the wooden bridge that would place him onto the trail after a wayward nail snagged the cuff on his Levi’s. A patrolling park attendant nodded, glancing half an eye toward him. If he knew what William had been up to, he did not indicate disapproval by denouncing his actions. William nodded back in nervous reciprocation. His shoes were caked with clay and mud; his shirt reeked of pond scum. If questioned, his story would be that his camera fell into the mud and as he performed CPR, the swamp decided to vomit its guts onto him.

The sun still fired off its flares and the heat still baked the gravel on which his rented Camry was cooking. It was six P.M. After his melodramatic city-dweller display of fear and exhaustion inside the forest, William required a bath. There would be a shower first; then he would boil water and soak in it. He felt his skin itch as some flesh-eating amoeba took up residence. The parasite was digging around somewhere. He just knew it.

On the way back to the motel, Rocco appeared on his Huffy, giggling from the sidewalk, peering into the Camry’s tinted windows. He taunted his father and dared him to a race. William revved the engine while idling at the town’s only stop light. He gave Rocco a head-start, his neon-green backpack bounced below his long curls: Splashes of blond and brown hair. He sped along the sidewalk with no hands while slobbering down a banana Popsicle.

When they had gotten inside the house after continuing their race on foot, they wrestled each other for the remote control to the stereo. Rocco dominated that skirmish as well. He put on some Johnny Mercer and tap-danced his way over to his poetry corner. William snapped photos of his son slumping into the couch as Rocco disappeared in visions only he could see. These saintly images would be added to the collection in the mammoth book Rocco would one day pen as his memoirs.

William’s eyes watered from yearning for those prophecies of his son to blossom into certainty. He smiled in a deep breath when he parked the Toyota at the door to his room.

“And it was good.”

On the final evening before his return to Chicago, William found himself packing. He had only brought one carry-on piece with him so gathering his belongings was swift. Only his electric razor and toothbrush had been left out for in-the-morning. Checkout was at eleven, more than adequate time to allow William to dream, then he would fling his bag into the rental and make haste toward the Jacksonville Airport.

Rocco was not one to have lengthy phone chats, but William spent a record ten minutes that night talking to his son about how he couldn’t wait to show him the photos as he hoped to sell his time there as a memory they would both share for a lifetime. Rocco had been excited and shared intense interest in visiting the area with his father one day as he held onto every word.

There was a knock on William’s motel door. Catarina Flores and her husband Eduardo invited him next door to their room for a gathering honoring their daughter’s quinceañera. They had told him it was a “después de la fiesta.” An after party. The Flores’ had rented out the only suite in the local Holiday Inn for the birthday, then gathered the remaining attendees back to their room for the night.

The celebrated girl was Carolyn. The namesake of the woman he could never seem to be allowed to forget no matter how often he pleaded to God quench it. The fifteen year-old Carolyn in the room with William, along with her loving family, radiated elegance. Her sinuous white dress hugged her adolescent curves accurately showing William that it was tailored just for her. She posed on the shag tears on the floor as though they were her very own red carpet. The doting paparazzi was her family who flashed light after bright light her way revealing in her eyes the illumination of both contentment and boredom with the whole affair.

William learned that Carolyn was the only child left to Catarina and Eduardo after their son was killed in a farming incident two years before. Sharing his father’s name, little Eduardo had fallen in nearby trees while running around watching his family spend the day harvesting corn. He had been missing overnight; the next day he was found sprawled in the earth where he died. The coroner’s report determined that his swollen, blackened leg to be the result of a rattle snake bite.

Carolyn showed William a photo of the stone marking Eduardo’s current resting place. “Eduardo Flores, Jr. Home with Angels. b. 1995 – d. 2004.” She explained to William that was all they could afford at the time to have etched in the marble veneer. There was an original plan to have an “At” in front of “Home” and a “the” before “Angels.” In the center of the arch inlaid a photo of the boy. He stood over home plate steadying an aluminum baseball bat. The navy-blue plastic helmet now served as a halo over his cherubic face.

Steven Bawer arrived to the party to take a break from his front desk duties and decided to throw back a couple of Coronas alongside the half-breeds. William noticed him eyeing the room to make sure no damage had occurred during their stay. He danced along to reggaeton blaring from various speakers as he pretended to know a miniscule degree of Spanish.

Rocco was in Illinois spread out on top of his multi-colored checkerboard sheets and his Picassoesque comforter. Earlier in the day his grandmother had given him a Joni Mitchell album to add to his eclectic vinyl collection. The record turned and softly crackled while exhaling a maple syrup-like aroma. The velvet alto massaged his earlobes and Rocco gave birth to new poetry. It was about a smaller-than-usual beaver who decided to abandon the dam he had been working on after hearing about a remarkable new land on which he could finally build a palace that would suit him and his family. The beaver’s family were not of his species. They were ducks. His parents were not there after he was born. All alone, he searched. Never being able to reunite with them, he was joyfully adopted by Mallards.

Rocco’s bronze cheeks lifted toward his eyes as he anticipated William’s return.

Joni swooned him into a trance, and while there, he helped gather limbs and rocks as he mixed