The Drip, a novel by Michael Gullo
“What a gorgeous day!”
“It really is. What’s going on up here?”
“I only been here a few minutes. Let’s head up. I’ll show you the week.”
“We need a golf cart.”
“I drove by your church just as they were letting you all out. Was there something special today? There were like three different puddles of people all taking pictures.”
“Nothing special. They do that a lot. Just getting pictures of the family in Sunday best.”
“I don’t get to be here often when there’s not a machine going or a saw or some caterwauling bit of progress. I love the weekends.”
“It’s so peaceful.”
“There. Hear that owl? They call him a four-hooter.”
“He’s so close, where is he?”
“He’s up there somewhere. He’s like thirty-inches tall, but you won’t see him.”
“He sees us though. Get-off-my-land, Get-off-my-land.”
“Nope, we got a deal. We’ll share. Wel-come-home-guys.”
“Poor guy, eight syllables of voice captured by the machine, and now we make him say whatever we want.”
“Eight syllables and we just took his land.”
“We’ll share.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“We will.”
“You know, Fish and Wildlife will be paying three-thousand bucks a head for those birds, dead-not-alive out west. Apparently, humans moved into their territories here in the east, and they migrated west where they found little competition, and they propagated, and they’re threatening some other owl. They’re recording the voices and playing them on megaphones, and they’re shooting them when they come to the call. They call it hoot and shoot.”
“No way.”
“Way. The ultimate spam call. Record your voice, prey on your deepest need, and not just take your rats, but take your life.”
“Is that real?”
“My phone’s been up here with me two months now. Google heard those owls, and it sent me the article – natural as could be.”
“That’s so sad. I don’t want to hear about this.”
“It is sad. I agree. But there’s another side. There’s a lady in Oregon, misses her Northern Spotted Owl, and sees this Barred fella’s distant cousins, and she’s not only not saddened, she’s out in the backyard with an Amazon recording rig trying to get the perfect recording and lure the most owls.”
“That’s okay. Those people aren’t allowed to own the gun that does the shooting, so just like every government program, this one’s destined to waste money and nobody but the politicians and lawyers get the actual three-thousand.”
“Spoken by the lady on the government dole.”
“Paycheck, Michael.”
“You’re still a little out of breath.”
“I don’t know how you do it all day, up and down that hill.”
“I’m gonna get one of those electric golf carts this week that we saw at Lowe’s.”
“You probably shouldn’t walk up that so much.”
“I can’t imagine a little exercise is bad for me, and it’s the only thing I get to do.”
“Wow. That’s pretty bright.”
“That’s a word for it.”
“It’s like a concrete truck crashed and smeared concrete down the face of the hill.”
“Two concrete trucks actually.”
“You said there’d be three.”
“Actually, the curse is here finally. The guy started that shit they do where they set up to make it my fault they didn’t do their job right.”
“So, not magic?”
“Either that or the lamp ran out of wishes.”
“Rub harder. The problem with conflict up here, you’ll run into him at the grocery store.”
“I’ll look him in the eye and nod.”
“That bad?”
“It was pretty bad. I jumped right in. Everybody was there. I gave him the check and told him to get lost.”
“Paid and ugly.”
“Yup, both ways. When the workshop comes though, it’ll cover almost all the whole wall, and we’ll have a small wood shed, and that’ll disguise the rest.”
“It’s bright.”
“You said that.”
“It’s bright.”
“I didn’t say, say that again.”
“It repeats all by itself.”
“Do you see why I did boulders on the easement?”
“I see it. You can’t shine this at the neighbor’s front porch.”
“It’s worse up close. Both walls the same size and shape,
and you don’t even know the washout patch is there.”
“No hiding that, though.”
“Well, it’ll weather in for one thing, and once I get the workshop built, that’ll hide it quite a lot.”
“When’s that?”
“Tough question. It’s a budget thing. A thousand square foot building, even on the cheap will cost at least fifty bucks a foot roof to floor pad. But we can’t build a blight to hide the blight. Needs windows and doors – garage bay doors like the shop in Hardin Valley. Cedar shake, plumbing, windows – watch out, it’s muddy there.”
“Sheesh, what’s that about?”
“When we plugged the spill pipe - the water. It rained a half inch three times this week, and it overflowed.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“It wasn’t originally. The springs fed the pond, but there were feet of freeboard, then rain never stopped and it overflowed.”
“All week?”
“More or less. See the skid steer tracks? Those were my relief valve. They carried the water over here – but the dam’s old. Way old.”
“Jury’s still out on that mudslide guess.”
“Not a guess.”
“Guess.”
“This sheeting supports my thesis. Do you see how the wetness is uniform? When the rain was heavy, it was a steady even sheet of water over the top, like any one of those old timey ladder dams you see along the Sunday roadside.”
“A weir.”
“What?”
“My English teacher was Alan Weir. That ladder dam. It’s called a weir.”
“Well, this dam sheds water over the top like a weir. It’s perfectly even like it had millions of rain storms to argue over it.”
“That bridge fits in, though. It’s like it was never not here.”
“It really is. They cleaned up all the stone debris this week, and it just blended into the terrain, like it fell in there with the dam.”
“I see Cody was here.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to take that one. Two-hundred-fifty years, and Cody Norman’s the last ring in its history.”
“Cody’s probably got a couple rings in there with all his years up here.”
“Amen. Probably shot dinner out of it a dozen times for all we know. I left it standing for now to protect the Maple.”
“Too bad it wasn’t the other way around.”
“Wish in a bucket would never fill up for a toilet flush.”
“That thing is – special.”
“Absolutely special. A holler needs a toilet in the yard, Stef. Dontchoo know nothin’.”
“Supposed to have flowers in it.”
“Well, this one’s a raccoon bath. Been back every night.”
“Not so muddy this time.”
“Look closer. They come every night, but it’s been raining all week, and they get cleaned off.”
“I wouldn’t call that clean.”
“Not clean, but cleaned.”
“Why don’t you just remember the paper towels?”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’m in denial.”
“Gotta have it. I’ll get a little outhouse around it eventually.”
“I mean, it’s a blight.”
“A bright one. But when we get the shop up and running, we can just take it off the line – won’t be here forever.”
“Karen’s pretty excited me and Clover are coming to stay there.”
“I bet she is. I am too.”
“Of course you are. You get to play homeless camping boy in the woods again.”
“I wasn’t playing then, and I’m not sure I have the youth to be playing much this time either.”
“I don’t know how I let you talk me into this. I mean, where are you going to shower?”
“I guess I’ll come up to Karen’s every couple days.”
“What else did they do this week?”
“Mostly, we watched, and we worried over that dam. With the spillway plugged, it’s been sheeting over all week, and it’s terrifying, but there’s nothing we can do. It’s been raining. We ran out of soil for it, and now it’s just a waiting game. My big plan was add in another Saturday, pay up, stick the spill pipe. Then it rained.”
“They worked all week in the rain.”
“Yeah, but in order to put in the spill pipe, we have to lower the water like a foot and a half. We can’t do that in the rain.”
“So, Monday, then?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Did you do anything else?”
“I started them on the back driveway.”
“What’s a back driveway?”
“Well, if we put the house over there, and the garage is on the basement level in back, we’ll need to drive along that hill face up there, come past here and create a switchback to turn back toward the house.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Okay, come here.”
“Looks like rain all week.”
“No surprise there. My legs have grown double up here with all the mud caked to my feet all day. That’s why you’re so out of breath, and I’m used to it.”
“Looks like Cody signed this one too.”
“Christ, that kid’s a menace.”
“Oh my god.”
“What, he get that side too?”
“No, look at this.”
“Charlie loves Bobbie, 8/11/89.”
“That’s the day they bought this land. It’s in the title paperwork.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, are you certain?”
“Yeah, it’s in the file in my office.”
“So they came up here after their closing just like we did, and they signed a tree to mark the occasion.”
“You should love me like that.”
“And it’s a Beechnut too. I’m having visions of The Jerk, he hates these cans.”
“What are you talking..?”
“We have to repair this tree while it’s still wet. Run up to the Farmer’s Co-op and get a can of Tanglefoot. I’ll cut some branches off these sprouts and get this ready.”
“Like, now?”
“Yes. This tree’s as good as dead if we don’t get a patch on here.”
“What’s it called?”
“Tanglefoot grafting compound. It’s a white can with red letters.”