The Drip, a novel by Michael Gullo
“Why you back empty handed, boy?”
“His old lady’s up thar with him.”
“Couldn’t get it?”
“Naw, they’s up thar when I come over the ridge.”
“Why they there on Sunday?”
“I dunno. I listen in up the ridge, hear ’em fine, talk about get a golf cart, but Tanner be here soon, n I needa get back.”
“This needa stay shirt pocket close. We need that saw cut that tree, but you need stay on the crew too.”
“It’s only noon. We got time.”
“True, boy. We git right on it.”
“Let Tanner drop off the computer, and I’ll go back up thar, see if they’s lef.”
“This a good deal, Mrs. King give us three month rent we come cut that tree today.”
“Don’t do no good. Meghan’s mama pay the rent.”
“She need our help.”
“I don’t see how it do me no good, we cut that tree n get paid credit the rent.”
“Do you good, maybe Mrs. King ply that money Jed’s rent. Maybe we cut that tree up, we get that truck pay up, and I pay rest on a book.”
“Tanner’s here.”
“Keep quiet. Let me do the talkin’.”
“Tell me keep quiet on my own porch. I ain’t keep quiet I wanna talk. It’s Merica, ain’t it? Free country on a man’s own free porch.”
“Hey Cody.”
“Tanner.”
“So, here’s the computer. I got it set up, and I gotta show you some things.”
“You already show me.”
“Not this. Your notes.”
“I don’t’ spell good.”
“You ain’t no carpenter, but it’s not that. Here look at the last invoice I did.”
“I seen that, kiss-ass.”
“It’s not kiss-ass, Cody. It’s the record. It’s the reference.”
“It’s his record, his reference. It’s his job, put on us.”
“Cody, that shit might work up there with Lonnie, but I ain’t gonna let you railroad me in your spite engine.”
“Just like him.”
“Cody, I’m going to tell you what needs done. You can do it or not do it, but you’ve had forty hours a week for the last five weeks, and the money’s good. The work’s easy. The man’s hard, but he’s honest – too honest.”
“That man ain’t honest, Tanner. I set here, and I listen you talk my boy like that, and I keep quiet, but you ain’t come up here say he honest on my porch.”
“Howdy to you too, Lonnie. Long time since I seen you.”
“Now he got the two step, Deddy.”
“Cody. You’ve been working five weeks now, good money. This is the best money either one of us ever got, and I won’t let you mess it up.”
“You won’t let me? Whatchoo gonna do about it?”
“I hope to talk reason with you. You took the job, Cody. You took it. The man told you the terms, and you said, I do. He put you in a machine and trusted you with his dig, and he puts up with your constant smart mouth.”
“You do got a smart mouth, Cody.”
“Deddy, I told you let me do the talkin’.”
“Christ, it’s like another world sometimes. I come up here to give you the computer so you can do your part with the company – I already did half the work. All you gotta do is put in the day projects and upload the hours when you’re done – print the invoice, and hand it over.”
“All that man want cheap labor, build a palace keep me off my land.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Lonnie? That ain’t your land. It never was.”
“Been our land all my life. Deddy right. We hunt and fish up thar, near ever meal we get half the Winter come off the deers we put in that freezer in thar.”
“Look, that’s not my – that don’t concern me. But I don’t want no trouble up there. Me and Rusty want this, and you do too, Cody, or you wouldn’t have taken the job.”
“It ain’t you tells me why I take that job, n that man say it ain’t no job anyhow. He say we own it. Why we can’t take our business somewhere else?”
“--- I see that, Cody. I do. We could bid jobs somewhere else, like on the weekends.”
“That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“Hard to bid jobs we ain’t got tools though.”
“We borrow them machines on the weekend when he ain’t thar.”
“Sounds like you stumbled on this idea mid conversation. First, that ain’t right, and he’s moving into that shed on Tuesday. Not to mention, every time we come in on Monday, he’s got some pile of dirt or some hole, or some bit of road built up. He works the machines all weekend.”
“That soff Yankee ain’t stay livin’ in no shed middle a Winter.”
“Lonnie, you don’t know this guy. Tell him, Cody.”
“He soft.”
“You’re both wrong. He’s sick. That’s plain, but I wouldn’t call him soft. He don’t take it off of nobody, especially you, and he’s stubborn. He’ll stay in that shed and if something gets hard, he’ll just buy the fix for it.”
“That’s him. Thinks his money git him whatever he want.”
“Maybe he’d loan us the machines on the weekend.”
“I ain’t get beholdin to that Yankee.”
“You got a no for every could be, Cody.”
“I ain’t.”
“That’s no, right there. You’d fight the water hose if you were on fire.”
“I ain’t barry nothin that man.”
“Lonnie, who’s talking here?”
“You don’t tell me mind my business my own porch.”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. Sort of. It’s just I got twisted in a knot here. I came up to show Cody how to write the invoices so we can get paid, and we from kiss ass to bright idea to can’t do that with more bumps and turns in it than that easement up there.”
“Twistin’ words.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Listen. Here’s the last four invoices. Use them to make this week’s invoice. Every day of the week needs details. Monday, Tanner – did these things = hours – price. Devin and what Devin did, price. Cody. Rusty. Tuesday, same thing. At the bottom it’s a subtotal. I’ll send you the bank charges for the payroll the week before any other expenses. You list those, and the total autopopulates down here at the bottom.”
“Autopopulate ain’t no word.”
“Yeah, that’s my summary too – not here’s how, but here’s wrong. That’s how it works, Cody. It’s your turn for the next two weeks. Get the invoice done so we can get paid.”
“If I don’t get it done, he just pay cash.”
“Cody, you can’t sabotage for cash. That man won’t fall for it.”
“I don’t want no withholding.”
“That’s not his choice. The IRS says you pay taxes, not him.”
“Boy, that ain’t right. It’s him. It’s all them comes down here tells us how we supposed live our own life. This valley git along just fine a hundred years without they come down here them laptop computers got they little knee-bow programs in em so a man can’t even work a little trade make a couple bucks tie the one end to the other’n.”
“You ain’t wrong, Lonnie. But this ain’t truck bed trading. Cody, this man said he’s building a place, and it’s gonna take two years, and the pay is on the books. And that ain’t changing. And don’t forget, he’s paying up. You worked for me at my grandma’s for fifteen an hour. This is twenty. You took home around six hundred with me and Grandma, and you take home six-fifty here – plus here you got Workman’s Comp and Disability insurance. Here you have a company can make more money once we earn the references of doing this project. Here the pay’s the same, but the payoff is huge.”
“Pay’s not the same. They’s levy my bank account, and this week I only get one-fifty.”
“Who levied your account?”
“I owes money on the fines, and soon enough the judgement start collectin’ too. Can’t get the money out fast enough the bank’s in on it.”
“Now I get it. So, you owe court fees still, and you got a judgement too. That’s none of my business until you make it mine. The man is paying on a W2. You can take that or leave that, but you’re getting a paycheck. I won’t let your unpaid debts mess up my life too. So work or don’t work. I don’t care, but don’t mess up my job.”
“Don’t mess up my life.”
“Cody, you’re the one owes money, and you have to grow up and pay it. Is that why you haven’t gotten your license yet? Are you deliberately skipping it so the bill collectors can’t find you?”
“This all none of your business.”
“One last beat on it, Cody. This, that, whatever it is. If you get it behind you, you won’t be held prisoner by it anymore.”
“None of your business.”
“Awesome, they had it.”
“I never heard of Tanglefoot in my life.”
“Well, there it is. I hope it works though.”
“The girl at the store never heard of it either.”
“I guess we’ll find out. I already cut the edges clean. This Spring I’ll make a bridge graft, but we have to wait for the buds to show for that.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“Clean edges and Tanglefoot I know from life knowledge. The bridge graft info is from the Google. This isn’t our tree, and we have to save it, so I looked up if there’s anything else I can do to improve its chances.”
“We have to save it, that’s true.”
“Well, what we do is spread this stuff thin on the skint surface. That’s all I knew to do. But I found this apple orchard website, and they show how you cut these thin year old branches of the tree – I’ll use these clonal sprouts here – and you cut them just a little bigger than the gap in the bark, and you wrap them in moistened and wrung dry paper towels and a bag, and you put them in the refrigerator until around March when the tree starts to bud, and there’s this whole process for bridging this gap.”
“And that’ll save the tree?”
“This one might be okay without it, actually. That tree over there has a huge tear in the bark. This one only goes around about a third of the way. It won’t like it, but it might survive. There’s no track treads on the root bed here, so I think he hit it from a distance while spinning the bed or something.”
“The guy is a menace.”
“I try to believe he’s just a human like the rest of us, and that he’ll rise to the occasion if he just has a different point of view to look at his future through. But I’ve never had a guy try so hard to prove I’m wrong before.”
“Menace.”
“I put him in the company though Stef. He owns it now. I did choose to have three members so that if one person becomes a problem, the other two can vote him off the island, but I don’t want to introduce that technology to the guys so early.”
“He worked fine for me, but I could sense it. You have me biased, but I’ve lived here all my life, and the Codys of the world aren’t hard to find.”
“You just don’t like the drugs history.”
“It’s not just that. I locked up a lot of people for drugs. Some of them are like this, but this guy’s different. It’s like he’s looking out from behind the bars clocking the guard’s schedule.”
“But the cell is mind forged.”
“That’s it. He’s like a jail junkie, but the jail is of his own making.”
“The format outcome is kind of cool. I can’t really fire the kid, so I’m forced to create work-arounds and build my tolerance.”
“Don’t fall too far the other way though.”
“I won’t, but I can’t make everyone the tree guy either.”
“No, you flew off the handle there.”
“It was ten years ago, honey. I literally hired the man to cut the tree so that the other tree would not be injured. I could have dropped it on top of the other for free.”
“You’re a hot-head sometimes.”
“It’s situational.”
“Hot-head.”
“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“That stick. There she is.”
“What? Who?”
“It’s a bear. Look at the ridge, where the light…”
“I see it.”
“I think she’s the one we’ve been seeing the most – I can’t tell this far.”
“She’s coming this way.”
“It’s okay. She’s just adjusting her path, steep up there.”
“I wonder if she sees us.”
“She saw us ages ago, smells us. Hears us.”
“I hope she speaks English then. Stay up there.”
“Ha! She’s not coming down here.”
“Do you speak bear?”
“They never bother us. It’s like they’re curious. They watch us.”
“Like audience?”
“No, more like they cast an eye between footfalls.”
“I see that. Is – Is she laying down?”
“Yup. Must like you.”
“I could pet her little ears.”
“I asked the raccoons. They got in a fight over some piece of food, and never answered. Her, you can ask yourself.”
“I don’t want to be forward.”
“Good instinct. I think she’s the pregnant one, but she’s too far for sure. She looks different.”
“Let’s give her some space.”