Now Darren smiled. His lumpy raccoon eyes glittered. He flexed his chest and his shoulder muscles. “Like I said, I’m gonna put a hurtin’ on that girl. I’m gonna split her wide open. And you know what? She’s gonna like it.”
They’re coming to get you.
The thought came to Smoke Dugan unbidden. It interrupted every quiet moment, ruining even the best of times. The more he tried to ignore it, the more he sent it back to where it came from, the more forcefully it resurfaced the next time. It was paranoid. It was stupid. But there it was – some part of him was convinced that they had found him.
He sat in his favorite outdoor chair, trying and failing to enjoy the early afternoon sun and the slight autumn chill in the air. The chair was a metal patio chair set before an ornate iron table in his backyard. The chair had three brothers, although rarely did anyone join him at that table.
Normally, he would have no problem enjoying the day.
The setting was perfect. It was fall and all around the neighborhood, the trees were turning. He wore a pair of baggy workpants and a bright blue Carraig Don wool sweater. He had just clipped, and now held in his gnarled hands a small Romeo y Julieta cigar. It came from the Dominican Republic, not Havana. In his present circumstances, Havana cigars were not easy to come by. That was all right. In the meantime, these Dominicans did a good job. He held the stogie to his nose and inhaled. It smelled sweet.
He had a bottle of Concha y Toro in front of him, a heart-healthy and tasty Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile. Here in Maine, the vagaries – some might call it the corruption – of the wine industry meant he couldn’t get the New York Long Island wines he had once favored. So now he experimented with the stuff from abroad, and much of it was to his liking. He had a bit of the red wine in his sparkling glass, which itself was imported Waterford crystal. Lola always cringed when she saw him using the crystal – how could he drink his everyday wine from such an expensive glass?
“Quality,” he would say, “makes it taste better.”
Nearby, Lorena Hidalgo was working in her garden. The whole backyard, except for the stone patio where Smoke now sat, the small grave plot with the tiny headstone that said, “Butch – One Smart Dog,” and the work shed in the very back, was Lorena’s garden. It was some fantastic garden. Smoke sometimes sat back there and marveled at it. It had tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, hot peppers and herbs. It had all the easy stuff. It also had carrots and cabbage and sure enough, she was growing a few pumpkins as well.
“Hey Lorena,” Smoke said. “Do me a favor and don’t go in the shed, okay? I’m working on something in there.”
Lorena looked up and made a face. “You know I never go in there. That is your place.” She went back to her gardening.
Lorena was a miracle and a menace rolled into one. She was an older lady from Guatemala. They had met a few months after Smoke had moved into the basement apartment of this house. He was sitting in the backyard at this same table, which had come with the apartment, skimming through a text on generating wind power. The backyard was a mess, and although he had toyed with the idea of clearing it, he hadn’t made any move yet. At first, he hadn’t trusted his new surroundings and was ready to leave at a moment’s notice. But after a while – for instance, after he buried that smart dog Butch – Smoke began to settle in. By the time Lorena called to him over the fence, he had decided to forget about the backyard and focus on making himself a little workshop in the old disused shed way at the back of the yard.
He closed his eyes and imagined the yard the day she had first shown up, in late March some three and a half years before. It was overgrown in places by high grasses and thick brush. In other places it was shallow mud from melting snow. Snow that hadn’t melted sat in clumps here and there. A ripped plastic bag from Shaw’s supermarket hung like a flag at the top of a bramble. Three cases of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles crouched by the door – reminders of the previous tenant. A rusty shovel and hoe leaned against the fence – the very tools Smoke had used to lay ol’ Butch to rest.
It was cool that day, but Smoke was in his shirtsleeves.
“Excuse me, mister sir!” someone called.
Smoke had a cigar that day as well, and he seemed to remember it was a dollar cigar he had bought at a highway rest stop. A man running for his life wasn’t always picky about cigars. His new name was James Dugan, and although he himself had created the name years before, he wasn’t comfortable with the first name. It seemed too bland to him. James. Everybody was named James.
He looked up from his reading and across the fence at the woman who was about to change his name for him. She was a small woman, round, impossible to tell her age, with gray and black hair and Mayan or mestizo features that seemed to have traveled time to arrive at his fence. Indeed, she wore a kerchief on her head and from the neck up could just as easily lived in 1399 as 1999. But that’s where the illusion ended. She also wore a big bubbly winter parka. It was bright red and had the words TRIPLE GOOSE DOWN stenciled in white on one of the sleeves.
“Accuse me, mister smoke,” she said, and outside of signing bank statements or paying bills, the name James went out the window.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Mister smoke?”
She smiled. She was just tall enough to clear the fence. “Mister smoke, yes. Can I help you?”
“Can you help me?”
“Yes. Of course I can.”
Talk about turning the tables. The woman’s smile was infectious. “How can you do that? Help me, I mean?”
“I can clean your house for you.”
He frowned. “Oh, that’s okay. I don’t need any house cleaning, thanks. I just moved in, and I don’t have very many things. In any case, I only have the basement.”
She went away, but the next day she was back.
“Mister smoke!”
“Yes,” Smoke Dugan said. “I am Mister Smoke.”
“I am thinking last night. It is a terrible shame about this garden. It is such a wonderful place.”
Smoke looked around at the murky jungle that surrounded him.
“I can help you with that,” the lady went on. “I propose a deal.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking about doing any gardening.”
“That is the beauty of it. You don’t do any gardening. You don’t pay me. I do the gardening. I pay you rent in the food I grow.”
“Well…” he said.
“You will eat only the freshest foods. No bad chemicals on them. I only grow them natural. Please? I have such a small garden at my home. This will be much better. It will be the wonder of the whole town.”
And so it began. Against his better judgement, Smoke had keys made for Lorena. He had to have keys made because there was no entrance to the yard. The only ways to get in were either by climbing the fence (quite out of the question for a woman “of a certain age” who just about cleared five feet tall), or by coming through the basement apartment. Lorena came there early in the mornings, tip-toeing through the efficiency apartment, past a sleeping Smoke Dugan. In the afternoon she came back, stopping for some small talk with Smoke if he sat at the back table, or leaving him alone if he was in his work shed. Smoke would sit at his table, absorbed in the problem of this or that, and gradually his awareness would begin to include sounds. The sound of clippers cutting, or the grunts of an old woman as she pulled weeds, or the squeak of the ancient wheelbarrow she had arrived with one afternoon.
And the place took shape. She cleared half the big yard that first year, the half that ran the length of the concrete wall. There was cabbage that year, tomatoes and green beans. The cucumbers were a disappointment, and the peppers were so hot that Smoke couldn’t put them on anything. But all in all, he had to agree with Lorena that the backyard was better for the garden.
Now the garden was an oasis. She had put in flagstones to mark the path to his patio, and then on to his workshop. There were giant sunflowers. There were all manner of vegetables and herbs. There were flowers. She kept the mosquitoes under control through a variety of natural means, and in any event, mosquitoes tended to stay away from Smoke’s cigars. All summer long he would get some vegetables here and there when their time came. But every year at harvest time, she presented him with a bounty of food, her part of the bargain for his allowing this garden to happen.