They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 2

I heard Noah before I saw him.

It wasn't screaming. Noah is brave the way ten-year-olds are, before anybody has talked him out of it. It was the scuffle: sneakers on gravel, a zipper, a boy's voice saying give it back, give it back.

I'd been trimming Mrs. Abernathy's hedge. She pays me in tomatoes, the best wage on the street. I still had the garden shears in my hand when I came around the dumpster behind the hardware store at my old man's pace.

Three of them. Danny's younger crew, the ones who get the small jobs. They had Noah backed into the dead end where the delivery trucks turn. His backpack lay gutted on the gravel: pencils, a library book, the little plastic dinosaur he carries everywhere. There was a scrape down the side of his face. And the one in front, nineteen maybe, drunk on his own reflection, had a knife out. Not pointed at Noah. Just out. Being admired.

"Hey," I said.

They turned. I watched them work it out. Old man. Shears. No phone. No help coming. Easy.

"Walk away, grandpa," the one with the knife said, and gave it a little flourish, the way boys do in videos.

I didn't decide anything. The shears were already open from the hedge, and when the boy lifted the knife to show it to me again, I stepped in, caught the flat of the blade between the shear blades, and turned my wrist a quarter-turn, like easing a nail out of soft wood.

The knife spun up and over and stuck, quivering, in the telephone pole ten feet behind me.

Nobody moved. The shears hung open in my hand like a beak.

"You were holding it wrong," I told the boy. "That's how a thing like that gets away from you."

"Pick up his things," I said.

They picked up his things. Pencils. Library book. Dinosaur. The library book had gravel ground into its spine, and I worked it loose with my thumb while they finished. The one who'd had the knife kept his eyes on the shears the whole time, and when they went, they went backwards for the first few steps, the way you leave a room with something sleeping in it.

The last one found his voice at the mouth of the alley.

"You think you're scary, old man? Marco's coming himself! This whole street is his, you hear me? Marco!"

Then running feet, and quiet.

I knelt down, slow, with the knee, because Noah was watching and some performances you keep up for love. I turned his face to the light. The scrape was nothing. But on his upper arm, where one of them had grabbed him and thrown him down, the bruise was already coming up in the shape of fingers.

Noah looked at me. Kids miss nothing. It's their whole job.

"Mr. Cole," he said. "You're not smiling."

"No, buddy," I said. "I guess I'm not."

He walked beside me the rest of the way home, close, the way he walks next to Sarah in a crowd, and he held the dinosaur up high so it could see where it was going.

"Will they come back?" he asked.

"Men like that come back until somebody teaches them the address isn't worth it," I said. "Don't you worry about it. That's grown-up arithmetic."

He nodded like I'd solved it. I envied him the nod.

That night I woke to the smell of gasoline.

By the time I got the back door open, the fence was going up and the fire was walking through the rose beds. I put the spigot on full and dragged the hose down the yard, and where the water reached I held the line. Where it didn't, I went in with blankets soaked in the rain barrel, beating the flames down one panel of fence at a time. An ember took my sleeve and I slapped it out against my thigh and kept going. I got the corner of the shed wet and kept it wet. The far bed I let go, because you save what can still be saved and you don't stand there mourning the rest. The trucks came while I was on my knees in the wet ash with the hose still running, and the firefighters were kind, and nobody said the word arson out loud on my property, which was also kind.

The garden was half gone. The Peace rose was a black stick. And Milo, who sleeps in the toolbox by the porch because she likes the smell of the oil, was nowhere. Cats run from fire. Everybody knows that. I called for her anyway, up and down the dark street, with my voice going strange on her name.

The Chens had come out in their robes while the trucks were still there. Mr. Chen dragged his own hose across the street without a word and set to work on my fence like it was his own yard burning. Nobody on that street asked me a single question while the ground was still warm. They were saving their questions. That is how I knew they already had their answers.

When the sky went gray I made coffee, and then I got to work. I shoveled out the scorched earth and hauled the dead fence. Then I walked the neighborhood putting up flyers with Milo's picture on them, drawn by Noah, labeled in crayon: LOST CAT. ANSWERS TO FISH.

"Just an accident," I told Mrs. Abernathy, who brought out lemonade and did not believe me. "Old wiring on the fence light. These things happen."

"Mm," said Mrs. Abernathy, and refilled my glass, and did not believe me some more.

Sarah came over in the afternoon to help me sift the burn, because that's who she is. We worked a while without talking, our shovels keeping time. Then her shovel stopped.

"Elias."

In the black soil at her feet, half-melted, lay a lighter. Heavy. Expensive. The kind a man carries to be recognized. Stamped into the metal on its side was an emblem: a crowned snake, eating its own tail.

Sarah picked it up with two fingers. Then she looked up at me, and for one second, one unguarded second, she saw my face before I could put the kind old man back on it.

She didn't scream. She didn't step back. ER nurses don't. Her hand tightened on the lighter, and in her eyes a question formed that had never been there before.

"Old wiring," she said. Not a question. She turned the lighter over and read the crowned snake the way she reads a chart. "Old wiring doesn't carry a crest."

"No," I said. "It doesn't."

"Then you take it." She held it out to me on two fingers, the way nurses pass things they don't like. "Somebody carried that onto my street meaning harm. It doesn't go in the trash, and it doesn't go in my house. It goes with the man whose face I just saw."

I closed my hand around it. It was warm from her fist.

"That face," she said, picking her shovel back up. "You keep it away from Noah."

Then she went back to sifting the burn, and after a moment I put the lighter in my pocket, picked up my own shovel, and went back to it beside her.