They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 3

They came over what was left of my back fence the next night, three of them, at about two in the morning.

They had a crowbar and a can of paint and instructions from Danny. The old man's truck, in front of the whole street, so the lane learns what happens to people who play games. They were young, and they were loud about being quiet, which told me where each of them was before any of them knew it.

What they did not have was any idea what a man builds when he has years of quiet, a hardware store account, and a professional interest in being left alone.

The irrigation came on at 2:04, because I turned it on at 2:04. Every zone, full pressure, the pressure I never use in daylight because it strips paint. The first boy took a rotary sprinkler to the face at nine feet and went down in the mud holding his nose. The second ran, straight down the gravel path in the dark, where the garden hose lay in a low loop between the tomato stakes. His feet found the loop, and the loop held, and he went down hard on the gravel.

The third one made it to the fence. He got a leg over, and he put his weight on the trellis by the beehive, and the hive, which I keep for the roses, woke up all at once and settled the matter. He came back off that fence into my yard a good deal faster than he had gone up it.

I watched from the kitchen window with a cup of tea. I have spent ten years learning not to feel some of what I felt in that yard. It was good to be a little bit back.

By dawn I had them dry-ish, stung, and tied to the streetlight at the corner, neat, with tomato twine, and I had pinned a note to the middle one's shirt: FOUND IN MY GARDEN. PLEASE COLLECT. — E.C.

I was standing at the corner with my tea when the street woke up around them.

Mrs. Abernathy came out first, in her robe, with her hair still in the net. She read the note twice and laughed once, a short bark she tried to turn into a cough. Mr. and Mrs. Chen came across from their side of the lane, and Mr. Chen filmed the whole thing on his phone, quiet and thorough, panning from the crowbar to the paint can to the three wet boys. By the time the patrol car turned onto our street, half the lane had the video.

Sarah came out with Noah still in his pajamas. Noah pointed at the middle boy and announced, to nobody in particular, that this was the best day of his life. Sarah did not say anything. She looked at the knots, and then she looked at me.

The boys were awake by then, and sorry about most of their choices.

"When you see Danny," I told the middle one, "tell him the truck's fine."

That got the street. Mrs. Abernathy clapped once, and then the Chens were clapping, and then half the porches were at it, while the boys hung their heads and the neighborhood enjoyed itself.

The police collected them. The young officer who took my statement wrote down what I told him, which was the truth, more or less.

"Old irrigation system," I said. "Very sensitive."

He had turned the middle boy half around and was looking at the knots at his wrists.

"These are bowlines," he said. "My granddad was Navy. These are sailor's knots, Mr. Cole."

"Garden knots, officer. You tie up tomatoes for ten years, your hands learn things."

He looked at me a moment longer than the paperwork required. Then he wrote something in his notebook, and I never did find out what it was.

At breakfast, Noah laughed so hard that milk came out of his nose, which set him off again worse. Sarah watched me over her coffee and did not laugh at all.

I was not there for the next part. I heard about it later.

At the corner, in a black SUV with the windows up, Marco watched Mr. Chen's video on his phone for the third time. Marco, who owned the collectors and the corner boys and the paint. Marco, who had never in his life had a street laugh at him before breakfast.

"Find out who he is," he said to the man beside him. "Not the name on the mailbox. Who he is."

Marco came himself that afternoon, in a suit that cost more than my truck, carrying a tray of rose seedlings like a gift from a better neighborhood.

"Mr. Cole." He smiled with all his teeth. "I heard about the fire. Terrible. And then your little sprinkler accident." He set the seedlings on my porch rail, where a guest sets a gift, and took the chair I offered like a man sitting down in his own waiting room. I poured lemonade into two glasses and set one in front of him. He looked at it a moment before he drank. I drank first, to save him the trouble of wondering.

"You're a hard man to frighten," he said. "Danny tells me the whole lane pays up scared, except you. You pay up smiling."

"I pay for peace," I said. "It's worth forty dollars a week. It's not worth a boy's arm."

He had not known about the alley. I saw it land in his face, the first honest thing I had seen there, and I watched him file it away to be settled later with somebody else's pain.

"I hate to see an old-timer suffer," he said. "So I brought you these, and some good news."

"Then we're after the same thing," I said. "I hate seeing boys sent over my fence at two in the morning. Somebody should look into that."

His smile stayed where it was, but it stopped being real. "The developer's raised the offer," he said. "For your place, above asking. All you have to do is sign." He opened the folder on his knee. "You sign, you're a rich man by Friday. You set the example, the lane follows, everybody's happy."

"And if I don't?"

Marco looked out at the street, at Mrs. Abernathy's porch, the Chens' bikes, Noah's chalk drawings fading on the sidewalk.

"Then accidents spread, Mr. Cole. Fires. Falls. Broken hips, broken windows. This whole street is very flammable. I'd hate for the boy next door to get hurt in a flammable street. Wouldn't you?"

I picked up the watering can and gave the tomatoes a long drink.

"Here's the thing about gardens, son," I said. "Nothing in them is finished until it blooms. My flowers haven't bloomed yet. Come back when they do."

He studied me a while. Then he laughed, shook his head, and walked back to his SUV with the folder under his arm, and I stood on the porch until the taillights went around the corner.

Then I picked up the tray of seedlings and carried it into the light.

There it was, pressed into the soil under the middle seedling. Black, flat, professional. A listening device, and not a cheap one.

It had sat in the sun on my porch rail all afternoon, listening. It had heard Marco name the boy next door. It had heard me say that a boy's arm is worth more than my peace. Whoever was on the other end of it knew, now, exactly what I would pay for, and they had not even had to ask.

I held it up between finger and thumb, close to my mouth.

"You heard the part about the boy," I said.

Then I crushed it, slowly, and let the pieces fall into the dirt.

Across the lane, Sarah's porch light came on against the evening. Her door sat square in its frame, with her boy behind it. I stayed at the window a long time, watching that door.