am being poh-lite.”
Emil stopped shoveling. “Polite? Last night you wanted me to shoot you.”
“So now you dig my grave?”
Emil went back to digging.
“It is the pepper patch, sí, amigo? That you dig? Unless you plan to visit China the slow way?” Franco laughed at his own joke. “Ayee, I have my headache this morning.” He waited. “The sound of that shovel is no help.”
“So take an aspirin, amigo.”
“You know, why do you trouble the place that won’t grow? Maybe the ground is still crying for La Señora Elena, you ever think of that?”
Emil leaned on the shovel. “Franco, don’t take this the wrong way: Screw yourself.”
“No, see, hombre, earth can cry. We don’t think so because we put buildings on top and roads; still, the earth feels; under all that shit she lives.”
Emil listened and all he could think of was Franco’s dump of a building and his trashed backyard. Elena saying he never gave Franco a chance. Sure. They used to talk through the fence, she and Franco, and sometimes out front. Once, home early, he’d seen her step out of Franco’s car.
Elena Morandi worked as a diplomatic translator for the Italian and Austrian Embassies. Her clothing had flair, suited to luncheons, cocktail parties, and dinners, political events where appearances mattered; fluid dresses and smart suits; a fine figure, pure class. That day he saw her was warm, her bare arms slipped through a sleeveless yellow dress with narrow brown stripes. She laughed before thanking Franco, leaning into the car. Thanked him for what? Emil was out in the garden before her key was in the downstairs lock. He pretended he’d been outside for some while, though he still wore his suit. He too dressed well and was noted for it at the precinct, for the cut of his dark suits, his tall frame filling them just so. “Emil! You’re home early,” Elena said, seeing him come in through the garden door. He stood along the frame. “You look lovely,” he said. She smiled. “A lunch?” he asked, all nonchalance, the noncommittal smile he sometimes used on suspects. “Mmm, Italian,” she answered before going upstairs to change. Emil watched her leave, loosened his tie, came inside to pour a glass of rosé from the refrigerator, and returned with it to the garden. From the other side of the fence he heard Franco whistling softly to himself. Disgusted, he threw the wine on the pepper patch. One time he urinated on it.
Franco sang songs to her, she said, and once in a while recited. “Recited what?” an incredulous Emil asked. “They’re in Spanish, poems. Very sweet,” she answered coolly.
He said through the fence, “Recite me some poetry, Franco.”
“Poetry?”
“If you can. Or sing me a song.”
“No,” he muttered. “Am I Falstaff?”
“What did you say?”
“I am no monkey act. You have the wrong man. I am going for beer, una cerveza; you want one?”
“No, wait, don’t go just yet.” Emil leaned the shovel against the fence. Franco stood silent on the other side. “Why did she grow the peppers?”
“Su esposa?” Franco shrugged. “How do I know?”
“She grew them for you, didn’t she?”
“Listen, why don’t you … try something else? Try an apple tree. Manzanas are good fruit. They keep away bad things.”
Emil’s head was beginning to tighten. When they first came to America he suffered severe headaches. His mother would place him in a shaded room and lay warm washcloths on his forehead and massage his neck with her strong fingers. He was beginning one now. The tree quarrel each spring … then the peppers; they were a recent addition, no more than two or three seasons before Elena’s death. A nerve at the base of his neck began to throb.
“Did she want an apple tree?” he asked.
“Why would I know that too?”
“Maybe you did something here, huh? For her, like poison … ”
Franco laughed. “Keep talking like that, amigo, you will be drinking beer with me soon.”
Emil shook his head, almost angry. “I don’t—”
“Sí, sí, you told me many times: no beer.”
“Did my wife drink beer with you?”
“Once or twice, to be polite.”
Adam and Eve never had a chance. If God created the snake, he also created the sin, its potential. The snake was a plant—Eve set up, Adam born to take the fall. He said, “I am going to ask you a second time, Franco, did you poison my ground?”
“A little weed killer. Not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal, huh?” Emil turned and walked into the kitchen, not fast, not slow; deliberate. He was calm, but underneath was something bitter, like chewing off his own hand, grinding the small bones and cartilage to a pulp, the crunch of tissue between molars. Only later would he understand that what he had chewed was his pride.
Inside, he pulled his backup revolver from a kitchen cabinet, lifted the gun out of its holster, and unlocked the safety. The weapon was instantly familiar in his hand, as much second nature as holding a garden trowel. He walked back outside, and the kitchen door closed hard behind him.
Franco, from his side of the fence: “Amigo?”
A helicopter passed somewhere off to the left. Emil raised his arm. His icy fury concerned more than a poisoned patch of ground, more than a drunken neighbor who may or may not have been too friendly with his wife. Focus hammer-locked, exterior steely cool, he took aim.
He’d discharged his service revolver exactly once in the line of duty and missed on purpose. The perp was a skinny fourteen-year-old running from the scene—a narrow alley—armed with a gun that was too big for him. Emil and his partner, Mike Dunn, stood safely behind a doorway. Emil stepped out and in a split second guessed the kid’s aim would be off if he fired. It was a fifty-fifty wager. He called out to drop the gun; the kid didn’t; he raised the weapon, but before the boy could get off a single round Emil fired just to his right. Feeling the breath of the bullet that nearly grazed him, the boy dropped the gun and froze.
There was only Franco on the other side of the fence when Emil squeezed the trigger and fired two rounds deep into the pepper patch: Bam! Bam! The noise cracked the air. Every tree branch emptied; birds flew off in a mad flapping of wings. The silence that followed was nearly as deafening as the shots. It was broken by a bouncy Latino song from a passing car radio that penetrated the backyards before moving on and retuning the morning to its near-dead quiet. Two craters splayed into the earth where the peppers once grew.
“Hombre? What did you do?”
Emil, calm as still waters: “You know, amigo, you should paint that scrawled-over warehouse wall of yours white. I think it’s filled with tears.”
Franco pealed out his rasping laugh. He seemed to eventually find everything
