sighed. “I did not truly refuse, I more neglected. Then maybe I forgot.”
Emil looked up at Franco’s ugly wall. The sulfurous heel was there, defiant as ever.
Franco spoke in a low voice: “I will tell you a secret, amigo.”
Emil clenched his jaw. “What’s that?”
“I never told her. I don’t like peppers.” Emil didn’t react. “Also, she did not like peppers too.”
Emil looked up at the sky, then down at the ground. “Did she ask you to poison the peppers?”
“No, that part was my idea. But to help her.”
Emil let out his breath. “And planting peppers in your yard?”
“For her, that she asked me. It is probably a good thing you just now shot where they grew, because now the apples can grow there.”
“What else did my wife ask you to do?”
“Why do you say this?” Emil was quiet, the pistol limp in his hand. Franco said, “Tell me, amigo, where is that weapon pointed now?”
Emil studied the gun, held it sideways in the palm of his hand. He pressed the thumb piece, pushed open the cylinder and dislodged the empty casings, letting them fall into the pepper-patch hole. He relocked the safety.
“I’m going to make you a deal,” he said. He kicked at the dirt with his right foot. “I plant an apple tree; you paint that black wall white. For her, see?”
Franco laughed but quickly suppressed it. “A big job painting that wall, señor. But okay, okay. Maybe.” He yawned.
“No maybes.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Okay, but no more bullets.”
Emil was quiet again on his side of the fence. Some minutes passed. He said, “That’s that.”
“That is what, amigo?”
“The pepper patch is dead.”
Franco couldn’t help his laughter. “Sí, muerte.” He laughed again. Then, almost reverently, repeated, “La muerte. Maybe now we can have some little quiet peace around here?”
Emil walked away, closed and locked his kitchen door, shutting the garden out. He placed the revolver back in the cabinet and went upstairs, where he dropped onto the bed in his clothes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. He awoke three hours later; ate lunch, then emptied the cylinder and cleaned the gun with Hoppe’s solution. He returned the four rounds, adding two more, and replaced the revolver in the cabinet. Then he walked down the basement stairs.
In the basement he methodically dumped all the jars of pickled peppers into a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag. The cellar was immaculate but he poked around for whatever else needed throwing out. In a corner he found a few things that had belonged to his sister and his mother. He found the army citation for his father, who died in the war. He threw it into the bag. His mother’s old teapot went in with a loud cracking of pottery against broken pickle jar. Terra-cotta pots, stacked neatly on a shelf, went in, smashing on top of the other breakables.
He stopped when he came to a postcard of Slovenia he’d sent to his sister, postmarked 1956. He lifted the card to his face half expecting to smell the fresh mountain air of Lake Bled pictured on the other side. He turned the card over and studied the photo of that long-ago lake with the storybook castle nestled on an island in the middle. Upstairs in a drawer he kept a tiny plastic replica of the castle. He stared at the postcard for a long time, finally throwing it in with the other fragments.
He tied the bag closed—tight—and dragged it upstairs. Out front he shoved the bag into the garbage can, to be collected in the morning.
The rest of the day drifted into what Elena called the unavoidable debris of life. He cleaned the not-very-dirty stove then went up to his office on the third floor to look into bills and other paperwork; things she normally saw to that he’d still not gotten the hang of handling himself. He’d rather clean the stove. But he’d noted some depletion in a mutual fund Elena had set up. Those accounts went up and down, she’d explained. But, looking more closely, he decided market fluctuations didn’t explain it, that a little too much money was missing. He wasn’t certain and had no idea how to find out whether he was right or not. He spent some time looking over the forms but gave up. He’d study the case more closely another time.
Anybody else would have grown furious suspecting a loss of funds. Emil grew restless having to think about the question at all. If it were up to him they’d have placed the money she’d invested under the mattress, where, Elena would have pointed out, it would earn nothing. He didn’t care. Having known great poverty did not translate into his having a love of money. They had a good life together he’d say whenever Elena spoke of improvements, of things they needed.
Late afternoon dissolved into evening spent in Elena’s day room across the hall from his office. The garden door remained locked.
Tuesday morning, June 20th, the graffiti heel on Franco’s wall was there to greet Emil when he opened the bedroom shade. Ahead of sky or tree or another person’s face, each morning his eyes fell on that misdemeanor mischief scrawled on a wall. As he stood in front of the window, his left hand on the frame, a dream from the night came back to him.
In this dream he was a cop again and he was trying to tell the other detectives something important. He began to shout until his voice grew hoarse, but the other detectives only stared blankly as he ran from one to the other until he was bellowing into their faces about a crime he could not name. He woke up breathing hard and lay awake, sweating, eyes locked on the ceiling until sleep again overtook him and the dream left him, until just now. In real life Emil had never raised his voice with the other cops. The dream made no sense; only the feature of him yelling came back, whatever crime he had been so anxious to report vanished like an overheard whisper.
As he washed up he thought about the apple tree he’d agreed to plant. He’d already decided on a miniature crabapple, imagined the branches draping over Franco’s side of the fence once the tree grew tall enough, and the spray of tiny white flowers in spring. A crab was a Malus same as any other apple tree. But he knew way down in the rigidly scrupulous part of his brain that he was cheating, that Elena wanted a real apple tree, the kind that yields pies and tarts and sauce.
First he’d have to dig out and bag the dirt, toxic from whatever the hell it was Franco did to the ground, cart it out to the curb, and then haul in new dirt. A tree couldn’t safely be planted until October, so the question was what to do with the hole in the meantime? He skipped over the question of how he had come to agree to plant the tree Elena had so long desired. Elena … she knew how to lie beneath the green trees. The thought that Franco’s wall might actually be painted and planted filled him with a kind of dumb elation.
His face in the bathroom mirror looked tired, but at fifty-eight, Emil Milosec was not without appeal; he’d be lying if he tried to say otherwise. The black hair, lightly peppered with gray, was not thin or receding; he’d have a full head to the end. As he lathered his cheeks, a bit of cream stopped up his left nostril. He blew it out with a sharp exhalation. Elena sometimes waited until he said something disagreeable at the breakfast table before informing him that a dab of shaving foam clung to the hairs inside his ear.
