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 funny. “She said so too, La Señora.”
“And you refused?”
Franco 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