Tree Fellas
Ezra has all of his teeth. This is not particularly important but considering his peers, it is noteworthy. The other guys on his logging crew are not so dentally successful. They ride together with chainsaws and fuel cans in a flatbed truck to a forestry block almost exactly like the one they’ve just left.
The crew call themselves The Dingbats, but it’s not like there’s a roll call. They’re an inconsistent line up, a messy collective. When they’re working, they work for Terry. Terry drives and refuses to follow roading suggestions like speed limits or center lines. If any of the new lads question Terry’s driving, they’re not picked up the next day.
When they arrive at the block, Terry and a few other stalwarts like Half-Face Mark unload the truck. Ezra runs a gaunt hand over his shaved head and climbs down from the truck. He notices the earth is soft under his boots. Buoyed by pine needles, he smiles. He walks downhill testing out this change in gravity. New Nicky follows him. Ezra doesn’t know New Nicky’s real name, he was simply named after his father, Nicky, who was a Dingbat before he went to prison.
The forest smells earthy and invigorating. Ezra breathes it in deeply while he looks for a spot, soon finding a thick pine away from the flatbed. He brings out a glass pipe and a baggie and, with some awkwardness, drops the point inside. He and New Nicky take turns holding a lighter to the bulb and sucking in the poison. They then pop out from behind the tree trying their best to act nonchalantly while Half-Face Mark rolls his eyes and issues them gear for the day.
*
‘We’re going to do a pizza wedge through here,’ Terry explains, pointing vaguely. ‘I want Ezra and Mark thinning, right? In the harnesses. New guys on the ropes. The rest of you, clearing in behind and dealing with any clean up, ok? I’m not pissing about today, smoko is either at 11 or when this section’s done, not before.’
The Dingbats set to work, trimming and felling trees as they make their way down the hill. Ezra works in a frenzy, his chainsaw buzzing, sawdust and sweat coating his shirt and face within minutes. His teeth jam together like roads merging as he’s hoisted up into a tree. He tries to split them open, but until he’s lowered down again, he finds his jaw is tight and hard. When his boots touch down, some of the anxiety lifts but he feels unhinged. He thinks he hears himself howl.
Ezra is nearly running between sections now, with New Nicky right behind him and the rest of the Dingbats making slower progress further up the hill. He’s unsure of the time but feels like he’s been at it for hours. The earmuffs help him close out the world. The sun is hard to track here, its pale fingers rarely make it through to the forest floor. He realizes he’s not wearing a watch.
Swirling with energy, Ezra spins, looking for his compatriot. He feels lost suddenly, his sense of direction evaporating like mist. But New Nicky is there when he turns again, standing in front of a tree trunk three times the girth of the biggest pines he has been cutting. The tree is sparrow coloured and textured with lines of a long-forgotten map. Ezra walks cautiously towards Nicky and mimics his posture, head tilted back, looking up.
‘We’ve got kauri here, boss,’ Ezra calls, half-remembering that Terry is several hundred meters behind him and hardly likely to hear. He turns to begin back up the hill then stops. He turns back to the tree. He holds a hand up towards it like it’s a wild horse and then stops. His mind jumps to a new topic, a glistening thought coming out of the water. He leaps on the memory of climbing trees with his brothers and follows it under. He thrashes with it and by the time he looks up and sees he is still in the forest, he’s lost all sense of what he was trying to do. He can’t be sure how long he’s been standing with a hand extended. He looks at New Nicky who is beside him and wonders if the boy has always been there.
‘What?’ Nicky asks, his small face smaller inside the orange hard-hat.
‘Whaddaya mean, what?’ Ezra’s eyes lose focus, then land again on New Nicky. He looks at the young man expectantly.
‘The kauri,’ Nicky nods towards the giant tree. ‘I mean, whaddaya doing?’
‘Doing?’ Ezra says. He looks at his hand and starts to notice the sweat clogging his eyes. He lifts his safety glasses and wipes his face with a stained sleeve. It feels coarse and gritty and for a moment he can’t see. He suddenly thinks he’s going blind. The fear tries to take over. He pushes away the twisting thought that tempts to take him under again, forces himself back to the present, to Nicky and the forest. He blinks heavily. ‘Nothing, wait, what are you doing?’
New Nicky holds his gloved hands up like he’s an innocent bystander in a Western, but Ezra’s eyes flick past him, over his shoulder, to another figure trudging down the hill.
‘Turn your chainsaw off, mate,’ Half-Face Mark says, loud and confident.
Half-Face Mark’s a real sad story, Ezra thinks as he often does when looking at Mark. He was pretty good-looking once. He had mostly smooth dark skin and broad shoulders that he held tall despite years of back-breaking work. A memory of the two of them in a tavern years before flings itself at Ezra. He can see the wooden bar and the pair knee deep in beer, singing waiata. Some German tourists, clearly lost, wander in and despite the girls knowing little English and no reo Māori, take to Mark’s singing in a flash. He wants to finish that memory, but as fast as it appears, it’s gone.
Ezra looks at Mark, then down at the chainsaw as if seeing it for the first time. He starts to hold it up for Mark to inspect, then changes his mind and holds it loosely to one side. It dawns on him that Mark is still talking to him and he thinks to flick his earmuffs off.
‘It’s idling. I’m not doing shit,’ Ezra says, nodding towards the chainsaw.
‘If you’re not doing shit, then turn it off.’
Half-Face Mark was a sort of cautionary tale, a ghost story, only the ghost was walking around telling you to fill in the near-miss forms. He’d been in Worksafe brochures and once got flown to Wellington to meet some politicians who pretended to give a shit. Before chain brakes were required on all chainsaws to prevent kickback, Mark didn’t have a nickname.
Ezra’s teeth clamp together hard. He feels his jaw pop out at the sides with the force of it. He’s indignant, radioactive.
‘I called it, didn’t I? I know the dieback protocol. I just want Terry to give us the distance we need to steer clear.’
‘I don’t know why this is so hard for you to get into your skull, crackhead. I am asking you to turn the damn chainsaw off.’
Ezra brings the chainsaw up between himself and Mark. It’s still idling, but it’s an arrow now, it’s a sword. He is not really thinking about Mark, and he has nearly forgotten Nicky, he is falling over the word crackhead. He knows that the word isn’t literal, it’s an Americanism, but like Halloween and hip hop, it’s arrived here. It doesn’t mean crack cocaine—it means zombie, fiend, deadbeat, loser. It was a word he used about other people once.
‘The fuck you call me?’
Mark laughs. This is a sight. The scar tissue warps and pulls at his mouth and eye on the left side, exposing parts of both that are raw and fleshy. His mouth is a mangled hole.
Ezra, enraged, takes another step towards Mark, unsure of himself but filled with crystal confidence.
‘You can get down off your high horse any time you like, mate,’ Ezra starts. ‘You want to know something? You were never Dingbat material, not really. You’re a bloody townie who comes out here in the good weather and makes pretend at hard fucking work. And cos your damn face is spaghetti bolognese, you think you know everything. Piss off.’
Ezra can feel his body come back to him, the drumming of his pulse in his wrists. The weightlessness of the morning is gone and now there is just the heavy clay beneath him, rocks in his boots. He is exactly the kind of maniac Half-Face Mark is accusing him of being. He has the chainsaw pointed at Mark, but without conviction, just a sort of large foam finger to point with, only made from plastic and steel.
New Nicky appears beside him again, a shadow, and Ezra seems to move to dismiss him, to tell him this isn’t so serious, he’s just letting off a little steam. He might have even been walking towards Mark to give him a hug and tell him all is forgiven, but his hand slips on the throttle. New Nicky is doing something that Ezra can’t understand, holding him, restraining him, he can’t be sure, but the chainsaw fires up briefly, just a spurt, but enough to take Nicky’s fingers clean off.
Terry arrives to screaming. New Nicky, despite smoking nearly as much white as Ezra, is lucid and losing his shit. The blood is wild, drooling out in great dollops, covering first Nicky and then Ezra. Ezra is holding the boy, clutching at him as he spins and then drops. Half-Face Mark is yelling over Nicky’s panicked gasps that Nicky should raise his hand above his head. Mark is fashioning some sort of tourniquet out of a harness strap. Ezra drops the chainsaw.
*
Ezra remembers from movies that if you can get the fingers to a hospital fast enough, doctors can reattach them, so he drops to his knees. In the bed of pine needles and little sunlight, it’s hard to see what he’s looking for. He picks up twigs and grasps at tree roots a dozen times or more before he finds Nicky’s ring finger. Its bottom is jagged, and the bone pokes out, hauntingly white. He yells in triumph and holds it up but sees only the backs of his three companions some ways off, jogging up the hill.
Ezra eventually finds the pinkie too, a good chunk of it is missing skin, but the fingernail is there and that somehow feels like an achievement. He can’t find the third finger and if there was a fourth, forget about it. He is vaguely aware the Dingbats have gone, realises they’ve probably rushed New Nicky to a doctor in town, or further, to Waikato Hospital. He stands up and notices it is getting dark.
He walks up the hill and along the forestry track. He holds the fingers in his ungloved hand loose and uncovered. He knows that if this was a movie, the fingers would be on ice, in a chilly-bin, but because he doesn’t have ice, not letting them get too warm is the best he can do. He walks for what could be an hour until a logging truck spots him. He waves, tucks the fingers into his jacket pocket and climbs into the cab. The driver agrees to take him into town.
*
Ezra takes a stool at the bar. He pulls the fingers out of his jacket and lays them in front of him before he waves at the barman. He buys a pint glass half-filled with ice. He places the fingers gently on the rocks and sits back on his stool. They look like a macabre cocktail, and he wonders if anyone will notice.
He remembers being here with Mark, before the accident. One of the German tourists, a tall woman with brilliant white teeth, flopped her arm around Mark’s shoulders as they sang. She’d gotten the right kind of drunk to be in a place like this. Her friend took some convincing and a few tequila shots but eventually the four of them danced slowly to the radio as the barman tried to close. He wondered if that was the last time he believed in good luck.
Ezra borrows a phone and calls Terry and then New Nicky. Neither answer. He calls Half-Face Mark who picks up on the third ring.
‘’Bout time you called.’
‘I was walking out, you assholes left me for dead.’
‘Least we could do, I figure.’
‘Is Nick ok?’
‘No, some idiot cut off his fingers. He’s feeling poorly.’
‘I have them, the fingers I mean, well, two of them. Can I take them to him?’
Half-Face Mark sighs. He lets the conversation hang like damp laundry for a moment and then asks where Ezra is. They agree that Mark will come and pick him up in fifteen.
‘Remember, this is for Nick and not for you,’ Mark says.
The tavern now is somehow brighter, uglier, hard on his eyes. He tries to think of New Nicky, bring up his face in his mind, but can only imagine his father. He shakes his head, hoping to ignore the pending conversation he’ll need to have with Nicky Senior.
Instead, he imagines Mark driving to the tavern, not the current Mark, but the one from before. A stylish slim boy with dark curls and a leather jacket. He wonders if he’s just cursed New Nicky to Mark’s life. He wonders if he can stay in this town much longer. He decides he can at least get a beer while he waits.
Hayden Pyke grew up in the Waikato and now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. He works in social services and writes poetry and short fiction late at night while his real life is asleep. His work has shown up in places like Landfall, Mayhem and the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook.