Autumn came. The temperature dropped to a manageable eighty degrees, and the relief from the heat was delicious. The mood in work relaxed, even though we were still busy. 

Boyd was the lead climber in the crew, so when we only had one tree to take down he would get it. I ran his ropes and cut brush so Junior, Donny, Rodger, and Robert could drag it out to the chipper. Boyd was one of those old school climbers who just needs a rope, a saddle, a set of spikes, and a chainsaw. Keep it simple stupid, he used to tell me. As soon as we hit the job, he would throw on his spikes, buckle up his saddle, and grab a rope. Then he’d start spiking up the bole of a pine tree with a cigarette still dangling from his lip. Boyd never seemed to be in a hurry. His movements were almost languorous. Yet his trees came down twice as fast as mine did. I watched him. He worked slowly but never stopped. I would dash up the tree, then stop to figure out what to do next. He had been cutting wood so long he didn’t have to think about it any more.

He was a fearless climber. On any particular tree, the last tenth or so is the scariest part of the climb. That is where the timber – the woody part of the tree – is at its smallest and weakest. On a deciduous tree with a spreading canopy it isn’t too bad, but on a single-stemmed pine tree that has shot up in height to the forest ceiling, climbing out on that last bit can be a real heart attack. The tree starts swaying. Every nerve in you is screaming to go back down because what you’re climbing on is about to snap, but you have to keep going.

A lazy tree surgeon won’t climb the whole way. He’ll go three quarters and cut it from there. This was usually impossible for us. We did the majority of our work in high-end residential surroundings. These trees were next to million-dollar homes and overhung costly outdoor landscaping. One of Bob’s holy commandments was, if you break it you pay for it, but he was always on our backs over time. Everything had to be faster. He didn’t want you to waste precious time setting up complicated rigging systems and roping large pieces off. Instead he preferred that you climbed out to the tips of the tree and cut it all out in small, manageable pieces. It’s the quickest way of operating. Boyd has mastered this practice to the point of artistry. By watching what he was willing to climb out on I was able to evaluate timber strength and size without risking my own neck. I learned more from him than any other climber.

I was getting faster but it was never fast enough for Bob. 

“You’re too slow,” he would tell me after a day spent in a hot saddle. “You’re gonna have to get faster.” 

Ever since I had moved into the RV with Donny, Bob had begun to ride me. He’d shout at you like you were a dog, and that’s what I felt like – me and Donny both. Ever since the accident, things had been pretty quiet in the RV. Donny was broke. After paying Junior off, then paying Bob his rent money, and the money for the chipper, he was lucky to have fifty bucks left on a Friday. That would be gone by Monday, then he’d be back into Junior again. His legs were bothering him. He had been to the hospital and they told him he had some kind of blockage in the arteries in his thighs. That’s what accounted for the dizzy spells he was having. He suffered from muscle spasms and cramp. One time he woke me in the middle of the night, screaming into the darkness of it. I lay there with my face to the wall, listening to his hoarse, old-man cries. I really thought he was dying. When I eventually got the guts to go up and see how he was, I found him lying on top of his bed, his leg jammed out straight in front of him. He was in so much pain he couldn’t talk for ten minutes.

Donny started slowing down on the job. It got to where we were carrying him. One day after work I was going into the office to see Bob about a pay rise when I heard him and Boyd talking from outside the room. I took my hand from the doorknob, cocked my head and listened.

“He can’t do it no more,” said Boyd. “He almost fell out yesterday.”

“Well, what the hell am I going to do with him?” said Bob. “If he ain’t up to it I can’t have him hanging round here.”

There was a pause. 

“You got to do something for him Bob,” said Boyd. He spoke quietly and calmly, as he always did, but there was an urgency in his voice that I had rarely heard.  

“You always had a soft spot for the old junkie, Boo Boo, didn’t you?” said Bob.

He and Boyd had this thing. When they were alone Bob would call Boyd Boo Boo. That made Bob Yogi, but I never heard Boyd call him that.

“He’s got nowhere to go, Bob,” said Boyd. “There’s gotta be shit around the yard he can do.”

“Don’t worry, Boo Boo,” said Bob. “I’ll find him something.” 

I didn’t get the pay rise. After Boyd left and I asked him Bob just laughed.

“I don’t think so Rob,” he said. “You’re gonna have to get a lot quicker before that happens.”

During the workdays, Robert the Rapper was starting to needle me. He was mixed-race – his father was black and his mother was redneck white. We were about the same age and size, so a little wrestling for position was only natural. Robert was part of an ongoing murder investigation. He had been out riding one evening with one of his white cousins who was a small-time weed dealer. The cousin decided to stop at the trailer of a client who owed him money. Robert stayed at the bottom of the lot in the car while his cousin went up to the door. The guy told the cousin to go fuck himself, and he slammed the door in his face. On returning to the car – which was a hundred meters from the trailer – grabbed an assault rifle and blind-fired a single round directly into the trailer. 

A day later Robert was walking out the front door of his apartment in town and got taken down by a SWAT team. The round from the assault rifle had entered the trailer, struck the occupant, and killed him. Robert was charged with accessory to murder. He was released on bail, but the next couple years were spent wrapped up in the case. This was the period that he worked for Bob. 

Robert was proud of having this in his background (he thought it made him a real-life gangster), but he wasn’t such a bad-ass really. I could see that whenever the topic came up for discussion, he was genuinely worried about it. Getting caught up in something like that is a very scary experience unless you can afford a good lawyer. The prosecution was using Robert as leverage to get his cousin to plead guilty to murder. If he pleaded not-guilty, they were going to charge Robert.  If he pleaded guilty, Robert would be free. 

One day at work, during a break, I asked Robert for a light. He hurled his Zippo at me, striking the bridge of my nose. It made a sound like a knuckle rapping on wood. Everybody was watching, and laughed. When we went back to work I couldn’t forget about it. I knew I couldn’t let the insult go. If I did it was only a matter of time before I was making everybody a packed lunch. We were dragging brush up a back garden, round the corner of a house and up the drive to the road. With each armful of pine branches, I was getting angrier and angrier – I was working myself into a rage. When we were hauling out the timber I waited around the corner of the house with a log over my shoulder. When Robert came down the drive and reached the edge of the house I stepped around the corner and walked straight into him. I caught him square in the chest with the load-bearing shoulder. He bounced off the side of the house and fell to the ground. I threw the log at the grass by his feet. 

“Sorry man, I didn’t see you there,” I said.

He climbed slowly to his feet. He tried to look tough for a few seconds, then he smiled.

“Take it easy, Irish,” he said, “before you kill somebody out here.”

After that, as is so often the case, we got on pretty well. 

Bob’s crew was the only place in the tree industry in the South that hired blacks. Normally, it’s all rednecks. The white guys came from poor backgrounds and were men that most people would call racist. The black guys there were from impoverished black communities. They should have been natural enemies, but the individual characters involved all liked each other. Junior and Rodger were buddies, and Robert and Boyd were pretty friendly. I remember one time Boyd was giving Robert, Rodger, and me a lift up to the bank on Friday to cash our checks. Boyd was driving, I was in the front seat, and Robert and Rodger were in the back. A car cut in front of Boyd. It was driven by a black man. Boyd blared the horn, then said: “You motherfucking nigger.”

There was a moment of silence in the car, then Boyd flinched. His eyes went to the rearview mirror. He saw Robert’s brown eyes looking back at him.

“Shit. Sorry, Robert. I forgot you were there.”

“That’s all right Boyd,” said Robert. “You ain’t got to pretend around me.”

I found it hard as an outsider to understand the complexities of race in the South. Many of the Irish people I knew arrived in North Carolina with a sympathetic outlook towards the black community. They had been raised on a diet of Hollywood liberalism where the bad guys were the evil white racists and the good guys were the clean-cut white Feds who took them down. As much as Hollywood likes to vilify racism it has an uneasy relationship with portraying black power – it prefers to portray the black community during the civil rights struggle in an essentially passive role. What these Irish immigrants were unprepared for was the level of sublimated hostility that can exist in the South. It normally took around six months for the new immigrant to tune in to the widely held prejudices of the local population. Economic factors played a main role in it. The urban poor in North Carolina were mostly black. Poor white people tended to stay out in the country. Every time you walk down a street in the downtown area and got panhandled, it would be by a black person. Every time you stopped at a gas station and someone tried to hustle you, they’d be black. They’d point excitedly to some pissed-off looking black girl in a beat-up car holding a baby as concrete proof of whatever what they were saying. 

It wasn’t just panhandling and hustling. A friend of mine was showing his sister, who was visiting from Ireland, the sights of Durham in a borrowed convertible sports car. Two other friends were in the back seat. They had the hood down. A car full of young black men pulled up next to them, hosed everyone down with pepper spray then tried to force the car off the road. 

Irish people, when they first came over, almost expected black people to be grateful to them for not being prejudiced. The disappointment they felt – when they finally understood that no matter what the fuck they thought, they were still going to have to live with the reality of racial conflict – could harden to anger and resentment.        

I used to work the door of an Irish bar in downtown Raleigh. The state was trying to revitalise the inner city, and new businesses had opened up around a town square that was ringed by poor black projects. The area was awash with panhandlers and crack addicts. The bar employed me and an off-duty cop in full uniform to make sure their patrons got to their cars safely. It was owned by two Irish guys and an American. I had been told by one of the owners, an Irishman called Michael, that under no circumstances was I to let any black people into the bar. I was to find some excuse – dress code or ID – to refuse them entry. It wasn’t a call I had to make often.  There didn’t seem to be many black people in Raleigh who wanted to spend Saturday night hanging out in an Irish theme bar full of white people. One night, a group of six young black men, a black girl, and two white girls arrived. They were well dressed. They were sober and courteous (as most North Carolinians are).  I checked their IDs and let them in.  They didn’t get ten feet in the door. Michael, who was off-duty drinking that night, blocked them from going any further.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he screamed at a young, black man with a goatee and a cashmere coat. “Let me see your ID.”

The black guy reached into his pocket and produced his ID. He gave it to Michael.

“He’s checked it already,” he said, pointing at me.

Michael didn’t even look at the ID. He made a show of not looking at it. He thrust it back into the man’s hands.

“That’s a fake. I’m refusing you entry.”

The group began muttering among themselves. They had done nothing more than walk into a bar, and now they were suddenly embarrassed. One of the white girls got angry and jumped up in Michael’s face.

“This is a disgrace. I’m going to call the paper and tell them about this.”

Michael was a small, middle-aged man with pale, sweaty skin that would flush deep red on his egg-shaped head when he was angered. When she spoke, his skin turned purple and he rose up on his tip-toes to glare down at her. Small deposits of froth gathered at the corners of his mouth.

“Get the fuck out of my bar, you cunt,” he shouted in her face. “I don’t care who you call.”

They left. On the way out, the man with the goatee and cashmere coat asked me: “What was that all about? I thought the Irish would understand what’s going on in this country.”

There wasn’t anything I could say. I was ashamed. 

Baptist Clyde fell off the wagon. He had done well – he had stayed off the drugs, kept down a job, even got into one of the coveted single rooms at the rehab halfway house. But the downside to staying in one of those is you are surrounded by fellow ex-addicts, some of whom are uninterested in quitting: they’re just trying to fulfill terms of their parole.

Clyde didn’t show up for work one Monday morning. Bob raised an eyebrow, the boys sniggered, and we all thought we’d see him the following day. By Wednesday, when he still hadn’t shown, Bob was telling everybody that he was gone – fired. Rodger, who knew some people in the same halfway house, got the full story a couple of days later.  

Clyde and another guy from the halfway house called Crackhead Johnny had gone for a couple of quiet drinks on a weekend evening. They sank a few beers, were feeling pretty good about things, and decided a trip down the neighbourhood wouldn’t hurt. Just one – seeing as everything was going so well. They had earned it. Four days later Clyde was holed up in a cheap motel out on Market, bouncing bad checks again after smoking all his savings. He had been kicked out of the halfway house. A week later we saw him. He came by on a Friday evening after Bob had left the shop. He was carrying a gym bag. He looked unhealthy – in just two weeks he had lost a lot of weight. He had bags under his eyes and he was tweaking – he couldn’t stand still. He walked up the back yard to the RV where Boyd, Rodger, Donny, and I were crammed inside smoking a joint. Junior stood outside at the door. Nobody said anything when he reached us, and he stood there for a little while, rubbing his jaw with one hand and trailing his foot in the loose gravel.   

“Hey fellas,” he said eventually. “What’s kicking?”

There were a few grunts from inside the RV, and Junior said, “Hey Clyde.”

“I guess you all heard what happened?” said Clyde.

There was silence. Then Rodger spoke.

“No, Clyde, we didn’t hear a thing. Why don’t you tell us?”

Clyde dropped the gym bag and knelt beside it. He kept his gaze on his hands as he pulled the zipper open.

“I guess it doesn’t really matter. I don’t suppose any of you want to buy my kit?” 

He reached into his bag and took out the brand new climbing kit he’d paid off over two months working for Bob. It was still shiny new, barely marked.

“I’ll give it to you for half price,” said Clyde. “One hundred and fifty bucks.”

Rodger looked at Boyd. They wordlessly got up and left. They walked past Clyde like he was the invisible man and out towards the gate to the front yard.

“How about a hundred?” called Clyde after their retreating backs. 

He looked at me, Junior, and Donny.  Donny and I shook our heads, but Junior took the kit from his hands and made a show of examining it – although he wouldn’t have known the front end from the back.

“All I can give you is fifty,” said Junior. “I don’t really need it but I hate to see a good man stuck.”

He took a fifty out of his wallet. Clyde stared at the money. Then with a quick swoop he snatched it. 

“Thanks, Junior,” he said and he crouched and grabbed the empty gym bag. Then he took off walking down Covill Avenue to Market. 

On Monday, Junior brought the climbing kit into work and sold it to Bob for a hundred bucks. 

Donny got laid off the tree crews. Bob had him cleaning up around the shop, and he split wood when there wasn’t anything else to do. Bob had a hydraulic log-splitter, so when we pulled into the yard in the evenings, Donny would have head-high piles of split hardwoods stacked all over the place. Bob had cut his wages down to six bucks an hour cash – the average cost of a bottle of beer in a bar was three dollars. Bob then sold the firewood on for 80 dollars a pick-up load. The man really knew how to wring money out of wood. One time we were doing a job for an old woman who wanted the trees around her house reduced in height. I had just finished working on a sweet gum, and I was hanging still in the canopy on my rope, shielded from view by the dense green leaves.  I was smoking a cigarette, enjoying the brief respite before my feet hit the ground again. Bob and the client were standing near the foot of the tree, and I could hear them talking.

“How much are you going to charge me this time Bob?” asked the old woman.

“It’s seventeen hundred,” said Bob without a moment’s hesitation.

The old woman smiled and slowly shook her head.

“Keeps on going up every time you’re out here.”

“Costs are rising all the time,” said Bob. “Nothing I can do about it.”

She looked around – first at Boyd in another tree, then in my direction, but she didn’t see me.

“Where do you get them Bob?” she asked.

“Get who?” said Bob.

“Where do you get these young men that make you your money?”

Bob looked around to make sure no one had heard her. He didn’t answer the woman. He just stood there with a sly, uneasy grin that gradually slid off his face. 

Bob was making a lot of money. He had a nice big house, which was paid for, out by the lake, a twin-engine, thirty-foot deep-sea boat, and a string of classic sports cars that he could barely squeeze into. But Bob wasn’t happy. Twice a year he would go out on the boat with his son, who dreaded the occasions. Bob always came back from these outings angered that the happiness that should have been his due from owning a luxury boat had once again managed to elude him. His children were nervous around him. His wife treated him with contempt. He was good at getting money. As a husband and a father he was an excellent provider. But he had no idea how to turn material wealth into psychological contentment. He had all the status symbols that were within his reach, and he was a little dismayed that the promise of fulfillment had proven false. He was like a great, fat child, alone on Christmas morning, who has received the electronic toy car that he has been dreaming of all year. But the instructions for assembly are in Chinese and every time he builds it, instead of racing around the room to the touch of a control knob, it sits where it is, one wheel spinning, and a high-pitched whine emits from the engine.