Pride and Petty Games

My name is Hector. I am forty-four years old, divorced eight years now, and I have been landscaping in Timber Hollow for nineteen of those years. I know every kind of soil this valley has, every plant that survives at eight thousand feet, and every trick the wind plays on a sprinkler head. So when Silver Fir Lodge needed a head landscaper this spring, I figured the job was mine.

It was not. They gave it to Johan.

Johan is thirty-eight, runs the crew as supervisor, and looks like the kind of man who eats egg whites and regrets nothing. He has been out as bi since his late twenties, which everyone knows because he talks about his dating life at lunch like he is reading a grocery list. He is fit in a way that seems rude. And he got the promotion I wanted because, and I quote the general manager here, "Johan has strong leadership presence."

I have leadership presence. I once got a whole crew of hungover twenty-somethings to replant four hundred tulip bulbs before a wedding. But apparently that does not count.

***

The morning after the announcement, I walked into the break shed at six-fifteen and Johan was already there, leaning against the counter with his coffee like he owned the building.

"Morning, Hector," he said. "Big day."

"It's Tuesday," I said.

"First Tuesday of the new era." He raised the cup at me. "Got the schedule posted. We should talk about your assignments."

I grabbed my thermos and did not sit down. "Let's talk about them."

He led me to the whiteboard, and that is when I saw it. The west slope. The west slope of the lodge grounds is a steep, shaded, rocky mess of a hillside that sits behind the maintenance garages where nobody but raccoons ever looks. It has bad drainage, thin soil, and a sprinkler line that freezes every April. Nobody gets the west slope on purpose.

"You're giving me the west slope," I said.

"I'm giving you the west slope," Johan confirmed. He tapped the marker against the board. "It needs someone with experience. Someone who can handle a challenge."

"A challenge."

"Consider it a showcase of your skills."

I looked at him. He was trying very hard not to smile, and failing at about the fifty percent level. "You put me on the ugliest hill on this property because I told the GM I had nineteen years of experience and you have what, eleven?"

"Thirteen," he said. "And it's not about years, Hector. It's about fit. Head landscaper has to delegate. You've spent nineteen years doing everything yourself. That's a strength, but it's also a habit."

"Don't psychoanalyze me at six in the morning."

"Then don't make it easy." He capped the marker. "Look, I didn't pick the west slope to punish you. I picked it because it's the section that actually needs a professional. The front lawn could be done by a machine and a kid with a leaf blower. The west slope can't."

That last part was almost flattering, which made it worse. I took the assignment sheet off the clipboard without another word and walked out. Behind me I heard him say, "Deadline's Friday," like I needed to be told.

***

So I made the west slope my business.

The first day I walked it end to end twice. The drainage issue was worse than the file said. Water came off the garage roof, cut a channel down the middle of the hill every melt season, and took topsoil with it. The previous crews had thrown a few junipers at it and called it handled. The junipers were dying in a neat diagonal line, like dominoes that had given up.

I rerouted the runoff with a shallow swale and a dry creek bed of river stone we already had stacked behind the greenhouses from a canceled project. I did not ask permission for the stone. I decided that asking was for people who had not been passed over. Then I pulled every dead juniper, amended the soil with compost from our own pile, and terraced the worst third of the hill with the leftover timbers from the fire pit rebuild. By Wednesday afternoon the hill had structure. By Wednesday evening it had a plan, with drought-tolerant perennials marked in stakes, blooming in sequence from May to September so it would never look bare for more than two weeks running.

I finished the planting layout Thursday at eleven in the morning, a full day early, and the hill looked better than the entrance garden. I am not saying that to brag. I am saying it because it is true, and because of what happened next.

I went looking for Johan to sign off on the overtime hours. I found him over by the front lawn, standing with Connie, the assistant manager, both of them facing the mountains like a couple of guys in a commercial. I was still twenty feet off when I heard my name.

"And the west slope? I put Hector on it just to keep him busy," Johan was saying. "He'll spend two weeks up there growing weeds with a system. You watch. By June it'll be the hill that eats the irrigation budget."

Connie laughed. "You did stick him on the ugly side of the property."

"Nobody's going to see it. That's the beauty of it. Give the old guard a hill and a deadline, he feels important, and the real work happens up front where it counts."

I want to note here that I am forty-four, not ancient. Old guard. The man is six years younger than me. I have planted things on this property longer than he has lived in this valley.

I came around the corner of the equipment trailer so they could both see me. Connie had the good grace to look embarrassed. Johan did not.

"Hector," he said. "How's the hill?"

"Finished," I said. "As of eleven o'clock. A day early. It's signed off by the irrigation inspector, the stone bed is in, and the planting plan is staked and photographed for the file. You want to walk it, I'll walk it with you."

That wiped some of the smile off him. "You finished the whole thing?"

"Every hour of it. I can show you the log."

Connie said, "Well, that's great, Hector," in the voice people use when they want to go home.

"Meanwhile," I went on, because I was not done, "you can tell the GM whatever you want about the west slope. But I heard what you said, and the next time you want to describe my work to management, describe it after you've looked at it."

Johan held up both hands. "Okay. Easy. I was shooting the breeze."

"You were shooting your mouth."

"There's a difference?"

"Not for you, apparently." I shoved the overtime sheet at his chest and he had to grab it one-handed to keep it from hitting the gravel. "Sign it. The hill is done. Do with that what you want."

He signed it. His pen ran dry on the first try and he had to shake it, which I enjoyed more than I probably should have. Then he looked up at me and said, "Fine. Monday, eight sharp, I'll walk the slope with you. If it's half of what you say, I'll say so to Connie and the GM."

"Do that."

"And if it isn't?"

"Then fire me," I said. "You've wanted the excuse all week."

I walked back to the shed and did not look at either of them. My hands were shaking a little, which happens when I get good and angry, and I told myself the shaking was anger and nothing else. Johan had a way of getting under my skin that no other supervisor had ever managed. Nineteen years, I had worked under men who ignored me, men who yelled at me, one man who cried at a staff meeting about the aspens. None of them lived in my head the way this guy did by Thursday.

That night I sat in my truck in my own driveway for a while before going in, drinking the last of my thermos coffee and looking at the lights of Silver Fir up the hill. I thought about the west slope. I thought about the swale, and how the water would run clean over the stone now instead of chewing the hill apart. I thought about Johan saying old guard and about how his hands had looked holding that pen.

Then I thought about his hands some more, and I put the truck in gear and went inside and did not think about it again until Saturday. Which is its own kind of problem.

Monday morning I was at the west slope at 7:40. Johan showed up at 8:02 and said nothing about being late, which I appreciated and did not mention. We walked the whole thing. He was quiet through the stone bed, quiet at the swale, and when we got to the terraces he squatted down and pressed a thumb into the soil like a doctor checking a pulse.

"You used the fire pit timbers," he said.

"Leftovers from the rebuild. They were going to rot in a pile."

"They're treated pine. They'll hold." He stood up and brushed off his knees. "Okay. It's good. It's better than good, it's the best thing on this property right now and I hate that."

"You hate that?"

"I hate that I have to walk into Connie's office and say it out loud." He was grinning while he said it, which is the kind of thing that makes a man want to swing at you.

So I said, "You could have just given me the job this spring instead of running your mouth about leadership presence."

"There it is." He turned to face me. "You've been sitting on that all week."