Grizzly Adams

By

“It’s just us and nature now.”

As days turned into weeks, we became more adept at building our house and settling in. I built closets, installed curtains and light fittings, planted bushes and flowers. The summer hoards left and the houses in the forest emptied, bar a few neighbors and a slowing stream of weekend warriors.

We were on our own.

It felt good. We relaxed and felt healthy away from the hectic pace of the big city. We walked in the forest, and I had a rush of memories of “The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,” the 1970-80s television series. I was becoming the famed woodsman, and building a self-sustaining ecosystem in my backyard, a forest of pine trees for wood and ample land for planting herbs and vegetables.

I collected wood for the fireplace and for the barbeque, all fallen branches from our own pine trees. I threw in pine needles and cones, too. The fire started in the barbeque and I prepared the beef (from the supermarket, but in my head it was my catch from the woods that stretched behind us).

A neighborhood kid, or, shall we say, a forest kid, came ambling down my land to watch me.

“What you doing?” she asked.

“Starting the fire for a barbeque, or, well, an asado, as you call it.”

“Do you know how to do an asado?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well, you’re American and all.”

“Well, you’ll just have to see, won’t you,” I said. “Why don’t you come back in an hour and be the judge?”

She looked up at me and said, “Maybe.”

I got the fire roaring and salted the beef, and put it on the barbeque along with blood sausages and pork sausages, a quartered red pepper and three halved zucchinis. We opened a bottle of wine and mellowed out while the kids played in the garden under the early-afternoon sunshine, the neighborhood kid racing around with them. I flipped the beef and the sausages, and then set the table and put out bowls of salad.

“It’s ready,” I called out.

My wife helped finish setting the table and the kids came running and sat down. We sent them to wash their hands. “Awww,” they moaned before marching off to the bathroom and then darting back with their hands still wet.

“So,” I said to the neighborhood kid, “you want some?”

She gave me a slow nod to say yes.

I served her a cut of bife de lomo, or filet mignon, and watched her poke at it and then cut a piece and try it. She chewed and swallowed and took a drink of water.

“So?”

“Yeah, well… it’s not bad for an American.”

The Straggler

By

Nervous?

In the end, I didn’t do anything to the foreman.

I had fired him months earlier after one of his wiry henchmen tried to sue me, presumably for not taking a big enough portion of the money from the house construction project. I told him to talk to my lawyer. That turned him off, a good thing because I don’t have a lawyer. The foreman moved on to other targets for skimming – or shoveling – off the top to keep himself in designer clothes and to buy a new Peugeot 207.

So we settled into a quiet life.

Almost.

One of the workers stayed on the job to help finish. He’s a good man, but not without his faults. He screwed up the polished cement floors. I thought of throwing him into one of the pits on our sandy lot and stoning him with the chunks of cement pulled up from his botched job. Instead, I fired him with still several thousand owed for the floor. I broke the news to him in the sandy lot.

“Nobody’s ever done this to me,” he said.

“That’s the way it is,” I said.

I had my father-in-law back me up. He has fists the size of sledgehammers compared with mine.

The worker left unpaid.

And we faced the task of finishing the house on our own, really on our own.

My Very Own Reservoir Dog

By

“Watch it, man, or you’ll lose an ear.”

I hatched my plan to get even with the foreman while sitting on the unfinished patio and watching the kids and the dog run around the sandy lot of our new home.

The plan won’t be easy or too salubrious. But it’ll sure do the trick in stopping him from filching again like he did with our project to push us into a mountain of debt. Indeed, the plan will take the pick out his pick pocketing.

Here’s how it’ll go:

First, I’ll invite the tosspot over to celebrate the new house and a job well done, or so he’ll think. “Looks like you’re settling right in,” he’ll say, ignoring the unfinished floors and closets and the ceiling with a watermark from a leaky toilet, and the unconnected gas water-heater. “Yeah,” I’ll say. Then I’ll open a bottle of red wine and slip a sleeping pill in his drink, and when he’s well zonked out I’ll strap him to his chair with thick rope and stuff socks in his mouth.

Then I’ll saw each of his fingers off and drag his sorry ass to one of the six-foot-deep holes left on the sandy lot by his builders and toss him in.

Bye, bye tosspot.

Man, the thought of it all makes me shudder.

So I grab another beer and sit back down on the patio with my wife as we mellow out to Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up.” We watch the kids race around underneath the blue skies and pine trees, with summer nearly upon us.

“Geronimo…” my daughter shouts out as she jumps and disappears into one of the six-foot-deep holes.

Maybe an email of complaint to the foreman will suffice, I think.

Or maybe I’ll just put the whole affair of the pilfering tosspot out of my mind and focus on the good that I have. A lovely family and a house in a pine forest that’s but a short walk from the beach and good surfing – a pine tree paradise.

My face brightened.