The Lumber Yard

A story about wood.

Men split boards in the lumber yard. Saw breaks wood. The boards stack piles. Inside, there’s a framework of corrugated sheets. Tin, iron. Crumpled balls of foil, fishnet stockings. The generator leaks. Blue tarpaulin rustles over planks and blocks. Plywood chimes flatly. Ropes slip through rings. The Boss eats a sandwich – ham, egg, mayo, lettuce, turnips, soft little baby’s teeth. He spits in paper on the floor. Bits of sawdust stir in paper. Fan blades slowly turn. An orange-yellow light. A blue aquarium. False coral, a bed of sand. Sawdust settles in the Boss’s hair. Between the doorway and the staircase, common sounds. The flight descends. The furnace glows brick red. The long and steady conveyor belt. A dark tunnel underground. An access pipe. The mouth opens, closes again. The smell of glue. Strong arms tear at gnarled knots of bark. Hatchets kept in holsters near the feet. An empty circle clears out among the teetering stacks. An arena. Two monkeys circle in the middle of a crowd. Eyes get bloody now. Mad hunger, mutilated for money. In the lumber yard, chainsaws used sometimes. The logs cut down to planks, the planks cut down to size. Hardhats often warn. The sky very often brown. No unregulated rumblings. Electricity is by the law. A wormy wet hole dug in the gravel by the entrance. A large stone unearthed, rolled by all the men into the middle of the yard. The stone becomes a sacred place, a garden grows around it. The garden fills with yellow grass. Slender stems. Heavy bulbs. There is a single perfect flower. Then the garden withers and the stone becomes a stone again. A stone, just another stone. The men turn it on its side and beat it like an orphan. All around, buckets full of rainwater. The Boss is pressing search on his computer: “The Perfect Crime Brother Murders Sister.” He fondles an intimate garment in his other hand. Planks swell. Timbers buckle. Small birds circle crimped antennae. The computer hums and whines for thirty-seven seconds and produces one result: news clippings pasted up with pictures of loud and barking dogs, straining at the ends of painful leads. His secretary makes a knocking sound. In the wall in front of him, a vision of a gilt-framed oval mirror appears and shows rolling ancient forests and a castle in the distance. Then, it fades away. Two men jab at each other in the gathered dust. Their fingers pinch at rusty nails. Their faces have no anger. A stack of splintered joints gets in their way. Cascade of rotten wood chips from the cabin of a truck. Perimeter patrolled by men in navy jumpsuits. Each one is different, but the same. Razor wire curls on certain walls. A rhesus monkey falls and oozes poison from its neck. Boards and planks still sag in serious piles. Pallets pile atop pallets, teeter into termination. An orange glow turns reddish-purple. Politicians visit and exhibit vague uncertainty. They arrive and are not really there. The building breathes around them, the yard becomes an endless maze. They disappear back into television. Stripped and sawed and sanded. The goods disappear into ash in the fiery furnace. The mouth hangs open. The conveyor whines. The Boss locks yellow eyes on yesterday’s telegraph: THE FLAMES HAVE REACHED THE BEDROOM STOP YOURE ON YOUR OWN NOW STOP SIGNED MOTHER