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With Rain, and a Dog Barking Part 2

Still, I seemed to have no choice but to walk him away from the trees, east back down Shoshone. I turned south on Nez perce so we could get back to Arapaho. There were cherries in bloom behind a greenhouse on our right,and LUcky whined when wewalked past them, quickened his pace so we'd get by faster. He barked out loud at three pear trees planted in a row in front of a house across the stree. When we got back to Arapaho, our street, and started towards our houses, he whined and barked and was shaking when I handed him back over to Maria. I walked into my front yard and looked at the two plum trees I had planted there then, regular plums, not flowering ornamentals. They had been blooming and had been a mass of color for nearly a week. The grass around them was thick with fallen petals.

 

Ellen got to my place around seven. I shook out her umbrella while she hung her coat in the hall closet. It had been raining again for nearly an hour, though now it was letting up. "What a night," she said.

She had rain misted on her chin and lips, and the water caught the light when she smiled.

"Your chin is red," I said, touching her.

"Cold," she said.

I got her a towel and watched her dry off, and wondered again why our relationship hadn't gone anywhere. We were just friends now- we'd tried dating, but it hadn't worked, and she was one of the few people who managed to stay in my life as a friend after something like that. I wanted the dinner to be nice for her.

"Baked danish ham," I said. It was glazed and beautiful. I let it keep cooking on low heat in the oven while we sat down to eat the salads.

Ellen took hold of my hands. "They're all read," she said. "Have you been working outside?"

"No," I said. But i remembered poking around in the tree with the broom that morning, knocking rainwater on my hands. Ellen's chine was still red. I got up and looked at the broomstick in the laundry closet. It was covered with a dusty film like my shoes had been. I could rub it off with one finger.

"You'll have to put some lotion on your hands," she sai,d

Maybe more than that, I thought. I sat back down and told her about the rain, that maybe there was something in it. We were quiet for some time. Ellen touched her chin.

"What's that noise?" she asked.

"The dog next door? You remember Lucky-"

"No. The high-pitched whine. Did you have an alarm system put in here?"

Ellen could hear high-pitched sounds I could never hear, like the whine of alarm systems in department stores. The clerks said a few people, especially children with their good ears, sometimes commented on the sound. Ellen wasn't the only one. A year ago, she'd insisted on having her desk at the paper moved farther away from the water fountain because it emitted a high-pitched whine no one else could here, but which bothered her.

"No alarm," I said.

"What's on?" she asked, looking around the kitchen.

"I left the oven on low heat," I said. I got up and turned it off.

"I still hear it," she said. "It's faint. Could it be from outside?"

She got up and looked out the kitchen window.

"Come outside with me," I said. "I wonder if you'll hear this sound under the plum tree."

I found us both hats to wear, and we kept our hands in our pockets. The sky was just dripping now. Occasional raindrops hit our hats when we walked outside; that's all. We walked back under the plum, getting our shoes wet. Lucky was whining on the Barreto's back steps, and he ran toward us when he saw us walk out, the pawed at the fence. I reached over and petted him.

"The sound is louder here," she said. "Much worse. Can't you hear it?"

I shook my head. "But this dog's been going crazy since last night," I said. "Barking and whining at this tree."

"It's no wonder," she said. "The sound would drive me crazy. It fluctuates a little, but it's pretty constant."

"So what's up there?"

She was looking at the tree. " No one spot emits the sound," she said. "It's as if the whole tree is resonating."

I had her walk out into my front yard.

"Your plum trees are doing it, too," she said.

 

I tried putting on music to drown out the sound, bu that didn't work. I could tell the sound still bothered Ellen, so we abandoned dinner at my place and drove to a little Vietnamese restaurant in a shopping mall a mile from my house- with asphalt parking lots between us and most trees. Ellen could'nt hear a whine inside the restaurant. But she called me later from her apartment to tell me she could hear dogs barking down the street near Liberty Park, which had apricots and cherries and plums in flower.

 

I walked back outside, not under the plum trees where rainwater might drip on me, but near them, and tried to hear their resonations. I couldn't. But I could hear Lucky trying to bark, though he was mostly hoarse now. There were dogs barking down the stree past the Andersons', and some big dog with a deep voice barking two or three streets south.

That night, I lay in bed and listened to dogs barking all over the city.

 

In the morning, all the petals had fallen from my fruit trees. By night, when I got home from work, the leaves had started to fall. Ellen called to say that she had gone for a walk in the park at noon, and that the fruit trees were resonating there, too, and dying. The leaves were falling off them.

I changed clothes, and Edwardo and I wore hats and gloves and took Lucky out for a walk. The dog didn't want to run, just walk. His paws seemed to hurt him, and I tried to steer him away from the puddles of water. He seemed exhausted, though calmer. And maybe with reason, I thought. The sound might have lessened. All the fruit trees down Arapaho and back up Shoshone had lost their petals and were losing their leaves.

 

Maria kept Lucky in her house, and lost whole patches of fur. The boys tried to brush him at first, but his skin was tender and it hurt him, so they just let him shed. The sound was over by then. We were right about the rain, that it had caused the rashes on our skin, and Lucky's shedding, and more. The rashes, at least, soon cleared up. All the news in the papers and on TV was about the new compounds in the rain, a result of many things - Loosened regulations on emissions from cars; dust blown in from the National Toxic Dumping Grounds in the west desert; pollution from the Geneva steel mill in the next valley over; and possibly the resumption of poison-gas testing at Dugway Proving Ground, though the media could never fully confirm the rumors of that connection. The compounds killed seventy-four thousand trees in Salt Lake in a matter of weeks, including most of the fruit trees. The stood without leaves all around us and made it look as though a new winter were coming, not spring.

"And I heard it," Ellen said to me when we went walking in the park past all the dead trees, crunching dry leaves under our feet in late April. "I heard the sound the trees made when they died."

And the dogs had heard it.

 

You think you understand the world. You think things work in certain ways, that they do only certain things. Then the trees make noise when we kill them with toxic compounds. It was the chemical reaction, the news said. The sound was a result of the chemical reaction going on inside the trees, the reaction that killed them.

I chopped down the plum trees in my yard and in the Barretos', had them hauled away. Maria and I didn't burn the wood, like some people did. We didn't want to risk breathing in whatever might have been in the smoke.

I washed my car every day after I knew what was happening, but the paint still faded in places. The whole neighborhoo got out hoses, and we sprayed down our house, but we were too late there, too. Most of the houses ended up with yellow spots all over them, and we had to repaint later in the summer, after the rain stopped.

And I didn't plant fruit trees back in the front yard. I planted junipers, a hardy desert tree that had stood up under the new rain, at least for now. New antipollution regulations had stopped the problem, we were told. It would be safe to plant fruit trees again It wouldn't happen again in Utah. But I wondered. So I stopped trying to grow fruit myself, decided to buy it instead from the country, where I hoped it would be cleaner away from the city, where I hoped the world still worked like it had when I was a boy, and the trees didn't cry out before dying.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I regret to inform you of this, but this great short story was not written by me.  It belongs completely to M. Shayne Bell, whose works I found while digging through a box of short story magazines. I hated to sink to the level of the copypasta, but after reading this I felt I had to share it with the more intelligent readers on EBW. I want to ask some of you to share your thoughts on this story. I found it beautiful, but absolutely horrible.

 

 

 

 

 

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