Part One: The Two Ferns

The rule for guarding the dumpster was simple: no one, under any circumstances, takes anything out.

So imagine my chagrin when I woke to the sounds of someone rummaging around inside the dumpster's hull. I wiped a porthole in my fogged up windshield and saw that it was before dawn: the sky dark, mist still clinging to the palm trees. I fished around until I found my spear gun and got out of the car.

"Time to quit that," I said and banged on the dumpster's side, sprinkling rust everywhere.

The noise from inside stopped.

"Out," I said.

A man peeked over the lip. He was older than I'd expected for a thief; he looked to be in his seventies, skinny and bent, with unkempt hair and a dirty white beard.

"What seems to be the problem?" he said.

"Scat. Now."

"All right. Fine. God damn." The old man swung his leg over the top of the dumpster and lowered himself to the ground with surprising agility. He wore no shirt, just a pair of cut-off jean shorts with long, fraying threads hanging off the ends. Spatters of pink spots dotted his chest and shoulders from years of too much sun. In his hand was a duck with part of its beak blown off.

"That goes back in," I said, and gestured to the duck, an old hunting decoy.

"Oh come on, son," he said, tucking the wooden duck beneath his arm. "No one's going to miss this thing."

"I'll miss it," I said. "My boss will miss it."

He shot a quick glance at the hedges beyond the lot. I could feel him doing the math, calculating his chances of getting away if he made a break for it. I tightened my grip on the spear gun and made sure he saw. The gun was a 24" Blue Reef Special. My boss, Orlando, had let me borrow it from the pawnshop for the night, to guard the dumpster. The Blue Reef was a long and mean-looking instrument with a razor-sharp harpoon sticking out from the barrel. Professional fishermen used guns just like it to bring down large, deep-sea fish --marlin and jackfish. Fish much faster and tougher than the old man standing by the dumpster.

He adjusted the duck beneath his arm. "Just hear me out. My son, he gave this to me for my birthday a few years back. It was a gift from my boy. It means something to me."

"See these?" I said. "See those?" I gestured at the flyers taped up everywhere Ðon the chain across the entrance to the parking lot, on the window of the pawn shop, on the front of the black, barge-like dumpster itself. The fliers explained that to remove anything from the dumpster was strictly illegal, as the dumpster was the collective, rented property of the neighborhood's four pawn shops, including Orlando's Second Hand, where I worked. On Dumpster Tuesdays, the first Tuesdays of every third month --March, June, September, and December-- the local pawn shops got together and rented a dumpster to use to clean out all the merchandise that had gone unsold for too long. The dumpster stayed in one of the pawn shop's parking lots for ten days, and then the rental company would come and pick it up.

This time around the dumpster was in our parking lot, outside Orlando's. We took turns guarding it at night: me, Orlando himself, and four or five guys from the other shops. It was my first Dumpster Tuesday.

"But no one bought this thing," said the old man, holding fast to the duck. "You tossed it out."

"If everyone who pawned something at our shop waited until we tossed it out and then just came by and got it out of the dumpster, no one would bother buying anything from us, would they?"

"Friend, I'm an old man." He smiled at me; I saw he was missing some teeth on top. "Memories is almost all I got left. And this duck brings up fond memories for me."

"Like what?" I said.

"Pardon?" he said.

"I mean what memories does it bring up for you? Name one."

He studied the duck in his hand. "Well," he said, "it makes me think of this one time my boy Jerricho and me, we went duck hunting together? We used this very decoy. And Lord did she work. I'm saying. The boys couldn't stay away from her. Thought she was a regular Marilyn Monroe." He nodded at the duck. "She did her job that day. Yes sir."

I stared at him.

"Aw come on already," he said. "Give me a break."

"Sorry. You missed your window. You should have bought the decoy back from us while it was still in the store. Better yet, you shouldn't have pawned it in the first place, if you cared about it so much."

Suddenly his eyes brightened. "Hold up, hold up. I know who you are," he said, pointing at me. "You're the guy who had all the problems with that country singer. I heard about you on News 12."

I felt an uncomfortable tingle at the back of my neck. "Back in the dumpster," I said, meaning the duck.

"Tell you what, it sounded like you was about ready to murder that poor cowboy. Following him around, threatening him and all. Not that I blame you, though. After the trouble he caused you? Bringing down a shit-storm like that?"

"I don't know what you mean," I said. But I knew exactly what he meant. And I knew exactly whom he was talking about.

"Listen," he said. "It's all right. I can't stand that guy. Dick Doyle? I don't like his songs. I don't like his singing. Hell, I don't like his whole, you knowÉ" he waved the duck in the air.

"Act," I said.

"Right," he said, pointing at me. "That act he does. I mean how in this day and age, with all our knowledge and computers and whatnot, can people still fall for bullshit like that? What a fucking phony, correct?"

The person the old man was talking about --the person who'd apparently brought a shit-storm down on me-- was a country singer named Dick Doyle. Dick was the flashy kind of country singer, the type that wears the big white Stetson, the colorful suit with rhinestones sparkling all over the lapels. The big belt-buckles. The cowboy boots with pointy silver caps on the toes. In the past couple of years, Dick had managed to become something of a local celebrity. He was always playing clubs and events around central Florida; he went on tour a couple times a year, up to the Northeast or across the Southwest. He'd even been featured on some national television shows. None of this success had anything to do with actual talent on Dick's part, though. No one paid to see Dick Doyle because he was a great songwriter or musician. People were only interested in Dick because of the bizarre circumstances surrounding his act.

"I don't have any problems with Mr. Doyle anymore," I said.

"That's good. Because folks are going to get the best of you in this life sometimes, son. Make you look foolish. Doesn't mean you're a lemon."

"I never said I felt like a lemon."

"Well you shouldn't. Hell. People call me all kinds of things. I don't let it get me down. Fuck them, right?" He laughed. "Fuck them right in their pie-holes."

A sickening feeling came over me: he was an old man holding a duck he'd stolen from a dumpster. He was giving me advice. Still, I refused to let myself get angry. Any day now I was going to leave Florida all together and put the whole Dick Doyle mess behind me. I'd found a great new girlfriend, Joan; she was young and Chinese-American, and soon enough I'd give Orlando notice and she and I would head back north.

I tried to picture my real life then, the life waiting for me back home: I pictured the building I worked in, fifty-two stories tall, a black tower rising above mid-town Manhattan. I pictured my office, my desk, my leather chair, waiting empty. See? I thought. You have a good job out there. You own an apartment in Brooklyn. You are a real person.

"Who's saying I'm a lemon?" I said.

"No one, buddy. I just meant that there's people on your side. That's all. Like Jerricho, my son. Who bought me this duck. The one I'm holding."

Just then Orlando's truck pulled into the lot. He must have seen what was going on because instead of parking in his spot he skidded to a stop right in front of us. The old man jumped back to avoid the spray of gravel.

Orlando got out and took a bat from the cab. He was from Argentina, and, though he stood shorter than both of us, he was a thickly packed person.

"Get out of here!" he yelled at the old man, his accent rearing up. He pulled the bat back like he was about to swing at the old man's head. "Get off of my property!"

"Whoa, sir," the old man said. "I was just leaving."

"Oh, but you are not leaving with that." Orlando grabbed the duck and dropped it on the ground. Then he raised the bat over his head. "This item is being sold for ten dollars. You pay ten dollars to me and you can have it."

The old man studied the duck rocking on its side. "I'll give you two dollars," he said.

"Ten," said Orlando.

"Two twenty-five."

"Ten."

"It's got no beak. Two-fifty."

Orlando waved the bat high in the air. "Ten."

The old man leaned over and spat on the duck. "Keep the change," he said. Then he turned and started walking away. "Oh, and Dick Doyle's a god damned genius!" he yelled over his shoulder.

I took a step toward him but Orlando grabbed my arm.

"What are you thinking of, talking to someone like that?" he said to me.

I watched the old troll vanish into the hedge. "I'm sorry. He started talking to me about Dick Doyle and--"

"Dick Doyle again," he said.

"I know."

"Get some sleep. Go home," Orlando said, and gently took the spear gun away from me.

It's difficult in this day and age to tell the difference between a real and an artificial plant. The technology has become so advanced. The age of rubberized stems and plastic leaves is long past. The synthetic plant of today is made from all kinds of designer materials --complicated, organic compounds like fibercore and poly-wax and spongeform. For example: your typical synthetic palm tree, standing fifteen to twenty feet tall-- the kind you find twisting up through every mall across America. Its trunk is sculpted from a wood resin that sweats and breathes just like a real tree's. The leaves are spun from a special waxen silk; they have actual veins running through them. If I were to plant a synthetic palm tree next to a real one, and then bring you over and ask you to tell me which was which, you wouldn't be able to. Even if I let you use your hands. Probably, the only way for you to discover the truth would be to gouge the trees open.

I'm not from Florida originally. Before relocating, I worked for a small marketing firm in Manhattan. My department was called "Corporate Synergism," which, though it sounds dynamic, is really just a sexy way of saying "joint venturing." Basically, my colleagues and I helped companies market themselves to each other; we worked as corporate matchmakers. A client company would come to us hoping to form a relationship with some other company out in the world that it found very attractive. And we, in turn, would help that client company put together a proposal to offer its crush --a proposal that would explain, point by point, why together they had synergistic potential.

The work was not the most exciting in the world, and the salary was modest, relatively speaking --only about seventy grand a year, for starters-- but I enjoyed my job well enough. It was a corporate life: I was invited to the restaurant openings and magazine launches and the gallery shows. I could get into the club with the movie-screen floor without having to wait in line. I'd received a key in the mail, inviting me to go to Locke Bar. I was regularly sent free samples of products sold by companies we'd helped out: cases of Scottish vodka, a bedspread with a 700-thread count, a little robotic floor vacuum that zipped around and cleaned the apartment while I was out.

Ours was a young, competitive department. I was the new hire, but my colleagues, who, for the most part, were only a few years farther into their thirties than me, all made in the mid-six-figures. My boss, Roddy, was only forty-two, and he had three homes already. One in Tribeca, one on the island, and a time-share in Park City, Utah. He owned art he actually had to alarm.

I was on my way --that was how I felt. I was engaged to a woman named Pearl, just 25, who was far and away the most beautiful girl I'd ever dated. She had the kind of face that moved through a crowd like a lantern. Huge blue eyes, a smile almost too big for her head. She was lean and graceful, with a dancer's body. In heels she was a good inch or two taller than me. She'd done some acting and now she was studying to be a playwright, taking graduate classes to get her masters, or whatever degree comes with playwriting.

I even owned my own apartment, a small duplex in a renovated factory building in downtown Brooklyn. Everything about the place was brand new: the moon white walls, the brushed steel counters in the kitchen. The bedroom windows were huge, industrial panels that afforded a perfect view of mid-town Manhattan. In fact, if I slid our bookcase out and squeezed myself into the corner of the room, I could just make out my own office building. Sometimes, when I couldn't sleep, I'd press myself into that nook and gaze out over the moonlit river until I found my building, then my office, and finally, my window. There, I'd think. You fit there. And after a while a soothing fatigue would come over me, and I'd climb back into bed.

Then, one day in January, Pearl came into the den with a strange look on her face. "What is it?" I said.

"You almost ready to go?" she said.

"Ready to go where?" I said.

"To see that guy I told you about? The one performing in the East Village," she said. "I've been going to see him sing every night this week. You promised you'd come tonight."

I looked down at the papers in front of me Ð part of a proposal by a company that manufactured high-end synthetic plants, everything from desk plants to full size trees. Our client was hoping we might help it court a major home improvement retailer, one that had giant warehouse-like stores all across the country. This was the biggest deal I'd been handed so far. Our client had sent along an artificial fern as a sample of its work, along with a real fern. I had both pots next to each other on my desk.

"Here, try to tell the difference," I gestured for Pearl to touch the ferns.

"Max, I want you to come. It's important to me."

"Just feel."

She sighed and rubbed a leaf from each plant between her fingers. "Wow."

"Feels real, doesn't it?" I said. "They're a good company. Now smell."

She squinted at me as though I were suddenly very hard to see. "MaxÉ"

I closed my binder and got up. "Who is this guy again?"

"He's a country singer," said Pearl. "His name's Dick Doyle."

As soon as we entered the club, I could tell something strange was going on. Usually the artists Pearl got excited about Ðthe musicians and painters and writers and suchÑwere up and comers: they'd been written up in the magazines and had some sort of buzz around them. And the people who went to see them perform were like us, they were in our crowd. But as we made our way toward the stage, I saw that Dick Doyle's audience wasn't our crowd at all. The people filing in were bikers and construction workers, security guards. Jeans and boots and even a little leather. It had been a long time since I'd felt over-dressed in a button-down.

At ten o'clock sharp, an old cowgirl came out from behind the curtain to offer an introduction to Dick's show. She was dressed in cowboy boots and a denim shirt with fringe hanging off the sleeves. When she reached the center of the stage, she took off her hat and held it over her chest.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she began, "there is a story behind the man you are about to see here tonight. A story that has become an inspiration to manyÉ"

I looked around at the crowd, expecting smirks and snickers, but everybody was just standing with their faces turned up toward the stage, listening. Even Pearl. I felt like checking outside just to make sure I was still in Manhattan.

"The story begins in Florida," the old woman continued, "with a man named Dick Doyle."

The audience erupted in cheers, clapping and stomping and whistling.

The old woman smiled and patted down the noise. "I know, I know," she said. "But back then, Dick Doyle wasn't anyone special, really," she said. "He was just your average country singer. Living and playing around town. Singing his songs at birthday parties and weddings. At the derby on Thursday nightsÉ"

I wondered why she was talking about Dick Doyle as though the man were dead. Wasn't Dick back-stage, waiting to come on? The band was already setting up.

"Oh, Dick was a real jokester, too," she said, smiling wistfully. "In between songs, he liked to poke fun at the audience, tease them a little, you know. Rib them."

The stage lights dimmed, but the spotlight on the old woman grew brighter.

"Except this one night, see," said the cowgirl, looking around at all of us, her face becoming grave. "Someone in the audience didn't take kindly to Dick's jokes. A man. He didn't like the way Dick was teasing him about his hair, which was long, you know, in a pony-tail? And so, after the show was over, he waited for Dick outside the bar in his truck, and when Dick came out, this manÉwell, he ran Dick down."

He ran Dick down. I couldn't help a laugh from bubbling up. Pearl shot me a cold look.

The cowgirl went on to explain that Dick had spent two months recovering in the ICU at Orlando Memorial. He had some broken bones, a few busted ribs, a fractured wrist. But worst of all Ðand here she let out a long, sad, sighÑ the doctors discovered that Dick had brain damage.

"Hemorrhage-induced catatonia. That's what the docs called Dick's condition," she said. "The way I think of it, though, is like a trance that Dick's stuck in. The accident knocked Dick into a life-long trance that he never wakes up from. Like one of those people that gets voodoo done on them."

"A zombie!" someone yelled form the audience.

"A zombie. Right," she said. "Except that in real life zombies never wake up from their trancesÉ" she said, putting her cowboy hat back on now. "But. The amazing thing about DickÉis that on certain occasions, under very special circumstances, Dick can wake up from his trance.

"Circumstances, ladies and gentlemen, such as these here tonight. Because if there's one thing that Dick remembers, one thing that can part those clouds sitting on his brain, it's the power of musicÉ"

And here the woman took a deep bow, then began backing away, off stage. A moment later she returned with two men, both of them helping a fourth person on to the stage. This fourth person was a man about six feet tall, my height, average build, with a big trucker's mustache. He was wearing a string tie and cowboy hat. His suit was bright purple, covered with musical notes made of glittering rhinestones. The crew stood Dick in the center of the stage and brushed him off.

I leaned over to Pearl. "That suit's giving meÉbrain damage," I said.

"Sshhh," she said.

The two assistants slung a guitar around Dick's neck and then adjusted the microphone to the right height, so that it came right up to his mouth, which was hanging open slightly. His eyes stared out at nothing.

I glanced at my watch. It was already ten thirty. I felt a pinch of agitation.

Country music started up from the back of the stage: a fiddle and a banjo, a slide guitar with that sad, watery echo.

"Look," said Pearl. "Look at Dick. Watch."

So I looked at him. He was just as I'd left him. Standing with his string tie too tight around his neck, gazing vacantly out into the darkness. But then, slowly, he began to show signs of life. His mustache twitched once, twice. He started blinking rapidly.

I would have laughed out loud, if I hadn't paid twenty dollars to see the show. To me, it all looked like bad acting. He scanned the crowd then, seemingly coming out of his daze. Where am I? Who are all these people? I couldn't help thinking of some of the student actors in Pearl's graduate program.

The crowd began clapping along to the music, cheering Dick on.

"Go Dick go!" they yelled. "Go Dick go!"

Dick's shaking hands slowly felt their way over the guitar, crawling over the body, the neck, eventually finding positions on the strings and frets. His playing was clumsy and lurching at first, but after a moment it smoothed out, became passable.

I glanced at Pearl; she appeared rapt, clapping and chanting, and I felt a sudden disdain for her. I spent the better part of my day assessing value Ðenumerating the attractive qualities of companies, making cases for or against them. I could not for the life of me see a case to be made for Dick Doyle. More than this, though, I couldn't see any benefit in a match between Dick Doyle's performance and my evening.

Pearl nudged me.

"Go Dick." I said.

Dick leaned into the mic, and started singing. His voice was nothing to crow about Ð nasal and whiny, typical country. The song sounded like a stock tear-jerker to me, too; it was about a man who gets struck by lightning, finds himself a different person afterwards, unable to fit his own life. Sniffle, sniffle.

I headed to the back to get a drink. The bartender was an older fellow. He looked reasonable enough.

"Can you believe this?" I said, when he brought me my beer.

He shook his head. It was hard to hear over the clapping.

I pointed a thumb over my shoulder at the stage. "That guy can't act for shit, huh?"

The bartender scowled, then took away my beer.

Late that night, I woke up to the sounds of Pearl crying. I got out of bed and found her dragging a suitcase down the spiral staircase.

"I'm leaving, Max," she said.

"Jesus. Wait a second," I said, trying to gage the situation. "What's wrong?"

"Please don't try to stop me." She was already halfway down the stairs, so that only her shoulders and head were visible from my vantage point.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and checked my watch: two-thirty in the morning. "Pearl. Come up here and talk to me."

She lugged the suitcase down another step. "No. We don't make each happy. I'm not what you want."

"What are you talking about? Of course you're what I want. I want you all the time. More than I've ever wanted anyone. I'm all over you. Constantly."

She stopped to wipe her face. "I mean you don't want me, who I am. You don't have any interest in me as a person."

"I have a great interest in you. I'm marrying you for Christ's sake," I said.

"But you don't have any interest in what I'm doing with my life. In what my goals are."

"Could you please just come up to the second floor, please?"

"You're always making fun of the theater, making fun of my friends. You don't take any of it seriously."

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the theater. I have trouble losing myself in the action of a play. The actors always seem hysterical to me, scurrying around the bright box of the stage, screaming and crying and clawing at each other. Watching a play, I always feel like part of some team of psychiatrists that's been called in to observe a group of out of control mental patients.

"I come to the plays, don't I?" I said. "I hang out with you and your classmates."

"Name three of my friends from play-writing school. In fact, just name three of my friends."

"This is ridiculous. Of course I can--"

"Name two."

"Bonnie and Pat."

"Pat's my sister."

"The girl you went out with the other night. The flat-chested one. Her name starts with a D. Debbie?"

She proceeded to name all my friends from work, some I might have forgotten myself. Everyone in my department.

"What's the title of the play I'm working on right now?" she said.

It was on the tip of my tongue. It had "dirt" or "mud" in the title. Something mud.

She leaned her head against the iron banister and closed her eyes. A ribbon of hair fell across her cheek. The sight reminded me of how she looked asleep in the mornings, just before waking up. Her expression so serious, brow furrowed in concentration as she swam up from that last dream.

"That singer tonight," she said, her eyes still closed. "Dick Doyle. All week I've been telling you about him, about how much I loved his songs. I must have spent twenty minutes just two days ago going on about how deeply his music spoke to me. "

I tried to recall these conversations, but I could hear of them were vague echoes. A few words here and there: Trance. Stage. Dream.

"I brought you tonight because I'd hoped that you might hear in those songs what I hear in them. I thought Dick's performance might affect you. But you didn't pay any attention."

"Do you have his CD? Give his record to me now. I'll listen to it. I promise."

She picked up her suitcase and continued down the steps. "I spoke to Belle, the woman who introduces Dick on stage. And she said they could use someone to help out with the show. They're headed back to Florida in a couple days. I want to go with them."

"Are you out of your mind?" I said, coming to the railing, peering down at the top of her head. "What are you, fucking brainwashed? We're getting married in six months. You're acting like a teenage groupie. You're twenty-five years old."

"If you need me I'll be at Pat's. I left my ring on the night table. I'm sorry, Max." Then she disappeared from view.

"Pearl. If you walk out that door, that's it. I'm locking you out! Pearl!"

The door shut.

I stood on the landing in my boxers, staring down into the vortex of our staircase. My hands trembled on the banister. I was sure Pearl would come back.

"She's just going through something," I told my friends.

Two weeks later I was driving south on 95, towards Kwimper County Florida.

Visit Scott Snyder's website and if you want to read the rest of this story, subscribe to Small Spiral Notebook today! Scott's story will be published in Issue 4, due out September 2006.