The old man called me a fruit for growing my hair long—even though I reluctantly kept it parted on the side—and he hated me for coming home drunk or stoned and for letting my schoolwork shit the bed. But I don’t think the old man seriously considered Caveech’s offer to pull some strings and get me a free ride to boarding school until the maple tree incident.

It was almost two in the morning when Mousy, DeCenz, and I drove past the great, scarred tree that two city employees were preparing to butcher. Mousy pulled the car over and looked back at them. “That’s a crock of shit if ever I saw one,” he said.

I wasn’t surprised. The maple tree had gained notoriety when one of the mayor’s right-hand men had been discovered sleeping and bleeding against it in a wrinkled Caddy at five o’clock on New Year’s morning. In the week since, the tree had been accused of everything except failing to submit to a breathalizer test. The right-hand man got off scot-free, and the hundred-year-old maple was sentenced to be amputated from the earth while the city slept.

Mousy squeezed the steering wheel. “Check out that shit.”

DeCenz and I watched out the back window through a cloud of exhaust.

“Think about it,” Mousy said. “That makes about as much sense as knocking down the Golden Gate Bridge just to keep loonies from jumping off it.”

“Yeah,” DeCenz said, “but that’s a bad corner to have a tree.”

“A bad corner to have a tree? Come off it, DeCenz, it’s a bad corner to have a corner. The tree ain’t in the road. If anything, they could pull the road over on the other side.”

“They’d have to knock down the building,” I said, pointing out the warehouse across the street.

“So?”

“Guess they don’t own it,” I said.

“But they own the tree?”

“Guess so.”

“Boy, whoever programmed you guys sure knew what he was doing.”

“Just goes to show you,” DeCenz said, “you can’t fight city hall.”

“Bullshit,” Mousy said, “that’s the problem with this place, the people are pussies. They’ll eat any shit the city feeds them. You’re wrong, DeCenz, we’re the only ones who can fight them … because we’re the only ones who care.”

When the old man picked me up at the pig station the next morning, he showed a lot of restraint. He did call me “jailbird” a couple times on the way home and suggested I thank Caveech that no charges were pressed, but he kept his fists clamped to the steering wheel. He asked what we’d intended by linking arms and wrapping ourselves around a tree.

“We were trying to stop them from chopping it down.”