“See?” purred the gardener, brushing his palms on patched denim and smiling, his own face a faunlike study of sweet satisfaction. “Vickie’s bound to love it. Let me get a photo here. Gorgeous.”

Krikor stripped dirt from his fingernail with a fang and blew crumbles from lips shaved wintergreen. “How old are you, Mr. Orozco?”

“Come on, man, call me Mateo.”

“Nah, I can’t do that.”

The gardener’s grin widened then and the white goatee hanging off his chin fanned as if in fraternal greeting. “Yeah, I figured. It’s how come I like you.”

A filthy looking woman followed her leashless dog past Krikor’s house and spat on the hellstrip. They watched her go from the shelter of the shaded patio.

“Least it wasn’t your lawn,” remarked the gardener.

“I guess.”

The gardener mussed his wild curls. “Well, so what would you say?”

“Say about what?”

“How old I am.”

“Oh, right, um...” Krikor appraised the man breathing before him: a squat fellow, strong too and set, observant through playful eyes which twinkled inside rutted folds of skin and a cooked complexion tawnied by time outdoors. He first spotted the gardener two years ago scrutinizing a neighbor’s climbing rose. Such careful slowness. Krikor soon became fascinated by his there-and-gone-again appearances, his heedful custody, and quietly hoped to someday cultivate the gardener’s acquaintance.

“Sixty-two?”

The gardener had bent to hoist the half empty bag of potting soil and from this stooped position he beamed up at Krikor, stretching that elfin smile even wider.

“Bang on, kid. And I’d peg you right at thirty-four.”

Krikor met the gardener’s Cheshire smile with a worthy rendition.

“Yup, bang on.”

“I’ve always been good with the ages.”

Sack of soil square on his shoulder, the gardener rose from the red saltillo tile which sparkled beneath the sweltering noonday sky like a bloodstained body of water.

“I’d also go on to venture that thirty-five isn’t far off, Krikor, am I right?”

“Next week, actually.”

“What’d I say? I’ve always been good with the ages. Thirty-five. Man! Thirty-five.”

The gardener shook his shaggy head and looked at Krikor for a searching moment, those impish eyes scurrying left to right to left to right to left. A ladybug had lit upon the gardener’s lapel and was idling now atop that flannel maze nearly disguised.

The younger man followed the elder to his battered pickup and the bed was a mishmash of blades and rakes and spades. Pushing the rusty gate, the gardener stretched his bandied legs.

“What’s next for us, Krikor?”

Cheap death, that’s what, but instead Krikor answered:

“Californian lilac under the big living room window.”

“Native, man, nice.”

“Let’s definitely plant three there, Mr. Orozco, not two.”

“Sure thing. It’ll be tight but we can make it happen. What else?”

“Jerusalem sage in front of—”

“Gah, puta, my ankles.”

“Are you OK, Mr. Orozco, do—”

“Jerusalem sage in front of the patio wall, I’m alright, kid. Just been through it, that’s all. Anything else I’m forgetting?”

“Yeah, the, those fluffy q-tip wheat stalk thingies—”

“Pampas grass.”

“Pampas grass. And of course—”

The gardener’s electric eyebrows shot up to almost graze his stalwart hairline, healthier and lower than Krikor’s receding rim, that embarrassed army.

“The pomegranate!”

“Yup, in the backyard.”

“We’ll do it for your birthday, kid. Do it for thirty-fuckin-five.”

The happy gardener slapped Krikor’s bicep and he felt the seasoned bite of decades, the child of sweat and sinew.

“What a trip.”

The irksome hock and blast of spit soared down the block on a gliding southern gale while Krikor presented the gardener with a wad of cash, the third such of their relationship. He waved as the blackish Ford chugged along the road, the gardener snapping his salute from the cranked window. The engine’s rev melted from cough to whisper to silence, a blanket buzz in which Krikor dallied for a spell. Behind him, their tall olive tree danced in its roots, growing, as Krikor’s arm stung where the gardener had struck. Later he walked barefoot back toward the house, past the person of the kumquat tree, and waited for Vickie to come home.

“Hey! You’re catching on, huh, kid? I love that.” And the gardener suspected Krikor felt a similar joy, for he noted a permitted pride in the sudden smoothness of the boy’s otherwise wrinkled forehead. “You wouldn’t hang a painting backwards or, I don’t know, situate a statue toward a wall like it was punished, would you?”

“Nope.”

“Same thing here, man.”

Krikor’s backyard was mostly grass, with a standalone garage on one side and a semicircle of decomposed granite on the other, ideal for a firepit. The gardener imagined people gathering around that divine warmth, finding fellowship in its flame. He looked down at his nodular knuckles like hooves slopped with loam and longed for bygone heat.

“Mind if I smoke a J?”

“Oh, um...” Krikor spread his arms like a black jack dealer. “Why not?”

“Appreciate you.”

The gardener torched his joint and surveyed Krikor as he wheeled the pomegranate to discover its ruddy aspect, the susurrus of spinning foliage pleasing his pricked ears. Visible to the gardener in those immature branches was an expression of pain, sorrow which with passage might blossom into beauty.

Fertile anguish.

Krikor stationed the tree and mopped his brow before looking to the old man for approval. In only a matter of days the gardener’s mane had by some fashion lengthened to tickle the base of his neck while Krikor was convinced that his own sad follicles had further retreated.

“Handsome, Krikor, very handsome. And speaking of, I think you’d look handsome, very handsome, with one of these.” The gardener tugged at his snowy goatee. “Or even a full thing. You Armenians can sprout terrific beards. Your cheeks are green like a field due to flower!”

The gardener extended to Krikor his smoldering blunt.

“Wanna hit this?”

Krikor attempted to pinpoint when last he’d gotten bombed. College?

“Eh, screw it.”

“Atta boy, man! Doin it for thirty-five, thirty-fuckin-five.”

After Krikor exhaled a snaking stream, the gardener snapped up his sharp chin. “Let’s put this baby to bed.”

Krikor tilted the pomegranate as instructed, exposing the bundle and snarl beneath, feeling himself tilt with the tree, while the gardener sawed its base as if cutting birthday cake.

“Giving the root ball a little bit of slack.”

“Yes, Krikor. Good. A little bit of slack is good for everybody.”

Tiny crimson swells festooned the tree, pulsating beads of patience.

“Wow, Mr. Orozco, this is pretty strong shit.”

“You better believe it.”

Someone in the neighborhood somewhere was listening to a theremin.

“When we got married,” began Krikor, the words bumping into each other like drunks leaving a saloon, “the day of our wedding.”

“Yeah?”

“Vickie, she hurled a fat pomegranate at a wall and it broke to pieces. Seeds,” Krikor flicked his wrist and goggled for a second at its freaky doubling. “Seeds just spilled everywhere.”

The gardener shifted his gaze to Krikor and did not shield his sundrenched eyes. A sly smirk dimpled the area beside his bony nose.

“More seeds, more kids.” Krikor shrugged. “Armenia forever.”

“Old magic.”

“If you want to call it that.”

“What else would you call it?”

“I don’t see any kids, Mr. Orozco. And I’ll bet Armenia’s off the map real soon.”

The gardener sheathed his saw and tousled free more root, more foundation. He once again transferred his steady gaze to Krikor, unblinking despite the thrashing rays, considering. Krikor sensed in their grip a cold kind of calculation, some important ruminations, but just behind this reckoning there bubbled still the gardener’s characteristic jollity, that carefree attitude which captivated Krikor in the very first place.

“Listen, before we put this guy down, go ahead and spit in there.”

“What?”

“Like that lady last Wednesday, remember? Just give it a juicy one, I know you got mad cottonmouth right now.”

“In the hole?”

“In the hole.”

“O... K?”

Krikor pooled thick saliva and spat in the hollow.

“Great, great. And you know what I like to, this is crazy, but I put a sliver of my hair when I plant at home.”

“Hair.”

“Yeah, a pinch, just a pluck. Signs to the spirits that you’re serious. Do it.”

Krikor ripped several strands of his thinning hair. That tearing sensation rebounded all over his skull like a wave, like a warm wave. He looked down into the cavity of the planet as his offering seesawed into its eternal embrace. The words cheap death came to Krikor again, surfacing unbidden and despised. Rich life, countered the gardener, and Krikor could not say for sure if he had indeed heard the parry or merely conjured it but before he could contemplate onward, the gardener had begun to plant the pomegranate and Krikor followed suit.

Kneebound he stirred the fecund soil, mixed it, imbibed its lusty aroma as it would soon imbibe water, pushed his elbows deep and was cooled by its grainy insulation. Together he and the gardener filled the depression, an emptiness vacated. Krikor tamped the base of his new tree, its skinny trunk thrusting heavenward as might the most grateful devotee at worship.

“Man!” exclaimed the gardener with a worn out whoop. “It’s amazing how much dirt comes out of a hole. What a trip. Do me a favor, kid, and fetch my clippers, would you?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Orozco.”

Krikor stood, and at full height, the pomegranate reached his chest, his heart. He adored Vickie but all else less so and this informal antipathy had been insidiously smothering his spirit, fettering a thing that needs to fly. Maybe it was the weed, maybe it was the work, but Krikor Avakian in his backyard, there on his thirty-fifth birthday, felt really fine.

He walked to the gardener’s bag and opened it.

Panpipes bulging below the shears.

“Mr. Orozco, you play?”

“Oh, yeah, man, do you?”

“Fool around with the duduk, it’s the Armenian flute basically—”

“I know what a duduk is, kid, I've been around, I’m an ancient citizen. Go on, get yours. Let’s jam.”

Krikor spun in a flash and took the stone steps in a single bound. Inside that calm space, the gardener puffed finally his joint and snuffed it between calloused fingers. His lips moved in murmurs, prayers to himself and through himself. He charged the land with quick essence, infused and galvanized his sorcery that was naught to him but nature. Boundless had been the gardener’s fancy, his inquisitive desire to mingle and manipulate, to promote this way or that. Were people so different from plants? Each wished to be proud, to stand tall, to expand in peace. Yet illimitable as his joie de vivre was, fatigue weighted the gardener’s life, his bones, and as any rose droops its head to die, so too must he.

Krikor reemerged with the duduk in his paw, a lengthy reed stoppered by a mouthpiece in the shape of a duckbill.

“Apricot wood,” declared the gardener.

“Yes. Apricots and pomegranates are big deal Armenian fruits.”

“Don’t forget grapes.” The gardener smiled at Krikor, a smile that could be misconstrued by the ignorant as wicked.

“Play something.”

And so Krikor played, his hot breath a loop dusted by pollen and powder and with his pipes the gardener duetted instinctive and ecstatic, low tones and high circling a frolic of visceral melody. Krikor saw in his mind’s swirling theatre the pomegranate tree spurting five, ten, a hundred, one thousand years, discerned its scarlet seeds engorging and splitting and generating again, detected the mirror of this operation within, Krikor’s knotted stones cracking and bleeding and flooding and sowing. The apricot bark in his hands vibrated alive and unafraid, a duduk from his forebears and for his descendants, and so playing Krikor reaped his past and so playing reveled his present and so playing ripened his future.

“What do you mean by that, Dede?”

Once upon a time, Krikor deemed “Papa” the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, but then came “Papik,” and now this, “Dede.” Such unimagined wonders had accreted over fifty years.

“Well, you have a face, right?”

“Yes.”

"And so do I, a hairy one!”

Krikor scratched his white beard, the thistly rasp roping a giggle out of his great-granddaughter.

“Plants have faces too, my dear. Go on and find this one’s if you can.”

“I will, Dede, I can do this!”

As she scrutinized the vegetation, Krikor let his eyes wander about the backyard and beyond. What was once a modest plain of grass had evolved into a microecosystem. Vickie, his Vickie, she was most at ease here in the Eden of their making, an idyll wherein they had raised a family, raised each other. Vickie, may the soil lay light.

“Dede, is this a face?”

Krikor floated home to her voice.

“You got it, Vee! Bang on. Kinda looks like me, huh?”

“Dede!”

“Come on, let’s place it together. You know I brought this vine back from Armenia? Snuck it in with my books. Do you remember how to say grape in Armenian, honey?”

“Khaghogh.”

“Perfect! Khaghogh.” And that gravelly pronunciation sailed him half a century to that lady and her leashless dog.

And to the gardener.

“Hey, Vee,” he said. “Let’s do something silly.”

“What, Dede?”

“Spit on the ground there.”

Without compunction she spat, a child’s liberty.

“Excellent! Now, I’m gonna snip just the teensiest bit of your hair, OK? Do you remember how to say hair in Armenian?”

“Maz,” she replied. “Why hair, Dede?”

“Old magic.”

“I love magic!”

“So do I.” He winked at her as he clipped a raven lock. The shears belonged to the gardener who’d left them by accident, Krikor assumed, the day they planted the pomegranate. He never did see Mr. Orozco again, no call backs, no answers to texts. Nothing. But people were like plants, weren’t they? Some took root and some didn’t, even those that you wished truly would.

All these long but short years legible in the thick trunk of that pomegranate tree, five decades enameled by miracles. Krikor figured he’d never get to taste a single purple grape off this eager vine but at least Vee would, and that was good.

His children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren said their farewells, offered a few more happy birthdays, and pelted Krikor with kisses. He saw them to their cars and then pottered outside again to fart around for a while. Amidst the gentle buzzing of bees, Krikor heard the latch of his redwood gate click open and shut.

“Forget something?” he called out.

“Yeah, my clippers!”

Krikor pivoted poorly and a gust of wind knocked him on his ass. Fallen leaves surfed down the driveway to precede the gardener’s scraping entrance.

“Eighty-five, huh? Eighty-fuckin-five.”

Krikor tried to stand, but shock had sapped his strength.

“Told you I was good with the ages, didn’t I?” The gardener appeared on the surface hardly altered but he was dragging his left leg and wielding a staff of hefty cedar for support. “Know what, kid, I gotta say, you don’t look a day over sixty-two.”

The gardener eased himself down into a cushioned chair.

“What a trip.”

Krikor rolled off his butt and dewy grass clung to the seat of his pants.

“Sorry about the missus,” the gardener offered.

“Mr— Mr. Orozco?”

The gardener laughed and his teeth shone.

“Man, come on, call me Mateo.”

“I don’t... I don’t think I can do that.”

The gardener’s hair had grown long like a bridal veil, but then again, so had Krikor’s.

“Said you could kill a beard, kid. It’s great.”

"Am I dead?”

The gardener smiled, and while much of him had withered, that had not. It was the same roguish grin.

“Far from it. Oh, listen, keep the clippers, by the way, I’m thinking I won’t need them for much longer. You keep em, use em.”

Krikor’s body had moved of its own volition to a chair opposite the gardener.

“You’ve done real good here, Krikor, real good.”

“Where— how come you never came back?”

“Ah, I’ve been going around, man, but my going days are done, feel me?”

“Not really.”

The gardener nodded and chuckled. He eyed Krikor up and down before lifting himself with the aid of his walking stick.

“That pom’s thriving, man.”

Krikor swallowed and the lump in his throat unfurled.

“We planted it well.”

“Planting’s easy, kid, it’s upkeep that makes or breaks.”

Perched there under the verdant shade of the tree, Krikor traced its hearty branches and thanked the pomegranate for its many gifts. He found the plant’s gratified face, shy behind bough and fruit, yet so familiar.

Krikor felt the air, his perennial companion, change course.

“Still have your duduk?”

Krikor patted his jacket.

“I was just about to play it.”

“Good, that’s good. Think you sho— gah, puta!”

“Mr. Orozco, please, let’s go sit back down, I can bring us a dr—”

“Kid, if I sit down I’m apt to stay down. I’m just tired, that’s all, just been through it. Let me lean against this bark and— man, this fucker’s kickin! I can feel it moving in my spine. Boy.”

Tears welled in the gardener’s eyes like rain on lilies.

“Hey, pluck one of them. Let me taste it.”

Krikor reached out a tough hand and twisted the plump pomegranate into his wizened palm. A practiced crack laid bare a gallery of hidden red jewels. The gardener extracted these baubles and split the load with Krikor, speaking over the glistening bounty in hushed blessings.

They chewed the immortal seeds and their tongues glowed.

“OK, Krikor, play your duduk a little and I’ll just rest right here.”

Krikor’s heart beat his chest hard like a conductor demanding attention. He wet his lips and again tasted the tart pomegranate, the harvest of his every yesterday. Krikor closed his eyes and brought up the instrument and blew a weeping song, for Vickie, for Mr. Orozco, and for himself. He pictured Vee, little Vickie, and clung fiercely to their precious handful of minutes. Krikor adored Vee’s way of speaking, how she would call her funny Dede a goddener instead of a gardener like some highborn English, those Rs still developing. And this entity here reposing on the tree, he was a goddener too, wasn’t he, a goddener goddening Krikor. Coaxing from the soil of cheap death a sapling of rich life.

Mourning doves on telephone wires overhead gossiped about the great exchange and bore witness to its happening.

The gardener watched Krikor for as long as he could, the golden music helping him to recall friends and lovers, meadows traipsed upon, forests gamboled in, brooks for bathing, a glorious planet of which he was and to which he now returned. The bark of the pomegranate yielded with careful slowness and he knew there was no need to panic. His time had come, as would in an eon come Krikor’s, that new natural. A sigh of thanks inside the comfortable cortex, attendant limbs bedding well the ancient citizen. Tremble of duduk sang in sync with tremble of tree and this euphony pleased his pricked ears, pleased them tremendously, until there was nothing left anymore for the gardener to hear.