Building fences for people often inserts me into the center of marriages, a no-mans-land where escape turns on my abilities as a counselor, salesman and psychologist.

I knew Landon* through business. In his office he was breezy, a tall, dark and handsome man. 

Their home, high on a hill above town, was an enormous stucco edifice with two-story white columns and arches. Its design suggested an overwhelmed architect. Toys, bicycles, plastic swords, rollerblades, the usual detritus of family, lay strewn about. Landon took me behind the barn to where they needed fence. We had only just opened the discussion of fence layout and design when his body language became contracted and defensive. Tracy this, Tracy that. Tracy won’t go for this. It’s kind of her thing, you know. He looked at me helplessly. You’re married, right? I said I was married. It would be best, he said, if he just got her out here.

From behind the barn I heard them coming. Landon had already abdicated. 

“He thinks we should take the fence straight west…”

“Landon, I’m not having the fence going west.”

Tracy was a blond girl with the richest Daddy in a small town. She was heavily made up, and the day’s exertions had been unkind to her hair and lashes. She did not look at me.

I knew what needed done. This wasn’t my first rodeo with this kind of woman. Soften her up with some subtle, off-hand affirmation, take the heat off Landon, get out ahead of negotiations, make my ideas become her ideas, and primarily, extract myself and get off the place. This was a situation that had no winners, no possible good outcome. 

We began. I positioned myself between them and moved us around in slow, revolving circles. Movement helps men think and speak, while the same movement disorients women. Landon slowly edged away from me, leaving me at Tracy’s side. 

She would not engage me directly. She looked around me, through me. She was quick. She was ruthless, twisted and aggressive. Around and around we went. I spoke to her, she spoke to Landon. I would wrestle the talk to fence specifics, foot by foot, x-ing orange paint marks decisively. Tracy did not know or care about fence; she was on a stage. Destroying Landon was the show and I was her audience. Her act had a final, two-pronged, unspoken objective, one for me and one for Landon. Watch what I do to men that I don’t like was for me, and for Landon, it was hit me, Landon, I dare you hit me.

“So, we’ll keep the fence up here, where it’s level,” I said.

“No, we’re filling this in all smooth,” she waved at a low, cratered area of stumps and boulders. I paused. We were here to build fence. I saw no dozers and excavators, no piles of fill. 

“Tracy, I don’t have equipment–” Landon protested, and she sprung her trap.

“Landon, do not talk to me with that voice!” 

Landon, as she knew he would, collapsed. He held his stomach, and in a bizarre, vomiting pantomime doubled soundlessly forward and down from his waist. It was a practiced move, the soundless scream of a man pushed far beyond his breaking point. 

I watched the drama impassively. This was unimpressive, nothing to see here. Is this all you have, Tracy? I gazed casual and unmoved at the afternoon sky. 

“Ok, so from that corner we go to here, right?” 

“Sure, from there to here.” She dabbed at something on her face.

“We actually need to get through there with the tractor,” Landon ventured apologetically.

“You fought me on every single thing about the house, Landon! And it turned out perfect!”

I did not turn, as Tracy wished, to take in the perfect house, which had the perfect, aesthetic grace of a steaming pile of bulldog doo. I could only imagine the relational atrocities committed in its perfect hallways as the costs blew past the first million and Tracy hadn’t yet began designing her bathroom.

Somehow we painted out some fence lines and I fled, hoping never to return. But Landon hired us and there was no way out.

My brother Dan and I moved our equipment in and began augering holes. We had only began when movement over by the perfect house caught our attention. On a little patio Tracy was doing her morning workout. In her Lycra top and leggings she bent, contorted, and stretched. The routine seemed clumsy and oddly unscripted.

We dug some more holes and suddenly were startled by heavy breathing and footsteps. Tracy came running, in her workout leggings. Panting heavily, she ran between us and the edge of the canyon, through the dust and tools, through the rocks and weeds behind the barn. Minutes later, she brushed by us again, pounding past as if we weren’t standing ten feet away. The property was large. There were roads, driveways, lawns. If one was running, why run through the fencing laborers and their tools and dirt piles behind the barn? We had our thoughts.

A month later I was in Landon’s office, alone, just me and him. I knew what he’d left that morning and what he’d return to that night. 

“How’s it going with you and Tracy?”

“We’re good, good, how about you guys?” He flashed his Colgate smile. I said we too were good, and he nodded and smiled. We both knew marriage, right? 

A year or two went by. And then, in the local newspaper, this headline: “School board member resigns after attempted strangulation charge.” 

Deputy Wilson had responded to a 911 call at the Nuxoll residence where he met Nuxoll in his driveway and arrested him. Landon was detained without incidence. Landon told the deputy he had slapped Tracy’s rear and she then hit him in the face. He did put his hands on her neck. Tracy told Wilson Landon had grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground until she began to lose consciousness and thought she would die. Deputy Wilson took pictures of the woman’s neck and noted there were no marks.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my face. I looked at Amy. We were good, good. We know how marriage goes.

A few more years went by. I was scrolling through real estate when the white pillars and garish fountain rolled up onto the screen. Tracy’s perfect house. I clicked through the pictures of the house. The double curved staircases alone would eat up half my yearly income. Six bathrooms, a salt water pool. The 2.5 million they were asking couldn’t have gotten Tracy very far in this home. 

The hardest decision for the new owner, the listing gushed breathlessly, will be from where to enjoy the magnificent sunsets. 

A novel concept for the property, I thought to myself. What was ever enjoyed in this place?

Tracy haunts my memories. What did she want from Landon? What had he done to elicit her contempt? Were they ever happy and how did it all go so wrong? 

*all names have been changed