By the end of July Charlie Sloan could always see how the grass was beginning to die. It was like it was doing its best not to show it but it was still only a matter of time before it turned brown. The green was slowly fading and whenever he ran across a patch with the Cub he could feel how it wasn’t as thick this time as it had been the last time he mowed. The grass was only the first of the omens to tell him summer was on the way out; he could see how the days were getting shorter and how in the morning the temperature had turned halfway bearable. In a few more weeks and some more lawns mowed fall would come tiptoeing in for sure.
He was finishing up the Ellis’ front yard. He had five more minutes of mowing and then he’d be through with only the trimming left, which in a yard this size without much in the way of shrubbery and fences didn’t take that long, and then he’d be free to go on to his second yard of the day, the Tatum’s house, which would take him two hours to finish. He tried to decide if he wanted to go ahead and tackle that yard or drive over to the Sonic and get something to eat first. If he did that he’d have to either leave the riding mower behind here in the Ellis’ driveway or take it home and drop it there, because he couldn’t pull in to one of those Sonic stalls hauling a trailer because it would stick out in the lane and keep other cars from being able to get by. And by the time he got home and unhitched the trailer, drove to Sonic and ate and then drove back and hitched up the trailer again to go to the Tatum’s he would have been almost through there if he’d simply driven there first and started mowing. That way he could have avoided all the backtracking he’d had to do just to get a hamburger and a milkshake into his stomach. Somehow, either way, it didn’t seem worth the trouble debating it in his head. It was like a lot of thinking he found himself engaging in these days. It was a waste of time.
Fred Ellis had passed away three years ago. He’d been out in the driveway spraying the soap off his Tacoma and trying to dry it off before the sun evaporated it and left spots, and when he finished he went back inside the house and opened a can of Miller Lite and sat down in the den. It was a Saturday afternoon and the football season was getting started and Fred thought he’d see who was playing who. He didn’t really care. It was still summer and the games weren’t that important yet, but it was football and old Fred certainly did like football. At the time he didn’t know he was going to his grave watching a game that didn’t matter to him, but that was it for Fred. Charlie had been cutting the Ellis yard since.
He looked at his watch and saw it was fifteen minutes until noon. Was he all that hungry? It seemed to him he was becoming something of a sissy in his old age of 66. He remembered how there were lots of times back when he was still working when he could go all day not eating if he had to. If he was busy building a display at Food City it was no big deal if he skipped lunch and stayed at it until it was finished. Heck, he’d just saved the money he would have spent eating somewhere and gone home thirty minutes early and ate leftovers. It was no big deal. But now, since he retired, he’d gotten to where he believed he might keel over if he didn’t eat by a certain time. He was growing soft lately, that’s what it was. He wasn’t tough like he used to be. He needed to suck it up.
When he got to the Tatum’s a dog sat watching him from a corner house. He didn’t know what was so interesting about him mowing a lawn that the dog would keep sitting there in what looked like rapt attention taking it all in. He studied it until he made a right turn on the Cub and kept going in a square until the front yard was done. He mowed the side yard and the front and the dog still watched him. When he finished he backed the Cub up the ramp into the trailer and shut the engine off. For a moment he looked up at the blue sky to see if there might be a cloud anywhere around. There wasn’t. It was clear as a bell and not even that hot for an early August afternoon. That was when he thought again about how the summer was coming to an end. It seemed the seasons passed faster these days. They didn’t wait for anybody. If you weren’t careful, they’d slip by without you noticing.
It was August those years back when Marsha first told him she was pregnant. They’d been married less than a year then, and Panama City was the first vacation they had taken together. He remembered how she liked to sleep on the beach in her lawn chair while he went deep sea fishing. He’d asked her to go with him but she told him no. I always get sick on boats, she said. I don’t want to throw up all over everybody’s tackle boxes. That would be no fun at all, so I’ll stay here on dry land. And when I came back I would walk down to the beach to find her. I remember her smiling at me that day and saying guess what? I didn’t have to go out on a boat at all. I just napped here in the sun and when I woke up I was sick to my stomach. I had to hurry down the beach and throw up behind a big pile of driftwood so nobody would see me. I was pretty sick, and the funny thing was I’ve hardly had a thing to eat all day. Maybe one boiled egg from the market. That was it. I wonder if it was rotten or something? Maybe that’s why I got sick. But it tasted all right at the time, so who knows?
It wasn’t until we got back home that she went to the doctor because she kept throwing up about everything she put in her mouth. She came home and said you’ll never guess, but the reason I’m sick all the time is I’m pregnant. At first I didn’t know what to do or say because I wasn’t anything but a kid back then too, and the thought of being a dad hadn’t occurred to me yet. Fatherhood was one of those things that happened to other people, guys who were older than me who had good jobs and owned houses and were totally prepared for such things, and in my mind I was too young for that sort of thing to be happening. I was accustomed to going out fishing with my friends and playing in a fast-pitch softball league two nights a week for Food City and working my shifts at the store and grabbing up overtime every chance I got. I went to college four years courtesy of my mom and dad and pretty much had a nice pattern after that of working and playing softball and going out with girls and getting good and wild a couple of times a week. I thought that sort of life would go on forever.
Food City is where I met Marsha. She was a cashier going to school at UT-Martin and we started talking and going to football and basketball games together, since Martin was my alma mater and I was used to the place already. That went on for about a year and a half until we decided to get married. It was all such of a rush that I don’t even remember proposing. It was like it just happened, like the two of us decided there wasn’t much of a chance we were ever going to meet anybody else we’d get along with the way we did with each other then so why wait around and waste time when the obvious answer was right there in front of us? I guess there was something in the back of my head that was telling me I needed to grow up sometime and not be a wild man forever, so I suppose having a little money in the bank and a new truck to drive to work every day coupled with the fact I was making pretty good money at Food City and was maybe going to be promoted to a head clerk position and soon be making more, then I guess I turned a corner and decided it was time to try something new like adulthood. I didn’t think too much about the lasting implications of getting married and settling into a quiet predictable life; to tell the truth, I guess I didn’t think too much about anything down that line. I just went ahead full-speed and did it the same way I always did things. No thought or hesitation at all. It was simply the next thing to get done on my list.
He’d bitten the bullet and bought a new weed eater this year. This was his third year of cutting yards for outside money and he’d gotten tired of having to restring worn-out trimmers every other time he used them. He wondered how much time he’d wasted attempting to get his trimmers in working condition. Now, all he had to do was pick one up and make sure it had gas and then pull the rope and get to it. He figured he’s saving at least an hour every day, so it was worth it buying a new one.
He gets the mowing done and is about to start trimming when he looks up and sees the dog across the street still sitting there watching him. He wonders if maybe the dog is enclosed in one of those electric fences and can’t go past where he is and he’s there because he has no other option.
Kind of a stupid dog, Charlie thinks. If I was him I’d go find someplace else where there’s shade and curl up and take a nap. Sure as hell would beat sitting out in the sun watching my every move. I don’t see how me cutting a yard could be that fascinating to watch.
I was twenty-four then, and I decided it was high time I started acting like a real adult, a grown man, if you want to call it such, and so I decided if I was going to be a daddy then the best thing I could do was work hard at the store and advance up the ladder—as if there was ever any ladder to climb, only my weekly routine of following the schedule and adjusting for sales and holidays and doing not only just enough but more on the job where I’d be considered a better choice for a head clerk job than anybody else—and that was pretty much it. That was all there was to worry about back then. Come to work rain or shine and don’t call out sick and do my job without screwing up so somebody sees it and takes notice. I told myself to do that and I’d go far.
He is about finished with the trimming when he looks back across the street at the dog and sees it is not a dog sitting there at all; it is a coyote, sure as shit and bigger than hell. He’s not afraid of it. Charlie knows this coyote is not about to solitarily choose to attack him right out here in the middle of suburbia on an August afternoon, so he doesn’t get jittery or nervous about it sitting there. It’s more like Charlie wonders what a lone coyote is doing out here, why it’s out by itself in the light of day taking everything in like maybe it’s important and there’s something about the neighborhood and Charlie and his Cub Cadet that it needs to observe. But it’s no big deal to Charlie. He’s seen plenty of coyotes in the neighborhood before. The son of a bitches are everywhere. So what’s one more? But the thing is this coyote sure seems out of place and off what should be the beaten path. Charlie wonders why it’s doing this. Something about it doesn’t seem right to him.
Charlie pulls out of the neighborhood still watching the coyote sitting in his place like he is not allowed to go anywhere else. The idea of eating lunch is gone from his mind now. He knows if he was to stop and eat lunch now it would take a squadron of paratroopers to pull him out of the house and inspire him to cut another yard today. He has two more places to go before he is finished with his mowing for the week, and it is in his head to go ahead and get them over with one after another with no stopping. It’s the way he’s always been. He knows there is no other course for him but to proceed to what is next on the agenda.
This is the way he’s always been about everything. When he was younger and went out with the guys for an evening of fun he could drink and drink the entire evening as long as he didn’t stop and eat something, because once he turned his attention to feeding his face the passion for alcohol would be gone and wouldn’t come back. He couldn’t explain it. It was like his life was built into segments like ladder steps and he could only take each one a step at a time, and once he had taken one step and gone on to another there was no going back to the step he had left or skip ahead to the next one because that was just not the way it worked with him.
There were a few clouds beginning to gather, so that helped in making him forget about lunch and to go on to the Mahaffey’s and spend an hour and a half there, and when that gets done go over one street to the Nichols’ and mow like crazy to finish up his schedule, then he could drive to the house with the satisfaction he was through for the day and the week and there would be nothing to worry about until next Monday rolled around. He really doesn’t have to worry about it anyway. He is retired and mowing yards is only something to do to stay occupied and bring in a little spending money.
Still.
At the Mahaffey’s Debbie’s van is there and he thinks about how maybe her kids are gone off someplace and she is home early from her job and all alone in the house because Robert can’t ever get off early at the Drivers Registration office. There was always a line with people waiting to get their licenses renewed or some form of business like that, and the office would close and there would still be people in line and if they’d been there long enough they’d have to be taken care of before Robert or any of the other clerks could leave. Charlie thinks of Debbie inside the house and knows if this is the case he can count on her coming out to talk to him at some point during his mowing, because she always does. He believes Debbie has a crush on him. She always made a special trip to the door to wave at him, to come out on the patio and bid him to stop the mower and talk to her for a few minutes. At first he didn’t much care for the idea, he wanted to finish his job and collect the money and get on to the next place, but there is something about Debbie Mahaffey that is starting to grow on him. She’s at least fifteen years younger than him and he hasn’t done anything stupid yet, but there is something giving him ideas and trying to talk him into making something happen. He tells himself no, but he isn’t dead yet, he is just a widower, that was all, and something inside him is giving him ideas.
He marks it down to foolishness and an inability to ever grow up and then sets about backing the Cadet down from the trailer. What is it, he thinks? Am I attempting to be Peter Pan? What, I had such a good time at college and work drinking with the guys and talking and looking at girls and it got me so worked up I forgot how to stop? I’m thinking that kind of stuff goes on forever? Ridiculous. I’ve been a decent adult because of a lot of hard work and making myself do the things I needed to do and supposed to do and telling myself I couldn’t do those things I’d done before no matter how much they rattled around in my head. All that’s in the past. I’ve told myself this for years, all the time Marsha was alive. This is the present and you’ll do well to remember it, otherwise a whole lot of bad crap is subject to come your way.
He remembers when Marsha lost the baby and he went in to see her and tell her it was okay and they would try again someday, but he knew even then they would never have a child because Marsha wasn’t capable of it, Marsha was always sickly, and he remembers how he had to keep reminding himself how he should be sad that Marsha had miscarried and not allow that small sense of relief to take hold in his mind, that voice that told him he should be glad he wasn’t going to be a daddy after all, how if that had happened he would have been forced to learn to walk a different path than the one he was accustomed to and didn’t truly want it to change.
He is out in the Mahaffey’s backyard for maybe five minutes when he sees the patio door open and Debbie come outside in one of her sleeveless tops and shorts that are anything but loose. He keeps cutting and looking straight ahead in an effort to make her think he doesn’t see her.
“Hi, Charlie!” she shouts. He hears her over the Cub’s engine. The engine never has been loud enough to drown anything out.
“You’d better stop acting like you’re deaf,” she says. “Turn that mower off and come and help me a minute.”
Charlie wants to keep cutting but Debbie stands at the edge of the patio and keeps waving at him. He can’t ignore her.
“I need you to help me move something,” she says. “It won’t take but a minute.”
They walk through the open door of the garage and into the laundry room by the kitchen. He follows her down a short hallway that leads to the dining room and living room. He’s seen nothing to move yet, and he wonders if he should simply turn around and go back outside just to avoid trouble. Now he doesn’t even want to finish the yard. He can always choose to come back another time when Debbie is still at work. He can readjust his schedule. But that would mess up today.
“I need help turning this mattress,” she tells him. It’s a big bed in the bedroom at the end of the house. It’s her bedroom she shares with Robert. Charlie knows that much. He’s been in the Mahaffey’s house one time before when Debbie had asked for help. He knew better than to hang around that time too. He’d walked away, just as he intends to do now.
He quickly goes over to the bed and picks the mattress up by himself and flips it over. He gives Debbie no time to help or get near him. When he’s finished he walks out of the bedroom and heads back through the house to finish the yard. All the time he feels her behind him but he never looks back and he never stops to allow her to catch up.
“I’ve got to hurry,” he tells her. “It looks like it’s going to rain.”
“It’s not supposed to,” Debbie says. She wants him to turn around and fool around but he keeps going. There was a time, he thinks, when he would have stopped, when he would have jumped right into the pit and roasted himself without a thought. But that’s all over now.
“I hate leaving anything half-done,” he tells her.
Then, like he’s been to another country, he finds himself sitting in the back corner of the yard with the mower running. There’s a dog from next door barking at him through a chain-link fence. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here like this, sitting and staring off aimlessly thinking about something that maybe hasn’t happened. He wonders if there is something wrong with him. He could swear he saw Debbie Mahaffey a few minutes ago. Maybe he didn’t, but he is still certain he was fixing to do something he was going to regret. But maybe Debbie hadn’t come outside at all. Maybe Debbie wasn’t even home.
“Jesus, man, are you all right?” he asks himself. The dog keeps barking. The dog sees him every two weeks, but always barks at him anyway. “Shut the hell up,” he says. The dog is one of those yappy furry half-pint dogs where you can’t see their eyes. He doesn’t like dogs like this. He would rather have a hound.
The best dog he’d ever had was a half-breed beagle somebody had given his dad. The dog had been mistreated somewhere and didn’t trust anybody. If you got too close he would bite. But I talked to him and fed him and he came to like me. I could pet him all I wanted and he didn’t mind. Not so with other people. But he was my dog for sure. No doubt about it.
Skipper used to tag along wherever I rode my bike, to the store to buy baseball cards, to the neighborhood baseball games my friends and I held in the afternoons, where he’d go off under a tree and lay in the shade and nobody dared come near, and in the mornings when I got up for my paper route he’d come along with me. He and I would deliver papers before the sun came up. We’d be the only ones around. It was like the world was ours while everyone else slept. At night Skipper slept in my room, though my mother didn’t like it. She said he shed hair everywhere he went and how hard it was to clean my room. When we went on vacation that summer, my mom and dad and my sister and little brother, we had to lock Skipper in the backyard where there was a tall fence he couldn’t get out of and a doghouse he didn’t like to sleep in. A neighbor came by two times a day to feed him and give him water. We warned him to be careful and not get bitten. When we came home after a week in Panama City Skipper was so glad to see me he ran out after I opened the gate and in his excitement galloped out in the road and got hit by a truck delivering furniture. It was a big truck and Skipper never had a chance.
“I don’t think I’ve shed a tear one time since,” I tell myself. I don’t know if I’m talking out loud or to myself or both.
I finish blowing off the driveway and then I’m finished. One more yard to go and I’m not the least bit hungry anymore. The Helton’s yard is the largest of all my lawns, but it’s also the one that pays the most. I get a hundred dollars for it, while for everybody else it’s seventy or eighty. I’ll bet if I had half a notion I could tell them I’ve had to go up on my fees and they’d pay me whatever I asked, but I’ve been cutting it for three years now and they never ask me to do anything extra, never make a peep about anything and always have the money waiting for me in an envelope on the back porch, so it’s like the best of all the jobs for me. I don’t want to do anything to screw it up.
When I pull into the drive a fat raindrop lands on the windshield and the sky starts getting dark. I step out of the truck and take a look at the clouds and wonder should I start mowing or tuck it in for the day. That’s when I remember Monica Helton had left me a message asking me to please have the yard cut by Saturday, since they were having a birthday party for their son and they wanted to put up a volleyball net and a croquet set and have a cookout in the backyard. This was Friday, and if I stopped now for the rain there was no guarantee it would stop by the next morning for me to do it then, the day of the party. I couldn’t do anything about it raining out the festivities that day, but I could at least get my end of it done. If the rain came after that, it wouldn’t be my fault. And I’d be through with my list.
I let the gate down on the trailer and back the mower out.
“You will never finish,” a voice tells me. “No matter how you try, you won’t be able to get this done today.”
“I always finish what I begin.”
“Not this time.”
I am stubborn and make fast work and am halfway through the backyard when the wind begins blowing and stinging rains come down like needles on my arms and head. The baseball cap I wear blows off in a gust and all at once my hair and face are sopping wet. It is difficult to see, but I know if I stop now I’ll never get to finish today because the ground will be soaked and the mower’s tires will leave ruts in the grass. I have to ignore the warning voice in my head and keep going before the major part of the storm arrives. I turn the speed of the mower up and try to go as fast as possible.
It is hopeless and I know it, yet I don’t stop. I always go through with anything I do and this is no exception. The weight of the mower sinks into the lawn and bends the grass down as if it has been trod upon by elephants. The blades spit out soggy clumps of earth that pile up on both sides of the mower’s path. After a few more minutes, with the rain falling harder and the wind sending branches of trees and debris flying, the engine begins to sputter from the wet grass trapped below the engine guard that’s wanting to clog and cut off the flow of gas. Then in a gasp the engine gives out and stalls, and I am in the yard alone with a mower that doesn’t run anymore amid a deluge of water and wind that has surpassed being that of a shower and become something much more. It is dangerous now. There is lightning and thunder all around me. There’s no time to try and get the mower started but if I don’t at least try it will mean I’ve given up. I never give up. I get down on my knees and reach beneath the guard and try to dislodge the wet grass blocked there. It’s then I hear the rumble and the sound of a freight train coming my way, and I know what is coming for me and that I am too late to do much about it except crouch on my knees by the silent riding mower in the pounding rain and the roaring wind and await what is coming here beneath the sky with the fury of the heavens about and above me, and my voice tells me that when it arrives it will be that ghoul who has been after me all these years, the monster in my head who tells me I will never be able to finish what I’ve told myself I must this day, that I cannot scratch this moment in time off my list, that I will never finish anything again. Something is coming for me, and there’s no getting around it and the best I can do is tell myself before it arrives that I at least tried. I spent a lifetime trying, so I guess that makes it all right. I never gave in and maybe I’m going to die trying but at least that’s something I can take with me.
I can cross that part of it off my list.
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