Front Yard

by Norman Draper

  “Hmmm.”

  “That’s it from you? You’re just going to be Mr. Monosyllable from now on?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then, it’s settled. Starting tomorrow, or I guess today if you want to be technical about it, the Fremonts move on to a new, more productive stage of life. That means putting our heads together to resolve this mortgage debacle. It also means job searches. All-day job searches. And yours could be a long one, since there’s that wine-break blot on your employment history. So, no more wine for you, mister. Or me either, for that matter. Our tippling days are over. First thing tomorrow, I head to the grocery store to load up on our new beverage of choice . . . herbal tea.”

  “Guess that makes us tea-totalers now,” said George without a trace of humor coloring his voice.

  “George!” Nan whispered urgently. “George! We have to go outside! We have to go outside now.”

  “I know,” said George, who was already sitting up in bed. “I need to take my bat.”

  “Yes, and I need to take the butcher knife.”

  Without question or having to stifle so much as a yawn, George and Nan got out of bed, driven by some purpose they didn’t understand and didn’t bother to question. George reached under the bed for his Smokestack Gaines batting practice bat, stroked its smooth, polished barrel and the rougher surface on the knob of the handle, where the chip had gotten knocked off, and lifted it to batting stance position. Already having made her way into the kitchen, Nan retrieved the butcher knife from the knife holder block and practiced her thrusts and parries.

  “Time to go,” said George, tapping the barrel of the bat into his palm like a billy club.

  “I know,” said Nan. “But, George dear, isn’t this kind of weird? I mean—”

  George raised his hand for her to stop.

  “Of course it’s weird, Nan-bee. Life is weird. But we’ve received our summons and we have to go. It was only a matter of time. We knew this would come, sooner or later.”

  “I know. But couldn’t I at least get dressed?”

  “No need.”

  “No need? I don’t want anybody seeing me in this baggy thing. I look like I’ve been living off cream puffs, Sugar Smacks, and heavily salted potato chips.”

  “You think I want to go prancing around like this, in my pjs, with a baseball bat? At least I’ve got the Gordon plaid bottom and the Jethro Tull Warchild top on. Smart of me to put those on last night. What if I’d just been wearing my underwear, huh? Slippers on?”

  “Umm-hmmm. You?”

  “Yep. That should be enough. Let’s go. Time’s a-wastin’.”

  The backyard, bathed in moonlight, seemed so much larger to them now, stretching out for acres upon acres. The bordering stretch of woods to the north appeared as a distant, impenetrable forest that was . . . shaking?

  “Who is THAT?” George said, pointing to a form approaching rapidly from an opening in the trees. “Whoa! It’s a woman and she’s stark-naked!”

  “Shhh! George, please temper your voyeuristic enthusiasm a little.”

  Nan squinted. The woman didn’t appear to be quite naked. Nan thought she could see a few strategically located weeds held in place by some unknown force, or maybe it was just sticky pine sap she was using. She had planted herself, firm and motionless, on the ground, long legs splayed out, and her spindly body perched precariously on tiptoes. It looked like she was holding a rod of some sort in her right hand. There was a muffled racket coming from somewhere in the forest behind her that was goopy- and crunchy-sounding at the same time. The closest George could come to describing it was by imagining a couple thousand buckets of Klinghopper’s Homestyle Coleslaw on the move.

  “That is Dr. Phyllis Sproot,” Nan said calmly. “She has either just leaped off the edge that separates the criminally insane from the only annoyingly so, or is really running behind in her laundry. Who the heck made the decision to let her out of the loony bin? I’d say we better get ready to defend ourselves.”

  Nan thrust out her butcher knife, which she was happy to recall had just been sharpened by Curman’s for free with her purchase of two pounds of tilapia fillets. George scrunched down, raised the bat up and pulled it behind his head, then wiggled it in the manner of Smokestack Gaines.

  Dr. Sproot was now manipulating the rod and pointing it at them.

  “George, look out!” shouted Nan. “She’s got a gun.” There was a muffled pop and something clinked against the butcher knife and knocked it out of her hand. “George!”

  George quickly jumped in front of Nan and pointed his bat directly at Dr. Sproot and her gun. There was another pop. George swung. Contact. The invisible BB pinged off the wood. Then another. Soon, George was swinging as fast as he could, dozens of tiny BBs pocking the white-ash smoothness of the bat. There was a short lull in the action as Dr. Sproot stopped to reload. Nan had retrieved her butcher knife, and, for a moment, gloried in the way the moonlight flashed off its blade. I can throw this thing if I have to, she thought; any target within ten yards I can hit and sink the blade in deep.

  The racket, which had subsided for a while, now resumed and grew even louder as Dr. Sproot raised her arm then brought it down, pointing a withered, trembling finger straight at the Fremonts. Nan, as a great, moving mass that looked like an ocean tide coming in emerged from the forest, now recognized all the noise as a guttural sort of plant speech, though far more primitive than anything she was accustomed to.

  “Gracious, George, those are plants making that noise. Bad plants. Weeds of all kinds. There must be thousands of them. Crabgrass. Dandelions. Cockleburs. Creeping bellflowers. Canadian thistles. And, better look out here, George. Sow thistles! Big damn sow thistles!”

  George flinched. In the moonlight, Nan could see the veins tighten in his neck.

  “Steel yourself, George, because what we’re facing here is Dr. Sproot in a state of dishabille as the anti–Mother Nature, leading hundreds upon hundreds of weeds she has insulted, poisoned, dug out, crushed, and basically treated like vermin. And, if I’m picking up the vibes correctly, they can’t wait to get their sticky appendages all over us.”

  “Eccch!”

  “That’s right,” came a voice close enough to startle the bejesus out of them. “Dr. Sproot has carried her powers to a new height. Somehow, she’s been able to call forth all the dead plants she’s weeded out of her gardens, and turn them into little plant people with really bad attitudes.”

  “Marta! Marta Poppendauber! What in heaven’s name are you doing here in our dream or crusade or whatever it is? What are any of us doing here, for that matter?”

  “Good question,” said Marta. “If I were to guess, I’d say Livia’s forces of horticultural good are here arrayed against the forces of horticultural bad in one huge battle to decide the fate of gardening in Livia. But, hey, what do I know? That’s just a guess.”

  “I’ll say one thing,” said another voice. “The girl’s got talent. Never expected her to make it this far.”

  “Edith!” cried Nan. “Or is it Sarah the Witch? What the heck is it you’re calling yourself these days? Ah, hey, thanks for doing that frog-and-toad thing, and what was apparently a pretty dang good fairy impersonation. I must say, though, Edith, that you should have known better than throwing in with Dr. Sproot in the first place. And all for a little extra pocket change.”

  Edith lowered her head and blushed in shame, though no one could see that in the milky darkness.

  “You’re right, Mrs. Fremont,” she moaned woefully. “I should have known she’d get carried away once she got a little witch power under her belt. I should have seen it and nipped it in the bud last year when we first met at the Hi-Lo. You heard, of course, that the mental health folks did an initial evaluation, gave her some drugs, and told her to go see a shrink. Then, they sprang her to the custody of one of her many local relatives, which is as good as no custody at all.”

  “I figured that,” said Nan. “Otherwise, why would she be here m
arshaling all her forces to turn us into bone meal for her stupid coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend and yuccas?”

  “Edith is now a helper for the good,” Marta said solemnly. “It’s important that you know that. She helped you quite a bit last year, too, though we don’t need to go into that here.”

  “Yeah?” said George. “It seems as though you said some pretty nice things about Dr. Sproot, too, Marta. That sort of calls your judgment of character into question.”

  “So, Edith,” said Nan. “If you’re with us, what is it you’re bringing to the party?”

  “Look behind you.”

  George and Nan turned to see that rank upon rank of flowers had moved into position behind them, and were seething with excitement and the sweet perfume of moral purpose.

  “Our little soldiers!” Nan cried.

  “This is Edith’s doing,” said Marta. “With some help from the rest of us, that being mostly you, even though you don’t realize it. But it’s all we could muster. I’m afraid we’re going to be outnumbered.”

  “Hey!” yelled George, waving, once he picked out the coleuses. “Whaddup, y’all!” He winked and gave them a thumbs-up. Nan poked him.

  “This is no time for either joking or favoritism, George. We’ve got serious work ahead of us. . . . Hey, what’s that big wooden door with the transom on top doing over there in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Don’t go there,” Marta warned. “That’s freshman-year chemistry and you haven’t been to a single class all year.”

  George felt his pajama bottoms suddenly slip to a pile around his feet, leaving him naked from the waist down. No one seemed to notice. Blushing from shame, George bent over to pull them back up again. The drawstrings around the waist tightened them up without his having to touch them, then knotted themselves up into a neat bow.

  A BB tore into the petal of one of the petunias.

  “First casualty!” George cried. “Dr. Sproot draws the first blood. Now, it’s our turn. No quarter! No quarter for villains!” He raised his bat above his head and swung it around as a rallying device. Another BB ripped into the pink-and-white striated leaf of a coleus. It slumped, then rose back up, triumphantly.

  “Only a flesh wound!” cried George. “Hurrah! Hurrah for the coleus!”

  Nan patted his shoulder.

  “George, let’s tone down the lust-for-blood warrior stuff, can we? And get that bat going again, please.”

  George flicked the bat right and left, then up and down, sending the incoming BBs scattering in all directions.

  “What I want to know is this,” he said. “Isn’t there some sort of shadowy acquaintance from your past that shows up at times like these to whisper in your ear that you’re dreaming? When’s that going to happen is what I want to know.”

  “You’re not dreaming,” Marta said.

  Edith nodded.

  “It may seem like a dream but it’s not,” she said. “Dreams keep trying to muscle in on our territory, though.”

  “Hey!” Marta shouted at a couple of creepy caped figures loitering around on the fringes of the woods. “Go away. You’re in the wrong subconscious.” She looked at the illuminated dial on her wristwatch, which squiggled like an amoeba under a microscope. “Don’t forget; only three hours till your bloodsucking night’s done.”

  “Mom! Daddy!”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Fremont!”

  George and Nan turned to see that Mary and Shirelle had joined them. They were carrying something that smelled both wonderful and dangerous.

  “Yikes!” cried George. “Angel’s trumpets! What’d you bring those along for? Shouldn’t those guys be on the other side?”

  “No, Daddy. They’re flowers, too, and they’re here to help. We’ll use them to shoot mind-altering pollen right out of the flower. Watch!” Mary pointed her angel’s trumpet at the approaching horde, which was inching closer to them. A little puff of dust arced into the moonlight then landed on top of a cocklebur, which proceeded to sway drunkenly from side to side, then collapse, writhing, onto the ground.

  “See?”

  “Well, okay then.”

  “I really don’t think you girls should be here,” Nan said. “And you, Shirelle, don’t you need to get up early tomorrow and commute to work?” Shirelle’s answer was interrupted by a howl and the slow, sweeping movement of plants in motion.

  “Everyone get ready!” cried Marta. “Here they come!”

  Within seconds, the two sides collided, rather softly as there were no metal parts involved. Dr. Sproot was taking down one flower after another with her BB gun. George was swinging in short compact strokes, demolishing dandelions by the score as they tried to wrap their long roots around his legs and arms, and blind him with their flying, fluffy seed down.

  Nan waded into a carpet of creeping Charlie with her butcher knife, carving away and turning one weed after another into rank salad fixin’s. Marta had brought pruning shears along with her, and tore a swath of destruction through the ranks of the Canadian thistle. Mary and Shirelle were doing good service with the angel’s trumpets, brandishing them like machine guns, and creating huge pockets of clueless, stumbling weeds plagued by visions of paisley-colored cows chomping on them with boulder-sized pink molars.

  But it wasn’t an even fight. It was clear that Dr. Sproot’s supernatural powers now far outstripped Edith’s, which were mitigated somewhat by her guilt at once having used them for nefarious purposes. So, while Edith, with some help from the potent vibes of Shirelle and the Fremonts, did manage to summon forth hundreds of flowers—mostly annuals, of course— that had once lent their glory to the Fremonts’ gardens, Dr. Sproot was able to call up tens of thousands of weeds that not only she, but all of Livia’s gardeners, had committed to garbage, compost, or the slow death by a Weed-B-Gon or Roundup dousing.

  Still, the battle seesawed back and forth for what seemed like hours. When George spotted the biggest sow thistle on the battlefield he made for it with a vengeance, bashing his way through the wall of enemy weeds with a whir of bat motion no human eye could detect. As he stood, face-to-vascular tissue, with the offending monster weed, Nan called out to him.

  “Don’t let its hairs touch you, George,” she yelled. “Remember what happened the last time you touched one of those. You got that infected rash that lasted for months. And this one’s ten times bigger.”

  Suddenly, the sow thistle lurched toward him, then started stumbling around blindly, as if it had imbibed too much dandelion wine. It finally tripped over its roots, which were trailing behind it, as ungainly as a bridal train. George saw his chance. Charging forward, he swung his bat as he’d never swung it before, going for downtown rather than just contact. Big, juicy chunks of stem flew everywhere, forcing George to bob and weave to dodge the bristles.

  In the time it takes an August yellow jacket to find an open can of soda pop, it was over. The sow thistle lay torn in shreds on the ground, its pulpy innards exposed, its leaves crumpled up into balls of rapidly decomposing matter. The other weeds pulled back, stunned and cowering.

  “That was easier than I thought,” said George, raising his arms in triumph.

  “Easy on the hail-the-conquering-hero stuff, dear,” said Nan, now at his side and keeping the weed masses at bay by holding her butcher knife straight out toward them and swinging it slowly back and forth along ninety-degree arc. “Especially when you had some help from another quarter.”

  “Yeah, Daddy,” said Mary, who along with Shirelle had crowded in next to him with their angel’s trumpets spitting out pollen puffs with a machine-gun rapidity. “That’s because we psychedelicized it with a few well-placed seed shots. That guy was in no shape to take on you and your bat. Now, let’s back up a little before these yard-blight scumbags start charging again.”

  George stared forlornly at his bat. Two more chips, one of those from the tip of the barrel, had been knocked off, and the whole thing, from end to end, was stained with gooey weed guts.

  “Now, I�
��m really mad!” shouted George, figuring he had just lost a good $800 in value off that bat.

  “George, we have to move,” said Nan. “We can’t hold ’em off here forever.”

  The weeds, recovered from the shock of seeing their champion vanquished, were moving toward them again, reinforced by ten thousand clumps of crabgrass just called up by Dr. Sproot once she had managed to tear a couple dozen lobelia off her legs.

  “Fall back!” shouted Nan. “Fall back!”

  The weight of numbers was beginning to tell despite the best efforts of Edith to add potency to her witch spells. Soon, there was nothing left of their flower allies but a few tiny alyssum, a badly battered core of elite hybrid tea roses, the angel’s trumpets, and a smattering of petunias.

  Then came a sound from out of the adjoining woods the likes of which no one had ever heard before. It was the battle cry of women who refuse to be dominated, whether by city hall, exploitative men, or a gaggle of puny-assed weeds on the brink of world domination. In an instant, a mob of them armed with rakes, shovels, and loppers passed through the pitiful remains of the allied flower ranks, formed a “flying V” attack column, and tore into the surrounding weeds, which fell back from them in some disarray.

  “It’s the Rose Maidens!” shouted Marta. “The Rose Maidens have been summoned to save us!”

  How come everyone else got to get dressed up? Nan wondered, looking at the Rose Maidens’ stylish pantsuits, dresses, and blouses, then down sulkily at her baggy, billowing, peasant-style nightgown.

  “And, look, up in the sky!” someone shouted.

  “Lightning bugs?” wondered George.

  “No, Mr. Fremont,” cried Shirelle. “It’s fairies. They glow blue, see? And, if you look closely, you can see little gossamer wings!”

  “Fairies!” shouted Mary. “Yippee!”

  The fairies swooped in like so many pint-sized Dauntless dive bombers, dropping their clumped loads of fairy dust timed to break up and disperse just above the attacking weed hordes, then veering off sharply before the weeds could throw out their stems and leaves to catch them. Dr. Sproot worked the lever of her BB gun, aimed, and a fairy came spiraling out of the sky. She shot down another, then another.