“Ha-ha!” she chortled. “Ha-ha! Whoever said fairies were immortal?”
A fourth fairy, taking advantage of Dr. Sproot’s temporary distraction, managed to find the bull’s-eye, and a concentrated wad of powder exploded over the top of Dr. Sproot’s head, covering her face with a glittering white. Her allergies activated and with none of the antihistamines she normally carried in her purse handy, Dr. Sproot sneezed so loudly it rang out over the cacophony of the battle.
But, apart from that, the fairy dive bombers appeared to be doing little damage to her or her plant hordes. They were, however, having quite the effect on the dwindling forces of good, who were breathing in enough fairy dust fumes to fuel a dozen cable TV comedy shows. George and Nan found themselves laughing uncontrollably. Mary and Shirelle, too. The Rose Maidens dropped their tools, joined hands, and began dancing in a ring-around-the-rosie circle as the weeds closed in and began to ensnare them.
“I think there’s been a slight miscalculation,” Marta said between guffaws. “The fairies’ happy powder works fine on us. I’m just tickled pink now, ha-ha. Tee-hee-hee. No go on Dr. Sproot and her weeds, though. Ha-ha. Isn’t that a hoot?”
Edith was bent over, convulsed with laughter after hearing one of Nan’s knock-knock jokes, and fell down kicking and waving her arms. The remaining, battle-ravaged flowers were expanding and contracting like accordion bellows, which is what flowers sometimes do when they’re having a rattling good time. Even George found himself laughing at one of Nan’s dumb riddles.
Meanwhile, one fairy after another was being shot down out of the sky by Dr. Sproot or ensnared by the weeds. What remained of them were now beating a hasty retreat, bobbing their way off the field like tiny blue will-o’-the-wisps.
“I sure hope they’re going for reinforcements,” said Nan, chuckling. “Hey, how many liatrises does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”
Slowly, the weeds surrounded them. Then, Dr. Sproot, her face and body smeared with plant guts and caked, streaky fairy dust, her BB gun at the ready, forced her way through the packed, groaning masses, and confronted the small clot of humans and flowers that formed the only barrier left between her and total plant domination.
“Gee, Doc Phil, don’t you think you could put some clothes on?” said Marta. “At least cover up those saggy boobs! Ha-ha. And in front of all these weeds! Goodness! I guess people just don’t have standards anymore. Hey, can I take my clothes off, too?”
Dr. Sproot sneered.
“Thank goodness, little Marta, I’ll never have to tell you not to call me Doc Phil again. And you will keep your clothes on. I’m happy to see you’ve all been rendered complete idiots by your little fairy helpers. What a bunch of screwups! Ha-ha!”
Everyone else laughed along with Dr. Sproot because they couldn’t help it.
“How do you manage to keep so trim, Sproot?” wondered Nan admiringly. “But up top? A little mascara and rouge would do you wonders.”
“Silence!” Dr. Sproot snapped. “Now who’s the first one to be sacrificed to the weed feeding frenzy?”
“Plants don’t eat meat, you dodo,” corrected Shirelle. “Except maybe Venus flytraps and one or two other fly eaters, but I don’t see any of them here.”
“I said shut up! Well, if they don’t eat you, they can certainly smother you, or gross you out, or, Mr. Fremont . . .”
“George.”
“George, give you a rash to end all rashes.”
George shuddered with suppressed laughter tempered by paralyzing fear now that the fairy dust was starting to wear off.
“Down on your knees, wimps. This is your last chance to say your prayers. Then, you can watch as your little flower friends get torn apart, petal by petal. Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”
That last chuckle froze in Dr. Sproot’s mouth. A small tornado of mist whirled up in front of her, then spewed out two ghostly forms that looked like actual people, only made out of puttyish cloud matter.
“What the blue blazes do you want?” sneered Dr. Sproot, who, though unafraid, was wondering how someone—presumably Edith—had managed to summon two humans—a guy and a gal from the looks of it—back from the dead. “No fair, Edith. You’ve really crossed the line by channeling the spirits of dead people.”
“No need to blame Edith,” said the guy ghost, who had a European accent nobody there could quite place. “We’re here of our own accord. And we’re here to take you away, Phyllis Sproot. You have transgressed the laws of nature and acted the part of destroyer. We despise destroyers.”
“You’ve disturbed our home for the last time,” said the gal ghost, rather serenely, everyone thought. “Your evil thoughts and evil deeds have done enough harm, to say nothing of disturbing our sleep one time too many.”
Nan shook her head, trying to stifle a laugh and wondering how dead people could speak in such well-organized and grammatically correct sentences, especially seeing as how this was probably a dream.
“Yes,” said the guy ghost. “We’re light sleepers. We’d really like to get that eternal repose we keep hearing about, but you keep messing things up for us.”
“Hey,” whispered George to Nan. “It’s the spirits of that Welsh guy and his Indian wife, huh? I hope they turn that Dr. Sproot-the-Weed-Queen into earthworm slime.”
“Shhhh!” everyone went. The two ghosts looked over their shoulders at George and frowned.
“Could you let us please handle this, George?” said the guy ghost.
George gaped at the ghost, unable to turn away.
“Yessir.”
“That goes for you, too, Nan, or may I call you Nan-bee?” said the gal ghost.
“Yes, ma’am,” croaked Nan hoarsely. “You can call me whatever you want.”
All this time, Dr. Sproot was calculating her odds. Let’s see, she thought, I’ve got about a million weed ghosts against, what, about a dozen humans, a few beaten-up flowers, and a couple of human ghosts. I like my chances.
“Attack!” she shouted. “Attack!” But nothing happened. Dr. Sproot looked around, and discovered she was alone. Not a single weed from the horde that had just moments ago covered the field remained. A meek vulnerability overcame her. She dropped her BB gun and her hands struggled to better cover her private areas, which she now felt she had no business exposing to all these people and plants, either alive or dead.
“Do you by any chance happen to have a wrap?” she asked. “I guess even a moderately-sized bath towel would do.”
“Time to come along,” said the gal ghost, gently extending her hand. “We have an exciting new destination in store for you.”
“Is it hell?” gasped Dr. Sproot, shivering uncontrollably in the chill of the night. “Are you sending me to hell? That’s a little extreme, don’t you think? I’ll be a good girl from now on, I promise.”
“It’s not hell,” the guy ghost said. “It is, however, a place far away. It’s a place in need of your special talents, where your peculiar tastes and obsessions can best be put to use. To destroy and rebuild consistently and with a certain gaudy grandeur, yes, but with no concern for the accepted conventions of behavior and beauty.”
“It’s a place called Las Vegas,” said the gal ghost. A gasp went up from the humans in the crowd. “Honestly, folks, we’d never heard of it up to now. Must be kinda new.”
“Gee, I was kind of hoping for hell,” said Nan to George, followed by cries of “Hush,” “We’re trying to listen,” “Keep it down, please,” and another stern look from the gal ghost. Dr. Sproot’s eyes brightened as the gal ghost threw her a robe that didn’t work so well because it was just as translucent and gauzy as the ghosts.
“Kind of thin material, don’t you think?” Dr. Sproot said. “So, it’s Vegas, is it? Well, that sounds like it just might work. What are we waiting for, spooks? There’s no time like the present. Let’s get a move on. Later, gators.”
“After a while, crocodile,” chirped Edith, who was still feeling the effects of the fairy dust
.
With that the ghosts began rotating, faster and faster, until they became one whirling vortex of mist. With a “whoop!” Dr. Sproot was sucked in, and the mini-tornado lifted off the ground, angled off over the tops of the trees, and disappeared.
“Say,” said George. “Isn’t that northeast? If my geography is correct, Las Vegas is off to the southwest.”
“Maybe they just said that to make it easier,” said Nan. “My guess? She’s going to hell.” As George and Nan looked around, they saw there was no sign of the legions of plants and flowers that had been tromping around only minutes earlier. In fact, there was no sign of any other living thing. The brightening in the east signaled that dawn wasn’t far off.
“Where are the girls?”
“Where are Edith and Marta?”
“Where are the Rose Maidens?”
“Well, gosh, you’d have thought they’d all stick around to give high fives or say good-bye after all we’ve been through here. They just vanished!”
“That means this must be a dream,” Nan said.
“But if it was a dream you wouldn’t be saying that. People don’t say, ‘This must be a dream’ in the middle of their dreams. That’s a known fact.”
“Okay, look, if this is a dream, then we should stay here and just sort of poof into awakeness like everyone else apparently did. If this is for real, this whole landscape will shrink back to its normal size, and the house will be right over there.... Hmmm, there’s the house. And it looks plenty real. Well, forget that part. I guarantee you that, tomorrow, everything will be just the same as it always was. In a few more weeks, you’ll forget this all happened . . . or didn’t happen, I guess I should say.”
“Mmm-hmmm, whatever you say, Nan-bee.”
It was late afternoon the next day. George and Nan were sitting at the patio table, unenthusiastically slurping herbal tea, and scanning the newspaper classifieds and Nan’s laptop for jobs.
“I could walk people’s dogs,” said Nan, a false perkiness coloring her voice. “I hear there’s a big market for that.”
“You could no doubt learn to talk to them,” said George. “I’m trying to cook up another invention. Something I can turn quickly. I’m thinking right now of a remote-control model plane that can shoot down yellow jacket nests.”
Nan shook her head.
“You’re aiming way too low. How about bagging the invention thing and applying for some kind of superhero job? I mean, you’re telling me that you vanquished evil last night. How about sprucing up your résumé with that, ha-ha? You could write under your ‘Qualifications’ heading: ‘Able to destroy anything bad.’ There’s quite the demand for that these days.”
“You make fun of that, Nan-bee, as if you don’t think it happened.”
“It didn’t. It didn’t happen, you kook. I mean, c’mon—flower soldiers and demons and Dr. Sproot all tarted up like an avenging bad angel from hell. Pul-eeze!”
“I’m telling you, it happened.”
“And I’m telling you you’re delusional.”
“Well, what about the part where the dream world tried to take over, but couldn’t? Like the vampires showing up. And my pj bottoms falling down and no one noticing. And the door to a classroom you or I hadn’t been in all semester? Whaddaya make of that, huh? Dreams trying to intrude on the reality in some kind of new dimension. That’s what I make of it.”
Nan snorted.
“What I do find kind of disturbing is your little middle-aged soft-porn dream featuring a naked Dr. Sproot. Good grief, George, can’t your subconscious come up with something more titillating than that?”
“There’s the proof!” cried George. “How could I possibly fantasize about an old hag like Dr. Sproot? It has to have been real.”
“Ba-loney,” Nan said.
“Okay, think about the here and now,” George said. “That’s where the evidence is. What’s delusional about two new chunks torn out of my bat and green stains on it that won’t come out, huh? And how about your butcher knife? Where’d all those nicks come from, eh?”
“It’s all about the power of suggestion, George. Those things were already there. They’re tiny. In the case of the bat, I’ll bet they’re nothing but miniscule chips. You just didn’t notice them before. Now, of course, you’re looking for evidence and you will find it, come hell or high water.”
“Uh-oh, visitor.”
A new Volvo pulled up to the curb, and they watched a distinguished-looking man with a florid complexion and carrying a briefcase get out of the car, spot them, and begin walking toward the patio.
“And, no, Nan-bee, that’s not a Rolls-Royce.”
As the man approached, they could see that he was older but not elderly, bald, and sporting a little clipped mustache. He was dressed in a starched white shirt, immaculate charcoal suit, and gray tie. A red handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket of his suit coat. To Nan and George, he looked British. Both concluded independently that here was someone at last who meant to conduct his business in a straightforward way, without trying to fleece or mislead them. This fellow was treading carefully on the pea gravel, which earned him extra points with Nan. He was also looking down at his feet, a welcome display of either shyness or humility considering some of the boisterous characters who’d come bounding up those steps over the past few months.
“Mr. and Mrs. Fremont?” said the man as he stepped onto the patio and offered them a thin but genuine-looking smile. George and Nan nodded.
“My name is Jones. Arthur Jones, of the Jones, Jones, Markham, and Jones law firm. I represent the estate of one Gwendolyn Price. I have some news about Miss Price’s holdings and recent acquisitions that she wanted you to know about. I think I might safely say it will alter your lives somewhat.”
33
A Spring Well-Sprung
It was April, the great transition month. The winter had been another hard one, with six feet of snow and forty-six nights of subzero readings.
Nan wondered what the ajuga would look like, protected as it was by such a thick layer of snow. But, of course, the ajuga wouldn’t be there anymore.
Another good thing about a bad winter was that it took a toll on the pests that ravage gardens during the summer. That meant there should be a drop in the rabbit population. As an added bonus, fewer squirrels would have been stripping the bark of the burning bush. But that was of no matter now, except in her imaginings.
The snow cover lingered until late March, and the ice in the smaller suburban lakes hadn’t cleared until a couple of weeks ago. A few stray snows still leaked out of the leaden skies. Some accumulated, even as the Muskies attempted to play their opening home series against the hated Millers and Deerticks. There were a few cancellations. Those games would be tacked on to others sometime in the summer as doubleheaders. Despite these last rear-guard actions, winter in Livia was clearly in full retreat. As the end of the month approached in its slowpoke way, the mercury finally topped 60 degrees and by a healthy margin. A new spring sky appeared with its warmer, wetter look of darker and more sudden clouds. The soil begun its thaw. Burdick’s PlantWorld was jammed with gardeners preparing for the season. The new shed Jerry built for the Fremonts was crowded with the usual tools, fertilizers, and potting soils.
As they strolled around their new property in the southeastern quadrant of the city, George and Nan wondered how they would be able to fill up one and a half acres in a way that could match what they had before.
“And this time it’s all us and our green thumbs,” said George. “No good spells to help us out now. And no handy spirits to make sure everything flourishes. Though who knows what might be buried under here somewhere.”
“Oh, George, you don’t believe in all that bosh, do you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“It’s all through the grace of God. We’ve been blessed with some natural talent, and a dedication and work ethic few others can boast. We did it before and there is no reason on earth why we can’
t do it again.”
As George gazed upon their extensive grounds, which were still to be prepped for gardening, his muscles and joints began to twitch, as they always did when he was faced with the prospect of a large, physically demanding project.
Nan, eyeing every swell in the land, mentally mapped out where the big roots would be, and imagined leaves where the buds were sprouting to form a pattern of where the light and shade would fall in the summer and at what time of day.
“This will be a whole-yard job,” she said. “And it can command our undivided attention. We no longer have to even pretend we’re looking for day jobs.”
“Maybe, one of these days, I’ll dash off a little doggerel or come up with an invention, just to keep my hand in,” said George, snaking his arm around Nan’s waist.
Their new yard seemed to go on forever. It left them with conflicted feelings.
“I miss . . . home,” Nan said, her eyes tearing up.
“Me too. Let’s drive by and see how things are going in the old ’hood.”
As they approached the intersection of Payne and Sumac, they passed a big sign that read ROAD CLOSED—NO THRU TRAFFIC. Several of the lots adjoining their own had also been bought by the city and vacated. A few of the homes, including theirs, had already been torn down. They pulled up alongside what bore only a topographical and geographical resemblance to their old lot and got out to inspect a site transformed. Much of it had been cordoned off, and energetic, purposeful workers swarmed around the site. A backhoe and bulldozer were parked in their driveway, or what used to be their driveway. Much of the concrete had been pulled up.
All this had been Miss Price’s doing. Shortly after the Fremonts unearthed the dragon-emblazoned chest of her ancestors and stuffed it in the trunk of her car, she had instructed her attorney to try again to buy the property, and to offer the Fremonts $400,000 this time. It would then be transferred to the city to be turned into a historical park, honoring the true founders of Livia. Miss Price was donating Livia another $400,000 from her apparently rather substantial fortune. That was to buy up one or two of the surrounding properties, raze them and the Fremonts’ house, and do the proper work of restoring the lot to its natural state. Also to perhaps reconstruct Caradoc’s and Livia’s cabin and store, which were described in full detail in Caradoc’s journals. Maybe there could be water fountains, walking paths, and nice benches on top of the rise for visitors to take in that view of Bluegill Pond.
Front Yard Page 30