Lawn Boy Returns

by Gary Paulsen

  This is for Kathy Dunn Grigo, publicist extraordinaire,

  and for Dylan, Ryan and Kaylee Grigo,

  for sharing so much of their mother’s time with me.

  Foreword

  I don’t have a clue how all this will end.

  There are people who say I’m a wonderboy—one who got jinxed—or that I knew some secret—which I fumbled—or that I had this big, hairy plan.

  Nope.

  One minute I was twelve years old and wondering where I could get enough money for an inner tube for my old used ten-speed. And the next minute I’m a financial prodigy with my own business and a bunch of people working for me and a stockbroker and a prizefighter of my very own. The minute after that I’ve got tax problems and employee difficulties and threats of lawsuits and greedy relatives no one’s ever heard of before and I’m sick to death of being rich.

  Six weeks ago, I inherited my grandfather’s old lawn mower and came up with a wild plan of making $7,500 over the twelve weeks of summer if I worked all day, every day, mowing lawns. At the time, it seemed like a staggering amount of money.

  Half a summer into my plan, after working really hard, partnering up with another lawn guy, and lucking into Arnold, a customer on my route who was also a genius stock wizard on a hot streak, I was suddenly worth $480,000 from business expansion and stock investments that were, for the most part, happy accidents.

  For a little while, it seemed like everything I touched turned to gold. That was the good part.

  But then for a little while, it seemed like everything I touched turned to compost. That was the bad part.

  I’d better explain.

  It all began at nine in the morning on a day in late July, when my grandmother showed up with Joey Pow and his brand-new long-lost cousin Zed.

  1

  The Origins of Economic Collapse

  I sponsor a great fighter: Joseph Powdermilk, Jr. His nickname is Joey Pow.

  My grandmother is the kind of person who always thinks the best of everyone. She’s also very big on family.

  So when this guy Zed approached Grandma and Joey at the gym and said, “Hey, Joey! It’s Zed, your second cousin once removed,” Grandma was thrilled.

  Joey couldn’t hear what the guy was saying because his ears were still ringing from his sparring partner’s accidental haymaker. Cousin Zed threw his arm around the still-reeling Joey. “I’m one a yer dad’s stepbrother Sam’s boys from his second or maybe his third marriage. Could be the seventh one, hard ta keep track a Sam, he’s always been what ya call a bad boy, gotta real taste for the ladies.”

  Grandma beamed at Joey and Joey got all excited because Grandma looked so happy. Grandma hugged Zed and then Zed hugged Joey, and bam, faster than one of Joey’s knockouts, Zed had weaseled himself into becoming part of Joey’s family.

  Over the past few weeks, Grandma and Joey have developed a great and unusual friendship, even though they don’t appear to have much in common. She speaks really fast and he talks really slowly; he’s enormous and powerful, she’s small and gentle. But they’re both early birds, which is great because Joey likes to do his workouts at the gym in the morning and Grandma likes to drink coffee and read the newspaper there to the sound of uppercuts to the chin and body punches.

  Grandma’s learned a lot about boxing recently. I walked in on one of Joey’s training sessions the other day and saw her shadowboxing in the corner. She’s been pestering Joey to teach her to feint and jab. Joey likes to have someone look after him, fussing about whether or not he’s getting enough sleep and eating enough fiber and all those other grandmotherly things.

  That morning, before Zed appeared, my mom and dad had left town for a few days to look at lakefront property up north; Arnold had told us that investing some of my earnings in land would be a good idea. Grandma was staying at our house to keep an eye on me while they were gone, so after Joey’s workout she brought Joey and Zed back to my house.

  Zed’s broken-down pickup truck towed an ancient camper. He parked next to Joey’s old station wagon in our driveway.

  Grandma is amazing and fun, but there are times when she makes no sense. Still, if you think really hard, you can usually figure out what she means. When she said, “I have always despised the taste and texture of olives,” and gestured to this dirty, hairy Zed person as he climbed out of his truck, I couldn’t figure out what Zed and olives had in common, but I got a bad feeling.

  I think I have a good sense of whether or not a person can be trusted. For instance, I knew right off the bat that Arnold, my stockbroker, and Pasqual, my lawn-mowing business partner, were good guys. And even though Joey Pow is large and slightly terrifying in appearance, I appreciated his good qualities immediately.

  I didn’t get the same vibe from Zed.

  “Good ta meetcha.” Zed stuck his hand out and I forced myself to shake his grubby paw. “Yer granny tol’ me how ya sponsor Joey.”

  “I did?” Grandma looked a little perplexed. “Oh well, it’s like I always say: people who are cut from the same cloth can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  “I know a little somethin’ about the boxin’ biz.” Zed threw a few fake punches and zipped his feet back and forth like he was bobbing and weaving to avoid an opponent in the ring.

  Grandma beamed at him. Joey wasn’t paying any attention; he was petting the neighbor’s cat. Next to the cat, Joey looked, as always, ginormous.

  I turned back to Zed, who had made himself comfortable in my mother’s lawn chair. He leaned back, farted once, burped twice and gave a mighty scratch in an area most parents urge toddlers not to touch in public. Charming. I moved upwind once I caught a whiff of him.

  “So, uh, where do you live?” I asked.

  “Oh, ya know, here ’n’ there. I was passin’ through town and heard about my cuz Joey from a buddy.”

  “Uh-huh. What, exactly, did you hear?”

  “I heard Joey’s gettin’ ready for a big fight. Bruiser Bulk—ain’t he the Upper Midwest heavyweight champ? From what I hear, Joey’s got a shot at takin’ the title.”

  I looked over at Grandma and Joey. She’d put her hands up in front of her face and Joey was, very gently, tapping them with loose fists as she taunted him. “Is that all you’ve got? C’mon, let’s see some speed and power.” Never mind that if Joey so much as flicked her with his forefinger and thumb, he’d propel her into next week.

  I looked back at Zed, who had been studying me with the same look that I see in the neighbor’s cat’s eyes when she watches baby birds learning to fly.

  “I heard how ya got stinkin’ rich this summer.” Zed smiled, and I got a chill down my spine when I saw his teeth. They looked like he’d sharpened them with a file.

  I thought: I’m not the only one who needs someone to keep an eye on them for the next few days.

  “So, what do you do for a living?” I asked.

  “Oh, ya know, this ’n’ that. I’m between jobs now an’ it seems to me Joey could use a good corner man, and who’s better to have on yer side than fam’ly? Plus I don’t go all squeamish at the sighta blood ’n’ guts.”

  Uh-huh.

  “Hey, bud.” Zed looked around and nodded. “Ya got a nice spread. Figger I can park my rig here? The parkin’ lot at Joey’s place don’t have much room.”

  “You could, um, probably stay here while you’re in town. For a few days. I guess. Because Joey’s real busy getting ready for the fight.” And I’d rather have you where I can see you, I silently finished. Looking out for Joey’s interests was part of my sponsorship responsibilities.

  “That’s real sportin’ of ya, pal, don’t mind if I do.” Zed looked way too happy about the chance to park in our driveway.

  I broke up Grandma and Joey’
s boxing lesson. “Zed’s going to park here for a few days.” Grandma didn’t seem to be bothered that we had just brought down the property values of the entire neighbourhood by offering to host this rusted-out piece of garbage. Meanwhile, Joey helped Zed plug in the world’s longest extension cord from his camper to our garage.

  Then Joey took off for his midmorning training session (not to be confused with his early-morning workout and, of course, nothing like his late-morning weight lifting). Grandma went inside to rest her eyes (that’s what she calls taking a nap), and Zed—after blowing his nose without using a tissue, sending a snot rocket onto the perfectly mowed lawn—thumped up the step into his “rig” and started to fry up some roadkill he’d scraped off the interstate. At least that’s how it smelled.

  And that was how the bad part started.

  2

  The Status Quo in Economic Endeavors—at Best, an Unreliable Concept

  I stood on the driveway for a second, wondering: How was I going to handle Zed? Because I had a really strong sense that Zed was a problem. A big problem. Epic. The kind of problem I didn’t want a nice guy like Joey to face on his own. I wished I could ask my parents for advice, because they always approach a problem calmly and thoughtfully, but I knew that if I told them about Zed while they were gone, they’d worry about me and Grandma and Joey. And they really deserved a couple of days up north without any worries, because they worked really hard, Dad with all his inventions and Mom teaching math. I wanted them to enjoy the little vacation they’d taken.

  Then I glanced at my watch and realized I was running late. I walked into the garage and took the tarp off my lawn mower.

  Every evening when I come home from work, I take a rag and wipe all the loose grass and dirt from the riding mower, and then I cover it with a big tarp. I saw a cowboy movie once and was impressed by how the sheriff always brushed his horse and threw a soft blanket over its back at the end of the day. I know I’m no sheriff and my lawn mower isn’t a horse, but it just felt like the right thing to do. Crazy, I know, but I’d spent a lot of hours in the seat of my lawn mower and it had been good to me. I owed it to the mower to take good care of it.

  I enjoyed five or ten minutes of quiet, just me and my lawn mower. It had started making some weird grinding-buzzing sounds on the drive home last night and I was tinkering with it, trying to recapture the familiar humming growl I’d come to know like the sound of my own breathing.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Kenny Halverson and Allen Grabowksi, my two best friends, came around the corner of the garage and saw me squatting next to the lawn mower. Kenny was dribbling a basketball and Allen had his head buried in a book. I don’t know how they do it, but Kenny is always bouncing a ball and Allen is always reading and they never trip or walk into anything.

  “Hey!” I stood up. “When did you guys get back?”

  “Last night,” Kenny said, “and my mother has already told me thirty-seven times to make myself useful, stay out of trouble and stop dribbling the ball in the house.”

  He lives across the street and around the corner and he’d been at camp for the past month and a half. I knew from his postcards that he and the guys in his cabin had started a hard-core heavy metal headbanging band they called Infected Wound, had gotten in trouble for collecting leeches and applying them to each other’s butt cheeks to see if they really did have medicinal properties, and as punishment had been forced to play board games with the camp director’s spoiled-rotten seven-year-old grandson. Kenny didn’t say whether they’d been punished for the music or the leeches, but since I’d heard him play bass before and Infected Wound was composed of him, three drummers, and a guy who made beat-box noises with his mouth, my money was on the music.

  I nodded and turned to Allen. “I got here twenty-seven minutes ago,” he said. The thing about Allen is that although he reads a lot, he hardly ever speaks. And when he does, he’s precise.

  Allen was visiting his dad two blocks away. His parents got divorced two years ago and Allen moved three towns over with his mom. Now he spends half of the summer, every other weekend, Tuesday and Thursday nights and some holidays with his dad.

  I was really glad Kenny and Allen were back. But I wondered if I’d have time to hang around with them, since I was working from sunrise until dark. And how would I explain what happened while they were gone? How do you tell your two best buddies that you’re a hundred-thousandaire without sounding like you’ve got a big head about it?

  “Wanna shoot hoops?” Kenny bounced the ball between his legs and behind his back.

  “Sorry. Can’t.” I nodded to the mower. “Got work to do.”

  “Sweet ride,” Kenny said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Grandma showed up on my birthday six weeks ago with Grandpa’s old riding mower. I’ve taken on, oh, a few yard jobs since then.”

  Kenny knelt on the ground next to me, studying the gas tank and bouncing his basketball off the front wheel. Allen thoughtfully tapped the throttle, where the rabbit and the turtle indicated the two speeds. He propped his book on the steering wheel and nodded. “Good fit.”

  “And so, uh, I’ve got this, um, little business now.” I’d ease them into the big picture gradually.

  “Need any help?” Kenny asked. “Allen and I haven’t got anything better to do, and it’ll be fun to make a few bucks. We don’t have riding mowers, but our dads have lawn mowers just sitting there in our garages, and I bet the three of us working together could make some serious coin.”

  Like four hundred and eighty thousand dollars? I asked him silently. I smiled. “Let’s do it. Go get your mowers and I’ll meet you at the corner of Hubbard and Noble. I’ve got to tighten a few bolts here.”

  As soon as they left, I made some calls. I let Pasqual and Louis, one of our most trustworthy employees, who was taking on more responsibility all the time, know that I’d be handling the Gorens’ yard myself that morning. It was the closest account to my house, and it was an enormous corner lot that I figured would give Kenny and Allen a better sense of the work involved. Plus, there’d be no risk we’d run into any of the guys who worked for me. Introducing my friends to my employees was going to be a seriously weird moment that I’d just as soon avoid for a while longer.

  And then I called Arnold to check in. He asked me to swing by the house later that afternoon; he had a few ideas he wanted to run past me.

  I figured I’d find the right way to introduce my two best friends to my stockbroker. Arnold was very laid-back and had a way of making the incredible sound almost sane, so I felt good about how that scene would most likely play out.

  We had a blast that morning in the Gorens’ yard.

  Sure, Allen almost cut his left foot off because he “got to a really good part” in the book he was reading and rammed the mower into some paving bricks along the front path, and Kenny thought it would be fun for us to race each other up and down the hill alongside the driveway pushing the mowers, blindfolded, and he knocked the mailbox down trying to beat me. (I texted Pasqual when Kenny wasn’t looking. Pasqual was in charge of the finer points of lawn care and promised to come over and repair the damage later that night.) The yard, which would have taken me forty-eight minutes by myself, took us three hours and twenty-six minutes to finish and looked pretty ratty along the fence (another secret text to Pasqual about that).

  But I remembered (a) how much fun it can be to hang with my buddies and (b) what a great feeling a person gets from good, old-fashioned hard work. Change is good, but sometimes leaving things the way they’ve always been is better.

  3

  The Methodology of Team Development

  After we were done working on the Gorens’ yard, we dropped off the push mowers and drove to the Burger Barn for lunch, Allen and Kenny clinging to the sides of my mower because you’re not allowed to walk up to the drive-through window. No one ever said anything about lawn mowers being prohibited, though. We screamed our orders into the speaker over the whine of the idling engine
and, when we putt-putted around the corner to pick up our food, we cracked up at the look on the window girl’s face. She laughed too.

  We raced each other to the park halfway between the Burger Barn and Arnold’s house. Allen and Kenny made better time walking—Kenny backwards and dribbling his basketball and Allen forwards but reading—than I did on the lawn mower. After we snarfed our burgers and fries and onion rings, I told them, “Okay, let’s go meet a friend of mine.” And then we pointed the lawn mower in the direction of Arnold’s house.

  When I walked in with Allen and Kenny, Arnold was sitting on his screened-in porch at his round picnic table drinking his hippie tea with four strangers, two men and two women. “Groovy, you’re here. And you brought friends. Far out.” Arnold pulled extra chairs out from the kitchen and practically fell over himself shaking Allen’s and Kenny’s hands, introducing himself and pouring three more glasses of tea.

  When Arnold told them he was my stockbroker, Kenny and Allen looked at him, at me, at each of the four people sitting at the table and at each other and raised their eyebrows. Then they sat down.

  Arnold began to speak.

  “Given the dramatic—and, may I add, unprecedented—expansion of your financial assets and professional interests this summer, which is, of course, trippy and wild, I think we need to discuss adding to the team. I’ve done some research and found four people I think you should meet.”

  I remembered the last time Arnold thought I should meet someone: Pasqual. And then I pictured the other fourteen people Pasqual had brought on board as we had expanded our services from mowing lawns to also doing cleanup at night—because some of our employees worked other jobs in the daytime but needed the extra income—as well as shrub trimming, pool cleaning, sidewalk edging and garage cleaning. I braced myself as Arnold introduced his other guests.