by Robert Inman
“I can’t pay you until I set up a checking account. I’ll do that tomorrow.”
“Whenever,” she said. She stopped at the door. “Wingfoot tells me you have a son, Mister Baggett.”
“Yes.”
“You and he are close?”
Will hesitated for just the tiniest moment, long enough for Dahlia Spence to say, “My Ernest and Roscoe were close. They did things together, but it was more than that. They genuinely liked each other. When Roscoe was killed, Ernest had no regrets, not about their relationship. There was grief enough in losing him without saying, ‘I should have…’ “
“He’s in medical school,” Will called as she went out the door and down the stairs.
*****
He pulled his car into the driveway and parked next to the garage steps. Mrs. Spence’s gray Oldsmobile occupied the only garage bay. She drove it seldom, she had said -- mostly to the grocery store, the hairdresser’s, or garden club meetings. It was a 1979 model and had lasted because she had it serviced regularly and kept it out of the weather. Will’s car would have to remain outside. No problem, he said. It had been parked at the rear of Morris’s driveway while he had served his time. It was in need of a good scrubbing, but he would get to that. It would give him something to do.
He carried his things up the stairs -- several boxes of clothing, toiletries, odds and ends of personal items -- all of it packed by Clarice while he was in jail and left for him, along with the car, at Morris’s. The clothing was entirely casual attire. He had seen no use for suits and sport coats and dress slacks. He wasn’t anticipating any kind of white collar employment. Jeans, chinos, loafers, knit shirts, sneakers would do just fine. It all fit neatly in the drawers of the dresser and the tiny bedroom closet. Afterward, he sat in the overstuffed chair next to the window overlooking the back yard and watched the birds for awhile, thinking how simplified life had become in his new state of affairs, how little stuff he needed to get by. There was a great deal more back at the house, but he couldn’t think of a thing that was essential.
He had thought at one point of asking for the computer, but then thought better of it. He decided he had spent far too much time on the computer on those long mornings when the house was quiet and Clarice was away making a career in real estate. He had checked weather-related sites on the Internet (to be better-prepared by the time he reached Channel Seven in the afternoon), dabbled a bit in the stock market, and emailed. But now he had no need for detailed weather information, his stock holdings were -- what was the word in the separation agreement? – frozen, and there was not a soul he wanted to email.
Mrs. Spence was back just after six, bringing linens and inviting him to supper. They dined on pork chops, rice and broccoli at the dining room table while Ethel watched from the kitchen nearby. There was homemade lime sherbet for dessert -- made, she assured him, with artificial sweetener. After the meal she served decaffeinated coffee on the front porch. The mid-day rain, despite what Brent had predicted on Channel Seven last night, had given way to a pleasantly clear afternoon and evening.
“This is very nice of you,” Will said. “A delicious meal and much better company than I’ve had recently.”
“I can imagine.”
“Miss Manners could have a field day at the Wake County Jail.”
Mrs. Spence just smiled.
“Are you sure you’re okay renting to a man with a criminal record?”
“Wingfoot says you’re harmless. He says you’re a bit of a tight-ass, but nothing to be afraid of.”
“About what you read in the paper…I don’t smoke pot.”
“It’s probably not good for a man with high cholesterol.”
They sipped their coffee and contemplated the evening. Will looked out across the lawn. It could use some work. The grass was patchy under the maples, spiked with crabgrass out where the sunlight hit it. Such a lovely garden, such a scruffy lawn. Given the choice himself, he would have had it the other way, especially since the lawn was here in front of the house where the rest of the world could see it. “Who takes care of your lawn?” he asked.
“Why, I do.”
“Ummmm.”
“More coffee?”
“No thank you. Would you mind if I give it a little attention? I don’t have one of my own now.”
“Be my guest,” said Mrs. Spence. “The lawnmower is in the garage.”
He set his coffee cup down on the table between them and rose. “I think I’ll give it a quick trim.”
“Right now?”
The mower was an ancient engine-less machine with two wheels and a cylindrical set of blades. It took a fairly strenuous push to get it into motion. He manhandled it around the corner of the house to the front lawn. Mrs. Spence was gathering up coffeepot and cups on the front porch. “You actually push this thing yourself?”
“Of course,” she said as she disappeared into the house. “It keeps me fit.”
“I’ll bet.”
He started at the sidewalk and worked his way toward the house. The blades weren’t very sharp and he had to retrace his steps, going over each strip twice. But he soon began to get into a rhythm. The whirling blades made a pleasant clatter, snippets of grass flew in the mower’s wake and gave off a familiar sweet freshly-cut smell. It had been awhile since he had smelled freshly-cut grass. There was something comforting about it. He trudged back and forth, leaning into it, working up a bit of a sweat. The air cooled, the sky purpled above the rooftops across the street, lights began to come on in the houses.
This was, he imagined, much what the neighborhood might have been like in 1952 when an off-duty Raleigh fireman pushed a clattering mower back and forth across this stretch of grass -- thinking perhaps of a son off at war. It would have been a pleasant, comfortable place to come home to. It seemed still to be. There were tricycles and basketball hoops in driveways along the street. Boylan Heights was enjoying something of a revival these days -- young people moving in, fixing up the old homes -- New Raleigh infiltrating the havens of the Old. And then there were a few, like Dahlia Spence, holding onto something. A history -- some good, some not so good. But a history, nonetheless. It would be, Will thought, a comfortable place to spend his meantime.
It was almost dark when he finished and put the mower away in the garage. He made a mental note to pick up a can of 3-in-1 oil and a file from the hardware store tomorrow. The mower was okay. It just needed a little maintenance. He liked the way it sounded and felt. Solid. Dependable. Uncomplicated.
Upstairs in the apartment he showered and put on pajamas and slippers. He turned on the radio and listened to the news from the public station in Chapel Hill. Then he turned off the radio and the lights and sat in the dark letting the night close in around him. He tried not to think of anything in particular, and he pretty much succeeded. A good while passed, and then he got up and went to bed.
He slept soundly and awakened early. There was just the faintest light outside, the first twittering of the stirring birds in the trees of Dahlia Spence’s garden. He looked at his wristwatch on the bedside table. 5:48. He had become accustomed over the past month to waking early, or at least to being awakened. Deputies marched along the hallways of the Wake County Jail every morning at six announcing that it was a glorious new day and the inmates, if they were to take full advantage of its opportunities, must arise from their fart sacks. After years of working at Channel Seven until nearly midnight and then sleeping until eight, it was a novel thing to Will. A sea change in habit, to which he had adapted more easily than he had expected. And now, free from confinement and regimentation, he thought that he would keep the habit. There was now the added pleasure of bird sounds and of early sunlight unfiltered by narrow jail windows.
But there was something else here, something nagging at the back of his mind, an itch of an idea that he couldn’t quite make out. Something that had come to him in the night while he slept. A dream? Perhaps. But what had he dreamed? He couldn’t quite make it out at f
irst. It seemed hidden behind a curtain, waiting for some signal to reveal itself. He got out of bed and went to the open window overlooking Dahlia Spence’s backyard garden. He stood there, trying to look obliquely away from the thing instead of straight at it. He waited for several minutes while the new light got stronger and objects in the yard came slowly into focus -- bird bath, love seat, plants and grass. Grass. He remembered.
It wasn’t a dream at all, not in the sense of a dream in which images drifted in a netherland between pseudo-fact and fantasy. It was, instead, a vivid and lucid recreation of a specific moment from his past. A summer day in Dysart, North Carolina. He was mowing Buster Dysart’s lawn. There was a sense of exquisite pain about it, of something lost. But too, and this surprised him utterly, was a sense of something worth seeking, worth finding again. It had something to do with grass, but it was more than that. Still, it started with grass.
He turned from the window and padded to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror above the lavatory. His eyebrows went up and a tiny smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and he said softly to himself, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
*****
He spent the day, a Friday, making domestic arrangements. Using the check Morris had given him, he opened two bank accounts: one for personal use, one for his new business. He put in an order for telephone service. He had the oil changed in his car. He shopped for toiletries and a few grocery items: mostly canned and frozen goods; milk, orange juice and shredded wheat for breakfast.
He bought a cookbook that advertised, on its cover, that it was for people who hate to cook. It wasn’t that he hated it, but that he was ignorant and thus inept about what went on in a kitchen. Put him at the grill on the back deck with a nice sirloin and he could do just fine. Now, though, he had no back deck or grill and -- given the size of his bank account -- he didn’t expect to eat a lot of sirloin, not anytime soon. Maybe later when his new business got off the ground.
His business. He was still astonished both by the idea and by the way it had come to him. Where had it come from? Maybe something Wingfoot had said while they were eating lunch at McDonald’s. Or Mrs. Spence’s lawn, the clattering old push mower, the smells and feel. Or his real-as-life dream. All of the above. Whatever, the seed had sprouted as he slept, and now it was emerging as the day went on as a full-grown thing, leafy and multi-branched. He didn’t even need to focus on it. Details appeared unbidden at odd moments. He could see in his mind a bookkeeping ledger in which he would tote up accounts -- income for this, outgo for that -- in neat columns. Figures that represented specific, concrete acts. He could see himself doing exactly what his idea called for him to do. It not only made perfectly good sense, it was right.
So Will spent a busy Friday, occupied with mundane details of establishing some mode of living while the plan took shape virtually on its own, a self-propelled idea. He was the empty, upright vessel, being filled with this thing that -- if not a way of getting his life back, as he had originally intended -- was a way of beginning to make a new one.
As night came he sat in the chair by the window and put the idea into words on a legal pad. It was so fully formed that what he wrote needed almost no editing or rearranging. When he finished he looked it over carefully. And then at the bottom he added a name. A partner.
*****
He arrived at Palmer’s Chapel Hill bungalow at mid-morning on Saturday to find Palmer emerging from his BMW, two plastic grocery bags in hand. Palmer stood at the open door of the car as Will pulled into the driveway behind him and got out.
“Hi,” Will said.
Palmer eyed him warily. “You’re out.”
“No, I escaped. There’s a posse out looking for me, but I thought, hell, Chapel Hill? A posse would never think of Chapel Hill.”
“Your beard’s grown out a lot,” Palmer said.
Will ran his fingers through his beard. “Another reason the posse won’t catch me.” He reached for one of the grocery bags. “Let me help you with those.” He followed Palmer into the house. “I’ve been doing some grocery shopping on my own. Winn-Dixie had a special on frozen dinners. Yesterday, I had mesquite chicken with English peas. Oh, and a cookie. It was part of the dinner. I don’t have a microwave, so I had to cook it in the regular oven. But they tell you on the back just how to do it. Anybody who can read directions can heat up a frozen dinner.”
He stood in the kitchen doorway while Palmer put away the groceries: a twelve-pack of beer, a large bag of pretzels, granola bars, a carton of orange juice, several cans of chunky soup. Palmer crumpled the plastic grocery bags and dropped them into a flip-top trash can.
“You know, you really ought to save those. If you’ll put your trash in those smaller bags and tie up the top, it’s easier to handle. And when the garbage truck comes around…you do have curbside pickup, don’t you? Amazing, that big mechanical arm on the truck that reaches out and picks up the whole roll-out garbage container and dumps it in the top. Just like pouring soup from a can into a pot. But if the trash inside the roll-out thing is loose, sometimes it just scatters all over the place, especially if there’s any wind. If it’s in the small grocery bags, you don’t have that problem.”
Palmer stood there open-mouthed, staring at him. Then he walked past Will into the living room and on out the front door. He sat down on the front steps. Will followed and sat down beside him.
“What do you want?” Palmer asked softly after a moment.
“Just checking in.”
“Aren’t you violating your probation by being out of Wake County?”
“Well, I haven’t had an official visit with my probation officer yet. That’s Monday. So…well, yes you’re right.”
“You could get arrested again if the cops caught you over here.”
“And the judge would stick my shiny pink ass right back in jail.”
Palmer propped his elbows on his knees and massaged his temples with his thumbs. Will thought he seemed to be pretty much his old self: hair freshly cut, face shaved, attire -- khakis, Docksiders (no socks), knit shirt clean and wrinkle-free. And there was no smell of marijuana in the house. Palmer would be wanting to return to his former life now. Now that Will had cleaned up his mess.
Palmer caught Will looking him over. “I met with the committee,” he said.
“And?”
“They’re letting me back in. On probation.”
“Like me. Probation.”
“Yeah.”
“Congratulations.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody knows but the people at the medical school?”
“No.”
“Your mother? Sidney and Consuela?”
“Like you told me. I lied like a dog. Only I didn’t have to lie, just keep my mouth shut. I guess in the strictest sense, keeping your mouth shut amounts to a kind of lie. But…”
“So,” Will said, “you got away with it.”
Palmer gave him a sharp look, but didn’t say anything. He went back to massaging his temples.
“Now that that’s settled, have you given any thought to what you’re gonna do this summer?”
“Well,” Palmer said hopefully, “I thought I’d do some reading, get ahead on stuff for the Fall. Maybe some time at the beach.”
“Sounds like fun. But what if you got a fantastic offer?”
Palmer’s thumbs froze.
“I have a business proposition,” Will said.
“What kind of business?”
Will sketched out the plan in the air with his hands. “I’ve got it all worked out. A pickup truck with a small trailer to hold the equipment. You see ’em all the time tooling around Raleigh. The trailer is a little low, flat-bodied job with wire mesh on the sides and a ramp in the rear that folds down so you can roll the equipment out. The bed of the pickup holds the small stuff.”
Palmer’s mouth worked silently for a moment before anything came out. “What small stuff?”
“Gas cans, leaf blower, tool box
, spare parts. Small stuff. The only thing I don’t have is a name.”
“Oh, shit,” Palmer said in a voice so low that Will could barely hear him.
“No, I don’t think so,” Will said. “I don’t think it would do for a convicted felon to be driving around town with a sign on the side of his truck that reads, ‘Oh shit.’ A sure way to get in trouble again. I had thought about ‘Mowers ‘R’ Us.’ Or ‘Two Guys and a Rake.’”
“Two guys.”
“Me and you. You and me. Frick and Frack. Father and Son.”
Palmer shook his head slowly.
Will nodded his head slowly. There was a rhythm to it, even though they were nodding in opposite directions.
“Let me get this straight,” Palmer said. “You’re going to start a lawn care business? Mow lawns for a living ?”
“I’ve got to support myself. It’s something I know how to do.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Ah, there’s nothing to it. Just keep going in a straight line, remember to turn at the end of each row. And as you say, you’ve got the summer…”
They sat there for a moment before Palmer finally said, “What are you up to?”
“Like I said, just a business proposition. Take it or leave it.”
Palmer stood with a jerk. “You think you’ve got my ass in a sling because…” he waved his arms, taking in Chapel Hill, medical school, the Greensboro Palmers, Clarice, marijuana, all of it. He bounded off the steps into the yard and stood there several feet away, glaring. “You think I’m going to push a fucking lawnmower around Raleigh all summer because you’ve got my ass in a sling.”
Will felt a little twitch of anger at the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He smiled and it went away. “Aren’t you glad we’re having this talk, son? I mean,” he spread his hands, “all these years we’ve hardly had anything to say to each other. And here we are having a frank discussion about the future course of our lives, yours and mine, at least over the next three months. I say bully for us!” He punched the air with his fist like a quarterback completing a sixty-yard touchdown pass.