of sod Derek and I had laid in a couple of weeks earlier to fix up some dead patches. I thought the grass had stitched its way into its new home, but it came up like a bad rug off a bald guy. The mower chewed up the sod and sprayed it across the rest of the yard.
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted. Sweat was trickling down my forehead and into my eyes and stinging like all get- out.
I went back to the truck, opened the passenger door, then the glove box, and found the crumpled flyer Derek had shoved in there a few days earlier. I dialed the number on it with my cell.
A woman answered. “Hello?”
“Is Stuart Yost there?” I asked. The kid who’d asked if we were hiring.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“It’s about a job,” I said.
“Oh!” she said, and shouted, “Stuart! Telephone! It’s about a job!”
I waited twenty seconds or more, then heard an extension pick up. “Yeah?”
“Stuart?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Jim Cutter. You came up to our truck the other day, looking for work. We cut grass.”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re interested, I’ve got work.” I paused. “My son’s not able to help me at the moment. Ten bucks an hour.”
“I guess,” Stuart said.
“Great,” I said. “You just aced the interview.” I found out where he lived and said I’d pick him up at eight the following morning.
“Could you make it eight-thirty?” he asked. “I usually sleep till eight.”
In the background, the woman who’d answered, presumably his mother, said sharply, “Stuart!”
He said, “Eight’s okay.”
We were in kind of a holding pattern for the next day. Ellen was going to see if she could get in to see Derek in jail, check in with Natalie Bondurant, deal with our financial situation, even make a couple of calls to Thackeray concerning the literary festival, even though Conrad had already indicated to her that she could take whatever time she needed to deal with the events of the past week. “I might as well have something else to take my mind off things, if only for a little while,” she said.
I left the house about a quarter to eight, found Stuart Yost’s place in a subdivision built sometime in the sixties, when developers, influenced by
“Sorry,” he said, and got into the truck.
I laid it out for him. I’d take the tractor, he could do the hand-mowing and trimming.
“Can’t I do the tractor?” he asked. “I like riding around on stuff.”
“Maybe later,” I said. I wanted an idea of how bright he was before I turned him loose on a piece of machinery that could lay waste to someone’s garden in three seconds if you weren’t careful. So far, I wasn’t particularly hopeful.
We were on our second house of the morning, and I was doing loops in the backyard with the Deere when it occurred to me that I’d not caught any recent glimpses of Stuart with the mower or weed trimmer. He hadn’t exactly distinguished himself at the first house, telling me when we got into the truck that he was getting a heat rash on the insides of his elbows.
I drove the tractor back around the house and into the front yard and still didn’t see him anyplace, then noticed someone sitting in the truck.
Stuart was in the front seat, with the windows up. When I killed the Deere, I could hear that the truck was running. I walked over to Stuart’s window and rapped on it lightly with my knuckle. His fingers were busy with a Game Boy or something, and I’d startled him.
He powered down the window and a blast of A/C came out. “Yeah?” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just taking a break,” he said.
I got out my wallet, peeled off a twenty and a ten, put the money into his hand, and said, “That’s all your pay, severance included. You got a cell, or do you want to borrow mine so you can call your mom to pick you up?”
It would have been wrong to make generalizations about kids today, that they don’t know how to put in a good day’s work, that they think they’re entitled to something for nothing. Derek certainly wasn’t like that. He always kept pace with me, pulled his weight.
But Jesus Christ, kids today.
I must have muttered it under my breath a hundred times through the rest of that day as I handled the rest of my clients solo. By the time I got to the Blenheims, on Stonywood Drive, I thought I was going to plant myself facedown into the lush, green front yard.
Stonywood’s a quaint old street in Promise Falls, and the Blenheim place is on a corner, situated across the street from a two-story century-old house with hedges so tall you can hardly see the first floor. If it were me, I’d cut them down to show the place off, but at least the place was well tended.
There was a gap in the hedge where the walk led up to the front porch, and I’d seen a man poke his head out from behind the bushes a couple of times, watching what I was up to. Maybe he’d spotted my name on the side of the truck parked at the curb out front of the Blenheim house, recognized it from the news.
Although I’d only caught a glimpse of him, I put him in his mid-thirties or so. Hair cut short, military-style, round head, thick neck, broad shoulders. About my height, maybe not quite as tall, but built, as they say, like a brick shit house. Probably played football in his younger days. Maybe he still did, for all I knew.
As I was finishing up with the Blenheim house, feeling a bit groggy and disoriented from the heat, I drove the lawn tractor around to the back of the trailer, where the ramp was already extended and in position. I was about to drive up it when something huge and red seemed to come out of nowhere, only inches away from me.
I swung my head around to see what it was, and I guess my arms, and the steering wheel, must have moved a bit with the rest of me. A shiny van, with four big letters on the side followed by two more: “TV.” A local news crew. The van screeched to a halt, its entrance so jarring and dramatic that I allowed the tractor to veer a bit too far to the left, and the front wheel slipped over the edge of the metal ramp.
The tractor tipped about forty-five degrees and I lost my grip on the steering wheel. Maybe, if I hadn’t been feeling so logy from lack of sleep, I’d have been ready. But I wasn’t, and I tumbled off the machine and landed on the pavement. The tractor was still roaring, the right back wheel spinning in the air, looking for purchase, and then there was a man in a nicely tailored suit, shouting, “Oh fuck!” He’d come running out of the van and was attempting to grab the steering wheel, but the dumb shit ended up nudging the tractor further, so it fell right off. The housing that enclosed the blades landed on my leg, halfway between my knee and ankle.
“Jesus!” I shouted, and as I writhed I caught sight of my football player, looking out from between the hedges, a stunned expression on his face. “Help me out here!”
He bolted across the street and had to more or less step over me to get to the tractor. He got his left hand on the steering wheel and gripped the sheet metal of the rear fender and lifted.
The tractor might as well have been a toy to him, he lifted it so effortlessly. I crawled far enough away so that if the machine fell again, it wouldn’t land on me.
The man gently let the tractor back down, half of it touching the pavement, the other half still on the ramp. He reached over and turned the key, and the tractor went silent. The guy in the suit, whom I now recognized as an on-air reporter for the local news, now had a young, long-haired man in jeans at his side. His driver and cameraman, I presumed.
“You okay?” the reporter asked.
