Do yourself and society a favor. Don’t be taken in. Just say no to partial people.
Thank you.
CARL’S LAWN & GARDEN
Let’s stop mourning for the good old days.
We are largely living in them still.
My last week on the job started (as usual) with a crisis. “Code Four, Gail,” Carl said, throwing me my cap. He never could pronounce my name. “It’s the Barbers, out in Whispering Woods subdivision, south of New Brunswick, just off Route One.” He backed the pickup to the shed end of the greenhouse and quizzed me while I threw equipment into the back. “Got the drip nozzles? Got the 4 plus 6? Got the Sylo-van, the Di50Si? The lawn injectors? The Thumper, just in case? Oh, and a Dutch Elm chip for the mall. We might make it by there today.”
It was a bright, mournful June day. The traffic was colorful and hard. The roadsides were brilliant green; newly painted for spring.
“Here we are, Gail. Whispering Woods.” We pulled past the wrought-iron gates between the two big laser maples with Dolby rustling leaves, and around the curved drive lined with big houses set on wide pseudolawns. It was all “nerf and turf” (that’s what Carl calls verdachip and astrolawn) until the Barbers’ house, at the turnaround.
Their lawn was not green but yellow-green. It was the only organic lawn in the sub. We put it in for them four years ago, and for two years it almost made it; then last summer we had to put it on twenty-four-hour IV, and now this looked like the end of the line.
Mrs. Barber was standing at the door looking worried. Her husband pulled in the drive just as we did. She must have called us both at the same time.
“Jesus,” Mr. Barber said as he got out of his Chrysler Iacocca and looked at his yellowing hundred thousand dollars ($104,066.29 to be precise; I sometimes watched Carl do the books). “It’s not too late, is it, Carl?”
“It’s never too late, Mr. Barber,” Carl said. The greenest part of the lawn made a crisscross pattern like an X ray showing the underground grid where the drip saturators were buried; the rest of the grass was jaundiced- yellow. A darker brown edge ran all around the yard, like paper just before it bursts into flame.
“Code Six, Gail,” Carl said, revising his original assessment. “Give me 4.5 liters of straight Biuloformicaine on a speed inject. And be quick about it. I’ll load up the ambulofogger.”
The nutritank was built onto the side of the ranch-style home, disguised as a shed. I spilled in a four-can of Bi, added some Phishphlakes for good measure, and set the under-pumps whining on super. Out front, Carl trotted up and down the lawn with a Diprothemytaline sprayer, while the Barbers looked on, worried, from the doorway. A few neighbors had gathered at the curb, a mixture of concern and poorly disguised pleasure on their faces. I could tell that the Barbers and their organic lawn were not popular.
The quick Dipro fix gives a green flush to the skinny little leaves of the grass. I could hear them sigh with relief through the soles of my feet. But unless the saturasolution coming up from the IV grid found living roots, the whole thing would be a waste.
Carl looked grave as he put the sprayer back into the truck. “If it’s not looking better by Wednesday, call me,” he said to the Barbers. “You have my home phone number. We’ll stop by on Friday to adjust the IV solution, and I’ll check it then.”
“How much is this—going to cost?” Mr. Barber whispered, so his wife and the neighbors couldn’t hear. Carl gave him a mournful, disapproving look, and Mr. Barber turned away, ashamed.
“Hell, I understand where he’s coming from, though,” Carl told me when we were back on the road. “It used to be that when you bought a lawn you could get insurance, especially with a new house, but these days nobody is insured.
You can insure a tree, a potted one, anyway, or a cybershrub, and of course any kind of holo. But a living lawn? Jesus, Gail, no wonder the guy’s worried.”
Carl’s empathy is his best quality.
We stopped for lunch at Lord Byron’s on the Princeton bypass; it’s the only place that’ll allow a girl with no shoes. Lord Byron was a cook at a veterans’ hospital for twenty years before he saved enough to start his own place.
Because of this medical background, he thinks he’s a doctor.
“The usual,” said Carl. Two beers and a sloppy joe on a hard roll.
Lord Byron lifted my cap and his huge warm black hand covered the top of my head. “Just as I thought,” he said. “Cold as ice. Sure you can’t find something on the menu you can eat, Gay?”
He never could say my name right either.
After lunch we changed the motherboard on a flower bed at a funeral home on Route 303. The display was one of those cheap, sixteen-bit jobs that you can’t walk through, that only looks right from a hundred yards or so. Carl had sold it to them last fall. It was supposedly upgradable, but in fact the company that made it had gone out of business over the winter, and now the chip was an orphan; you couldn’t change the variety or even the colors of the flowers without a whole new unit.
Carl explained this hesitantly, expecting an argument, but the funeral home manager signed for the new chip, a Hallmark clone, in a minute. “It’s one of these franchise operations, Gail,” Carl said on the way back to the shop. “They don’t care what they spend. Hell, why should they? It’s all tax deductible under the Environmental Upgrade Act. I never liked flowers much anyway. Even organic ones.”
Tuesday was a better day because we got to dig. We put in ten meters of Patagonian Civet Hedge at Johnson, Johnson, & Johnson. Pat is not really Patagonian; the name is supposed to suggest some kind of hardy stock. It’s actually cyberhedge, a fert-saturated plastate lattice with dri-gro bud lodgements at 20 mm intervals on a 3-D grid.
But the tiny leaves that grow out of it are as real as I am. They bask in the sun and wave in the wind. The bugs, if there were any, would be fooled.
Carl was in a good mood. Ten meters of pat at $325 a meter is a nice piece of change. And since the roots themselves are not alive, you can put them directly into untreated ground. There’s something about the sliding of a shovel into the dirt that stirs the blood of a nurseryman.
“This is the life, right, Gail?” Carl said.
I nodded and grinned back at him. Even though something about the dirt didn’t smell right. It didn’t smell wrong.
It just didn’t smell at all.
After lunch at Lord Byron’s, Carl sold two electric trees at the Garden State Mall. The manager wanted the trees for a display at the main entrance, and Carl had to talk him out of organics. Carl doesn’t like the electrics any better than I do, but sometimes they are the only alternative.
“I sort of wanted real trees,” the manager said.
“Not outdoors you don’t,” Carl said. “Look, organic trees are too frail. Even if you could afford them—and you can’t—they get weird diseases, they fall over. You’ve got to feed them day and night. Let me show you these new Dutch Elms from Microsoft.” He threw the switch on the holoprojector while I started piecing together the sensofence.
“See how great they look?” Carl said. “Go ahead, walk all the way around them. We call them the Immortals. Bugs don’t eat on them, they never get sick, and all you have to feed them is 110. We can set this projector up on the roof, so you don’t have to worry about cars running over it.”
