Too Close to Home

I started with the Fleming house. Normally, our first stop on a Wednesday. Average-sized yard, not a lot of fiddly tidying around flower beds, but you had to be sure not to leave any grass clippings on the driveway or Ned Fleming would have a shit fit. There usually was no one home when we came in the morning, and there was no one here in the afternoon, which was fine. The fewer people I had to talk to, the better.

The job took a lot longer than usual, of course. And not just because there was only one of us to do the work.

As a team, Derek and I could knock off a place like the Flemings’ in half an hour. One of us on the tractor doing the big, easy-to-reach areas, the other with the lawn mower doing the narrow spots. Then one of us would grab the weed whacker and trim up along the sides of the house and next to the driveway and along the sidewalk while the other got the blower and swept all the clippings to the street.

The gods, who’d already been fucking me over of late, decided to keep it up at the Flemings’. First, the belt that drives the three blades under the Deere slipped off, and it took me ten minutes of lying on my side to get it back onto the pulleys, and not without jamming my fingers in there twice.

Then, the weed whacker ran out of line, and when I had the sucker upended and the housing off to take out the old spool and put in a new spool, the little spring that sits under there fell out and disappeared into the uncut lawn. Lost another five minutes finding it.

If I’d had Derek with me, either one of us could have been dealing with these setbacks while the other kept on with the job.

The gods weren’t finished. I was using the mower in the backyard when the blade caught the edge of a piece 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 The Jetsons, thought carports with slanted roofs looked cutting edge. He wasn’t out front when I got there, so I sat at the curb a moment, waiting for him to appear. When it got to be 8:05, I got out of the truck and was heading up the walk when he blew out the front door like there’d been an explosion inside the house.

“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.