Lawn Boy

  With all gratitude to Britten Walker

  FOREWORD

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

  There are people now who say I'm some kind of wonderboy or that I know some secret and 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. I didn't have any money and my parents didn't have much either. My mom is a teacher in an experimental school and my dad's an inventor. Sometimes it takes a long time to work out a new idea. This was one of those times so we were a little bit broke. Mom and I have learned not to ask too many questions about what he's doing because if we do, he wants to use us as guinea pigs and we learned our lesson during what we now refer to as the Voice-Activated Door Incident. Dad swears Mom's nose is as cute as ever and I don't notice anything different about it, but she still touches it gingerly when he starts talking about some big new idea he's got going.

  The next minute, it seems, I've got a business of my own, with employees, and I'm rich.

  I'd better explain.

  It all began at nine in the morning on my twelfth birthday when my grandmother gave me an old riding lawn mower.

  My grandmother is the kind of person who always thinks that no matter how bad things might seem, everything will always come out all right. Her hair could be on fire and she'd probably say, “Well, at least we have light to read by.”

  She's the most positive person in the world, and amazing and fun to be around, but in a strange and happy way sometimes she seems to be about nine bricks shy of a full load.

  You can say, “You know, I think the Yankees will win the World Series again.”

  And she'll answer, “Yes, but it's still nice to put carrots in stew for the flavor.”

  And you think that somewhere inside that brain maybe a screw came loose. Then you find out that the last time the Yankees won the World Series she made a stew and forgot to put carrots in, and blamed the Yankees (she'd never liked them anyway) when the stew tasted funny. She still doesn't like the Yankees.

  “It all makes sense if you wait long enough,” she says.

  So when I turned twelve she came to the house with an old riding mower in the back of her Toyota pickup.

  “Happy birthday,” she said. “It used to belong to your grandfather. He was always working on it. I thought you might like it.”

  “A mower?” Though we lived on the edge of what was termed an upper-middle-class neighborhood— Eden Prairie, Minnesota—our house was small, a “fixer-upper” when my folks bought it four years ago. It had a yard the size of a postage stamp and the grass never seemed to grow enough to need mowing. It just sprouted, stopped, gave up and died. Over and over.

  My father and I lifted the mower down from the truck bed. “A lawn mower?” I looked at Grandma. “Thanks.”

  “My bridge club is meeting on Thursday night,” she said, getting back into her truck, “which makes it hard to watch CSI since it's on Thursday too. Did you know that?”

  And she drove away before I could answer her, much less wait for the part where it made sense.

  “It appears you now have a lawn mower,” my father said, smiling, as he walked back into the house. “I don't know the connection with her bridge club either, although I'm sure there is one. She's your mom's mother, maybe your mom will know what that meant.”

  I looked at the mower. Very old, low, small. It looked like it only cut about a two-foot-wide area, and it was nothing like the fancy new machines. The seat was steel, without a pad, and the driver's feet went over the top of the motor to rest on two foot pedals. One was a brake, the other a clutch that you had to push down to get the mower moving. It steered with two levers, like a very small bulldozer, and looked more like a toy than a mower.

  Okay. Since I was twelve, I didn't have much experience with motors. I've never even had a dirt bike or four-wheeler. I'm just not machine oriented.

  My birthday present sat there. I tried pushing it toward our garage, but it didn't seem to want to move. Even turning around to put my back against it and push with my legs—which I thought might give me better leverage—didn't help; it still sat there.

  So I studied it. On the left side of the motor was a small gas tank, and I unscrewed the top and looked in. Yep, gas. On top of the tank were two levers; the first was next to pictures of a rabbit and a turtle. Even though I'm not good with machines, I figured out that was the throttle and the pictures meant fast and slow. The other lever said ON-OFF. I pushed ON.

  Nothing happened, of course. On the very top of the motor was a starting pull-rope. What the heck, why not? I gave it a jerk and the motor sputtered a little, popped once, then died. I pulled the rope again and the motor hesitated, popped, and then roared to life. I jumped back. No muffler.

  Once when I was little, my grandmother, in her usual logic-defying fashion, answered my request for another cookie by saying that my grandfather had been a tinkerer. “He was always puttering with things, taking them apart, putting them back together. When he was around nothing ever broke. Nothing ever dared to break.”

  Loud as the mower was, it still wasn't moving and the blade wasn't going around. I stood looking down at it.

  This strange thing happened.

  It spoke to me.

  Well, not really. I'm not one of those woo-woo people or a wack job. At least I don't think I was. Maybe I am now.

  Anyway, there was some message that came from the mower through the air and into my brain. A kind of warm, or maybe a settled feeling. Like I was supposed to be there and so was the mower. The two of us.

  Like it was a friend. So all right, I know how that sounds too: We'll sit under a tree and talk to each other. Read poems about mowing. Totally wack.

  But the feeling was there.

  Next I found myself sitting on the mower, my feet on the pedals. I moved the throttle to the rabbit position—it had been on turtle—and pushed the left pedal down, and the blade started whirring. The mower seemed to give a happy leap forward off the sidewalk and I was mowing the lawn.

  Or dirt. As I said, we didn't really have much of a lawn. Dust and bits of dead grass flew everywhere and until I figured out the steering, the mailbox, my mother's flowers near the front step and a small bush were in danger.

  But in a few minutes I got control of the thing and I sheared off what little grass there was.

  The front lawn didn't take long, but before I was done the next-door neighbor came to the fence, attracted by the dust cloud. He waved me over.

  I stopped in front of him, pulled the throttle back and killed the engine. The sudden silence was almost deafening. I stood up away from the mower, my ears humming, so I could hear him.

  “You mow lawns?” he asked. “How much?”

  And that was how it started.

  When it all began, it was simple.

  Our neighbor's house had a larger yard than ours, with what looked like good grass. No difficult corners, just a big square with a large elm tree in the center.

  I mowed it, and he gave me money.

  Twenty dollars.

  Figuring that I used almost all the gas in the tank, about a gallon, which cost three dollars, and not counting the wear and tear on the mower (I didn't know how to figure that out), I made seventeen dollars for my work. It took two hours so I made eight dollars and fifty cents an hour.

  That, I was to learn later, was called capitalism.

  While I was finishing up that lawn the next neighbor up the block came by and said:

  “How much to mow my lawn?”

  Wow. Another job, just like that.

  I poked around in our garage and found an old three-gallon gas can. I walked to the station on the corner, bought gas, br
ought it back, filled the tank and mowed the second guy's yard.

  And while I was doing that a third man came and asked me to mow his lawn. The lawns kept getting bigger, and soon it was dinnertime and I had done three lawns and had made sixty dollars and I had a small piece of scrap paper with phone numbers and addresses for six more lawns. …

  Turns out the man who owned the lawn service that had done all the yards in our neighborhood had run off with the wife of one of his customers and all the husbands were worried about hiring a new company after what had happened. A kid like me mowing their lawns wouldn't be much of a threat, I suppose. Plus, I was cheap.

  Later I would learn that I had tapped into something called an expanding market economy.

  All I knew was that it felt good to have all that money in my pockets.

  That evening I took a rag and wiped the mower down, parked it in a corner of the garage and—a little admission here—patted it on the top of the gas tank. As I bent over, the wads of bills cracked in my pockets. Thanks, Grandpa. I never really knew my grandfather but the mower seemed tough and friendly. Maybe it was like him. He had worked on it and used it and it was nice to think of him as part of it.

  Then I went inside. A strange thing happened.

  My parents were getting food on the table and as we sat down to eat my dad said:

  “That new film about astronomy is on at the IMAX. It would be great to see it.” He sighed and I knew he was thinking about our budget.

  And there I sat. My pockets full of money. And I could have said no problem, I've got money, and I'll earn more money tomorrow and more money the day after that….

  But I kept my mouth shut.

  I could have said all those things but nothing came. Somehow it didn't feel right for me to be the one offering to take us all to the movies. If I did that, wouldn't Dad feel worse? Wouldn't it sound like I was bragging?

  I ate my meat loaf and green beans and then went into the living room and watched a little television. Or tried to. I still had the sound of the mower in my ears so I couldn't hear the set. And my whole body was still vibrating from sitting on the mower all day. After a few minutes, I couldn't keep my eyes open. By eight o'clock I was sitting on the couch with my head hanging forward, drool dripping onto my T-shirt, sound asleep.

  Mom shook me awake and sent me up to bed, where I crashed onto the pillow, still dressed, pockets full of bills. End of day one with my lawn mower.

  And that was the easiest day.

  There was a second then or a minute or maybe even a day when things could have remained sort of normal.

  The next day I moved the mower farther into the richer part of the neighborhood, where the lawns began to get larger while my mower seemed to get smaller. Of course it didn't really, but that's how it felt. Soon it became obvious that I could only do three or maybe four lawns a day if I worked from just before dawn to just after dark.

  And while it's true that the owners of the larger yards paid me more—I was getting thirty to forty dollars a lawn the second day—there was also the distance factor. I had to ride the mower from lawn to lawn and as I moved farther from our house that meant it would take me longer to get home at night, putt-putting down the edge of the street on the mower. Plus, I had to stop every few hours to buy more gas, and that really chewed up my time even more than the bigger yards. Great mower, small tank.

  I must have been the only kid my age in what felt like a ten-block radius who hadn't signed up for sleepaway summer camp or who wasn't on baseball and/or swim and/or tennis teams that summer— I was burned out on sports after spring baseball league. All the older guys had real jobs like at the Clucket Bucket or the Dairy Whip and all the guys my age were mostly busy or gone, so I had a long summer full of nothing ahead of me, almost as if I'd known how things were going to work out. Which, of course, I hadn't.

  More and more people wanted their lawns mowed—on the second day I had eight jobs—and the fact was that I was fast approaching my limit.

  Three lawns a day, plus refilling the tank from time to time, was all I could manage, and I would have to mow the lawns every week. Three lawns a day, once a week, twenty-one lawns if I worked seven days, dawn till dark, no days off.

  Making approximately six hundred and thirty dollars a week.

  It seemed like a staggering whop of money. Summer was twelve weeks long, which meant that by the end of vacation I would have made over seven thousand five hundred dollars.

  Way, way more than I needed to buy a new inner tube for my old ten-speed.

  And of course, there would be no vacation.

  Which ran through my head as I worked. No vacation, no summer fun, no bike trips with my best friend, Allen, when he came to visit his father in the summer.

  No vacation.

  Seven thousand five hundred dollars.

  No summer fun.

  Seven thousand five hundred dollars.

  I had just finished the second yard of the second day, and I was already a little sick of the sight of grass, grass, grass. The only sound in the world seemed to be the sound of the mower. The vibration of the seat was the only feeling my butt had ever known.

  And then I met Arnold.

  He showed up on the sidewalk when I started the third yard of the day.

  Another customer, I thought.

  I had plenty of time to study him as I mowed toward him.

  Very short. I'm pretty short and he wasn't much taller than me and kind of round. Not fat, not heavy, just round. Everything about him was round. Rounded shoulders, hips, arms, legs—even his head was a ball. And his haircut looked like somebody had put a large bowl on his head and cut around it with scissors.

  Wild clothes. I saw a seventies show on television once and everybody had shirts with impossibly long collars and colored patterns that looked like maybe somebody had taken a bucket of flowers dipped in paint and thrown it at the actors.

  That was Arnold's style.

  And he had a wide, wild tie and a kind of sport coat that looked suede but was cut with wide lapels and shoulders and a narrow waist that didn't look too good on his round body. He looked like somebody who had flunked clown school. It was hard not to smile.

  He waved as I approached and I stopped and pulled the throttle back to turtle. I liked that. Turtle or rabbit. Not written—not FAST or SLOW—just a picture of a turtle or a rabbit. Everything should be like that. Highway signs, posted signs in the hallways at school. Turtles or rabbits. It's so simple.

  “I hear you're the new lawn boy.”

  I nodded.

  He went on. “My name is Arnold, Arnold Howell, and I'm over there on the corner. How much would you charge for my lawn?”

  I looked past him. It was good-sized, but flat and with not much detail work. “Would forty dollars be all right?”

  “Thirty-five would be better.”

  “Well …” Other people had been paying me forty dollars for a lawn that big and that seemed fair. “I guess….”

  “The thing is, I'm having a cash-flow problem and I'll have to scramble to find even thirty-five dollars. I'm a stockbroker and I work from home and I'm a bit overextended right now.”

  All of which was more than I needed or wanted to know. But he seemed okay and I thought he had an honest face—which turned out to be right, except that I'm not sure what a dishonest face would look like. Maybe a sneaky turtle? Or a shifty rabbit?

  “Tell you what,” he said. “How would you like to barter—take it out in trade?”

  “I don't know what you mean.” I didn't think he'd have anything I wanted. Not clothes. Especially not clothes.

  “Like I said, I work out of my home. I do mostly day-trading. Work the small board, so to speak. I mean it's far-out, a real groovy way to work … and I make a nickel now and then, you know, moving this and that.”

  Was he crazy? Or one of those people with something loose in his brain? Somehow he forgot he was talking to a twelve-year-old kid with an old riding mower who knew noth
ing about the stock market.

  “So, like, you're too young to have an account of your own but I could run the thirty-five dollars I owe you in on my account and make a purchase for you. It would be in my name but you would get the proceeds. What do you think?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about. You're going to buy something for me with money you owe me but don't have?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What are you going to buy?”

  “Stock.”

  “What's stock?”

  “Shares in a company. You would buy shares in a company.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then if the company does well the shares go up in value and you sell them to someone else and make money.”

  “That's how the stock market works? It's that simple?”

  “Well, yes. With a whole bunch of rules and regulations and controls, that's pretty much how it works.”

  “And you always make money?”

  He shook his head. “Not always. That's the … beauty of it. If the stock you buy goes down, you lose money.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have to be aware of that and buy carefully.”

  “Well then, the secret is to only buy stock that goes up.”

  Arnold nodded.

  “How hard can it be?” I shrugged. I didn't have a clue what I was talking about. But it seemed pretty basic, and I had pockets full of money. I hadn't figured out where in the house to hide it where my mother couldn't find it, so I kept it jammed in my pockets.

  Arnold made it all seem so easy.

  “Let's do it,” I said.

  I guess you'd say that I'm a pretty normal boy. Intelligence-wise.

  I mean it's true that my parents are very smart people. Maybe not about money, but in other ways. My dad is full of ideas and how to tackle them. He even understands Einstein. My mother can do amazingly complicated math in her head.

  I'm not like that. Now, I can read, and learn things; I go to a regular school in Eden Prairie, and I get good grades. Maybe good is too strong a word. I get all-right grades.