Saturday sky. Carla and Alicia were at his mother-in-law’s and the house was his. It would be a
pleasant surprise for them if the boy who was coming to cut the lawn finished before they came back.
He cracked a beer and sighed as Dick Drago was touched for a double and then hit a batter. A little
breeze shuffled across the screened-in porch. Crickets hummed softly in the long grass. Harold grunted
something unkind about Dick Drago and then dozed off.
He was jarred awake a half hour later by the doorbell. He knocked over his beer getting up to answer it.
A man in grass-stained denim overalls stood on the front stoop, chewing a toothpick. He was fat. The
curve of his belly pushed his faded blue overall out to a point where Harold half suspected he had
swallowed a basketball.
‘Yes?’ Harold Parkette asked, still half asleep.
The man grinned, rolled his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other, tugged at the seat of
his overalls, and then pushed his green baseball cap up a notch on his forehead. There was a smear of
fresh engine oil on the bill of his cap. And there he was, smelling of grass, earth, and oil, grinning at
Harold Parkette.
‘Pastoral sent me, buddy,’ he said jovially, scratching his crotch. ‘You called, right? Right, buddy?’ He
grinned on endlessly.
‘Oh. The lawn. You?’ Harold stared stupidly.
‘Yep, me.’ The lawnmower man bellowed fresh laughter into Harold’s sleep-puffy face.
Harold stood helplessly aside and the lawnmower man tromped ahead of him down the hall, through
the living room and kitchen, and on to the back porch. Now Harold had placed the man and everything
was all right. He had seen the type before, working for the sanitation department and the highway
repair crews out on the turnpike. Always with a spare minute to lean on their shovels and smoke Lucky
Strikes or Camels, looking at you as if they were the salt of the earth, able to hit you for five or sleep
with your wife any time they wanted to. Harold had always been slightly afraid of men like this; they
were always tanned dark brown, there were always nets of wrinkles around their eyes, and they always
knew what to do.
‘The back lawn’s the real chore,’ he told the man, unconsciously deepening his voice. ‘It’s square and
there are no obstructions, but it’s pretty well grown up.’ His voice faltered back into its normal register
and he found himself apologizing: ‘I’m afraid I’ve let it go.’
‘No sweat, buddy. No strain. Great-great-great.’ The lawnmower man grinned at him with a thousand
travelling-salesmen jokes in his eyes. ‘The taller, the better. Healthy soil, that’s what you got there, by
Circe. That’s what I always say.’
By Circe?
The lawnmower man cocked his head at the radio. Yastrzemski had just struck out. ‘Red Sox fan? I’m a
Yankees man, myself.’ He clumped back into the house and down the front hall. Harold watched him
bitterly.
He sat back down and looked accusingly for a moment at the puddle of beer under the table with the
overturned Coors can in the middle of it. He thought of getting the mop from the kitchen and decided it
would keep.
No sweat. No strain.
He opened his paper to the financial section and cast a judicious eye at the closing stock quotations. As
a good Republican, he considered the Wall Street executives behind the columned type to be at least
minor demigods – (By Circe??) -and he had wished many times that he could better understand the
Word, as handed down from the mount not on stone tablets but in such enigmatic abbreviations as pct.
and Kdk and 3.28 up 2/3. He had once bought a judicious three shares in a company called Midwest
Bisonburgers, Inc., that had gone broke in 1968. He had lost his entire seventy-five-dollar investment.
Now, he understood, bisonburgers were quite the coming thing. The wave of the future. He had
discussed this often with Sonny, the bartender down at the Goldfish Bowl. Sonny told Harold his
trouble was that he was five years ahead of his time, and he should…