Lawn Boy (2 page)

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 nothing 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.

And with my average brain and average grades I lead a pretty average life. When I was small I played with toys, made models. I sometimes still make models. I went through a massive video game phase and still like to play now and then. I like girls but can't talk to them. Not a word. I try to be nice to everyone, and polite to old folks, people over twenty or thirty.

So there's nothing to explain what happened to me that summer. It's easy to say it was all just luck. But it's hard to believe there wasn't some kind of force behind it.

After meeting Arnold, I wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do, but two days later, I mowed his lawn and he told me that he would buy me not thirty-five dollars' worth of some kind of stock but forty dollars', which was the original amount that I'd wanted for mowing his lawn. “You're right,” he said, “that's a fair price.

“I bought you stock in a small company that makes coffins. They're just starting up and the stock is going for fifty cents a share.”

“Coffins? You mean for dead people?”

“Right.”

“But I don't want any coffins.”

“You're not going to get any. You're going to get eighty shares of stock in a company called the Memorial Wooden Container Corporation.”

“Well, good. Because a coffin … that's more trouble than I need right now.”

“Is something wrong?” We were standing on Arnold's front steps and he handed me some kind of hippie iced tea that tasted sweet but, he said, had no sugar in it. He studied my face.

“Nothing, really. It's just that I'm getting more and more jobs. I can't do them all and I have to start turning them down.”

“Supply and demand.” Arnold nodded. “It's groovy, man. The very nature of the concept of economic structure. You just need more mowers, more people, to meet the growing demand. The previous lawn service—before, of course, the unfortunate instance of the romantic … mishap—had a small crew of workers to handle the burden of all the lawns you're now working. You need to start distributing the wealth, dispersing the work. Far-out. It's beautiful.”

“Well, it might be beautiful, but I can't do it. I don't know anybody—”

“I might”—he held up his hand—“be able to help you with this.”

“Help me mow lawns?”

Even his smile looked round. “No. I'm busy. But I've done some investing for a man named Pasqual. He knows lots of people who are always looking for work. He's a good, reliable person, known him for years. Can you come back after dark?”

“Well, sure, I suppose. Not real late because my parents want me in by nine. But …” Alarm bells were ringing in my head. “Why only after dark?”

“Pasqual looks after his kids during the day. When his wife comes home from her job, then he goes to work.”

“He mows lawns when people are sleeping?”

Arnold shook his head. “No. He does other work that isn't so noisy. Trimming, fertilizing—that sort of thing. Quiet things that won't wake the neighborhood.”

“In the dark?”

“He wears a headlamp. Ingenious, really. I admire his creativity in the face of opposition. Entrepreneurship at its finest—there are no impossibilities, just hurdles to be overcome.”

“Is it, you know, safe?” Kenny Halverson's uncle
said he didn't like half the things he saw in the daylight and that there was a very good reason for being afraid of the dark. If we were supposed to be out in the dark, Kenny Halverson's uncle said, we'd be born with night-vision goggles on our heads.

“Pasqual is honest, which is really what you wanted to know. And yes, he's safe. If you don't want to meet him, that's fine. Just keep your business at its present level. But if you want to expand, I think Pasqual can help you.”

Five days earlier I had been wondering where I could find enough money for a bike inner tube and now I was considering how I could expand my business to distribute work and disperse wealth. I shook my head at how weird things had gotten and looked back at Arnold.

“Okay. Let's talk to Pasqual.”

“Groovy. I'll call him right now. We'll meet him tonight.”

And so we did.