The Elephant Vanishes (34 page)

I drove with all the windows open. The wind grew brisk as I headed out of the city, the surroundings greener. The simmering heat of the lawns and the smell of dry dirt came on stronger; the clouds were outlined sharp against the sky. Fantastic weather. Perfect for taking a little summer day trip with a girl somewhere. I thought about the cool sea and the hot sands. And then I thought of a cozy air-conditioned room with crisp blue sheets on the bed. That’s all. Aside from that, I didn’t think about a thing. My head was all beach and blue sheets.

I went on thinking about these very things while getting the tank filled at a gas station. I stretched out on a nearby patch of grass and casually watched the attendant check the oil and wipe the windows. Putting my ear to the ground, I could hear all
kinds of things. I could even hear what sounded like distant waves, though of course it wasn’t. Only the rumble of all the different sounds the earth sucked in. Right in front of my eyes, a bug was inching along a blade of grass. A tiny green bug with wings. The bug paused when it reached the end of the grass blade, thought things over awhile, then decided to go back the same way it came. Didn’t look all that particularly upset.

Wonder if the heat gets to bugs, too?

Who knows?

In ten minutes, the tank was full, and the attendant honked the horn to let me know.

My destination address turned out to be up in the hills. Gentle, stately hills, rolling down to rows of zelkova trees on either flank. In one yard, two small boys in their birthday suits showering each other with a hose. The spray made a strange little two-foot rainbow in the air. From an open window came the sound of someone practicing the piano. Quite beautifully, too; you could almost mistake it for a record.

I pulled the van to a stop in front of the appointed house, got out, and rang the doorbell. No answer. Everything was dead quiet. Not a soul in sight, kind of like siesta time in a Latin country. I rang the doorbell one more time. Then I just kept on waiting.

It seemed a nice enough little house: cream-colored plaster walls with a square chimney of the same color sticking up from right in the middle of the roof. White curtains hung in the windows, which were framed in gray, though both were sun-bleached beyond belief. It was an old house, a house all the more becoming for its age. The sort of house you often find at summer resorts, occupied half the year and left empty the other half. You know the type. There was a lived-in air to the house that gave it its charm.

The yard was enclosed by a waist-high French-brick wall topped by a rosebush hedge. The roses had completely fallen off, leaving only the green leaves to take in the glaring summer
sun. I hadn’t really taken a look at the lawn yet, but the yard seemed fairly large, and there was a big camphor tree that cast a cool shadow over the cream-colored house.

It took a third ring before the front door slowly opened and a middle-aged woman emerged. A huge woman. Now, I’m not so small myself, but she must have been a good inch and a half taller than me. And broad at the shoulders, too. She looked like she was plenty angry at something. She was around fifty, I’d say. No beauty certainly, but a presentable face. Although, of course, by “presentable” I don’t mean to suggest that hers was the most likable face. Rather thick eyebrows and a squarish jaw attested to a stubborn, never-go-back-on-your-word temperament.

Through sleep-dulled eyes she gave me the most bothered look. A slightly graying shock of stiff frizzy hair rippled across the crown of her head; her two thick arms drooped out of the shoulders of a frumpy brown cotton dress. Her limbs were utterly pale. “What is it?” she said.

“I’ve come to mow the lawn,” I said, taking off my sunglasses.

“The lawn?” She twisted her neck. “You mow lawns?”

“That’s right, and since you called—”

“Oh, I guess I did. The lawn. What’s the date today?”

“The fourteenth.”

To which she yawned, “The fourteenth, eh?” Then she yawned again. “Say, you wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

Taking a pack of Hope regulars out of my pocket, I offered her one and lit it with a match. Whereupon she exhaled a long, leisurely puff of smoke up into the open air.

“Of all the …” she began. “What’s it gonna take?”

“Timewise?”

She thrust out her jaw and nodded.

“Depends on the size and how much work it needs. May I take a look?”

“Go ahead. Seeing’s how you gotta size it up first.”

There were some hydrangea bushes and that camphor tree and the rest was lawn. Two empty birdcages were set out beneath a window. The yard looked well tended, the grass was fairly short—hardly in need of mowing. I was kind of disappointed.

“This here’s still okay for another two weeks. No reason to mow now.”

“That’s for me to decide, am I right?”

I gave her a quick look. Well, she did have me there.

“I want it shorter. That’s what I’m paying you money for. Fair enough?”

I nodded. “I’ll be done in four hours.”

“Awful slow, don’t you think?”

“I like to work slow.”

“Well, suit yourself.”

I went to the van, took out the electric lawn mower, grass clippers, rake, garbage bag, my thermos of iced coffee, and my transistor radio, and brought them into the yard. The sun was climbing steadily toward the center of the sky. The temperature was also rising steadily. Meanwhile, as I was hauling out my equipment, the woman had lined up ten pairs of shoes by the front door and began dusting them with a rag. All of them women’s shoes, but of two different sizes, small and extra-large.

“Would it be all right if I put on some music while I work?” I asked.

The woman looked up from where she crouched. “Fine by me. I like music myself.”

Immediately I set about picking up whatever stones lay around the yard, and only then started up the lawn mower. Stones can really damage the blades. The mower was fitted with a plastic receptacle to collect all the clippings. I’d remove this receptacle whenever it got too full and empty the clippings into the garbage bag. With two thousand square feet to mow, even a short growth can amount to a lot of clippings. The sun kept broiling down on me. I stripped off my sweat-soaked T-shirt and kept working. In my shorts, I must have looked dressed
down for some barbecue. I was all sweat. At this rate, I could have kept drinking water and drinking water and still not pissed a drop.

After about an hour of mowing, I took a break and sat myself down under the camphor tree to drink some iced coffee. I could feel my entire body just drinking up the sugar. Cicadas were droning overhead. I turned on the radio and poked around the dial for a decent disc jockey. I stopped when I came to a station playing Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” lay down on my back, and just looked up through my shades at the sun filtering between the branches.

The woman came and planted herself by my head. Viewed from below, she resembled the camphor tree. Her right hand held a glass, and in it whiskey and ice were aswirl in the summer light.

“Hot, eh?” she said.

“You said it,” I replied.

“So what’s a guy like you do for lunch?”

I looked at my watch. It was 11:20.

“When noon rolls around, I’ll go get myself something to eat somewhere. I think there’s a hamburger stand nearby.”

“No need to go out of your way. I’ll fix you a sandwich or something.”

“Really, it’s all right. I always go off to get a bite.”

She raised the glass of whiskey to her mouth and downed half of it in one swallow. Then she pursed her lips and let out a sigh. “No bother to me. I was going to make something for myself anyway. C’mon, let me get you something.”

“Well, then, all right. Much obliged.”

“That’s okay,” she said, and trudged back into the house, slowly swaying at the shoulders.

I worked with the grass clippers until twelve. First, I went over the uneven spots in my mowing job; then, after raking up the clippings, I proceeded to trim where the mower hadn’t reached. Real time-consuming work. If I’d wanted to do just an adequate job, I could have done only so much and no more; if I
wanted to do it right, I could do it right. But just because I’d get down to details didn’t necessarily mean my labors were always appreciated. Some folks would call it tedious nit-picking. Still, as I said before, I’m one for doing my best. It’s just my nature. And even more, it’s a matter of pride.

A noon whistle went off somewhere, and the woman took me into the kitchen for sandwiches. The kitchen wasn’t big, but it was clean and tidy. And except for the humming of the huge refrigerator, all was quiet. The plates and silverware were practically antiques. She offered me a beer, which I declined, seeing as I was “still on the job.” So she served me some orange juice instead. She herself, however, had a beer. A half-empty bottle of White Horse stood prominently on the table, and the sink was filled with all kinds of empty bottles.

I enjoyed the sandwich. Ham, lettuce, and cucumber, with a tang of mustard. Excellent sandwich, I told her. Sandwiches were the only things she was good at, she said. She didn’t eat a bite, though—just nibbled at a pickle, and devoted the rest of her attention to her beer. She wasn’t especially talkative, nor did I have anything worth bringing up.

At twelve-thirty, I returned to the lawn. My last afternoon lawn.

I listened to rock music on FEN while I gave one last touch-up trim, then raked the lawn repeatedly and checked from several angles for any overlooked places, just like barbers do. By one-thirty, I was two-thirds done. Time and again, sweat would get into my eyes, and I would go douse my face at the outdoor faucet. A couple of times I got a hard-on, then it would go away. Pretty ridiculous, getting a hard-on just mowing a lawn.

I finished working by two-twenty. I turned off the radio, took off my shoes, and walked all over the lawn in my bare feet: nothing left untrimmed, no uneven patches. Smooth as a carpet.

“Even now, I still like you,” she had written in her last letter. “You’re kind, and one of the finest people I know. But somehow, that just wasn’t enough. I don’t know why I feel that way, I just do. It’s a terrible thing to say, I know, and it probably won’t
amount to much of an explanation. Nineteen is an awful age to be. Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to explain things better, but after a few years it probably won’t matter anymore, will it?”

I washed my face at the faucet, then loaded my equipment back into the van and changed into a new T-shirt. Having done that, I went to the front door of the house to announce that I’d finished.

“How about a beer?” the woman asked.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said. What could be the harm of one beer, after all?

Standing side by side at the edge of the yard, we surveyed the lawn, I with my beer, she with a long vodka tonic, no lemon. Her tall glass was the kind they give away at liquor stores. The cicadas were still chirping the whole while. The woman didn’t look a bit drunk; only her breathing seemed a little unnatural, drawn slow between her teeth with a slight wheeze.

“You do good work,” she said. “I’ve called in a lot of lawn-maintenance people before, but you’re the first to do this good a job.”

“You’re very kind,” I said.

“My late husband was fussy about the lawn, you know. Always did a crack job himself. Very much like the way you work.”

I took out my cigarettes and offered her one. As we stood there smoking, I noticed how big her hands were compared to mine. Big enough to dwarf both the glass in her right hand and the Hope regular in her left. Her fingers were stubby—no rings—and several of the nails had strong vertical lines running through them.

“Whenever my husband got any time off, he’d always be mowing the lawn. But mind you, he was no oddball.”

I tried to conjure up an image of the woman’s husband, but I couldn’t quite picture the guy. Any more than I could imagine a camphor-tree husband and wife.

The woman wheezed again. “Ever since my husband passed
away,” she said, “I’ve had to call in professionals. I can’t stand too much sun, you know, and my daughter, she doesn’t like getting tanned. Other than to get a tan, no real reason for a young girl to be mowing lawns anyway, right?”

I nodded.

“My, but I do like the way you work, though. That’s the way lawns ought to be mowed.”

I looked the lawn over one more time. The woman belched.

“Come again next month, okay?”

“Next month’s no good,” I said.

“How’s that?” she said.

“This job here today’s my last,” I said. “If I don’t get myself back on the ball with my studies, my grade point average is going to be in real trouble.”

The woman looked me hard in the face, then glanced at my feet, then looked back at my face.

“A student, eh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What school?”

The name of the university made no visible impression on her. It wasn’t a very impressive university. She just scratched behind her ear with her index finger.

“So you’re giving up this line of work, then?”

“Yeah, for this summer at least,” I said. No more mowing lawns for me this summer. Nor next summer, nor the next.

The woman filled her cheeks with vodka tonic as if she were going to gargle, then gulped down her precious mouthwash half a swallow at a time. Her whole forehead beaded up with sweat, like it was crawling with tiny bugs.

“Come inside,” the woman said. “It’s too hot outdoors.”

I looked at my watch. Two thirty-five. Getting late? Still early? I couldn’t make up my mind. I’d already finished with all my work. From tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to mow another inch of grass. I had really mixed feelings.

“You in a hurry?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“So why don’t you just come in and have something cool to drink before you get on your way? Won’t take much time. And besides, I’ve got something I want you to see.”

Something she wants me to see?

Still, there was no hesitating, one way or another. She had already started to shuffle off ahead of me. She didn’t even bother to look back in my direction. I had no choice but to follow her. I felt kind of light-headed from the heat.