I got hired on at the lawnscaper’s the summer after my senior year. It was a big franchise, one you’d know the name of if I told it to you. I was off to college in the fall and figured there were worse ways to make money in the meantime. Couple girls from my class went off to work at The Trophy Club, I heard. Not that I ever went to check. There was never any fun in paying for it. They could still be there shaking ass for pocket change for all I know.
I’d heard, too, that Salinger stormed the beaches of Normandy with an early draft of The Catcher in the Rye stuffed in his breastpocket. Hell, I’d aced AP lit. I figured if he could find time to write the Great American Novel between shooting Nazis and all that, I could probably do him one better between one lawn and the next. You can only think that way when you’re eighteen.
Five other guys signed on when I did. Just me and Jordan finished out the whole season. Two didn’t make it through the week of onboarding paperwork and training videos. The other two washed out the second week, when Glen, the branch manager, sent us out in the field for the first time with our trainers and last season’s uniforms. The XXL shirt Glen gave me fit fine but the pants had somebody else’s name printed on the tag and they were tight.
“You’ll shrink into ‘em ‘fore long anyhow,” Glen said. “Pushin’ the spreader’s no joke.” He wasn’t lying. I was down to fighting weight by the end of the summer. Of course, I gained it all back and some change at the dining hall my first semester, but for about a week there I looked real good. At least the girls on campus seemed to think so. Taylor, Maddie…
I’m drifting.
That first day out, I was supposed to ride along with Jeff but he called off the night before so Glen paired me up with Tod instead. Tod, with just the one d at the end. If I didn’t remember him for the other thing I’d remember him for that.
He came in when Glen was deciding what to do with me. I’m not tall by any stretch, but I stood head and shoulders taller than Tod did. His salt and pepper beard grew into the tangle of his chest hair and I guessed him to be forty or somewhere around there. He reminded me of a badger or a wolverine, some squat woodland animal with sharp claws and beady eyes.
“Tod, mind taking Dawson here along with you this morning? Show him the ropes?” Tod didn’t say anything right off, not until Glen mentioned he’d get an extra dollar fifty for every hour I rode with him. “I’d be glad to, boss,” Tod smiled. His teeth were stained nicotine yellow. “Won’t be a problem at all.”
I followed him out to his truck. It was a late model Ford. White, like all the rest. Half of the bed was taken up by a tank of liquid herbicide; the other half by a pallet of 19-0-5 fert stacked nine or ten tall.
The sun was just coming up. Lawnscapers get an early start, especially on days it’s supposed to get into the nineties before noon.
“Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company. Just throw all that shit on the floor or… wherever. Ought to be space behind your seat.” I did like he told me. Buried under the fast food wrappers and spent cigarette cartons I found an old beat up copy of The Day of the Triffids. “Big reader?” I asked.
Tod looked up from the tablet, saw what I was holding, then looked at me. You would’ve thought I’d found a porno mag or something, the way he blushed. “Mostly science fiction. Bradbury, Asimov, guys like that. I don’t really go in for all that literary stuff.” He said. “I like that one because it’s about triffids, you know, killer plant monsters. Makes me feel good about this job.”
I changed the subject. I’d outgrown Asimov and the rest of them around the time I learned to tie my own shoes. I read real books; I didn’t want to spend the rest of the shift hearing about robots. “How long have you been doing this? This job, I mean.”
“Back before we got bought out, and that was… Damn, that’s coming up on about five years now. And seven or eight years before then, so, what, that makes it twelve or thirteen years total.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything. He got logged into the tablet and started studying the day’s route. Our first stop was about twenty minutes away. Tod put on the radio, saving me from trying to make any more conversation. “I always keep it on local stations,” he said. “That way I know when there’s rain coming. You never want to get caught in the rain.” I nodded. That made sense.
We listened to the broadcast. There wasn’t anything about rain, but there was plenty about that family of four the Toledo PD found murdered in their home the week before. The killer, the radio lady said, was still at large. “Gonna be a good day,” he said.
We followed the GPS to the first house. Tod pulled up to the curb, put the truck in park. “Alright,” he said. “Go up and knock. Always knock. For one, the company keeps track of it. Don’t ask me how, but they do. For two, it’s the best way to figure out if they’ve got dogs. Last thing you want is to open the back gate and have some two hundred fifty pound half pitbull/half motherfucker mix bearing down on you.” Tod paused. “Did you ever meet Chad?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s because he didn’t knock.”
I crossed the lawn to the front door and knocked. Nobody answered. That’s usually how it went. Even if they were home, they didn’t want to talk to a lawnscaper first thing in the morning, literary aspirations or no.
Tod’d taken the spreader off the back of the truck and was standing beside it smoking his first cigarette of the day. “Anybody home?” I told him no. He took one last drag, then tossed the butt to the ground and stomped it out with his chemical resistant boots. They looked like the ones Glen had given me, just dirtier. “Let’s get to work.”
Tod dropped the tailgate and pulled a bag of 19-0-5 off the pallet and swung it over the spreader. The bags weighed about forty pounds a piece, though you wouldn’t know that watching him handle them. He wrapped his left arm around the bag, holding it close to his body. He dug in his pocket with his right hand, searching for a knife. I was expecting a box cutter or one of those shiny multi-tools I’d seen the other guy’s carrying, but instead he pulled out a black handled stiletto. It looked strange in his gloved hand. Out of place, somehow.
“Hell of a pigsticker, isn’t it?” he said, popping the blade. I nodded.
The blade gleamed in the early morning sun for only a moment before he stabbed it into the bag. He drew the knife across in one impossibly fluid motion. Fertilizer gushed from the incision into the hopper.
“Your turn,” he said, handing me the knife handle first. I sat it down on the tailgate and wrestled another bag off the pallet. I tried to do it the way Tod had done, but I’m lefthanded so I held the bag with my right. I positioned it over the hopper and reached back for the knife.
I jammed the knife into the bag, but I couldn’t draw the blade across near as smooth. I ended up sawing back and forth, back and forth across the thing. Granules of fertilizer started spilling out. Slowly at first, then at all at once in a great bursting release. I was left standing there sweating and panting from the exertion, holding an empty sack in one hand and a switchblade in the other.
“Not bad. One more and you’ll be ready to start pushing,” he said.
I did it again. Smoother that time, but still not as smooth as Tod was. I said as much and he told me I’d get there with practice. “By the end of the season you’ll be a pro.” Tod was right.
Glen gave me my own route the next week. I only got smoother. I even picked up a knife of my own at a gas station. It’s got a cute little bikini girl on the handle. I still have it.
I saw Tod around the branch until I didn’t. I didn’t think much of it. We didn’t often speak after that first week, and when we did it wasn’t about anything. The weather, at most. Maybe he’d started coming in a little bit later. Maybe he’d quit. Maybe he’d gotten fired. Whatever, I didn’t care enough to add another ten minutes to my in-branch time asking after him. Glen was a bastard about that. “I’m not paying you guys to stand around thumbing your asses,” He’d say. “Hit the lawns.”
The next time I heard about Tod it was on the news. TPD caught Tod. He’d left a butt at the scene of the crime and some crack forensic dick matched the DNA on it to the DNA in his mouth and a month later he was sitting in jail, awaiting trial.
I imagined him handling that woman the way he’d handled the bags; one arm wrapped around her chest to hold her steady while he sliced her white belly open. Did he do the man the same? The kids?
I was sick on my chemical resistant boots.
— Dawson Alexander Wohler