Volunteer
Let’s stop mourning for the good old days.
We are largely living in them still.
—Euell Gibbons
MY LAST WEEK ON THE JOB STARTED (as usual) with a crisis. “Code Four, Gail,” Carl said, throwing me my cap. He never could pronounce my name. “It’s the Barbers, out in Whispering Woods subdivision, south of New Brunswick, just off Route One.” He backed the pickup to the shed end of the greenhouse and quizzed me while I threw equipment into the back. “Got the drip nozzles? Got the 4 plus 6? Got the Sylovan, the Di50Si? The lawn injectors? The Thumper, just in case? Oh, and a Dutch Elm chip for the mall. We might make it by there today.”
It was a bright, mournful June day. The traffic was colorful and hard. The roadsides were brilliant green; newly-painted for spring.
“Here we are, Gail. Whispering Woods.” We pulled past the wrought-iron gates between the two big laser maples with Dolby rustling leaves, and around the curved drive lined with big houses set on wide pseudolawns. It was all “nerf and turf” (that’s what Carl calls verdachip and astrolawn) until the Barbers’ house, at the turnaround.
Their lawn was not green but yellow-green. It was the only organic lawn in the sub. We put it in for them four years ago, and for two years it almost made it; then last summer we had to put it on twenty-four-hour IV, and now this looked like the end of the line.
Mrs. Barber was standing at the door looking worried. Her husband pulled in the drive just as we did. She must have called us both at the same time.
“Jesus,” Mr. Barber said as he got out of his Chrysler Iacocca and looked at his yellowing hundred thousand dollars ($104,066.29 to be precise; I sometimes watched Carl do the books). “It’s not too late, is it, Carl?”
“It’s never too late, Mr. Barber,” Carl said. The greenest part of the lawn made a crisscross pattern like an X-ray showing the underground grid where the drip saturators were buried; the rest of the grass was jaundiced-yellow. A darker brown edge ran all around the yard, like paper just before it bursts into flame.
“Code Six, Gail,” Carl said, revising his original assessment. “Give me 4.5 liters of straight Biuloformicaine on a speed inject. And be quick about it. I’ll load up the ambulofogger.”
The nutritank was built onto the side of the ranch-style home, disguised as a shed. I spilled in a four-can of Bi, added some Phishphlakes for good measure, and set the underpumps whining on Super. Out front, Carl trotted up and down the lawn with a Diprothemytaline sprayer, while the Barbers looked on, worried, from the doorway. A few neighbors had gathered at the curb, a mixture of concern and poorly disguised pleasure on their faces. I could tell that the Barbers and their organic lawn were not popular.
The quick Dipro fix gives a green flush to the skinny little leaves of the grass. I could hear them sigh with relief through the soles of my feet. But unless the saturasolution coming up from the IV grid found living roots, the whole thing would be a waste.
Carl looked grave as he put the sprayer back into the truck. “If it’s not looking better by Wednesday, call me,” he said to the Barbers. “You have my home phone number. We’ll stop by on Friday to adjust the IV solution, and I’ll check it then.”
“How much is this—going to cost?” Mr. Barber whispered, so his wife and the neighbors couldn’t hear. Carl gave him a mournful, disapproving look, and Mr. Barber turned away, ashamed.
“Hell, I understand where he’s coming from, though,” Carl told me when we were back on the road. “It used to be that when you bought a lawn you could get insurance, especially with a new house, but these days nobody is insured. You can insure a tree, a potted one, anyway, or a cybershrub, and of course any kind of holo. But a living lawn? Jesus, Gail, no wonder the guy’s worried.”
Carl’s empathy is his best quality.
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END OF SAMPLE
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