Front Yard (28 page)

“Well, you can add this to the lawsuit,” said Mary. “Shirelle, what's wrong?”

“This yard,” said Shirelle, choking back sobs, her face twitching in agony. “All that's happened to it over the past few days. And all the pain you can feel coming from the flowers. It's like one vast moan out there. There's no joy, no energy, no motivation to recharge and recover. And now the arbor's all torn up, and for
what?
”

Nan reached across to pat her hand.

“Thank you, Shirelle,” she said. “But it's not so bad. Who knows? We might still have a comeback. Stranger things have certainly happened. Last year, for instance. But, if not, we'll just roll up our sleeves and try again next year.”

 

Three weeks later, the Fremonts bid Shirelle adieu and best of luck in her new job with a major landscaping company in a neighboring state. The Burdick's sign had been taken down, either by predetermined design, or in acknowledgment of the very obvious fact that there was little to look at anymore. In a few weeks, Ellis and Cullen would be leaving for college, and Mary would lug her trombone to the first marching band practice of her freshman year at Stanford.

32

T
he Fremonts loitered on the patio later than usual on a hot, muggy August night that seemed more suited to a six-pack of cold beer than a bottle of tepid Sagelands. Still, after three glasses each of '07 vintage, George and Nan were able to lapse into the sort of listless comfort that turns a blind eye to the streams of salty liquid soaking your shirt, blurring your vision, and making your underarms scream out for a thick coat of Right Guard.

Since the plague of insects and unearthing Miss Price's genealogical treasure, they'd been mired in a state of downtrodden ennui. This last assault on their gardens and the enervating treasure hunt debacle left them winded and apathetic, and there was no Shirelle to buck them up with her relentless enthusiasm. There had been no effort to replace their broken and destroyed flowers, or to even maintain what had survived undamaged. Mary's focus was now entirely on her approaching freshman year and a boy named Bertram she'd met at work.

A week before, all plant communications shut down.

The citronella candles still burned in their effort to drive off a population of mosquitoes already greatly diminished from its early-July peak. The moon rose through the trees big and butterscotch and a couple of slivers short of full. They barely noticed it. George poured them each a refill, but he did so mechanically. He wasn't even giving the bottle that little quarter-twist when he poured out the wine. A few drops spattered onto the tabletop.

“George, dear, I have the terrible feeling that we have misspent a sizable chunk of our adult lives.”

George nodded.

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow, we shift gears. Either both of us get working like normal people, or find hobbies that won't keep putting us through this hell-and-heaven cycle every year. Our gardening days are over. Maybe whatever money we make out of this lawsuit can get us off to a good start in another direction. Hey, maybe we can start traveling again.”

“Hmmm.”

“That's it from you? You're just going to be Mr. Monosyllable from now on?”

“No.”

“Okay, then, it's settled. Starting tomorrow, or I guess today if you want to be technical about it, the Fremonts move on to a new, more productive stage of life. That means putting our heads together to resolve this mortgage debacle. It also means job searches. All-day job searches. And yours could be a long one, since there's that wine-break blot on your employment history. So, no more wine for you, mister. Or me either, for that matter. Our tippling days are over. First thing tomorrow, I head to the grocery store to load up on our new beverage of choice . . . herbal tea.”

“Guess that makes us
tea-
totalers now,” said George without a trace of humor coloring his voice.

 

“George!” Nan whispered urgently. “George! We have to go outside! We have to go outside
now
.”

“I know,” said George, who was already sitting up in bed. “I need to take my bat.”

“Yes, and I need to take the butcher knife.”

Without question or having to stifle so much as a yawn, George and Nan got out of bed, driven by some purpose they didn't understand and didn't bother to question. George reached under the bed for his Smokestack Gaines batting practice bat, stroked its smooth, polished barrel and the rougher surface on the knob of the handle, where the chip had gotten knocked off, and lifted it to batting stance position. Already having made her way into the kitchen, Nan retrieved the butcher knife from the knife holder block and practiced her thrusts and parries.

“Time to go,” said George, tapping the barrel of the bat into his palm like a billy club.

“I know,” said Nan. “But, George dear, isn't this kind of weird? I mean—”

George raised his hand for her to stop.

“Of course it's weird, Nan-bee. Life is weird. But we've received our summons and we have to go. It was only a matter of time. We knew this would come, sooner or later.”

“I know. But couldn't I at least get dressed?”

“No need.”

“No need? I don't want anybody seeing me in this baggy thing. I look like I've been living off cream puffs, Sugar Smacks, and heavily salted potato chips.”

“You think I want to go prancing around like this, in my pjs, with a baseball bat? At least I've got the Gordon plaid bottom and the Jethro Tull
Warchild
top on. Smart of me to put those on last night. What if I'd just been wearing my underwear, huh? Slippers on?”

“Umm-hmmm. You?”

“Yep. That should be enough. Let's go. Time's a-wastin'.”

The backyard, bathed in moonlight, seemed so much larger to them now, stretching out for acres upon acres. The bordering stretch of woods to the north appeared as a distant, impenetrable forest that was . . . shaking?

“Who is THAT?” George said, pointing to a form approaching rapidly from an opening in the trees. “Whoa! It's a woman and she's stark-naked!”

“Shhh! George, please temper your voyeuristic enthusiasm a little.”

Nan squinted. The woman didn't appear to be quite naked. Nan thought she could see a few strategically located weeds held in place by some unknown force, or maybe it was just sticky pine sap she was using. She had planted herself, firm and motionless, on the ground, long legs splayed out, and her spindly body perched precariously on tiptoes. It looked like she was holding a rod of some sort in her right hand. There was a muffled racket coming from somewhere in the forest behind her that was goopy- and crunchy-sounding at the same time. The closest George could come to describing it was by imagining a couple thousand buckets of Klinghopper's Homestyle Coleslaw on the move.

“That is Dr. Phyllis Sproot,” Nan said calmly. “She has either just leaped off the edge that separates the criminally insane from the only annoyingly so, or is really running behind in her laundry. Who the heck made the decision to let her out of the loony bin? I'd say we better get ready to defend ourselves.”

Nan thrust out her butcher knife, which she was happy to recall had just been sharpened by Curman's for free with her purchase of two pounds of tilapia fillets. George scrunched down, raised the bat up and pulled it behind his head, then wiggled it in the manner of Smokestack Gaines.

Dr. Sproot was now manipulating the rod and pointing it at them.

“George, look out!” shouted Nan. “She's got a gun.” There was a muffled pop and something clinked against the butcher knife and knocked it out of her hand. “George!”

George quickly jumped in front of Nan and pointed his bat directly at Dr. Sproot and her gun. There was another pop. George swung. Contact. The invisible BB pinged off the wood. Then another. Soon, George was swinging as fast as he could, dozens of tiny BBs pocking the white-ash smoothness of the bat. There was a short lull in the action as Dr. Sproot stopped to reload. Nan had retrieved her butcher knife, and, for a moment, gloried in the way the moonlight flashed off its blade. I can throw this thing if I have to, she thought; any target within ten yards I can hit and sink the blade in deep.

The racket, which had subsided for a while, now resumed and grew even louder as Dr. Sproot raised her arm then brought it down, pointing a withered, trembling finger straight at the Fremonts. Nan, as a great, moving mass that looked like an ocean tide coming in emerged from the forest, now recognized all the noise as a guttural sort of plant speech, though far more primitive than anything she was accustomed to.

“Gracious, George, those are plants making that noise. Bad plants. Weeds of all kinds. There must be thousands of them. Crabgrass. Dandelions. Cockleburs. Creeping bellflowers. Canadian thistles. And, better look out here, George. Sow thistles! Big damn sow thistles!”

George flinched. In the moonlight, Nan could see the veins tighten in his neck.

“Steel yourself, George, because what we're facing here is Dr. Sproot in a state of dishabille as the anti–Mother Nature, leading hundreds upon hundreds of weeds she has insulted, poisoned, dug out, crushed, and basically treated like vermin. And, if I'm picking up the vibes correctly, they can't wait to get their sticky appendages all over us.”

“Eccch!”

“That's right,” came a voice close enough to startle the bejesus out of them. “Dr. Sproot has carried her powers to a new height. Somehow, she's been able to call forth all the dead plants she's weeded out of her gardens, and turn them into little plant people with really bad attitudes.”

“Marta! Marta Poppendauber! What in heaven's name are you doing here in our dream or crusade or whatever it is? What are any of us doing here, for that matter?”

“Good question,” said Marta. “If I were to guess, I'd say Livia's forces of horticultural good are here arrayed against the forces of horticultural bad in one huge battle to decide the fate of gardening in Livia. But, hey, what do I know? That's just a guess.”

“I'll say one thing,” said another voice. “The girl's got talent. Never expected her to make it this far.”

“Edith!” cried Nan. “Or is it Sarah the Witch? What the heck is it you're calling yourself these days? Ah, hey, thanks for doing that frog-and-toad thing, and what was apparently a pretty dang good fairy impersonation. I must say, though, Edith, that you should have known better than throwing in with Dr. Sproot in the first place. And all for a little extra pocket change.”

Edith lowered her head and blushed in shame, though no one could see that in the milky darkness.

“You're right, Mrs. Fremont,” she moaned woefully. “I should have known she'd get carried away once she got a little witch power under her belt. I should have seen it and nipped it in the bud last year when we first met at the Hi-Lo. You heard, of course, that the mental health folks did an initial evaluation, gave her some drugs, and told her to go see a shrink. Then, they sprang her to the custody of one of her many local relatives, which is as good as no custody at all.”

“I figured that,” said Nan. “Otherwise, why would she be here marshaling all her forces to turn us into bone meal for her stupid coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend and yuccas?”

“Edith is now a helper for the good,” Marta said solemnly. “It's important that you know that. She helped you quite a bit last year, too, though we don't need to go into that here.”

“Yeah?” said George. “It seems as though you said some pretty nice things about Dr. Sproot, too, Marta. That sort of calls your judgment of character into question.”

“So, Edith,” said Nan. “If you're with us, what is it you're bringing to the party?”

“Look behind you.”

George and Nan turned to see that rank upon rank of flowers had moved into position behind them, and were seething with excitement and the sweet perfume of moral purpose.

“Our little soldiers!” Nan cried.

“This is Edith's doing,” said Marta. “With some help from the rest of us, that being mostly you, even though you don't realize it. But it's all we could muster. I'm afraid we're going to be outnumbered.”

“Hey!” yelled George, waving, once he picked out the coleuses. “Whaddup, y'all!” He winked and gave them a thumbs-up. Nan poked him.

“This is no time for either joking or favoritism, George. We've got serious work ahead of us. . . . Hey, what's that big wooden door with the transom on top doing over there in the middle of nowhere?”

“Don't go there,” Marta warned. “That's freshman-year chemistry and you haven't been to a single class all year.”

George felt his pajama bottoms suddenly slip to a pile around his feet, leaving him naked from the waist down. No one seemed to notice. Blushing from shame, George bent over to pull them back up again. The drawstrings around the waist tightened them up without his having to touch them, then knotted themselves up into a neat bow.

A BB tore into the petal of one of the petunias.

“First casualty!” George cried. “Dr. Sproot draws the first blood. Now, it's our turn. No quarter! No quarter for villains!” He raised his bat above his head and swung it around as a rallying device. Another BB ripped into the pink-and-white striated leaf of a coleus. It slumped, then rose back up, triumphantly.

“Only a flesh wound!” cried George. “Hurrah! Hurrah for the coleus!”

Nan patted his shoulder.

“George, let's tone down the lust-for-blood warrior stuff, can we? And get that bat going again, please.”

George flicked the bat right and left, then up and down, sending the incoming BBs scattering in all directions.

“What I want to know is this,” he said. “Isn't there some sort of shadowy acquaintance from your past that shows up at times like these to whisper in your ear that you're dreaming? When's that going to happen is what I want to know.”

“You're not dreaming,” Marta said.

Edith nodded.

“It may seem like a dream but it's not,” she said. “Dreams keep trying to muscle in on our territory, though.”

“Hey!” Marta shouted at a couple of creepy caped figures loitering around on the fringes of the woods. “Go away. You're in the wrong subconscious.” She looked at the illuminated dial on her wristwatch, which squiggled like an amoeba under a microscope. “Don't forget; only three hours till your bloodsucking night's done.”

“Mom! Daddy!”

“Mr. and Mrs. Fremont!”

George and Nan turned to see that Mary and Shirelle had joined them. They were carrying something that smelled both wonderful and dangerous.

“Yikes!” cried George. “Angel's trumpets! What'd you bring those along for? Shouldn't those guys be on the other side?”