Lawn Boy

  Before long, our numbers began to dwindle. Moses had to pick up his girlfriend from work. The lady in the sweats had to split at five fifteen, but not before she ducked into Walmart for a carton of smokes. Around five thirty, I spotted Tino and two sleepy-eyed companions I didn’t recognize in the northeast corner of the lot, spilling out of Tino’s beater van.

  “You work here now, ese?”

  “I’m protesting.”

  “Yeah, but do you work here? You get any kind of discount?”

  “I don’t work here. I told you, I’m protesting.”

  “They fire you?”

  “No. I’ve never worked here.”

  “So why you protesting, then?”

  “Because,” I said. “Walmart is exploitative.”

  “Okay, ese. I believe you. Hey, you still live with your mom?”

  “Shhh.”

  He said something in Spanish to his sleepy-eyed companions. They all laughed. Once again, Andrew came to my rescue, braces gleaming in the weak sunlight. “We’ve got signs, brothers. Join the resistance.”

  “No, thanks, mano. I got enough trouble.” Tino turned his attention back to me. “Hey, Miguel, you still got your mower?”

  “I got a new one.” If I could ever get it back from Goble.

  Tino nodded, looking impressed. “I keep my eye out for you.”

  He set a hand on my shoulder and gave me a pat before the three of them proceeded on their way into Walmart.

  “Give me a call, Miguel,” he shouted over his shoulder. “We grab a beer!”

  It wouldn’t be a proper protest unless the cops showed up eventually. Well, cop, in our case. I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised that the cop happened to be Jar Jar Binks, the racial profiler, who tried to shoot my tire.

  “You,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m occupying.”

  “Yeah, a parking lot, I can see that. You and your friends need to disperse.”

  Lowering his sign, Andrew stepped up, a little sauerkraut still stuck between his braces.

  “We’re not doing anything illegal, officer. We’re exercising our right to assemble. As a matter of fact, you ought to be protecting that right.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said the cop. “But we’ve had two complaints about the music. And you’re blocking the entrance—which is a fire hazard, last I checked. If I can’t get you kids to clear out, hey, no sweat off my back. I’ll just leave it to the hose jockeys. It’ll be fun breaking up their barbecue.”

  “Or you could just shoot somebody,” I observed.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “We’re doing absolutely nothing unlawful here, officer,” said Andrew.

  “Yeah, you already said that.”

  “The right to peaceably assemble is an inalienable—”

  “Save it, Cesar Chavez. Just quit blocking the entrance. If you want to save the world from great prices, move it over by the shopping carts.”

  Needless to say, Andrew wasn’t happy about the move, but we didn’t really have much choice. It took some more wind out of our sails, that’s for sure. Three more folks took the opportunity to drop out, and the few who remained started playing hacky sack. By six, the resistance folded once and for all.

  “You hungry?” said Andrew.

  “Starving.”

  We never did use the walkie-talkies.

  Lists and Reminders

  At Central Market, Andrew bought a couple of wild salmon fillets (sixteen bucks!), a bag of organic salad greens (six bucks!) and a six-pack of something called Hopjack (ten ninety-nine!). I figured the library must pay pretty darn well if Andrew could afford to shop like that. Or maybe he was a Trustafarian, but I doubted it. I mean, he was from Belfair, how could he be rich? He was gracious about not accepting my six bucks.

  We drove to Andrew’s apartment, which was way up on the hill above Rite Aid and Albertsons. It used to be a green belt up there, but developers gave the hill a buzz cut about ten years ago and started putting warts on its forehead. Developer is a bit of a misnomer, if you ask me. Rite Aid and Albertsons used to be wetlands. All that’s left now is a sad little swathe strewn with swamp grass and scraggly trees. It’s great for catching discarded Big Gulps and stray plastic bags, but I can’t say I’ve seen a lot of waterfowl there.

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous of Andrew’s apartment, which was at least six times the size of my shed. It was beautiful chaos: books stacked everywhere, boxes of old records. A receiver, turntable, and speakers. A writing desk, a brown sofa, an old wooden coffee table riddled with tea candles, rolling papers, and dental floss. A great big overgrown herb garden in the windowsill of the kitchen. There was a saxophone, some picket signs, a dented globe, and no TV. Everywhere you looked there were lists tacked to the wall.

  Places to go: Solomon Islands, Dublin, Aruba, Patagonia.

  Bucket list: Space travel. Adopt children. Finnegans Wake.

  Values: Gratitude. Curiosity. Empathy.

  What I liked about Andrew was that he was earnest and easygoing at the same time. He obviously had ambitions, among them civic-mindedness and straight teeth. But he wasn’t about to beat you over the head with his semivegetarianism or anything. Heck, he’d even eat a hot dog in a pinch.

  He opened us a couple of those expensive beers, and I sat at the dining-room table and watched him prepare the salmon on one of those wood planks they’re always gushing about at Red Lobster. There were even more lists plastered in the kitchen—on cabinets, on the refrigerator, over the sink.

  Qualities: Kindness. Thoughtfulness. Forgiveness.

  Ambitions: Strong heart. Clear mind. Pure body.

  Dos: Listen. Learn. Love.

  Don’ts: Judge. Project. Hold grudges.

  “Oh, the lists?” he said, registering my curiosity. “My constant attempt to be mindful. I tried yoga, but it gave me gas.”

  “So what are you trying so hard to achieve?” I asked.

  “I’m just trying to figure out how to be happy without being the best at anything, you know? What about you?”

  “I kind of want to be a writer, I guess. Or make some kind of splash with my topiary.”

  “An artist! Why didn’t you tell me that? That’s amazing. How could you not tell me that?”

  “I’m just a wannabe.”

  “Well, isn’t that where everybody starts? C’mon, no limits, no excuses. Get after it, Michael! Fake it till you make it. You can be anything you want.”

  “Pfff. I doubt that.”

  “It’s true—anything.”

  “I couldn’t be an astronaut.”

  “Sure you could.”

  “I’d have to be a pilot first.”

  “So?”

  “I’m field independent.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a brain thing. I have trouble separating details with the surrounding context or whatever. It means I could be flying upside down and I wouldn’t even know it. They don’t let people like me be pilots.”

  “C’mon, Michael, rules are made to be changed.”

  After dinner, Andrew and I took our beers and sat on the veranda overlooking the Rite Aid parking lot. What with the glow of the lights, and the traffic on 305, and a whiff of Taco Bell in the gentle breeze, it was sort of pretty. Even the Taco Bell smell was okay. I’m not saying I was famished or anything, but I should’ve eaten that jumbo hot dog back at the protest, instead of taking the moral high road. Those exorbitantly priced organic greens didn’t stretch too far, if you know what I mean. Not that I didn’t appreciate Andrew’s effort.

  “What made you decide to get braces, anyway?” I asked.

  “The usual: I wanted to feel better about myself. I thought straight teeth might boost my confidence.”

  Instinctively, I ran my tongue over my recently vacated teeth.

  “The plan was to get the invisible kind, but I only had four grand. And that’s only becaus
e my uncle died and left me the money. I probably should have paid off my student loans.”

  “No, they look good,” I said. “I mean, they will. You know, afterward.”

  The truth is, I hardly noticed Andrew’s braces anymore. I could already see his future smile, and it was a winner. As far as I was concerned, all his lists and reminders were working, too. He was someone to aspire to: kind, thoughtful, and forgiving. He had a strong heart and a clear mind. I had no doubt that he’d see Patagonia and Aruba and that he’d read Finnegans Wake eventually. Shit, he’d probably find a way to do a little space travel, the big goof. The guy had a plan. Not an angle, like Chaz, not a self-serving dictate, like Goble, but an actual plan for a better life, a better world. He wasn’t about to sit there with crooked teeth and take the scraps the world offered him. He did things. He attended lectures. He bought local. He joined a Toastmasters group. He was going to mindfully plot his course, and I respected the hell out of that.

  As the evening wore on, Andrew shifted the focus to me, asking me questions as though he was hungry for the answers. What books had changed my life? What were my five favorite movies? He asked me about Suquamish, and I didn’t really have much to wow him with—no great bookstores or Ethiopian restaurants, no killer nightspots. Just the Tide’s Inn and the minimart and the abandoned grocery store. But Andrew was interested all the same. We didn’t talk about football or chicks on TV we’d like to bang. No complaining about gays and Mexicans. There was here and now, and the future, wherein anything was possible, at least that’s how it felt.

  Andrew actually listened to me when I talked—not like a lot of people, who only seemed to be waiting for their own turn to talk. He asked me about Nate and my mom and Freddy. He said that he wanted to meet them all, that he wanted to come to our house and cook for us. He wanted to know all about the Great American Landscaping Novel. He wanted to be my first reader. He wanted to see my merman and my mushrooms and my pipe-smoking gnome.

  After a while, I began to feel like I was talking too much about myself.

  “Not at all,” he insisted. “I want to know more. What about your dad? You never talk about him.”

  So I began to regale him with what little there was to tell about Victor Muñoz and the shadow that he didn’t much cast. I told Andrew about the time my dad took me to Disneyland and told me they moved. Most people get a kick out of that story. I mean, it’s pretty funny, even though the experience broke my heart. Even if it largely defined my expectations for the life that lay ahead of me, even if the yearning and disappointment, the sense of possibility that died that day, still reverberated somewhere down deep inside of me. I recalled clutching that chain-link fence in the spitting rain and looking out over the sea of pitted concrete and the half-barren shipyard beyond, the putrid stench of clams assaulting me, the seagulls jeering at me from above. And the whole time I told the story to Andrew, he seemed to vacillate between horror and indignation. He didn’t laugh once. In fact, for an instant, I thought he might cry.

  “It really wasn’t a big deal,” I insisted. “I mean, at least he made an effort, right?”

  “Hmph,” Andrew said, looking vaguely out over the lights of the strip mall. “My father hasn’t spoken to me in four years. I’m dead to him. He won’t even acknowledge my existence. People ask him about me, and he shrugs or waves me off. My mom talks about me, and he changes the subject.”

  “That’s fucked up,” I said.

  “But it’s my mom who really kills me. Every single time I talk to her, she wonders aloud where she went wrong with me, you know? Like I’m a mistake. And it doesn’t matter who I am, or how decent I am, or how hard I try, or what I believe, or what I accomplish—there will always be something fundamentally wrong with me in her eyes. A parent’s love is supposed to be unconditional. But if my mom had a choice, she’d have me be somebody else entirely.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother felt the same way about Nate and me.

  “Dude, you’re amazing how you are,” I said.

  “Stop,” said Andrew.

  When I looked at him, he sort of grimaced like he was about to get sick, but then I saw that his eyes were brimming over with tears, so I set my hand on his knee and gave it a little pat and tried to think of something lighthearted to say.

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of.

  And that’s when Andrew did a very unexpected thing, something that made me a little uncomfortable: he clasped my hand in his own, and he squeezed it.

  Making a Stand

  Though I possessed zero street cred as a protester, having never been arrested, detained, gassed, or beaten, Andrew didn’t hold it against me. He assured me that I’d get my opportunity sooner or later. As for him, he’d been arrested twice. Once at the Bangor nuclear submarine base for attempting to serve coffee to state patrol officers and once for chaining himself to the wrong tree. The fact that it was the wrong tree was immaterial.

  “These are the sacrifices we make,” he explained.

  Maybe today was my day to get arrested, I kept telling myself. Or gassed. Or beaten. But secretly, I hoped it wouldn’t be.

  We were scheduled to occupy the southwest corner of a strip mall in Silverdale, protesting a pet store that allegedly purchased their puppies from a notorious puppy mill in Kansas. The previous week, Andrew had sent out press releases announcing the protest. He’d been recruiting aggressively. Moses was bringing his little sister. The lady in sweatpants was bringing her son.

  “Gandhi said that ‘the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by how it treats its animals,’ ” Andrew told me in the Subaru as we were passing Skippers. “Somebody has to advocate for these animals, Michael. They can’t advocate for themselves.”

  When we arrived at the pet store ahead of schedule, nobody was waiting for us. For the next fifteen minutes, Andrew checked his phone obsessively. I guess he figured there’d be at least one TV crew since he sent out all those press releases.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” he wanted to know. “Where’s the commitment? Doesn’t anybody care?”

  “They’ll be here,” I assured him.

  I knew I was lying, but I think it softened the blow when nobody else showed up. Not even Moses. Not even Sweatpants and her son. So the puppy mill protest wasn’t exactly the March on Washington. Nevertheless, we did occupy space, and nobody could take that away from us. And we carried ourselves with dignity and the requisite amount of moral outrage, hoisting our picket signs high, marching purposefully to and fro in front of the entrance like a pair of armed sentries. Not that there was any traffic to contend with—not like Walmart. Nobody was going to the vacuum repair or Radio Shack. Mostly people were going to T.J. Maxx and Starbucks, and one or two people to the hair salon.

  Around noon, we got our first potential convert when an earnest, dirty-faced girl of eight or nine in a grease-stained sweatshirt stopped short of the entrance to read our signs.

  “Where’s your mommy and daddy?” I asked.

  “My daddy is in Pensacola with that whore Loretta,” she said. “And my mommy is at T.J Maxx.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  “She lets me wait at the pet store.”

  “What’s your name, sweetie?” said Andrew.

  “Waverly,” she said.

  “Well, Waverly, you don’t want to wait at this particular pet store, because they get their puppies from a puppy mill.”

  “What’s a puppy mill?” Waverly asked.

  “A puppy mill is a terrible place,” said Andrew. “It’s a place where little puppies die of neglect and starvation.”

  “Oh,” she said, visibly unnerved.

  In my opinion, Waverly didn’t need any more convincing. I think she was ready to boycott the place, I really do. But Andrew was too impassioned to notice. And I couldn’t really blame him. Finally, somebody was listening! This is how you made change happen!

  “Some puppy mills,” he explained, “are
littered with piles of dead, partially eaten dogs, stuffed in corners and hanging from rafters. And in some puppy mills, starving adult dogs eat their newborn puppies.”

  Around now, Waverly’s face muscles started twitching visibly, and her chin began to quaver. I nudged Andrew, but he was in the zone.

  “One miller stuffed five Rottweiler puppies into a birdcage and left them to starve. Except that they kept growing, anyway. And eventually they were too large to be extracted from the cage, and they had to be euthanized through the bars.”

  I think it was about at this point that Waverly began to hyperventilate. But Andrew was on fire.

  “When the females are no longer fertile, they’re left to starve, and their bodies are fed to—”

  I would describe it as a screech, the sound Waverly made. Or maybe part screech, part squeal. Have you ever stepped on a puppy’s tail? Like that, but sustained—really sustained. It was goddamn unsettling. Only when shoppers started converging on us from all directions did Andrew realize he’d miscalculated.

  “What have you done to that child?” demanded the lady from the travel agency, having charged out the door.

  “Hey now!” said a fat guy in front of the vacuum repair.

  “Yo!” cried a nearby tweaker in a filthy Ravens cap.

  People were now rushing out of T.J. Maxx and the hair salon to see what all the fuss was about. Still screeching like a banshee, fists clenched, Waverly clutched her arms tightly to her chest. Setting our picket signs aside, we did our best to deal with the situation. Lots of shushing and considerable shoulder patting. But Waverly couldn’t be reached. She was a human teakettle.