Post 3

On Sunday, Peter woke up early and worked on the lawnmower a bit more. He made sure it had enough gas and oil, and fired it up and ran it long enough to know that it wouldn’t give him any problems. In the process, he cut the patch of grass next to the garage. Cutting lawns was a good job for him. He learned a lot about keeping his lawnmower running, how different people liked their lawns cut, and a little about customer service. He also got to know quite a bit about lawns and how to keep them from burning up in the hot, Colorado sun. It kept him active and out of the house in the summer, and in touch with the other people in the neighborhood. But most importantly, it got Laura Sinclair to talk to him!

After lunch, he walked the mower down the street to the address that Laura had given him. It was a nice split-level ranch house with a fenced-in yard. The front yard was mostly xeriscaped, with only a small patch of grass on either side. There was a gate between the front yard and the back, and Peter parked his mower next to it before walking up the steps to the front door and ringing the doorbell.

Mr. Sinclair answered the door. He was a heavy, balding man who reminded Peter of a used-car salesman. How someone as beautiful as Laura came from this man’s genes, he had no idea. They talked for a little while about Laura and school, and about how much Peter wanted for mowing their lawn. As they spoke, Mr. Sinclair walked Peter through the gate. They had a pretty sizeable back yard dotted with several large, older trees. A privacy fence separated their yard from the adjacent park. On one side of the yard was a doghouse where Knickers, the Sinclair’s terrier, was leashed.

Peter surveyed the amount of mowing that was there and was thankful he had brought along the extra gas can. He was going to need it. He and Mr. Sinclair finally settled on a price and Peter got to work. He was thankful that the afternoon had turned cloudy, since it kept the temperature down.

When he was about halfway through, it began to sprinkle down rain. Peter was more focused on making the path of the mower overlap in a straight line than on where he was in the yard. Suddenly, the mower made a loud sound, and then sounded as though it were going to choke out on heavy, wet grass. He knew it wasn’t that wet yet, and so was momentarily perplexed. He didn’t realize until it was too late that he had gotten too close to the dog’s leash, and had run it over, severing the line and tying up his mower blade.

The noise from the approaching mower had driven the dog into its little house, but when Peter turned off the engine, Knickers ran out, straight for the open back yard. He was a smart dog, though, and realized quickly that his leash wasn’t holding him back. Suddenly, he was a dog on a mission, and noisily made a beeline for the back fence before Peter could even react.

Peter ran half-heartedly across the lawn, but lost a lot of ground to the much faster Knickers. As he approached the back fence, he saw Knickers running back and forth chasing a shadow on the ground. A moment later he realized that Knickers was actually chasing a squirrel that was running across the fence.

The nervous squirrel jumped down off the fence and began running full-speed towards a tree in the Sinclair’s yard. Either Knickers was a fast dog or this was a slow squirrel, but while Peter watched, the dog caught up and bit down hard on the squirrel’s neck. For a moment, the squirrel squealed loudly, but with a violent shake of his head, Knickers silenced him forever. Pleased with his new play toy, Knickers tossed the dead squirrel into the air and ran after it, while Peter sprinted across the yard in his direction.

After a few tosses, the light-colored fur around Knickers’s mouth took on a reddish hue, stained with the blood of his toy. Peter finally caught up and, since Knickers was distracted, was able to grab the frayed end of the leash to keep the dog from reaching where he tossed the squirrel’s body. Knickers barked sharply at the body several times, and then looked back at Peter as the slack of his leash was taken in. Peter pulled the dog across the yard and knocked on the back door of the Sinclair’s house to let them know what had transpired.

Of course, Laura answered his knocking. “Hey, Peter. How goes the mowing?” she asked.

Peter felt the adrenaline rise, and found it difficult to make his mouth work again. She had that affect on him normally, but now that she has to tell someone about their dog killing a squirrel, he was doubly tongue-tied. Finally, he was able to say, “Could you get your dad? I need to tell him that I, um, ran over the leash.”

Laura laughed and stepped out the door. She looked down at Knickers and walked over to him. “Are you a free little dog, Knickers?” she asked in a playful tone. As she knelt down to pet him, she stopped suddenly. “What happened to your face?” she said to the dog. Then, turning to Peter, “What happened to his face? Is he bleeding?”

“No! He’s fine, he just got loose and got a squirrel in the back yard,” he said truthfully. Laura stood up quickly and said, “Eew! I’m getting my dad!” She ran back in the house, calling for her father.

Mr. Sinclair stepped out a few moments later. “What happened, Peter?” Peter explained everything to Mr. Sinclair, who asked Peter to wait a moment. He stepped back inside, then returned a few moments later with a length of clothesline. Mr. Sinclair agreed with a chuckle to take the dog to the side and hose the blood off his snout while Peter replaced the tie-down leash. When they were finished, Mr. Sinclair brought Peter a small trash bag to collect and dispose of the dead squirrel.

Reaching through the bag and wearing it inside-out like a glove, Peter was squatting down and about to pick up the body of the squirrel when he caught sight of movement out of the corner of his right eye. Just as he turned to look, a barely-discernable shadowy presence passed through him – he thought he felt it push its way right through the muscles at his hip, down his right leg and out his knee – and hovered next to the squirrel’s body. The sensation reminded him of the time in middle school shop class when he stepped on the exposed electrical wires that crossed the floor, connecting the old table saw to the outlet, except that the sensation of electrical current that flowed through him now seemed more faint, even somewhat disconnected from him. Momentarily stunned, as much from the sensation as from the strange sight he saw, Peter dropped the squirrel’s body and called out as he fell backwards, rolling onto his back. He barely heard Mr. Sinclair asking him if he needed any help as he watched the shadow change in color from a dark, flat gray to a dull red. It seemed to be absorbing something from the body of the squirrel. Ten seconds later, an insubstantial reddish cloud hovered over the dead squirrel, then faded away into nothingness.

Peter stared after it for a few moments before he realized that Mr. Sinclair was kneeling next to him, asking if he was okay. He snapped out of his trance and said, “Y-yeah, yes, sir. I’m okay now. Thanks.” He looked behind Mr. Sinclair and saw Laura watching from a distance, her hands brought to her mouth as if she is worried about Peter.

Mr. Sinclair helped him get to his feet asking, “What happened out here? You look like you’d seen a ghost!”

“Oh, no, sir,” Peter lied, “I just got a little freaked out about handling a dead thing. I’m okay now, though.”

“I can take care of this if you’re not up to it, Peter,” Mr. Sinclair offered.

“No, sir, I’m fine,” Peter answered as he took up the bag once more. He grabbed the squirrel’s body with the plastic bag and pulled it so that the body was in the bag and his hand was on the outside. He walked with Mr. Sinclair to the trash can at the side of the house, thinking about what he had just witnessed. He could tell by Mr. Sinclair’s actions that Peter was the only one who had seen the weird cloud over the body, and he wasn’t sure why.

Depositing the bag into the trash can, he thought of the story he read in school about Ben Franklin and a squirrel he sent to his friend in London. When it arrived, it escaped and was killed by a dog. “Snug as a bug in a rug,” he mumbled, repeating the words given as the eulogy of that squirrel. He looked up to the window above the trash can just in time to see Laura spin on her heel and retreat into the house. “I blew it with her,” he thought.

Peter finished mowing the back yard, stopping only once more to fill up the gas tank. He felt strangely good, though, as though he hadn’t already spent an hour walking a lawnmower around Mr. Sinclair’s property. He finished up in record time. Mr. Sinclair paid him, and he was on his way, returning to his house. On the way home, he noticed that he had energy to spare!