Front Yard (29 page)

“No, Daddy. They're flowers, too, and they're here to help. We'll use them to shoot mind-altering pollen right out of the flower. Watch!” Mary pointed her angel's trumpet at the approaching horde, which was inching closer to them. A little puff of dust arced into the moonlight then landed on top of a cocklebur, which proceeded to sway drunkenly from side to side, then collapse, writhing, onto the ground.

“See?”

“Well, okay then.”

“I really don't think you girls should be here,” Nan said. “And you, Shirelle, don't you need to get up early tomorrow and commute to work?” Shirelle's answer was interrupted by a howl and the slow, sweeping movement of plants in motion.

“Everyone get ready!” cried Marta. “Here they come!”

Within seconds, the two sides collided, rather softly as there were no metal parts involved. Dr. Sproot was taking down one flower after another with her BB gun. George was swinging in short compact strokes, demolishing dandelions by the score as they tried to wrap their long roots around his legs and arms, and blind him with their flying, fluffy seed down.

Nan waded into a carpet of creeping Charlie with her butcher knife, carving away and turning one weed after another into rank salad fixin's. Marta had brought pruning shears along with her, and tore a swath of destruction through the ranks of the Canadian thistle. Mary and Shirelle were doing good service with the angel's trumpets, brandishing them like machine guns, and creating huge pockets of clueless, stumbling weeds plagued by visions of paisley-colored cows chomping on them with boulder-sized pink molars.

But it wasn't an even fight. It was clear that Dr. Sproot's supernatural powers now far outstripped Edith's, which were mitigated somewhat by her guilt at once having used them for nefarious purposes. So, while Edith, with some help from the potent vibes of Shirelle and the Fremonts, did manage to summon forth hundreds of flowers—mostly annuals, of course— that had once lent their glory to the Fremonts' gardens, Dr. Sproot was able to call up tens of thousands of weeds that not only she, but all of Livia's gardeners, had committed to garbage, compost, or the slow death by a Weed-B-Gon or Roundup dousing.

Still, the battle seesawed back and forth for what seemed like hours. When George spotted the biggest sow thistle on the battlefield he made for it with a vengeance, bashing his way through the wall of enemy weeds with a whir of bat motion no human eye could detect. As he stood, face-to-vascular tissue, with the offending monster weed, Nan called out to him.

“Don't let its hairs touch you, George,” she yelled. “Remember what happened the last time you touched one of those. You got that infected rash that lasted for months. And this one's ten times bigger.”

Suddenly, the sow thistle lurched toward him, then started stumbling around blindly, as if it had imbibed too much dandelion wine. It finally tripped over its roots, which were trailing behind it, as ungainly as a bridal train. George saw his chance. Charging forward, he swung his bat as he'd never swung it before, going for downtown rather than just contact. Big, juicy chunks of stem flew everywhere, forcing George to bob and weave to dodge the bristles.

In the time it takes an August yellow jacket to find an open can of soda pop, it was over. The sow thistle lay torn in shreds on the ground, its pulpy innards exposed, its leaves crumpled up into balls of rapidly decomposing matter. The other weeds pulled back, stunned and cowering.

“That was easier than I thought,” said George, raising his arms in triumph.

“Easy on the hail-the-conquering-hero stuff, dear,” said Nan, now at his side and keeping the weed masses at bay by holding her butcher knife straight out toward them and swinging it slowly back and forth along ninety-degree arc. “Especially when you had some help from another quarter.”

“Yeah, Daddy,” said Mary, who along with Shirelle had crowded in next to him with their angel's trumpets spitting out pollen puffs with a machine-gun rapidity. “That's because we psychedelicized it with a few well-placed seed shots. That guy was in no shape to take on you and your bat. Now, let's back up a little before these yard-blight scumbags start charging again.”

George stared forlornly at his bat. Two more chips, one of those from the tip of the barrel, had been knocked off, and the whole thing, from end to end, was stained with gooey weed guts.

“Now, I'm really mad!” shouted George, figuring he had just lost a good $800 in value off that bat.

“George, we have to move,” said Nan. “We can't hold 'em off here forever.”

The weeds, recovered from the shock of seeing their champion vanquished, were moving toward them again, reinforced by ten thousand clumps of crabgrass just called up by Dr. Sproot once she had managed to tear a couple dozen lobelia off her legs.

“Fall back!” shouted Nan. “Fall back!”

The weight of numbers was beginning to tell despite the best efforts of Edith to add potency to her witch spells. Soon, there was nothing left of their flower allies but a few tiny alyssum, a badly battered core of elite hybrid tea roses, the angel's trumpets, and a smattering of petunias.

Then came a sound from out of the adjoining woods the likes of which no one had ever heard before. It was the battle cry of women who refuse to be dominated, whether by city hall, exploitative men, or a gaggle of puny-assed weeds on the brink of world domination. In an instant, a mob of them armed with rakes, shovels, and loppers passed through the pitiful remains of the allied flower ranks, formed a “flying V” attack column, and tore into the surrounding weeds, which fell back from them in some disarray.

“It's the Rose Maidens!” shouted Marta. “The Rose Maidens have been summoned to save us!”

How come everyone else got to get dressed up? Nan wondered, looking at the Rose Maidens' stylish pantsuits, dresses, and blouses, then down sulkily at her baggy, billowing, peasant-style nightgown.

“And, look, up in the sky!” someone shouted.

“Lightning bugs?” wondered George.

“No, Mr. Fremont,” cried Shirelle. “It's fairies. They glow blue, see? And, if you look closely, you can see little gossamer wings!”

“Fairies!” shouted Mary. “Yippee!”

The fairies swooped in like so many pint-sized Dauntless dive bombers, dropping their clumped loads of fairy dust timed to break up and disperse just above the attacking weed hordes, then veering off sharply before the weeds could throw out their stems and leaves to catch them. Dr. Sproot worked the lever of her BB gun, aimed, and a fairy came spiraling out of the sky. She shot down another, then another.

“Ha-ha!” she chortled. “Ha-ha! Whoever said fairies were immortal?”

A fourth fairy, taking advantage of Dr. Sproot's temporary distraction, managed to find the bull's-eye, and a concentrated wad of powder exploded over the top of Dr. Sproot's head, covering her face with a glittering white. Her allergies activated and with none of the antihistamines she normally carried in her purse handy, Dr. Sproot sneezed so loudly it rang out over the cacophony of the battle.

But, apart from that, the fairy dive bombers appeared to be doing little damage to her or her plant hordes. They were, however, having quite the effect on the dwindling forces of good, who were breathing in enough fairy dust fumes to fuel a dozen cable TV comedy shows. George and Nan found themselves laughing uncontrollably. Mary and Shirelle, too. The Rose Maidens dropped their tools, joined hands, and began dancing in a ring-around-the-rosie circle as the weeds closed in and began to ensnare them.

“I think there's been a slight miscalculation,” Marta said between guffaws. “The fairies' happy powder works fine on us. I'm just tickled pink now, ha-ha. Tee-hee-hee. No go on Dr. Sproot and her weeds, though. Ha-ha. Isn't that a hoot?”

Edith was bent over, convulsed with laughter after hearing one of Nan's knock-knock jokes, and fell down kicking and waving her arms. The remaining, battle-ravaged flowers were expanding and contracting like accordion bellows, which is what flowers sometimes do when they're having a rattling good time. Even George found himself laughing at one of Nan's dumb riddles.

Meanwhile, one fairy after another was being shot down out of the sky by Dr. Sproot or ensnared by the weeds. What remained of them were now beating a hasty retreat, bobbing their way off the field like tiny blue will-o'-the-wisps.

“I sure hope they're going for reinforcements,” said Nan, chuckling. “Hey, how many liatrises does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”

Slowly, the weeds surrounded them. Then, Dr. Sproot, her face and body smeared with plant guts and caked, streaky fairy dust, her BB gun at the ready, forced her way through the packed, groaning masses, and confronted the small clot of humans and flowers that formed the only barrier left between her and total plant domination.

“Gee, Doc Phil, don't you think you could put some clothes on?” said Marta. “At least cover up those saggy boobs! Ha-ha. And in front of all these weeds! Goodness! I guess people just don't have standards anymore. Hey, can I take my clothes off, too?”

Dr. Sproot sneered.

“Thank goodness, little Marta, I'll never have to tell you not to call me Doc Phil again. And you will keep your clothes on. I'm happy to see you've all been rendered complete idiots by your little fairy helpers. What a bunch of screwups! Ha-ha!”

Everyone else laughed along with Dr. Sproot because they couldn't help it.

“How do you manage to keep so trim, Sproot?” wondered Nan admiringly. “But up top? A little mascara and rouge would do you wonders.”

“Silence!” Dr. Sproot snapped. “Now who's the first one to be sacrificed to the weed feeding frenzy?”

“Plants don't eat meat, you dodo,” corrected Shirelle. “Except maybe Venus flytraps and one or two other fly eaters, but I don't see any of them here.”

“I said shut up! Well, if they don't eat you, they can certainly smother you, or gross you out, or, Mr. Fremont . . .”

“George.”

“George, give you a rash to end all rashes.”

George shuddered with suppressed laughter tempered by paralyzing fear now that the fairy dust was starting to wear off.

“Down on your knees, wimps. This is your last chance to say your prayers. Then, you can watch as your little flower friends get torn apart, petal by petal. Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”

That last chuckle froze in Dr. Sproot's mouth. A small tornado of mist whirled up in front of her, then spewed out two ghostly forms that looked like actual people, only made out of puttyish cloud matter.

“What the blue blazes do
you
want?” sneered Dr. Sproot, who, though unafraid, was wondering how someone—presumably Edith—had managed to summon two humans—a guy and a gal from the looks of it—back from the dead. “No fair, Edith. You've really crossed the line by channeling the spirits of dead
people
.”

“No need to blame Edith,” said the guy ghost, who had a European accent nobody there could quite place. “We're here of our own accord. And we're here to take you away, Phyllis Sproot. You have transgressed the laws of nature and acted the part of destroyer. We despise destroyers.”

“You've disturbed our home for the last time,” said the gal ghost, rather serenely, everyone thought. “Your evil thoughts and evil deeds have done enough harm, to say nothing of disturbing our sleep one time too many.”

Nan shook her head, trying to stifle a laugh and wondering how dead people could speak in such well-organized and grammatically correct sentences, especially seeing as how this was probably a dream.

“Yes,” said the guy ghost. “We're light sleepers. We'd really like to get that eternal repose we keep hearing about, but you keep messing things up for us.”

“Hey,” whispered George to Nan. “It's the spirits of that Welsh guy and his Indian wife, huh? I hope they turn that Dr. Sproot-the-Weed-Queen into earthworm slime.”

“Shhhh!” everyone went. The two ghosts looked over their shoulders at George and frowned.

“Could you let us please handle this, George?” said the guy ghost.

George gaped at the ghost, unable to turn away.

“Yessir.”

“That goes for you, too, Nan, or may I call you Nan-bee?” said the gal ghost.

“Yes, ma'am,” croaked Nan hoarsely. “You can call me whatever you want.”

All this time, Dr. Sproot was calculating her odds. Let's see, she thought, I've got about a million weed ghosts against, what, about a dozen humans, a few beaten-up flowers, and a couple of human ghosts. I like my chances.

“Attack!” she shouted. “Attack!” But nothing happened. Dr. Sproot looked around, and discovered she was alone. Not a single weed from the horde that had just moments ago covered the field remained. A meek vulnerability overcame her. She dropped her BB gun and her hands struggled to better cover her private areas, which she now felt she had no business exposing to all these people and plants, either alive or dead.

“Do you by any chance happen to have a wrap?” she asked. “I guess even a moderately-sized bath towel would do.”

“Time to come along,” said the gal ghost, gently extending her hand. “We have an exciting new destination in store for you.”

“Is it hell?” gasped Dr. Sproot, shivering uncontrollably in the chill of the night. “Are you sending me to hell? That's a little extreme, don't you think? I'll be a good girl from now on, I promise.”

“It's not hell,” the guy ghost said. “It is, however, a place far away. It's a place in need of your special talents, where your peculiar tastes and obsessions can best be put to use. To destroy and rebuild consistently and with a certain gaudy grandeur, yes, but with no concern for the accepted conventions of behavior and beauty.”