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mower.  There was also a shelf, high up on the back wall, covered with unlabeled cans, and a couple of wooden chests on the floor, one empty and the other containing various implements the uses of which he could not begin to guess.
    Phil had lived in apartments all his life.  His understanding of yard work was restricted to what could be learned from watching television adds.  But he was reasonably certain that a lawn mower, particularly one you pushed yourself, wasn’t going to cut grass that had grown to be almost waist high.  Accordingly, he opted for the hedge trimmer.
    The biggest patch was right by the entrance.  After about an hour he had chopped over a quarter of it down to an uneven stubble, and his shoulders were killing him.  His undershirt was soaked through and he was quite sure he would never be able to straighten his legs again.  Clearly, this was all going to take much longer than he had thought.
    Phil needed a rest.  He went around to the back, where the house itself threw a comforting shadow across the old outdoor dance floor, found one of the metal lawn chairs that were scattered around like fallen leaves, and sat down.
    He was tired.  He lit a cigarette and pulled another lawn chair over so he could put his feet up on it.  There wasn’t a breath of wind, and somewhere in the distance he could hear an odd mechanical sound which he finally decided was probably a bullfrog.  He was in serious danger of falling asleep, a prospect which did not appall him.
    Even the pain in the shoulders had something luxurious about it.  His boss at the Arlo Finance Company, his last place of employment, had been rumored to be an avid gardener.  Was this what it felt like for those rich guys, taking Saturday off to putter around in the yard?  Phil glanced back at the gloomy facade of the old Moonlight Roadhouse that was, with his flaking paint and peeling gutters, and it made him sad to think that he was probably going to end by selling it.  He would have money then—for the first time in his life, a substantial wad of cash that might just be enough to buy him some kind of chance in life—but he rather liked owning the Roadhouse.  It made him a property owner.  A home owner.  He hated the idea of parting with it.
    The cigarette had burned down all the way to his fingers, and he hadn’t even touched it. He had simply forgotten.  He shook off the long, curving ash, stamped out the butt under his heel, and lit another, smoking this one with deliberate concentration.
    By the middle of the afternoon, with a half-hour break for lunch, he had the one large patch of lawn all chopped down to stubble.  He raked the cut grass into a heap on the driveway, where it looked like a haystack, and got out the mower.  By the time he was finished, and the grass from the mower had been added to the heap, his lawn looked approximately like a lawn again, trimmed to a uniform two inches, and the color of buckskin.  He didn’t know what to do to make it green—maybe that was something which would take care of itself.
    The heap of cuttings was a puzzler.  Did you put that out with the garbage?  It didn’t seem likely.  He went back to the garage, looking for a basket or something to put it all in, and then he remembered the tarp.  When he had it all raked onto the tarp, and the four corners knotted together to make a bundle like Santa Claus’s bag, he started to look around for someplace to dump it out.
    There were woods on three sides of the property.  Phil didn’t know whether they were his woods or someone else’s or nobody’s, but, since there weren’t any other houses about, he was prepared to take possession.  He carried the tarp a good fifty feet back through the trees, where he was sure no one would be able to see it, and dumped it out.  All the time he kept on the lookout for snakes.  It was getting toward dusk and, anyway, he didn’t like woods.  They gave him the creeps.
    When he was finished he put