Ragweed
by Avery Gregurich
Dan fixed most everything himself, except mowers, and when they broke he guided them up into his truck bed on top of short boards and brought them out to Len in the country. Len in the country worked on favors and care packages heavy on beer and sweeter confections.
Dan was owed one as he had finished out Len in the country’s porch and set up some security cameras on its roof. Len in the country wanted proof that a bobcat had been scratching up his deck and stealing his barn cats late at night and sometimes early in the morning. He had also made Dan do it in difference to a vague sort of paranoia that was sweeping through the county. It seemed to be everywhere now, just like bobcat sightings.
The mower was busted, which shook all the rest of the mower as it was moving, which was the problem. Dan asked Len in the country to take a look at it and he agreed and turned the radio back up when Dan drove away. It was still August and he worked on things with engines out in the yard with a tarp beneath him.
Len in the country laid all the pieces in the tall grass without order or planning and knew he could still get it together the same way. It’s just the kind of person Len in the country was: he did and knew how things were done without asking much more than when. Len in the country was known for, if not fixing the thing broken, knowing and pointing to exactly what was wrong with it. He lived alone.
He took the mower deck off the mower. From up above it had all looked good, which is always evidence of a greater problem somewhere else. He flipped the deck upside down and took off the pock-marked blade. As he did this, a bunch of pearls fell out, but they were sharpened at the edges and less necklace-like and more from freshwater mollusks.
They hit the flipped-up metal deck and made a grinding sound. Down in there also was a bunch of teeth or something gumming up the works. Len in the country had a styrofoam cup nearby and gathered all the bits down into it. He lubed up something that needed it, and after he’d put it back together, ran the mower out over the patch of yard he always tried to mow after he’d fixed a mower, crisp as a cadet’s head.
Satisfied, he put the mower on the trailer and drove to Dan’s real slow, something in the styrofoam cup distracting him. He got there and Dan was in the shop with the door open straightening the tools hanging on his corkboard. Grandkids or something had messed them up.
Dan said to Len in the country “Well?” and Len in the country said “Look.” He took the lid off of the styrofoam cup and tilted some of the contents into Dan’s cupped hands. They both looked and Len in the country was glad to see it wasn’t just him that was confused anymore.
Dan said that he had run over something when it had started shaking so bad, but this stuff wasn’t roots, limbs, fence, or rock even. He remembered the sound, though, and said it sounded like hitting a deer in a small car: cheap plastic on bone. Len in the country asked where it was and they walked out into Dan’s yard where the chicken coop sat abandoned and unsightly. The brood had been gone for a few months, gone the way that bees sometimes do: all at once, without explanation. The ragweed was head high and neither man was small. You could tell it was killing Dan to have his yard looking this way in front of anybody, even Len in the country, who didn’t care about anything anyways.
The men got down on their knees where the mower had made it before shaking so bad that he quit, and Dan said “Fuck” and straightened back up. He now had a hole in his jeans and his knee where blood was trickling through the front and down the back onto his sock. Len in the country reached down and picked up the thing that had done it to Dan.
They pulled some of the growth back and then they saw them all: dozens of chicken feet sticking straight up with their talons out, the skin picked clean down there in the shade. The bones hadn’t bleached.
“Weasel?” Len in the country asked. “Fox?” Dan replied.
Then they started naming culprits back and forth, each shunning the other’s suggestion for his own until there were no possible suspects left and it remained a mystery. Dan had a dog that would kill rats in the barn and bake them out in the sun until they were all bloated and stinking and then roll onto them and pop them, carrying that ugliness into the house and onto the furniture with fabric on its legs. It was possible that the dog had done this, but neither one offered it up.
His work finished, Len in the country left to let Dan douse the coop and surrounding effigy in red diesel and burn it. Dan stood close until the smoke was too much, went up to the house and sprayed the dog with the garden hose for a while until he cleaned his hands and arms with it as well.
Len in the country looked over and realized he had a little of that stuff left in the styrofoam cup in his cupholder, and so rolled down the window and pitched the cup and all into the gravel. It mixed in well with the road, and Len in the country drove back home quickly to check his cameras.
He just couldn’t stand a thing like a bobcat being so close, and him not being around to see it.
Avery Gregurich, a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa, was raised next to the Mississippi River, and has never strayed too far from it.