Loose End by Ivan Coyote

Author:Ivan Coyote
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: ISBN9781551521923
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2010-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

Butch Like Me

There’s this guy named Dave who lives in my hometown, and if I were to ever imagine myself a straight guy living a salt of the earth life in a small town, well, then I’d wanna be just like Dave Who Owns Fourth Avenue Esso.

I met him thirteen years ago, that summer before I went to electrical school. He hired me to mow his lawn. He picked me because he saw my Honda self-propelled four-stroke mower in the back of my pick-up when I stopped to get gas one day.

My father had just bought me the shiny red mower for my twenty-first birthday. “There you go,” he had said all in one breath, his cigarette dangling perfectly from one corner of his mouth so the smoke, as always, never got in his eye. “Happy birthday. Now you’ll never be out of work again.”

My dad was right. Dave Who Owns Fourth Avenue Esso hired me not the very next day to mow his lawn Every Friday After Work, but only after he made sure the mower had a self-propelled clutch, which meant the thing mows the lawn for you; you just have to walk behind, cigarette a-dangling, and steer.

That was because Dave – which I found out the hard way the very next Friday – also turned out to be the Guy Who Owns That House On The Hill On Twelfth Avenue. It was the kind of a hill that we used to wish as kids didn’t belong to Old And Scary Guy, or we would have tobogganed down it after school. But that guy died and Dave bought his house, and now I had to mow the Hill On Twelfth.

Lucky for me, I had my new-fangled mower what my pa got me, I figured, until I realized after one pass of Dave’s newly seeded, staked, and taped-off lawn, that every time I engaged the clutch of my self-propelled lawn mower, the wheels spun and dug dark brown trenches into Dave’s perfect new grass.

So I mowed Dave’s lawn the rest of that summer with a mower heavier than a regular one, what with all that extra machinery I couldn’t use, the thing was a fucking monster. But I was too proud, and Dave was too butch for me to tell him anything other than, “Yeah, this thing works like a charm. Easy-peesy.”

“Nice machine,” Dave said in return, one hand tracing the clutch handle of my mower, and the other hand opening a beer all by itself. The one-handed beer can open is a good move to cop off the guys in the neighbourhood; ladies really dig that move, though most are loathe to admit it.

By the end of the summer, I had calves that you could crack an egg on, and I had grown to really like my buddy Dave. Hated the lawn, but loved the man. Dave, of course, paid me in cash.

Back then Dave had a shock of dark brown hair and blue, blue eyes. He used

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