I slo-moed the mow, see.
The movie’s called Chores and Maintenance, in case it ever comes out for real and people want to know.
Everyone called Kay Sue “Kazoo” behind her back until she took off from Fred. I’m hoping that Chores and Maintenance never gets picked up by a major distributor, just so she doesn’t gain fame and royalties.
Lee Wayne got out of the car and skipped our way. He said, “All right! I smell something good!” When I say “skipped,” I mean that he actually skipped, like a schoolgirl. He still possessed long sinewy arms, the face of a hatchet, the legs of a man who’d never used a ladder. He looked like my beautiful wife, minus the boobs.
I dropped my cigarette butt and stomped on it twice, then reached down to pick it up. As I stood erect, Monica dropped hers so that I’d have to stomp on it, and bend back over. At least that’s what I thought about a year later. I said, “Hey, Lee Wayne.”
He held his arms out wide and said, “Not bad, huh? That was certainly worth it.” He hugged his sister, then nodded up and down toward me. We didn’t shake hands or anything. The last time we shook hands that I could remember was at the bachelor party when he returned from a place I never learned. He came back, and shook my hand, and said, “I got to thank you, my man.” My groomsmen had taken me out to one of those Hooters places. I think he might’ve hooked up with a barmaid out in the parking lot in the van he used to drive.
I said, “What’ve you been up to?” pretending I hadn’t heard.
Monica said, “What you smell is those steaks over there,” and pointed toward our neighbors, who had evidently made a pact to keep their backs pointed our way, like synchronized swimmers. Kind of too loud she blurted out, “We’re eating fish, asparagus, coleslaw, potatoes, peach pie, soup, and hummus, because it’s more nutritional than red meat!”
They were either Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or one of those other denominations whose members prided themselves on clean living and pure spleens. I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t found the right time to take them some flowers or brownies.
While I spent my day telling men named Fred and DaQuawn to spread pine nugget mulch around the pansies, Monica taught kindergarten and, I imagined, had to raise her voice often.
“I need a beer,” Lee Wayne said to me. “Let’s go inside and get a beer. Y’all still smoking? I quit. They don’t let anyone smoke inside prisons these days anymore, so I had to quit. What a good way to quit!” He put his arm around my shoulder as we walked inside and said, “Say, you got any pennies I could buy off you? I’m going straight back to my old ways, seeing it’s worth it.”
Monica shot me a mean look. I wasn’t supposed to say “penny” and those other things. I said, “I think we might have some one-cent currency units, Lee Wayne. Why do you ask?”
We went inside. We ate the hell out of some fish tacos. If it matters, Monica chose catfish. Tilapia would’ve been fine, but she chose farm-raised catfish from down in Mississippi. We had catfish juices dribbling down our faces, and we drank beer, and we turned up the stereo so we couldn’t hear the neighbors sizzling next door. We listened to Johnny Cash, because Lee Wayne said they wouldn’t ever let anyone listen to Johnny Cash for the month he spent in lockup. We listened to Merle Haggard, and Social Distortion, and about anyone else we figured had a lead singer who’d done time. Robert Johnson. Steve Earle. The Monkees. Monica and I didn’t have the most complete CD collection, but we made do. I said some things. I said, “Here are some people who will be in jail,” and played one of those sad Italian operas.
We never even got to the peach pizza pie. We ate, and sang along, and then finally Monica said, “Tell me what happened exactly.”
Here’s Lee Wayne’s — and then my, eventually — story: a copper penny gets a person one cent’s worth of merchandise. Let’s say that there’s an item out there that costs a penny these days, like maybe one-tenth of a gumball. But a full copper penny — it takes 146 pre-1983 pennies to make a pound — was worth about $3.40 a pound when Lee Wayne envisioned his brilliant, prison-worthy idea. I’ve never been good at explaining things mathematically, and I had to listen to Lee Wayne twice. One hundred forty-six pennies minted before 1983 equals $1.46. In weight, 146 pennies equaled $3.40, what with the price of copper.
Again, it’s against the law to mutilate or diminute. I doubt that “diminute” is even a word, but before Lee Wayne I’d never heard of “diminution,” either. It’s not a word used widely when telling employees to spread fertilizer or cull vines.
“What else did I have to do?” he said to us. “Y’all know how I was spinning my reel and not pulling anything in. Look, it only took time, and I had that going for me. I’d go to the bank, buy, say, a few hundred dollars in pennies, sort out the pre-1983 ones, put them aside, and rewrap the post-1982 pennies. Then I’d go down to the railroad track — you can’t just take regular pennies to the recycling center and hand them in — and set the pennies down on the rail. Presto change-o! The pennies got flattened, I scooped them up and took them to a place where they knew, deep down, what I did but didn’t care, and then I took that money — it would be quite a bit, and then I’d turn in the newer pennies for a penny apiece, you know — back to another bank and bought more. Over and over.”
I wasn’t accustomed to drinking anymore. Monica said I could only drink on days when she came home from kindergarten happy. I said, “Let me get this straight. You had the pennies smashed by trains, and then you took those smashed pennies to the metal recycling center and turned them in. Like I might do with cans I pick up on the side of the road.”
“That’s what I did,” Lee Wayne said. “I hung out in a hobo jungle-like setting, and I put pennies down on the rails. There’s a place I know where freight trains come by on the hour. I set down all these pennies, and then I picked them off after they rattled off the rail all flattened and unrecognizable. Meanwhile, I set down more and waited for the next train to come by. Then I took bags of flattened pennies down to this iron and metal place. They knew what I did, but somehow they didn’t get charged. Let me tell you, a guy named Mike Wayne something or another who worked down there should’ve spent time in jail too. But I ain’t sad or blameful about it.”
I thought about a railroad track that ran straight through town, right in the middle of where I sent my workers to weed-eat cockleburs. I said, “How come not everyone’s doing this?”
Lee Wayne craned his neck around and smiled. “The maximum fee is something like a hundred bucks and six months in prison. Or at least it used to be. I got charged a hundred bucks and thirty days in the county lockup. I wasn’t really in a prison, technically. So what? You know how much I made, Cuz?”
Monica said, “Wait a minute. So you traded in dollars for rolls of pennies, and then went through the pennies and pulled out all the ones minted before 1983, when there was a bunch of zinc added or whatever. Am I getting this right? Is this what you did? And then you took the old pennies and laid them out on railroad tracks so they’d get smashed into unrecognizable, flat pieces of copper. Then you took the smashed pennies to some guy who paid you whatever copper costs by the pound, and walked out of there, and bought more. Is this right or is this wrong?”
I said, “You might be the smartest man I’ve ever met.” I said, “Hey, whatever happened to you at my bachelor party?”