The Street That Watered at Six
The sound was what got me out of my chair. A flat, hard crack, like somebody breaking a dinner plate over a fence post.
Then another one.
I set my coffee on the porch rail and walked around the corner of the house in my sock feet, and there was Carl Jessup, standing in my grass in pressed khaki shorts, with a seven iron over his shoulder.
He looked at me. Then he looked down, lined himself up the way a man does on a tee box, and took the head clean off my fourth sprinkler.
Black plastic went skipping across the lawn. A piece of it landed by my foot.
“Carl,” I said.
“Morning, Dave.”
He walked six paces down the property line to the next one. He was not in a hurry. That is the part I still think about. A man who is mad swings fast. Carl swung like he was being paid by the hour.
Crack.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing?”
“I’d think it was obvious.” He nudged the broken riser with the toe of his shoe, the way you check a dead snake. “I told you in May your water was getting on my car.”
“You did.”
“I told you it leaves spots. The water in this town is nothing but rock. It dries on the paint and it etches.” He pointed the club at his driveway without looking at it. “That is a fifty-eight thousand dollar automobile.”
It was, too. A white Cadillac, three weeks old, parked eleven feet from my lawn. It was the cleanest thing in Reno County.
“I said I’d look at it,” I said.
“You did say that.” He stepped to the sixth head, the last one on that side. “And then it ran again this morning at five thirty, and I came out to a car that looked like it had the measles.”
Crack.
He bent down, picked up the biggest piece, and held it out to me. I took it. A man hands you something, you take it.
“Now I’ve let you know,” Carl said.
He put the seven iron back over his shoulder and walked across his own perfect grass to his garage, and the door came down behind him, slow and quiet, like the end of a church service.
I stood there holding a piece of a fourteen dollar sprinkler head.
Water was bubbling up out of six broken risers and running down the slope toward the curb. It was July in Hutchinson, Kansas. We had not seen rain in thirty-one days. The grass on the corner lots had already gone the color of a grocery sack, and here was mine with six little springs coming up out of it.
I walked to the garage, shut the system off at the valve box, and came back.
Carl’s garage door was still down. The blinds in his front window moved, just a finger’s width, and then went still.
“Well,” I said, to the front of his house, in a regular speaking voice. “Thanks for letting me know, Carl.”
Then I went and got the broom.
Nancy met me at the kitchen door with the cordless phone already in her hand.
My wife is five foot two and she taught second grade for thirty-one years, and there is not a man alive, me included, who wants to be on the wrong end of the look she had on.
“I watched the whole thing from the laundry room window,” she said. “I am calling Jeff.”