Love and Lawnmower Maintenance
A humor short story
Nate and Bill stared at the lawn tractor. It was a Deere, green and yellow and black, and it wasn’t starting.
Nate had been preparing to cut the grass for the last time that fall before winter but without a running mower that wasn’t going to happen, not though the grass was long and green and the sun shining and the air warm on a Saturday in late October.
That’s how things go sometimes. The whole universe lines up for you and then Fate throws a spanner in the works.
Bill, who lived alone just down the street, had been out for his morning walk and, seeing Nate standing staring at the mower, had sidled up next to him so they could stare at it together.
Bill was in his sixties, a blue and white windbreaker hiding a slight paunch and the breeze playing with a still-full head of graying hair. He was rugged, not handsome but rugged, like he’d seen a thing or two and his eyes darted around continuously like he was always thinking about something or somewhere else.
Nate was more than twenty years younger. He had broad shoulders and was inclined to smile genuinely and warmly at most people he met.
“Hey, Bill,” Nate had said.
“Mower won’t start?”
“No.”
So they stood and stared at the mower sitting lifeless in the driveway.
“Did you try rocking it?” Bill said.
“Rocking it?”
“Get on and turn the key then scoot forward and back like you’re riding a horse, like you’re trying to roll it forward. Here, watch.”
Bill climbed on the tractor mower and turned the key. While the engine remained stubbornly silent he rocked his weight forward and back. The whole mower moved back and forth, its straining bolts creaking, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.
“Let me try giving it a little gas,” Bill said. He pressed the gas pedal while turning the key, while rocking forward and back. Nothing. “Open the hood.”
Nate watched the fan whirl half-heartedly on top of the engine block.
Bill gave up and climbed down.
“You check the battery?”
“I got this,” Nate said, picking up a battery booster from just inside the garage, “but it doesn’t check the battery, just jumps it if it needs a jump.”
“Can’t hurt to hook it up.”
“Guess not.”
Nate clipped the booster to the battery, red clip to positive, black to negative, then pushed the power button and, a moment later, the charge button.
“Give it a second,” Bill said as Nate climbed on the mower.
The key turned. The engine emitted a dull humming noise but not the satisfying starting growl Nate was hoping for.
“Is there gas in it?” Bill said.
“Yeah there’s gas in it.”
“How’d you get it out of the garage?”
“Just rolled it. Easier to get it out past the car that way ‘cause it’s a bit tight in there and I can stand behind it and see where I’m going as I back out.”
Nate looked up as a black SUV approached in the street. Steve, Nate’s neighbor from across the street, waved from the car then parked in his driveway, got out, and walked over.
Whereas Nate was newer to the neighborhood and had young kids, Steve—fifties, balding, and perennially tired—had four kids all in high school or college and had lived in the neighborhood for over twenty years.
“Hey, Steve,” Nate said.
“Hey. Hey, Bill,” Steve said.
“Morning,” Bill said.
“What’s going on?” Steve said, a slight nasal inflection to his voice.
“Mower won’t start.”
“Battery dead?” Steve said, examining the booster still clipped to the terminals.
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
“You try rocking it?”
“Yeah.”
“No good?”
“No.”
“Hmm,” Steve mused. “Gas?”
“Yeah, I checked the gas.”
“Could be the spark plugs,” Bill said. “You got a socket wrench?”
Nate retrieved the socket wrench and the various attachments from the shelf in the garage. Bill tried different sockets until he found the right one then cranked off the bolts holding the plastic panels onto both sides of the engine bay, exposing the engine, the fuel filter, spark plugs and the rest of the inner workings of the machine.
“You got your spark plugs here and here,” Bill said, pointing. “Most tractor mowers are basically the same. I got the X580 so the controls on this—what’s this?”
“D140,” Nate said.
“—on this D140 are a little different but they’ve all got similar engineering for the engine and whatnot. I got power steering on mine, which is nice and the deck is powered too, it raises and lowers with a toggle instead of manually. Traded my old one in when the warranty was up; that’s what I always do. What d’you got, Steve?”
“Cub Cadet. I forget the number.”
“Ah, nothing like a Deere,” Bill said.
“People like their Deeres, don’t they?” Steve said.
“Why not?”
Steve shrugged. “They’re pretty bad with their maintenance on their larger equipment, combines and so on. Farmers can’t fix them, they just have to take them into the dealership and get charged an arm and a leg. They used to make tractors and combines that’d run forever and anyone could fix; now it’s all controlled by software and if the computer doesn’t like something it doesn’t run. Plus they’re laying off workers left and right and moving everything overseas.”
Nate could feel Bill’s posture getting defensive.
“Well I’m no farmer and I don’t know anything about that, just that they make a good tractor mower as far as I’m concerned,” Bill said and went back to examining the engine.
Looking from Bill to Steve as Bill fiddled absently with the engine and Steve stood watching him, Nate got the feeling that Steve had broken some unspoken rule of rural-suburban small talk, that a man’s choice of tractor mower was a simple choice with no other larger cultural or political or economic implications. If John Deere or Cub Cadet make a good tractor mower, well then that should be good enough. Maybe you’ve always bought Deeres or your family has always bought Deeres, so you buy another Deere. Maybe you think Cub Cadet or Craftsman or Husqvarna or Kubota are more reliable. Debate reliability and power. Debate the trade-offs between tractor and zero-turn mowers, between base models and bells-and-whistles. But bringing right-to-repair and offshoring and labor disputes into the conversation just wasn’t done, not between neighbors chatting around a stalled mower. This was polite company in a sacred forum not to be corrupted by such sordid concerns.
“Well, I’m gonna take off,” Steve said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Bill relaxed as soon as Steve hit the end of the driveway, although Nate knew he wouldn’t bring up Steve’s comments.
“It’s a real humdinger. I don’t know,” Bill said, inspecting the spark plug he had extricated from the engine, “do you have spare spark plugs? This one looks fine but it’s not starting so it can’t hurt anything to replace this one; that’s for sure. Better do them both while you’re at it. When did you change the oil last?”
“I don’t know, March or something, before I started cutting this summer.”
Bill shook his head. “I’ve got no idea. You might need to call a mechanic to come take a look. I send mine over to the dealership, Rochester Tool & Implement, every other year for regular maintenance, greasing the bushings and all that. They’ll be able to pick it up and take a look at it.”
“I was hoping not to. That’s probably a couple hundred bucks at least.”
“You can borrow mine if you want.”
“Thanks. I’ll let you know.”
“Okay. Well, I’m going to finish my walk. Come by if you want the mower.”
“Thanks, Bill.”
Bill headed off down the driveway, his windbreaker swishing as he walked.
“How’s it going?”
Nate’s wife, Lauren, emerged from the garage. She was a brunette and pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way. Nate thought her the most beautiful woman in the world and he was glad to see her.
“Hi,” he said, smiling for the first time all morning. “Not great. I can’t get the dang thing started.”
“Seriously? It was running fine last week.”
“I checked the gas, the oil, tried jumping the battery, I checked the spark plugs. Bill was here and he looked at it too. We rocked it back and forth while trying to start it. Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Did you try opening the hood while starting it? I feel like sometimes it needs extra air. Whatever it does, it seems to help.”
“Yeah, we tried that too. At this point I’m going to just have to roll it back into the garage and call somebody to come take a look at it.”
“Did it run for you to pull it out?”
“No, I just rolled it out backwards.”
“Did you put the thing back in?”
“No, I thought we were going to do that later tonight.”
“Nate!” Lauren said, giggling. “You know what I mean. The thing in the back that you pull out—”
Nate grinned.
“—don’t say it! The rod that you pull to disconnect the transmission or whatever so it doesn’t wreck the engine while you push it.”
Still grinning, Nate said, “Yes, I yanked on the rod before pulling out the mower and I pushed the rod back in once it got it out here.”
“And did you put the parking brake on?”
“Yes, of course I put the parking…” The smile faded from Nate’s face. “Oh, God bless it.” Nate got on the mower and depressed the brake pedal with his left foot. Not locked in place, it popped back up. He depressed it again, engaged the brake lock, and turned the ignition.
The engine did its best impression of an emphysemic, coughing as Nate rocked back and forth, and then roared to life.
Goddammit, he thought.
“You’re welcome,” Lauren shouted over the noise, already on her way back inside the house.
Nate watched her go. “Thanks,” he said, half-heartedly.
A little while later Bill came by on his walk. He smiled and gave Nate a thumbs-up.
“You got it going,” Bill shouted.
“Yeah! Spark plugs.”
“What?”
Nate cut the engine.
“Spark plugs. I swapped them out.”
“They didn’t look too bad but I guess you never know,” Bill said. “I’ll see you later. Let me know if you want to borrow my aerator.”
“As long as it doesn’t have an engine then yeah, I probably will. My yard needs it.”
“No, no engine. You just pull it behind the mower. That’s why I like a tractor better than a zero-turn.”
“Can you not pull with one?”
“You can but you usually need to buy an extra attachment to put on the back so you can put on a trailer hitch.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Well, so long.”
“See you later, Bill.”
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance, perceived resemblance, or similarity to any other fictional works, to actual events or persons, living or dead, and any perceived slights of people, places, or organizations are products of the reader’s imagination. This fiction is the result of a partnership between a human writer and the character(s) he accessed with his creative subconscious as he raced through the story with them. No AI of any kind, generative or otherwise, was used in any way to write this story.