The 4th Pip: The Early Years — Part III
At ten years of age, Red finds an unexpected benefactor, struggles with sock garters, and clutches a broken record player to his chest.
Revival on the Front Lawn
Years Passed.
Two.
Red’s grandmother was staring out of the guest bedroom window. The lawnmower that woke her, then kept her up, had, mercifully, puttered out of gas. She had scissor-kicked her way out of the bed to see — with her own eyes — exactly who was mowing a lawn at 7:00AM on a Saturday morning.
Her grandson, the culprit, was the one mowing the lawn at 7:00AM on a Saturday morning. He wasn’t done either. She saw the boy topping up the self-propelled mower with gas from a metal gasoline canister.
It was a sight.
The lawn looked like it had been visited at half time by a distraught football coach. Endless arrows and directional half-moon markings had been mown into peculiar, but clearly not random hieroglyphics. The grass patches were already mown down to an inadvisably-deep yellow.
Impossibly, her grandson wore a powder-blue, ruffle-chested suit and dress shoes. Her mind didn’t know where to start.
After five pulls on the cord, one of w…
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