Haunted House Flipper

Chapter 44

I fetched the mower and the weed whacker. Seeing it reminded me of Claire and how hard we had laughed together. I really missed her. That was before Bill Baldock interrupted us with his big news he was buying the mansion out from under us. That was another thing I had to take care of. The Poltergeist Palace.

"Okay," I said. "Claire said the best way to cut grass this tall is to go over it with a weed whacker like this, and then mow it after it's all been leveled."

"Yeah man. It's like a jungle" Cordo said.

"Yeah no kidding. So would you rather do the weed whacker, or go behind with the mower?" I asked.

"Is there another weed whacker?"

"You call it that too?" I asked.

"Yeah why?"

I laughed.

"Claire calls it a string trimmer."

"That's funny. I've only heard of weed eater, but I've always called it that. Back in my past life when I used things like weed whackers."

He stopped and kind of looked out into space for a few seconds. Then he snapped out of it and looked at me.

"Anyways it would probably be faster if two of us used them first," he said.

"Yeah, I didn't think of that. It would probably be faster. Good thinking."

I walked over to Claire's trailer and saw two more inside. I held one of them up.

"We're in business!"

After several tries we managed to get them started, and got to work. I walked toward the mansion, and Cordo started near the entrance gate. It was slow going, but after a while I sort of got the hang of it and was able to work much faster. I had to get used to maintaining a good consistent height above the grass. It didn't cut down a large area of grass, but sliced through the grass with ease.

Before too long, however, it was getting really hard to keep going. My arms just couldn't keep holding it up. They were burning something fierce. I kept going, trying to push through the pain, but my arms were starting to fail and my back was really starting to hurt. It was pathetic. I looked over at Cordo. He looked like he was doing better than I was, but he was sweating and his face was pretty tight. I'm sure he was in pain too. I turned off the weed whacker and walked over to him.

"I don't know about you, but my arms could use a break. Why don't we try and mow up what we've cut down so far and then maybe that will be enough of a rest to try some more of this."

We still had a lot to do. We went to the trailer and found one self propelled mower.

"It's going to take forever to bag all of this grass," I said.

"I say we just get it trimmed down and leave it for a while. Grass clippings actually help grass stay healthy," Cordo said.

I looked over at him with a surprised smile.

"What? I used to mow lawns a lot as a kid. It's a great way to make money," he said.

"Money..." I said. "That's a great idea. I want to get this place looking good as fast as possible so we can get it sold. I bet I could get someone to take care of all this grass for a couple hundred bucks. It's clearly going to take us all of tonight and tomorrow. We still have the sides and the back to do and the back is even deeper than the front. Why don't we put this equipment away and go buy some paint stuff," I said.

"Sounds good to me man."

"Yeah. I'll call someone tomorrow. Let's put this stuff away and head to the store. Also I have a pretty strange chore to do tonight. I'll tell you about it on the way."