Four in the ayem was when they usually tried it. Sometimes they crept by on the road and threw seed canisters from the windows of a car. Sometimes they interfered with the municipal water main where it split down where Soldier Trail ran into the old 49ers golf course. They were terrorists, pure and simple. Steve was ready for them. His house security let him know any time a car slowed down within two hundred yards of his property line, or when the available water pressure varied outside standard parameters. He’d even put in rooftop cameras after they’d dropped half a million cactus seeds from a remotely piloted hang glider. The greenies were after Eagleburger’s lawn, but they weren’t going to get it.

This morning, the house security woke him up at 3:47 to inform him that it had detected an all-terrain vehicle approaching the property line from Agua Caliente Wash. Eagleburger got out of bed, put on his bathrobe, and went outside with his father’s pump-action Remington swaying in the crook of his right elbow. The sky was clear, the air a bit chilly. A gorgeous desert night, in that moment right before the birds began to chirp and the day began again. Eagleburger could hear the ATV. It had that strange growly whine you got when you tried to get a lot of torque from an electric engine. He walked across his lawn, barefoot, feeling the rich mixture of bluegrass and fescue between his toes. At the back corner of the lot, closest to the wash, he had a shed for his lawn-care equipment and products. The greenies had graffitied it, knocked it over, firebombed it. Now it was sheet metal sunk into a concrete pad. He waited at one corner of it, where he’d be able to see anyone coming up from the wash before they saw him.

The ATV’s engine cut out. There was a silence. Then Eagleburger heard the crunch of footsteps on the brown, brown desert that bordered and threatened his green, green, lawn. He took a night-vision scope from his bathrobe pocket and looked through it. There were two of them. They were less than fifty yards from his property line. He couldn’t yet tell what they were planning.

As far as Steve Eagleburger was concerned, he would have been within his rights to kill any greenie who set foot on his lawn with bad intent. His Water Board contacts had suggested that they were sympathetic to this view, but that it might be more prudent to take nonlethal countermeasures. So both barrels of the Remington were loaded with police-issue beanbags that would knock the stuffing out of a greenie but not kill it. He lowered the night-vision scope and waited. They were coming closer, and he could pick out their silhouettes. When they were twenty feet from the fence, they stopped and squatted to prepare some kind of equipment.

Eagleburger was interested. What would it be this time? They were inventive, the greenies. He felt like he should keep abreast of their tactics. Still, it was four o’clock in the morning, and Eagleburger was damned if he was going to live in a world where he had to await the pleasure of terrorists who wanted to destroy his lawn. He stepped quietly out around the shed, leveled the Remington, and unloaded both barrels.

Their howls of pain made it all worthwhile. “Goddammit, you greenie freaks!” he screamed as they ran like hell back into the wash. “Stay off my lawn!”

#

Steve Eagleburger had the last lawn in all of Arizona, and he intended to keep it that way. Once in a while he heard from one of his pals on the Water Board that someone else in Tucson or Chandler or Sun City was growing a lawn. They knew that if they came to him, he’d make it worth their while to come down on these upstart greenskeepers with the full weight of the Water Board’s authority–which, since the Crisis of ‘47, was more or less the same authority as the National Guard had. The Water Board ran Arizona, and Steve Eagleburger had spent enough money on Super Bowl tickets and expensive Scotch to know that they would always have his back. They invited him to their retreats: white-water rafting on the Colorado, fly fishing in the Absarokas, weekends in Las Vegas. Good times.

Four hours after he’d beanbagged the two greenies out by the wash, Eagleburger gave Hector Salcedo from the Water Board a call to let him know what had happened. An hour later, Hector stopped by. Eagleburger was out in the back yard, listening to the ch-ch-ch-ch of the sprinklers and going through the duffel bag the greenies had left behind. “Would you look at this stuff,” he said to Hector, holding up a clear liter-sized bottle with an aerosol attachment on the top. “I bet you my last dollar this is some kind of root-killing parasite.” The robot that aerated and enriched the soil crept past, ticking. Eagleburger went inside to get a couple of beers. It was a good hundred and five out, but he and Hector sat in lawn chairs on the back patio under a beach umbrella, facing out over the wash and up toward Gibbon Mountain. “What’s the news from in town?” Eagleburger asked.

“Same shit,” Hector said. “We keep moving people out, they keep wanting to come back. Word is the population limit’s gonna be cut again. You don’t watch out, they’ll make you move.”

They laughed because both of them knew this couldn’t happen. The Water Board would never move Steve Eagleburger.

“Hey, listen,” Hector said. “I got a favor to ask you.”

“Name it,” Eagleburger said.

“My daughter Violeta’s getting married, kind of in a rush, you know? They set the date and then didn’t get their shit together, so it’s going to be a crash production. Two weeks. The halls are booked, nobody wants to use an abandoned church or something like that. They want it to be memorable. So out of the blue this morning, she asked me if I’d ask you if they could have the ceremony on your lawn.” Hector was watching Eagleburger carefully. Eagleburger knew he should do it. Hector had done a lot for him, and how could you turn down a man’s request for his daughter’s wedding?

But the thought of all those feet on his lawn. All those chairs with their legs crushing the delicate root structures he’d spent thirty years nurturing and refining. Eagleburger felt ill. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.” What else could he do?

“Terrific,” Hector said with a broad grin. “How about the reception?”

#

Eagleburger had nightmares about dance floors and lines of shuffling feet approaching buffets. He called his daughter Leila, who had left for Moorhead, Minnesota during one of the first rounds of resettlements. She’d been up there, what, fifteen years now. At least. “So now I have to have a wedding and a reception on my grass because Hector Salcedo felt like he had to call in a favor,” grumbled Eagleburger.

“How many people are coming?” Leila asked. Eagleburger didn’t know. “Maybe it won’t be too bad,” she said. “A couple dozen people on the lawn for a couple of hours, Dad. No permanent damage, right?”

“Permanent in the sense that grass will never grow? No,” Eagleburger said. “But I’ll sure as hell have to reseed, aerate, feed…it’ll be months before it’s the same. Hector owes me. And he’s Mexican. Those people don’t have small weddings.”

“You’re a hate criminal,” Leila said.

“I speak the truth,” Eagleburger said.

“Why don’t you just come up here? It’s nice. And nobody gives you a hard time about wanting a lawn, since it’s buried under snow five months out of the year anyway.”

“Leila, apple of my eye, there is nothing in the world you can say that will make me want to go to a place where snow cover endures for months.” Eagleburger looked out the window from his study. The choreographed dance of sprinklers and robot went on. His lawn shimmered in the desert sun. Leila had never understood how much it meant to him. She was better than his ex-wife Marcia, at least. To Marcia, the lawn was one more example of what she considered Eagleburger’s raging self-centeredness. He changed the subject. “So how are my grandkids?”

#

If he’d had to explain it at gunpoint, and been granted the gift of perfect expression for as long as it took to communicate the idea, Eagleburger would have said that the lawn was an important symbol of the times when people could and did ignore the consequences of their actions. Wasn’t that important? Shouldn’t there be some sign of the way humankind had once imposed its will on the landscape, growing golf courses in the desert? He considered his lawn a memorial to a better era, before the water troubles and climate bullshit and the planet’s general reassertion of its prerogatives. Eagleburger did not consider himself hostile to environmental concerns. He gave money to the Sierra Club and the Red Cross efforts to resettle refugees from Bangladesh. He powered his house, including the sprinklers and robots, with a solar array on the roof. He recycled his trash and drove a hydrogen car.

All he wanted was to have a lawn. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently it was. Eagleburger was demonized by the greenies when they weren’t trying to get on his nerves by ridiculing him. He was a symbol to them, all right. Once in a while he consented to an interview with some greenie cast or feed, and every time he found that they didn’t get it. “Is the water I use on my lawn really going to irrigate enough crops to avert famine in Amarillo?” he asked.

“That’s not the point,” the interview said, almost invariably. “The point is that why should you feel entitled to so much more of that resource than is needed to sustain you?”

“Because,” Eagleburger began. He tried to explain why he thought the lawn was important, but he never got it right. Interviewers psychoanalyzed him, probed his personal history, inferred relationships between his lawn and the household-robotics firm he’d founded, developed, and sold but for which he still acted as a consultant. Wasn’t he just holding onto his lawn because he missed his ex-wife and his daughter, who had left Arizona independently of him, escaping his control? Wasn’t he just clinging to a way of life that deserved to be gone and shouldn’t be memorialized? Wasn’t he just afraid that if he gave up his lawn, it would reflect badly on Eaglebotics, with a loss of share value that would adversely affect Eagleburger’s own high standard of living?

In the end, all he could say was, “This is America, right? I own a half-acre of land. In America, when you own something, it’s yours to do with as you like. And I want a lawn.”

Hector always called him up after an interview to suggest that he shouldn’t do them anymore. “I mean, Steve,” he said, “what the hell good does it ever do? These people, they want what they want. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind.”

Which was true, but it was awfully hard to sit around and hear people saying things about you, and not be able to defend yourself. Eagleburger was pondering this when he got a call from a catering outfit called Last Supper. “Hi,” said a sprightly young woman. “Are you Steve Eagleburger?”

Steve said he was. “Great,” the woman said. “We’re the catering company for the Salcido-Villalobos wedding, and we’d like to stop by and get a sense of the space.”

This was one of those phrases that Eagleburger hated. It conjured up images of people tyrannized by New Age crap philosophy, closing their eyes and breathing deeply in their kitchens to receive some transcendental revelation about proper arrangement of the cutlery. “Sure,” he said to the sprightly young catering woman. “I’m here all day today.”

She arrived later that afternoon and introduced herself as Carolyn. “Wow,” she said, looking toward the house. “Gorgeous lawn.”

Eagleburger was instantly suspicious. Who was this smiling, roly-poly, alleged caterer who just had to come out and get a sense of his space? He envisioned conspiracies, infiltrations. But he also couldn’t resist a compliment on his lawn. Despite himself, he smiled. “Thanks. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it.”

“Almost hate to set up on it,” Carolyn said.

“You and me both,” Eagleburger said. “But I owe the father of the bride a favor. This is what I get for having friends.”

#

A couple of days later, Eagleburger was tinkering with the robot he’d built to patrol the perimeter of his property line. The EPA had come after him a couple of years ago for spreading nonnative flora in a fragile desert ecosystem, so now he made sure that the grass stopped growing exactly at the fence line. The robot pruned and weeded and reached little pincer tools through the fence to pluck any blade of grass that dared grow in the precious desert. He’d put it together in his garage, but since then he’d licensed the design. Every so often, Steve Eagleburger was surprised by the fact that he was rich. It didn’t bother him, but he’d never really expected it. If I was poor and kept a lawn, he thought, people would leave me alone. But since I have money, I’m a symbol of something. He powered the robot back up and watched it head for the fence line. Everything I have is inside that fence, he thought. Leila didn’t have a fence around her yard in Minnesota.

He started having heterodox thoughts about his lawn. What if he did leave? What if he just let it all go? Who would it hurt? What was it all worth?

The wedding was six days away. Eagleburger called Hector. “Groom hasn’t run off yet?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?” Hector said. “This guy would put out fires with his tongue if Violeta asked him to.”

Eagleburger sighed. “I think I’m coming to an accommodation with it,” he said. “I mean, the people on my lawn.”

Hector laughed. “Hey, don’t sweat it. I think the Water Board might have some petty cash to get the grass going again.”

Eagleburger savored the irony of the Water Board giving him money for his lawn. Then he heard himself say, “Nah, that’s okay. I’ve got it. Listen, I’ll talk to you later.”

Now why the hell did you do that? Eagleburger asked himself.

If he wasn’t careful, he was going to suffer a bout of self-examination, in which he would internally role-play a conversation in which he asked himself why a sixty-year-old multimillionaire, in good physical health, handsome, poured his heart and soul into maintaining a patch of grass in the desert. And why said handsome millionaire hadn’t had a steady girlfriend in three years. These bouts always left Eagleburger debilitated, with a kind of spiritual hangover. He avoided them by working on the lawn. According to one of the botany journals he subscribed to, some terrorist outfit had created genetically engineered dandelions that could deliver airborne toxins. How long would it be until the greenies retuned them to survive all of the anti-dandelion defenses Eagleburger had built after the last guerrilla assault of dandelion seed? He still dreamed about that one occasionally: all those little wisps of potential lawn-murder, fine hairs of puppas suspending the lean brown bomb of the achene, drifting down on the breeze from where a phalanx of greenies stood on the hill shaking bunches of gone-to-seed dandelions and spinning around like they were doing some kind of interpretive dance. They’d been too far away from him to shoot, and all he could do was watch the little floating horrors settle across his half-acre of green.

When she was little, Leila had called them puffies. She’d always loved dandelions, had picked the seeding ones and run around in circles shaking them until she was covered with the seeds. He called her and said, “I think I’m going a little nuts.”

“Going?” she said.

“I had a sentimental moment about you and dandelions,” Eagleburger said.

“Ha,” she said. “You mean puffies?”

“Puffies, yeah,” he said. “For a second there, I didn’t hate them.”

Leila paused. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Call a doctor, Dad,” she said. “Really. You’re going a little nuts. Come to Minnesota.”

Instead he went outside and turned on the sprinklers. They weren’t due for another hour, but he couldn’t wait. Eagleburger gloried in the glittering arcs of water, and in what they meant to him.

#

The day before the wedding, Carolyn from Last Supper showed up with a truck. Eagleburger cringed, but he forced himself to watch as she set out a hundred chairs and a bower in his back yard, with a dance floor under a dining tent over by the shed. Every blow that drove the tent stakes into his yard also drove a sense of dread into Eagleburger’s soul. But he had to face it. She came to him with a look of sympathy when it was all over. “Tough for you, huh?” she said.

Again Eagleburger heard himself say something that he couldn’t believe even as it left his mouth. “I’m trying to be kind of Zen about it,” he said. An awkward silence followed this transparent lie. Eagleburger broke it by asking her about the company’s name. “Last Supper? Do people think that’s funny?”

“Who cares?” Carolyn said. “I think it’s funny. And they keep calling. Are you eating at the reception? Hector said he wasn’t sure.”

“Put me down for a steak,” Eagleburger said. He was planning to get good and drunk to dull the pain of wedding carnage; he’d need something in his stomach.

The next morning, his doorbell went off at seven-fifteen. The wedding wasn’t until eight that night, after sundown. Eagleburger arrived at the door in his bathroom to find himself facing a reporter with a video drone hovering near her left shoulder. “Mr. Eagleburger,” she said. “Vanity Arguello, Channel Six.”

“There’s still a Channel Six?” Eagleburger said. He never watched local television.

“Don’t overcomplicate this, sir,” said Vanity Arguello. “I’d just like to ask you a couple of questions about the wedding and your lawn.”

“This is news?”

“When the most defiant proponent of the classic American lawn in all of southern Arizona opens his property to a hundred people for a night of dancing and drinking, that’s news,” Vanity said, in her camera voice. “We’re here to see what made you do it.”

“Simple,” Eagleburger said. “A friend’s daughter was getting married, and she wanted to do it here. How could I say no?”

“That friend is Arizona Water Board deputy enforcement chief Hector Salcedo?”

Warning bells went off in Eagleburger’s head. “I know he’s with the Water Board, yeah,” he said. “But I don’t know his title.”

“There’s a rumor going around that this is part of a clandestine effort on the Water Board’s part to destroy your lawn. The American Lawn Care Association and the Alliance for the Betterment of Yard and Shrub Horticulture are threatening to sue, claiming that Salcedo put pressure on you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Eagleburger said. “He did not. His daughter asked him to ask me, and he did what any father would do. I’d have done the same thing for my daughter.”

“Are you willing to state for the record that no unethical consideration was offered or given for the use of your lawn?”

“Hell, yes,” Eagleburger said. His world was slowly tilting off its axis. “What is the Alliance for the Betterment of Yard and Shrub Horticulture?”

“We’re looking into that,” said Vanity Arguello.

“Because I’ve never heard of them, and I know a little about the current state of the conversation regarding the American lawn,” said Eagleburger. “I’ve had my disagreements with the Water Board in the past, but I’m not going to be used as a cat’s-paw for someone to go after Hector. He’s a good guy.” This, Eagleburger belatedly realized, was perilously close to a TV-ready sound bite. He’d been had. “Now I have some things to get ready before the wedding,” he said, starting to shut the door. “Can you please leave?”

Vanity Arguello flashed him a camera-ready smile. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Eagleburger,” she said. “We might be talking again.”

#

The interview, such as it was, broadcast on Channel Six at noon. By twelve-twenty, Eagleburger had irate messages from every representative of every lawn association in North America. He was a traitor. Killing was too good for him. He had betrayed the people who had stuck up for him in the face of greenie oppression. Eagleburger began to realize that many of the people who felt as he did about their lawns were, in fact, nuts.

As were the Last Supper caterers, who arrived with a tractor-trailer pulling a fifty-three-foot mobile catering kitchen. Eagleburger had never seen anything like it. They pulled up, plugged in an array of generators and refrigeration devices, tapped a gas line from a second truck that pulled up covered in bright red warning signs, and went to work. “You know, I got married in front of about six people,” he said as Carolyn went by making verbal notes into a handheld.

“Cold feet,” she said without breaking stride. “It’s never just the bride.”

Eagleburger felt himself to be in a fix. The greenies were still out there, and might use the wedding as a diversion to do something to his already beleaguered lawn. Plus now his former allies among America’s lawn aficionados had turned against him. To top it all off, he wasn’t sure how Hector would react to having his name dragged into the whole mess in the context Vanity Arguello had unhelpfully provided. Could be things were about to get less cozy with the Water Board, and Eagleburger’s irrigation and seed-control permits were due in a month. He might be in for a round of permit waterboarding. Caterers stomped here and there with tablecloths and bowls of snacks. Flower arrangers curdled his blood every time they dropped a vegetable life form to the ground; who knew what pollens and fungi and pathogens those flowers might carry? It dawned on Eagleburger that he had in all likelihood signed his lawn’s death warrant when he agreed to let Violeta Salcedo get married here.

“And I protected Hector on TV,” he muttered to himself.

As if summoned, Hector himself appeared. “Hell of a day,” he said. “How you doing, Steve?”

“Last Supper about says it all,” Eagleburger said. “I feel like someone somewhere is slipping out to earn thirty pieces of silver.”

“What?” Hector said.

Eagleburger waved it away. “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s just say impending doom is my dominant sense right now.”

“Got a call from a TV reporter,” Hector said. “Channel Six, I think. She wanted to talk about this. Said you’d made a comment about me.”

“She brought you up. I tried to change the subject.”

“Yeah, but how did you try to change the subject? Like you were avoiding something that might come up if you kept talking about me?”

Doom, Eagleburger thought. From all directions. “I changed the subject, Hector. She brought you up, I said that you were a straight shooter, and I changed the subject.”

“Uh huh.” Hector looked around. “I told them to go easy on the lawn, that you were sensitive about it.”

“Thanks,” Eagleburger said. “How’s Violeta doing?”

Hector shrugged. “Haven’t seen her.”

“I got married in front of I think six people,” Eagleburger said.

“Ha,” Hector said. “I got four kids, and I’ve never been married. Violeta’s mom is coming, but I don’t think I’ve seen her in eight or ten years.” He started walking away. “Things to do, amigo. Stay away from reporters, okay?”

This, Eagleburger thought, was beginning to look like a day that called for grand and futile gestures. Carolyn came up to him. “Can you call off the robots for the day? They’re getting stuck in the chair legs, and one of them started trying to take the flowers off the tables.”

Resigned to the additional damage this would cause the lawn, Eagleburger agreed. He went into the shed, started running remote recall and shutdown protocols on the robots, and froze.

A single dandelion achene, still attached to its pappus, hung suspended in a spiderweb near the shed window that faced out toward Agua Caliente Wash.

Eagleburger shut the door.

#

Some time later, he was aware of voices. “I don’t know where he is.” That was Hector. Eagleburger opened the door, startling Hector, Carolyn, and a fearsome elderly woman Eagleburger took to be Hector’s mother or aunt. She looked him in the eye and said, “You’re drunk.”

There was no arguing it. The dandelion seed had tipped him over the edge, and he’d gotten into the wine refrigerator he kept in the shed next to the robots. “I am,” Eagleburger admitted. He looked around his yard, where preparations were in full swing. “I bet I’m not the only one.”

Hector draped an arm over his shoulders and led him into the house. “Sit,” he commanded. Eagleburger did, and Hector made him iced coffee. Carolyn came in. “You have the worst case of cold feet I’ve ever seen in someone who wasn’t actually getting married,” she said.

“You think?” Eagleburger said. The coffee tasted good. Carolyn looked good. Eagleburger opened his mouth and said, “Even if you’re a greenie infiltrator out to destroy my lawn, I think you’re okay. Let’s get married.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Carolyn said. She went back out and Eagleburger noticed Hector trying not to laugh.

“You know,” he said, “days like this are the ones when it seems like it isn’t worth it, but these are the ones that really make it worth it, you know?”

Hector squinted with the effort of parsing this sentence. “Five,” he said. “You said ‘it’ five times. In one sentence. What’s ‘it’?”

Eagleburger shrugged and windmilled one of his arms around, taking in the house, the lawn, all of it. “All of it,” he said.

Hector poured himself some coffee. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. My daughter’s getting married in an hour. Instead of taking care of a million things out there, including trying to track down her mother, I’m in here pouring coffee into your drunk ass. This is the last time I ask you for a favor, Steve. I swear to God.” He sipped at the coffee. After a pause, he added, “And with this TV thing, I might not be able to do you quite so many favors, either.”

Eagleburger thought about this. “Taraxacum,” he said after a while.

“What?” Hector said.

“Dandelions,” Eagleburger said. “They always win.”

Hector eyed him warily. “My daughter’s about to get married,” he said. “Hope you come out to join us.”

#

Eagleburger did, and found the whole scene surreal. He felt highly attuned to something, not a message but the fact that a message was being sent. Maybe. The dandelions always win, he thought, over and over, as if he’d heard it somewhere and couldn’t quite remember where. At times he thought he saw capering greenies up on the hills beyond the back yard. Everywhere he thought he saw dandelion seeds. Doesn’t make any difference, he thought. When the permits come up, I’m going to get waterboarded.

He sat in a chair, feeling its legs crush the life from the delicate blades and tillers below. The soil would compact. The roots would die. Four hundred chair legs would sever stolons, destroy delicate ligules. Entire square yards of surface life would die under banquet tables and serving stations.

Someone sat next to him and he looked over to see Carolyn. “You’re a strange one,” she said. “Is all you do tinker with robots and obsess about your lawn?”

“Yep,” Eagleburger said. “That’s about the size of it.” He liked this candor thing. It was new to him, but he was definitely going to give it a chance to take root. “Actually,” he said after a moment, “tinkering with the robots is part of the lawn thing.”

“So you made yourself millions of dollars, and now you’re a recluse obsessed with keeping a pocket ecosystem alive thousands of miles from a place where it could actually flourish.” Carolyn held Eagleburger’s gaze. He wanted to dispute this characterization of himself, but couldn’t. Not really.

And was saved from the necessity of having to by the first notes of Pachelbel’s Canon, and the appearance of Violeta Salcedo. Radiantly she progressed down the aisle between the double ranks of chairs, each footstep mangling his meticulously groomed mixture of tailored Zoysia, fescues, and blue grama. The rose petals strewn at her feet dispersed foreign pollens and microorganisms. Eagleburger envisioned root disorders, strangled rhizomes. But God, she was gorgeous, and Hector looked like the happiest guy in the world.

As she passed him, one of her attendants gave her train a little flip, to straighten out a forbidden wrinkle. Tiny motes danced away from the fabric, and Eagleburger noticed two things at once.

The motes, with their circular haloes and lean brown seeds.

The arms of the attendant, spackled with the kind of fading deep bruises that might result from getting in the way of a load of beanbags fired from a twelve-gauge Remington.

He’d been infiltrated. The entire wedding was a greenie Trojan horse, carrying God knew what else other than dandelion seeds. What was on those rose petals? What pollens and aerosolized parasites might have been dusted onto the hems of dresses and the soles of shoes. Eagleburger’s jaw tightened. He leaned over to Carolyn and whispered, “See that? Dandelion seeds. Even here. See what I mean?”

She patted his knee and whispered back, “Steve. We’ll make a deal with you. Get a couple of goats and you’ll be our hero.”

#

I knew it, Eagleburger thought later. From the second I laid eyes on her. But I didn’t listen to myself. It was a great thing to find out that your paranoia was justified. He lay awake at four-thirty in the morning, habituated by years of greenie incursions. Sometimes he awoke from dreams of Minnesota and found that they strengthened his resolve. What he was doing here, it meant something. The greenies weren’t going to change that. His suspension from the Alliance for the Betterment of Yard and Shrub Horticulture wasn’t going to change that. His hearing before the Water Board next Thursday wasn’t going to change that. Whether he had any friends or not, Eagleburger was standing up for something.

Four thirty-three. He could tell by the pace of his thoughts that this was going to be one of those mornings where he didn’t sleep again. What the hell, he thought.

Might as well get up and water the goats.