Big Wheat (10 page)

Chapter 15

Sanctuary

Charlie rode all night. But the single headlight on the Indian was about as effective on the dark road as a candle lantern, and he didn’t dare go very fast. It was past dawn when he found the Ark again and parked beside the machine shop. He put the goggles and hat back in the saddlebag and headed for the mess tent, where he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down to read the letter again. He was still trying to grasp the enormity of it when Jim Avery came up behind him.

“So how’d the Indian treat you?”

“Didn’t see him,” he said, not looking up.

“Huh?”

He looked up, his concentration broken. “Oh, you mean the bike. Fine; no problem. She’s a real thoroughbred.”

“That she is. But you seem to have left your wits on the far side of nowhere. Is there anything you want to tell me about?”

“Something I have to show you, anyway.” He sighed deeply and scratched the back of his head, feeling as if he were about to deliver his own execution order. Then he handed Avery both the letter and the flier. “Read the letter first, I think.”

“Why don’t you read them to me? There’s nobody else around to hear.” He handed the papers back, and Charlie read both of them aloud. When he read his sister’s letter, his voice faltered at several points, but he pushed on to the end. When he read the flier, he sounded more astonished than upset. And when he finished both, he looked up to see that Avery had been studying him intently.

“Well,” said Avery. “Not your average trip to the big city, was it? Anybody following you?”

“No. At the post office, I ran into the sheriff from back home, but his pickup wouldn’t start, and I got away from him, clean. No way he could tell which way I was headed. And on the way back, I stayed off the main roads.”

“His pickup didn’t start, huh? I don’t suppose it was missing a shear pin, or something?”

“Could have been something like that, yes.”

“Did you kill her?”

“Excuse me?”

“The girl, Mabel whatever. I have to know. Did you kill her?”

“No. I swear—”

“Don’t swear, just say it.”

“All right. The first I knew she was dead was”—he paused to get control of his voice—“when I read my sister’s letter. I have no idea who killed her.”

“But somebody did. She didn’t just walk off a cliff. And whoever did her in must be real happy, about now, that this sheriff is after you.”

“I would say that’s true.”

Avery went and got himself a cup of coffee, then sat down across from Charlie, put an elbow on the table, and buried his chin in his hand for a while. When he spoke again, it was with a different tone.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. First—”

“I expect you want me to leave. I won’t argue with you. But I should go right away. That pickup isn’t going to stay broke down forever.”

“You talk like a fish, Charlie. You’re my people now, and I don’t give my people up.”

“What else can you do?”

“You ever hear the saying, ‘hide in plain sight’?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re about to do it. Come with me. And bring a folding chair.”

Outside, Stump was checking over the Indian, and Avery asked him if he had seen Emily.

“Cook shack, last I saw. Looks like this machine’s been through some mighty rough and dirty country.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

At the cook shack, Emily was washing up the last of the breakfast dishes.

“Let somebody else do that,” said Avery. “You go get your bottles and brushes. We need to make Mister Bacon, here, into a different man.”

“He been a bad boy, has he?”

“No, but somebody thinks so. We need to make him hard to see.”

“I can handle that, right enough.” To Charlie, she said, “Take that chair down by the creek and find us a nice sheltered spot to work. I’ll meet you there. Here, take a couple of dishtowels with you, too.”

He had no idea what they were doing, but he did as told. He picked out a spot by the biggest tree he could find, set up the chair, and sat down to wait. Soon Emily joined him, carrying a small wicker hamper. She seemed to be suppressing a smile, like a poker player who can’t quite hide the fact that he had just filled his inside straight.

“I need to talk to you, Emily.”

She put down the basket, tied a dishtowel around his neck, like a bib, and began circling around him, peering intently at his hair.

“First the length, then the color.”

“What are you talking about? Didn’t you hear what I said?” He started to get back up, but she put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down again. He realized with some surprise that it was the first time she had ever touched him, and he found the touch oddly exciting.

“That shock of hair on your forehead is like a white flag. We change that, and nobody looking for Charlie Bacon will glance twice at you.” She produced a comb and scissors from her basket and went to work. “Hold still, will you?”

“I’m not sure I—”

“I am.”

“Do you really know what you’re doing? I mean, where—”

“I worked in the theater for a while.”

“Really? I thought—”

“You’ve already made it very clear what you thought, Charlie. I didn’t go on stage. I was what they call a dresser. I worked with costumes and makeup and hairdos. You’d be amazed what you can do with stage makeup. You can even make somebody like me look like a real woman.”

“I never thought you looked like anything else.”

“Than what, a dresser?”

“No, a real woman.”

“Oh, really? Well, you certainly took your sweet time saying so.”

“Well, you said it first: I’m no good at reading people. I guess that means I’m no good at knowing what I should say to them, either.”

“Hmm. Well maybe that’s not such a bad thing, at that.”

“How do you figure?”

“If you don’t know any guile, then you’re stuck with honesty. Sometimes honesty works, you know.”

“Unless you’re talking to the law.”

“Too bloody right. Or unless I’m trying to tell you I’m not a whore, yes?”

“Excuse me?”

“Being honest didn’t help me a bit there, did it?”

“What are you saying? I never called you a liar.”

“I could tell you wanted to.”

“You could
not
tell, because it wasn’t true!”

“I’m the one who can read people, remember? At the very least, you weren’t sure about me.”

“I might have had a small doubt somewhere, but that’s not—”

“Right. So small that you just had to tell somebody else about it?”

“Oh, my God. How did you—”

“Just forget it, Charlie. You had your chance to give me your trust. And fool that I am, I might give you another one. But not today. Will you
please
hold still?”

“I’ll try.”

She spent a long time cutting his hair, not merely getting rid of the forelock but making the entire style different. “Your neck and shoulders are one big, tense knot,” she said as she worked. “Did you get in some trouble in Minot?”

“More like I found out about some trouble I was already in.”

“You promised me I could see a letter, I believe.”

He wouldn’t exactly have called it a promise, but he pulled the letter out of his pocket and handed it over his shoulder to her, all the same. She made no comment on it and he couldn’t see her face, so he didn’t know what her reaction was. She passed it back to him and went back to her clipping. After a while, she started humming a little tune as she worked.

“That’ll do for a first cut,” she said, finally. “Now get down on your hands and knees by the creek, with your head hanging over the water.”

He did as she said, and she hunkered down next to him and poured creek water on his head with a big enameled saucepan. Her knee and shin pushed up against his ribcage, and she made no effort to move farther away. Her shin felt hot, even through his flannel shirt. She put down the pan, picked up a bar of soap, and worked thick lather into his hair with both hands. She took her time, stroking the strands almost sensually. Or was that his imagination? She let her fingers wander over his neck and the backs of his ears.

“I’m about to transform you completely, Charlie. Have you ever been so totally in a woman’s hands before?”

“Not that I can decently talk about.”

She gave a surprised little laugh, high-pitched and lilting. “Aren’t we the racy one, though?”

“We? You’re the one who can’t keep her hands to herself.” He grinned. He could no longer tell if she was just lathering his hair or was deliberately kneading the back of his neck, working out the knots of tension with skilled, soap-slick hands. But if she was doing more than necessary, he didn’t worry about it. It was surprisingly easy, being touched by this woman. In fact, everything was suddenly easy with her. It was as if she made him real. He had never felt that with Mabel Boysen.

“Close your eyes tight.”

He did. She poured a deluge of cold rinse water on his head, and the soapsuds disappeared downstream. She lathered him up a second time, more slowly than the first, and the feel of her hands was again charged and faintly erotic. She rinsed again and then let him sit back on his haunches to dry his eyes while she toweled his hair off and applied some kind of dye from an evil-looking dark glass bottle.

“That looks like poison.”

“It probably is, but I wasn’t going to ask you to drink it, you know. Now get back in the chair. We’ll do a final cut while the dye takes.”

“Takes?” He went to the chair and sat down.

“That’s what I call it, anyway.” She combed and snipped, this time doing a lot more looking than cutting. He saw that the hairs falling on his dishtowel-bib were pitch black. “You’ll have to touch this up from time to time, but the basic job will last for months. You’ll also have to start using some pomade, to hold it in its new shape. I’ll teach you how to do all that.”

She turned her attention to his eyebrows, which she colored using a toothbrush. Then she took an artist’s brush and painted a pencil moustache on his upper lip. “You’ll quit shaving in that spot, right away. When your real moustache starts to grow out, we’ll do that with the toothbrush, too.”

“I can’t believe this is happening. Is Jim really meaning to hide me? He could get in a lot of trouble, doing that.”

“He doesn’t worry about trouble all that much. He’s been in and out of it all his life. He’s an old hand at slipping past the law.”

“I hope he’s better at it than I am.”

“Trust, Charlie. Remember that word?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, let’s have a look at you, and then we’ll do a final rinse.”

She took off the dishtowel and produced a mirror. He looked at himself from every possible angle. His hair was short enough to reveal a widow’s peak, and slicked back on the sides and top. His eyebrows were thick and brooding, and the moustache really looked very believable, from anything more than a couple of feet away. He looked for a long time, scarcely daring to believe his eyes. Looking back at him from the mirror was the exact, unmistakable image of his dead brother.

“You like it?”

“I’ll let you know when I get over the shock.”

Chapter 16

New Horizons

Avery was greasing a bearing journal on the big Peerless steam engine when Stringbean Moe, still wearing his sling, walked back into camp. Avery wiped his hands on a rag, picked a two-foot crowbar out of the toolbox on the tractor platform, and strode out to meet him.

“I don’t give second warnings, Stringbean.”

“Now don’t go getting yourself all worked up. I got business here.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You seen this?” he asked, holding out one of Sheriff Hollander’s fliers.

Avery took it from him, looked at it for a moment, then tore it into pieces and threw it on the ground. “No,” he said, “and neither have you.”

“I run into some kind of sheriff on the road yesterday. He give it to me.”

“And you told him what?”

“Told him I hadn’t seen this guy, was all, but I’d be looking out for him. I told him I used to work at this place, and he said as how he’d be heading this way.”

“You told him where we are?”

“He’d a found you anyway, I expect.”

“But you just couldn’t resist helping him, could you? Did he say when he’d be here?”

“A day or so. He had to go to some church first, he says. I could be watching for him, seeing as how I know his rig now. I could warn Bacon, or Krueger, or whoever he is. For the right fee, that is. I figure he’s been making some good money, doing all that fancy metal stuff and all. For the right fee, he ain’t never been here ay-tall. Or if you fellas druther, I seen him headed south on a fast coal rattler.”

“You would do that, would you?”

“Yes, sir, I surely would.”

“You would lie to the cops, but only for money, and if you don’t get your money, you would rat out a fellow traveler, is that about it?”

“Aw, come on. It ain’t such a bad thing as you’re making it out to be. Everybody’s got to live, don’t they?”

“No, not everybody.” Avery suddenly had fire in his eyes and an intimidating set to his jaw.

“Jesus man, don’t get all riled. I just—”

“Stump!” When there was no immediate response, Avery went over to where the Peerless engine was chugging away at a smooth idle and blew the whistle once, a full ten-second blast. Soon the whole population of the Ark began to gather in a loose circle around the engine, where Avery now stood on top of the boiler, on a wooden catwalk he had installed there.

“This man,” he said, pointing at Stringbean, “is a backstabbing fink. He wants to rat one of us out to the law, unless he gets a bribe.”

“Hey, it ain’t like that!”

“If the skipper says it is, then it is,” said someone in the crowd that was now pressing in on him.

“Stump,” said Avery, “take this turncoat up in the mountains, as far as the truck will go on one tank of gas. Take his damn razor away from him, tie him to a tree and leave him.”

“Hey, I ain’t going to—” But Stringbean never got to finish his protestation. Emily, with her arms still wet and a kitchen apron clinging to her front, hit him solidly on the back of the head with a cast iron skillet. It made a lovely, resounding “blong.” The man rolled up his eyes briefly, then closed them and collapsed in a heap. Stump picked him up in a fireman’s carry and headed for the truck.

Still perched on top of the big engine, Avery began to shout orders.

“All right, pay attention here, please! Fold up the tents, bury the garbage, fill the water tanks, and get everything secured,” he said. “I want us hooked up, packed up, and ready to travel in two hours, tops. You know the routine, people. Time to part the Red Sea.”