Big Wheat (13 page)

And suddenly she was in the tank with him, first with her clothes still on and then as naked as he was. She rubbed and soaped him some more from behind, then stood up in the tank and walked around to his front. She let him have a long look at the body he had once “guarded,” then wrapped her legs around his waist, sat back on his thighs, and put her arms around his neck. Their mouths found each other, hungry, yearning, and he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her to him greedily, feeling her single erect nipple against his chest.

“I can’t possibly be doing this,” he said. “I’m way too tired.”

“Your body doesn’t seem to know that, does it? It looks to me like it wants my crumpet.”

“It does look that way, doesn’t it? Do you think Annie Praise God would approve?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve not a doubt that’s why she gave me the soap and told me about the tank. You can’t tell me the Bible lovers don’t screw. They just can’t bring themselves to call it that.”

“I don’t think I care what we call it.”

“Charlie?”

“Yes.”

“Just shut up and fuck me, all right?”

Chapter 21

Side Tracked

Sheriff Amos Hollander had kept his vehicle in good repair; the Windmill Man had to give him that. It would do almost forty miles an hour on a flat grade, and it only burned about a pint of oil for every tankful of gas. It also had the new-fangled No-Skid tires that looked hardly worn. But that was the end of the good news. By the time he saw the spire of the Unitarian church off in the distance to his right again, the Windmill Man had to admit that he had lost the trail of the traveling machine shop. He didn’t approve of profanity, as a rule—it showed a terrible lack of self-control—but he uttered some, under his breath.

He stopped in the middle of the single-track lane he had been following and opened Hollander’s leather satchel, hoping it might contain some kind of notes about the hunt for the fleeing Krueger kid.

The first thing he came to was a telegram from somebody named Tom.

C
OUNTY BOARD AUTHORIZES BACK PAY AND TRAVEL EXPENSES FOR YOU STOP SEND NAME OF FIRST WESTERN UNION OFFICE YOU FIND TO THIS SENDER STOP MONEY WIRED AT ONCE STOP

He had no experience with telegrams, and he puzzled over it for a while. Could they really send money over a telegraph wire? Maybe they just sent authorization, and the office paid cash out of their own till. Even so, it was a remarkable innovation. But the message implied that it had to be a Western Union office. And even he knew that there were a lot of places with telegraphs that were not Western Union.

The message was dated two days earlier, and it was printed by hand on a lined yellow form. Not a Western Union form. That probably meant that Hollander had not yet collected this marvelous over-the-wire money. Should he? Was providence again guiding his steps? It had been the first piece of paper he pulled out of the satchel, after all. And while he didn’t need the money all that badly, it gave him a new direction. And new directions were never to be ignored.

So where would he find the right kind of telegraph office? He would find somebody to ask.

“But not at the church,” he said out loud. And he chuckled at his own joke.

He started the pickup again and continued west. Five miles later the road got a little wider and was paralleled by a set of railroad tracks. He stayed with it. Some fifteen miles later, he came to a grain elevator on a short spur line. There were a few other buildings around it, but he couldn’t tell if they were offices.

Several wagons were lined up at the elevator, waiting to unload. There were two lines, one for farmers who had their grain in bags and a longer, slower one for those whose crop was in bulk, in high-sided wagons. He picked a farmer at the back end of the slow line to chat with.

“You been here long?”

“I ain’t got any gray hairs yet, but I’m working on it.”

“You sell your grain here, or just ship it?”

“Both, I reckon. Pillsbury Company, from over Minnesota, has an agent right here, buys it off you smack dab on the spot.”

“How do they know what the going rate is?”

“Oh, they’re real fancy. They got one of them little machines that makes a lot of clickity noises and spits out a skinny paper ribbon with all manner of numbers printed on it. If they’re cheatin’ you, they at least put on a good show about it. You can sell on the futures market, too, if you want, store it at the elevator here and don’t ship ‘til the middle of the winter, when the price is up. Course, then you gotta pay the elevator a bigger fee. Personally, I don’t hold with it. I sell my crop now, I get paid now, and I let somebody else worry about when to put it on the Great Northern R and R.”

“Can you send a regular message on this Pillsbury machine?”

“You can’t
send
anything. It
gets
numbers, is all. Prices.”

“So they don’t have a regular telegraph office here, then, just the machine with the prices?”

“What in tarnation would anybody want with a real telegraph office here?”

“Law enforcement business.”

“Oh. Well, we don’t get a lot of that out this way. Law is mostly a Bible and a shotgun. Specially the shotgun. You most probably want to go where there’s a county courthouse and a Western Union, I expect.”

“You expect right.”

The farmer said nothing more for a while. Then he clucked at his horses and moved his wagon forward ten yards or so. The Windmill Man considered slapping him alongside the head, but he wasn’t sure if that was how a real sheriff would act. If it came off as just petty anger, that would be no good. Mostly, people who saw him angry had to die. He tried another question.

“And just exactly where would I find a county office and a Western Union?”

“Oh, you don’t know? Huh! Some lawman. Well, Fort Thompson would be one, but that’s about sixty miles west and a little south.”

“How interesting. Try again.”

“Oh, well, Ithaca is one, I guess. You follow these here train tracks sorta northwest, you’ll get there all right, just so long as nobody shoots you for trespassing along the way.”

“How far?”

“How far will they shoot you? All the way until you’re plum dead, I’d s’pose.”

“How far is Ithaca, you brainless hick?”

“Oh, that. Twenty miles, tops. Maybe eighteen, if you hurry.”

“If there is a god, your own horses will step on your head before I get there.” He forced himself to walk calmly back to the Model T.

“They tried that already. It didn’t work. Nice talking to you, though. Surely was.”

***

Three hours later, he pulled into the town of Ithaca, identifiable by the name painted on the side of a shiny new water tower, the sure mark of a rising metropolis. He guessed it was a town of somewhere between one and two thousand people. There were few buildings more than one story tall, but Main Street was seven blocks long and there were storefronts on side streets as well. It looked prosperous and new.

Even in the towns, he noticed, the people of the high plains used the land as if there were an unlimited supply of it. In a city that was unlikely to see fifty cars on Main Street on the same day, the streets were sixty feet wide, some with planter islands in the center. He couldn’t decide what was worse, growing wheat or growing unnecessary pavement.

He ignored the County offices for the time being and went straight to the railroad depot, which also had a Western Union office. With the help of the clerk, he composed the briefest, and therefore cheapest, message possible, to be sent to Tom, whoever he was, back in Beulah:

“You can tell by the original message where to send it?”

“I send it to everybody on the line who’s close enough to pick it up, but only the Western operator who hears his call sign will copy it. That’s here on the message, see? If he’s too far away, somebody else will forward it.”

“Good. And how long will it take to get a reply?”

“How should I know? They’re your people, not mine.”

“Let me put that another way. When you get a reply, how soon can I get some money?”

“On the spot, Sheriff. That’s unless it’s such a big amount that I gotta send somebody to the bank. But even then, real soon.”

“Excellent.”

The telegraph key rattled, and he strode out of the office to look for someplace to get something to eat. Maybe they would give him a cup of coffee at the County courthouse. Sooner or later he would go there anyway, to ask if anybody had any leads on the Krueger kid.

But before he found any government offices, he was taken in by the aroma of a small bakery and café. As he got closer, the air was filled with the smells of cinnamon, yeast, bread, and lard-and-sugar frosting. He went in, took a small round table with wrought iron legs by a window, and ordered a frosted long john, two kinds of Danish rolls, and six sugar cookies, which he dipped in strong dark coffee.

His waistline did not reflect his fondness for sweets. He didn’t apologize for it and certainly never called it a weakness. In fact, he had never understood why so many people referred to their appetites as weaknesses or sins or bad habits.

He himself had very few appetites, but he respected all of them. Smoking and drinking did not appeal to him. He generally felt comfortable being around other people, but he had never craved either friendship or love, wasn’t even sure what those words meant. Money did not interest him, in and of itself. As for sex, if he wanted a woman, he would wait for the right moment and take one. And the pleasure of throwing her away afterwards was at least as great as the pleasure of sex, which was, after all, just a reflexive body function, like sneezing or letting gas. But power was another matter altogether. To have another human being utterly under your control, desperately seeking your approval, even begging for your mercy, was a pleasure not to be rivaled by anything else he had ever known. Still, a good maple long john was not to be scoffed at, either. As he was paying his bill, he chatted up the teenage girl who was working the cash register.

“That was a real banquet, darling.”

She blushed a bit at the “darling” and mumbled something like, “Glad you liked it, sir.”

“Yes indeed. You know, they say the wild, barren prairies produce the most beautiful flowers ever known. Jewels of the wilderness, so to speak.”

“Um, I guess I never heard that. Sir.”

“Did you make the cookies?”

“Yes, sir. Well, I helped, anyways.”

“Well, I think they are jewels of the wilderness, too.”

“Um. Thank you.” She blushed and gave a bit of a nervous giggle.

“You don’t know what to say to that, do you? You think I’m just a funny old man who’s talking nonsense.”

“Oh, no, sir.”

“You’re polite as well as beautiful, I see. It becomes you. It’s Amos, darling. Just Amos, not ‘sir.’ And you are…?” He began to hold her eyes with his, with gentle intensity. It was an old tactic. The reference to being old, which he definitely was not, put them at ease, while the intense and very sexual stare drew them in.

“I’m Darlene.”

“What a lovely name. Where are you from, Darlene?”

“I was born here. My pa owns the shop.”

“Does he, now? Well, I must say I’m amazed at that, I truly am. I figured you for a transplant from some big, glamorous city like St. Louis or Chicago, you have such genteel and sophisticated beauty.”

“Oh gosh.” She giggled again. “You shouldn’t say things like that, sir.”

He continued to hold the eye contact, and when he gave her the coins for his tab, he made a point of touching her hand longer than necessary. She was obviously embarrassed and a little scared. But just as obviously, she was interested. They always were.

“Amos, remember?”

“Oh gosh, yes, I forgot.” She giggled again.

Wait until I shove you up against the wall in the back room
, he thought
. After that, it’ll be a long time before you giggle again, and you will never, ever forget my name. Or rather the one I’m using
.

Violence for him was like whiskey to a blackout drunk. The drunk could make a rational and conscious decision to buy a bottle of liquor, could even make a conscious, if hardly unbiased, decision to open it. But once the first of the alcohol was in his blood, all free will disappeared. He was on a road that had only one direction, and he could no more turn back than he could stop breathing.

The Windmill Man knew he was like that with violence, and the thought did not bother him, any more than did his other appetites. He could make a rational decision to make this silly girl into a senseless, quivering victim, based on a cool assessment of the odds for success. But once he made that decision, he crossed a threshold that could not be uncrossed. The outcome could be delayed and the strategy changed for unforeseen circumstances, but the end of the game was absolutely set. It would enforce itself. And like the drunk, he would go farther and farther into the throes of it until he reached a state where he did things that afterwards could not be remembered at all. He would remember being on the brink of a delicious blackout and loving it, but that was all.

That was partly why he always had to collect a memento.

He looked at the foolish girl’s neck and saw no locket or necklace. She had no bracelet or earrings, either. She did have an unusual tortoise-shell comb in her thick blond hair. He considered it.

But fate was not having it just then. The bell on the front door jingled and a couple of men with stiff collars and ties, probably shopkeepers, walked in, chatting with each other. They looked like the types who would sit down for coffee and stay a long time. The Windmill Man made one last bit of eye contact and spoke very softly, so the newcomers couldn’t hear.

“I’ll be back to see you later, Darlene, my little prairie flower.”

Now she had gone from giggling to staring, transfixed, like a chicken looking at a fox. And he knew, absolutely, that he could own her, could do anything he wanted with her. It was almost too easy, really. He would think about it a while longer. Of course he would, just as the drunk would consider whether he really wanted that next bottle of whiskey. He spun on his heel and marched smartly out, tipping his hat to the two interlopers on the way.

“Gentlemen.”

“Officer.” They nodded. “Lovely day for a fresh doughnut.”

You have no idea.

Out on the street, strolling down one of the boardwalks that were everywhere, it occurred to him that what he had just considered doing was dangerous. Working at breaking down and raping a girl in her father’s own shop in the middle of the business day was sheer madness. Very dangerous indeed. How delicious it would have been. He might go back again, at that, and ravage that little bit of giggly fluff. But it could never again have the same thrill of a completely spontaneous act of great risk, great danger. And that, he admitted, was the fourth appetite that he did not call a weakness or a sin. Danger. Power, danger, violence, and sugar, more or less in that order, were the only things he ever craved. He definitely had enough of the last one for the time being. He wondered if the day might yet bring him one or more of the other three.