Big Wheat (16 page)

Then they all pitched straw until the whole mass was completely covered, making a very plausible imitation of a header. Over at the next straw pile, the only other one that hadn’t yet been burned off, they tidied up the shape a little, making it more loaf-like. There was no way to blow the whistle anymore, so they all joined in a huge cheer.

They were answered by rolling thunder from all directions. The sky turned the color of dirty dishwater, and the clouds seemed to be going in all directions at once, twisting around one another like colossal snakes, backlit by chain lightning. Over at the bogus header, some of the straw was floating upward into the sky.

“This,” said Charlie, “does not look good.” The others looked up in silent awe.

As he was debating where they should go if a tornado hit them, Maggie Mae tugged on his sleeve and pointed to the west, where a wall of rain was marching across the prairie.

“We are delivered again,” said Annie.

There were a few hushed amens, because they all knew that if they had a severe rainstorm, then the heart of the twister, if there was one, was someplace else.

Three minutes later, it hit them, with gale force winds and raindrops the size of quarters. They stood there for a while, letting it drench them, laughing like idiots. Then they ran for the shelter of the big barn.

“You just had to name that thing the Ark, didn’t you?” said Charlie to Maggie Mae. She grinned.

The noise on the roof of the barn was terrific, but it was not the noise of a tornado.

“Them’s thick-sawed cedar shingles up there,” said Joe. “The rainstorm ain’t been made can rip any of them off. I think it’s time for a celebration here.”

“Oh yes,” said Annie. “Yes, indeed.”

“I’ve got a fiddle,” said somebody.

“I’ve got a jaws harp.”

“I’ve got a jug of sipping whiskey.”

What else could they possibly need?

***

A bit later they were gathered around a circle of lanterns on the old threshing floor, a glass of booze in every hand.

“A toast,” said Charlie. They all stopped talking and turned to him.

“Here’s to Jim Avery, wherever he may be. Godspeed home, Jim.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Amen.”

“To Jim. You bet.”

“And here’s to Charlie Bacon,” said Annie, “and to the bounty of the good harvest. Praise God.” And she took as deep a drink as anybody.

The fiddle screeched, somebody let out a whoop, and the party began.

***

Twenty miles away, Emil Puckett was taking a drink from his silver flask and fuming. His big Hudson was stuck in the mud up to the hubcaps after his windshield wipers had been utterly unable to cope with the sudden downpour and he had lost sight of the road and driven into the ditch. He had half a pint of gin and five tailor-made cigarettes to last him through the night and the storm. It was going to be a long night. Somebody was definitely going to pay for this.

***

Farther away still, Jim Avery sat at the dining room table of what had to be the most boring man he had ever met. While they drank elderberry wine, he listened to the merits of dry cultivation, the best way to build a cluster of corn shocks, and how to dispose of a stillborn calf, and he seriously thought about riding back out into the storm.

“You a gambling man, Mr. Avery?”

“We’re probably all gambling men. Some of us just don’t know it.”
I’m gambling with my sanity, right this minute.

“What I mean is, would you fancy a little friendly game of poker?”

“Sure, why not?” It had to be better than the conversation.

Two hours later, he was the owner of a 1917 Chevrolet flatbed truck. The Indian would fit on the back very nicely, and if the windshield wipers worked, he could continue on his way in spite of the rain.

***

The Windmill Man stood in the shadow of a storage shed in the alley behind Ithaca’s Main Street bakery. He was wearing his nondescript bindle clothes again, and water poured off the brim of his slouch hat and onto the front of his rubberized range coat. His trousers were soaked, and the water had dripped down and filled his boots, as well. But he paid no attention to his body’s discomfort. In the back room of the bakery, the foolish little blonde was taking loaves of bread out of a big oven, dumping them out of their pans, and dabbing butter on the top crust of each one. She worked by the light of two kerosene lanterns, and he could clearly see her through the single back window of the shop.

She was alone.

Soon she would be locking the place up for the night. If she left by the back door, he would have her at once. If she left on the street side, by the front door, things would get a bit more difficult. He might have to shadow her for a while and look for a different place to take her. But either way, her fate was sealed. He had crossed the threshold.

The storm would hide most of her cries, and his hand would muffle the rest. He could beat her into unconsciousness if she screamed too loudly, of course, but he would much rather have her awake when he raped and slashed her. And when he was done, her body would look just like the one that had been found in the field back in Mercer County, the one that was now attributed to Charlie Krueger.

He wondered fleetingly where her “pa,” the one who owned the shop, was. Whether he was sleeping blissfully or engaged in his own dark adventures of the night, he would soon regret leaving his daughter alone, probably for the rest of his life.

His temples throbbed, and despite the cold rain, his face and body felt hot as the power flowed into him. Soon it would possess him utterly. It was a feeling like no other. Maybe this time he would manage to remember it.

The blonde wiped her hands, hung her apron on a peg on the wall, and then blew out both lamps. The Shadow Man moved to the side of the door and waited for the knob to turn. The blood fugue was about to begin.

But the knob did not turn. After an endless minute, he went back to the window and saw the girl leaving by the front door. A fat man with a lantern was with her. The father, no doubt, come to see his little girl safely home. Damn! Damn, damn, damn it all! Never before had he gone this far and then had to abort. Was he still being punished for his carelessness back at the abandoned campsite? Hadn’t he suffered enough already?

He fumed with impotent rage as he watched the front door close and the shop go utterly black. Then he limped off into the night. He was surprised at how cold the rain suddenly felt. His bad ankle sent shards of pain up his leg, and he did not smile.
Somebody
was going to pay for this debacle.

***

Four blocks away, Stringbean Moe huddled miserably under the inadequate shelter of a makeshift tent tied to a tree by the Courthouse. It didn’t matter that his tarp kept out most of the rain, because water was flowing in sheets across the lawn. His clothes were soaked, and he shivered uncontrollably. Sleep was impossible.

He decided to take the sheriff’s deputy up on his offer of jailing him for vagrancy. How much worse than this could it be? First, though, he had to hide the Luger somewhere. He looked around for a likely place.

Chapter 26

Gray Dawn

The party at the Wicks’ barn went on all evening and well into the night. The fiddler played every tune he knew and then started over, and anybody who didn’t know how to dance learned on the spot. They drank whiskey and hard cider and homemade wine and ate pickles and hard-boiled eggs and ginger snaps, and they laughed and danced until they collapsed.

The rain went on longer than the party. In the morning, it was reduced to a misty drizzle but still showed no sign of being ready to quit. The wind had shifted to the north, and it had a distinct bite to it. The golden days of the long harvest were rapidly drawing to a close.

The farmyard and fields at the Wick spread were a greasy, soggy mess, and beyond the usual morning chores of picking eggs and feeding the livestock, people put their ambition on hold for the day. There were still eighty acres of corn to be cut and shocked, but that could wait.

Charlie and Emily woke in each other’s arms, in a corner of the hayloft over the horse barn, where they had a small measure of privacy. The night before, she had brought them two blankets, a bottle of wine, and a chamber pot.

“How romantic,” he had said.

“Practical. I’m planning on us having our clothes off for a good long time here, and I don’t want to have to run out to the loo that way.”

“A thoughtful sort, my woman is.”

“Your woman? That better not be somebody else you’re talking about.”

“Not on your life. You want to get married?”

“I can’t ask you to do that, Charlie.”

“You didn’t ask, I did. It’s a symbol, in a way, and I guess I’m asking if you need that. As far as I’m concerned, you’re my woman, absolutely, until the day I die, whether we have a certificate and a ceremony or not. But if you need those things, you can have them. You just have to say so.” He looked over at her face and saw that she was crying.

“What in the world is wrong, Em?”

“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, you idiot. You really don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“I know enough. I know who we are when we’re together.”

“What if I told you I was a fallen woman?”

“Then I would say, ‘Well, now you have somebody to pick you up.’ If anybody else says that to me about you, though, they had better be ready to duck.”

She laughed softly, though the tears still flowed. “If this is all a big lie, I don’t ever want to hear the truth. Please, Charlie, don’t break my heart. If you’re going to leave me, kill me first.”

“That might not be so easy. You’re a wicked hand with a cast iron skillet, as I recall.”

“Well, just see that you remember that.”

“You do realize that I have nothing to offer you? I have no land and no family that I can ever go back to. I have no education and no money, and according to that flier that I took off the post office wall in Minot, I’m also wanted for murder. I could wind up swinging from the end of a rope most any time, and I have no idea what to do about that. My life is a real mess.”

“Charlie?”

“Hmmm?”

“Shut up and make love to me again, okay?”

“You didn’t say ‘fuck’ this time.”

“I’m a lady now.”

***

At first light, Emil Puckett, stiff and cold from sleeping in his car, slogged through the mud to a nearby farm where he hired the farmer and his team of mules to pull the car back up onto the road. It cost him five dollars.

“I would ‘a done it for two,” said the hayseed, “but that was back afore you said I hadda do it afore morning chores.”

“Well, my time is important. I’m—”

“A banker, yeah. You told me that already. To tell the truth, that didn’t help you much, neither.”

As if that weren’t a big enough disaster, there turned out to be something wrong with the steering on the big car. It consistently pulled to the right, and he thought there might be a vibration in the front end, too. So now instead of going home to his nice, warm bed and liquor cabinet back in Waltham Corners, he had to drive all the way back to the Hudson dealership, where he would demand that they fix his defective machine. He would not, of course, mention that he had driven it off the road. The Hudson dealer was in Ithaca, some forty miles away.

***

Stringbean Moe had managed to spend the night indoors, in the Ithaca jail, without actually being arrested. The night deputy, as it happened, was a person who had a bit of compassion and a passing resemblance to a human being. He had let Moe sleep in an unlocked cell.

In the morning, the deputy did not offer any breakfast, but he did give Moe a cup of coffee. Having his spirits thus lifted, he decided to have another try at the Krueger reward.

“I haven’t heard anything, but I’ll ask Sheriff Drood about it when he comes in. So you know where this Krueger guy is, do you?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Moe. “I just know who he’s traveling with.”

“And who would that be?”

“Hey, I ain’t telling you that until we talk about some reward money.”

“Oh, yeah?” And suddenly Moe learned that the new deputy was not such a swell guy, after all. Faster than he could have believed possible, he found himself pushed back up against a cinder block wall, with a beefy forearm pressed hard against his wind pipe and a very hard-looking set of eyes staring into his.

“You’re saying you only want to do the right thing, which is also your legal duty, if somebody pays you? Is that what you’re telling me here? That better not be what you’re saying, because if it is, then I’m going to have to leave some big, ugly marks on you, just so the sheriff can see I’m doing my job. You understand me?”

“Hey, a fella’s gotta eat.”

Whap! A hand made for wringing chickens’ necks slapped him on the ear, so hard he thought the drum must be ruptured.

“While you still have one good ear, you want to try that again?”

“Hey, I just—”

The meaty arm cocked itself to fire again.

“Okay, okay! This Krueger guy is with a traveling machine shop, belongs to a guy named Jim Avery. He has a Peerless steam engine.”

“And?”

“And?’ That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”

“And you think that piss ant piece of information is good for some kind of money? Get the hell out of here, before you use up all my good will”

And once again, Stringbean Moe found himself walking away from the sheriff’s office with nothing to show for his trouble. He went back to the dense shrub under which he had hidden his pack. The stick was just poking out enough for him to see the end of it, and he grabbed it and pulled the pack to him. Inside it, he found no Luger. It wasn’t possible! He rifled through the pack again, with growing frenzy, then crawled under the scratchy bush, thinking the gun must have fallen out of the pack. It had not. He couldn’t find it anywhere.

“Son of a
bitch
!”

He climbed back out on his hands and knees and found himself looking at a pair of black leather boots and some canvas trousers. Looking up, he saw the familiar face of Jim Avery. In his hand, pointed squarely at Stringbean’s forehead, was the seven-millimeter Luger.

“Looking for this, Stringbean?”

***

Joe Wick headed in a totally different direction from Ithaca that morning. The roads were still greasy and soft, but the Model T was designed for bad roads, and its high clearance allowed him to go down secondary trails that his banker’s Hudson could never navigate. He headed north and east, to the grain elevator and rail siding at a place called Meeseville. It wasn’t really a town, but somebody apparently thought it never would be one unless they gave it a name and a sign. What they also gave it, more importantly, was an agent who could buy Joe’s grain. If he would, that is.

The elevator operator was an authorized agent for Wilcox-Crosby, General Mills, and several lesser milling companies, all located in Minneapolis. The elevator man worked on a straight commission, so it was in his interest to get the farmer the best price for his crop. That is, except when he was acting as an intermediate broker, which was most of the time.

“You’re kinda late, Joe. Most folks hereabouts have already sold their crops this year.”

“Ya, well, I had to fight a little war, sorta, with my banker before I could get together a crew.”

“Anybody beats a banker is a friend of mine. Trouble is, though, my elevator’s full up. And nobody’s calling for me to ship anything for another two months. They made enough money this year and they want the profits from milling the rest of the crop in 1920, is what I figure. And you can’t argue with high-powered strategies like that. You want coffee?”

“That’s what you figure, is it? Seems to me you figure a little too much sometimes, and every time you do, I lose money. I got eleven thousand bushels of Turkey red in perfect condition. What can you do on it? And your coffee is always lousy.”

“You want some, or not?”

“Sure.”

“Is the grain bagged or bulk? Help yourself. Over there, by the counting desk.”

“It’s about half and half. You want it all bagged, it’ll cost you another nickel a bushel.”

“You got enough space to store it, out of the weather?”

“Well, I might have to tell the old woman to sleep in the outhouse, but I can find enough room, sure. Sour owl shit, this really is bad coffee.”

“How about I give you a contract now for buying it in December?”

“For how much?”

“Oh, I think about eighty-five cents would be fair.”

“And they say all the big-time highway robbers are dead and gone.”

“Hey, I’m taking a big risk here. What if the market is at fifty cents by then?”

“And what if it’s at two and a quarter? You going to suddenly up my contract, just to be a fair-minded kind of a guy?”

“There ain’t ever going to be two dollar wheat again, Joe. That was only in the war, when the government was underwriting it.”

“Okay, then, tell you what: you give me a contract for one-seventy-five, with half in cash up front, and I’ll store the stuff for you all winter if you want.”

“A dollar even, and that’s being generous.”

“A buck and a half and that’s just being fair.”

“Somehow I get the feeling there’s a number somewhere between those two that we’re both headed for, you know?”

“A buck and a quarter?” said Joe. Half a cup of burnt coffee earlier, he had really been hoping he could get one-fifteen.

“Hey, there’s an interesting number! How about it?”

“Maybe. But I got to have at least five thousand cash money now.”

“The banker again?”

Joe nodded. “Him, plus paying off the crew.”

“Mr. Wick, you just sold a crop. Throw out the rest of that bad coffee, and let’s have a real drink.”

“What about the five thousand?”

“I don’t keep that kind of cash here. I have to give you a check, for a bank in Ithaca.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Does your wife know you talk like that?”

“Are you plumb tetched? I’m still alive, ain’t I?”

***

Charlie woke a second time, well after dawn. A cold, gray light was seeping through the cracks in the barn siding, and outside, it was still raining. He had a hangover that would stop a horse dead in its tracks, but he had no regrets. He sat up and looked at Emily, lying by his side. She had partially thrown off her blanket in her sleep, and her scar was totally visible. He wondered how he could have once thought it was ugly. He bent down to kiss her gently on the breast. She smiled but did not open her eyes. He got up and pulled on his clothes as quietly as he could and left.

On the threshing floor below, some people were already up, stitching sacks of wheat closed while they sipped coffee from thick mugs. One was sitting on a pile of filled bags and playing a harmonica softly. Charlie found a big pot of coffee that somebody, probably Annie, had placed on top of a milking stool. He poured himself a cup and strolled with it over to Avery’s machine shop, which was at one end of the floor. He found himself humming along with the harmonica.

In the machine shop, he opened a drawer in the workbench and looked at the broken Pittman-arm gear. Then he looked at the stocks of metals and welding rods and bronzes they had on hand, and he felt an idea begin to emerge.

The problem was that the gear was cast iron. The factory called it “crucible steel,” but everybody knew it was really just cast iron with a little extra carbon thrown in. Weld metal would not fuse to cast iron. And that was too bad, since weld metal was as hard and strong as most steels. Braising alloy would fuse to cast iron, but it was soft and malleable, like brass. If you tried to make gears out of it, they would wear out right away. The question was, would braise alloy fuse to a welding rod? If it would, then maybe Charlie could braise a welding rod, or a bundle of them, to the stump of a broken gear tooth. Then he could file the whole composite mess down to get it back to the correct shape of a new tooth. The welding rods would reinforce the mix, and with any kind of luck, they would also wind up being the wearing surface of the tooth. If braise metal would stick to weld metal, that was. He put some of each material on the workbench, made up a little test bundle, and lit the gas torch.

Three and a half hours later, he had a gleaming, solid, whole gear. He couldn’t wait to show it to Jim Avery. Where the hell was Avery, anyway? He should have been back by now.

***

Emil Puckett left his Hudson Deluxe Touring Car at the garage in Ithaca and strolled down Main Street through the continuing drizzle. He told himself he was looking for a good place to eat, and at some level, he was always doing so, but what he was also looking for was somebody who would be impressed with his custom-tailored three-piece suit and his gold watch fob with the real Harris timepiece on the end of it. And of course, his splendid umbrella with the carved silver handle. He had had quite enough, lately, of people who failed to show him proper respect.

It was an epidemic. Hell, it was a
pan
demic. Probably all due to the war, he thought. People went over to France, picked up its loose morals, and brought them back home. Pretty soon the whole country was full of upstarts and Bohemians. There was a rumor just that month that a professional baseball team had taken some gamblers’ money to deliberately lose the upcoming World Series, if you could believe such a shocking thing. If you paid a certain amount of money to a certain person in Minot, the story went, he would tell you which team to bet on, as long as you didn’t bet with him. Puckett believed it. He had heard other stories about things that went on in Minot. And in the larger world, a formerly sensible President of the United States was advocating giving up the nation’s sovereignty to that wobbly-commie League of Nations. Worst of all, it looked as though women were about to get the vote. No, the world was definitely not what it was supposed to be anymore.