Big Wheat (17 page)

He sighed, thinking of the decline of the western world and Joe Wick. Should he really call the note, at the twenty percent discount? It was a game of liar’s poker, of course. If Wick could actually come up with the cash, then Puckett would take a real beating on the transaction. But if Wick hadn’t managed to cash out his crop yet, then Puckett could wind up owning a twelve hundred acre farm for a song. It wouldn’t be the first one, of course, but it would still be satisfying. If he had his car back, he could be out making the rounds of the elevators, bribing operators not to buy Wick’s crop. But that impudent mechanic wouldn’t even promise him a time exact. It just never stopped, did it? It was becoming a whole nation of backsliders.

He looked down the street and saw a crowd of migrant workers in front of the County Courthouse. They, at least, would be impressed by the watch. They would also steal it if they could. Across the street from them was the sheriff’s office, and on a sudden burst of inspiration, he headed there.

The bell on the door announced his entrance. Sheriff Drood was at his desk, looking as if he had his usual chip on his shoulder. Standing next to him was another man with a sheriff’s badge, whom Puckett did not recognize.

“…saw him in the alley behind the bakery, but he got away. He was riding a motorcycle with some kind of advertising painted on the gas tank.”

Drood’s face got darker, and he formed a steeple out of his hands and stared off into space. Puckett ignored the conversation, strode up to the big desk and put his well-groomed knuckles on its polished top.

“Good morning, Sheriff. I just stopped in to inquire as to whether you have any reports of a stolen Peerless steam engine?”

“Look, Mr. Puckett, I’ve got a fugitive to catch this morning, and I don’t have time to—”

“Peerless?” said his deputy, seated at a desk toward the rear. “Did you say Peerless? The stiff who was in here last night said the Krueger guy was with an outfit that had a Peerless.”

“What else did he say?”

“Nothing. I threw him out.”

“Nice work, Otis. Remind me to kick your ass when I get some free time.”

One minute later, they were all outside, looking for Stringbean Moe in the city park. They jerked people rudely out of pup tents and rolled over drunks who were sleeping on park benches.

“How long ago did he leave?” asked Drood.

“Half an hour at least, maybe three quarts. He could be most anywhere by now. No, wait a minute! I think that’s him over there, sleeping under that big bush. Hey, you! Hey, ‘bo!” He began to run.

They grabbed the pair of worn shoes that were at the edge of the bush and dragged the man out. It was, indeed, Stringbean Moe. The bad news was that he had a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Puckett, two sheriffs, and a deputy looked at the body without being able to grasp what it might portend. Then the sheriff whom Puckett didn’t recognize spoke,

“Well, it looks like our boy Krueger has got himself a gun.”

“I’ll buy it for now,” said Drood. “So exactly where was it, Mr. Puckett, that you saw this Peerless steam engine?”

“I didn’t get a serial number, mind you.”

“Oh, I don’t think we have to worry about that. We’re not going to bother to get a warrant, either.”

***

They drove out to the Wick farm in Drood’s four-door Dodge sedan, the sheriff and a deputy in the front seat and the Windmill Man and the banker in back. The Windmill Man controlled his anticipation with a force of pure will. Was he finally about to be forgiven for the time he had missed his quarry by delaying a day? Would he be able to make up for letting the silly bakery girl live? He believed it, but he didn’t yet let himself get excited about it.

The farmyard had a single set of tracks in the mud from Wick’s Model T, going out but not coming back. There were no people or vehicles out in the yard. In the mowed wheat field behind the barn were two huge piles of straw. Drood told the deputy to drive in a wide circle around the farm buildings, then around the stacks.

“Hah!” said Puckett. “You see that? They didn’t get those last two headers threshed, at that. Wick is not going to be able to pay his note!” He rubbed his hands together in the classic gesture of greedy people the world over.

“We didn’t come here so you could gloat about some of your goddamn money, Puckett,” said Drood. “Where is this steam engine you say you saw?”

“Well, the guy who was running it, the young guy, must have cleared out and took it with him.”

“Why would he have done that, if they aren’t done threshing yet?”

“Because I bribed him to.”

“What?”

“Sure. I gave him two hundred bucks not to finish the job, and he must have—”

“Are you seriously telling me that you brought us all the way out here, on muddy roads that could have thrown us in the ditch in a thousand bad places, all to look at a
possibly
stolen steam engine that isn’t here because you paid somebody to make it go away? Is that really what you are saying,
you stupid shit
?”

“I’ll thank you to watch your tone, sir. You are, after all, a public servant. And
I
am—”

“A goddamn blithering idiot.”

“Could we please drive up to the house now? I’m going to call in Wick’s note.”

“I don’t work for idiots, Puckett. And if we stop in this mud, we might never get going again. Let’s get out of here, deputy.”

***

They drove a little more than half way back to Ithaca in silence. Then they stopped at about the place where Puckett had first driven in the ditch, though they had no way of knowing that. And once again, Emil Puckett, under-respected titan and landowning mogul in no less than seven counties, found himself walking at the side of a muddy road in a misty drizzle, muttering invectives to himself.

“Why did you dump him there, exactly?” said the Windmill Man.

“I didn’t want to do him the favor of a ride back to Ithaca. Absolutely, damn never. But I didn’t want to leave him close enough to the Wick place to walk back and maybe stay the night, either.”

“What difference would that make?”

“If the harvest really isn’t done, there will be a bunch of bindlestiffs and threshers at that place somewhere, probably hiding right now, and at least one of them knows where Krueger is. When we come back, I don’t want any
important
people around as witnesses. And Puckett thinks he is just so goddamned important.”

“When will that be, that we go back?”

“Tonight, if the rain lets up. Late. You drag people out of their beds and push them outside with no clothes, it takes the fight right out of them.”

But the rain went back to being a serious downpour. Drood’s deputy had to squint hard to see past the feeble vacuum-powered windshield wiper, and nobody talked for the rest of the trip.

In the back seat, the Windmill Man silently wondered where he could get a cartridge belt. When they came back in the morning, he wanted to be sure he had enough bullets to kill both Krueger and the sheriff. He didn’t trust the sheriff. Maybe he should do the deputy, too. Maybe a lot of people. He hadn’t decided yet. The City of Ithaca did not have a newspaper, but he pictured a headline, all the same: B
LOOD
B
ATH
A
T
L
OCAL
F
ARM
. Wouldn’t that just be something, though? Just what he needed.

Chapter 27

In the Belly of the Rooster

Joe Wick didn’t make it back to the farm until late evening. His Model T was almost completely coated with brown mud, and so was his face. He had obviously given up on trying to keep the windshield clear and had folded it up to full horizontal and looked under it instead.

He went out to the barn first, to talk to the crew of the Ark. Annie Wick came out of the front door of the house and joined them. Some of them were working on sewing up the tops of wheat bags, but most were just sitting around aimlessly. They all looked up eagerly.

“You missed supper,” said Annie.

“I’ll get over it,” said Joe. “I saw the tracks in the yard. Did Puckett come back?”

“We couldn’t tell,” said Jude. “There was a blue Dodge with a white star on the front door. But nobody got out. They just circled around the yard once and then left. We all stayed out of sight.”

“That would be Sheriff Drood’s rig,” said Joe. “But if he had Puckett with him, I can’t figure why they didn’t get out.”

Neither could Charlie. But if some lawmen had come to the farm, and they weren’t there about the banker’s money, he was very much afraid he knew what they were looking for.

“Maybe they got confused when they didn’t see the Peerless,” he said. “If so, they won’t stay that way for long. We should figure on them coming back.” And what the hell would he do then?

“Maybe so,” said Joe, “but not anymore today. The roads are terrible slick. I barely made it back from Ithaca.”

“What were you doing in Ithaca?” said Annie.

“Getting money from the bank, Mama. We sold the crop, but we got to bag it and store it for three months.”

“Well, we know how to do that, all right.”

“A nickel a bag to anybody wants to help with it,” he said to the group.

“Who keeps track of the count?” said one of the crew.

“I trust you.”

“Wow, a fair man!” said another. “That’s good enough for me.”

Some of them drifted away from the group to start work that night. Some just went to bed.

“I don’t suppose you ran into Jim Avery in your travels?” said Charlie.

“No, but I wouldn’t worry much. Nobody’s traveling tonight without a powerful reason.”

Like running from the law
, ran through his mind, but he said nothing. It seemed to him that Avery had been gone far too long for him not to worry, but he could see nothing he could do about it.

Then he remembered the Starving Rooster. He had resolved to clean and grease and oil it one last time before it got put away for the winter, and it had completely slipped his mind. He went to the machine shop and collected some tools in a canvas bag, put on his leather jacket, lit a kerosene lantern, and headed out to the corncribs. Emily gave him a kiss on his way out.

Two hours later, he was fast asleep. Inside the concaves of the big machine once again, he had greased, oiled, tuned and adjusted everything in sight. Afterwards, the pace and tension of the past few days and the lack of sleep finally caught up with him. He fell into an exhausted heap on a cushion of straw that was left in the separator. Sometime between then and dawn, Emily found him there, put a blanket over him, and put out his lantern.

***

The lawmen returned to the Wick farm just before dawn. They came in two vehicles this time. Drood led the way in his Dodge, with his two deputies, Otis and the big former farm kid, whose name was Clete. The banker, Puckett was not with them.

The Windmill Man followed in his official Mercer County pickup. He hadn’t bothered to explain his reasons for that to Drood. The truth was that he didn’t trust the three goons not to make a mess of the whole operation, and if that happened, he wanted his own way of getting clear. And of course, he didn’t ever like somebody else having control of his actions, even in a small way. It did not worry him that he did not have a plan yet. He had always been lucky at improvising. Part of his luck came from being opportunistic without being emotional. And part of it, of course, was just pure Providence. He trusted Providence. But even so, there were definitely too many wild cards in this game.

The roads were still treacherously soft and slippery, but the rain had finally stopped, so the drivers could at last see where they were going. That was enough. Both vehicles had high undercarriages and good tires, and their progress was steady, if not fast. Drood pulled into the Wick place and came to a sliding stop in the middle of the main farmyard. He motioned to the Windmill Man to pull up alongside him.

“Put your pickup around on the back side of the barn,” he said. “Keep anybody from running off into that corn field out back, while my deputies and I search the outbuildings. Anybody we find, we’ll herd them toward you. You see the Krueger guy, you sing out.”

“What about the house?”

“Most likely nobody there but the Wicks. I know them. They’re old, and she’s a Jesus freak. We’ll let them sleep for now. They won’t come and interfere. If we need them later, we’ll go back and slap them up.”

That seemed far too careless to the Windmill Man. But he went along with it for the moment, giving Drood no expression that he could decipher. He drove the pickup around behind the barn, near the staged water tanks by the windmill. He put the driver’s side away from the buildings, so he had the bulk of the vehicle between himself and anybody who might come out of the barn, shooting. He shut off the engine but then put the magneto switch back to “on,” so if he had to start it in a hurry, one quick crank would do it. One nice thing about the T, he thought, was that the crank was always right there, in the ready position. It didn’t detach, as on some of the newer models, just to get lost somewhere. He got out of the rig, turned up his collar against the morning chill, laid his hands on the warm hood, and waited.

***

Charlie woke to the sound of voices in the corncrib bay. He was about to stick his head out of the Rooster to see who was there, when he caught a glimpse of khaki trousers, polished boots, and shotgun barrels. He pulled his blanket over his face and waited.

“See anybody?”

“No. The place is empty.”

“Should we look in the corn?”

“The cribs are full. Nobody can get in there.”

“How about inside the threshing machine?”

“Judas Priest, Clete, you are dumber than a sack of hammers. Who the hell would be
inside
a threshing machine?”

“Hey, come on; it’s possible.”

“It’s also dumb. I looked under it, okay? Let’s get over to the barn. That’s where they’re all going to be. You mark my words.”

“It wasn’t so dumb.”

“Just move it.”

The footsteps receded, and after a minute of silence, Charlie risked a peek out of the Rooster. Then he climbed out as quietly as he could, went to the end of the machine bay, and peered around the corner into the yard behind the barn. Thirty yards away, by the windmill and water tanks, the brown Model T pickup from Mercer County was parked pointed away from him. But the man in the uniform, leaning on the hood, was definitely not the man he had seen in Minot. There was something dimly familiar about him, but he couldn’t place it. He moved back into the shadows and then hunkered down behind one of the wheels of the Rooster and continued to watch.

Soon the blue Dodge with the white star stopped by the far corner of the barn, and another uniformed man got out. Then the crew of the Ark came shambling out into the yard in their nightclothes, followed by the two men who had been in the shed by the Rooster, with their shotguns up. So it had happened. The law had come for him, and somehow or other, they had known where to look.

Jim Avery, of course, would tell him to stay where he was. The people of the Ark had gone to a lot of trouble to hide him, and it would be an insult to them to throw all that away. But Avery wasn’t there, and Charlie had to do something.

He needed a weapon. His bayonet was back in his pack, in the barn loft, and he saw nothing in the machine bay that would be a substitute. There wasn’t even a corn knife or a sickle. He picked up the biggest wrench he could find and moved to the other end of the enclosure, the one facing the farmhouse. Looking out, he saw nobody in that part of the yard, and he ran as fast as he could from the corncrib to the front of the barn. If somebody saw him dash between the two buildings, he was done for. He flattened himself against the barn and held his breath for half a minute. When nobody called out, he continued on his way.

He entered through the small door of the horse stable and quickly climbed the ladder to the hayloft above the main barn. At the place where he and Emily had slept, he found his pack, with the bayonet in it. He put the sheath on his belt, buckled it up, and descended to the old threshing floor. He put the wrench in his boot.

Partway down the ladder, he saw a door open and shut at the front of the barn. He dropped to the floor, drew his blade, and moved that way, ducking behind stacks of grain bags as he went, his heart throbbing in his ears.

Most of the barn was in deep shadows, and he concentrated in vain on trying to see into the corners. The hair on the tops of his hands and arms stood up as if he were in an electrical storm, and he was dimly aware that he was sweating. He tried to breathe quietly. Was he doing that? His heart was beating too loudly for him to tell. Finally, the intruder stepped into a patch of light from an upper window, and he saw her clearly. He put the bayonet back in its sheath and stepped out into the open space.

Annie Wick was carrying the biggest double-barreled shotgun he had ever seen, quite probably an eight gauge. When she saw him, she made a sign to be quiet and moved quickly over to whispering distance.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Annie. How did you avoid the party out back?”

“Me and Joe been watching from the upstairs window of the house. They didn’t bother to roust us, and a lucky thing for them, too. Joe’s got his rifle, but he can’t get a clear shot at anybody. I saw you run out of the crib shed and come here, so I came, too. What are you fixing to do, Charlie?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’ve got to do something. This whole mess is my fault.”

“You don’t know yet if it is a mess. Let’s watch some.”

They went over to the big doors in the back of the barn and each picked a knothole to look through. The crew of the Ark was standing around in a loose cluster behind the barn, women in long flannel nightgowns, barefooted in the cold mud, and men in wool long johns, some with work boots hastily pulled on but not laced. Now and then they were pushed or prodded by the two deputies with shotguns, and they folded their arms against the cold and squinted into the light. They looked confused, sleepy, and frightened. A few, including Maggie Mae, looked boiling over with rage. She had her arms folded across her chest in a defiant posture, and her eyes spoke of murder.

The sheriff from the blue Dodge paced arrogantly in front of the group, hands on hips. Soon the sheriff from the Mercer County pickup came over to join him, limping slightly, and suddenly Charlie remembered were he had seen him before.

The two sheriffs spoke to each other, too quietly for Charlie to hear. The one with the limp was shaking his head.

“Who is it that wants you, anyway,” whispered Annie, “that lawman from Mercer?”

“Probably. Only he isn’t a lawman.” Charlie kept his voice to a whisper, as well.

“
What
? What is he, then?”

“Good question. The night I left home, I saw him dressed like an ordinary stiff. He was in a harvested field, pitching straw in the moonlight.”

“Why on earth?”

“I don’t know, I just—oh my God, yes I do know. He was trying to hide something. Something he couldn’t let anybody see. That son of a bitch!”

“I don’t understand.”

“He was hiding a grave, Annie. The grave of the woman everybody thinks I killed. That bastard killed her. And he doesn’t know if I saw the grave or not.”

“Oh, dear. If that’s true, then he wants to kill you, too.”

“He surely does.”

“I think he’s evil, Charlie. You should get away from here. You can’t kill evil.”

“We’ll see about that. I don’t know anything about the other guys in uniform, though.”

“They’re from Ithaca. We know them. The sheriff’s name is Drood. He’s meaner than a dog that’s been bit by a skunk. He’d as soon shoot you as look at you. His deputies aren’t quite as bad by themselves, but they try to show off for him, act like tough guys. But they won’t chase you past the county line. None of them. That’s about ten miles east. I think you ought to go that way, real quick.”

“I’m not leaving the others to be beat up or killed.”

“What else can you do?”

“I’ll know when I do it, won’t I?”

“Bad plan.”

Out in the yard, the sheriff named Drood raised his voice and addressed the group.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here? Looks like a threshing crew to me.” To one of his deputies, he said, “You sure you got all of them?”

“Unless there’s somebody in the house, boss, that’s it. We looked in every building, even in the lofts.”

“How about the steam engine?”

“Didn’t find one. Threshing machine is in one of the corncrib bays, but no engine, no how.”

“That’s not good. And no Krueger, either? Hollander?”

“He’s not any of these people,” said the Windmill Man.

“Not good at all. All right, people, what’s the story here? Where’s the boy and his little toy steam engine? Where’s Charles Krueger?”

“I’ll tell you what the story is, Sheriff,” said Emily. Charlie held his breath. “The story is, you produce a warrant or get the bloody hell out of here. This is private property, and the owners have rights and so do we.”

He wanted to hug her. That might not have been the smartest thing to say, but damned if she didn’t have guts.

The sheriff walked up to her slowly, fixing her with a hard stare that she returned without flinching. When he got within a foot of her, she uncrossed her arms and put her fists defiantly on her hips. He looked her up and down, then grabbed a handful of gown at the top and ripped down. As she reached down to grab her garment and cover herself again, he backhanded her in the face with his other hand. She staggered to her knees, dripping blood on the wet ground.