Big Wheat (7 page)

Chapter 9

Life on the Ark

Breakfast at the Ark was flapjacks the size of dinner plates, molasses and butter, and fried ham. It had already started when Charlie opened his eyes, and he was grateful that he had fallen asleep too tired to undress, since his sleeping place was in the mess tent. He pulled his boots on, poured himself a cup of coffee from a big enameled metal pot, set it over by his sleeping pallet to cool, and went outside to look for a place to relieve himself. The others, at one of the big tables, ignored him.

Not finding a latrine, he settled for wetting the leaves of some scraggly looking bushes. Then he went down to the little creek, where he took off his shirt and splashed water on his face and torso. He had no towel, and he was about to dry his face on his flannel shirt, when a woman’s voice stopped him.

“Here.” A soft hand held a worn but large towel out to him. When he looked up he saw that the hand was attached to a soft bare arm and a small, dark haired young woman. She wore a tightly belted shirtwaist dress in a blue flower print and had a matching kerchief tying back her thick, dark hair. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face, with a prominent chin and a slightly upturned nose and large, hazel eyes that looked wise and a little bemused. She also had a scar that ran from the corner of one eye, down her cheek and neck, and into the covered area under her high collar. Charlie looked away from her face quickly, hoping he had not stared.

“Take it. Do a proper dry before you put your shirt back on, or you’ll have a chill all morning.” Was that an English accent? It was soft and lovely, whatever it was.

“Thank you,” he said, a bit bewildered. He took the towel and buried his face in it. It was coarse and unevenly napped, but it felt good, and it dried him nicely. He dried his torso, also, suddenly feeling very self-conscious.

“I’m Emily,” she said.

“Emily…” He made a palms-up gesture to indicate that he was still missing a surname.

“Just Emily,” she said. “And you are?”

“Charlie Bacon.”
A few more times, and it will be a genuine habit.
He wasn’t sure if he should offer to shake hands, or kiss her hand, or what, so he awkwardly buried his right hand in the towel, suddenly finding himself awfully busy drying.

“It takes a lot of character to wash in a cold creek, Charlie Bacon. Are you a man of great character?”

“That’s not a question I ask myself a whole lot. I do what I can, I guess.”

“Then I’ll tell you what you can do. You can stand guard while I take a whole bath in the creek. Are you comfortable with that?”

“Um, sure. I guess. Why not?” He wasn’t at all sure whom he was guarding her from or what the job involved, but he couldn’t imagine refusing.

“Do it then.”

“Right.” He draped the big towel over a bush, making a sort of screen and folded his arms over his chest, which reminded him he still hadn’t put his shirt back on. He twisted part way around and bent down to retrieve it, and his eyes could not resist straying over to the creek, where a very naked Emily was settling down into the rushing water, her back to him. She was slim and athletic, and as unlike the soft, voluptuous Mabel Boysen as she could be. He had never seen a woman who looked like that before, or even dreamed of one.

“Turn your back, asshole!”

“Sorry.” Besides sorry, he was also breathless, stunned, aroused, and very confused. Here was a young woman who actually used foul language but who was also so scrupulous about being clean that she bathed in an icy-cold creek. And she had kindly given him a towel before that. Clearly, she was a woman of great mystery and contradiction. She was nice. She was sweet. She was possibly wicked, with a hint of a violent past. But she was also modest. And in her own way, she was gorgeous, at least from the back. He concentrated on standing his watch and hoped his erection wasn’t too obvious.

Looking back at the camp, he saw a tall, angular man with a horse face and bad teeth heading his way. He had been introduced to him the previous day, but he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Something odd. Stringbean; that was it. Stringbean Moe. He thought it was a stupid name, and he hadn’t much liked its owner, either. When the man got within four or five yards, Charlie held up a hand, palm down.

“You can’t come around here right now.”

The man looked up and squinted. “Because you say so? Who the hell you think you’re talking to, stiff?”

Charlie knew the look. He had seen it on the faces of two men who once tried to kill each other in a saloon in Hazen, one drunken Saturday night. This was not the look of his own bully of a father or of the farmer who had cheated him. This was the look of a man who liked to fight, liked the excuses that brawls gave him to hurt people. Charlie knew that if he had to fight him, he had better not quit until he had put him down, hard.

“You can’t come here,” he said again.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, boy. I’m going to have some fun here. I’m either going to go down to the creek where that little British chippie takes her bath and get a piece of her ass, or I’m going to stay here and slice up a piece of yours. Or maybe I’ll just do both. What do you think of that?”

He reached into a hip pocket and produced a folding knife with a straight, six-inch blade. He took his time opening it, spat tobacco juice on the ground, and went into an attack crouch, feet spread wide, arms out for balance.

Charlie slapped instinctively at his belt and felt the haft of his bayonet poking out of its sheath. But he couldn’t pull it. He simply couldn’t.

“Forget something, did you? Like, your nerve?”

“It won’t matter.”

“That’s right; it won’t. Hee, hee.”

Charlie pulled the towel off the bush and quickly rolled it into a tube. Then he wrapped one end around each hand and put both hands in front of him, in a defensive vee, looking for a chance to snatch the knife hand in a wad of protective cloth. What he would do after that, he had no idea. And he knew that was bad. His brother had told him, “Always know what you’re going to do in a fight. Otherwise, all you’ve got are your instincts, and you, little brother, don’t have the instincts of a fighter.”

The two men circled each other warily, with Stringbean making occasional false lunges and slashes. Charlie knew better than to react to them.
Don’t let him learn how you move. Not yet, anyway
. He watched Stringbean’s eyes, rather than his hands. And when he saw them suddenly get wider, he stepped smartly to his left and lunged with both hands, catching the knife hand in a vise grip. He pulled the hand to his right, twisting, and tried to trip the man as he passed in front of him. But all he managed to do was make him stumble a bit. The man’s hand still gripped the knife, and now Charlie had no good way to hurt him. They froze in that pose for a moment and locked eyes, and the man spat again.

Then there was a muffled thud, and the knife fell from the hand. Emily, still naked, had come up behind them with a driftwood club and had smashed Stringbean’s wrist.

“Don’t let go!” she shouted.

Charlie continued to hold the man’s hand and to twist, and Emily delivered two more blows, swung from over her head. At the second one, they could hear something crack, and the arm went limp. The man screamed, and Charlie let him go. He stumbled back toward the camp, cradling his smashed arm in his other one.

“I said don’t let go, you bloody twit!”

“But he—”

“Somebody pulls a knife on you, you don’t mess about. You put him in hospital or in the ground. I can’t
believe
you don’t know that!” She had tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Sorry,” was all he could think of to say.

She seemed to realize quite suddenly that she was still naked, and she put a hand over her very ample tuft of pubic hair and an arm across her breasts. The scar that began at her eye ran all the way to her left nipple, which had been cut off. It made Charlie want to cry for her.

“Well, now you’ve seen it all, haven’t you? Are you feeling satisfied, then?”

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t—”

“You’re feeling sorry for a lot of things, yeah? Try to be a little less sorry and act like a watchman while I get my clothes, will you?” She disappeared into the bushes.

In a few minutes she was back, once again dressed in the simple print dress and heavy shoes. She wrapped her thick dark hair in the towel she had originally given him, tied it in a sort of big knot in the back, and turned back toward the tent. Charlie fell in beside her.

“So much for my knight in shining armor.”

“Sor—Um, well, I guess I don’t have a lot of practice at it.”

“No, I guess not. Why didn’t you draw your knife? I saw you touch it.”

“Because I knew if I pulled it, I could have wound up killing him.”

“And just exactly what would have been wrong with that? Avery would have stood by you, you know.”

“I wasn’t thinking about getting caught. I just couldn’t see myself doing that.”

“Well.” She sighed and wiped a cheek with the back of her hand. “I guess there’s no help for that. If you haven’t got the stomach for what has to be done, then you haven’t got it. Let’s go get some breakfast, Charlie.”

“Sounds right to me.”

But it didn’t sound right, at all. As they walked back to the canvas café, a dozen different emotions washed over him, all of them heavily laced with self-recrimination. Why the hell couldn’t he simply have pulled his bayonet? What was wrong with him, anyway? This woman had started out calling him a man of great character. Did he have to prove her wrong so quickly?

The adrenalin was wearing off now, and his legs felt unsteady. And he had the terrible feeling that he had only begun to get settled into the life of the Ark, and already he had botched his audition.

Chapter 10

Searchers

Amos Hollander and his deputy caught up with the Red River Special thresher with the extra large Windstacker ten miles north of the tiny town of Bergen, in McHenry County. It was run and hired out by a man named Pat Flannery, who was more than a bit miffed at being questioned by a couple of uniformed law officers.

“Somebody trying to say I stole something?” he said, fists defiantly on his hips. “I never took nothing from no farm, I didn’t, except as somebody give it me. Free and open, that’s the way. Sometimes the farmwoman, she might not always tell her husband, but is that my fault? I runs a clean operation, I does. I don’t even hold out any grain berries in the sorting trays, and I don’t never—”

The sheriff cut him off with a “whoa” gesture.

“I’m more interested in your crew, Mr. Flannery.”

“Like do any of them seem like killers?” added the deputy. Hollander shot him a look that would have dropped an ox in its tracks. If the deputy noticed, he made no sign of it.

“Me crew? I don’t gots no regular crew. Just me and the engineer there, Freddy, who also so happens to be me brother-in-law, so I can vouch for him, all right. The others, the farmer goes out and hires his own self, from whoever’s drifting about, you see.”

“But some of them must follow your machine, surely?”

“Sometimes. A few as does. What’s this getting at, here?”

“I’m looking for somebody who might have stayed with your rig after you worked the Boysen spread, about eighty miles south of here.”

“Argh, I remember the Boysen place. Six hundred and forty acres, a full section, all in one big wheat field. A lot of fun, them kind are. Big crew, too, more than a dozen men.”

“Forget about the fun. Think about the bindlestiffs.”

“I mostly didn’t know them by name. Some I got to know by sight after a while.”

“Try for some names.”

“Well, there was one that I heard his name later because he got into a row with one of the other farmers we worked for.”

“What kind of a row?”

“Said the farmer didn’t pay him, so he took a bunch of groceries and all. I believed him, me self. That farmer was one shifty character. Tighter than bark to a tree. Anyhoo, the farmer claimed he threatened him with a knife, though I never seen it.” He waved the steam engineer over from his place at the rear platform of the big 20-50 Case. “Freddy, what was the name of that kid, back at the Bjorkland place? The one that faced down the fat, smiley bastard?”

“Oh, him? Um, Kringle? Craig? Chris Kringle. Crazy Craig. Not quite, but I’m getting closer. Keggler. Krueger! That’s it. Somebody Krueger. Charlie, I think.”

“Bingo,” said Hollander, under his breath. Aloud, he said, “Could you point him out to me, sir?”

“Hell, no, I couldn’t point him out. I mean, he walked away after that, didn’t he? Pity, too. Hell of a good worker.”

Sheriff and deputy traded looks of disappointment and exasperation with the crazy Irishman who had gone to the trouble of remembering a name of somebody who wasn’t there anyway.

“Well, then, can you describe him, at least?”

“I can describe anything I ever seen, I reckon. He’s a big guy, maybe six-two, six-three, built like a prizefighter. I seen a real prizefighter once, in Derry, back when—”

“You were telling me about Charlie Krueger, I think.”

“Have a care. I’ll get to him. He’s maybe twenty-one or two or fivesome years, has near white hair that hangs in his face. I think he chews tobacco, right Freddy?”

“Well, he don’t smoke, anyways,” said Freddy. “Probably drinks a bit of the brew, though. Anybody works the apron has to have a drop of the brew, don’t he?”

“I really don’t care about any of that.” To himself, he said
bullshit, all of it
. But at another level, Hollander was finding Flannery’s description very interesting. He wondered if he knew this kid. Had he at least seen him a time or two? He began to think so. He knew most of the people in his county by sight, if not always by name.

“So you have no idea where this Krueger went?”

“There’s maybe anywhere from fifty to a hundred custom threshers working the Dakotas right now. Could be with any of them.”

“Great,” said Hollander. “Just absolutely wonderful.”

“Some days it’s so goddamn, you can’t even hardly,” added Freddy, cheerfully.

“A course, there’s Jim Avery,” said Flannery, mostly to the engineer.

“That there is,” said Freddy.

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a guy runs a repair service for the machines, a kind of traveling smithy shop.”

“He does at that,” said Freddy.

“And therefore what?” said Hollander, writing the name in his pocket notebook.

“Well, he sees an awful lot of crews, or at least his runners do. You ought to go ask them.”

“And just exactly where would I go to do that?”

“Dunno. Go to some town that has a rail siding or a grain elevator and ask around. Not the cops, he don’t talk to them. But, like an elevator manager or a train hand. He hands out fliers and tells people where he’s going to be for a while, asks if they know of any machines that’s broke down.”

“That’s what I’d do, all right,” said Freddy. Now that he was a part of the conversation, he seemed to feel obliged to always add a final word or two, even if there was nothing more to be said.

“Well,” said Hollander. “Well, well, well. Gentlemen, you’ve been a great help.” He started to walk away.

“What did this Krueger guy do?”

“Thank you for your time,” said Hollander.

“We think maybe he murdered a young woman,” said the deputy, “and had his way with her and maybe even—aagh! Ain’t no call to kick me, Sheriff.”

“I’d have shot you, but there were witnesses.”

***

They ate late breakfast at a diner on Main Street in Bergen.

“I haven’t seen you boys in here before,” said the heavyset waitress, pouring coffee for them.

“We’re from Beulah,” said Hollander.

“Yeah, and we’re hot on the trail of a vicious killer,” said the deputy. Hollander rolled his eyes. The waitress snorted and left them to study their menus.

“You couldn’t shut your mouth if your life depended on it, could you?” said the sheriff.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Where’s the harm?”

“Did it ever occur to you that the Krueger kid might eat here some time, too?”

“So what? You think the waitress is going to tell him we’re after him?”

“Who knows? If you can’t keep your mouth shut, why should she?”

“Oh. I guess I didn’t think of that.”

“No. I guess there’s a lot of things you don’t think of.”

“The hash is good today,” said the waitress, returning to warm up their coffees.

***

There was a small Great Northern Railroad office in Bergen, and Hollander sent a telegram from there to Western Union in Beulah, asking if there were any urgent messages for him. But he didn’t use a specific addressee, so the operator in Beulah didn’t know who to give it to. He put it aside, to ask his supervisor about later. He had plenty to do, minding his own business, without running around taking a survey of who might want to communicate with a wandering sheriff.

Then the lawmen found a flier tacked to a tree by some railroad tracks, advertising Jim Avery’s moving shop. It said he was set up by some creek, near the McHenry-Benson county line.

“So, we head east, then?” said the deputy, once again behind the wheel of the Model T pickup.

“Not just yet, Tom. First we’re going to make a little detour, to the big city of Rugby.”

“Whatever for?”

“To see if they have a newspaper.”

***

The lawmen wasted most of the rest of day in and out of Ipswich, which they were referred to by a shopkeeper in Rugby. It turned out that the
Ipswich Chronicle
had an old time reporter who used to draw his own illustrations with pen and ink, before the day when newspapers had the technology to print photos. They had wanted Freddy, the steam engineer, to go see him, but he flatly refused to take the time off from running his engine. So Hollander and his deputy took descriptions to the
Chronicle
reporter and got sketches, which they took back to the threshing site for critiques, then back to Ipswich again for corrections. Finally, they had a drawing that Pat and Freddy agreed was a reasonable likeness of Charles Krueger. And Hollander knew he had seen the kid before, though he had never talked to him.

The newspaper also did custom printing jobs, and they made up two hundred copies of a handbill with the picture and the caption
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
It also had directions for contacting the sheriff’s office in Beulah, though truth to tell, Hollander still had a much less than perfect system thought out for forwarding his messages. They had to wait a day and a half for the printing, which cost three dollars. Hollander paid it out of his own pocket. He would have liked to post a reward as well, but he couldn’t afford it. In his home turf, of course, he probably needn’t have bothered. Mabel Boysen was well liked back there. People had expected her to become fat, prosperous, and important someday, the wife of a banker or a wealthy farmer. They were devastated by her murder. And of course, a lot of them already knew what Charlie Krueger looked like. And the more those people thought about it, the more they thought they knew that he was guilty, as well. The poster only said “Wanted For Questioning.” As far as the folks around Hazen were concerned, he was wanted for lynching.

As far as Hollander was concerned, Krueger was wanted as a candidate for getting “shot while resisting arrest.” But he kept that to himself.

“So now we head east?” said the deputy.

“I do. You get on the next train that stops at that Great Northern station and head back home. Ask around at the farms near the Boysen spread, see if anybody remembers seeing anything strange.”

“Aw, horse feathers, Sheriff. I want to stay on the chase.”

“Stay in Beulah. Check the Western Union office several times a day, to see if I’ve wired in. If you find out anything useful, you can send me a reply, to wherever my last telegram came from. I’ll wait around for one. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Well, sure. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“You fooled me. Get going.”

“But I—”

“Argue with me again, and you’ll go back without your badge. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” His tone indicated that he understood altogether too well.

Hollander, for his part, had no idea what a huge mistake he had just made.

***

The search and the season wore on. People worked, made money, ate bountiful meals, nursed aching muscles, made babies, incurred horrible injuries, went to church, loved the land, sowed, reaped, and harvested. And here and there, one at a time, a few people disappeared.