Big Wheat (15 page)

“I know a place west and south a bit. Big cottonwood tree in a small grove.”

“Good. If you still haven’t seen me by the end of the month, it’s up to you where to go next. The heat should be off by then, no matter how I make out. Small town law enforcers have a long memory but a short attention span. If you want to stay with the harvest and pick up the repair work, you should be someplace north and west of Winnipeg by then. You can get a good run along about the fifty-second parallel, almost all the way to the Pacific Ocean. You’ll get another two months of work there.”

“Two? The harvest will be over in one.”

Avery nodded. “And afterwards, people catch up on the tricky repairs they didn’t want to stop for sooner. It makes kind of a nice cycle, don’t you think? You start the year a hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico and end up a hundred miles from the Pacific. If I make it, that is.”

“If you don’t, I’m going to be mighty pissed off at you.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll do what I can to see that doesn’t happen. See you, Charlie.”

“Listen, boss, there’s one other thing I have to get off my chest.”

“Spit it out, but make it quick.”

“I think Stump was killed with my gun. It’s a German Luger, and it’s missing from my pack. Stringbean must have taken it.”

“Ah, shit, Charlie. Just shit.”

“That’s what it feels like, all right.”

“I’m sure. Stump is just as dead, wherever the gun came from, but that’s a heavy load for you to carry. Keep it to yourself, though, okay? You are going to be in charge around here, and you don’t need a rumor going around that will undercut people’s faith in you. They need that, you understand?”

“Okay, if you say so. But there’s another reason I brought it up. It was a German officer’s pistol, okay? My brother sent it home from the war.”

“I hope you’re not going to tell me you want it back, for sentimental reasons?”

“No, I’m going to tell you that I know this gun, really well. And if Stringbean didn’t clean and oil it damn carefully after he shot Stump, it could be next to useless by now. Lugers will rust up and jam up if you give them too long a dirty look.”

“That’s good to know. I wasn’t planning on giving that asshole a chance to use the thing, but it’s mighty good information, all the same. Anything else?”

“That’s about it.”

“Show me a bare field when I get back.”

“Get back.”

They shook hands and then Avery kicked the Indian into life and rolled it off its stand. Maggie Mae ran over and gave him a fierce embrace and kiss, and then he was off, with a pack on his back that contained a rifle with a scope sight. Charlie climbed up on the catwalk where Avery had stood so many times.

“All right, people, lend an ear! We’ve got bad weather moving in. We’ve only got about a hundred acres’ worth left to do, so let’s see if we can get it all put away before it gets nasty out here. But if you see the wind shift around to the southeast, drop whatever you’re doing and run like hell for any kind of shelter you can find. Don’t wait for a funnel to hit us.”

Emily, who had appeared at his side without his noticing, stood on her tiptoes to whisper something in his ear. “You’re probably right,” he said.

Shouting again, he said, “Let’s make Avery proud of us, folks. You know how it’s done. Let’s make some wheat!”

The sky boiled, the Peerless undermounted double complex engine chugged, and the Starving Rooster spat out bushel after bushel of clean, hard wheat kernels. It would be a race.

***

In the City of Ithaca, Stringbean Moe walked into the office of the County Sheriff. A big, blunt-featured farm kid in an ill-fitting uniform sat with his feet on top of a large desk, reading a Pink Police Gazette. He did not look up until Stringbean cleared his throat.

“Yeah, what do you want?”

“I was hoping to talk to the sheriff.”

“He’s out making his rounds. I’m one of his deputies. Whatever’s on your mind, you can tell me. You a Wobbly?”

“No. I was a bindle, ‘til I hurt my arm, but I was never a Wobbly.”

“Doctor’s office is down the street, thataway.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

“I was wondering if you folks are looking for a guy named Krueger. There’s supposed to be reward money for him.”

“You got him?”

“No, but I seen him. He’s with an outfit’s got a Peerless steam engine. I might could—”

“You see any reward posters for him up there? Up there, on the big wall, is all the wanteds and all the rewards we got. You don’t see it there, we ain’t got it. Get it?”

“I don’t read so good. Maybe you could help me some.”

“Life’s just a goddamn vale of tears, ain’t it? Get out of here before I book you for vagrancy.”

He strongly suspected that the deputy didn’t read so good, either, but he knew it was time for him to leave. Maybe the real sheriff would have a different attitude about what he knew. By God, he was going to find
somebody
who did.

He noticed that the sky outside was darkening, fast.

Chapter 24

The Open Bottle

Over the blue plate lunch special at the Sunshine Café on Main Street, the Windmill Man learned from the counter man that the sheriff of Lewis County, of which Ithaca was the county seat, was named Delbert Drood, and that anybody who thought that was funny quickly came to regret saying so.

“Likes to assert his authority, does he?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

“I think I saw him shoot a Wobbly over in the park yesterday.”

“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t say anything about it, if I was you, unless he brings it up first.” He leaned low over the counter and dropped his voice to a near whisper. “More often, he just takes ‘em over to the county line, kicks their asses a little and tells ‘em never to come back. If he shoots ‘em, too, I guess I don’t know anything about that. With the Wobblies, though, it’s good riddance, either way.”

“Sounds like a tough guy in a tough job.”

“That, he is. Bet your tintype on it. More coffee?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll just go meet this tough guy.”

***

Sheriff Drood was back in his office at the county jail, having relieved the heavyset deputy, whose name was Clete, for the day. His reaction to the sheriff from far away Mercer County was noticeably cool, though he shook his hand firmly enough.

“You’re kind of a long ways out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Hollander?”

“I’m chasing a young man who murdered a woman back in my county. Maybe you’ve run into him?” He passed Drood a copy of the wanted flier, which he’d been carrying folded up in his hip pocket.

“Can’t say as I have.” He passed the flier to his other deputy with a blatant show of disinterest. “How you figure on finding him?”

“I was hoping you might have some ideas in that department, Sheriff.”

“Uh huh. Like I don’t have enough of my own business to take care of? I don’t see anything on that flier about a reward.”

“There’s a reward of fifty dollars. But of course, lawmen like us can’t take rewards.”

“I think you got too small a hat, Hollander. Pinches your brain. Makes you think funny. A lawman can damn well take a reward to pass on to the unnamed person who helped him out.”

“The person who wants to remain anonymous, maybe?”
That’s it. Keep going
.

“Could be something like that.”

“The reward only gets paid if this Krueger guy gets arrested and convicted. That could take some time.”
Now put in the last piece
.

“Well maybe that could all be done without. Like if he was to get shot while resisting arrest, say.”

“Maybe it could, Sheriff Drood. Just maybe it could, at that.”

“I’ll give some thought to finding this guy. How long you figure on staying in town?”

“At least another day. I’m waiting for a telegram.”

“I see. You got a place to stay, out of the rain? It looks like some nasty stuff blowing in off to the west. You’re welcome to sleep in the jail, if you want. It ain’t very fancy, of course. But then, folks ain’t supposed to like it.” He snickered at his own joke, and his deputy dutifully grinned.

“I got a room in the back of a saloon down on the other end of Main Street.”
And I really don’t want you knowing when I come and go
. “But thanks for the offer.”

“Any time. Maybe I’ll see you in the morning. I usually eat at Merle’s, down West Main.”

“Maybe you will.”

They shook hands again, and he headed back out to his pickup.
Nice guy, this Drood
, he thought.
Not a moral fiber in his body, and he’ll do anything for you if you let him think it was his own idea
.

But he didn’t think the man was quite highly motivated enough yet. After dark, he would go back to the bakery. And if the giggly little blond just happened to be the last one in the place, he would give Sheriff Drood a powerful new reason to find Charlie Krueger.

Fat drops of rain were beginning to splatter on his windshield as he drove back toward the saloon he had mentioned, with its rooms in the back. It was two storefronts down from the bakery.

He had a brief image of a hand reaching for a whiskey bottle.

Chapter 25

Storm Clouds

North of the Wick farm, Avery picked up the tracks of his own Reo truck. When he came to the main road again, he headed east, back the way the Ark had come from, looking for their original turning point. The cool gray light of the threatening storm made all the tracks easy to see, and he could hold the Indian at a nice steady thirty-five without fear of losing them.

If he wound up retracing the trail of the Ark all the way back to the campsite by the creek, he would have failed. Stump had known roughly where they had been headed, and even in a wounded and confused state, he would have tried for an intercept route rather than a direct trail. Avery was looking for the place where the truck tracks first joined the caravan tracks, coming in from the west.

He found it sooner than he had expected, only about five miles south of the big road. Any farther north and he would have missed it, and indeed Stump probably would have missed the Peerless tracks in the harder, unplowed ground. But this was solid wheat stubble, and the prints were easy to read. He turned the bike and opened up the throttle. Now that he had only one set of tracks to watch, he could afford to get a little careless.

After another five miles, he lost it. He stopped, retraced his path slowly, and then found a spot where the Reo had made a hairpin right turn. So Stump had never made it to the mountains at all. Another mile or so, and he found some oddly matted stubble along one side of the tracks, and that was enough for a picture to emerge.

Stump had not bothered to tie up Stringbean before he had left with him. Avery knew that much, because they had argued about it briefly. Stump assumed the guy was out for a long count and didn’t need to be bothered with. But the stiff must have revived early and got the gun out from wherever he had it hidden and shot Stump then and there, with little or no preamble. But afterwards, Stump had managed to push the guy out the passenger door and get the hell out of there.

He stopped to look more closely at the matted down stubble. Was it consistent with a body falling out of a moving truck? He thought it was. So the man with the Luger would have gained his freedom but nothing else. No truck, no money, and not even his pack, which was now back at the Ark. So where would he have gone? Back the way he had come, most likely. Back where he knew the lay of the land. Avery got off the bike and looked more carefully still. And sure enough, there was a set of footprints making a dashed line through the loam, pointing back to the east. He got back on the bike and followed them, more slowly now.

When the first heavy drops of rain threatened to wipe out all tracks of any kind, he opened the throttle, fighting hard to keep control of the bike on the rough field. There was a farm up ahead. As the drops were joined by even more, he looked up at the sky and saw a fast moving black bank of clouds that went from horizon to horizon and swept over him like God’s eyelid closing over the sky, turning day to night. The few drops turned into a shower, then a full rain, cold and driving, and he headed for the farm, driving the bike into the center bay of the barn just as the black clouds opened up into a full-blown deluge.

“I believe,” he said, “that’s what is known as ‘rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock.’” He wondered what it was like back at the Wick farm.

“That’s what we call it, all right. And just what the hell do you think you’re doing in my barn?”

The voice belonged to a big, square-faced man with a Scandinavian accent and a heavy canvas barn coat and knee-length rubber boots. He looked as if he, too, had run into the barn unexpectedly to escape heaven’s wet wrath. He looked more bemused than hostile.

Avery gestured at the door and said, “Getting out of the rain.”

“I’d say that’s a pretty good answer, all right. I always did like a man who knows what he thinks he’s doing. I guess you’ll stay to supper, den?”

“If I’m invited.”

“I just said so, didn’t I?”

“Then I accept. I’m Jim Avery” He held out his hand.

“Arlan Gustafson. Good ta know ya. Last guy I caught in my barn, he wouldn’t stop and visit at all. Took off hitching a ride with the creamery truck driver, who also don’t never visit.”

“Oh, really? What did this last guy look like?”

“Tall, skinny drink of ink. Smart-alec smirk on his face all the time. Called himself Beanpole or Beanbag, or something.”

“Stringbean?”

“Yeah, just like what I said, den.”

“And just where would the creamery truck have taken him, I wonder?”

“Nearest big town, he said he wanted. That would be Ithaca.”

And once the rain stopped, that would be Avery’s destination as well.

***

Charlie ran back and forth between the Peerless and the Aultman & Taylor, doing his best to tend to the needs of both. The last header stack of grain must have been at the perfect moment of ripeness, because the separator worked flawlessly. He figured they were putting out something between fifteen and twenty bushels a minute, one every three or four seconds. After an hour or so, he had to stop and let the baggers catch up. The product bin on the thresher could hold a hundred bushels before it started to overflow. An auger drive would empty it periodically into either of two wagons that could hold another three hundred each. They should have had three more. Once they were full, they just had to stop the feed for a while and wait for the discharge end of the production line to clear itself out. That gave Charlie time to add water to the boiler, fine tune the pressure a bit, oil a few bearing journals, and add some coal to the firebox. It was an exhausting routine, but the results were spectacular. By eleven o’clock the header pile had been replaced by a less orderly straw pile, and they had suddenly run out of things to thresh.

Charlie went back to the engine and held down the lanyard for a long, gleeful blast on the whistle. As he did, he looked up at the clouds that continued to boil overhead, getting darker and more violent by the minute.

“Beat you, you bastards.” He shut down the power takeoff, climbed down from the platform, and took a long swig from a gallon stoneware jug that Annie Wick had carried out to the crew. It turned out to be beer, and it tasted like heavy, dark, homemade brew. Jesus-loving Annie was just a bundle of surprises.

Off to the north, a dust cloud announced another car coming to join the party, both faster and bigger than the ubiquitous black Model T. Something with wide, fat tires, a long hood, and a shiny, dark blue coach body. Charlie picked it for a Hudson.

“My banker,” said Joe Wick. “I’d give a pretty to see the look on his sour puss right now.”

“Maybe he’ll come over and share it with us.”

He did not. Instead, he stopped some hundred yards away and glowered. So the whole crew walked out to meet the big banker’s car, surrounding it in a loose picket of men and women with bemused smiles on their faces and pitchforks in their hands. Joe Wick led the group up to the car window, and the banker, who was alone in the car, rolled it down.

“Howdy, Mr. Puckett. Nice day for a drive out in the country. Gonna rain in a bit, though.”

“Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you, Wick? Just exactly where did that steam engine come from?”

“Tell him, Charlie.”

“I believe the manufacturer’s plate on the boiler says Waynesboro, Pennsylvania,” said Charlie, stepping up a bit closer.

“Another clever fellow. Is that your engine?”

Charlie caught the eye of Maggie Mae, who was standing to one side with her arms folded over a pitchfork handle. She nodded to him. She may have been mute, but it was becoming increasingly clear that she was definitely not deaf.

“Yes it is. You looking to hire it?”

“I don’t need your antique hunk of scrap iron. I’ve got my own Case. What I want to know is where you stole it.”

“I’d be careful about irresponsible accusations if I were you, Mr. Puckett.” He did not fidget, and his voice was steady and serious.

“I’ll be careful, all right. I’ll take the serial number of that machine to the sheriff, and when it turns up on a missing list, I’ll be back here to have it seized.”

“You might do that, if you had a warrant to go get the serial number in the first place. Of course, this isn’t my farm. If Joe, here, wants to let you wander around it where you will, I guess I can’t stop him. Joe?”

“Get off my land, you ink-stained thief.”

“You better be careful, too, Joe. You’ll need a good crop if you’re going to pay me back my note.”

“And I’ve got one, too, by dad.”

“Looks to me like you’ve still got two headers left to thresh over there.”

Charlie furrowed his brow at that, and Annie Wick, behind the banker, pointed to her eyes and made a gesture showing a tiny distance. Apparently the banker was nearsighted.

“Let me talk to this man,” said Puckett, pointing to Charlie.

“Talk.”

“A little more private, if you don’t mind. Would you get in the car, please?”

Charlie looked at the others, shrugged, and got in the car on the passenger side, making a point of not brushing the dust and dirt off his clothes first. Puckett rolled his window back up, pulled a roll of bills out of his inside jacket pocket, and stuffed some in Charlie’s hand. “That’s shut-down money,” he said, under his breath.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re all done threshing here. Okay? We have an understanding?”

Charlie snorted once and counted the money. “Sure,” he said. He put the money in his pocket and got out of the car, a wry smile on his face.

Puckett rolled down his window again and talked to Joe Wick.

“That note is due now, Joe.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s due on the first of November, like everybody else’s.”

“Look at the fine print. If I want to take a twenty percent discount, I can call it whenever I want. And if you don’t have the cash from selling the crop yet, that’s just too damn bad. I can have you thrown off your land. You think the sheriff doesn’t work for me?”

“But he don’t seem to be here, does he? And somehow, I don’t think you’ll find any other witnesses to your calling the twenty percent clause.” All the others in the group shook their heads, no.

“I’ll come back with the sheriff, then.”

“You think so? Might be kinda tough to make it back to town in the rain that’s moving in, what with all those holes in your tires.”

“What holes?”

“The ones these here pitchforks are about to make.”

Puckett looked around the car in a panic, put it in low gear, and floored the gas pedal, throwing dirt and rocks as he careened wildly, making his escape. The threshing crew laughed, clapped, and cheered.

“Maybe we should have punctured his tires and made him stay here, at that,” said Joe. “He will be back with the sheriff, you know.”

“Then we’ll just have to give him something to see when he gets here, won’t we? How much do you need to pay off that note he’s talking about at the twenty percent discount?”

“The note is for five thousand.”

“Discounted to four, if he wants it right away,” said Charlie. “Maggie Mae, can we swing that kind of transaction?”

She held out her splayed hand and rotated it back and forth, then held out three fingers, meaning they had three thousand, more or less.

“He won’t really do it,” said Joe. “That’s less than the original principal, and even he won’t lose money just for spite.”

“But you should be ready to call his bluff, all the same.”

Maggie Mae made some other gestures that Charlie didn’t understand. He looked over at Emily for a translation.

“She says maybe we could make up a Philadelphia bankroll.”

“What’s that?”

“A great big wad of one dollar bills with a few hundreds on the outside, so it looks like a fortune.

Joe nodded. “A bluff, you’re saying. That’s a pretty dang high-stakes game.”

Charlie shrugged. “You can only do what you can do.”

“Maybe what I can do is sell the crop. I’ll go out first thing in the morning and see. If Puckett comes by before I get back, everybody hide. You, too, Annie. He can’t call the note if there’s nobody to talk to.”

“What did the banker give you money for, by the way?” said Emily.

Charlie pulled out the wad of bills and fanned them for the group, grinning. “Wait until you hear this. He gave me two hundred dollars to promise not to thresh anymore here.”

“But there’s nothing left to thresh,” she said.

“He’s nearsighted from counting all that money, I think,” said Annie. “He must have thought those last two piles of straw were headers still waiting to be threshed.”

“We should leave them there, just so he can feel stupid when he comes back.”

“And just so he can see that I don’t have to give him back his two hundred bucks,” said Charlie. “But I’ve got an even better idea. Besides showing him what a fool he is, let’s make the engine disappear.”

“I got no more sheds big enough,” said Joe.

“Not sheds. He can look inside them, anyway. Lets put some tarps over the engine and bury it in the straw, make it look like the header he thought he saw anyway. I promised Jim I’d wait for him here until Sunday, and it might not be such a good idea to have the Peerless out in plain sight that long. Whether it has a checkered past or not, the sheriff and the banker together might be able to cook something up. Let’s just make it go away.”

“This whole game just gets better and better,” said Joe. “God, am I glad you folks came along.”

“It was a miracle,” said Annie, for the hundredth time.

“I sure hope we don’t have to change your mind on that score.”

They pulled the Starving Rooster over to the last empty machine shed first, put it inside and shut the doors. Charlie made a mental note to grease and oil it one last time before they shut it up for the year. Then he ran the Peerless over alongside the last big straw pile. He opened the emergency valve in the shelf above the firebox, flooding the box with steam and completely smothering the fire. Soon there was nothing anywhere on the engine any hotter than the temperature of steam. He blew off the last of the boiler pressure and they draped tarps over the entire machine, using wooden props here and there to form a tunnel under the machine and onto the control platform.