The Beet Fields (5 page)

Except that the boy could not stop thinking of her, of Lynette, standing in the pale light watching them dance. When they finished the eighty acres and Bill paid them, the Mexicans started to walk down the driveway and the boy followed, his hoe and feed sack over his shoulder. But
Bill
stopped him.

“Where are you from?” Bill looked off at the beet field.

“I'm with them.”

“Yeah, I know. But you're
not a Mexican and I
thought…well, let's try
it another way. Can you
drive a tractor?”

The boy had driven tractors on his uncle's farm, had plowed and disced and even drilled seed, but he merely nodded.

“I need help here, for the rest of summer. Someone who can drive a tractor. I've got a bunch of lease land I've got to work up and get ready for winter wheat planting.…”

And here a picture of Lynette entered the boy's mind. He had been thinking of going on with the Mexicans because he was feeling like a man of the
road now, with some money in his pocket and another hill to get over—a phrase he'd heard in a country-and-western song—but the clear picture of Lynette came into his mind and he opened his mouth and said, “What would it pay?”

Bill looked at him and back out across the field and dipped a pinch of snuff into his lower lip. “Five a day and found, including Saturday and Sunday if you want to keep at it.”

“That comes out at thirty-five dollars a week.”

Bill nodded. “A hundred and fifty a month if you work straight through.”

“I make eleven dollars a day hoeing beets.”

Another nod.
“When
there are beets to hoe. But when it rains or the beets are done, so are you. I'm offering steady work here for the rest of the summer.”

Again Lynette was there—a clear picture. The boy nodded. He'd seen her exactly twice, she was at least a year older than he was and yet he could not stop thinking about her. “When do I start?”

By this time the Mexicans were at the end of the driveway and he thought to run after them and say goodbye but he stopped, thinking of Lynette, and then they turned the corner onto the
road, walking all in white to the next job, and were gone and he did not see them again and would never in his life see them again. He walked with Bill back into the yard and it was in this way he came to work a steady job and to fall in love for the first time.

H
E NEVER ONCE SPOKE TO LYNETTE
.

Bill set him up in a small trailer next to the machine sheds that had once been used for camping but was now falling apart. It had a bunk across the end covered with rfiouse droppings and a small table next to the bunk. No lights, no heat, and when it rained it leaked like a sieve.

“You won't be in here that much,” Bill told the boy. “We work all the time summer and fall. You'll bê working from light to dark and then some.”

Except that it wasn't work, not like hoeing beets had been. It was just sitting driving a tractor. Bill had two large Case diesel tractors and it only
took him a few minutes that first day to teach the boy how to refuel and run one of them. He hooked the diesel onto a disc and sent the boy off to work the fields he'd leased.

The fields were a good three miles from his farm and once the boy was there working, Bill kept him there until well after dark. Alice drove out in a pickup and brought him cake and sandwiches for forenoon lunch, a full hot meal in lard buckets for midday dinner, cake and sandwiches again for afternoon lunch and then a full supper, always taken in the field so he could keep working.

He had thought at first they might send Lynette with the food but it was always Alice, always good food, more than he could possibly eat but always Alice. She brought him coffee to drink in a Thermos and he hated coffee but drank it anyway, with sugar she brought in an old peanut butter jar, to keep awake on the droning tractor he was driving.

There were no lights on the tractor, for which the boy was grateful. Just at dark—close to nine o'clock—Bill would come in the pickup and take him back to the trailer. The boy would fall asleep
on the bunk, mouse turds arid all. Before daylight Bill would pound on tfie side of the trailer to Wake him. He would just have time to stop at the outhouse, eat a standup breakfast at the tailgate of the truck—a thick-bread sandwich with eggs and bacon between the slices. Then Bill would drive the boy back to the field, dozing all the way, to refuel the tractor and start discing again at first light.

The boy prayed for rain, prayed to get sick, prayed for the tractor to break down, prayed for Bill to get sick, prayed for lightning, prayed for the very earth to swallow the tractor and end the woik. But all he got was good weather, the roar of the poorly muffled diesel and the endless, endless North Dakota fields. He thought of many things; he thought of
all
things. Tractor thoughts. He thought of love and making love and what it must be like when it is right and would let his mind go until he thought he would cripple himself with desire and of course he thought of Lynette, though he never saw her. He thought of movie stars and cars he would like tú own" a hot rod he would build someday and Hank Williams and he sang, at the top of his
lungs, trying to harmonize with and sing louder than the tractor, he sang every country-and-western song he knew and then made some up and at last, in the end, he came down to thoughts of revenge. He thought of getting even with everybody who had ever done a wrong thing to him—his parents, bullies, life, a teacher who'd hit him, an aunt who'd called him a shit-kid when she was drunk—thought of all the ways he could hurt them and make them know,
know
that they had done him the wrong way.

And still there were more fields. He worked a week, then another, then another with no break and each Monday morning Bill handed him seven crisp five-dollar bills to add to the beet money in his pockets. He was rich but even if he'd had time off he didn't want to go to town because he was afraid of being found and sent back.

He lived for sleep and lived to see Alice coming with the pickup to bring him food. He would try to get her to talk but she walked along the edge of the field while he sat and ate, picking bits of grass and small flowers until he was done, then took the dishes and leftover food
back, all without speaking more than a word or two but smiling at him and nodding and leaving him.

Jail must be like this, he thought after three weeks—except that it doesn't move and they don't pay you.

• • •

When it all fell apart and sent him on the run again as a fugitive it was Bill's fault. Or, as the boy thought of it, of course it had been Lynette's fault for making the picture in his mind that kept him there at Bill's farm and then it was Bill's fault for needing to go to town and not coming back.

The boy did not know anything was wrong. He worked the whole day and when it was time to stop for the night it was not Bill who came to take bin} back to the farm but Alice.

“Bill had to go to town,” she said to him as they drove to the farm. “He'll be back later.” But there was something in her voice, some tightness that he had not heard before, and he would have thought more of it except that he hadn't heard her voice enough to know for sure.

None of it mattered. He ate a beef sandwich
she brought, so hungry that his jaws ached, and when she stopped in the yard near the yard light he was so exhausted he stumbled to the trailer and fell asleep without undressing.

These nights—he thought of them as tractor nights—he didn't sleep so much as pass out. Nothing moved while he slept. His head jammed into the extra pair of pants he used as a pillow, he didn't dream, he just went down. For this reason it was hard to wake him, and when he at last heard the pounding on the side of the trailer and came out of unconsciousness he couldn't think.

He rolled upright, his eyes still closed and his feet on the floor, and he thought, God, I haven't slept at all and here's Bill already, and he stood and went to the trailer door. It took him four tries, swiping his hand across the lever-type handle before he caught it and opened the door to find not Bill standing there but Alice.

She was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and her face looked tight in the moonlight, the skin drawn over her cheekbones in something like a snarl.

“Is it time to go back to work?” he asked.

“No. It's two o'clock in the morning. I need you to go to town and get Bill.”

“Get Bill? What do you mean?”

“I mean he hasn't come home yet, which means he's stinking drunk and you have to go get him. If he tries to drive he'll likely kill himself or some other—“

“But I can't go into town—“

“You take the grain truck and drive into Adams. It ain't but nine miles. He'll be at the tavern—there's only the one beer hall—and you go inside and tell him Alice says to come home now. I'd do it myself but it ain't right for a woman to go into a beer hall and pull at her man. Then you take him out to the grain truck and bring him home and I'll deal with the son of a bitch then.”

The boy saw the anger in her eyes and thought of all the reasons he couldn't go into town—it wasn't safe, he was too young to go to a beer hall, he didn't have a license, he needed sleep. Bill was the boss and he shouldn't go in and drag him home, Bill was bigger than he was and what if he didn't
want
to be dragged home— and none of them came out.

Instead he was quiet and she led him to the 1951 one-ton GMG grain truck and she told him how to start it and turned on the lights and he was heading down the driveway when he realized he had never been to Adams arid didn't know how to get there. He stopped and jumped out of the truck—it seemed like ten feet to the ground— and ran back to where Alice was standing.

“Just turn left and go straight when you hit the main road. You can't miss it.”

Under almost any other circumstance he would have liked driving the grain truck. He had driven tractors and sometimes he'd driven the '51 Chevy sedan when his parents were sleeping off a binge. He would sneak out and drive the car around the block in the middle of the night. The grain truck was a good chance to practice shifting and working the clutch. But he was worried too much about what to do when he got to town to enjoy the driving.

Alice had been right about Adams. There were just five buildings, which comprised die main street. A grain elevatorf a gas station, a dry-goods store, a farm implement dealer and a tavern called simply Pete's Place; ten or twelve houses were scattered out near an old water tower.

The boy stopped the truck in front of the tavern, the only building with any lights showing. There were three cars there and Bill's pickup all pulled in nose to curb and he brought the truck in-that way—though he was worried about getting reverse right and backing out when it was time to leaver—but misjudged the length of the truck's front and drove it up on the sidewalk a bit before he got it stopped.

He hesitated at the door of the tavern. He knew about taverns and knew about drunks and hated them both; He had spent many nights waiting in the car outside taverns while his parents drank—sitting there sometimes for two, three hours before he worked up the courage to go in and try to get them to leave. They never did. All the memories came back now, of the fights and the screaming and the tears" and he shook his head. It's all bullshit, he thought, and pushed open the door.

Pete's looked like all the small-town taverns he had ever seen. Down the right was a rough wooden bar with no barstools and a low-to-the-floor galvanized steel-pipe rail for the drinkers to put their feet on.

On the left side there were three tables with metal chairs scattered around them. At the far end of the bar was a large clock on the wall with its hands frozen at 1:30 and the room was lit by a dim bulb hanging from a single wire in the middle of the ceiling.

There was a bald bartender wearing a filthy white shirt, open at the neck, and at the corner of the bar near the rear, where there was a small opening for the bartender to get through, three |men stood playing cards.

“Damn!“
one of the men yelled, and the boy saw that it was Bill. “I can't lose!“

Again the boy waited, thinking, I'm not hired for this—to go to a tavern and watch drunks play cards.

But he stepped forward and moved to where the men stood, wondering as he walked what he would say. The money there took it all out of his mind.

The bartop seemed to be covered with money. Twenties, fifties, hundred-dollar bills were piled in front of each man and Bill's pile was huge. The boy couldn't imagine how much money—thousands of dollars?—was in Bill's rumpled pile.

As the boy came close, Bill said, “I'll bet one, no, two thousand dollars. You want to see what I've got, you'll have to pony up.” He removed some money from his pile with the exaggerated care of the truly drunk, counting bills slowly and putting them in the pot, and the boy stopped about four feet away and stood silently, watching, mesmerized by the money.

The other two men hesitated briefly, and then silently—they seemed drunker than Bill—put the money from their piles into the pot.