by Will Weaver
When Martin could no longer maneuver the tractor in the hole, he came down to help with a shovel and then with a crowbar. Guy and Martin pried at the plank face of the garage. The wood was soft and flaky, like the damp undersides of fallen logs. The rust-capped spikes pulled through the wood. The nails were shiny underneath.
Guy broke open a doorway wide enough to throw a beam of daylight into the garage. The Chevy sat square and silent. The headlights on its broad face were fogged and pupilless, the wide-set eyes of a strange Greek statue.
Martin pulled away more boards, made a doorway. Guy stepped inside. Chrome peeled and curled on the front bumper. The cheeks of the hubcaps were pitted through. A cluster of red cancers grew along the rocker panels and the bottoms of the doors. But the diesel fuel that Guy, twelve years ago, had poured over the car had drawn dust to form an oily shroud, a petroleum shrink-wrap around the Chevy.
“Be damned,” Martin said. “She don’t look that bad.”
Guy opened the hood. The battery had leaked. Thin white tears of acid coursed down the fender well, and where they had frozen, had eaten through the metal. The radiator was dry. The fan belt lay slack. But the dipstick shone with cool, clean oil.
Martin went home for the pickup and some tools. Guy worked again with the shovel, smoothing a road up the hill. Two pickups turned into the yard, one with Losano Farms markings and another that Guy recognized from the Defense League. He kept swinging the shovel.
Finally Martin came with the pickup.
“What did the boys want today?” Guy said as he unloaded the air compressor.
“Nothin’,” Martin said as he bent to lift the chain. Guy helped with the chain. It was Helmer’s log chain from when he had cleared land. Guy had forgotten its weight. The chain links were as big as calves’ hooves, the hook and clevis at either end bound by one-inch machine bolts. The chain was used for only the biggest jobs—logging, moving a granary to replace a foundation, pulling a combine from a soft spot in a field, hoisting up a truck bed to replace a broken axle. It was the chain they had used to lift the tractor off Jewell Hartmeir.
Martin hooked the clevis to the tractor. Guy secured the hook to the frame of the Chevy. He wiped the windshield enough to see, then got inside. The interior smelled of dust and incense and Pine Tree air freshener and old shotgun shells. Images of his past came like a cloudburst. But Martin started the tractor and the chain jerked tight.
Before they proceeded, Guy got out and Martin got down from the tractor. They checked once more, as they always had, as Martin had taught him, the chain and its fastening. Its iron links stretched between them as straight as a rod. Martin strummed the chain, then held it; for a moment Guy could feel his father through the iron.
“Okay,” Martin said, stepping back, “let’s roll.”
The Chevy jerked and creaked forward.
Guy steered.
Martin gunned the tractor and the Chevy rolled from its garage into daylight. At the top of the earthen ramp the tractor spun in sand. The chain jerked and whipped, but the Chevy kept rising. Suddenly Guy could see tree trunks. Fields. Then buildings.
Martin gunned the tractor in the sand. As the Chevy crested at field level there was a sudden cracking noise—like a rifle report—and something slammed into the grille of the Chevy. The Chevy began to roll backward. Guy jammed on the brakes. The chain had broken.
Martin jumped down. He looked at the two new, bright ends, at the tiny eye of gray slag that had caused the break. He touched the new ends together as if by contact they would weld themselves. “Shit,” he muttered, “the old man’s gonna be pissed.”
Guy was silent.
Suddenly Martin looked up to Guy, then across to the house. “Goddamn,” he said to Guy. He let the chain drop. He sat on the ground. His eyes welled with water. “Goddamn but it’s hard.”
That night rain spattered briefly on the roof, then quit. Come morning, the sun rose dusty red. By midday cows queued along the sides of the barn for the narrow shade of its eaves, or clustered beneath the scattered oak trees of the cow lot. Often the Holsteins turned their noses north and huffed the air. Bumblebees droned in the same direction. Both could smell water.
On Hank Schroeder’s farm the potato irrigator turned clocklike around the field. Still under injunction, irrigators across the reservation spun shiny sheets of water onto the ground—thanks to Cassandra Silver. She had persuaded a judge to impose a small, daily fine on each irrigator. Until the matter was resolved, Ricardo Losano paid up and the irrigators circled the fields.
The next night, distant gunfire tattooed the dark. The yellow yard light by Martin’s barn flickered and went out. The TV hissed and faded to black. Guy heard a faint thud, like a faraway thunderclap. They went outside onto the steps and looked north. Something burned in the sky.
“What the hell?” Martin said.
They drove fast in the pickup to investigate. A quarter mile from Schroeder’s field a big electrical transformer burned on its pole, a tall sparkler stick jammed in the ground. Two Losano Farms pickups stood parked nearby, and men with guns clustered on the road in the headlights.
“Fuckin’ Indians shot out the transformer,” one of the men said to Guy.
Across the road the irrigator stood motionless, water dripping.
Then they all looked up. Across the prairie, farther north, gunfire crackled again, followed by another boom and thud, and a faint flare of light.
“This is fuckin’ war,” one of the Losano men muttered.
“Let’s go after ’em,” Martin said.
Pickup doors slammed and engines raced.
Guy walked home alone.
The next morning at 10:00 AM Guy looked up from beneath the hood of the Chevy. He listened. A faint, far-off rumble came from the east. A thunderstorm. But weather never came from the east. He stood up and shaded his eyes to see better. Beyond the cow lot, across the shimmering haze of the fields, a dust cloud grew on the road. A brown, lumbering tornado, lying on its side, of road dust. At the same moment he heard engine noise. Guy squinted and then began to make out the vague green shapes of tractors driving the dust before them. A half mile of tractors.
He turned quickly back to the farmyard. By the machine shed Martin stood running diesel fuel into the big John Deere. “What the hell’s going on?” he called to Martin.
Martin only checked his watch, glanced at the dust cloud, and kept running fuel. Guy crossed the yard and came up to his father. “What is that?” he said, pointing to the long convoy of tractors.
Martin looked briefly at Guy, then away toward the dust. “You make trouble, you pay the piper,” he said. “The potato boys and a lot of other farmers on the reservation have had enough of the Indian trouble.”
“Where are they headed?” Guy asked.
Martin’s eyes flickered, looked across to the inner reservation toward No Medicine Town, then back to Guy.
Guy was silent for long moments. Then he said to his father, “You don’t have to join them.”
Martin squinted up at Guy, then back to the caravan of green and brown.
“Stay here. With me,” Guy said.
“No,” Martin said suddenly. “I can’t.” He turned away, hung up the hose, and pulled himself up into the John Deere. He stared down at Guy. In the sunlight, skeins of wrinkles showed around his father’s eyes.
“Don’t you see?” Martin said, looking back to the oncoming dust cloud. “This was my idea.” He turned the key and his John Deere engine rumbled alive.
Guy drove the pickup fast toward Tom’s house. He took the long way so he did not have to pass the slow-moving tractors. He pushed the Ford hard around the curves and through the trees until he skidded to a stop in Tom’s yard. He rushed through the door without knocking. Madeline rose up, startled, from her writing desk.
“W
here’s Tom?” Guy called.
“At the Humphrey Center. Guy, what’s . . . ?”
“Come on—and hurry,” he said.
He explained as he drove.
“And Martin?” Madeline asked.
“He’s with them.”
Madeline was silent for a moment. “Last night—the power lines and the irrigators,” Madeline said. “Tom had nothing to do with that. It was friends of Sonny Bowstring. They’ve been pushing Tom and pushing him—especially after Sonny was killed. They’ve got a lot of guns. So far he’s held them back.”
Guy stared at Madeline for a moment, then turned back to the road.
“Doesn’t matter who did what,” Guy said, “Tom’s the one in trouble.”
At the Humphrey Center, Guy and Madeline walked quickly to Bear Wing. Loud voices came from the Tribal Office. No music. Inside, Tom stood up against his desk with his arms folded as several long-haired Indians shouted at him. The shouting Indians were dressed darkly in jeans, black T-shirts, leather vests, and black slashes of charcoal across their cheekbones and foreheads. The night shift. Close behind them leaned several rifles and .30–30 Winchesters, and two Remington .30–06 automatics, one with a long scope.
“There’s your problem right there,” one of the Indians said as Guy and Madeline came through the door.
Tom turned to Madeline and Guy, then looked back to the other Indians. A vein in his neck began to pulse.
“Tom—come!” Madeline called.
“See what I mean?” the first Indian said.
Tom started to speak but Madeline cut him off. “The tractors—they’re coming and you should get out,” Madeline said. “Come with us.”
Tom stared, confused. “Look,” Madeline said, pulling him toward the window. The other Indians gathered behind Tom and Madeline. Over their heads and through the window Guy could see the dust cloud rising down the road, rolling toward No Medicine Town.
Tom and the other Indians stared.
“Shit, man, they’re gonna terminate us for sure,” one of the Indians said. He grabbed up a rifle.
Tom whirled and pulled away the rifle. “No—no guns!” he said.
The other Indians stared, first at Tom, then at each other, then back to Tom. “Fuck you, man,” one of them finally said, “guns is all there’s left.”
“No, not yet—this is left,” Tom said, sweeping his hand at the papers, the typewriters, the file cabinets.
“Nah,” one of the other Indians said tiredly, “that’s just papers, a fuckin’ merry-go-round of papers that never stops.”
One by one they picked up the rifles. Tom stared as they jacked shells into the chambers.
“All right—keep the guns but take them the hell out of here,” Tom said rapidly. “You’ve got time. Go!”
The Indians looked back out the window. The lead tractor, tall and green, with four wide tires in front, was even with the junkyard on the edge of town. Most of the tractors pulled implements. Plows. Disks. Sprayers. Harrows. All were folded upright for highway travel.
“Forget it, man, we ain’t gettin’ our asses run over!” one of the Indians said.
“Besides,” another said, turning back to Tom, “why the hell should we run? This is our place. Our land. That’s the whole fuckin’ point, right?”
Tom was silent.
“Tom, come with us,” Madeline said. “You can leave!”
Tom stared at Madeline for a long moment. Then he grinned briefly and shook his head. “No, I’d better stay here. Somebody might shoot his toe off and need a Band-Aid or something.”
Nobody said anything.
“Then I’ll stay too,” Madeline said.
“No,” Tom said quickly. “Tex, take her home. I’ll be there later.”
Guy steered Madeline toward the door and down the hallway. Tom stood behind, outlined against the big mural, and watched them go. The other Indians started to flow out the door, but Tom pushed them back inside and closed the door behind him.
Guy and Madeline stepped through the front doors of the Humphrey Center just as the tractors rumbled into No Medicine Town. Two Indian boys who had been kicking a ball on the lawn now stood silent, holding the ball, watching. The ribs of the tractor tires whined on the asphalt and swirled up dust from the shoulders. The junkyard Labrador crouched flat in the back seat of his old Cadillac, only his head protruding, and barked frantically, soundlessly in the noise. Three Indian children scuttled across Main Street and into a store; like round loaves of pumpernickel bread, their heads slowly rose to peek out the window. Main Street was a narrow slot suddenly filled by tall tractors and dust and whirling bits of trash. At the grocery store a square of plate glass slipped and shattered like a sheet of ice falling from the face of a glacier. The tractors passed without slowing.
Guy looked for Martin, but in the haze and motion the tractors all looked alike. Behind the green-tinted windows of the tractor cabs the drivers were vague figures in feed caps and sunglasses.
The lead tractor, a tall, dual-tandem John Deere with a square rack of traction weights hung on its face like an extra jaw, headed toward the Humphrey Center. It pulled a field disk. The disk arms began to unfold.
“Jesus!” Guy said.
The two Indian boys on the lawn bolted for the door of the Humphrey Center.
The disk’s multiple arms, each one a skewer of parabolas scoured shiny by the sandy soil, rose on hydraulic joints like a praying mantis arching its wings. Behind the second tractor toothed harrow arms spread, and farther back in the convoy sprayer booms dropped like arms of a railroad crossing.
Madeline stepped backward, behind Guy.
“Come, Guy,” she said. She pulled his arm toward the Humphrey Center.
In the foyer one of the Indian boys said, “They’re gonna crash the building over.”
“No,” Madeline said immediately. “It’s only . . . a parade.”
The Indian boys said nothing. As glass began to tremble they stepped farther back. The rolling bulk of the tractors vibrated the foyer like long, wobbly aftershocks of an earthquake. Among the tractors Guy saw a smaller, red Massey-Ferguson. The Hartmeir tractor. It carried a manure-bucket loader with the legless Jewell Hartmeir perched inside. Mary Ann drove. Just behind Mary Ann was Martin in his John Deere. Guy lost sight of them as the lead tractor veered from the road down into the ditch. Its wide disk settled onto the ground. Rolling blades sliced through the brown grass and rolled the sod belly-up, torn and dusty.
In the middle of the lawn stood the tall bear totem. The lead tractor swung its face straight at the trunk of the totem. Behind Guy down the hall someone swore—one of the night-shift Indians. Guy watched the tractor’s nose close on the totem. Its square iron jaw slammed into the belly of the bear. In slow motion the bear broke in half. Like a tree toppling, the bear’s gaze fell forward in a slow downward arc, gathering momentum as it fell. It crashed across the tractor cab, bounced down the green iron onto the spinning ribs of the tires, which pulled the broken bear beneath its wheels. There was a crackling noise of breaking wood. For a moment the bear jerked upright and free between the rear tractor wheels and disk. But then the disk blades pulled it down again. The rolling blades tore the totem into splinters and spread the bright chips of wood behind.
There was more shouting behind Guy. He looked back and saw Tom blocking his office door as Indians shouted and pointed. A sudden scrape and screeching noise jerked Guy’s eyes back to the lawn. The lead tractor’s disk caught the edge of the sidewalk, tore it loose from the ground, where it plowed along intact before the disk, then shattered into chunks of concrete that dispersed themselves, scraping and screeching, between the irons.
Other tractors crossed the ditch and surged onto the lawn. One pulled a chemical sprayer. Its thin pipe arms hissed a white mist that wet the ground a
nd briefly settled the dust with a sour smell of herbicide. But the dust rose again behind a third tractor and its wide harrow.
Guy turned back to Tom just as the shouting Indians pushed their way past him into the hallway. Tom held on to three of them. All carried rifles. There was shouting and cursing, a stumbling fight and the clank of guns. Guy and Madeline ran to help.
“No—get back,” Tom shouted, whether to the Indians or to Madeline, Guy was not sure. He hung on to two Indians with rifles but could not stop the roiling flow toward the door.
They crashed into the foyer, then outside into the path of a tractor, which veered suddenly at the sight of the guns. Tom and Madeline and Guy struggled for the rifles, but on the torn sod, among chunks of concrete, they fell.
A rifle went off with a dull clap. Someone cried out. They all froze, then got to their feet. Around them the tractors braked to a halt. Guy and Madeline and the other Indians all looked at each other.
Tom broke the silence. “Like spin the bottle,” he said softly. “My unlucky day.” He pushed aside his vest. High up on his white T-shirt grew a red rose.
Guy caught him as he fell.
“Tom!” Madeline screamed.
Tom’s back bloomed bright red and Guy tried to cover the hole with his hand.
“Aw, Tex,” Tom whispered, “I don’t know if you can get me out of this one. . . .”
“Don’t talk,” Guy said.
Two nurses floated from the clinic like sea gulls and landed beside Tom. They pushed Guy and Madeline aside.
One by one the tractor engines shut off. The farmers opened the doors of the cabs and slowly climbed down. At first they lingered by their tractors. Then, slowly, they came forward, stepping carefully over the furrows. They paused in a ragged circle around Tom.
Tom’s eyes squinted against the bright sun overhead. “Madeline,” he said.
“I’m here,” Madeline whispered. She held his head in her arms.
“Where’s Tex?”