The tractor’s body was one big green molded piece of plastic, but the big tires in the back were real rubber. The front tires turned on their axle as a single unit. The dash was just the big red “On” button and a black steering wheel. On the back of the tractor, there was a ring about the size of a Hula-Hoop.
“I hate this tractor,” the farmer’s daughter said as Sunny approached. “You hear me, tractor? I hate your pull-’n’-play guts. You damn ten-token bargain-bin carnival prize.”
Boy laughed and put all his weight into pushing the button. He didn’t weigh much, but he was the right size of a six-year-old. “It can’t hear you like I can,” said Boy. “It’s just a tractor.”
The farmer’s daughter tried to slam the hood down, but it had one of those magnetic latches in the front, where you push down to make it pop up. So it came up. She slammed it again. It still didn’t catch. She reached up and put a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her other hand was on her hip.
“I’m gonna melt this thing and put it in the attic, Sunny.”
Boy mewled at the mention of the attic. He sat back in the tractor and moved his wrists in circles. If ever anyone mentioned the chest of cast-off toys in the barn attic, he’d rotate his wrists and roll his fingers like he was playing piano. To have so many points of articulation, working ones, showed he was high quality, and he wasn’t broken. He had a fine white military hat, and the black bill had chipped a little, but he wasn’t no broken tractor.
“Farmer wouldn’t like that,” said Sunny as he dropped Pup on the ground.
“Tell him to grow ’em with engines, then.”
“Springs loose?”
“No.”
“Got you this far.”
“Two lines in two hours.”
Sunny watched her walk to the back of the tractor and grab the big ring. The front hood was still open like a hungry, hungry hippo. Sunny walked over to see if the latch had snapped where she’d slammed on it.
“Met that drifter I told ya about,” said Sunny.
“Is he just traveling through?”
“You could say that,” said Sunny. He wasn’t in a hurry to tell her about the standoff. He saw that the latch was busted, with the magnetic head snapped clean off.
“He still around?”
“Yep.”
“Well, which is it? He staying or leaving?”
“He’s looking for work.”
The farmer’s daughter yanked on the ring and propped one boot up on the tractor to get a better foothold. Sunny pulled out his dart, then untied the piece of twine he used as a belt. He pulled the twine over a notched part of the metal arrow and yanked to make two pieces. He threaded the smaller piece of twine through the latch on the tractor. He brought down the hood and tied it off tight. The farmer’s daughter growled as she yanked hard on the ring. Neither paid attention to Boy, who was leaning over the back of the tractor, saying, “Pull it to the left, Dot.”
Sunny tied the larger piece of twine back around his waist.
“We don’t have any work,” said Dot.
“I told him,” said Sunny.
“What’d he say?”
“He wondered if I was the farmer. I said no. He said ask the farmer.”
“What’d you say?”
“Said I’d ask you.”
“We don’t have work.”
“Pull it to the right,” said Boy.
“Come help me with this,” said the farmer’s daughter.
Sunny went around to the back of the tractor. Pup left the bulb he had been digging up.
“He’s real old,” said Sunny. “Called me chacho. Said I’m a kind of sheriff.”
“Just turned eighteen and already a sheriff,” said Dot. She wasn’t much older, thought Sunny, for all that. Dot said, “But old don’t mean kind. What if he’s an outlaw? What if he’s wanted, like me?”
The two of them grabbed the big ring and pulled. It spooled out on a few feet of string, making a whirring noise from inside the tractor. Then the line caught and the string retracted back. The tractor lurched forward a yard. Boy fell into the seat and laughed.
“Like you?” said Sunny, as they grabbed the ring and got purchase once again.
“Didn’t you know, Sheriff? I’m wanted in five counties.”
“You an outlaw?”
“Nah,” said the farmer’s daughter, smiling. “Just good-looking.”
The two of them pulled again, this time jerking past the caught-up section. The whirring lifted to a higher pitch as the wheel inside the tractor spun. As the ring reeled back, the tractor hopped forward, this time falling into a steady gear and driving on. Dot clapped her hands, then knocked Sunny on the shoulder.
“Thanks, Sheriff.”
“Gets wound around itself sometimes.”
Sunny considered telling her that the old stranger had come armed. The farmer’s daughter trotted up to the moving tractor, jumped on the step, and leaned over Boy to straighten the course. Sunny grabbed Pup and walked alongside. She set Boy on top of the hood and reclaimed her seat. She said, “You know, they got a hangin’ judge in town. Ain’t even bothered to take down the scaffold since he came.”
“Brought his own hangman, too?”
“Nah, does it himself, they say. Likes the feel of it. That wishbone sound they make.”
Sunny spat some straw, then picked at his tongue for a few remaining threads.
“They say he pounds his gavel, then takes off his robe and puts on a hood, hangs folks right then and there.”
“Judges from the gallows,” said Sunny.
“The saloon next door.”
Sunny had spent some time with a hangin’ judge before the farmer had found him. He hadn’t been much bigger than Boy at the time. Dot knew it, too. When they got to the end of the line, the farmer’s daughter turned the steering wheel to head back the other way, and Sunny kept walking on toward the farmhouse. When she saw he was going, the farmer’s daughter shouted over the whine of the tractor and Boy’s excited whooping, “If he’s an outlaw, ain’t no better time to leave town.”
Sunny raised a hand in the air to say he’d heard. He hadn’t told her that the old man backed him down, made him fall on his heels, and then tried to teach him about hospitality. He also didn’t mention that Sobrino was armed with ten fingernails that a hangin’ judge would have considered visible admissions of being up to no good.
It was nearly late afternoon, and he hadn’t checked on the billy goats. They might have eaten each other’s tin horns by now. Sunny plodded up the hill toward the farmhouse. He stopped on the side, under the shadow of the eaves, to take a drink of water from the hose. His back ached as he bent to turn the faucet. His back always ached. It was the way he slept. He turned the knob all the way and looked around for the end of the hose. A few seconds passed. A few feet away, an orange mortar shell bobbed up from the grass. It shook, then sent an arc of water in every direction. Pup barked and started running circles around it, trying at once to dodge the water and still get wet.
“Aw, hell,” said Sunny. He twisted the sprinkler bomb off of the hose as though he was popping open a soda bottle. He tossed the globe to Pup and drank from the hose. The water soaked into him, drew his cords taut, and made his limbs feel weighty. He poured some water at the foot of the hollyhocks growing up the side of the house. Inside their purple blooms were baby doll shoes.
Sunny decided it was a sheriff’s business to shield the women and children from fear. He walked across the front of the house, along the porch. To his right, all the way across the empty pasture, he could feel Sobrino watching him. Pup had to sprint to keep up. Sunny wasn’t afraid of the stranger’s weapons; he just didn’t want the old man to feel like he’d taught Sunny a lesson. The inhospitable thing to do was ignore the beggar till he shuffled off. The ornery crow sent up a chattering call from out by the woods behind the pasture. It had found something, but what, Sunny didn’t care to know.
THAT NIGHT, THOUGH Sunny listene
d for it, the coyotes didn’t sing a prairie dirge. A dreary purge. He sat on the unlit porch of the farmhouse, dueling a lazy cricket’s hum with the creaks of his rocking chair. He couldn’t play a harmonica, since his lips were always as dry as a threshing floor, but he would have. His straw hat hung on a post from a purple plastic screw. A buttery smell wafted from the rows in the back of the house — a mix of rich soil and Play-Doh.
Pup had long since fallen asleep at Sunny’s feet. The moon looked like a fingernail had punctured an eggplant. Instead of moving on, Sobrino had set up camp on the far side of the oak, just beyond the property line, as a sign of respect maybe. The way he’d leaned over the fence as though it was nothing, Sunny wondered if camping beside the tree wasn’t a joke. Like carving up the fence.
The only light, sparing the feeble glaze of the moon, was Sobrino’s campfire. Sunny could see it across the pasture. It was a glittery wink, a hundred yards away at the end of a black tunnel, ready to burn him down. Even if he soaked his limbs, a fire that bright could eat Sunny down to the buttons.
Sunny’d spent the early evening rounding up the livestock, untangling a kite from an apple tree, and tightening the bands on a collapsible pony so it wouldn’t collapse all the time. He’d found ants in the gum-ball machine and gum balls in the ant farm. One of the gum balls was actually a dinosaur sponge capsule. Sunny considered pouring water on it and smothering a few ants to teach them a lesson. Then he couldn’t figure what that lesson was exactly. He took the gum-ball machine out to the barn and set it on a crossbeam above a horse stall. He’d find a home for it later.
When he thought he heard the scratching of three blind windup mice from the barn, Sunny figured he’d better find a home for the gum balls first thing in the morning, before any real mice got to them. For now, Sunny had just battened everything down, as if a tornado was fixing to rip across the plain. The cotton-wool sheep wanted to graze in the pasture, but Sunny wouldn’t let them get that near the stranger.
Sunny lifted his sleeve to his mouth and pulled out a long piece of straw. He bit off the end and spat it out the side of his mouth. The night was cold. The cricket stopped humming for fear he’d give away his position. Sunny drew his feet in and sat up straight. He squinted and saw half an outline of the stranger in the distance, sitting by the flames with a stick in his hand. He was poking the fire, sending up sparks like poison mist into the air. A kettle of black coffee sat in the red coals. It was too far away to hear the crackling of the fire as it gnawed the wood, but Sunny could imagine the sound.
Sunny wiggled his exposed toes. He wondered what it would feel like to put leather boots on them and prop them up near a fire.
He didn’t even own a pair of boots. There’d never been a need. Boots were for fighting: kicks and protection from getting stomped on. Now Sunny wished for some. The farm was too far from town to run for help, and farther still from anybody you’d call a neighbor. Out there, it was any kind of law you negotiated for. You could do whatever it was someone else wasn’t stopping you from doing. If you were big enough, you could steal a whole farm.
The creaking of Sunny’s chair seemed too loud in the new dark hour. The silence was a language of the trees. They had waited all day for everyone else to shut up.
Sunny got up quietly so Pup wouldn’t hear and grabbed his hat. He stepped clear of the loose porch steps straight onto the grass. It was darkest in the gulf between the farmhouse and the campfire, but Sunny didn’t need the light. He walked just a few yards in front of the porch, still on the crest of the hill, where a six-foot post had been pounded into the ground and nailed with one perpendicular beam. It stuck up like a piece of fencing someone had forgotten to build on or take down.
Sunny knew exactly where the stake was. He yawned as he walked up to his bedpost. He leaned back on it as though it was the side of the barn, shifted a little, letting the post adjoin the groove of his back. He fixed his hat so it’d cover his eyes, crossed his arms, and put a foot up on the pole.
He could just see the fire through the mesh of his hat.
Sunny breathed a heavy sigh and settled in for the night. He fell into an unwilling sleep and dreamed that coyotes were sneaking down from the buttes to steal one of his velveteen rabbits.
When the crow called out a murderous cackle, Sunny snorted awake, but the last hour of the night was dewy and still. The campfire had been put out. As he closed his eyes again, Sunny heard a raspy sound, like the old stranger sucking pulp from his teeth.
THE ORNERY CROW stepped left then right on the oak branch, watching Sunny, who stood in the pasture with his head down and his hat over his eyes. The bird’s plumes were so black they were purple. It raised its throat and called three times in succession, but Sunny didn’t move. He still leaned against his bedpost, with one foot up and his arms folded. The crow thrust its belly out over the empty space and opened its wings. It flew over the dirt road, the split-rail fence, and the hundred-yard pasture, and landed on Sunny’s shoulder.
The morning light had already climbed up over the farmhouse and spilled out onto the pasture. The farmer had walked the rows and gone inside already. The bird clamped tight on its perch, but Sunny didn’t stir. His muscles were like coiled ropes, taut but giving. The crow bobbed his head. Sunny had no particular smell, leastways not like carrion would in his position.
The crow decided to explore. It stuck its beak into Sunny’s ear and pulled out a bit of straw. A hand came up, lethargic with sleep, and scratched unconsciously at the itch. The crow flew up out of reach and landed back on Sunny’s shoulder when his hand fell.
The crow gripped Sunny’s shoulder and plunged its whole head into his ear canal. It rummaged for some time. Finally the flapping of its wings knocked Sunny’s hat off his head.
Sunny didn’t wake, but Pup caught sight of the straw hat blowing across the pasture and came running. The crow didn’t hear Pup’s yips and backflips, because its head was dug so deep in Sunny’s skull. Other dogs might have pulled back their ears while their hackles came up. Pup just squatted in his one position and yapped the only round tone he knew over and over.
The crow didn’t even notice when Sunny roused and wiped his nose with his sleeve. He wondered where his hat had gotten off to. Pup bounced at his feet to get his attention.
“What is it?” said Sunny.
Pup tried to backflip in such a way as to point at the bird growing out of Sunny’s head.
“What? I ain’t a carny show. Git.”
Sunny started to lean over, to see what was wrong with Pup, but the crow felt the swaying of his perch and began batting its wings at the side of Sunny’s head. Before Sunny could grab more than a handful of feathers, the crow pried its head loose and fluttered off, cawing its cusses back toward them. Pup ceased his conniption once the bird flew off. Sunny patted his ear to survey the damage.
He’d be fine, but he’d overslept. He’d stayed up to keep an eye on the stranger — Sunny looked over to Sobrino’s camp but didn’t see the old man anywhere. The wind was already blowing away the ashes of his fire. The fescue grass was bent where he’d slept. “Aw, hell,” said Sunny.
At his foot was another cup of coffee with sugar and cream — and the crow had added a mess of straw floating on top. Sunny kicked over the cup. He spotted his hat in the far corner of the pasture, blown up against the fence. It slapped the rails intermittently, like a loose screen door. Pup sat as still as possible on a wagging tail, panting with a stupid-looking grin.
“Heaven and hell,” said Sunny. On his way toward the fence, Sunny swung his foot out and knocked Pup onto his back. Pup rolled over one and a half times and rushed back up alongside Sunny.
Sunny squeezed his temples to juice the sleep out. He could hear the pull string of the tractor whirring all the way in the garden. He picked up his hat and dusted it as he walked to the back of the barn. The chickens would be nervous in the coop. Usually, he’d have had them out hours ago.
Sunny opened the coop and pulled o
ut each hen, gently holding its aluminum body with both hands so it wouldn’t dent. Instead of feet, they had one yellow wheel nestled under them, with a gripped surface like a print roller. He dragged each hen across the ground so the wheel could build up enough energy for the day. Then he pulled each hen back toward him, putting two fingers hard on the wheel so it wouldn’t spin out as he lifted the hen off the ground. He repeated the step till the pressure seemed to tighten the chicken’s breast and its drowsy warbles became hungry clucks.
As Sunny released the wound-up hens, Pup greeted them with a lick. Then they’d wheel around in curious circles, looking for chicken feed they might have missed from the previous day. A few of them had dented a wing as they stirred in the coop all night, and Sunny had to soothe these while he worked the aluminum with his thumbs. The uneasy hens burbled inside their gullets, afraid of any pain, even the healing kind.
Sunny’d been repairing the chickens since they’d been grown in the rows. One of them he’d really had to fix up after he’d found it nearly flat on the gravel road. Only difference to it afterward was that it looked like a piece of paper, balled up and smoothed out again.
After he’d wound the last hen, Sunny stood up and scattered seed in the dirt lot between the coop and the back of the barn. The hens swirled around one another, rocking on their wheels to peck seeds, then spinning on to search for more.
Each had a keen sense of the others in the manic tangle, or else they’d bump, crumple the aluminum where they’d hit, and fall off their axles. So they kept some miraculous clearance but whizzed around together out of a flocking instinct. Any one of them by itself was light and inconsequential, almost lost without the garbled lot of all of them together.
Straw House Page 2