“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 pro
ps here and there to form a tunnel under the machine and onto the control platform.
Then they all pitched straw until the whole mass was completely covered, making a very plausible imitation of a header. Over at the next straw pile, the only other one that hadn’t yet been burned off, they tidied up the shape a little, making it more loaf-like. There was no way to blow the whistle anymore, so they all joined in a huge cheer.
They were answered by rolling thunder from all directions. The sky turned the color of dirty dishwater, and the clouds seemed to be going in all directions at once, twisting around one another like colossal snakes, backlit by chain lightning. Over at the bogus header, some of the straw was floating upward into the sky.
“This,” said Charlie, “does not look good.” The others looked up in silent awe.
As he was debating where they should go if a tornado hit them, Maggie Mae tugged on his sleeve and pointed to the west, where a wall of rain was marching across the prairie.
“We are delivered again,” said Annie.
There were a few hushed amens, because they all knew that if they had a severe rainstorm, then the heart of the twister, if there was one, was someplace else.
Three minutes later, it hit them, with gale force winds and raindrops the size of quarters. They stood there for a while, letting it drench them, laughing like idiots. Then they ran for the shelter of the big barn.
“You just had to name that thing the Ark, didn’t you?” said Charlie to Maggie Mae. She grinned.
The noise on the roof of the barn was terrific, but it was not the noise of a tornado.
“Them’s thick-sawed cedar shingles up there,” said Joe. “The rainstorm ain’t been made can rip any of them off. I think it’s time for a celebration here.”
“Oh yes,” said Annie. “Yes, indeed.”
“I’ve got a fiddle,” said somebody.
“I’ve got a jaws harp.”
“I’ve got a jug of sipping whiskey.”
What else could they possibly need?
***
A bit later they were gathered around a circle of lanterns on the old threshing floor, a glass of booze in every hand.
“A toast,” said Charlie. They all stopped talking and turned to him.
“Here’s to Jim Avery, wherever he may be. Godspeed home, Jim.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Amen.”
“To Jim. You bet.”
“And here’s to Charlie Bacon,” said Annie, “and to the bounty of the good harvest. Praise God.” And she took as deep a drink as anybody.
The fiddle screeched, somebody let out a whoop, and the party began.
***
Twenty miles away, Emil Puckett was taking a drink from his silver flask and fuming. His big Hudson was stuck in the mud up to the hubcaps after his windshield wipers had been utterly unable to cope with the sudden downpour and he had lost sight of the road and driven into the ditch. He had half a pint of gin and five tailor-made cigarettes to last him through the night and the storm. It was going to be a long night. Somebody was definitely going to pay for this.
***
Farther away still, Jim Avery sat at the dining room table of what had to be the most boring man he had ever met. While they drank elderberry wine, he listened to the merits of dry cultivation, the best way to build a cluster of corn shocks, and how to dispose of a stillborn calf, and he seriously thought about riding back out into the storm.
“You a gambling man, Mr. Avery?”
“We’re probably all gambling men. Some of us just don’t know it.” I’m gambling with my sanity, right this minute.
“What I mean is, would you fancy a little friendly game of poker?”
“Sure, why not?” It had to be better than the conversation.
Two hours later, he was the owner of a 1917 Chevrolet flatbed truck. The Indian would fit on the back very nicely, and if the windshield wipers worked, he could continue on his way in spite of the rain.
***
The Windmill Man stood in the shadow of a storage shed in the alley behind Ithaca’s Main Street bakery. He was wearing his nondescript bindle clothes again, and water poured off the brim of his slouch hat and onto the front of his rubberized range coat. His trousers were soaked, and the water had dripped down and filled his boots, as well. But he paid no attention to his body’s discomfort. In the back room of the bakery, the foolish little blonde was taking loaves of bread out of a big oven, dumping them out of their pans, and dabbing butter on the top crust of each one. She worked by the light of two kerosene lanterns, and he could clearly see her through the single back window of the shop.
She was alone.
Soon she would be locking the place up for the night. If she left by the back door, he would have her at once. If she left on the street side, by the front door, things would get a bit more difficult. He might have to shadow her for a while and look for a different place to take her. But either way, her fate was sealed. He had crossed the threshold.
The storm would hide most of her cries, and his hand would muffle the rest. He could beat her into unconsciousness if she screamed too loudly, of course, but he would much rather have her awake when he raped and slashed her. And when he was done, her body would look just like the one that had been found in the field back in Mercer County, the one that was now attributed to Charlie Krueger.
He wondered fleetingly where her “pa,” the one who owned the shop, was. Whether he was sleeping blissfully or engaged in his own dark adventures of the night, he would soon regret leaving his daughter alone, probably for the rest of his life.
His temples throbbed, and despite the cold rain, his face and body felt hot as the power flowed into him. Soon it would possess him utterly. It was a feeling like no other. Maybe this time he would manage to remember it.
The blonde wiped her hands, hung her apron on a peg on the wall, and then blew out both lamps. The Shadow Man moved to the side of the door and waited for the knob to turn. The blood fugue was about to begin.
But the knob did not turn. After an endless minute, he went back to the window and saw the girl leaving by the front door. A fat man with a lantern was with her. The father, no doubt, come to see his little girl safely home. Damn! Damn, damn, damn it all! Never before had he gone this far and then had to abort. Was he still being punished for his carelessness back at the abandoned campsite? Hadn’t he suffered enough already?
He fumed with impotent rage as he watched the front door close and the shop go utterly black. Then he limped off into the night. He was surprised at how cold the rain suddenly felt. His bad ankle sent shards of pain up his leg, and he did not smile. Somebody was going to pay for this debacle.
***
Four blocks away, Stringbean Moe huddled miserably under the inadequate shelter of a makeshift tent tied to a tree by the Courthouse. It didn’t matter that his tarp kept out most of the rain, because water was flowing in sheets across the lawn. His clothes were soaked, and he shivered uncontrollably. Sleep was impossible.
He decided to take the sheriff’s deputy up on his offer of jailing him for vagrancy. How much worse than this could it be? First, though, he had to hide the Luger somewhere. He looked around for a likely place.
Chapter 26
Gray Dawn
The party at the Wicks’ barn went on all evening and well into the night. The fiddler played every tune he knew and then started over, and anybody who didn’t know how to dance learned on the spot. They drank whiskey and hard cider and homemade wine and ate pickles and hard-boiled eggs and ginger snaps, and they laughed and danced until they collapsed.
The rain went on longer than the party. In the morning, it was reduced to a misty drizzle but still showed no sign of being ready to quit. The wind had shifted to the north, and it had a distinct bite to it. The golden days of the long harvest were rapidly drawing to a close.
The farmyard and fields at the Wick spread were a greasy, soggy mess, and
beyond the usual morning chores of picking eggs and feeding the livestock, people put their ambition on hold for the day. There were still eighty acres of corn to be cut and shocked, but that could wait.
Charlie and Emily woke in each other’s arms, in a corner of the hayloft over the horse barn, where they had a small measure of privacy. The night before, she had brought them two blankets, a bottle of wine, and a chamber pot.
“How romantic,” he had said.
“Practical. I’m planning on us having our clothes off for a good long time here, and I don’t want to have to run out to the loo that way.”
“A thoughtful sort, my woman is.”
“Your woman? That better not be somebody else you’re talking about.”
“Not on your life. You want to get married?”
“I can’t ask you to do that, Charlie.”
“You didn’t ask, I did. It’s a symbol, in a way, and I guess I’m asking if you need that. As far as I’m concerned, you’re my woman, absolutely, until the day I die, whether we have a certificate and a ceremony or not. But if you need those things, you can have them. You just have to say so.” He looked over at her face and saw that she was crying.
“What in the world is wrong, Em?”
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, you idiot. You really don’t know a damn thing about me.”
“I know enough. I know who we are when we’re together.”
“What if I told you I was a fallen woman?”
“Then I would say, ‘Well, now you have somebody to pick you up.’ If anybody else says that to me about you, though, they had better be ready to duck.”
She laughed softly, though the tears still flowed. “If this is all a big lie, I don’t ever want to hear the truth. Please, Charlie, don’t break my heart. If you’re going to leave me, kill me first.”
“That might not be so easy. You’re a wicked hand with a cast iron skillet, as I recall.”
“Well, just see that you remember that.”
“You do realize that I have nothing to offer you? I have no land and no family that I can ever go back to. I have no education and no money, and according to that flier that I took off the post office wall in Minot, I’m also wanted for murder. I could wind up swinging from the end of a rope most any time, and I have no idea what to do about that. My life is a real mess.”
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