“What have you done so far?”
“Run the screws all the way up and seven turns back.”
“Why don’t you start it and I’ll work on it some? Race it when I tell you.”
The rumblings of the engine and shouts of Quint and Johnny brought D.W. down the stairs and into the sun-washed yard. He peered under the hood. Presently the old car’s engine idled as smoothly as it raced, and Johnny backed away and wiped his hands on a red rag. “You’ll have to see if it starts any better when it cools off,” he said. “Where’s Benny?”
“Upstairs asleep,” D.W. said.
“Let’s wake him up.”
They trod clamorously up the staircase and past the bathroom into the cluttered bedroom. They looked at one another, grinning, and after consulting shouted on Johnny’s signal, “He’s a real Bronco!”
Benny sat up and said, “Not anymore.”
“You weren’t asleep,” Quint said. He leaped over the foot of the bed onto Benny, and D.W. lay over laughing onto them, pushing their heads into the mattress.
When the commotion subsided, Johnny said, “If you eight balls can straighten up, you need to come to dinner in a little bit. We’ll get the trucks ready and load the combines.”
“We still going to Guthrie in the morning?” Quint asked.
“Yeah.”
“Alexander after that?
“I imagine. If we get done by the first of July, I may go north.”
“I want to,” Benny said. “I want to get as far away from Texas as I can.”
“We’ll know after we get into it good at Alexander,” said Johnny. His pickup’s well-muffled exhaust and low compression six cylinder engine made a vacant, pinging echo between the houses and up the street.
“Where will we go if we go north?” D.W. asked Quint.
“Maybe Colorado to start, then Nebraska or South Dakota, then Montana and maybe Canada.”
“What about college?”
“He might run over and get new hands or we might have to register late. Depends on how good the wheat is and how lucky we are. The summer ain’t very long.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Benny said. “I wonder if anybody knows what happened the other night.”
“They’ll know,” Quint said. “If he really died, they had to take him somewhere and answer questions.”
“They could have said something else,” Benny said.
“I doubt it. They’d want to get it off their backs, and to do that they’d just about have to tell what happened. They told about us. Don’t think they didn’t.”
“What do they need us for?” Benny asked. “We didn’t see anything that everybody else didn’t.”
“We were impartial.”
“So was the bartender.”
“I think our best chance to stay out of this is if the cops figure we’re too much trouble to run down,” said Quint. “They know what happened anyway. It happens all the time.”
“Not to me,” D.W. said.
“I mean in places like that.”
“I dreamed some cops came here because those honyocks said I was the one that killed him,” Benny said.
“If they knew the other guy, it could happen,” Quint said. “Particularly if he’s really bad. But he proved that.”
“The old guy was drunk,” D.W. said. “He didn’t have a chance.”
“Yeah, but the young guy probably had a knife in his pocket and a gun in the car. A guy like that does whatever he wants.”
“It probably won’t come to anything,” Benny said.
“They can find us if they want us,” Quint said. “I’m betting they don’t put in that much work on a killing at Drunkard’s Mountain.”
“We don’t know for sure he was dead, do we?” D.W. asked.
“He was,” Benny said. “The only other time I did that mirror thing was at the wreck last summer. Pulled it out of the visor and held it to that Terkel boy’s nose. It should have been just another drag. I don’t know why he ran off in the field and turned it over.”
“He was inexperienced,” Quint said. “You can’t just up and decide you wanna go drag. You got to go out by yourself and practice.”
“We’ll be out of here tomorrow,” D.W. said. “Some places are good to put behind you.”
They drove around in Crow’s Corner before lunch, circling the square with its courthouse and soldier statue, and honked at a walking girl who turned and smiled. Alice fed them pork chops and mashed potatoes with gravy. They lingered with a bottle each of Johnny’s Budweiser beer. The summer sultriness took hold outside, and their bottles, resisting the heat, filmed and ran with moisture beads.
“We better go hit it,” Johnny said.
With Benny and D.W. in the back of the pickup, they went to the elevator for the trucks. They were nearing the field when Johnny saw a deep, sloping section of the borrow ditch and stopped. When the trucks arrived, he motioned Quint to back into the ditch perpendicularly and signaled D.W. to park off the road. Quint backed the brown truck straight into the ditch and came part way out when he saw the rear of the bed was a foot off the ground. Johnny got a shovel and dug along the tracks. He made the holes slope to the bottom of the ditch and dug them to a depth approximately the difference between the truck bed and the ground. Quint backed in again, and the holes were deep enough but too narrow in a couple of places. Quint drove out once more while Johnny perfected the trenches, and Quint brought it back and jammed the end of the bed into the dirt.
Having repeated the procedure with the blue truck, they unbolted the sideboards, pulled out the stumps on the bottoms of the thick wooden sheets from their sockets along the edges of the truck beds and stacked the heavy sides atop one another just so in the centers of the beds. With the trucks ready for the combines, Johnny and Quint took Benny and D.W. to them and went across the field for two long, two-wheeled trailers. Quint held each one of the trailers level in turn while Johnny guided Benny and D.W. and they moved the combines forward, positioning the headers six inches over each trailer. Johnny motioned to let the headers down gently, and with minute shifts the brothers bolted the headers to the trailers through small holes in protruding steel lips at each end. Benny and D.W. left the combines running so the hydraulic lifts holding the two thousand-pound headers would not let them fall even slightly. They climbed down and watched Quint and Johnny take the headers loose, and the four took the machinery over the field to the trucks.
“I want you boys to stand by and show me how I’m doing,” Johnny said. “Quinton, get in back and watch how straight I am. Y’all know we need the left front tire about half off the side because that side’s heavier?
“We do now,” D.W. said.
Johnny nodded and looked at them with his wide green eyes. Benny’s combine had an odd, unbalanced look without the reels and scythe far out on either side, towering over the boys as Johnny drove it to the edge of the ditch. Although he could not see the tires, he stopped a few inches from the truck bed. The left front tire was too far left. At least two-thirds of it was past the edge of the bed. D.W. shook his head and held up his hands four inches apart for Johnny to see. Johnny backed up, turning the small rear wheels to move the combine to the right, and with the machine realigned he moved it back to the edge. This time it was right. Idling down the engine and using the clutch and brake alternately, he mounted it onto the truck. Once he felt it straight on the steel and oaken bed, he drove it boldly to where it was almost touching the truck cab.
“Ain’t that kind of hard on the nerves?” asked Benny as Johnny got down.
“I been doing it a long time.”
“What’s the hardest part?”
“Getting from the ground to the truck. After I get on the truck, I know I’m okay.”
They pulled thick chains from under the driver’s seats in the trucks. With these and the hinged, heavy metal boomers, they secured the combine to the truck at both sides and the rear. Johnny used a pipe over the long handles of the boomers, which, a
ttached by hooks to the chains, pulled the chains tight enough to make the combine squat slightly when they were drawn down shut. The combine teetered massively on the truck as Johnny drove it out of the ditch. Going up a few feet and back at a time, he worked the truck around to get it straight in the road.
It was almost five o’clock by the time the second combine was loaded and chained. The harvesters hitched the header trailers to the brown truck and the pickup and proceeded in caravan style up the packed dirt road. The high-perched combines swayed lethargically. The going was easier on the highway, though still unhurried. In town, they parked the equipment in a vacant lot across the street from the trailer house. Dinner was ham with pineapple sauce. That and the seasoned ranch style beans were quickly gone, and Johnny and the youths went outside to sit in the shade.
“Ever see combines loaded?” Johnny asked.
“Only in passing,” Benny said. “I hadn’t thought it would be that delicate.”
“There’s not much to it as long as you don’t make any mistakes. I unloaded them just about by myself before y’all got here. Alice helped me a little.”
“Actually, it’s more complicated because we have to take off the headers,” Quint said. “But they’re just too wide.”
Before long they were sitting and talking almost in the dark. Johnny thumped his cigarette high across the yard, and it burst into sparks upon the ground. “You got to be careful of fire in a wheat field,” he said. “Did y’all know that? See you about seven.”
The boys stopped at a drive-in. Vague lighting made it look closed, but a few cars in various states of roadworthiness were parked like litter in front. To the side, a giant dragon painted Army green pawed the air and showed its teeth to the silent town. Red lights burned in each flared nostril. A silver awning circled the drive-in at the roof and made it look in its semi-illumination like an out-sized, sharp-cornered mushroom. Cups and crumpled paper littered the parking spaces. A girl in a green and white football jacket sat in one of the booths inside. A young man stood talking to her, and another leaned on the counter across from a young waitress. “Where y’all from?” the youth at the counter asked Quint when the three stood away to drink their Cokes.
“Victory.”
“Oh, that’s where you wheaties have all them tornadoes,” said the one at the booth.
“At least we got something,” Benny said. “There ain’t nothing here but skinny cows and skinny girls.”
Quint and D.W. laughed. The Crow’s Corner youths said nothing else. Nothing moved outside. The breeze carried the scent of the fields. They got into the car and returned to the tin-roofed house.
Chapter Five - Harvesters
Johnny led in the brown truck, dragging the trailer house. Quint, in the blue truck, pulled one of the long trailers, and Benny drove the pickup and pulled the other header. D.W. drove Quint’s car behind the pickup, and Alice was last with the car and children. The terrain was utterly flat for many miles out of Crow’s Corner. Most of the wheat lands were simply ranch lands that the ranchers had cleared, planted in the fall and winter and forgotten until harvest time in the early summer; the country through which the harvesters passed in the early morning was therefore primarily ranching country. Mesquite trees lined both sides of the road and overhung some of the curves.
They had lunch at a service station-restaurant with a parking area flat enough to let the combine-laden trucks roll off easily the road. A shuffling, obese waitress with red splotches on her cheeks served them. She stood closest to Benny, who, nauseated, ordered a boiled egg and a glass of orange juice. The woman responded to the words coming at her but otherwise did not appear to be in the least aware of her surroundings or the people she waited on. “Is there a dead badger in here?” Benny asked when she moved away.
They’d been climbing all morning. The ranch land petered out as they neared Guthrie, which was more a farming area. Now the difference was marked. Instead of uncut, grown-over lands pressing in on the highway from both sides, the country was more rolling and open. Furrowed fields with men on tractors abutted the road, and small ranches with green, fenced pastures and purebred cows grazing were an alternate sight. The high lines looped from pole to pole farther away from the roadside. The traffic thickened. In mid-afternoon they topped a hill and entered a medium-large town with few shade trees. Almost everywhere, men and youths walked the sidewalks or roadside, stood and talked at filling stations or rode in pickup trucks or trucks with names and hometowns on the doors: “Jerry Chase Custom Combining, Black Steer, South Dakota; Faulk and Stoner, Terkel, Texas; A.E. Pulgrechek Custom Cutting, Hillsboro, Neb.; Bell & Sons Combining, Indian Springs, Colorado; Stauffer Bros., Salina, Kan.”
At the end of the main street near the edge of town, they came upon an open place along the road and parked the trucks and pickup. Johnny left to find a trailer park and rented a motel room for the boys.
“I’ll be back around eight,” he said. “If the wheat’s ready, we might go out tomorrow afternoon and cut a little bit before dark.”
They lay in the room resting for an hour, listening to the radio. “I wanta live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory,” sang Faron Young, letting out the phrases as if to an inaudible snapping whip.
Benny sat with his legs straight out on the bed and his back against the yellowed wall. “Hey, did y’all ever feel like you were somebody else?” he asked.
“Why would I?” Quint asked.
“You remind me of Higgins that time he got knocked out,” Benny said. “He wanted to go back in, and Willard said, ‘Aren’t your eyes dilated?’ And ol’ Higgins, he said, ‘I don’t know, coach, I can’t see ’em!’ I’m looking at my legs, and the way I feel right now they could be somebody else’s. What I mean is, everything looks kind of strange like I’ve never seen it before, even you and D.W.”
“Twilight Zone.”
“I don’t like it, and the cops are after me. You know, I ought to write a letter.”
“Write one, then,” D.W. said.
Benny got some red and white stationery and a pencil out of his suitcase and put the suitcase flat on the bed. After a few minutes with Benny craned over the suitcase writing, D.W. and Quint sat on the cooling sidewalk outside and listened as the sorrowful sounds of mandolins, fiddles, steel guitars and singers flowed through the open door and the cars and trucks, lights glaring, creaked and shivered past them in the street.
Chapter Six - Fire!
E.K. Shuggs stuck his arm out the pickup window and waved down Johnny as they passed each other on Guthrie’s main street. With harvest pickups outside a cafe, the street was getting busy. The air was still chilly from the night, and the sun had not taken the shadows from between the buildings.
“Well, Johnny, I’m sure glad you’re cutting my wheat again,” said Shuggs when they met behind the vehicles. “I guess you were just coming to see me.”
“We’re ready to go. How’s the wheat look?”
“It’s shaping up about like I told you on the phone. I think it’s ready.”
“Good, I want to hit it hard,” Johnny said. “These new machines are fast.”
“Coming up in the world, are you?”
“No hill for a stepper.”
“Owing money is all right if you know where to get the money to pay it back.”
“I know where to get it. Should we start the same place we did last year?”
“About. I’ll be there to show you if you know when you’ll be there.”
“Three or three-thirty.”
Shuggs bobbed his head. “Got time for a cup?” he asked, indicating the cafe a half-block away.
“I better pass. I got breakfast waiting, and I got to go get my boys.”
“Okay, then.” Shuggs turned toward his pickup and waved stiffly. He held himself in a military posture, holding in his chin and turning his head instead of his body.
Johnny found the boys asleep in a disarray of bed covers and suitcase contents. After bre
akfast they took the trucks to the railroad depot, where they waited for an hour for an earlier group to drive their combines off trucks onto the loading dock. It was noon before they got the headers on the combines and had the truck sideboards bolted.
“It’s about bean time,” Johnny said. “We’ll eat and go see what the wheat looks like. Won’t take an hour to get there, and old man Shuggs don’t expect us till three. Prob’ly won’t hurt to wait the extra hour. That wheat off the road looked kind of green.”
In two hours, after lunch and some piddling with the machinery, Quint and Johnny started down the highway in the combines with Benny and D.W. following in the pickup. The combines met a succession of harvest trucks and pickups and ranch and farm pickups and were obliged to pull onto the shoulder or stop if a mailbox or culvert was in the way. They turned off the asphalt onto a quieter dirt road, met two trucks in the first miles and stopped and backed into the ditch for them to pass.
Shuggs was waiting at the post of an open gate when the combines came up, keening. He smiled wide and waved them through. Johnny crossed the ditch and brought his big red combine up sideways past the relatively narrow gate. Backing and turning, he put the back end through the gate until the rear of the header assembly was about eight feet from the fence and parallel to it. Without hesitating, he depressed one of the two brake pedals on the floor, locking the right front wheel, and let out the clutch. He spun the left end of the header slowly past the main fence post, brushing it, and the combine was inside the field. Johnny backed it some more when the body was straight with the fence, turned it to clear the gate, drove forward into the wheat, lowered the blades and started cutting. Quint came through in the same way but stopped inside and shouted for D.W., waiting in the pickup with Benny, to come and drive. Johnny led the way around the inside of the fence, and D.W. followed a swath farther in.
“I got to learn that,” Benny told Quint, turning the pickup toward town.
“You’ll do it all the time if we go north,” said Quint.
The Byrds of Victory Page 13