“I think we could do it tomorrow if we really tried,” he told Alice.
“Why don’t you?” she asked.
“I think I will,” he said, sitting with her at the kitchen table. “I thought I could smell rain in the air.”
“You don’t want to get stuck here, not with it all going so well.”
“No, we might as well. We can rest when we’re done.” He sat with his jaws on the heels of his hands, and she leaned back with her hands in her lap. Every now and then she drew on her cigarette and let the smoke out in a sort of sigh. “Are the kids asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go to sleep ourselves.” They went to the back bedroom, and Johnny locked the door. Alice and he embraced like friends in the cold. “I’m nearly too tired,” he said.
“That’s okay,” she said, pulling her nightgown over her head.
The night had been cool enough to leave the wheat wetter than usual. As a result, it was almost ten when they began. Clouds were starting to gather, so they took a tack more commonly saved for later in the day, settling into a rhythm so frenetic that it excluded everything but work: the combines slashing and threshing the wheat, piling it up, showering it into the trucks; the trucks heaving around the field and back and forth from town in a mist of chaff and floating dust. Alice came and went with sandwiches, Fritos and tea, and the work ground away the afternoon. A bank of blackening clouds built high in the southwest.
D.W. and Benny had each burned over twenty gallons of gasoline by the time dusk neared and the heat began to break. The day had gone well. The wheat was thick but not too thick; and the Farnells kept the trucks moving so efficiently that neither combine had to wait for even a minute with a full hopper. They could see about three hundred acres of wheat left standing, or a little more than they had covered in the preceding eight hours. The storm clouds had come in overhead but still were too high and thin to rain. They kept charging when Alice brought supper at six-thirty, slowing only enough to keep the flow of the trucks from becoming unsynchronized with the combines. Johnny ate a small amount of fried chicken and drank some tea when his wife opened the trunk and spread out the food. “Think you’ll finish up tonight?” she asked as he filled a paper plate.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“When will you be in?”
“Might do it by one. Should be through by two anyway.”
Mike and Leigh ran through the stubble to the brown truck, and Alice called them back, saying, “Y’all get away from there; you’ll get hurt.” The children, giggling, chased each other around in the empty field as if at a loss for frivolity in the open flatness. “Well, I won’t wait up then. There’ll be something in the fridge.”
It was a half-hour after she left that D.W.’s combine broke a belt under the cab for which Johnny had no replacement in the pickup. Benny kept cutting while Johnny and Quint looked under the cab and talked with D.W. “It’s too late to get another one, isn’t it?” Quint asked.
“That parts place closes at six,” Johnny said. “I looked when I was in the other day. I don’t know why I didn’t get that one instead of some of the ones I got.”
“Matter o’ luck.”
“Check there when you go in. Maybe we’ll catch ’em open. Always test your luck just after you get kicked. Sometimes you’re lucky then.”
“I doubt it tonight.”
“Well, we can’t have more than two-fifty to go. We can do that with one combine if we have to.”
“In time.”
“Keep going. That’s all there is to do.”
Benny stopped the next time around, and Johnny shrugged exaggeratedly and waved him on. The breakdown made tending the trucks a leisurely task. Without D.W. and the greater movement of the trucks, Benny sang and talked to himself more than usual in the sweltering cab. “John Wesley Hardin was evil and mean,” he sang in time to the flashing reel bats. “Killed his first man when he was only eighteen. Son of a preacher, should have been a good lad. Nobody knows what made John Wesley bad.” He was alone on the far side of the field. Sometimes the wheat, thinner there, was hard to make out in the puffing dust and swarming bugs even with the floodlights pouring down. “My name is Archibald MacGillycuddy, and if you think my name is cruddy, you ought to see my Uncle Scuddy,” he said. “I don’t know why. . . anything. I don’t even like to sing. On top of Old Smoky, all covered with grass, sat Daisy Redrover on her great feathered ass,” he sang. “Well, today I’m so weary, today I’m so blue, sad and broken hearted, and it’s all because of you. Life was so sweet, dear, life was a song. Now you’ve gone and left me. Oh, where have you gone? And it’s all for the love of a dear, little girl, all for the love that set your heart in a whirl. I’m a man who’d give his life and the joys of this world all for the love of a girl.” Benny’s Levis stuck to his butt and the backs of his legs. His arms felt hollow. But he pushed the combine remorselessly, working as mechanically as the machine. Quint and Johnny kept to their trucks, and the field-to-elevator trips were cut to less than half their prior frequency. Benny stopped once and asked D.W. to spell him, but he met the combine on its fourth round and motioned D.W. out.
“Let me keep it for a while,” D.W. said.
“Nah, I’m a masochist,” Benny said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter who’s moving it as long as it’s moving, right?”
The field was pitch as midnight passed. The elevator was open all night with a three-man crew because other harvesters also were trying to beat the rain. Benny went round and round and the trucks came and went somnambulantly. When they were still, D.W., Quint and Johnny sat and talked or listened as though keeping a vigil. A vague scent of rain stayed in the air, but the undiluted darkness kept them from seeing the clouds. After two o’clock, D.W. and Quint started watching Johnny more closely in the hope he would call a halt. He sensed it and said, “It’s late, but I think we have to get as much done as we can.”
Benny sat with his eyes half closed and his back hurting. He’d fallen silent. He drove with less alacrity, weaving down the straights and oversteering on the corners. He no longer adjusted the speed, which was too fast for the turns and too slow for the now-crooked straightaways. Shortly before three, he hallucinated a cougar pouncing sideways and jerked the steering wheel to miss it. It was after five when Johnny gave up. He saw it might take another hour or two, and the wheat was thin enough in the remaining part to get him by the ranch manager if it rained. They were too tired to say anything. D.W. fell asleep in the truck that Quint drove to the elevator to get the last of the wheat safely behind concrete, and Johnny took them to the motel. “Thanks, Benny,” he said.
“Woo hah,” said Benny, half looking back. He went to sleep almost as he lay down, and he slept till eleven o’clock in the morning. “Hey, man,” he said. “Where’s Quint?”
“I don’t know,” D.W. said, moving only his lips. “Who cares?”
“I think I’ll walk over to the trailer house and see what’s going on.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Too numb to tell.”
Benny walked the six blocks to the trailer court and met Alice hanging wash on her makeshift clothesline. “Where’s Quint?”
“Him and Johnny went back out. We appreciate you working so hard last night.”
“You going out in a little while?”
“I have to bring dinner, or I suppose I do. They didn’t say, so I guess I will.”
“Me and D.W. will ride out with you, okay?”
“Did y’all get your rest?”
“Well enough. We’ll be back in a little while.”
Benny looked up and saw the storm bank was the same. It might rain and might not. When they reached the field, Quint and Johnny were filling a truck each from the combines. They stopped both machines to eat. The meal went quickly, and the work went fast when they resumed. They were done at one o’clock.
Chapter Eight - Freedom!
It was a Saturday near the end of June, and Johnny had decided
Alexander would serve as the halfway point of the season. They had taken off the headers and loaded the trailers in the field. Tomorrow they would put the combines on the trucks at the depot. Benny was effervescent again after his twenty-one hour day. He and his friends roamed Alexander on foot for most of the day, tried without success to get acquainted with some of the local girls and talked of a better celebration at night. They had gotten twenty dollars each against their earnings, and they used their time to buy things to drink and eat and browse in stores. They returned to the motel in mid-afternoon. Quint had had Connie drive his car home with his parents, who were done with harvest until the sorghum ripened in the fall, because it appeared Johnny would go to Colorado and another car would make moving unnecessarily complicated over the longer distances north.
At dusk the boys changed clothes and went out again. Going toward town, Benny balanced on the curb while Quint strolled insouciantly beside him. D.W. moved with his head slightly forward and his legs working less leisurely than those of his lighter companions. They stopped indecisively at a liquor store. “You go in, Benny,” D.W. said. “You look the oldest.”
“If they see y’all out here, they’ll know we’re underage,” Benny said. “Why don’t we all just go in?”
“Let’s go,” Quint said. “All they can do is throw us out.”
They went casually in, letting the screen door slam when its air cylinder did not hold. The wall above the counter was luminous with beer and whiskey signs. The proprietor, a middle-age man on a trucker’s cushion in an old swivel chair, arose to watch them. He went on patiently watching as they chose. “What shall we have?” asked Benny.
“Let’s be ritzy and get a case of Coors in bottles,” D.W. said.
Benny went to the counter and said, “A case of Coors.”
“I.D.,” the man said.
“We’ll just get it somewhere else.”
“Take off.”
Benny shrugged and started out, and Quint and D.W. fell in behind him. D.W. called back as they left, “Big deal!”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Quint said. “Everybody knows the harvesters are out. The town’s really boarded up. We better watch it or the cops’ll throw us in jail.”
The streets were loud with cars and youth. Around a downtown corner a dance was in progress, and the bass guitar carried for blocks. Police patrolled the streets enthusiastically. The boys had walked through town and were near the northern outskirts when an old pickup came off the highway and stopped just ahead. An arm waved them to come up.
“What are you, wheat harvest?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” Benny said.
“Get in.”
He was a short, medium-paunchy man about forty who drove with an earnest air, blinking at traffic. He turned and put the pickup on a high spot north of town. From under the seat he pulled a six pack of Schlitz beer, and they gathered at the rear of the pickup. “I’m just lonesome,” the man said. “My old lady left me, and I got to go to work at the sugar plant.”
“Is that hard work?” D.W. asked.
“Wouldn’t be except it’s ten at night to six in the morning. It’s an old story, boys. You come in one day, and ever’thing’s cleaned out. There’s been songs and things about it till they’ve made it old, but there’s nothing newer than walking in there and maybe saying something cheerful before you realize.” His voice cracked. “It makes it hard to get up in the morning. You sleep too much, and before long ever’thing’s a mess. No dishes, no clothes.”
“There ain’t but one way to get over a girl or a woman,” Quint said. “Get another one.”
“I’ll be all right, I reckon,” the man said.
They contemplated the town lights until the beer was gone, and they drove to town and went through it twice before stopping on the roadside. “Goin’ to work,” the man said, his head lolling forward. “Wish’t we could make it a night.”
“Good luck, old buddy,” Benny said.
“Thanks,” Quint called, waving as the man drove away. “If we could find some girls, we’d be all right.”
They walked through town without seeing any receptive girls and were turned away from two other liquor stores. “Why don’t we see if Johnny’ll buy some?” Benny suggested.
“He won’t,” Quint said.
“Let’s try him,” Benny argued. “Maybe he will.”
They reached the trailer and called Johnny to the door. Quint talked to him, Johnny went inside, and Quint came back and repeated, “He won’t do it.”
“Let’s make another run through town,” said Benny.
“Nah, let’s go in,” said Quint. “It’s a losin’ battle.”
“I’m goin’ to church in the morning,” D.W. said. “We don’t believe it’s wrong to drink, just when you go overboard.”
“I ought to go with you,” said Benny, “That wreck keeps botherin’ me.”
“It wasn’t our fault,” D.W. said. “You weren’t even driving. Quint was.”
“No, but I shot that kid the finger and egged it on. I don’t think he came to town very much. He was in his daddy’s new pickup. You think you don’t care if you kill somebody, like in football, but when it happens it’s completely different. It ain’t like whippin’ em.”
“We were draggin’ like any other time,” said Quint. “He just ran off the road. We didn’t hit him.”
They moved quietly across the little yard to the unpaved street. They followed a rock that Benny kicked in the direction of the motel, scuffing their boots in the dirt.
Chapter Nine - North from Texas
“I’m up here sweatin’ it!” Johnny hollered, controlled fear in his voice.
“What do you want us to do?” D.W. yelled.
“Get the chains!”
The boys flung open the doors of the truck, dragged out the heavy chains and threw them over the rearing I-beams that braced the bottom of the blue truck’s bed. Fifteen feet above, Johnny sat trapped in the combine cab as the machine yawed forward and to the left where its weight had bent the big steel jack double and pressed the left rear of the truck toward the ground. The right front of the bed was way up, and the combine was on the verge of toppling sideways off the truck and the depot dock. The boys looped the chains around the I-beams and the truck frame next to the cab and fastened them tight with the hooks on the ends, then backed off to see if they would hold. The tortured truck made a faint “eek” a couple of times where the boards twisted, but the combine and truck had found a balance of sorts and didn’t move. Johnny broke his helpers’ fascination with the balance by saying, “Get the boomers and crank it down. I think if you can lower it enough, I can drive it the rest of the way on.”
With two chains looped around the I-beams and frame, they got back under the truck and combine, hooked and re-hooked the boomers to chain links, incrementally cinched the truck back down and raised the combine to a less dangerous angle. Only about a third of the combine had been committed to the truck, which was still too far from being level for the combine to be backed onto the dock. Johnny started the combine, put it in gear and edged up, stopping to test each new lie of the weight. The worst moment was when the rear wheels of the combine dropped the eighteen inches off the dock onto the truck. The truck shook, but Johnny decisively drove the combine the rest of the way on. The chains held and the greater weight of the combine’s front end leveled the bed to its normal position.
“Guess I should’ve told y’all I had the hydraulics put on so it can dump,” he said when he got down, shaking his head and grinning. Referring to the notorious tendency of that type of jack’s handle to fly up and knock guys out when a big weight was put on it, he said, “I really thought that suicide jack would hold. House movers use ‘em.”
From Alexander, it was an easy drive through the northern edge of Texas to the Oklahoma Panhandle. The caravan escaped the Texas High Plains by mid-morning. It was a short way across Oklahoma, so the young men knew as they rode into Boise City, Oklahoma, t
hat they would soon be in Colorado.
Boise City was a medium-small town that looked like it had shrunk back on itself. The highway led them past an abandoned roundhouse. The brick building lay a hundred yards off the road and was still in reasonably good condition. Johnny and Quint, in the trucks, had to concentrate on driving too much to pay attention to the roundhouse, but D.W. and Benny got a good look at it from the pickup. They saw the tracks leading under the immense doors where the trains were once taken in for maintenance and repairs. Almost all the windows on the upper edge of the curving walls were out. The town was less interesting than the roundhouse, and they passed through it barely realizing it was there. On their left, the edge of the Rocky Mountains began to show in little knobs and tables, and the country ahead was obviously something to which they had to climb. The ascent was not imposing or at all discouraging; but it was steep enough to take a subtle price from the engines and make the harvesters drive more purposefully than they would have had they been going the opposite way.
It was almost one o’clock when they came upon an establishment advertising itself as “Forrest’s Trading Post.” The “Bar & Grill” swaying on wires under the heavy sign brought the vacant place the eight persons and twenty-five tons of machinery. “Well, well, what’ll you have, what can we do for you?” exulted a man in a red-striped shirt, a straw hat and a paste-on walrus mustache.
“Uh, where can we eat?” Johnny asked.
“Right through here, folks, right through here,” the man replied, pointing through a door to a lower level room beside the main part of the building. “And when you get all the grub you need, come on back in here and look around for a spell. We got it all right here.”
“Thanks,” said Johnny, smiling. The cafe was not like the trading post. There a heavy waitress shuffled about the concrete floor in house shoes, and behind a partition a T-shirted cook grimaced over the grill and dripped sweat onto gurgling hamburger patties.
The Byrds of Victory Page 15