Chapter Eleven - Rain
Johnny drove to Alfred Schultz’s house the next morning, but conversation was superfluous because he saw from the road that the wheat was only turning ripe instead of being ready to cut like the man had told him when he called from Cherokee. “Well, Mr. Farnell, I’m glad to see you,” Schultz said in the front yard.
“I thought you said this wheat was ready, Mr. Schultz.”
“I thought it would be, I thought it would be, and it will be in a day or two. It just hasn’t been getting the sun it needs.” Schultz, short and dark in khaki pants and a flowered shirt, was half smiling.
“It puts me in a bind to sit around and wait, hands to pay and kids to feed. I need to keep moving.”
“I’m sorry the wheat isn’t ready, but it shouldn’t be more than a couple of days. I’m a man of my word in that the job is yours. It’s a thousand acres, like I said. Shouldn’t take more than two or three days after we start.”
“Can’t wait over three days. If it’s not ready, I’ll have to either take another job here or head on down the road.”
“I’m sure that will be more than enough time.” Schultz smiled and held out his hand, and Johnny shook it and forced a smile.
“I’ll be out every morning and afternoon to look. Soon as the elevator will take it, we’ll go.”
“That’s the way I want it,” Schultz said, shaking hands again.
On the way back, Johnny saw that most of the other fields were ready and several had combines in them. He grew angrier, and his neck was hurting by the time he arrived at the motel. He looked south toward Schultz’s place before he went in. “It looks like y’all have a day or two off,” he told the boys, who had just awoke. Benny and Quint had put on their Levis and were walking around shirtless, and D.W. was getting awake on the twin bed the motel owner had provided.
“The wheat ain’t ready,” said Quint.
“Schultz told me it was to get somebody nailed down. His is behind, and he’s afraid all the combiners’ll be gone by the time his is ready. Somethin’ else I noticed is not all that many come to Draper this year. Prob’ly all in Kansas or gone to South Dakota. See, they’ll spend a few days here and get on so they don’t get too far behind the harvest. Old Schulz could see himself gettin’ the short end.”
“How long will it be, do you think?”
“I told him three days and I’m gone. There should be enough ready to keep us busy in a couple of days.”
“If it don’t rain.”
“It’s been pretty good up to now, except for the fire. Maybe we’ll stay lucky.” Johnny sat in a corner chair and made small talk while the boys dressed and went in and out of the bathroom. “I meant to tell you. Some fellers at the cafe told me a couple of roughnecks caught the old boy that runs this place in their room and took him out and roughed up his neck. You might watch him. I don’t know if he’d do it again. He probably would.”
“If we miss anything, we’ll just go beat hell out of him,” Quint said.
Benny laughed, saying, “Sounds to me like a man who learned a lesson.”
The boys spent two days walking around town, going to stores and movies and drinking three-two beer. It rained for twenty minutes late on the first afternoon, but the sun came out the next morning. The second day’s sun was so strong that large patches of the wheat were turning brown by dusk. A warm wind blew that night, and on the third morning Johnny walked in the field with Quint. “It’s still green, basically,” Quint said, chewing some grains.
“I know it, but we have to get in here. This corner looks like the ripest of the whole place. We’ll start on it and let some of the worst parts go for a day and bluff our way past the elevator.”
They had brought the equipment, so they had only to get Benny and D.W. The men running the elevator took the wheat with some reluctance, but the loads were ripe enough to take on borderline legitimacy. As the boys worked, they could nearly see the sun burning the green from the field, the ripening so rapid and yet subtle that they perceived the changing hues in a kind of retrospect. Alice was cheerful at lunch, telling Benny it was a relief to get Johnny to work after two days of inactivity. “When he can’t get out and do, he’s miserable,” she said. “He’s hang-dogged around ever since we got here.”
“I’d like to get done and go,” Benny said. “I’m gettin’ to where I like to break into a new town, see what there is and move on. We shouldn’t have any trouble. If it doesn’t rain, that is.” He studied burgeoning clouds in the west as he chewed.
Alice had been gone for two hours when the first drops fell, thickening by degrees. It was well after the rain started that they knew they would have to stop. When it finally came in earnest, D.W. and Benny drove out of the wheat, raised the whirling reels and made for the trucks. The first day’s shower was a harbinger of ten straight days on which the clouds flowed over each afternoon and poured unwelcome rain. Quint and Johnny went out the first few days but recognized the field was too wet for their inspections to have any purpose. On the third day, Johnny talked with Alice about leaving. She told him not to because he had never started a job without completing it and because the Shultz fields were big enough to be worthwhile.
“I’m losing my chance,” he said. “He broke our verbal contract by misleading me.”
“I think we might as well wait it out,” she said. “There’ll be other years.” He ended by saying he had to get a part in town and going hurriedly away in the pickup.
It was the first big dollop of leisure the boys had had since the harvest began, so they spent the first days exploring Draper with pleasure. They played pool in the bars and bought clothes in stores. Benny got grapes and plums and ate them at the motel. Benny and D.W. got books at the library, which looked like an abandoned filling station on the outside and on the inside was filled mostly with books that no one who liked good literature would read. At night they went to the drive-in movie or indoor theater movie or drove around. “The D.I.,” starring Jack Webb as a boot camp sergeant for the Marines, was at the drive-in the night after they were rained out. “Career-wise, I have learned something,” Benny said as they were leaving. “I do not wish to fall into the clutches of a bunch of jar heads.”
“What’s the matter?” Quint asked. “I thought your old man was a Marine.”
“He was. He told me they were marching through the mud on one of those islands, and a truck loaded with Army guys went by. One of the Marines barked, you know, because they were dogfaces. This Army sergeant leans out and yells, ‘That’s right, bark like a dog! You live, eat and die like a dog, you oughta sound like one!’ I asked him if any went crazy, and he said, ‘A few went completely berserk, and the rest were less affected.’ He named me after the bravest man he ever knew, a guy totally without fear.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died in combat. Do y’all know what bushido is?”
“Yeah, it’s why the Japs made the kamikaze dives and banzai charges,” D.W. said.
“When you fight somebody or play football, you take something from each other. Multiply it a thousand times in a war. Daddy never said it and probably never thought it, but the Marines were in such close contact with the Japs and fought them so hard that I think they got some bushido. I think those who grew up with veterans of the South Pacific got some from them, like osmosis. You couldn’t get the fine points, but it could be partly why I look at things like I do.”
“Banzai Benny,” said Quint.
“More like takin’ the long view,” Benny said.
They’d been involving themselves in one diversion after another for a week when Benny, browsing in a sporting goods store, bought a German-made twenty-two caliber revolver designed after a Colt and carried it to the pickup dangling from his fingers. D.W. and Quint showed mild interest when Benny brought it in. After an inspection, D.W. suggested trying it out. So they took the pistol, three boxes of long rifle ammunition and two six packs of beer out of town. Until the sun went d
own, they had trouble finding a place to shoot. Every dirt road off the highway was lined with houses, it seemed, or had a gate with a “No Trespassing” sign. But just as twilight came they saw a ranch road that did not have a sign prohibiting their entry. They drove onto it and went up it two or three miles.
“Where are we?” D.W. shouted as they got out.
“The firin’ range,” said Benny, shooting at a fencepost, a can, a rock, a flying bird, another can and something hopping away from the uproar. “What was that?” he yelled, having missed all six targets.
“Kangaroo mouse,” Quint said. “They got ‘em all over the place here.”
Benny reloaded and, because it was getting dark, started the pickup and turned the headlights on. He coaxed the gray mouse from the weeds with two shots behind where he thought it was hiding. Showing its peculiar big ears and disproportionally long legs, it came hopping out. Benny fired four times, blowing dirt on it with two close misses. The mouse escaped farther down the road when the gun was empty.
“Dang, if I couldn’t shoot no better than that, I’d throw rocks,” D.W. said. “Let me have it.”
“It’s about like shooting at a match head,” Benny said, reloading for D.W. But in twelve more shots they were unable to get the mouse into the lights again. They switched to fence posts because the wet wood went “thut” each time a bullet hit. Bored, Quint sat on the pickup fender. D.W. and Benny each hit six fence posts in a row.
“D.W., I bet two six packs I can hit six again,” Benny said.
“Okay.”
Gravely, he raised the pistol like a dueler, cocked it, lowered it and fired. He hit the first five posts but erred on the sixth, knowing he had missed because a pained “moo!” came out of the black pasture. “Didn’t mean to do that,” Benny said.
“Hate to mention it,” said Quint from the fender, “but. . .” He pointed up the road, and Benny and D.W. saw pickup lights bouncing furiously toward them from about three-quarters of a mile away. They scrambled into the pickup, Benny behind the wheel, and the gravity of the situation hit when the engine didn’t start.
“Come on, baby doll!” Benny urged, and it started. He went forward, turned into the fence, backed up, turned again, backed up and turned down the trail-like road.
“Shag ass,” Quint said. “We’ll be in jail if they catch us. They’ll find that cow.”
Benny had slapped the footfeed to the floor and was pushing the six cylinder International hard, doing sixty between what looked like walls of posts on each side. The pickup jarred so violently that D.W. twice hit his head on the cab roof while Quint barely missed it and Benny held on to the steering wheel. D.W., in the middle, looked back and saw the lights behind them fading. “We’re beatin’ ‘em,” he said.
“Don’t slow down,” Quint said.
“I’m gonna blow and go till we get home,” said Benny. “They won’t be able to find us after we hit town.” He held the pickup at seventy-five, its peak, but in Draper he stayed two miles an hour under the speed limit. He rolled through the lights around the main part of town to the motel, killed the engine ten yards from the door and coasted to a halt. They went in without turning on the lights.
A day passed without rain, and a second reached eleven o’clock in the morning with no clouds. The boys were sitting at a drive-in hamburger stand, and Benny asked Quint if they would work. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Johnny around lunch time,” Quint said. “We haven’t had enough wind to dry it out, but we need to move some way or another.”
A Ford pickup stopped beside them, and a youth with pimples on his face scooted across the seat and rolled down the passenger side window. “Are y’all from Victory?” he asked.
Benny, the driver, said, “Yeah, we work for Johnny Farnell.”
“I could just see the ‘Victory’ on the door. It’s muddy. My dad and I know Johnny. Is that Quinton in the middle there?”
“Yeah,” said Quint. “How’re you doing?”
“Where you from?” Benny asked.
“Ivanhoe. My dad’s Will Daniels. Quinton knows me. I’m Tommy.”
“I didn’t know y’all were up here,” Quint said, leaning up to look at Tommy.
“We went through Kansas and thought we might as well. Just as soon we hadn’t. Damn kid tore up our truck.”
“What happened?”
“Daddy needed a hand, so he got this high school kid from here. Asked if he could drive a truck. He said, sure, he could drive it. Got going up a big hill with a load and missed a gear. Started rollin’ back, tore up the transmission, went over in the ditch, broke the sideboards and spilled four hundred bushels.”
D.W. and Benny laughed abortively. Tommy looked at a car with some Draper high school boys going into the space adjacent to him on the other side. “Is that him?” Benny asked.
“Naw,” the youth said, pulling his straw hat down by the brim. “If it was him, he’d have run over the speaker or hit the back end of the pickup.” Tommy didn’t laugh, but it was enough of a joke for Benny, Quint and D.W. to chortle. They had finished eating, so they left the tray at the speaker and bade Tommy goodbye. He tugged his hat again and looked at them mournfully.
“A lot of people are not as smart as a good bird dog,” Quint said. “When you hear about some bad accident with people killed, it’s usually somebody like that or somebody unfortunate enough to be there when they came along.”
“Anybody can get killed,” D.W. said. “I had this uncle who went all the way through the war. One time he went in this farm house in Italy and found a German officer sitting behind a desk. My uncle told him to get up and heard him getting into a drawer as he came up. He shot him right there and found a Luger in the drawer. He went through all that and got back home, and about six months later he died in a car wreck.”
Waiting at the motel, Johnny took the Chevy back to Alice, and he and Quint rode in the back of the pickup while Benny drove to the field with D.W. Johnny had run the combines daily, so they were easy to start. He rode with D.W. beside the cab and chewed some wheat. “It’s still too wet,” he said, looking at high, colorless clouds. “But it won’t be in a couple or three hours.”
When they returned, the combines took wheat a bit more sluggishly than they would have had it been perfectly dry, but the occasional slight grinding didn’t slow them. D.W. and Benny worked eagerly, the engines ran well, and the sickles cut a wide, clean swath. It had been a comparatively long time since they worked, so it was a soothing, easy thing. Fifty yards apart, encased in glass, metal and noise, they sang. But dark gray clouds began to gather in the west. The clouds built and came in slowly. By five o’clock, they were higher than they had been on some previous days, but they darkened as if to bring a precipitous dusk. Then the harvesters watched the clouds as much as the field. A few diffuse raindrops fell, and lightning arced among the clouds. A long way off, a bolt joined cloud to earth and poured its incredible energy into whatever it was it hit.
“Think we should pack it in?” Quint asked Johnny.
“I don’t see why unless it gets worse. The rain isn’t hurtin’ us yet.”
The lightning got worse and the rain thicker. The Farnells saw lightning hit a couple of miles away. They got into the brown truck and, pulling the headlights on and off, rushed to the combines. D.W. stopped, and they started to stop there so the machines could empty on either side of the truck. Butt Benny kept on; thinking he hadn’t seen them, Quint threw the truck into granny gear and heaved toward the second machine. Benny kept going till the truck was beside the tumbling bats and even for a way more with Quint and Johnny alongside. Finally he waved an acknowledgment. They stopped with him, and he started the unloading auger. Johnny was busy with the tarpaulin and did not see Benny for a moment. Then he saw him atop the combine cab with his arms high and hands clasped. Head down, Benny stared vacantly over the truck into the cut stalks. His dark brown hair lay forward, and the rain ran from his face through the thin dust on his cheeks and neck.
&
nbsp; “Get down from there!” Johnny called. Benny didn’t move. “Get down!”
Benny exclaimed, “I’m a lightnin’ rod!”
“Don’t push me, Benny.”
“Aw, man,” he said, breaking the pose and starting down. “There’s no danger it.”
Johnny did not answer but unrolled the tarp as the auger rattled empty. Benny re-entered the cab and punched the handle to the floor. When D.W. had unloaded, they left the combines and Johnny and Quint took the trucks out. D.W. and Benny followed in the pickup and went to the trailer house. The brothers parked the trucks in an empty lot across the street after finishing at the elevator. D.W. and Benny were drinking coffee with Alice when Johnny and Quint came in.
“How much did we cut today?” D.W. asked.
“A hundred, hundred and fifty acres,” said Johnny, putting his hat in the center of the table.
“How much do we lack?”
“All of it.” He shrugged and drank from his cup. “He’s got some more that was planted later, but it’s too green and thin to mess with. We’ll cut the rest of what we’re on and go. They’re cutting in South Dakota. We’ll prob’ly have to head to Montana.”
“How long do we wait?” Benny asked.
“I guess as long as it takes. We’d already be gone if we hadn’t started it. I can’t leave now, can’t make myself. Every time I get to thinkin’ I don’t have any principles, I find out I do.”
After a pause, Benny said, “I noticed the lightning didn’t bring much rain.”
“It may not. Might even get to work some tomorrow.”
“Come get us,” Benny said, rising,
The Byrds of Victory Page 17