“You ought to think about other people. I don’t mind drinking. I drink myself. But you ought to at least know when to hold it down.”
Benny sat sullenly for a minute and said, “You’re right. We won’t ever do it again.”
“We’re sorry, Johnny,” D.W. said. “I know we look like a couple of fools.”
“I said all I had to say. If it doesn’t happen again, you won’t hear any more about it.”
Benny had been subduing belches ever since Cheyenne. About halfway home, he leaned up and said, “I have to stop.” Johnny’s anger had subsided, and he quietly stopped. Benny went behind the car. The blinker lights make the beer look like blood when he pitched it onto the pavement.
Chapter Thirteen - North Again
Alfred Schultz’s wheat somehow got sun enough to ripen despite the constant rain. Toward the end of the second week in which the harvesters were stymied, clouds formed in the early afternoon but did not darken into rainfall. The rain ceased for two days, and on the morning of the third day the harvesters greased the combines and started them slicing through the wheat. Minute-long showers came in the afternoons, but Benny and D.W. only slowed a little until the rain stopped. They cut the fields in a spiteful, almost frivolous way, and the job was done at lunchtime on the third day. They ran another fifteen minutes to get it all after Alice arrived and then ate a long, leisurely meal. Johnny had the boys take the trucks to town while he saw Schultz. He sped to the house and saw that the yellow porch light was on.
“Johnny!” said Schultz at the door. “All done, I see, and ready to settle accounts.”
“Got done a little bit ago,” said Johnny, following Schultz into the kitchen, where they sat at opposite ends of the table.
“Let me see,” said Schultz, figuring in a notebook. “I owe you thirty-two hundred and eighty dollars?”
“About that.”
“Well, if you can come by tomorrow morning, I’ll have your check.”
“I think we might as well settle up now.”
“I know it’s fine, but I haven’t seen the field or checked the elevator.”
“I hadn’t seen the field, either, when I said I’d cut it. I want my money now.”
“Well. . .”
“Or we can go outside and I can kick your sorry ass all over the yard.” They gazed at each other, and Schultz went out of the room. After a minute, he came back and laid a check on the table.
Benny had gone to sleep when D.W. and Quint went out, so he awoke while his friends were still asleep. He took a wristwatch with a stapled band from a front pocket of his jeans and held it to the closed curtains: six-thirty. For lack of anything else to do, he got his pistol out of the drawer and started wiping it with a sock. He was perusing it, turning it one way and then the other, when the door clicked and opened. The motel owner stuck his head in, saw Quint and D.W. asleep and started in before noticing Benny in the chair beside the door. “What do you want?” asked Benny, cocking the pistol and then letting the hammer down.
“Uh, I thought you might need more linen,” the slender, gray-haired man said.
Benny saw that he had no linen. “I don’t think we need any. Why don’t you get out of here?” The man made the suggestion of a shrug and backed out the door, neglecting to lock it, so Benny reached over and jabbed the button with his thumb.
Well behind the harvest now, they stayed in Draper for an extra day. At supper the day after they had finished and loaded the combines, Johnny discussed going to northern South Dakota but said it was probably almost done. “I guess it’s Montana,” he said. “Or home. Do y’all wanta go home?”
“I don’t,” said Benny. “It’s only what, the twenty-first of July? I’d as soon go to Montana while we’re going.”
“We’ll make more money,” D.W. said.
Quint’s willingness was not in question, so Johnny said they would continue north. “We’ll be moving for three or four days,” he said. “I thought I’d pay y’all a dollar an hour for road time. Of course it’s regular pay for everything else. By the way, the motel man wants you to be sure and give his key back. He said he’s been losing a lot of them. I guess you have the day to yourselves tomorrow. I have to make some phone calls. You might come by about four. We’ll change the oil in the combines.”
Benny had not shaved in a week, and on their last morning in town he went to a barbershop and had his hair cut almost to the length of his whiskers. All summer, he had worn a green flat top cap that he had bought in an Army surplus store in Victory. D.W. found a bar and drank beer mixed with tomato juice to quell a headache. Quint left his friends in town and took the girl for a long goodbye on a picnic in the country. Benny found D.W., and they played pool on a big snooker table till after lunch. At two o’clock they walked the twelve blocks to the Lantern Light. Quint returned at three. “There he is,” D.W. said. “The world’s greatest lover.”
“It goes to show that anybody can have romance,” Benny said.
“Yeah, even you,” said Quint. “By the way, why didn’t you go the second night with that woman in Cherokee? Me and D.W. sat across the street and watched her come out. She was lookin’ for you.”
“She was a lot older than me, and we were fixin’ to leave. I didn’t want to fall in love, which can sneak up on you if you’re not careful.”
“Don’t bet on it where I’m concerned.”
D.W. left the room silent for a moment and asked, “Are we gonna to give that old devil his key back?”
“Hell, no,” Benny said, laughing.
They all laughed and spontaneously decided to race to the pickup. Benny and D.W. wrestled at the door behind Quint, and D.W. pushed Benny aside and stumbled out. Quint held the door open for D.W., intending to leave Benny, and Benny ran with Quint starting away. He jumped through the open window of the passenger’s side and hit his back, and D.W. pulled him in with him holding his back. Johnny had them change the oil in the combines with Quint checking the work and running the combines on the trucks to ensure the task was properly done. They talked casually at the trucks until Alice called them to dinner, and when they went outside again, Johnny brought a shiny black Gibson guitar. With surprising acumen, he played “There’ll be No Teardrops Tonight,” a Hank Williams song, and picked out parts of other tunes as he talked.
“How long have you had that?” D.W. asked.
“About a year. We went all over Lubbock, and this was the only one I really liked.” He strummed A minor.
“Who’s your favorite guitar player?”
“I have two or three, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Doc Watson. I saw a colored guy on TV that I liked a lot, Lightnin’ Hopkins. He gets some sounds you wouldn’t believe, uses a woman’s lipstick case to fret with like a steel guitar, and plays some of the bluest arch top you ever heard.”
“What do you think about The Ventures?” Benny asked.
“They’re pretty good, a little sloppy.”
“Do you know ‘You Win Again’?”
Johnny played until dark. Benny sang with him in “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” and they sounded a little like Johnny Cash and Luther Perkins. Hunched over, Johnny sweated on the guitar strings and body, his freckled hands and work-thickened fingers playing to a background of indefinable, barely audible sounds from the town and fields.
“When I was a high school senior, me and some other guys were playin’ a dance in Joy,” he said. “I was goin’ with Alice, and she was sittin’ there listening and not dancing with anybody. This old boy comes by and asks her to dance. She says no, but he just laughs and tries to pull her out on the floor. I get mad and run over and spin him around and say, ‘Let’s go outside!’ I made the mistake of starting out ahead of him. He hit me from behind as I got to the door, got me goin’ and didn’t give me room to breathe.”
“The first lick wins the fight,” Benny said.
“He said he was going to come to the house the next day and do it some more. My nose was broke, I had teeth chipped, my ea
rs were swollen, and there were knots all over my head. I didn’t think he would, but I loaded my twelve gauge pump and set it by the bed. I never felt like that before. If he had stepped in the yard, I would have killed him.”
“I felt like that sometimes when we were freshmen and the upperclassmen were whipping us with boards or knocking us on the arms,” Benny said.
“I learned a few things,” Johnny said. “Don’t ever fight unless you have to. I should have told him she was with me before I called him out. The second thing is, if you’re gonna fight, don’t mess around. I did something especially stupid. I turned my back.”
“Anybody that doesn’t happen to who gets around very much is careful or lucky,” Quint said. “It’s nearly happened to me two or three times.”
“A lot of guys say they’d kill a man if he screwed their wife, but I figure it takes two. I’d just walk away. There are some things I’d fight over. If somebody hurt my wife or kids, I’d kill ‘em or make ‘em wish they were dead. I’d fight if somebody laid hands on me or I thought they were about to. I would also fight a man over money. Old Schultz tried to slow play me, and I offered to fight him.”
“No kidding?” Quint asked.
“Yeah, I told him I was going to kick his sorry butt all over the yard.”
The boys guffawed, and Quint said, “That makes my year.”
“You have to pick your spots,” Johnny said. “You can’t last if you fight all the time.”
“You got to gear up, too,” Quint said. “You’re at a big disadvantage if you get surprised.”
“Tell him ‘bout Drunkard’s Mountain if you haven’t already,” Benny said. “It won’t hurt anything.”
“We went by there on the way back from Edgar,” Quint said. “This big guy got his skull cracked over a pool game. We helped take him to his car, and Benny thought he was dead. He held the sunshade mirror up to his nose.”
“Was he?” Johnny asked.
“He wasn’t breathing,” Benny said.
“That’s hard to tell by.”
“I don’t know for absolute sure. He took a pop.”
“What did the other guy do? Did he bother you?”
“He just got his money out of the guy’s pocket and left.”
“A cop came by the trailer one night in Crow’s Corner and asked if any of my boys had been to Drunkard’s Mountain,” Johnny said. “I told him no, I’d been workin’ you too hard for you to have time. I didn’t know if you had or not.”
“I dreamed the cops were after us,” Benny said.
“This is what we do,” said Johnny, starting the Hank Snow song, “Movin’ On.”
When they returned to the room, Quint and D.W. listened to the radio and went to sleep at eleven. Benny stayed up trying to finish his book on John Wesley Hardin. Johnny ran the trucks during breakfast, and the steady rumbling hurried the meal. “You don’t want to move a combine on a cold truck,” he explained. They strolled in the lightening darkness across the street as Alice finished loading the car.
At the trucks, Benny said, “I want to check the chains.”
“What for?” Quint asked.
“I just want to.”
Benny felt the chain on the left front of the combine on the blue truck and said, “This one’s loose.”
“What?” Quint asked.
“This one’s loose. Somebody took the wire loose and popped the boomer.”
“What?” called Johnny from the other truck.
“Benny says the chain’s off over here.”
“Hell’s bells!” Johnny exclaimed. “Why would a son of bitch do somethin’ like that?” he asked, watching Benny tighten the chain with the pipe. “How did you know to look?”
“I don’t see how they ride up there,” Benny said. “I’m glad Quint and D.W. drive it because I don’t want to.”
“It don’t make any difference who did it,” said Johnny, looking south, “not since we found it, anyway. The only thing is not… to let it… whip ya!” He waved his right arm and let himself on the leg. “I might get whipped, and I might not ever have a damn thing! But I ain’t never, never gonna let nobody scare me into quittin’ or slowin’ down!”
The boys looked at him to see if they should laugh, but he wore an expression that not even Quint had ever seen. “Let’s get it behind us,” he said, turning away. Frenetically, they made the trailer house ready to move, and Quint pulled it into the road with the pickup. They hitched it to the brown truck, and Johnny led the way out. D.W. and Benny rode in the pickup behind Quint’s blue truck. A hundred yards beyond the city limits, Quint, still sleepy, ran off the right side of the asphalt, and the combine lolled heavily to the right and caught on the left front chain. Quint showed his experience then by easing it delicately back onto the highway.
“There it is!” Benny shouted, pointing. “I knew we had to look out when I went to bed last night.”
“You were right,” D.W. said.
“Know what else I know?”
“What?”
“Something else’ll happen, somethin’ bad.”
“Bull.”
“Wait and see.”
“I still say bull,” D.W. said. “Nothing will happen if we’re careful.”
“Well, I could be wrong. Nobody is always right, not even me.” Benny exchanged a drawn glance with D.W. and asked, “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“The key.”
D.W. chuckled a little in his throat as he dug the room key from his pocket. “Here.”
“You’re the closest to the ditch.”
D.W. rolled the window down and turned in the seat to throw the key. Unsatisfied, he sat back and leaned against the door with his arm outside. He coiled his arm and flipped the silver key high past the line of weeds on the crest of the ditch.
Chapter Fourteen - Montana
The road sloped up slightly as they headed north. Above Draper, Nebraska was greener than ever. A breeze blew directly into the trucks and combines, and they averaged no more than thirty-five miles an hour. By nearly noon they were just over the Nebraska line into Wyoming. Johnny did not stop at Lingle but went on to Fort Laramie to get hamburgers at a drive-in. He talked with Alice while they waited and went back to his truck to eat. He got onto the right front bumper of the brown truck and sat with his legs around the black housing of the blinker light.
A full afternoon took them halfway up the eastern side of the state. “Matterhorn, Wyoming,” read a sign outside the town they reached at sundown. They put into a trailer park and ate a hurried supper, and the boys passed the night in the crowded back bedroom while Alice and Johnny slept in the small room between the children and the kitchen. On the second day, a Friday, they drove ten hours to get through Wyoming. The narrow highway presented hazards to the trucks, particularly where it was weak at the edges, but it gave them the advantage of having little traffic. Johnny explained at a lunch of sandwiches along the road that the big highways more frequently lead under power lines and underpasses too low for loaded harvest trucks.
Montana was the deepest, most pervasive green the boys had ever seen. The mounded mountain-hills and cupping valleys were covered spotlessly with bright grass and richly budded trees. They crossed the state line in the late afternoon, and the countryside changed from the desert plains to brilliant, rolling verdure. There was only an hour of driving time remaining, and they arrived in Rossen, Montana, thirty miles over the line, as the sun swelled out huge and started hiding behind the horizon at their left. The road into the tiny town was tree-lined on both sides. Johnny left in the car with Alice and the children when the trucks were safely parked, and he came back and took the trailer house to a single space a half mile away at the other side of town. The boys blocked the trailer house while Johnny got under it and ran the sewer hose into the sewer pipe in the ground.
“I don’t know if I told you, but we’re stuck here till Monday morning,” he said. “There’s a state law that says you can’t move com
bines on trucks between sundown Friday and sunup Monday.”
“That’s cruddy,” D.W. said.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do. Might as well just enjoy the rest.”
“I got all the rest I needed in Draper.”
“So did I.”
“I don’t think it makes any difference,” Quint said. “They’re just getting done in the Dakotas, and there’s prob’ly not any wheat ready up here yet.”
“We could find somethin’ around Great Falls,” Johnny said. “But I don’t know. We might have to go way north in ten days or two weeks to get any work. I won’t do as well as I might’ve, but this’ll get me through the year all right.”
“Really, we ought to go up in the hills and camp out for a couple of days,” Benny said. “I haven’t done any hunting or anything like that since Christmas. There’s nothing to do here, and I imagine Alice would enjoy it.”
“A lot of this land belongs to the government,” Quint said. “To us, in other words.”
“Might as well,” D.W. said. “If we can get a tent or something.”
“Y’all can use mine,” said Johnny.
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“Oh, yeah, I got one tucked away in the trailer. Don’t know why I have it, but I do.”
“Do you want to go, Quinton?” Benny asked.
“I guess. What’re you gonna hunt with, that pewter pistol?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna hunt kangaroo mice.”
“Let’s hope you do better than you did the last time.”
Quint and D.W. chuckled, but Johnny did not ask them why. He looked over their heads for a moment and went in, and they lingered outside until they were too bored to do anything but go in to sleep.
They walked five miles before they began to tire. They had not prepared for the excursion other than to buy cans of soda pop and food, a loaf of bread and a package of bacon at the grocery store in Rossen. D.W. carried the food in a pillow slip in one hand and then the other. Benny had his pistol in his right hand and an old iron skillet Alice had given them in his left. Quint shifted the rolled-up tent from arm to arm and walked with the big canteen from the pickup hanging around his neck on a rope, thumping against his middle every other stride. The country was more wide open than they had expected. They had crossed a moderately high hill just away from town but had moved across a tremendous valley and still could see the hill. There had been only one barbed wire fence to traverse. They had not seen anyone since they left the trailer house. It was afternoon, and they were coming up a long hill.
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