The Byrds of Victory

  “My ass is dragging,” D.W. said.

  “Let’s get over this hill and camp,” said Benny. “That’ll be plenty far to walk back.”

  They went another mile and, with some difficulty getting the stakes hammered into the grassy ground with the skillet, pitched a camp and ate canned pork and beans and Vienna sausages and drank the lukewarm Cokes. “What are we doin’ out here?” asked Quint.

  “Nothin’ right now,” said Benny. “But it’ll be okay because we have to make up things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m gonna go for a walk in a little while and shoot a rabbit or something. Then tonight I’ll get up at the campfire and tell my story like an Indian. Lots of bragging.”

  “That should come easy.”

  Quint crawled into the tent and lay down on the grass, and Benny took his pistol out of his cowboy belt and drug into cartridges in his left front shirt pocket. D.W. went with him as he walked lazily away from the camp.

  “Who put a burr under his blanket?” Benny asked.

  “He just gets that way sometimes,” D.W. said. “There doesn’t have to be a reason for everything.”

  Without carrying so much, Benny and D.W. found walking more agreeable, and they ambled over the grassy hills for two hours before seeing a young snowshoe rabbit turned half-white for the winter make one hop from behind a clump. It was still and looked sidewise at the intruders. Benny cocked the pistol, raised it and aimed. The shot was low. The rabbit hopped twice and obligingly was still again. Benny shot, and the bullet made a “thunt” in the middle rear of the creature’s abdomen. The rabbit gave a soft but horrified squeal and started hopping. It was able to make only a half-dozen jumps, and it lay down with its side where the bullet had come out against the ground. Benny came up close and shot it again.

  “I guess we got a little rabbit meat to eat,” D.W. said.

  “He’s young,” said Benny, holding the rabbit up by its hind legs. “Ought to be good.”

  It was nearly dark when they reached camp, but they would have been able to find it regardless because Quint had a fire going in front of the tent, sitting in bare feet with his back against the tent pole. The fire fluttered in the lazy wind and flashed its orange light lambently back and forth across him. Benny tossed the rabbit at Quint’s feet and said, “I got one.”

  “Good,” Quint said. “I’m hungry. You don’t think he has worms, do you?”

  “Nah, he’s too young.”

  D.W. cleaned his yellow-handled pocketknife in the ground and heated the blade in the fire. With Quint and Benny watching, he gutted the rabbit, getting little drops of blood on the light blond hair on the backs of his hands, and peeled back the skin from circular cuts he made at the hind feet. Then he split it down the back and found green sticks to shove through each half. They took turns holding the popping meat in the fire until it was cooked and passed the halves around with the canteen to eat. “That was good, I have to admit,” said Quint. “I’m glad you’re a shooter.”

  “It’s a wonder we got anything,” Benny said, pitching the bones into the dark. “We walked ten miles, and he was all we saw.”

  “I suppose you guys expected to learn somethin’ this summer, but I been on harvest too many times to learn anything,” Quint said.

  “I learned one thing, what it’s like to be colored,” Benny said. “I never had people openly prejudiced against me before, like those cops in Draper.”

  “They were just playin’ around. If they’d been prejudiced, they would’ve thrown you in jail.”

  “What’s buggin’ you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Okay, then.” Quint pushed his face forward and looked up at Benny from the fire. “You work pretty good most of the time. You’re a little screwy, but generally you work all right. What pisses me off is your attitude toward Johnny and Alice. You act like this is some kind of game, some little thing you just do for fun. Let me tell you, this ain’t no game at all. Johnny went in hock up past his ass to get those new Massey-Fergusons, and he’s either going to pay ‘em off on time, a payment ever’ month, or the bastards’ll come get ‘em. He’s got four mouths to feed, more counting him and us. It ain’t no game.”

  “Who said it was?”

  “Shut up. He doesn’t expect anybody to get all charged up over his problems, but I don’t like it when you act like it’s sort of funny but not funny enough to laugh.”

  “Man, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about!”

  “Why don’t y’all get out there and fight it out?” D.W. asked, getting to his feet. “I’m tired of it.”

  Neither Quint nor Benny said anything. Then Benny asked, “Do you wanta fight?”

  Quint ran his hand over his face. “Yes, I do,” he said.

  They got up and walked a short way out. They started circling easily yet alertly. “We haven’t hit each other since we were kids,” Benny said. Quint kept up the boxer’s stance and said nothing. “I don’t want to beat on you, Quint.”

  “Look out for your own ass,” Quint said.

  “I apologize, okay?” Benny dropped his hands.

  “You better fight or I’ll just lay it on you!”

  Quint made a feint, and Benny jabbed him in the forehead. Quint knocked the arm aside and hit Benny hard on the jaw. Benny stumbled, and Quint tripped him and got him down, pummeling Benny’s head without really hurting him further. “Damn it, you better not ever do it again!” Quint was crying, D.W. heard by his voice. Benny, a little battered and still disoriented from the blow on his jaw, saw Quint’s face ugly with tears in the firelight. “Benny!” Quint raised his fist. “Will you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  He got off Benny’s chest, strode to the fire and stood with his back to it and his friends. D.W. and Benny went over and sat in silence. Presently, Quint turned and sat with them. Benny saw that Quint had a blue knot on his forehead. They waited for a long time before Benny smiled and said, “You nearly knocked me out.”

  “You shouldn’t have made me so mad,” Quint said.

  “Let’s forget it, all right?” D.W. said. “Byrd’s a dumb ass, and we all been under each other’s feet too long. Y’all say you forget it or I’ll whip your asses.”

  “I done forgot it,” Benny said, looking at Quint.

  “I’ll forget it, too,” said Quint, “if you don’t do it anymore.”

  “I didn’t mean anything in the first place, but I’ll try not to act like that. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

  “What do you think we’ll do now?” D.W. asked cautiously.

  “You can’t tell,” said Quint. “I think Johnny figures on going up past Great Falls. We may be able to get something around there.”

  “Can we get there Monday?”

  “No, it’s too far. We could get as far as Cliffside.”

  “I guess it’s Gray Wolf sooner or later,” Benny said.

  “He’s got this big job there, and he has to do it since he’s come this far. We’ll get to see Canada anyway.”

  Instead of trying to use the tent, they fell away from the fire and lay down in different directions with their feet to the embers. They talked some and fell asleep unintentionally.

  D.W. walked a long way through the dewy grass and found a high hill where he could watch Quint and Benny at the camp. They were awake when he got to the vantage point he wanted and lay down. They did not see him. They merely got some cans out of the pillowcase and opened them and ate without apparent conversation. Quint took down the tent and rolled it up, and they waited in obvious expectation of D.W.’s return. Disappointed, he descended the hill and hurried the half-mile back.

  The return trek was as hard as Benny had predicted. With bumpy grass for beds and mediocre nourishment, they were tired and vaguely weak. They carried their paraphernalia more lackadaisically and made it shortly before noon. Johnny noticed the knot on Quint’s forehead b
ut did not say anything. Benny saw Johnny contemplating him and went expressionless to turn the wide green eyes away. Gratefully, they ate the lunch Alice fixed.

  Monday dawned with them already on the road. Johnny had determined to bypass Great Falls to the east and go almost to the Canadian border to a town called Carl. During the day they saw combines finishing fields, but there was no place for them at such a late stage. They had to be in at the first when the jobs were arranged and the combines unloaded. They pushed all day with a brief stop for a lunch of sandwiches and Fritos. Johnny said they had to reach Cliffside by nightfall because there was no good place to stop for seventy miles on their side of it.

  The sun bore into their faces in the late afternoon. Quint and Johnny did not seem to mind, but Benny, driving the pickup with D.W. a passenger, got a pair of old welding goggles out of the glove compartment and put them on. On a long, sweeping curve, he passed a slow-moving pickup that had come onto the road between him and the trucks. The sun and the road shadows hid an approaching car. Going down a gentle slope, he reached seventy-five after he was committed and then saw the car. Alice, two hundred yards behind, watched Benny goose the pickup and check behind to clear the trailer before he pulled back in. The pickup he was passing had slowed, and the car was getting off the road when he made it by.

  “Be careful,” D.W. said.

  “I didn’t see him,” said Benny, grimacing. “I’m just gonna lazy on in.”

  They labored up a mountain higher than any they had encountered in Montana and saw Cliffside from the peak. They perused the shaded streets and the old, jutting buildings with orange and red roofs above the green foliage as they braked their way down carefully to it. The waitress at the Cliffside restaurant was a middle-age woman with little white bows in her hair and a trim figure who bantered with Quint and Johnny while taking their orders. A modest country and western band was making a hollow attempt to fill the room, and a stocky, intense man came to the bandstand from a nearby table to sing. Johnny and his family and the boys were the only customers except for the singing man and his wife.

  “Did you come a long way?” the waitress asked.

  “About three hundred miles,” Johnny said.

  “Yeah, after that, we hate to sit back down,” Benny said.

  “I feel the same way about walking home after spending the day on my feet.”

  The boys stayed after Johnny left with his family till the band started packing and the waitress told them it was closing time. Quint drove, getting off on two one-way streets the wrong way, and they cruised the dark streets aimlessly. Then they came upon a thick, maroon car with two heads of long hair at either side of its front seat. Quint honked a couple of times, and they waved when the girls turned to look. They followed the car for many blocks and turned around with it once. They were meeting it going opposite ways when Quint put his head out the window and yelled, “Hey, can we talk to you?” The girls stopped, and Quint got out. After a few minutes, he brought them smiling to the pickup.

  “We never rode in a pickup before,” said a thin girl with an Indian nose. All five rode in the front. The other girl, a blonde with a figure like a bowling pin, rode in D.W.’s lap with her friend squeezed between Quint and Benny. Quint eased around Cliffside and found a road out of town, got well out and stopped. He had been driving with his arm around the thin girl, and D.W. was holding the blonde with his arm around her middle. When they had been outside talking for a while, Benny wandered into the field and lay down. He sang “Streets of Laredo” twice and lay silent with his eyes closed. Strolling back some time later, he saw that D.W., walking in with the blonde from the other side of the road, was happy and Quint, sitting in the pickup with the thin girl, was irritable.

  “You boys ready to go?” Benny asked. “What time is it?”

  “Midnight,” Quint said.

  “We better get on in, honey,” D.W. told the blonde.

  Quint and Benny ignored the girl between them, but D.W. kissed the blonde and talked to her all the way to town. Quint and Benny ignored them, too. D.W. and the blonde exchanged waves over the top of the maroon car, as she dropped into it. Driving the empty streets again, they realized they did not know the way back to the trailer park. Quint didn’t concede it for a while, but the truth was established when Benny laughed and there could be no other reason for laughing.

  “Do y’all have any idea where we are?” D.W. asked.

  “We’re in Cliffside, Montana,” Quint said. “It’s not too big, so we just have to look for home.”

  “D.W.’s happy, anyway,” Benny said.

  D.W. grinned. “Had to come all the way to Montana to find a girl.”

  “I think it’ll be easier to get girls in college,” Benny said. “You wanta know why I think we didn’t do any better around Victory?”

  “Why?” Quint asked.

  “I think the emptier a place is, the more people get scwunched in.”

  Unsuccessful in random driving, Quint started going around the city as closely to its perimeter as he could. He went around it once and started again farther in when they saw the lighted trailer park to the right. Johnny’s blue and white Chevy was at the trailer.

  Chapter Fifteen - D.W.

  Carl was a few miles below the Canadian border in north- central Montana. After traveling two full days from Cliffside, the harvesters reached it in the afternoon. The boys stayed in the trailer house because there was not a motel in town. The next day, they took the combines a short way out to the wheat. The farmer was a young man with strong arms and legs and a harsh face. He rode on the combine with Benny and then with D.W. and got off to check the stubble and under it to see if all the grain was going into the combines. Satisfied, he left the field and did not return.

  During their time in Carl, the harvesters worked long days and pushed hard with a growing sense of being harassed. The valves in the engine of the blue truck burned out on the second day, and it was two days before Johnny got it back from the garage. The boys slept three in a bed for two nights, but Quint went out on the third night and slept on a blanket under the brown truck. They worked almost until midnight every day, so they had to bathe as an extra effort after coming in late. Benny didn’t bathe for the first two days. On the third night, he came in so dirty that his arms and face were nearly black. His hair was full of chaff and dirt. He itched. He went into the bathroom at twelve-thirty and ran a tub. The children evidently had been bathed earlier, and he was able to get only thirty seconds of hot water. He ran six inches of water and got into it. The water was cold from the cold coming in over the hot, and Benny sat down in it uncomfortably. He suddenly felt exhausted. He sat with his arms limp and his legs splayed out and his head hanging forward. Dully, he watched the dirt and grime seep off his ankles and start to stain the water.

  On the fourth day, they started early because there had been no rain and light dew. There was still much to be done, but Johnny had told the boys they would finish before nightfall the next day. Quint had decided to drive Benny’s combine for a while, so Benny went into Carl in the early afternoon with Johnny to get the blue truck. When the hoppers filled, Quint and D.W. stopped. D.W. lowered his header and left the engine running for the air conditioner, but Quint dropped his header halfway down and left the machinery engaged. He came out of the cab, swung around the front of it and stepped onto the narrow walkway. Reel bats flopping furiously past him, he moved onto the header with his back to the glass of the cab. He stepped sideways until he was a third of the way across and bent his knees to ride the surging metal walk. The noise was outrageous. The path had adhesive strips for traction but was not meant for use when the header was engaged at near full speed. Quint’s boots slipped some on wheat seeds that had collected on the walk, and he kicked some away into the bats and auger. But there were too many seeds and the soles of his boots were slick, so the churning action of the combine shook his feet forward into the blurring metal and wood. His right foot went in first, and he fell at a slant
into the auger. He tried to catch himself but could not get a hold. The flashing auger took his feet and legs out under the reel bats, and the bats beat him senseless while the auger held his legs, bent them under and pulled him toward the big silver spokes in the middle. He screamed his voice away in one explosion of breath.

  D.W. had not seen Quint fall but saw the header jam and stop. Quint was not in the cab or around the combine. Frightened, D.W. slammed open the cab door and jumped down. He screamed in a voice he had never used before when he saw Quint, and he reached in anguish for him but realized he had to kill the engine. Groaning like an animal, he banged and clawed his way into the cab and shut off the ignition. He looked at Quint through the glass and tried to think. He started down the steps but was stiff with shock and fell. He went to Quint and touched his head, which was out over the sickles and lolling heavily down. There was blood where the sickles had cut into Quint’s chest and arms. The legs were twisted around the auger. The silver spokes had stopped in Quint’s back.

  Talking to himself in words he would not remember, D.W. got onto the walk and pulled on the spokes to try to reverse the auger. It wouldn’t move. He went to the end of the header and pulled on the chains until his hands were torn. He ran into the field and screamed. He whirled around as if to look for help but then stopped still. He saw the pickup a half-mile away and ran for it. He got a pipe wrench, a Crescent wrench and one of the pipes they used to pull the boomers down. He was winded when he got back to the combine, and he fell to reversing the auger without looking at Quint. Using the pipe wrench and pipe, he caught the machinery at the left side of the header and slowly made it move. Without reserve, D.W. put all his strength against the auger and moved it until he thought he could look at Quint again. D.W. saw Quint’s bloody head and broken legs and vomited. But then, crying, he took hold his friend and pulled him free. He picked up Quint and started half-walking, half-trotting toward the pickup. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” he moaned in rhythm with his legs. He was almost at the pickup when a white Ford pickup he did not recognize stopped on his right.