Four

FOUR

He never once spoke to Lynette.
Bill set him up in a small trailer next to the machine sheds that had once been used for camping but was now falling apart. It had a bunk across the end covered with mouse droppings and a small table next to the bunk. No lights, no heat, and when it rained it leaked like a sieve.

`You won’t be in here that much,` Bill told the boy. `We work all the time summer and fall. You’ll be working from light to dark and then some.`

Except that it wasn’t work, not like hoeing beets had been. It was just sitting driving a tractor. Bill had two large Case diesel tractors and it only took him a few minutes that first day to teach the boy how to refuel and run one of them. He hooked the diesel onto a disc and sent the boy off to work the fields he’d leased.

The fields were a good three miles from his farm and once the boy was there working, Bill kept him there until well after dark. Alice drove out in a pickup and brought him cake and sandwiches for forenoon lunch, a full hot meal in lard buckets for midday dinner, cake and sandwiches again for afternoon lunch and then a full supper, always taken in the field so he could keep working.

He had thought at first they might send Lynette with the food but it was always Alice, always good food, more than he could possibly eat but always Alice. She brought him coffee to drink in a Thermos and he hated coffee but drank it anyway, with sugar she brought in an old peanut butter jar, to keep awake on the droning tractor he was driving.

There were no lights on the tractor, for which the boy was grateful. Just at dark – close to nine o’ clock – Bill wold come in the pickup and take him back to the trailer. The boy would fall asleep on the bunk, mouse turds and all. Before daylight Bill would pound on the side of the trailer to wake him. He would just have time to stop at the outhouse, eat a stand-up breakfast at the tailgate of the truck – a thick-bread sandwich with eggs and bacon between the slices. Then Bill would drive the boy back to the field, dozing all the way, to refuel the tractor and start discing again sat first light.

The boy prayed for rain, prayed to get sick, prayed for the tractor to break down, prayed for Bill to get sick, prayed for lightning, prayed for the very earth to swallow the tractor and end the work. But all he got was good weather, the roar of the poorly muffled diesel and the endless, endless North Dakota fields. He thought of many things; he thought of all things. Tractor thoughts. He thought of love and making love and what it must be like when it is right and would let his mind go until he thought he would cripple himself with desire and of course he thought of Lynette, though he never saw her. He thought of movie stars and cars he would like to own, a hot rod he would build someday and Hank Williams and he sang, at the top of his lungs, trying to harmonise with and sing louder than the tractor, he sang every country-and-western song he knew and then made some up and at last, in the end, he came down to thoughts of revenge. He thought of getting even with everybody who had ever done a wrong thing to him – his parents, bullies, life, a teacher who’d hit him, an aunt who’d called him a shit-kid when she was drunk – thought of all the ways he could hurt them and make them know, know that they had done him the wrong way.

And still there were more fields. He worked a week, then another, then another with no break and each Monday morning Bill handed him seven crisp five-dollar bills to add to the beet money in his pockets. He was rich but even if he’d had time off he didn’t want to go to town because he was afraid of being found and sent back.

He lived for sleep and lived to see Alice coming with the pickup to bring him food. He would try to get her to talk but she walked along the edge of the field while he sat and ate, picking bits of grass and small flowers until he was done, then took the dishes and leftover food back, all without speaking more than a word or two but smiling at him and nodding and leaving him.

Jail must be like this, he thought after three weeks – except that it doesn’t move and they don’t pay you.

When it all fell apart and sent him on the run again as a fugitive it was Bill’s fault. Or, as the boy thought of it, of course it had been Lynette’s fault for making the picture in his mind that kept him there at Bill’s farm and then it was Bill’s fault for needing to go to town and not coming back.

The boy did not know anything was wrong. He worked the whole day and when it was time to stop for the night it was not Bill who came to take him back to the farm but Alice.

`Bill had to go to town,` she said to him as they drove to the farm. `He’ll be back later.` But there was something in her voice, some tightness that he had not heard before, and he would have thought more of it except that he hadn’t heard her voice enough to know for sure.

None of it mattered. He ate a beef sandwich she brought, so hungry that his jaws ached, and when she stopped in the yard near the yard light he was so exhausted he stumbled to the trailer and fell asleep without undressing.

These nights – he thought of them as tractor nights – he didn’t sleep so much as pass out. Nothing moved while he slept. His head jammed into the extra pair of pants he used as a pillow, he didn’t dream, he just went down. For this reason it was hard to wake him, and when he at last heard the pounding on the side of the trailer and came out of unconsciousness he couldn’t think.

He rolled upright, his eyes still closed and his feet on the floor, and he thought, God, I haven’t slept at all and here’s Bill already, and he stood and went to the trailer door. It took him four tries, swiping his hand across the lever-type handle before he caught it and opened the door to find not Bill standing there but Alice.

She was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and her face looked tight in the moonlight, the skin drawn over her cheekbones in something like a snarl.
`Is it time to go back to work?` he asked.
`No. it’s two o’clock in the morning. I need you to go to town and get Bill.`
`Get Bill? What do you mean?`
`I mean he hasn’t come home yet, which means he’s stinking drunk and you have to get him. If he tries to drive he’ll likely kill himself or some other-`
`But I can’t go into town-`
`You take the grain truck and drive into Adams. It ain’t but nine miles. He’ll be at the tavern – there’s only the one beer hall – and you go inside and tell him Alice says to come home now. I’d do it myself but it ain’t right for a woman to go into a beer hall and pull at her man. Then you take him out to the grain truck and bring him home and I’ll deal with the son of a bitch when.`

The boy just now saw the anger in her eyes and thought of all the reasons he couldn’t go into town – it wasn’t safe, he was too young to go to a beer hall, he didn’t have a license, he needed sleep, Bill was the boss and he shouldn’t go in and drag him home, Bill was bigger than he was and what if he didn’t want to be dragged home – and none of them came out.

Instead he was quiet and she led him to the 1951 one-ton GMC grain truck and she told him how to start it and turned on the lights and he was heading down the driveway when he realised he had never been to Adams and didn’t know how to get there. He stopped and jumped out of the truck – it seemed like ten feet to the ground – and ran back to where Alice was standing.

`Just turn left and go straight when you hit the main road. You can’t miss it.`

Under almost any other circumstances he would have liked driving the grain truck. He had driven tractors and sometimes he’d driven the ’51 Chevy sedan when his parents were sleeping off a binge. He would sneak out and drive the car round the block in the middle of the night. The grain truck was a good chance to practise shifting and working the clutch. But he was worried too much about what to do when he got to town to enjoy the driving.

Alice had been right about Adams. There were just five buildings, which comprised the main street. A grain elevator, a gas station, a dry-goods store, a farm implement dealer and a tavern called simply Pete’s Place; ten or twelve houses were scattered out near an old water tower.

The boy stopped the truck in front of the tavern, the only building with any lights showing. There were three cars there and Bill’s pickup all pulled in nose to kerb  and he brought the truck in that way – though he was worried about getting reverse right and backing out when it was time to leave – but misjudged the length of the trucks front and drove it up on the sidewalk a bit before it got stopped.

He hesitated at the door of the tavern. He knew about taverns and knew about drunks and hated them both. He had spent many nights waiting in the car outside taverns while his parents drank – sitting there sometimes for two, three hours before he worked up the courage to go in and try to get them to leave. They never did. All the memories came back now, of the fights and the screaming and the tears, and he shook his head. It’s all bullshit, he thought, and pushed open the door.

Pete’s looked like all the small-town taverns he had ever seen. Down the right was a rough wooden bar with no barstools and a low-to-the-floor galvanised steel-pipe rail for the drinkers to put their feet on.

On the left side there were three tables with metal chairs scattered around them. At the far end of the bar was a large clock on the wall with its hands frozen at 1.30 and the room was lit by a dim bulb hanging from a single wire in the middle of the ceiling.

There was a bald bartender wearing a filthy white shirt, open at the neck, and at the corner of the bar near the rear, where there was a small opening for the bartender to get through, three men stood playing cards.

`Damn!` one of the men yelled, and the boy saw that it was Bill. `I can’t lose!`
Again the boy waited, thinking, I’m not hired for this – to go to a tavern and watch drunks play cards.

 But he stepped forward and moved to where the men stood, wondering as he walked what he would say. The money there took it all out of his mind.

The bartop seemed to be covered with money. Twenties, fifties, hundred-dollar bills were piled in front of each man and Bill’s pile was huge. The boy couldn’t imagine how much money – thousands of dollars? – was in Bill’s rumpled pile.

As the boy came close, Bill said, `I’ll bet one, no, two thousand dollars. You want to see what I’ve got, you’ll have to pony up.` He removed some money from his pile with the exaggerated care of the truly drunk, counting bills slowly and putting them in the pot,  and the boy stopped about four feet away and stood silently, watching, mesmerised by the money.

The other two men hesitated briefly, and then silently – they seemed drunker than Bill – put the money from their piles into the pot.

`Cards,` Bill said, and the boy saw he was dealing. `How many?`

One man took two, the other one, and Bill laughed. `Shit, I need three.` And he dealt himself three cards.

The boy knew poker, as a small boy had watched it played in bars when his mother was drinking and dragged him with her to chip joints in Chicago. A drunk named Casey had taught him the rules of poker when he was four and the boy had played it later, when he set pins in the bowling alley back home. He and the other pinsetters worked for seven cents a line and lived back in the pits where they drank Pepsi and peed out the back window between lines. One of them had a deck of cards and when it was slow they played poker for pennies and the boy almost never won.

After the draw the man on Bill’s left looked at his cards, holding them back against his body and staring down his nose, and smiled. `Your ass is mine this time,` he said to Bill. `I’ll bet all I have.`

He counted money into the pot – it came to just under four thousand dollars, the man said aloud – and leaned back with the same smug smile on his face.

The other man smiled as well and called the bet and then raised what he had left, another seven thousand dollars. `If you’ve got the balls,` he said to Bill, `if you’ve got the balls…`

Here the bartender stepped in. he ad been leaning back watching the game, his eyes worried. `You’re betting your whole soil allotment money. This is nuts.`

`This,` Bill said, calling the raise, `is not nuts, this is poker. What have you suckers got?`
The man on the left had a jack-high straight and reached for the pot but the second man laid his hand down. `Flush,` he said, `king high.`

Bill had not even looked at his cards and he held them up now and studied them and smiled and laid them down.

`Four ducks – four little deuces. Jeez am I hot!`
The boy expelled breath and realised he’d been holding it all this time and Bill started to scoop the money in when the fight started.

`You son of a bitch! You held a pair of deuces and you bet two grand?`
`When you’re hot, you’re-` Bill started, and the man on his left took a drunken roundhouse swing at him and hit him on the side of the temple, knocking Bill away from the bar and on top of the boy.

`stop this crap!` the bartender yelled, but it was too late. Bill came up like a mad bull and charged into the stomach of the first man, driving him back away from the bar and into the wall. The third man, still standing at the bar, turned now and hit Bill first on the back of the head with his fist and then took another swing at the second man, catching him in the forehead.

Had they been sober any of the blows would have caused severe damage but they were all slow and their punches were flabby. The boy scrambled out of the way and was going to watch until it was over but as the three men pushed and swore and bled and hit at each other they came rolling past the boy. Bill saw him and said through his teeth, `The money, get the goddamn money!`

The boy nodded and moved to the bar and grabbed the money. There was too much for his pockets, so he tucked his T-shirt in and jammed it down inside past his neck until the front of his shirt bulged with it.

The fight had moved towards the door and the bartender waited until the exact right moment and opened the door and kicked-pushed the men outside.

`I don’t care what you do outside,` he said, turning back in the bar, `but I’m sick of you wrecking my bar.`

The boy ducked through the door after them, holding his arms across his belly to keep the money in, and watched the fight. But moving outside had changed the battle – with space around them they backed off, weaving drunkenly and holding their fists the way they thought fighters should hold their fists, taking ineffective jabs and trying footwork that couldn’t be done sober in work boots until finally Bill said `Jeez, forget it, I’m going home,` and climbed in his pickup, started the engine, backed out and drove off leaving the boy.

For a moment the boy stood there, realised that he had all the game money inside his T-shirt, and before they could figure that out he moved to the grain truck, started it and after some gear grinding backed it into the street, turned and followed the taillights of Bill’s pickup moving away from town.

Bill stopped about four miles out of town and pulled over and was leaning on the fender of the pickup, vomiting, when the boy caught up with him. The boy stopped the truck, put it in neutral, set the brake and climbed down.

`It goes away when I puke – always has,` Bill said when he stood up. `You got the money?`

Except for some vomit on his bib overalls and those sunken eyes Bill now looked stone-cold sober. The boy dug the money out of his shirt and handed it to Bill/ `I never saw a game like that – so much money.`
`Last year it was Oleson’s turn. It just goes around. How pissed is he?`
`Who? Oh, you mean Alice.`
`Yeah.`
`She’s mad. She called you a son of a bitch and said she’ll handle you.`

`Ahh – that bad. Well, let’s not tell her about the money. It would just confuse the whole thing for her.` Bill was lining up the bills and stacking them on the hood of the pickup and he held out a handful of money to the boy. `Here – your pay for the evening.`

The boy took the money and glanced at it in the light from the grain truck’s headlights. He saw a fifty-dollar bill and many twenties and some tens and thought, Jeez, it must be at least two hundred dollars! He jammed it in his pocket and climbed up into the truck, waited for Bill to start off and followed the pickup back to the farm, shifting loosely, easily, his arm propped on the window of the truck, driving with one hand, singing a Hank Williams song in harmony with the engine, his pockets full of oney, and he thought, Hell, there ain’t nothing to look back for – thinking it in melody like a country-and-western song, thinking, I’ve got it now, I’ve got it by the balls, and he smiled because he thought, that was the way a man would think it, not a boy but a man.