Postcards (29 page)

The wind moved back and forth like a saw endlessly sawing. If
he lay on his back, his ears free of the pillow, he could hear grains of sand strike the windows. On full moon nights the wind roared against the house, mooing and rumbling in the dark, rolling a bucket across the yard, dragging weeds along the clapboards until the squeaking and banging sent him up out of the grey sheets, shouting at the ceiling. When you lived alone you could shout at the ceiling. But it got the dog up, made her pace the kitchen linoleum, her toenails clicking, worrying if the menacing clouds that raced the daylight sky had at last attacked under cover of darkness.

He thought he’d go in for dry navy beans. The hell with sugar beets. Beans he understood. He fitted himself out with a used tractor, cultivating and planting attachments and made an arrangement to lease the Shears boys’ famous combine at bean harvest, after their grain was in.

‘If it goes good in a year or two you might want to get a blade-type bean harvester,’ old Shears advised, ‘it’s got your vine turners, your row dividers and your windrowing rods. But you can probably do pretty good with the boys’ combine, just so’s you run it at about one-third speed. You still gonna lose quite a bit to shatter. When you’re ready I wouldn’t mind comin’ over, take a look at how it goes.’

The beans came along well the second year. Before he harvested them Loyal wanted to fence off the yard and set out a triple row of Scotch pines for a new windbreak. The old poplars were shredded and broken with age. Jase came skulking in unbidden one noon to help him build fence. Loyal was startled to see him, thought the poor bugger must have pulled himself together at last after months of therapy at the VA hospital. They worked in silence through the day, the scrape and chunk of the posthole auger, Little Girl’s gallop stirring up beetles. Loyal looked over at Jase again and again. He knew how to set posts. There was a fluidity in the shift of muscle that drew his eyes. He must have come out enough to work for old Shears lately; face and torso were a sore red. The silvery hair was knotted up in a club under the ranch hat. In the late blaze of afternoon Loyal called it quits.

‘Five-thirty. That’s enough for me,’ said Loyal. ‘Let’s have a beer out on the porch, cool off a little.’

The beer was sweet in their hot throats. They drank in silence. Loyal brought out a pound of rat cheese and some bread. The sun boiled away at the end of the plains and in the limpid sky the first stars came out. Jase slapped at his neck.

‘Got ’im!’ The bottle hooted when Loyal blew across its mouth. Jase stood up. There was something about the way he moved that brought the image of a trout hanging still in the current, then dipping away.

‘Well, I’ll be goin’. Just as soon come by again if you can use me.’

‘’Preciate it,’ said Loyal, understanding he was hiring. He felt an absurd rush of pleasure and played the radio until late.

The pure darkness of the nights was broken by the spill of light from the McDonald’s at the crossroads. Farm families drove distances as though to a son’s wedding to eat meat in buns, lick at the slippery sauce, suck from waxed paper cups. The lights of the parking lot swelled like blisters on the droughty night.

Loyal and Jase sat out on the porch in their stiff clothes at the end of the day, the cold bottles in their hands, Jase, naked to the waist, his chairback leaning against the wall, hair wadded up off his neck, the twists of wet hair in his armpit visible every time he raised the bottle. Little Girl lay on her back exposing her belly to the stir of air, jaws smiling in sleep.

‘Want some of this?’ Jase, shaking the homegrown into a Zigzag paper and twisting it up, sucking in the hay-smelling weed smoke and passing it to Loyal.

The talk began slowly, Jase wanly dragging out a few jagged words, warily. Loyal sorting through his mind for subjects. They could work in comfortable silence all day, just the words to pass the fence pliers. On the porch there was a difference. Loyal did not look at Jase now except from the corner of his eye. He felt his own withering skin hang on him like rotting wallpaper. The antiphonal conversation began with weather, drought, thunderstorms, ahh the goddamn wind and
tornado weather. How much meat was left in the freezer. Was the gardens burning up or not. Sick animals. Water and wells. What the dogs been up to. An engine running sweet as you’d want but no brakes to speak of. Elvis.

‘Yoooooo – u want Elvis? Look!’ Jase, as perfect to look at as a river stone, flapping his arms began to howl, to thrust his pelvis at the yard. ‘Ah – oooo, ah – oooo!’ until the dog sat up and tipped her muzzle back for a good yodel. Out in the darkness a coyote answered derisively and Loyal, heart beating, boot heels beating time on the step.

Coyotes then, and wheat, dry beans, soybeans, corn, pig Utters and weight gains, Mormons, poison baits, and back to coyotes. Trapping, no not trapping, at the word ‘trap’ Jase shook, his mind veered dangerously to booby traps, humping up the red mountains, probing the soil with a K-bar for a safe place to sit down, digging in, the pick barely denting the root-shot soil. His panicked memory leaped from Bouncing Bettys, punji sticks, the old C-ration cans soured with spring-detonated bombs, the children who exploded when you clasped them. The random bits of metal, feet and tissue and splinters of bone raining around you. How few understood the frightening and devious intelligence of hunting humans. He would choke off the talk, stare at the dog’s dream-twitched hind leg and rush away, be gone for days, leaving the work to collapse around Loyal.

‘You dooooon’t know. How smaaaaart. A huuuumanbeingis.’

So, milder subjects, how small farms were doomed, was that son of a bitch Butz doing any good at all in the world or selling them out to the big corporations, bee stings, people with big feet. Mormons, the best wood for fence posts, what the dogs were doing, if beer was better ice-cold or just chilled a little, Frank Zappa, women, miniskirts. No, not women. Loyal would crackle his beer can in his scabbed hands, spit at the dirt.

Together they built hog pens, a new machinery shed, fenced in a square yard around the house, planted the Scotch pines, put up a garage for Loyal’s truck. Why not, thought Jase, there was good money paid and not everyone would hire a crazy son of a bitch who smoked weed and howled. Why not, thought Loyal, it didn’t hurt anybody to talk.

After the stifling August days of the third season a dry summer persisted, the wind never stopped. Loyal could not get used to the way it leaned over with him as he bent to loosen a wheel, crowded him around the corner of the hen coop. The dog, the hens, Jase. He was as isolated in his life as an exhibit. The farmhouse was barely furnished. The filmed windows reflected back his own face, his grizzled jowl, arms akimbo or hands half opened like someone moving toward a dancing partner.

He turned the kitchen radio up loud in the morning and only shut it off when he went to bed. On the dresser the old black and white television boomed tin laughter, and the other radio on the chair that served as his bedside table chattered along comforting with rosaries of songs repeated again and again, and again and again the excited voice crying, ‘National shoes ring the bell!’ until he fell asleep, and in his sleep half-heard, under the wind, voices laughing between the music like a distant family, the crackling of galaxies in static.

Through that autumn the drought did not break. Jase took a back turn and again went to the VA hospital every day. The equinoctial dry storms came, wind and soil and locked knots of tumbleweed bouncing across the fields, gathering fellow weeds as they rolled, spraying the earth with seed. He’d hear them at night working up against the house with muffled scratches.

The last week in October, beans still in the row, the wind was a tidal wave from the west tearing over the earth. The house shuddered. Loyal sat on the edge of his bed writing in the Indian’s book, now a green-paged bookkeeper’s ledger with vertical columns for income and debits. The farm was blowing away. The sky choked with dust, the stars smothered. The house nearly lifted on its foundations, the windows nearly cracked. The dog was tormented by the wind in the chimney. Only Loyal’s pen, moving blackly, fluidly, was calm.

‘Stung by a yellow jacket on thumb. Beans almost ready. Few more days. Wind strong all day. How is Jase doing.’

In the morning his bedroom was muffled. He sat up, looked at the watch on the bedside chair and saw half past seven, full day and yet the room was dim. He could barely hear the wind, but he could feel it in the tremor of the bed. The window was covered with
something, something like a choke of willow in spring runoff. He went to it and stared, drawn face reflecting in the glass, recognized tumbleweed, tumbleweed massed up against the second-story window.

All across the open land the wind had driven the balls of weeds, herding them until they hung up on barbwire or jammed against buildings and corrals, extending out into barrier reefs. He went downstairs. Pitch dark. He could not get the kitchen door open. He threw his weight against it. It gave an inch or two, then bounced back like a rubber door. He turned on the radio but the power was out.

Back upstairs a clearer light came from under the door of the spare room. This window, on the lee side of the house, was empty. He looked out. The wind was still streaming across the prairie, tumbleweed vaulting through dust. Tumbleweed was packed up ten feet and more below him, forced around the corner of the house from the weed-flooded yard at the front. He didn’t want to shinny down a rope of sheets into the tangle below, then fight to where the front door had been the night before and wrestle tumbleweeds as big as trucks, but he couldn’t think of another way. Take down part of the fence, maybe, so the weed could pass through.

Coming down the sheets he heard the sirens off to the west. Somebody hit one of those things at speed on the road and it would turn you over he thought. The sheet twisted on its knots. Never get them knots undone, he mumbled under his breath, and felt the hump of tumbleweed quiver beneath his feet.

The yard was filled with tumbleweed balls as big as chairs, as big as cars. The fence was down. The fence was the problem. It had funneled the weed to the house. His truck was in the weed. He could see the glint of glass, but couldn’t work through the wiry Turk’s head knots of twisted stems. The wind still rolled them along. He saw the great balls bound on the highway. He heaved at a cluster on the edge of the yard but they were knit together, springy and resilient. And dry as a bone. The brown stems cracked in his hand, powder spilled from the pith.

‘I’ll need a goddamn backhoe to get out of this.’ The dog was barking inside the house. ‘Unless you’re smart enough to climb down a knotted sheet that’s where you’re going to stay for a while,’ he called.
The sirens wailed again and he looked west in the direction of the sound. There was a pillar of smoke. Was Shears on fire? Was Jase gone wild? He started to run along the road, looking back over his shoulder to flag a ride when someone came along.

It was a stake truck from Wallace Doffin’s dude ranch, the Walldolf Astoria. Wally himself, seventy years old, clenched the steering wheel, peered at Loyal from under his ruined Stetson.

‘Well, where’s your truck, Mr. Blood? She break down on you?’ His jocular voice boomed.

‘Damn tumbleweed’s jammed all around it, jammed the front door, jammed the yard out to the fence.’

‘I’ve always favored a door that opens in, Mr. Blood. It seems best in heavy snowfall country or when you’re under attack by the tumbleweed. I take it you are offering succor?’

‘I’m offering to find out if that smoke is coming from Shears.’ The pale smoke writhed in the wind.

‘Oh, it’s not Shears’s place, Mr. Blood, not yet, anyway. In about half an hour perhaps it will be. It’s the McDonald’s.’ The milky eyes peered forward at the shifting haze, ‘If I was you, I’d be worried, Mr. Blood. Your place is due east of Shears’s. But then, you have no stock.’

‘Three miles east. Like to hope it’s not coming that far. And I got fifty leghorns.’

‘Oh, leghorns. Prime stock, I imagine. Hope and pray, Mr. Blood. She could be at your place in an hour.’ He slowed as they neared Shears’s turn-in. A cacophony of squeak swelled from the hogs. Old Shears and his two wheat-farmer sons were goading the animals into a truck as fast as they could work. Orson ran over.

‘Jesus Christ I’m glad to see you Wally, you too, Blood. We got to get ’em out as fast as we can. The goddamn fire’s all over the place.’

Jase and old Shears prodded the panicky hogs up the ramp. Loyal looked at Jase. He glanced up, nodded.

‘Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!’

‘Dad, might have to let the rest go, let them take their chances.’ The wall-eyed Pego, his face transformed by the seriousness of the danger into a red mask glazed with sweat.

‘Chances? Unless there’s a pig here can run sevendy mile an hour, his chances is fuck-all he roast while he run. I ruther get ’em down to the pond. I seen pigs come through a fire by going in a pond. You go open that pond gate, we’ll see if we can’t get them down there by the truck. They can make it in the pond. If they can make it anywhere.’

‘Mr. Shears, I sent word down the line that you needed trucks here. We will see reinforcements soon.’ Doffin’s courtly voice.

Loyal was puzzled by the Shears’s mad haste, the hogs ricocheting off the walls of the pens. He looked west again toward the smoke, saw a brown wall and at its base dots of sparking fire.

‘There’s one!’ shouted Shears, pointing. One of the dots rolled obliquely across the highway and hit the fence. A string of smoke rose from it. Loyal saw that the tumbleweed was on fire, globes of flame running before the wind.

Under the sound of wind and crackling they hardly heard the two stock trucks come in from the east, the biggest one driven by Pearly-Lee, Dirty David’s cigar-smoking wife.

‘Hey, I heard you got some hogs you might want moved?’ she screeched at old Shears, laughed. As soon as Jase moved the filled truck out she began maneuvering the truck into place. Dirty David slid out of the cab while the truck was still moving.