Full Dark, No Stars

Yes, I thought, I’ve no doubt. But I’ll bet your name isn’t even on the door. The big boys back in Omaha don’t have to eat country dust to pay for their daily bread, do they? The big boys have got their feet up on their desks, drinking coffee and admiring the pretty ankles of their secretaries.

I said, “In that case, sir, why don’t you just go on and put that hand away? No offense.”

He did just that, and with a lawyer’s smile. Sweat was cutting clean lines down his chubby cheeks, and his hair was al matted and tangled from the ride. I walked past him to Lars, who had thrown up

the wing over his engine and was fiddling with something inside. He was whistling and sounded just as happy as a bird on a wire. I envied him that. I thought Henry and I might have another happy day—in a world as varied as this one, anything is possible—but it would not be in the summer of 1922. Or the fal .

I shook Lars’s hand and asked how he was.

“Tolerable fair,” he said, “but dry. I could use a drink.”

I nodded toward the east side of the house. “You know where it is.”

“I do,” he said, slamming down the wing with a metal ic clatter that sent the chickens, who’d been creeping back, into flight once more. “Sweet and cold as ever, I guess?”

“I’d say so,” I agreed, thinking: But if you could still pump from that other well, Lars, I don’t think you’d care for the taste at all. “Try it and see.”

He started around to the shady side of the house where the outside pump stood in its little shelter. Mr. Lester watched him go, then turned back to me. He had unbuttoned his duster. The suit beneath

would need dry-cleaning when he got back to Lincoln, Omaha, Deland, or wherever he hung his hat when he wasn’t doing Cole Farrington’s business.

“I could use a drink myself, Mr. James.”

“Me, too. Nailing fence is hot work.” I looked him up and down. “Not as hot as riding twenty miles in Lars’s truck, though, I’l bet.”

He rubbed his butt and smiled his lawyer’s smile. This time it had a touch of rue in it. I could see his eyes already flicking here, there, and everywhere. It would not do to sel this man short just because he’d been ordered to rattle twenty miles out into the country on a hot summer’s day. “My sit-upon may never be the same.”

There was a dipper chained to the side of the little shelter. Lars pumped it ful , drank it down with his Adam’s apple rising and fal ing in his scrawny, sunburned neck, then fil ed it again and offered it to Lester, who looked at it as doubtful y as I’d looked at his outstretched hand. “Perhaps we could drink it inside, Mr. James. It would be a little cooler.”

“It would,” I agreed, “but I’d no more invite you inside than I’d shake your hand.”

Lars Olsen saw how the wind was blowing and wasted no time going back to his truck. But he handed the dipper to Lester first. My visitor didn’t drink in gulps, as Lars had, but in fastidious sips. Like a lawyer, in other words—but he didn’t stop until the dipper was empty, and that was also like a lawyer. The screen door slammed and Henry came out of the house in his overal s and bare feet. He gave

us a glance that seemed utterly disinterested—good boy!—and then went where any red-blooded country lad would have gone: to watch Lars work on his truck, and, if he were lucky, to learn something.

I sat down on the woodpile we kept under a swatch of canvas on this side of the house. “I imagine you’re out here on business. My wife’s.”

“I am.”

“Wel , you’ve had your drink, so we better get down to it. I’ve stil got a ful day’s work ahead of me, and it’s three in the afternoon.”

“Sunrise to sunset. Farming’s a hard life.” He sighed as if he knew.

“It is, and a difficult wife can make it even harder. She sent you, I suppose, but I don’t know why—if it was just some legal paperwork, I reckon a sheriff’s deputy would have come out and served it on me.”

He looked at me in surprise. “Your wife didn’t send me, Mr. James. In point of fact, I came out here to look for her.”

It was like a play, and this was my cue to look puzzled. Then to chuckle, because chuckling came next in the stage directions. “That just proves it.”

“Proves what?”

“When I was a boy in Fordyce, we had a neighbor—a nasty old rip name of Bradlee. Everyone cal ed him Pop Bradlee.”

“Mr. James—”

“My father had to do business with him from time to time, and sometimes he took me with him. Back in the buckboard days, this was. Seed corn was what their trading was mostly about, at least in the

spring, but sometimes they also swapped tools. There was no mail-order back then, and a good tool might circle the whole county before it got back home.”

“Mr. James, I hardly see the rel—”