“That one?” Gordy pointed to the big yellow tractor sitting deeper in the shed. “The wheels are bald.”
“That’s why it’s so cheap.”
Gordy shook his head. “Then what? Go down to Florida with your dad?”
Dale grinned broadly. “Probably.”
“Well, good luck, Needle-Dick.”
Dale stood up and placed his hands on his hips. “Don’t call me that ever again.”
Gordy laughed and held out his hands and wiggled his fingers in a mock fright. “Oooh.”
“I mean it, I’m giving you fair warning,” Dale said calmly.
“Needle-Dick.” Gordy grinned, flipped Dale the bird, and walked out of the office. Dale watched him swagger back across the road, go up the porch, and disappear into the Missile Park.
Dale held his fists tight against his chest. Ten years Gordy had been picking on him.
He had lost his focus and now he had to get it back.
He took a couple of cold Cokes from the small refrigerator and tossed them in his backpack. People used to ride him about the pack. Just a tiny thing in his huge hands, the seams parting, yellow with a little blue butterfly on the flap. It had been his schoolbag in elementary school. Just room for two Cokes and a sandwich.
Methodically, he shut off the lights, locked the door, and walked to his ancient Grand Prix. Getting in, his boots poked around, stirring through a compost of hamburger wrappers on the floorboards.
The windshield was clouded with grime. Dale paid no mind. He started the car and drove north along the grid of roads through wind-rippled fields that were mostly empty. Here and there he saw a huge-wheeled tractor. The skeletal rails of a hay wagon. They were waiting on the crop to ripen. Waiting on the custom combiners to come through.
He poked the radio and KNDK came on with the weather for the Drayton, Walhalla, and Langdon area: cloudy and humid, ninety-two degrees. Legion baseball tonight, Langdon at Grafton. First pitch at 5:45, weather permitting. Dale turned it off when the Successful Farmers’ Radio Magazine theme music started up.
He thought of the deserted homes that dotted the fields. Successful farmers, my ass! The houses were just hulks, long since abandoned; the farm families who used to live in them had been torpedoed by consolidation and had sunk out of sight beyond the sea of wheat.
Finally he pulled into an overgrown driveway. He shut off the motor and listened to the buzz of the cicadas. The damp ferment of sodden crops rolled over him as he looked up the drive at the house. He had fields of his own in his chest. He could feel the waves of sadness rippling off to the horizon.
He heaved out and walked toward the peeling farmhouse. Every year it looked more tiny and more run-down. The wind had finally stove in the north end of the barn and now it sagged in on the foundation. The once vibrant red lumber had faded to gray splinters. The old pasture and truck garden were long since plowed up and put into wheat.
He heard a rasp of steel-sheets of rusty tin that had come loose on the Quonset shed in back of the house. A death rattle in the wind.
Hard to believe a family of five had lived in this tiny place. Two bedrooms upstairs, an alcove downstairs with a curtain on a runner for his sister. The old Fisher woodstove.
He stopped and stared at the blister packs of Sudafed torn open and littered on the steps. Rage stirred in his chest as he kicked through the wrappers that dotted the steps and the mud porch. Fuckers. They snuck in here and cooked meth.
He trudged up the stairs and into the room he’d shared with his brother until he was seven. The springs from his old bed lay in a rusted tangle next to the window. The springs creaked as he lowered his weight down on them.
Funny how he remembered this cramped house feeling so clean. Hell, the wind would sift the dust right through the walls. No way to keep the dirt out of the kitchen. But field dirt was different from town dirt. Dad used to say dirt with sweat in it wasn’t really dirty. Dale’s chest fluttered. Last time he remembered being happy was sitting here, looking out the window facing east, watching the sun rise over the fields.
During the time of the missiles.
His eyes fixed on an irregularity in the wheat two hundred yards away. He could barely make out the square of chain link and barbed wire. Once the power lived there, a hundred feet beneath his father’s field. A silo with a Minuteman II. Like his own scary genie.
Sixteen-year-old Ace would say to six-year-old Dale: “Enough power in our field to blow up half of Russia. Just in our field alone.”
There was bad mixed in with the good, like when he would wake up at night convinced he heard the remote controls snapping and hissing under the ground and he just knew the field was going to explode. That fire was going to fall from the sky.
He woke up screaming from the image of the cows and pigs burning up, the rabbits, the geese, the chickens.
Stubby, his cat. Shaggy, his dog.
Never people, though. He never saw people burning. Only animals.
The nightmares changed and he’d just wake up and sneak out and walk across the field and stand at the edge of the mowed grass belt around the wire and hold up his hands, palms out, and try to feel the power radiating out from the silo. Not too close, because they had remote sensors and the air-basers would come by helicopter to check. Little by little he overcame his fear and made friends with it and soon the dreams went away.
All that harnessed energy poised and quiet, down deep in the earth. Dale thought he could actually feel the power in the crops that pushed up out of the earth in the spring. Feel it brood beneath the winter snow. Hear it howl in the blizzard wind.
He’d watch the trucks come in when the air-basers checked the wire and the sensors. In the summer they came and mowed the offset perimeter grass around the wire. Sometimes he’d stand on the road and wave to them.
In the end, Army engineers came with explosives to implode the empty silos. Joe Reed, whom Gordy wanted back working for him, explained how they did it. Joe knew about explosives. He was an Ojibwa from the Turtle Mountain rez and he’d worked in the oil fields up in Alberta. Some folks called him Pinto Joe because of the patchy way his face healed after an oil well blew up on him.
So they blew them in on themselves and filled them with dirt and strung barbed wire around the sites so they looked like little graveyards dotting the wheat. Something about verification, like the empty silos left open for the ABM sites south on State 1, at Nekoma.
He looked up. Little empty graveyards, so the Russian satellites could count them.
Dale drew up his legs and hugged his arms to his chest. Sometimes he felt like a buried atomic bomb they’d missed when they’d pulled out the Minutemen and the Spartans and the Sprints. The missile fields had all gone to seed and fallow. But what if they missed one? What if buried deep under the wheat there was one last cone of latent power?
Poised.
Dale shut his eyes and imagined his gross body swept away in the launch flames. Then they’d see him for who he really was, a moment of beautiful fire and grace exploding into the sky.
The moment passed.
He clambered off the old springs and walked down the stairs, running his finger along the wall like he’d done every day of his childhood. He trudged through the rooms littered with wrappers and plastic bottles and went outside. He looked up at the heavy, roiling clouds, gravid with rain. Far to the west a shiver of lightning.
Dale looked up at the relentless clouds that combined and came apart against each other. The constant gray churn could be the gears of history up there, meshing, grinding out fate.
The future.
He went around back of the house and stood for a long time staring at a pile of meth trash. There were discarded coffee filters gummy with pink and white residue; plastic funnels; a cracked blender; aluminum foil boxes; discolored Pyrex dishes; plastic jugs; and a scorched twenty-pound propane cylinder.