The names were on the mailboxes: Guyon, Hylan, Barrett, Agricola...
The dirt road went off to the right, fenced in barbed wire on both sides. On its left was a cornfield, on its right a grazing pasture. Ahead, the road ran into a copse of trees.
I didn’t want to go in that road, on which I would be open and exposed and trapped, while there was any chance I’d meet those two killers coming the other way. So I went past the entrance, and down the road a ways farther, and where a tree had fallen over to make a natural bench beside the road I sat down to wait.
It was getting to be late afternoon now, the sun losing some of its warmth, the breeze adding to its chill. I lit a cigarette, and scuffed my feet around a little in the dirt beside the road, and sat on the fallen tree, and wondered what I was doing here.
Trying to save my life, I supposed.
Though it did take some of the heart out of the expedition to have Uncle Al turn traitor that way. And having those two guys in their black car show up everywhere I went was beginning to give me the willies.
What if I couldn’t convince Agricola? What if he wouldn’t listen to me? What if he took one look at me, realized who I was, and started shooting?
If only I had a gun of my own, I could hold it on him and force him to listen to me while I talked. If I had a gun. And if I wouldn’t be too scared to use it, which I would be.
Sitting there on the tree, thinking about things, I began to get myself more and more frightened and more and more depressed. Surely the best thing for me to do was go away to Mexico or Tierra del Fuego. Regardless I had only seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents. I could stow away on a ship, on a plane. I could hitchhike to Mexico. In Brasilia perhaps I could find a job, learn the language — could Portuguese be learned? — and build a new life for myself.
But I knew it was a false dream. Wherever I might try to hide, from Aabenraa, Denmark, to Zywiec, Poland, they would find me. From Zululand to Afghanistan, from Etah to Little America, the wrath of the organization would seek me out. There was no use trying to run away from the organization. All I could hope to do was convince the right people that I wasn’t someone they wanted to kill after all.
Down the road, the black car nosed out into view. I tensed; they were returning to action, armed with fresh orders from their boss, off again in their search for me.
The car turned right. Toward where I was sitting.
My first instinct was to throw myself on the ground behind the fallen tree, put my face in the grass and my arms up over my head, and await my end in as cowardly a manner as possible. But I resisted; all was not lost, not all, not entirely. They couldn’t be expecting to see me here, and that was to my advantage.
So all I did was fold my arms in front of myself, to hide the shortness of the jacket sleeves, and lean forward with my head slumped as though I were asleep. I was well aware what an inviting target I made for a hit-and-run accident, my bent head sticking out there just at headlight height, but I locked every nerve and every muscle and every joint, and I waited.
The black car rolled by me, with a purr of engine and a hiss of tires. I sagged a bit, in relief, but otherwise held my pose until I was sure they were out of sight. Then I sat up, and looked to left and right, and I was alone on the road.
Now there was no longer any excuse to stall. The black car was gone, I was all alone and unobserved. I had come here to see Agricola; now was the time.
I got to my feet, heavy-footed with reluctance, and started walking.
Chapter 7
It was a long way in. The first part, between the pasture and the cornfield, I felt as obvious and exposed as the last house standing in the Dust Bowl, and when I got to the cover of trees without incident I had to stop a minute to calm my nerves and wipe my brow and wind my courage up again.
Also to get off the dirt road. This copse of trees was thick with underbrush, but I preferred to fight my way through a thicket or two than be caught on that road by Agricola or any of his henchmen. So I labored along, not as quiet as a Cooper Indian nor as fast, but progressing.
What I was blundering through was a slender arm of forest reaching down between two cleared sections. The farmhouse, when I finally saw it through the trees, stood in lonely grandeur in the middle of a huge clearing all its own. I looked at it, and depression got a fresh new grip on me.
The building itself didn’t register with me at all, to begin with; only that blank open grassy expanse stretching between me and it. Agricola, I knew, must have had this in mind when he moved into yon house; the business he was in, it must be reassuring to know no one can sneak up on you.
So what to do? Wait till darkness? But it was now barely three-thirty in the afternoon, and besides, if this was Agricola’s defense against a brutal world in the daytime, what would his defense be like at night? Floodlights at the very least, and maybe armed guards. Visions of slavering dogs leaped in my head.
Better in than at. I struck out across the open ground toward the house.
Every nerve-ending in my body developed radar, and they all detected the same thing: machine guns in every window of the house, all aimed at me, all waiting for me to get just a step closer, two steps closer, just a little, little closer...
I kept walking. Nothing happened, and I kept on walking, following again now the dirt road, and ahead of me the house loomed larger and larger.
It was a farmhouse, that’s all, of the afterthought variety. Someone had built an ordinary rectangular farmhouse, two stories high, with a bit of a porch in front, and with an A-shaped roof sloping front to back, the roof bulging with two dormers, and then rooms and rooms and rooms had been added as afterthoughts. A chunk had been stuck on at the left side, as full of windows as the bridge of a Staten Island ferry; possibly a solarium or a hothouse or who knew what. Another chunk on the right, windowless. A chunk on the top of the solarium, with modern crank windows instead of the old-fashioned kind on the rest of the house. More chunks, here and here and here, most of them in approximately the same clapboard as the original house, but with a final concrete-block addition on the left and something that looked like aluminum siding used on one second-story chunk on the right. The result, sort of Grant Wood flaccid, had been painted maroon and left for dead.
The dirt road, in its last stages toward this stack of building parts, stopped being a dirt road and started being a blacktop road. The pasture, too, having been pruned and watered, had graduated to a lawn. The blacktop road cut across this lawn, turned right at the house in order to go past the front door, and turned left again to go around the side of the house to the back. A gray Lincoln Continental was parked in the sunlight at the side of the house, facing me with Chinese eyes and a grille that laughed in evil anticipation.
I attained the blacktop. No gunshots, no guards, no slavering dogs. Nothing but silence and sunshine and the maroon house and me walking forward and the Oriental Continental. I kept walking, breathing from time to time through an extremely narrow opening in my throat.
I got all the way to the front door, and still nothing had happened. I stopped there at last, close enough to the door to touch it, and wondered what I should do next.
Just knock, and wait? But a servant, I assumed, would answer, or maybe a bodyguard. Anyway, not Farmer Agricola himself, that was for sure. And whoever it was, I could visualize the conversation:
“Mr. Agricola, please.” “Who’s calling?” Charles Poole.” “Bam! Bam!”
Some other way then. The thing to do was sneak into the house somehow and see if I could find Agricola alone. Then, if only I could talk fast enough and convincingly enough, maybe he’d listen.