Kings of the Earth: A Novel (5 page)

Audie

I
HEARD
V
ERNON
say it wasn’t pixie dust but wires, but I never seen any wires myself.

Donna

T
OM CAME OUT
carrying a canvas gym bag that belonged to his father. It was green and it said
CASSIUS COUNTRY CLUB
on the side and it bore the club’s crest, crossed irons on a shield of gold with a white-tailed deer rampant. The bag was heavy and the boy hauled it that way. Inside it were his schoolbooks and his gym uniform and the harness of thick leather straps and cotton webbing and brass clips and sliders that he wore so as to be lifted up and swung out over the stage. The other cast members, older than Tom and at home in the high school building, kept theirs in their lockers and donned them in the boys’ and girls’ rooms before putting on their costumes. The director made an exception for Tom and let him change at home, which made for an uncomfortable car ride. He’d taken it off in the boys’ room because it chafed, and with his free hand he was rubbing alternately at his shoulder and his crotch as he came.

The brothers cheered when he and Donna emerged from around the corner. Creed put two fingers in his mouth and blew a salute. Vernon fell to one knee and held his arms out. Audie stretched out his arms too but without kneeling down, as if Tom might possess the power to fly straight into them from where he stood.

“Hey,” said Tom.

“Boy, you done great,” said Vernon.

“You was a regular Buddy Ebsen out there,” said Creed.

Tom smiled down at the floor.

“OK, Mr. Movie Star,” said his mother. “How about persuading your uncles to let me give them a ride back to the farm.”

He tried but they wouldn’t budge. Vernon said he didn’t deserve to ride alongside a big shot like Tom so he’d just stick to the tractor. Creed asked Donna if she’d hired a limousine or some other such transport as befitted a luminary like Little Buddy Ebsen and when she said no he feigned disappointment and said he’d find his own way home. Donna screwed up her face and balled up her fists and told them that they could freeze stiff on that tractor for all she cared, but that didn’t budge them either, so she quit.

The lot was nearly empty when they went out. The sky was crowded with stars, millions upon millions of them hung in black space so deep as to transcend vision and confound it. Audie looked up and stumbled over a curb and windmilled his arms, falling and falling into the populous sky until Vernon caught him by the straps of his overalls and set him right. Donna and Tom got into the car and drove off. The brothers climbed aboard the Farmall and Vernon pulled out the choke and started it up and let it run for a minute. It shook like a dog fresh out of a lake. They shook along with it and the stars shook too on the backs of their eyes. After a while the engine smoothed out some and Vernon pushed the choke in and it settled down. Sparks flew out of the muffler and scrambled upward into the cold night.

Vernon hollered at his brothers to hang on as he jammed in the clutch and threw it into gear. The transmission had a kick like a mule and with that tricycle setup in front the whole thing turned on a dime no matter how old and ill used it was. Vernon straightened out the wheel and they leaned to one side and came straight again and went lumbering down the access road to the highway, and once they were away from the lights Creed leaned over and shouted into his ear. “Turn off and go cross-lots why don’t you,” he hollered. “Save time.” He pointed, his arm stiff in the starlight. So Vernon cranked the wheel, cutting north over the outer limits of the big lawn, past the tennis courts, leaving a three-part trail of dark ruts in the wet spring grass. If you can’t take advantage of it now and then, why drive a tractor in the first place.

Preston

I
SAW THEM
coming up the road in the dark. The tractor had two headlights on it and only one of them seemed to be working and even that one was kind of dim and crusted over. It cast a yellow light that wobbled. I’d never seen it lit up before but all the same it’s how I recognized them coming up the road. Who else would it have been? That one headlight was the only bright thing for miles around except the lamppost at the end of my little gravel driveway, the one I’d put on a timer a year or two before. Their farm was dark as always and the roads were dark too. The only light over there most times is the TV, and it was an old set when they got it and it gives off a blue light and they sit there in that light still. I don’t know what all they get out of watching it. They just look at cop shows and lawyer shows like everybody else. I don’t have much use for television, so I was sitting in the front room with a book in my lap when I saw them coming up the road.

I set down my reading and I went. I put on my jacket and I stood on the porch and I watched that little yellow light come passing back and forth up the dirt lane among the fields. If it’d been high summer and the corn was up I’d never have seen it, but this was in the springtime and there wasn’t anything in the ground yet.

They rounded the one last curve onto that level stretch past my lamppost and in the light of it I saw Vernon at the wheel as usual, with Creed beside him holding on. They were both looking steady and hard into the night as if they’d been expecting trouble all the way from town and hadn’t seen any of it yet but wouldn’t quit looking out for it just in case. Behind them with his feet hooked on a piece of plow chain was Audie, balanced on the back end of that tractor like some kind of trick rider. He had his eyes shut tight and his arms out to both sides like wings, and he was flying. Flying on that tractor in the dark. All the way up the road from town.

DeAlton

N
OW THIS HAS GOT
to be the shortest goddamned par-three in the state. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed to bring you out here and have you see it, but there it is.

I know you don’t play much and that’s fine. I understand. It’s still good to get out, though. I never played much myself until a few years back and if I had nothing but this course to play on I don’t believe I’d play at all. You start getting a little good it bores you right to death. Someday we’ll go play Green Lakes. Now there’s a course. It’s a state park but it’s a nice course all the same. Your tax dollars at work. Might as well make use of it.

Shit. That’s all right. Take another ball and we’ll act like it never happened. I got plenty.

You know who owns this land? Same old fellow owned it all along. He just leases it to the club. It takes a certain kind of individual to turn good farmland into something as useless as a golf course. I’d say it takes imagination. It takes a different turn of mind from other folks. He does all right with it, though. He does all right. Don’t you worry about him. Me, I’m the same way. I guess that makes me the black sheep of my family but that’s all right.

No, you’re fine. That’s fine. You don’t have to call fore if the ball’s headed straight into the cornfield. Just kidding. Really. Here.

Anyhow, I’m the one struck out on my own. Went to work selling for Roy Dobson, as you well know.

Yeah, old Roy’s still around. Absolutely. His name’s on the building and he’s still around all right. But he hasn’t had a fresh idea in thirty or forty years, so he uses me to have his ideas for him. You didn’t hear it from me but that’s mostly what he pays me for. You know how it is. Sometimes a man’ll have one good idea and he’ll keep on riding on it as long as he can and you can’t blame him for that, especially if it makes him a fortune. Roy’s a fine gentleman and he’s made his fortune all right. The only problem is he thinks since a cow’s udder hasn’t changed in a million years he doesn’t need to change the machine that milks it. Like I said, I’m the black sheep.

Here, let me help you line this one up.

So I grew up in the muck on my old man’s onion farm out past Wampsville, and as soon as I could cut loose I cut loose and I went. I never once looked back. Not once. My boy, he’s the same way. He was born independent. It comes naturally to him and he can’t help it. A while back I arranged things so he could come work for Roy, learn the ropes, come up through the ranks like I did, but he wasn’t having any of it. Can you imagine that? It hurt my feelings a little bit, I don’t mind telling you. Then Tommy took that two-year college education of his and what did he do with it but start working construction over in Utica. Can you imagine that? Talk about a black sheep.

Just go on tap that one in and we won’t even count it.

He did get some of my instincts for the business world, though. That boy won’t stay in construction forever, and you can bet money on that. Old Tommy’s always got a couple of irons in the fire. Just like his old man.

Tom

I
T WAS BETWEEN
eight and nine and the shadows were getting long when Tom Poole came tearing up the dirt lane to his uncles’ place. He parked the pale blue VW fastback in front of the barn and he jumped out and slammed the door behind him as if he hated that damned car, which he did.

“You working late?” Creed’s high and reedy voice, from the shadows of the barn.

“I
been
working late and now I’m starting the second shift.” As if it was his uncle’s fault.

The construction project in Utica had gone into overtime, which was just perfect for making Tom’s life miserable since he still had his plants to look after. His grandfather Poole had always said that there was no rest for a man who chose to make his way in an agriculturally-oriented endeavor, and the old man should have known what he was talking about since he was usually standing knee-deep in muck when the notion to pontificate came into his head. Tom hadn’t ever paid him much attention and he’d certainly never thought that the old coot’s useless wisdom would apply to him—first with his college plans and then with his construction job—yet here he was. Watching the sky and hauling fertilizer in a wheelbarrow. Calculating his yield and watching the market. Something told him that this was better than onions, but not by much. He hated onions. That was for sure. And he didn’t hate dope, except for the work and the uncertainty that went into growing it.

“I been working late myself,” said Creed, his voice whistling in the dark. He hadn’t stepped out of the barn and he wouldn’t. Let the boy come in if he had something to say.

But Tom didn’t go in. Last year’s crop was about used up and this year’s was coming on and he humped up the hill behind the cow pasture to see what was what. Hoping that he could get it harvested and dried and cured before the old supply ran out and he developed a cash-flow problem. He had his tools in his backpack. Not the tools from Utica, but his own. He knew he ought to take some other path up into the high field but there wasn’t ever time. He ought to park his car over on the Middle Road and cut through the woods on the back side of Preston Hatch’s property—either that or find some other way—but who cared. He hadn’t ever been caught and Creed hadn’t ever been caught running that old whiskey still out there either. History was on his side. History and habit and probably custom too.

Up the hill he went and down a little tractor path that was more like a game trail than anything ever made by a man, and then on through a break in the barbed wire that passed for a gate. It sagged and it dripped rust. You could close it up if you had work gloves or if you didn’t mind bleeding to death or if your hands were made out of elephant hide like his uncles’, but he never bothered. He passed through it and walked another thirty yards in the low sun over fallow land. After a while he came to a little patch of woods. His uncle Creed’s old still was hidden in the middle of it and his own marijuana plants were set all about the perimeter where they could get sun. The marijuana competed with fiddleheads and poison ivy and Queen Anne’s lace and a million other kinds of underbrush that he didn’t know by name. It was a mixed blessing. Competition and concealment both. There was a time when he’d cunningly set the individual plants among the cornrows, hiding them in plain sight and thinking to put his uncles to work without their even knowing it, but the old men had surprised him and gotten up there with the harvester when he wasn’t looking. A season’s worth of grass, straight into the silo. He’d hoped the cows had enjoyed it. Since then he’d come to put his trust in nature. He made do without irrigation, contrary to the conventional wisdom, relying instead on a creek from up in the hills that fed this whole area and kept it all more or less green and yielded up this little copse of trees and brush. The creek ran over a couple of little waterfalls where he’d spent plenty of happy hours as a boy, and it still managed to bring him delight—if only indirectly—now that he’d put away childish things.

It turned out the plants weren’t near ready yet, and he didn’t know whether to take that as an affront or a reprieve. He was prepared to begin trimming them and carrying them down to dry in the hayloft, and he was sure as hell eager to start turning his crop into cash, but on the other hand it was pushing nine o’clock and the air was still godawful hot and he was just plain beat from the overtime. How come the dope business was turning out to be so much like farming, anyhow?

Vernon was on the porch, collapsed into a great big overstuffed chair. Damp clouds of cotton wadding leaked out of it along every seam as if something inside it had blown up. Vernon sat plucking little bits of the wadding with one hand, rolling them into little pellets between his thumb and forefinger and flicking them into the yard and then starting again. He’d been squinting into the failing sun and waiting for Tom to come down from the high field, down through the pasture and along the fence and into the barnyard where he might either turn toward the house or just get into his car and go. Finally he showed up. He came around the corner of the barn and turned into the yard and the old man spoke to him, his voice coming out with a deep and penetrating kind of squawk, like the voice of a crow slowed down. “Watch your step among them whirligigs,” he said.

“I see them.”

“You’re always in a hurry.”

“I’m a busy man.”

“I guess.”

A light breeze had come up. It pulled the lace curtain out through the window and Vernon brushed it away from his face with one hand. The whirligigs in the yard veered as if they shared one mind among them, rotating to face away from the wind and begin their slow turning. Winged pigs and cows and horses. Chickens and geese and ducks. They creaked in the failing light and the sound of them drew Audie’s sharp face to the window from behind the curtain that his brother had pushed away. His eyes were vague and his long beard mingled with the lace curtain and he smiled through it as if he had just been reminded of something remarkable.

Tom came up on the steps and sat.

His uncle said, “I seen that crop of yours on television.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I seen it all right.”

From the window Audie muttered something either oracular or idiotic. Maybe words and maybe not.

“I seen it on that
60 Minutes
last week. They was saying it might do me some good.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Vernon.”

They sat for a minute and the wind kept up and the things in the yard kept turning. Audie said something to them, either to the things or to his relations, but he got no answer. Vernon worked at the chair. After a while a door opened somewhere and the lace curtain billowed out from the window and the door slammed and the curtain collapsed back in on itself.

Vernon did not so much as turn in the overstuffed chair. “That you, Creed?”

“Suppertime,” said Creed, in from the barn, standing by the dead refrigerator in the dark house. He took a plate of butter from on top of it and swatted away flies and set it on the table. Then he opened the refrigerator and took out half a loaf of bread and put that on the table too. The refrigerator was jammed with stuff but not much of it was food and not much of that was still worth eating. Audie moved from the window to the table and scraped back one of the three chairs and sat.

Vernon flicked away a pellet of cotton batting and held out his hand. “Help an old man up,” he said.

“If you sat on a straight chair,” Tom said, “this wouldn’t happen.”

“You don’t know.”

“I work alongside men older than you forty hours a week. Plus overtime.”

“Work,” said Vernon. He smiled and wheezed. “I know about work. You couldn’t kept up with me in my day.”

“You’ve still got your day, old man.” Tom stood and hauled Vernon to his feet. “It’s still your day, as far as I can tell.”

“I’m sixty years old.”

In the kitchen, without turning his head, Audie offered something by way of disputation.

“So I’m fifty-nine then. He’s right enough. I was born in the fall of twenty-five. I’m fifty-nine.”

“That’s not old.”

“I got a birthday coming.”

“I know.”

“My own mother died at fifty-six.” He shuffled toward the door. He was still half bent from sitting and he tilted forward, grimacing behind his beard. “She had the same cancer as me.”

Tom just shook his head. “When’d you last see a doctor?”

“I ain’t never seen a doctor. Not but that one time I got the blood poisoning.”

“So how do you know what you’ve got. If you’ve even got anything.”

“I know what I got. I seen it kill her. We all did.”

Tom held the door for him. “Go on in and have your supper,” he said. “Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

“I’ll feel better if you give me some of what you’re growing up by the still.” Vernon stepped into the inner dark. “That’s how I’ll feel better.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tom said.