The Beet Fields (6 page)

“Cards,” Bill said, and the boy saw he was dealing. “How many?”

One man took two, the other only one, and Bill laughed. “Shit, I need three.” And he dealt himself three cards.

The boy knew poker, as ä small boy had watched it played in bars when his mother was drinking and dragged him with her to chip joints in Chicago. A drunk named Casey had taught him the rules of poker when he was four and the boy had played it later, when he set pins in the bowling alley back home. He and the other pinsetters worked for seven cents a line and lived back in the pits where they drank Pepsi and peed out the back
window between lines. One of them had a deck of cards and when it was slow they played poker for pennies and the boy almost never won.

After the draw the man on Bill's left looked at his cards, holding them back against his body and staring down his nose, and smiled. “Your ass is mine this time,” he said to
Bill. “I'll
bet all
I
have.”

He counted money into the pot—it came to just under four thousand dollars, the man said aloud—and leaned back with the same smug smile on his face.

The other man smiled as well and called the bet and then raised what he had left, another seven thousand dollars. “If you've got the balls,” he said to Bill, “if you've got the balls…”

Here the bartender stepped in. He had been leaning back watching the game, his eyes worried. “You're betting your whole soil allo“I'ment money. This is nuts.”

“This,” Bill said, calling the raise, “is not nuts, this is poker. What have you suckers got?”

The man on the left had a jack-high straight and reached for the pot but the second man laid his hand down. “Flush,” he said, “king high.”

Bill had not even looked at his cards and he
held them up now and studied them and smiled and laid them down.

“Four ducks—four little deuces. Jeez, am I hot!”

The boy expelled breath and realized he'd been holding it all this time and Bui started to scoop the money in when the fight started.

“You son of a bitch! You held a pair of deuces and bet two grand?”

“When you're hot, you're—“
Bill
started, and the man on his left took a drunken roundhouse swing at him and hit him on the side of the tem-ple, knocking Bill away from the bar and on top of the boy.

“Stop this crap!“ the bartender yelled, but it was too late. Bill came up like a mad bull and charged into the stomach of the first man, driving him back away from the bar and into the wall. The third man, still standing at the bar, turned now and hit Bill first on the back of the head with his fist find then took another swing at the second man, catching him in the forehead.

Had they been sober any of the blows would have caused severe damage but they were all slow and their punches were flabby. The boy scrambled
out of the way and was going to watch until it was over but as the three men pushed and swore and bled and hit at each other they came rolling past the boy. Bill saw him and said through his teeth, “The money, get the goddamn money!“

The boy nodded and moved to the bar and grabbed the money. There was too much for his pockets, so he tucked his T-shirt in and jammed it down inside past his neck until the front of his shirt bulged with it.

The fight had moved toward the door and the bartender waited until the exact right moment and opened the door and kicked-pushed the men outside.

“I don't care what you do outside,” he said, turning back into the bar, “but I'm sick of you wrecking my bar.”

The boy ducked through the door after them, holding his arms across his belly to keep the money in, and watched the fight. But moving outside had changed the battle—with space around them they backed off, weaving drunkenly and holding their fists the way they thought fighters should hold their fists, taking ineffective jabs and trying footwork that couldn't be done sober in work boots
until finally Bill said, “Jeez, forget it, I'm going home,” and climbed in his pickup, started the engine" backed out and drove off, leaving the boy.

For a moment the boy stood there, realized that he had all the game money inside his T-shirt, and before they could figure that out he moved to the grain truck, started it and after some gear grinding backed it into the street, turned and followed the taillights of Bill's pickup moving away from town.

Bill stopped about four miles out of town and pulled over and was leaning on the fender of the pickup, vomiting, when the boy caught up with him. The hqy stopped the truck, put it in neutral, set the brake and climbed down.

“It goes away when I puke—always has,” Bill said when he stood up. “You got the money?”

Except for some vomit on his bib overalls and those sunken eyes Bill now looked stone-cold sober. The boy dug die money put of his shirt and handed it to Bill. “I never saw a game like that— so much money.”

“Last year it was Oleson's turn. It just goes around How pissed is she?”

“Who? Oh, you mean Alice.”

“Yeah.”

“She's mad. She called you a son of a bitch and said she'd handle you.”

“Ahh—that bad. Well, let's not tell her about the money. It would just confuse the whole thing for her.” Bill was lining up the bills and stacking them on the hood of the pickup and he held out a handful of money to the boy. “Here—your pay for the evening.”

The boy took the money and glanced at it in the light from the grain truck's headlights. He saw a fifty-dollar bill and many twenties and some tens and thought, Jeez, it must be at least two hundred dollars! He jammed it in his pocket and climbed up into the truck, waited for Bill to start off arid followed the pickup back to the farm, shifting loosely, easily, his arm propped on the window of the truck, driving with one hand, singing a Hank Williams song in harmony with the engine, his pockets full of money, and he thought, Hell, there ain't nothing to look back for—thinking it in melody like a country-and-western song, thinking, I've got it now, I've got it by the balls, and he smiled because he thought that was the way a man would think it, not a boy but a man.

T
HE BOY HAD JUST PUT HIS HEAD DOWN ON HIS
rolled-up pants that he used for a pillow, his pants with the money in the pockets, when he heard pounding on the trailer door and Bill was standing over the bunk with a flashlight.

Sleep was still in his mind and the boy opened his eyes and looked up into the light and said, “What's wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing's wrong, it's time to go to work.”

Bill turned and left and the boy started to lie hack, so hungry for sleep—it couldn't have been an hour—that his eyes almost
slammed shut, but Bill turned and pounded on the trailer again. “Come on, boy—we got work to do.”

And that time it worked and the boy slid out of the bunk and put his feet on the floor and pulled his pants on and went out to pee and eat a breakfast sandwich as Bill drove the truck to take him out to the field.

“How much money did I give you last night?” Bill asked while they were pouring diesel into the tractor from five-gallon cans.

“I don't know—I didn't count it yet,” the boy lied. He had counted it in the yard light coming through the window of the trailer before he went to sleep. A hundred and forty dollars Bill had given him.

“I don't want it back,” Bill said, reading his thoughts. “It wasn't a lot, was it? Like a thousand dollars or anything?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“I mean I don't care. I just need to know so I can tell how much I won.”

“A hundred,” the boy said. “A hundred and forty dollars.”

“Oh. Jeez, I was hoping it was more. I wanted
to go over twenty-one thousand—the way it is, I'm shy by seven hundred dollars or so,-'

“You won twenty thousand dollars?”

“Almost. But Oleson he won over twenty last year when we got our soil money from the bank and I just wish I could have won more than he did—you know, just to say it when we're sipping a beer and rub his ugly face in it“

He left the boy just as the sun edged up and the boy started discing on a field that was a mile long. It was all he could do to stay awake and finally he stood and sang at the top of his lungs to keep from falling asleep. He had decided to hell with it and vfos going to stop the tractor and sleep when he saw Alice coming with the pickup to bring the forenoon lunch.

He was moving close to the end of the field and she drove around and waited where he would end the round.

She smiled at him and gave him cake and sandwiches and a Thermos of coffee, which he drank first while it was still warm, hoping it would keep him awake.

She did not leave while he ate this time as she always had before but instead sat in the truck with
the door open while he sat on the ground leaning back against the wheel a few feet away chewing the food and staring out at nothing.

“Was there a woman?”

The question came so suddenly that the boy jumped. He looked at her. “What?”

“Woman,” she repeated. “Was there a woman?”

“I don't know what you mean—“

“I mean last night at the bar. I know he played poker. He's always a bad one for cards. And to drink now and then. I can understand that. But I want to know if he had a woman there at the bar with him when you went in for him. Was there a woman?”

He looked out across the field again, chewed and swallowed. It was a meat loaf sandwich and tasted so good he didn't want to swallow but keep chewing. “No. Just men.”

Alice looked intently at him for a moment, then nodded. “Good. I've put on weight these last two years and I worry that he'll go to wanting skinny women. I read about it in a magazine, that men want skinny women with big breasts. Is that right? Is that what men want?”

Talking like this made him uncomfortable,
made his stomach tighten, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye and saw that she had been pretty before the weight, and wasn't that fat and was still pretty, and he thought, I have never talked with a woman about breasts before and I am not a man to know what men want, but he remained silent and she kept talking.

Of course you read all these things and they don't mean Shinola but I did want to know if he bad a woman at the bar. Especially if she was a skinny woman…” She let it hang and he realized that he was expected to answer again.

“No No woman. Just men.” And he had to turn away because she was leaning forward and down from the cab and he could see the swell of her breasts above her dress and there was a little perspiration on them where they came together and he couldn't stop staring at them, at the dampness of them.

'Well, that's all for the good.” She straightened. “Are you done eating? I'd better get back to the house and start cooking dinner.”

She took the bucket and the Thermos of coffee and drove off and he went back to the tractor and started it and began to disc. He worked all
afternoon up to dark when he saw Bill coming for him and if he didn't force his mind to think of other things it stuck on the way Alice's breasts had looked with the faint sheen of sweat on them when she'd leaned down and asked if men liked skinny women with large breasts.

They drove into the yard just as it turned dark and the boy was so tired he'd fallen asleep in the truck. Because he was dozing it took him seconds to realize what Bill said as they turned into the driveway.

“Damn,” Bill mumbled. “A sheriff's car is here. I'll bet Oleson was pissed about losing that money and wants the law to get it back for him!“

Bill parked and they got out just as a deputy came from the house with Alice.

“He wants to talk to the boy,” Alice said to Bill, and the boy thought, Shit, the Mexicans were right. They have been looking for me.

“I got a report on a runaway and I heard you have a new hired kid out here,” the deputy said. He was tall and had a stomach that hung over his gun belt but his shoulders were wide and he looked strong. And mean, the boy thought— something about him had an edge.

“What's your name, boy?” the deputy asked, and the boy gave him a phony name.

“You got some paper with your name on it? A license or something?”

“No.”

“I think you're lying, boy. About the name. You come with me and we'll straighten it out.”

“Hell, Jacobsen, he's a good worker. There ain't nothing wrong with him.” Bill stopped him with a wave. “He busts his balls for me.”

“Fine. If he ain't the runaway I'll bring him back hère. But there's a poster and I've got to tell you he looks close to the picture. Get in the car, boy. The front seat.”

The inside of the squad car smelled like booze and puke and he setded into the seat with his knees near the shotgun bolted in the floor bracket and thought of how it would be to go home. He no longer had a home, in his mind, and if the sheriff had the right picture they would send him back and he didn't think he could stand it.

The deputy drove in silence—breaking it only to make a report on the radio—until they came to a town, the boy fighting sleep all the way so that
he missed the sign that said the name of the village.

“We get out here," the deputy said, parking by a two-story brick building and pointing to a side door. “Wait by that door. Don't run.”