Cicada (9 page)

She offered to break their awkward moment when he didn’t speak further after several long seconds. “You break down?” she asked.

“Break down?” he parroted her dumbly, before catching himself. “Um, no. I just was…. Say, you sure are out here a ways.”

“Not really. We have a place just around yonder.” The young woman barely motioned with an index finger to indicate some place unknown to John that lay farther up the road. “I was checking in on a neighbor,” she added. “She’s elderly. You know…with the heat and such as it’s been.”

“Yeah. No…that’s right Christian of ya. So y’all moved into those, um…yeah.”

“Yeah, that’s us,” she said with a shake of her head and a bit of laughter. “You’re the one out a ways. Lost?”

“Lost? No. I’ve lived around these parts my whole life. Couldn’t lose myself if I wanted to.” As he spoke he tasted the gun oil again. It seemed to be the only thing keeping his cottonmouth at bay. “Name’s John. John Sayre.”

Cicada considered his hand as he held it out to her. They were the calloused hands of a farmer. Beneath the nails were the traces of diesel, grease, and earth, the skin of his knuckles cracked and pink from toil. She paused just long enough to make him uncomfortable, but then stepped forward shyly and shook his hand just when he thought she might not.

“Hello, John Sayre. I’m Cicada.”

She expected some sort of ridiculous remark at her introduction, the kind that she’d become all too used to. To her surprise, however, John only returned her coy smile and said, “Nice to make your acquaintance, Cicada.”

John teased a loose stone on the macadam at his feet with the toe of his work boot. Cicada watched him closely, not sure herself of how they were to proceed, and that was when fate intervened.

A truck—nearly as rust brown in color as the dried mud that spackled almost the whole of it—suddenly hurtled around the curve in the road less than a quarter of a mile behind them. It slid crazily off the hardtop and then back on again, snaking and spitting up gravel and earth as it did. Cicada turned to face it, but stood fast at her place in the middle of the road, momentarily dumbstruck by the unexpected intrusion. Fortunately, John had the presence of mind to reach out and pull her to him. The truck sped by in a matter of seconds with a blast of wind and noise. The radio blared out static-laced country music that was all but incomprehensible amongst the roar of the engine and the rumble of massive tires. In its wake the truck carried along a foul mix of dust and exhaust, with the latter pouring out thick from its sick, oil-burning engine. The filth on the windshield and the glare of the sun had concealed the occupants until the last moment, but as it passed, the passenger, a gap-toothed man that John knew, but would’ve rather not, leered over a dangling sun-burnt arm.

John and Cicada just had time to look to one another and then back to the barreling truck before it shuddered to a skidding halt a few hundred yards up the road. Neither John nor Cicada could hear its radio anymore, but the over-throttled engine shook the chassis with a rumbling idle that sounded something like an angry animal. The tailgate was the vehicle’s most remarkable feature now. The stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag painted over its entirety. Even from the distance, it was clear that it wasn’t a professional job. The colors were accurate enough, but the two crossing bars weren’t the same thickness, with some stars along them unequal and uneven in spacing and dimensions. Furthermore, those stars along the upper right hand portion of the flag were squished together so tightly that the last two looked like a dividing amoeba.

Three pounds of stupid in a two pound sack
, John had remarked once to his wife when they’d first seen the truck some years earlier.

Above the flag, through the haze of exhaust, heat, and more dirty glass, the head and shoulders of the three occupants—as tightly squeezed together as the stars of the tailgate’s flag—could just be made out bobbing about excitedly inside the cab.

“You need a ride somewheres?” John offered to Cicada without taking his eyes off of the idling truck.

“Sure, yeah. Thanks.”

Normally John would have opened the door for a woman, but on this occasion he stood motionless as she stepped around to let herself in. It was only when he remembered the pistol on the floorboard that he moved quickly to get in before she could. In one swift motion he leapt up into the cab, and, as he leaned over to open her door, he used his heel to kick the gun up under the seat.

“I’m just up the road here a piece,” she said as she slid in.

John stared at the truck still waiting in the middle of the road in front of them and then he looked across to Cicada who didn’t take her eyes off the crooked flag.

“You got a little time for a ride?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“I was thinking of driving over the Little Wassee Bridge to see if the old boys are catching anything,” he said, pointing a thumb back over his shoulder.

Cicada glanced behind them following John’s gesture and then looked back ahead to the truck barring their way. “Sure. Why not? That’d be…
fun
,” she said. It sounded more like she was admitting to having a stomachache.

“Great.”

John turned the engine over and began backing up quickly, both of them silently thankful that the other truck stayed in place. As John sharply swung his truck around back onto the road, pointing it in the other direction all in one swift motion, they both couldn’t help but notice as the handgun slid free from where moments ago he’d kicked it into concealment up under his seat. John looked down at it and then back up in time to see the young woman do the same.

With the heel of his boot John slid the gun back into the dark beneath him and so they drove on in silence.

“How long you been a farmer?” Buckshot inquired. It was his seventh or eighth question in half as many minutes.

“I don’t know…long time,” Ben answered from somewhere beneath the weathered, once-bright-green John Deere tractor. Only his lower half, soiled blue jeans and scuffed work boots, had been visible for the whole of this, their first conversation. Above Ben’s head, the otherwise quiet engine was still clicking and ticking, radiating off the heat it had accumulated before malfunction had silenced it. The man and the boy were well out in the far, freshly-tilled fields of the Sayre farm, and so other than the engine’s small sounds and their brief conversation, the world was quiet.

“You must be fierce hot up under there, huh?” Buckshot prodded. He was straddling the frame of his bicycle with his arms folded over the handlebars.

“Mm-hmm,” Ben agreed.

Even if the little white boy didn’t know it, he’d made a good point. Ben didn’t possess much in know-how in the ways of mechanics, certainly not enough to spend fifteen minutes staring dumbly at the underside of a tractor in search of the elusive cause of the damnable thing’s cantankerous sputtering and repeated stalling. He slid out. He wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers and unclasped the engine hood and peered once more at the mysterious collection of metal innards within. Unfortunately for Ben there was still no obviously loose wire, dangling hose or broken belt offering a ready and quick solution.

“Where are your tools? Can’t see how ya can fix no tractor engine without tools. If ya had some, I could help. I’m real good at help on account of I know the names of most tools and so when ya ask I could hand ‘em to ya.”

With a look that conveyed as much as words could have, Ben burned with frustration over his shoulder down onto the boy who’d eased ever-closer on his bicycle. The big man’s stare made Buckshot nervous, and he realized he was probably
running off at the mouth again
, as his father, John, sometimes scolded. Nonetheless, Buckshot was for the moment bored, and forever persistent, so he held his ground.

“I like to help,” he said, kicking a clump of tilled earth.

“I can see that.”

Buckshot squinted as he looked up again at Ben, who seemed, Buckshot thought at that moment, almost big enough to block out the whole bright sky of that summer’s incredible sun. Ben finally shook his head and chuckled, a sound that the boy appreciated greatly. The farmhand carefully secured the hood and with a grunt he clamored back up into the driver’s seat.

“I don’t think your ol’ man would appreciate it none too much if I run his tractor into the ground way out here in the field, do you?”

“No, sir.”

He considered the boy more closely for a moment more before a friendly smile came to the big man, and then the farmhand suddenly called out as if he were directing a fellow cowboy in a cattle drive.

“You ride on ahead and get that barn door open for me, ya hear. We’re taking her in!” And then he added under his breath, “If the damned thing can make it that far.”

“Yes, sir!”

As the old tractor coughed and startled to life once more, Buckshot took the lead, racing down a rut in the field, happy to help, just as he’d made claim.

Back in the utility barn—the smaller of three on the property where the tractor stayed parked when not in use—the air was almost cool in comparison. Cooler, but still far from comfortable. Buckshot stood at the open doorway waving madly as if Ben needed his direction to successfully navigate the tractor into its place.

“Clear way now!” Ben yelled as he passed. His direction was just as superfluous; Buckshot had already scurried away.

As if seeming to somehow know that it was where it belonged and sensing no more was required of it, the tractor coughed and stalled even as Ben was reaching forward to cut the ignition, just managing to roll into the indentions in the earth where it was kept.

“We made it!” Buckshot over-dramatically proclaimed. His was the breathless relief of a bomber co-pilot to his comrade after the safe landing of their badly-crippled flying fortress, managed home against all odds on little more than prayer and favorable winds.

“Yeah, mighty, we just did at that,” the pilot acknowledged.

Ben stayed seated atop the old tractor looking over it with a mother’s concern as his eyes adjusted to the shadows of the barn. After a moment he reached over his head with both of his massive arms and pulled off his soiled cotton t-shirt. There in the half-light, the sweat that glistened off his skin gave him a ghostly sheen along his otherwise darkened form.

Beneath him, where he’d crept up, Buckshot was still heaving from the trek from the far field when Ben finally turned his gaze on the boy. Pedaling through the tilled dirt had been more than tiresome.

“Hot, ain’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why don’t ya go see if your ma ain’t got no lemonade made for us while I wash up out by the pump,” Ben said, examining his palms before wiping them on his trousers.

“Okay,” Buckshot agreed but didn’t make a move to go.

“Well?”

“Hey, Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“How can you colored folks tell if y’alls’ hands are dirty?”

It was the simpleminded question of a child, not meant to be an insult. Ben knew this, but he couldn’t help but feel the sting all the same. His throat clenched and he had to make an effort to keep his hands open.

“You best be goin’ now,” Ben said.

“I’ll bring ya lemonade?” Buckshot offered. He knew he’d angered Ben, but his innocence allowed the reason to elude him.

“I don’t reckon I need no lemonade,” Ben said as he stepped down from the tractor and glared at the boy until the child stumbled out of the barn and back into the heat.

With Buckshot gone, Ben’s anger further got the better of him. The big man struggled to breathe evenly as his heart pounded and tears welled. It was the first such emotion he’d released since the passing of his mother and it swept over him like a levied tide that would be held at bay no more. He cried for his lost mother and his frustration and love for her, and he cried for his own loathing and self-pity. All his life he’d struggled with his pride and now his pride had him pinned down. He was all too aware of how he looked and that didn’t help matters either. As the tears began to flow he leaned into the tractor and began gently patting the crown of his head with just the palm of one hand as if he were his own mother come to console his woes. It’d been a long time coming.

“Busted down by a lil’ boy,” he chided himself aloud, only to then be surprised with a fit of laughter.

He wasn’t any more certain as to why he laughed than he understood why he’d wept. But just as the tears had welled, so did his throaty laughter. Before he knew it, he was collapsed against the old John Deere heaving in a fit as though drunk.

High overhead, hidden in the shadows of the rafters it’d only recently come to call home, a lonely little screech owl ruffled its feathers and stretched its talons in consternation for the disturbance from below that had troubled its sleep.

Buckshot listened from outside the barn. The mystery of what he’d done to make the big man go so mad both confused and frightened him. Finally, when Ben eventually grew silent, Buckshot ran away across the field and into the wood, smothered in a fit of panic almost as great as he had known when he’d discovered Raymond Stout.

Things had progressed almost as if out of his and Cicada’s control. Or so John had tried to fool himself. Certainly it was no mere coincidence for the young woman to have discovered him that day, moments away from committing his soul to damnation by throwing away God’s greatest gift. Or so the troubled man had also concluded. He’d tossed beneath the covers the next few nights after their first meeting, and by the dawn of the third day he’d resolved to head over to her home under the dubious pretense that he wanted to meet her brother, Benjamin, to offer the man a job. She’d told John a great deal about her brother and uncles as the two of them stared out over the waters of the Little Wassee River, acting much like teenagers struggling to make awkward conversation, yet eager to do so all the same.

“The man needs a job, an’ I need a hand,” John said out loud in argument to his nagging conscience while driving over after deciding to skip breakfast.