The Daisy Ducks (23 page)

After the initial rush wore off, I felt sleepy. I
opened the camper windows to let the cool air in, turned down the
bunk bed, and went outside to sit over the fire while it died. From
far off down the hillside, I heard the faint sound of spring peepers,
those tiny tree frogs with the ultra-shrill voices. They seemed to be
out early. But then, I was hundreds and hundreds of miles south of
Boston. The fire died. It was not even ten, but I went inside the
camper, doused the lights, and crawled into bed. I decided to leave
it to fate. If I awoke early, I'd go have a look at Royce's farm. If
I slept through, then I'd stay put and spend the day reading. So be
it.
 

16

AT TWO-THIRTY, I found myself pulling on my thermal
underwear. I had gotten out of the bunk, found the clothing in a
drawer, and was putting it on even before I was fully conscious. Half
asleep, I sat at the dinette table and placed my Browning Hi-Power on
it. I slid out the magazine, which was filled with thirteen
nine-millimeter Luger rounds, hollow point. I squirted some WD-40 on
the magazine and the rounds. I wanted them to snake out of there
lickity-split if need be. They would. I put on a thick sweater over a
quilted thermal liner, then the leather motorcycle jacket. Its side
zip pockets were large enough for the pistol, but just barely. I
wouldn't be able to get it out fast, but that was okay. I knew I
could use the piece if I really had to, but it would take a bad
situation for me to consider it. The second item was a flashlight. I
put this in the left pocket along with the two spare magazines for
the Browning. I made coffee and filled the metal thermos bottle. I
poured the rest of the coffee into a mug and downed it along with a
Snickers bar.

Then I almost tried pulling out of the campsite
without disconnecting the hoses and cords, but I remembered at the
last second. In less than thirty minutes, I was pulling onto the
level space off the shoulder of the highway that fronted the Royce
farm. I carried my thermos of coffee and my binoculars out and locked
the camper. I looked up; there was a sliver of moon up there, with
silvery-gray clouds ghosting across it. The night was cold; I could
see my breath. I walked along the road. It was dead quiet. The one
thing that had me worried was the possibility of dogs. Even if not
mean, they would raise a ruckus if they detected me. Everything was
still when I came up alongside the farm. The camper was parked a
quarter of a mile away, which I liked. If anyone happened to pass it,
I hoped they would assume it had broken down and I had abandoned it,
or else that I was a hunter and had left it to roam in the woods. I
didn't know what, if anything, was legal in North Carolina this time
of year. Turkeys? Raccoon?

From a knoll not far from the highway, and hidden
from it by thick brush, I could get a good view of the valley and the
farm. The binoculars helped gather enough light for me to see the
buildings clearly. The house had no lights on, no vehicles parked
nearby. From the looks of it, it had been abandoned some time ago.
There were two barns. The big one was diagonally planked on the
sides, with cracks in between to let air in. I knew what that was: a
tobacco barn. And its wide doors were open. The smaller outbuilding
looked as if it might have been a chicken house or swine shed at one
time, but it too seemed deserted. I sat on the little hill and stared
at the place for a long time. Something was missing. What? The
machinery. Where were the tractors and cultivators? Then I spotted
them. There was a big tractor in the tobacco barn that had been
invisible earlier because my eyes were still getting used to the
darkness. Behind the barn, drawn up near the edge of the forest, was
a smaller tractor with a scoop on the front, turning it into a skip
loader.

I glassed the place a while longer to make sure
nothing was up. Then, just before three-thirty, I stowed the thermos
bottle and the binoculars under a bush on top of the knoll and walked
down into the valley. It would have been easier to walk right up the
road, but I stayed at the edge of the trees as I walked toward the
buildings. I came up to the old swine shed, or whatever it was. The
roof peak was only about eight feet tall, and its sides, of
corrugated steel, sloped gently down. I crept around the side and
peeked into one of the low windows. Nothing. I took out the
flashlight and shined it in. Dirt floor, old animal stalls for pigs
or calves, some old hand tools such as spades, scythes, and rakes.
That was it.

Over to the big barn. I examined the diagonal
planking. Nice work. Fieldstone foundation also. Sixty or eighty
years old at least and not even cracked. Some Scots-Irish or Moravian
ancestor had done an excellent job of barn raising. And since I'd
heard that most of the mountain folk had come down here from the
Pennsylvania Dutch farm country, this wasn't surprising. I walked
into the big barn and scouted it. There were no stalls or partitions.
Elaborate drying racks still hung from the rafters overhead, but
there was no tobacco on them. Old fuel and oil cans stood against the
walls. Mostly, this barn was the home of the big Ford tractor and its
various attachments. The one affixed to the tractor now was one I had
never seen before on a farn tractor, a disk harrow with remarkably
small disks and a series oi heavy chain links that dragged behind. It
was probably a planting or sowing rig of some kind, and I remember
that planting time was several months earlier in the South. But I
didn't see any drills or seed holders, so it remained a mystery to
me. Another mystery in the barn was the bottom half of an old
tractor. The big wheels and the undercarriage were there, all right.
But where were the engine and the drive shaft? Why half a tractor?
Strange.

Then I went to the edge of the clearing and examined
the smaller tractor with the skip loader blade in front. There was a
big pile of gravel next to it, which meant that they were using the
rig to fill in low spots on the land. The house was next, and I
wasn't anxious to go inside. I circled it once before drawing near,
then went up the three steps to the old verandah that went around two
sides of it. As I got close to the first window, I realized I had
taken out the Browning and was holding it in my right hand, the
flashlight in my left. The beam of my light played through the old
window glass, sweeping through dark and dusty rooms. No carpeting or
furniture. Old ripped windowshades. Vacant. I continued my tour
around the house, shining the flashlight inside every available
window. I tried the front door. Unlocked. I went in, leaving the door
open. It took me less than a minute to scan the downstairs because
there was nothing there. I stood and stared at the old stairway. Dark
wood, with thin turned spindles in the railing. Forget it, Adams, and
the cellar too. No. I walked up the stairs and checked all the
bedrooms. There was an old bed in one; the rest were empty. The john
was ancient, with a toilet tank high on the wall and a pull chain to
flush. Old torn shades and boards on the floor. That was it. Quickly,
before I had time to change my mind, I went halfway down the cellar
stairs and shone my light around. Nothing but an old furnace and some
cardboard boxes that looked stuffed with pieces of rug. Enough of
that. I padded out of the house quickly, on cat feet, shutting the
door silently behind me. I wasn't sorry to leave; I'd had some bad
luck in similar old buildings. I shone the light on the footpath that
led to the steps and the porch. Grass grew there plentifully. I
walked around the house and checked the ground behind the back door
and found it was I the same. The grass showed me nobody was using the
house. I returned to the old porch and sat down with my feet on the
stoop steps, watching my breath in the faint moonlight. I rummaged in
my pockets and took out the can of snuff. Nasty habit, snuff. I did a
couple of sniffs. My eyes watered and I felt a ring of fire around
the edge of my scalp. But it gave me a lift. Yes indeed, it did do
that.

Well, I thought, there's nothing here. Whatever
personal problems Bill Royce has with substance abuse, it doesn't
affect his farm. And maybe he sees this place as a kind of
therapy—working with his hands on the land of his youth. What's
that his aunt had told me? "Being home is the best thing for a
body."

Yes, she was right.

I replaced the flashlight and the automatic in my
jacket and began the walk back to the edge of the woods. I went along
the road first, then began to cut across the field. I tripped hard on
a small tree stump and fell on the cold ground. I spent the first few
seconds cussing and grabbing my knee, which felt as if it were
broken. In a few minutes the pain eased up a bit, and I could walk. I
shone my light down to look at the stump. I found it, sticking up out
of the ground about half a foot, hidden from casual view by the tall
pasture grass.

But it was the strangest stump I'd ever seen.

My flashlight beam reflected back at me from a big
glass eye. The eye, a dome of glass about four inches across, sat on
the end of an aluminum cylinder, which appeared to be a hollow tube.
I squatted down and grabbed the metal base and tried to wiggle it.
Wiggle it did, and I pulled it up a few inches, revealing a thick
metal spike. An electrical cord led from each side of the
contraption. The cable, thick and black, dove into the earth only a
few inches from each side of the object. I peered in through the
glass eye. The top end of a two-hundred-watt lightbulb stared back:
lightbulb pointing skyward with a weatherproof cover. Keeping the
flashlight on, I hobbled in pain along the road. Fifteen paces
farther, I found another glass eye, again with a subterranean cable
leading in one side and out the other. Another fifteen steps and
another glass eye, and so on, right up to a few hundred feet from
where the farm road ended.

Farm road, my fanny. I was looking at an airstrip.
The road was straight, wide, and very smooth. The tractors, with
their special blades and drags, made certain of that. I crossed the
road and walked back on the other side. Lights on that side too. I
followed the trail of glass eyes maybe two hundred feet beyond the
buildings. At that point, the road took a right turn and crossed the
creek, then disappeared into an adjoining field. I wasn't interested
in that; I was following the cable from the last set of lights. I
didn't want to rip it out of the ground, but I did want to see which
way it was headed. I walked not more than forty feet before I saw a
small, very low structure with a slanted tarpaper roof about four
feet high. It looked like a pump house for a well. I shone my
flashlight all around it. Sure enough, the black cable snaked into it
under the tall grass and weeds. I tried the low door. Locked. Ha! The
whole place open to the wind except this one, and it's nailed up
tighter than a drum. There was a small vent window in back. I peeked
through with the light. I saw eight auto batteries, connected all in
a row. There was also a portable Honda generator that appeared to be
hooked up to the batteries. As I stood up to leave, I noticed the
cable snaking out the back of the structure and into the grass. Now
where did that lead? I yanked up on it. Two feet of the cord flew up
out of the ground. It was headed right toward the woods at the foot
of the mountain. I walked slowly in that direction, sweeping the
flashlight beam ahead of me the way a blind man sweeps his cane.

I walked into the trees. The ground began to rise. I
looked for perhaps half an hour, afraid my batteries were going to
give out, before I saw the cord again. This time the little devil was
sneaking up a tree trunk. It went up the side of a straight pine,
through a gray metal electrical box, and then joined a metal mast
that appeared to be bolted to the tree. I don't know much about
electronics, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that this end
of the cord terminated in some kind of antenna. And the metal box? It
looked like a fuse or switch box, the kind you see everywhere. It was
chest high. I pulled the lever on the side of it and opened the door.
I saw the end of the cable at the bottom and three wires coming from
it—not the usual two, but three. One could have been a ground wire,
but it didn't appear to be. Each wire end was connected to a
different brass screw. There were some other gizmos in there too, and
a "B-X" cable running out the top of the box to the
whatever-it-was up in the tree. The inside of the box was dominated
by a black plastic switch knob that was pointing to the right. I
stared at it for about a minute until I couldn't stand it any longer.
I turned the knob to the left to see what would happen.

It was one of the two or three dumbest things I've
ever done in my life.

The whole valley lit up. Looking down the hill
through the pines, I saw the two rows of bright lights. I turned the
switch back immediately. Nothing happened. The lights continued to
illuminate a big portion of Graham County. It looked like there were
twenty squad cars down there.

I flipped the switch back and forth repeatedly, but
it was no use; the landing lights kept shining away like there was no
tomorrow. And if the farm crew saw those lights and caught me on
their property in the dead of night, for Charles Adams there would
probably be no tomorrow. Nothing I could do would turn them off.
There had to be some kind of automatic timing device that kept them
on for a certain length of time no matter what happened to the
switch. In a near-panic, I slipped my fingers beneath the ends of the
cable and yanked. One of the wires came off its brass screw, and the
lights finally went out.