another combine in, but everybody from the Missouri line to central Minnesota was going hell for leather, and there was no reliable equipment to be had.
But—he’d get it in, if the weather held. If he could stay awake.
FLOOD HAD ALMOST fallen asleep when there was a sharp rap on the glass next to his face, and he jumped. “What?”
“I can’t get the main door open,” the kid said. “The handle’s stuck. Gimme a hand?”
Flood climbed down from the truck. He wasn’t a big man, but he had the hard muscles of a forty-year-old who’d spent his life doing heavy labor. He was wearing OshKosh overalls and a hat with a front label that said “John 3:16.”
He walked around the back of the truck and stepped onto the grate. Beans trickled from the larger door’s open hatch. The farmer leaned in and grabbed the handle and pushed up hard, expecting resistance. There was none, and the bar slipped out of its slot and the doors swung open. Beans flowed out in a wide, fast stream.
Surprised, Flood hopped back a few feet to the edge of the grate, and turned to where the kid had been. “What the hell . . .”
The kid wasn’t there. He was behind Flood, with the T-ball bat, light and fast in his athletic hands. Flood never saw it coming.
THE BAT CRACKED into the back of the farmer’s head and Flood went down like a sack of dry cement. “Fuck you,” Tripp said. He spat on the body. “You sick fuckin’ prick. . . .”
Then the fear lanced through him, and he looked up, guilty, expecting to see somebody watching: nobody there. He walked around to the edge of the building, peered down the highway. Nobody coming. A pigeon flew out of the rafters up above, and he jumped, stepped back, and looked down the road again.
“Nobody there, man, nobody there. Don’t be a pussy,” Tripp said aloud, to himself, for the simple reassurance of his own voice.
He went back to the body, watched the flow of grain coming out of the truck. Already half of it was gone: he stirred himself, said, “Move, you dumbass.”
He bent over the older man, lifted his head and slammed the back of it against the grate, hard as he could, as though trying to crack open a coconut, and at the same time, trying to hit at the precise point where the bat had. He’d thought about this, had lain in bed and planned it out, visualized it, the way he would a pass pattern. He was right on schedule.
With Flood profoundly unconscious, or maybe already dead, Tripp lifted the man and pushed him into the grain flow, face up, reached out, and pulled his mouth open. Soybeans were spilling from the truck like water from a pitcher, flowing around the unconscious farmer, filling his mouth, nose, ears. They gathered in his eye sockets, and in his shirt pockets, and in the John 3:16 hat. They squirted down into his overalls, slipping through the folds of his boxer shorts, hard and round, looking for a resting place in a navel or a fold of skin.
Tripp watched for a minute, then hurried back to the side of the elevator to make sure there were no more trucks coming, then went inside, washed the bat, stuck it under the mat in the trunk of his car. Back inside, he filled out the paperwork on Flood’s visit. Five minutes passed.
Had to be dead, Tripp thought. He went outside and looked at the man on the grate. His eyes were open, but there was nothing going on. Tripp leaned forward and put his hand over Flood’s mouth, and pinched his nose with the other hand. No reaction. Held them for a minute. Nothing. He was dead. He hadn’t seen many dead bodies that he could remember: his grandfather, but he’d been in a coffin and looked more waxed than dead. He’d gone to a couple more funerals when he was a kid, but he could hardly remember them.
But this guy was dead.
Tripp stood, caught sight of the hat, said out loud, “Three:sixteen, my ass.” He knew what it meant—“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life.”
He knew what it meant, but it didn’t apply to Flood. Tripp bent over, grabbed the farmer by the feet, and dragged him off the grate. Watched him for another moment, thought,