the farmer, the hay bale, and the still-sleeping baby goat adieu, Archer wondered how he was going to get back. But like most things, he decided he would tackle that when the time came and not before. He was a man who lived each moment as though it would surely be his last. War just did that to you. And prison had piled on that notion, forcing it bone deep into Archer. He figured he would never be free of it now.
He eyed the name on the mailbox that leaned toward the road, like it was giving an edge to the postman coming.
L. TUTTLE.
The farm stretched as far as Archer could see. He didn’t know if that qualified it as a big farm or not; he was not versed in such matters. He’d grown up far from here, in a home of glass, brick, and vertical quality. Grass had not been included in the deal. There was not a cow that he knew of within twenty miles of his birthplace. Here, though, the bovines were everywhere, dotting the land like a foraging army bivouacked for a stretch till the time for fighting would come along.
He saw the gravel road that led out of sight and figured the home of L. Tuttle would be just along that way. He eyed the sky, and the sun told him it was now nearer to four than three. He checked his watch, although he trusted the sky more than he did his windup.
He saw dust kicking up in the distance: either a tornado, or a tractor working away. As he squinted, Archer could make out it was the latter. He took off his hat, slapped it against his pants leg to dispel the dust that clung to every bit of him, and headed up the road.
He’d been right; the one road branched off, like the sweep of a river, to three o’clock, and a quarter mile down this fork he saw the house and the outbuildings.
It occurred to him that Tuttle was a prosperous man, which made the matter of the debt more problematic, at least in his mind. But a promissory note signed, with collateral laid against it, was a serious thing, he was finding. While perhaps some would see it as a small issue, the fact was, if debts remained unpaid, whatever followed would genuinely be the collapse of civilization as any of them would know it, Archer included. And he and millions of others had just fought a world war to ensure that neither anarchy nor fascism nor anything else would replace the reasonable screwing over of people without money by those who possessed damn near all of it.
Archer had come back from the war feeling lucky to be alive. He had not come back to seek a fortune. He wanted his share, to be sure, but it constituted a small ambition, and would not move mountains or deprive others of theirs. He had undertaken a years-long, small detour due to a profound lack of judgment over a concern that he had no sooner deemed of little importance, when it rose up and smote him with the power of a king and his legions crossing the Rubicon. And that mistake had caused his ass to be dragged right to Carderock Prison.
His two years of college had included readings in ancient history. He didn’t know that material would have applied so readily to him in the year 1949.
He picked up his pace as he went in search of Lucas Tuttle. He had a plan. Whether it would work or not was anyone’s guess. But something tickled at the back of his head, same as when he was a scout looking first for Italians and later for Germans. He had found the Italians the far easier of the pair. They didn’t really want to fight, he reckoned, because every time he’d run into some, they were either drunk or eating their dinner. He wasn’t surprised they’d turned on Mussolini and stuck his head up on a pike. They probably wanted to simply get back to their pasta and bottles of wine and their women. The Germans, on the other hand, seemed to like killing about as much as Dickie Dill liked strangling folks or smashing hogs in the head just so till they died. Archer had never ventured to the Pacific Theater, but he’d heard the Japanese were worse than the Germans.
As he drew closer, he saw that the house was a large,