HE PICKED UP Joan Carson at her house and took her to the McDonald's for dinner-Big Macs, fries, shakes, and fried pies, and she said, 'I can feel the cholesterol coagulating in my heart. I'm gonna drop dead in the parking lot.' But she didn't stop eating.
'Ah, it's good for you,' Virgil said, shoving more fries into his face. 'Eat this until you're forty and then nothing but vegetables for the rest of your life.'
'Makes for a short evening, though,' she said.
'I was hoping you'd take me out to the farm,' Virgil said.
She looked at him: 'What for?'
'You know…to see what you do.'
She shrugged. 'Okay with me. You know anything about farms?'
'Worked on one, up in Marshall,' Virgil said. 'One of the big corporate places owned by Hostess. Harvest time, I'd be out picking Ding Dongs and Ho Hos-we didn't do Twinkies; those were mostly up along the Red River. We'd box them up, ship them off to the 7-Elevens. Hard work, but honest. I used the money to buy BBs, so I could feed my family. Most of the local workers have been pushed out by illegals, now.'
She eyed him for ten seconds and then said, 'You do have a remarkable capacity for bullshit.'
THE STRYKER FARMSTEAD was an archaeological dig in waiting: a crumbling homestead, a woodlot full of abandoned farm machinery and a couple of wrecked cars, a windmill without a prop. The farm was built a quarter mile off a gravel road, in a grove of cottonwoods, at the base of a steep hill. Red-rock outcrops stuck out of the hill, while below it, all around the farm buildings, all the way to Bluestem, and really, all the way to Kansas City, was nothing but the darkest of black dirt, a sea of corn, beans, and wheat.
Among the wrecked buildings, the barn was the exception, and was still substantial. 'Don't have animals in it, but we keep it up for the machinery,' Joan said. 'One of the neighbors-you can't see his place, he's a mile down the way-rents out the loft, sticks his extra hay up there.'
The house, a hundred feet across a muddy parking circle from the barn, was little more than a shed. Originally one of the plain, upright, porchless, clapboard farmhouses built on the plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a coal-and wood-burning furnace and a hand pump in the backyard, it had been converted to a farm office and lounge.
The second level, never fully heated, had been blocked off with insulation and plywood to eliminate heat loss in the winter, Joan said. The utilities had been moved out of the basement to the old back bedroom, and the basement was nothing more than a hole with some rotting shelves holding empty canning jars.
'Probably could get twenty dollars each for those jars, on eBay,' Joan said.
'Why don't you?'
'I don't need four hundred dollars.'
THE FIRST FLOOR had a barely functioning kitchen with a countertop hot plate, a microwave, and a sink, with a table and six chairs; an electric pump fed the sink. Two ruined couches occupied the living room, with mud circles on the floor where the farmhands had tracked through. An aging computer sat on a table in the former dining room, with a Hewlett-Packard printer next to it, and a couple of four-drawer file cabinets pushed against the lathe-and-plaster wall.
'After the roads got better, it never made much sense to actually live out here,' Joan said, as she showed him through the place. 'Everything had to be brought out, and you were living out here in isolation. Most of the time, if you didn't have animals, there wasn't much to do. In the winter you did maintenance, in the summer you'd do some spraying and mowing…but basically, you were watching the corn grow, or the wheat, or the beans. By the time I was a kid, we had all that Star Wars machinery, a farm wife could sit up on a Deere in an air-conditioned cab with a cassette deck and listen to rock 'n' roll and do the harvest by herself. Ninety percent of it was pushing buttons and pulling levers. No need for a house. I mean, it wasn't that simple…but it almost was.'
'So you moved to town,' Virgil said.
'Well, look around,' she said, waving at the horizon. 'If you look right over there, you can see one other house, but nobody lives in it. It's lonely as hell out here. And Dad killed himself right out back, which still gives me the creeps if I'm out here on a winter night.'
'Nice now, though,' Virgil said. The sun was slanting down toward the horizon, and a few wispy clouds streaked the pale blue sky; there was just enough breeze to stir the leaves on an endless ocean of corn.
'C'mon,' she said. 'I'll show you why the house is so far from the road. We have to hurry, before it gets too dark. Bring your camera.'
VIRGIL GOT the Nikon out of the truck, with a long image-stabilized zoom, and tagged along past the end of the barn and the rotten timbers of what might once have been a hog pen, past an old pear tree, and a couple of apples, angling downhill to a creek. A footpath, maintained by feet, led along the banks of the creek up toward the hillside. As they got closer, Virgil could see that the creek came out of a crack in the hill, feeding into a broad, shallow stock tank. Overflow from the tank fed the creek.
'This is about as much water as we ever get,' she said. 'We're a little drier here than farther east. C'mon.'
She led him straight into the crack in the hillside, a narrow, rocky cleft that widened to twenty feet, slightly climbing, with the water pounding downhill. The spray caught him a couple of times, a cooling sprinkle on the face and hands.
'Keep coming…'
AT THE TOP of the canyon, two hundred yards into the hillside, was a natural rock pool fifty or sixty feet across, fed from a spring that fell down the back wall of the canyon. A few small trees struggled to stay alive in the thin dirt, and cattails rimmed what must've been a muddier flat on the far side. 'Cool,' Virgil said.
'Called the Stryker Dell on the geological surveys,' she said. 'Us kids used to come up here and swim. It's good in the evenings, when the sun's coming down the canyon. It's a little gloomy in morning, and cold.'
Virgil stepped down to the water, stuck his hand in. Cool, but not frigid, and he said so.
'Because the water's trickling down that rock in the sunshine,' Joan said. 'This spring will go mostly dry in the fall, it'll just be a stain on the rock. The pond never goes dry, because it's too deep-twenty feet, right below our feet-but sometimes, no water runs out of it. There used to be a pipe up here, that'd feed the stock tank down below. Anyway, it's why the farm was here: year-round water without much work, just by siphoning. If it wasn't for this, my great-grandfather probably would have built out by the road.'
Virgil took a picture of her standing on a rock on the edge of the pond, said, 'Must've been a great place to come when you were a kid.'
'It was; if only there'd been more people around, it would have been perfect.'
THEY SAT on the rock, in the sunshine, and Virgil showed her how the Nikon worked. A red-winged blackbird showed up and did some stunts on the cattails, and he took a couple of shots. They compared small-town childhoods, and chatted about college years, dope-smoking and rock 'n' roll, the price of corn-ethanol, about their parents. 'My mom lives one street over, and one block down from me,' she said. 'By now, she knows about your trying to feel me up last night.'
'Only teenagers get felt up,' Virgil said. 'I was expressing a physical affection.'
'Huh. Seemed like getting felt up,' she said.
'I'd like to dedicate some time to do it right,' Virgil said. 'But this Gleason case, Judd…'
So they talked about the case, and he worked the conversation around: 'So your mom and dad were good friends with Judd? You think your mom would know something that went on back then? There's gotta be something. Who the hell is the man in the moon?'
'Maybe if we took my mom over to see Betsy Carlson, she could find out,' Joan said.
'We could do that,' Virgil said. 'Think she'd go along?'
'If they let you back in. They might not be too happy to see you, if you had Betsy all freaked out when you left.' She stood up and brushed off her seat and yawned. 'We oughta get back before dark. I've got my payroll to put together for tomorrow.'
HE LEFT HER at her house, in town, after spending another two minutes on her porch. She offered him a cup of coffee, but he had some online research to do, and she had her payroll. 'Will you have time tomorrow night?' Virgil asked. 'Maybe we could run up to Marshall, go to a place that has candles and wine.'
'I'd like that.'
'Call your mom,' Virgil said. 'Ask if she could run over to Sioux Falls to see Betsy.'
