Steven Havill: Out of Season

“Johnny, did Dick Finnegan shoot at that airplane?”

This time he didn’t hesitate, didn’t turn coy. “I don’t know, Sheriff,” he said and added, “If I knew, I’d tell you. He could have, and he could have hit it, too. I’ve seen him drop a coyote at five hundred yards, just resting the rifle over the hood of the truck. And that’s no small trick. But I don’t know.”

“Do you suppose Edwin knows?” Estelle asked. Her voice was quiet and husky, but it startled both Johnny Boyd and me.

“I don’t see how he could,” Johnny said. “He’s so goddam lame he can’t do much more than hobble. And at the time that shooting happened, he wasn’t even in the county.”

“That’s what he told us,” I said.

“If that’s what he said, then that’s what’s true,” Johnny said vehemently. “My brother don’t waste a whole lot of words, but one thing he don’t do is lie.”

“He hasn’t said anything recently that was out of the ordinary about Finnegan? They weren’t arguing about anything?”

“If they were, he didn’t tell me anything about it.”

I watched as we turned south on the narrow lane that would lead us to the first gate that marked Finnegan’s zoo. “When was the last time you talked with him?” I asked.

“With Dick? Oh, we cross paths regular. We both use the same road, you know.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“I saw him the day before yesterday.”

“That was before the crash?”

“Yes. That morning. We met at the intersection of the county road.”

“He say anything?”

“He said he was still thinking about running the pipe across that little spur of land I own. But he wasn’t sure of how much water there’d be.”

“And that was it?”

“And that was it. I told him that whatever he decided was fine with me. Just that if he was going to run pipe across my land, I could use some of the water a time or two.”

“It would have cost him quite a bit to go around, wouldn’t it?”

“Sure. Some.” He chuckled that dry, hacking laugh again.

“Half an antelope, maybe.”

“What did Edwin think about that?”

“Not much. He was pissed at Finnegan for borrowing our dozer to try digging his goddam pond and then turning around and being so goddam tight about the pipe deal. He stewed about that some. I figured it was just one of those things, you know. One of those things that gets sideways. To this day, I don’t know why Dick wanted to bother trying another pond. This country is mostly gravel. There’s no dirt tank in the county that will hold water unless you line it. Plastic or bentonite. But it’s his business. I told Edwin to just let it ride. Hell, it didn’t cost us anything except a couple gallons of diesel.”

We pulled to an abrupt halt, our headlights illuminating the wire gate. In all the frenzy earlier, Tom Pasquale had actually paused long enough to make sure it was closed and the herd of evidence secured. Boyd didn’t seem in much of a hurry as he loosened the wire closure.

“What do you think?” I said to Estelle. “You’re the only one of us who seems to have an idea of where Edwin’s headed.”

She drove through the gate, pulling far enough ahead that the second vehicle could follow.

“I don’t think Dick Finnegan was much interested in ponds,” she said.

Estelle pulled the patrol car close to the fence and stopped with the headlights off. She opened the windows and killed the engine. Sand, gravel, and bunchgrass crunched as the Bronco pulled in behind us and halted. Pasquale switched it off, and for a few seconds, the five of us sat in the darkness.

“Be kind of funny if he was going the other way,” Johnny Boyd said in a half whisper.

“He’d be easy to track,” I replied, and the rancher hacked what could have been a chuckle.

“I got to thank you,” he said after a moment. I didn’t see any cause to be thanked, so I didn’t reply. “You don’t exactly go chargin’ in on things, do you?”

“We try not to,” I said. “You get as old and clumsy as I am, you learn to watch where you put your feet.”

“I can see that the kid behind us gets a little squirrelly now and then.”

“Yes, he does. As you say, he’s young. But Deputy Pasquale is a fast study. And he’s got a veteran riding with him.”

Boyd coughed again. “Costace? That’s his name?” I nodded. “He seemed eager enough to ride on over here with the cavalry before you reined him in.”

“He got you in the car, didn’t he?” I said, and Boyd chewed on that for a moment. The thinking would do him good.

“And what are you going to do when Edwin gets here with that dozer? If this is where he’s headed?” he asked.

“I plan to get out of this car, walk up to him and ask him what the hell happened. And maybe while I’m at it, I’ll ask him why the first thing he did was jump on a goddam Cat and drive it a mile or two in the dark.” Estelle stirred as if she wanted to say something, but then thought better of it.

“He’s going to be arrested?”

“That depends on what he tells me.”

“Odds are good, though, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are.”

“You’ll let me be there?” I had never heard Johnny Boyd’s voice so small.

“I’m counting on it, Johnny.”

He fell silent.

“There it is,” Estelle said and pointed. Sure enough, off in the darkness to the west a couple of hundred yards, two bright lances of light appeared as the dozer clanked its way around a small outcropping that thrust up sharp limestone in the machine’s path.

“Let’s go find out,” I said and started the process of hauling my tired self out of the car. Before I had pulled myself upright, I realized that Deputy Pasquale was holding the door open for me.

“How are we going to stop that thing?” Pasquale asked, and I saw that he was holding a pump shotgun.

“Before you do anything else, put that back in the unit,” I said. He hesitated. “You piece all this together in your mind and you’ll understand why I’m asking you to do that,” I said gently.

Neil Costace stood in front of the Bronco, watching the approach of the ponderous machine, his hands thrust in his pockets. “Any man with even half his marbles doesn’t choose a bulldozer as an escape vehicle, Tom. The man wants to show us something,” he said.

Edwin Boyd drove the machine straight toward our position, until the only thing between him and Dick Finnegan’s property was the tightly strung fence. The machine never slowed. The blade caught a fence post squarely. Standing a hundred yards away, I could hear the groan and twang of the wire.

With enough tension stretching them over the sharp edges of the dozer’s blade, the barbed-wire strands finally parted and snapped away, their ends curling and snaking, lashing the dirt and tangling in the scant vegetation. The gridded sheep fencing was tougher, and it wrenched loose from the posts and followed on either side of the machine as it clanked across the flat toward the windmill.

Just when it looked like he would crash into the old windmill tower, Edwin Boyd spun the dozer in its own length so that it was facing due north. The blade dropped into the prairie soil twenty yards from the windmill tower and the stack belched as he opened the throttle. From fifty yards away, I could smell the dirt as the bulldozer ripped open the earth.

He pushed dirt for fifty feet, then raised the blade, drove over the mound he’d made and pivoted for what looked like a return run. Just as suddenly, the heavy growling of the diesel died, ticking into silence. The two headlights continued to stare at the freshly scarred ground, their beams softened with power only from the battery.