“I will if I have to,” I said. “They would have seen you.”
“You could have just told me to get down.”
“Can we argue about this later?” I looked around the tire. Curt had joined Roxanne on the deck along with a police officer. “There’s a cop out there with Curt and Roxanne.”
Dekker looked. “Okay. We’ll wait until he goes back inside and then I’ll try to start this thing, because it’s going to make a lot of noise.”
“What difference does it make? It’s farm machinery on a farm.”
“But no farmer would be out in his tractor when it’s raining.”
“Do they know that?”
He made a growling noise. “I wish I’d called in sick yesterday.”
“Me too,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t have to listen to your endless whining.”
“If I had, you’d be on your way to Detroit. Or in jail.”
I peeked around the tire again. Another cop car had pulled up to the house. The cop on the back deck stayed put, even though the rain was getting heavier. Roxanne went in, and Curt beckoned the cop inside the house, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
“More cops,” I said. “We have to go now.”
“No. Not until he goes inside.”
“He’s not going inside!”
Dekker growled again and looked for himself. “Shit.”
He got to his knees and tried the door on the tractor. It opened. He slowly crawled into the cab. “Shit,” he said again. “No keys. And it only has one seat.”
I hoped the rain would prevent the cops from walking the property, or we would have to crawl away from here. I noticed the sky, how it was closer now and moving fast with oddly lace--edged, charcoal clouds spinning end over end.
I slid Dad’s laptop onto the floor of the cab.
“Who gives a shit about the laptop! I told you there are no—- Oh.” I heard the jingle of keys. “They were up in the visor.” Dekker exhaled. “Okay, get in here on the floor, although I don’t know how you’re going to fit.”
My shirt was already soaked through from the rain and my hair was dripping. But I crawled in as far as I could, getting tangled in Dekker’s long legs.
“Put them to the side,” I said.
“I have to run the pedals.”
“I’ll do it by hand,” I said. Still, I couldn’t get all the way in. My butt and legs stuck out of the opening. “You’re going to have to hold onto the door.”
He did.
“Okay,” I said. “Start it up.”
“I hope this is a direct injection engine,” Dekker said. “Push down the clutch, the leftmost pedal. Once the motor starts to turn, push on the rightmost pedal. That’s the gas.”
I shoved the left pedal to the floor and held my breath as Dekker stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The diesel engine came to life as I pushed on the gas pedal and let go of the clutch. The tractor jerked forward and died.
“You can’t let go of the clutch until I tell you,” Dekker said, with more patience than I would have expected. “Let’s try it again.”
We did. I kept the clutch pushed in until he put it in gear. Then I let go too fast and the tractor lurched forward again but kept going.
“The cop’s looking this way,” Dekker said.
“Don’t look at him,” I said. It was so tight and humid inside that tiny space, sweat ran into my eyes and dripped off my nose. It itched like crazy but I couldn’t do anything about it. Not being able to see what was going on was torture, but Dekker narrated for me.
“Okay, I’m heading for the road,” he said. “Oh, no. The cop is walking toward us.”
“Don’t look at him!”
“I’m not. I can see him in my peripheral vision.”
“Drive.”
The sound of the rain on the roof changed from a pleasant piano solo to rocks in a cement mixer. The wind outside shrieked. I felt a creeping dread.
“Holy crap,” Dekker said. “Where are the windshield wipers on this thing? I can’t see a thing.”
“Just go forward.”
“I am!”
My butt and legs, still sticking out the door, were soaked. I heard a plink, and then another.
“Of course,” Dekker said. “Hail.”
The plinks accelerated and soon my back end was being pelted painfully with hailstones. Dekker kept going.
“Can you see the cop?” I said.
“I can’t see anything,” Dekker said grimly. He reached toward the dashboard and switched on the radio. The only sound was the rhythmic buzzing of an emergency broadcast. “Oh, fuck. Fuck.”
“The National Weather Ser-vice has issued a tornado warning for Pottawatomie County until four--thirty Central Daylight Time. At three--thirty, National Weather Ser-vice Doppler radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado. This dangerous storm was located ten miles southeast of Wamego moving northeast at thirty miles per hour. Large hail and damaging thunderstorm winds are expected . . .”
Dekker seized me around the waist, dragged me onto his lap, banging my head on the ceiling, and yanked the door shut with some difficulty. The tractor died and Dekker put on the hand brake.