He found it a lot faster than Clyde was really expecting him to and followed Clyde up the steps; Clyde could feel the structure of the stairway and of the building to which it was attached sagging downward, as if The Heavyweight could pull Clyde down toward him simply by walking up the steps and tearing the house and all its contents into the central pit.
But Clyde made it out the front door and got to his truck, which was parked sideways in the front yard. He vaulted over the edge into the truck’s box, picked up the spare tire, stepped onto the truck’s roof to give himself more altitude, and heaved it at The Heavyweight as he was emerging from the front door with a section map of Nishnabotna County wrapped around one of his lower legs.
It looked as if the spare tire bounced right off Tab Templeton’s thick, bearded, mashed-in face, but in fact it probably just bounced off his chest. Normal body-part terminology did not always apply in the clearest sense to The Heavyweight, with his spherical physiognomy and short, fat, stunted extremities.
He brushed the spare tire off as if it were an acorn falling out of a tree, but he stopped on the edge of the front porch to take his gold medal and put it carefully around his neck. Then he dropped the medal down inside his shirt.
This gave Clyde the time he needed to sort through all the stuff in the back of his truck and find a tire chain, roughly twenty or thirty pounds of rusty iron. He held it in the middle so that about three feet of it dangled down on either side of his hand, and he stood in the middle of the truck’s box so that The Heavyweight would not be able to get him by the legs.
“You scratched my medal,” The Heavyweight said. He sounded amazed that anyone could do such a thing.
“I’ll scratch a lot more than that if you don’t lay off,” Clyde said, brandishing the chain. “I don’t want tou se this, because it’s a very bad, dangerous kind of weapon. But I’m off duty and I don’t have my baton, so I got to improvise.”
Clyde whirled the chain around a couple of times, just as a visual aid. It was so heavy that it almost pulled his arm out of the socket and caused nauseating pains in his sternum. He had to plant his feet wide apartto prevent it from pulling him over.
The Heavyweight observed this demonstration calmly and then shrugged. He was giving up. “You gonna arrest me?”
“Nope. Like I said, I’m off duty.”
“Got any jobs you need done?”
Clyde thought this one over. “Keep people from breaking into this place and partying, and I’ll give yousome more of those McDonald’s gift certificates.” They didn’t serve booze at McDonald’s.
“Okay,” The Heavyweight said.
“And haul all of this debris and stuff out of the yard and stack it up in back by the alley, and I’ll give you a bonus.”
“Okay.”
April
Chapter Six
Kevin Vandeventer parked his rusty Corolla in the faculty lot just after five-thirty P.M., when the campus cops gave up on doing parking checks. As he walked toward the grand entrance of the Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center—a brand-new I. M. Pei knockoff planted on the former site of the vet-med barns—he smelled the aroma every farm boy knows. After they had torn down the barns to make room for this new structure, they had hauled in new topsoil and capped it with fresh sod. But when the spring thaws came, you could still smell the underlying stratum of old, fermented manure, down deep in the soil. The smell of planting season.
As he approached the building and stepped through the enormous plate-glass doors, another set of odors took over. He paused in the main entrance hall to take in the splendor of the permanent multimedia display that had been set up there to wow visiting congressmen and agriculture ministers. He inhaled a deep draft of the building’s filtered and purified air, ripe with laboratory solvents and chemical fertilizer. It smelled like Science. Totally unlike the gymnasiums, which smelled like the fierce balm that wrestlers slathered on their torn muscles, or the Fine Arts Pavilion, which smelled like the microwave-popcorn fumes that constantly escaped the maintenance engineer’s room in the basement.
The Scheidelmann was named after a late and beloved dean of the EIU College of Agriculture, who rated a small plaque by the door. In the center of the entrance hall was a rotating ten-foot globe, studded with tiny, electrified EIU pennants marking the locations of the myriad research and extension projects that were being run out of this complex. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling photographs depicting Twisters in action, planting rice seedlings in the paddies of Burma and giving gaunt, buck-toothed Africans practical tips on soil erosion. More than a few of these photos featured Dr. Arthur Larsen, the Rainmaker.