All the Amish roadside groceries look the same: creaking wooden bins, empty baskets. All of the fruits and vegetables, of course, are long gone; ditto all the cakes and pies; all the Amish honey and Amish cheese and Amish pretzels.
For ten miles or so there are what feel like dozens of these places, and at each I get off the bike and check carefully for concrete work. In one place, slim round posts holding up the wood roof; in another place a set of handsome rounded steps leading from the racks outside to the little store. Over and over again I slide my aching body off the bike and kickstand it and get down on all fours to scour an abandoned farm stand, looking for a red stamp that bears the single word JOY. Over and over Houdini heaves himself out of the wagon and roots around next to me as if he knows what we’re looking for—the two of us together pushing past empty wicker shopping baskets and wads of thin discarded receipt paper.
A day of this. Almost a whole day of nothing, finding nothing, and then it’s late afternoon, and each time I get back on the bike I think maybe that’s it, maybe I can’t go any farther, but I can’t go back, what if I go back with nothing? My body is aching, and I’m starving, the chicken meals are a distant memory, and all the faded signs for pie and pretzels are not helping in the least.
“Okay,” I say to Houdini, at the sixth or eighth or hundredth of these little abandoned useless roadside stands. “Okay, now what?” There’s Cortez, back in Rotary, waiting impatiently, sitting cross-legged atop the secret door: Well? There’s Detective Culverson, at the Somerset of blessed memory, puffing wryly on his cigar. I don’t want to say I told you so, Stretch.
Except then there it is—a quarter mile farther down State Road 4, with just enough daylight left to see it—there it is. Not stamped on a post in the dirt after all, or at the base of a step, but above my head, written on a billboard, right up there in red letters literally ten feet tall. JOY FARMS.
And then, below it, in slightly smaller letters: CLOSED AND DESERTED. And below that: JESUS = SALVATION.
There’s another of the farm stands just beneath the sign, and a few minutes of investigation reveals a narrow byroad leading perpendicularly off into the cornfields behind it. I pause, looking back and forth between the sign and the road, and then I just grin, grin until my cheeks tighten, just to feel what it feels like, just for a second. And then I aim the bike down the byroad.
After a quarter mile winding through rows of corn the byroad narrows into a path, and when it narrows more it becomes impassable for the wagon, so I dig out the Swiss Army knife and use the Allen wrench to uncouple it, and then I leave the wagon behind and keep riding, deeper into the fields. After ten or fifteen minutes the clouds open and begin to spill rain across my forehead. The bike wheels get slick and wobbly on the wet path. I squint and wipe my eyes, wipe them again, pedal more carefully, slow down. The narrow path winds through the corn until I am confronted by a crossroads, and then another. Arbitrarily I choose my route, feeling after more time has passed that I am lost in a tangle of dirt passages, the rain now pouring steadily, confusing my way. I stand up on the pedals and angle forward a little bit, trying to cover Houdini with my body—Houdini who has somehow managed to fall asleep. Deeper I go, down this gravelly one-lane path, and it’s harder going, the rain really coming down now, pouring down through my eyebrows and soaking my cheeks, and I look away for a minute at the sodden patches of corn, and when I turn my eyes back to the path there is a tall wide man in a black hat, seated on a horse, right in the center of the path just a few feet away, sheets of rain parting across his face, a hunting rifle raised and aimed.
“Hey,” I start, and he fires the rifle in the air.
My face jerks back from the noise and I pull the handlebars hard to the right, wheeling and angling the bike sharply and careening off the road and smashing into the bent cornstalks. I tumble off the bike, watch Houdini bounce out of the basket. I scrabble for cover with my hands over my head. Two more shots. Each of them a loud, distinct kaboom, like he’s shooting at me with a cannon.
“Hold on now,” I call out from the ground, clutching the sides of my head, shouting. “Please.” Crawling among the stalks and the sheets of rain. Heart pounding. The dog raises himself unsteadily, soaked by rain, looks around and barks.
The shooting has stopped. I’m on the ground. I’m unhit, unharmed, getting rained on, half hidden among the rows. I can see the horse hooves clopping toward me, splashing into puddles.
“Go,” calls the stranger.
“Wait,” I say.