“That’s what I thought, but it started jerking all around when I started it up,” said Lyle.
Jeremy climbed down. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, it’s a lot more sensitive than the older machines, that’s for sure.”
Lyle squinted in the afternoon sun. “You really think this is worth what they wanted for it?”
Jeremy paused, and took a breath to keep himself from smiling; Lyle had been farming at least twice as long as Jeremy’d been alive. He hadn’t called the store for a demonstration. He’d called because he wanted to talk to somebody about his new toy.
“Lot of guys around here swear by it,” said Jeremy. “We had a couple guys order Case four-fifties but those were construction firms, big projects. Pretty popular with the guys that have ’em. Anyway, most everybody loves the joystick once they get used to it.”
“Well, I guess I’ll get used to it,” Lyle said; in the light, his tanned, wrinkled face looked like a bronze sculpture.
*
On the walk back to the barn where Jeremy’d parked his car Lyle detailed his plans: they seemed overambitious for a man of his age. He was going to clear enough space to have a pond put in and stocked with fish, and then he’d be able to fish without having to stay out overnight or drive home after it got dark. “I’m not supposed to drive at night anymore,” he said, tapping his thick lenses.
“Seems like a whole lot of work,” Jeremy volunteered.
“Yes,” said Lyle. He nodded his head over toward the other side of the highway, still distant but visible from the path they were walking. “But I had a crew come in to build that place a few years ago and they could probably handle it.”
Jeremy looked at the house across the highway, all beige vinyl siding and pristine rain gutters: it was hard to feel like it’d ever really look like it belonged, but that was only because he’d seen a little of how things had been around here once upon a time. In truth it was places like Lyle’s that weren’t going to fit in pretty soon: white paint on wood, tall rusty windmills out front. They looked like movie props, even to some of the locals.
As they walked, they passed an old shed, boards visibly loosening from the frame—it was an antique, the real thing, something whose nails had earned the right to rust. “Don’t make ’em like that anymore,” Jeremy said: it was more reflex than remark.
Lyle grinned. “Well, now, that’s true, but how would you know anything about that?” he said. He was only teasing, the way a grandfather might.
“I’ve spent a little time in the country here and there,” he said, smiling, and he heard the way it sounded: like they were just a couple of guys talking about the things guys talk about when they run out of business to attend to. But his mind was racing privately backward, as through a dark tunnel, to the interior of the Collins shed, sixteen months ago now: the mounted camera, and the silver fuzz of the boom mic, and the built-up lighting rigs with their bright bulbs screwed into old flash housings probably salvaged from the junk heap; Stephanie standing quietly in the corner, bearing witness, declining Sarah Jane’s offer to go wait in the car: “It might be easier”; and then the questions, smooth staccato under a slur riding the hairpin to a foreseeably blunt climax, losing their rising intonations as their numbers gathered, one after another, calm at first and then emerging in their true forms, all the shades of hurt and outrage and buzzing currents of hot anger trying to make contact with the ground, Jeremy ready for it, open to it, as if his gently meandering path had been leading him gradually over the years to a night like this: to find himself alone among the nameless vanished in seeing Lisa as she was, wanting to help her even if it meant getting hurt. It rushed in on him quickly, but he had learned young how to consign hard thoughts to hidden corners, and he sent it all back to its permanent home: a space that resembled, in one part, the place where people in the movies said they stored memories of their weekends in Las Vegas, and which resembled, in its greater part, nothing like those weekends at all.
“Well, that’s good,” said Lyle; at the sound of his voice Jeremy’s thoughts scattered like light mist from the surface of water. “There’ll be less and less of it to see after a while, I guess.”
“I guess that’s right,” said Jeremy, trying without success to stop his mind’s eye from conjuring up an unattended Super Boom, and, failing that, trying not to watch as it plowed directly into an old wooden shed: the teeth of the bucket shiny and sharp, the CPU gone berserk, everything over in less than a minute—the shock of impact, the satisfying crunch of boards cracking under hard steel, the muffled sounds of everything inside being quickly crumpled into unrecognizable pulp.
PART FOUR