Part 3
He stopped.
For a while he looked at the hand, the gray letters smeared now into something like a bruise. Then he put the truck in gear and drove the three hundred yards home without a word, and parked, and turned off the engine, and still sat there.
“He asked me to let him say it,” he said. “On the bank. You heard him.”
“You let him.”
“I let him.” He took off his cap and set it on the dash. “Royce has farmed that ground forty years. They know him. He’s got a bad hip and a grandson and a clean record, and he figures an agent looks at all that and sees a storm and an old man who couldn’t get down a muddy bank. They look at me, they see a hired man who was told to do a job and didn’t.”
“Is he right?”
“Probably.”
“So it’s a good lie.”
“It’s a lie,” her father said. “I never said it was good.”
Her mother’s car pulled in behind them at twenty to eight. Dana Tuttle got out in her work fleece with the county patch, lanyard still around her neck, and stopped short: Wade wet to the armpits, Josie in pajama pants stiff with silt to the knee, a dripping yellow dog vest on the seat between them.
“Somebody start,” she said.
Wade started. Josie had expected him to hand her mother the short version with the edges filed down. He didn’t. He told it standing on the kitchen mat while Josie peeled off her socks, from the radio call to the collar to the hand he’d put under the water. He told the Monday part plainly. Royce had asked him at six in the morning, with the north lane still passable. The storage barn alarm had gone off at a quarter past, and he’d gone there first, meaning to get to the traps by noon. By noon the lane was under. He hadn’t told Royce they were still out.
“He thought I’d pulled them,” Wade said. “I let him think it. I meant to walk the bank Tuesday.”
“You drove right past that ditch,” Josie said.
“Four times Tuesday,” her father said. “Yes.”
Dana sat down at the table with the lanyard in her hands. Josie knew the look on her face; her mother used it on callers who were telling her only part of an emergency. “And money,” Dana said. It wasn’t a question.
“And money.”
Nobody had to explain that to Josie; she remembered the envelopes her mother opened standing up, after the paving company let her father go in January with two paychecks still owed. Then Royce’s offer had come. Drainage season on the farm, running the excavator through his ditches, and the little house at the end of the north field for half what it was worth. Her mother had cried in the car after they signed the lease, the good kind of crying.
“So you keep quiet,” Josie said, “and he keeps the blame, and we keep the house.”
“That was the arithmetic.”
“You do that.” It came out before she could stop it. “You figure out what’s easiest, and then that’s what happened, and nobody else gets a—” Her voice went somewhere she couldn’t follow. She stood there holding one muddy sock.
Her father looked at her as if she’d spoken in a language he used to know. “Tell me what you mean.”
She couldn’t. Not this morning, with her mother’s lanyard on the table and the vest dripping onto the floor. She went to her room and lay on top of the covers in her ditch clothes. Through the wall she heard her parents talking low, and then she heard her father’s voice change into the one he used with strangers.
“Ms. Pruitt? This is Wade Tuttle. I work for Royce Gaskins. Mr. Ortega gave me your number. I need to correct something that was said this morning.”
She got up and stood in the hall. He told the agent all of it. When he reached Monday, he said, “Mr. Gaskins asked me at six a.m. to pull every trap on that line. He did his part. I didn’t do mine.” Josie leaned against the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor.
Royce’s truck came up the drive a little after three. His grandson was driving, fifteen years old with a learner’s permit and a farmer’s tan that ended at his sleeves. Royce got out of the passenger side one careful piece at a time. Cole stayed behind the wheel.
Wade went out onto the porch. Josie stayed inside the screen door, where she could hear.
“She called me back,” Royce said. He didn’t come up the steps. “Your Ms. Pruitt. Asked me, real polite, why my story didn’t match my hired man’s.”
“I’m sorry it went that way.”
“Which way did you figure it would go?” Royce’s voice didn’t rise; it went flat. “I told the government’s own wolf man my story at five this morning, and by ten you’d made it a lie on paper. I stood on that bank and asked you.”
“I know you did.”
“I’m seventy-one. Nobody was going to lock me up over a coyote trap. I could carry it.”
“You shouldn’t have had to.”
“That was mine to decide.” Royce looked out at the water still lying in the north field. “The Spencer boy can finish the ditches. I’ll take the radio and the excavator key.”
Wade unclipped the handheld from his belt, worked the key off his ring, and came down the steps to put both in Royce’s palm. Royce’s fingers closed over them.
“A lease is a lease,” Royce said. “I don’t put a family out in June.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Don’t tell me what you think of me today.” Royce turned toward the truck, then stopped with his hand on the door. Through the open window, Cole was looking past both men at the porch, at Josie behind the screen.
“Was it her?” Cole called. “That wolf. Was she the one that got my ducks?”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇