Bait

by Mia Carson

  Roger was the tech that handled most of the combine harvester problems, and he was a wizard with them. He’d been working on John Deere combines for almost forty years and could listen to one of the big green machines running and know exactly what was wrong with it. If your combine was making a ‘weird noise,’ Roger was the man you wanted to talk to. He could often diagnose the problem from a description or picture, then the owner could decide if he could fix it himself or needed to bring the machine into the shop. Mr. Goodall didn’t mind the techs helping people out because at the very least he got a part sale.

  “He’s in the shop. You want me to get him for you?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll walk back there. How’s Levi?”

  The change of subject caught me off-guard. “Fine, I guess, why?”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “Not since Saturday. Why?” I asked again.

  Dad shrugged. “Just wondering. You seem happier now than I’ve seen you in a long time.”

  I smiled. “Yeah. They’re busy gearing up for harvest, like everyone else, but he calls me every night and we talk. It’s nice to be wanted again.”

  “Just take it slow, Ella. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

  “We are. We both made mistakes, but we’re working our way through them. You know, he hasn’t changed a bit. Well, he has, but only for the better. I was so stupid not to trust him to understand.”

  “You live and learn. That’s what makes you grow. And don’t forget, trust goes both ways. He could have reached out to you.”

  “I know. Like I said, we both made mistakes.” I smiled again. “We both think what happened was mostly our fault. That makes it easier to get over. I’ve forgiven him, and I think he’s forgiven me.”

  “I just want you to be happy.”

  “I know, Daddy.”

  He shuffled his feet a moment, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’m supposed to tell you to invite him to dinner some night.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  His laugh lines appeared around his eyes as on corner of his mouth twitched up. “It doesn’t matter if I am or not, your mom said invite him.” His smile grew a little. “But, yeah, I’m okay with it. I liked, like, Levi.”

  “I tell him when I talk to him tonight. Tell Mom I’ll let her know what he says. It might be a while with harvest coming up.”

  “Yeah, she knows. If it doesn’t stop raining, nobody will be doing any combining.”

  “Yeah. Everyone is starting to worry.”

  “With good reason. Okay, I got to go. I’ll see you this evening.”

  “Love you, Dad.”

  “Love you too, punkin,” he said. He only called me by the nickname he’d given me as a kid when we were alone. It was our secret, and that made his use of it special.

  He went through the door into the shop, ignoring the Authorized Personnel Only sign, just like everyone else.

  I didn’t get a lunch break because the farmers ran into town while they were stopped. I peeled the banana that served as my lunch, eating it while I ordered replacements for the parts I’d just pulled, wanting to get my lunch eaten before the rush hit.

  I was getting ready to quit for the day and go to my second job when Steve showed up. I hadn’t seen him since Levi ripped him a new one, and that suited me fine. Previously I’d have felt a degree of shame around Steve, but today I felt empowered. That was the effect Levi was having on me. I’d never forgive Steve for what he’d done to me, but he could no longer make me feel ashamed for something I had no control over. What had happened was his fault, not mine.

  With Mr. Goodall’s warning buzzing in my head, I smeared a smile onto my face. “How can I help you, Steve?”

  “You went out with Levi?” he demanded.

  I kept my smile firmly in place. “None of your business.”

  “It is if you took Abby with you.”

  “Who I date is none of your business.”

  “I don’t want him around my daughter.”

  “Oh, so she’s your daughter now? After five years, you’re suddenly concerned about her wellbeing? Here’s a news flash for you. I don’t care what you want.”

  “I have a right to control who’s around my daughter!”

  I snorted in clear disdain. “Funny, you never cared about someone being around her when she and I went somewhere with a guy before.”

  “I care now, and I don’t want Levi McCormick around her.”

  “Tough.”

  “I mean it, Mary Ella.”

  “So do I.”

  “If you don’t stop, I’ll take her away from you.”

  I felt a rush of fear at the thought of losing Abby, but I realized what was really happening. “You’re worried! Levi is back in town and he’s making you look bad.” I smiled. “You think you can take her away from me? I’d love to see you try. You’ve got joint custody, but you’ve not visited her once since you saw her in the hospital. You pretend she doesn’t exist. You’ve never sent her a card, a present, nothing. When’s her birthday?” He hesitated, and my smile widened. “You don’t even know your own daughter’s birthday.” My voice lowered and was full of threat. “Are you really willing to stay home every night, or are you going to have that bitch of a mother raise her? That’s what this town needs, another spoiled, entitled brat like you. So go ahead, try to take her away. I’ll drag you through so much hell you’ll be begging me to stop. I’ll ruin your name and expose you for the fraud you are. So go ahead, Steve, take your best shot if you think you’re man enough.” Oh my God, that felt good!

  He stared at me, his mouth slightly agape, as if he couldn’t believe I’d stood up to him. He tried to recover. “I was man enough for you that night.”

  If he was going to lob them up there, I was going to swing for the fences. “And yet I can’t even remember it. I wonder if it’s because you have a tiny little penis or are a two-pump chump. You’ll have tell me because I really don’t know.”

  “Fuck you, you bitch!”

  I had him rocked back on his heels, so I bored in. “Sorry, you’re not my type. I prefer real men, like Levi, not some guy who can only get laid if the woman is passed out.”

  For a moment I thought he might hit me, but I stood by ground, silently daring him to take his shot. This was Texas, and in Texas real men don’t hit women. If he did, every man in town would know him for what he was.

  His mouth hard, he spun on his toe and stomped out, banging the door open savagely hard. He wasn’t even out of sight when the shakes started. I sat down on the stool at my computer and took several deep breaths, trying to calm myself. In hindsight, I had taken a hell of a risk, goading him like I did. Steve was no Levi, but he wasn’t exactly a hundred-pound weakling either. If he’d hit me, it would have hurt like hell.

  It only took a couple of minutes for me to gather myself. Now that the danger was past, the shakes quickly subsided. Taking a deep breath, I stood as Marcy appeared to collect the tickets.

  “Ella? You okay? You’re pale as a ghost.”

  I forced a smile and reached into my basket for the tickets. “Fine. Here you go.”

  Marcy took them and returned to accounting. If she’d been two minutes sooner she would have had another juicy bit of gossip as I’d verbally slapped Steve around.

  I walked to my Escape, hurrying as I tried to stay dry. In the ten minutes since Steve left, I’d completely recovered. I was feeling like Wonder Woman, powerful and strong. I’d stood up to Steve in a way I never had before, and it felt terrific.

  I debated calling Levi to see if he wanted to have a coffee after I got off from Dolly’s. As I drove to the café, I decided that probably wasn’t a good idea. If he so much as kissed me, I’d probably drag him back to my place, rip his clothes off, and fuck him on the spot.

  Not just fuck him, oh no. I’d wear his good-looking ass out! I smiled at my wanton thoughts. I remembered our last time together, when we’d made love under the trees at Stamford Lake
. He’d fucked the absolute shit out of me. No other man had been able to match the intensity of that experience. I wasn’t so naïve to think he hadn’t had other women after me. He was five years older, even better looking, and more experienced. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stand a more intense sexual experience. However, I wanted him to take me flying with him, and I didn’t mean in an airplane.

  I pulled to a stop behind the café. I took a couple of deep breaths to clear my head. I grabbed the review mirror and twisted it around so I could see myself. My color was up. I smiled at myself and put the mirror back where it belonged. This new me was all Levi’s fault…and I loved it!

  I sat for a few more minutes, sitting in my car, thinking calming thoughts. I thought of Abby, Mom and Dad, how Grandma had broken the ice by pushing her way to Levi to hug him. I took another deep breath. I pulled the mirror around again. My color was back to normal. With another deep, cleansing breath, I put the mirror back in place, opened my door, and hurried through the rain to my job.

  Levi

  I moved with the machine as it slowly traversed the field, gently pitching and rolling like a great green ship of agriculture. If someone had been watching me, they’d have said I was daydreaming, but I wasn’t. I was communing with the machine. I could tell more about what the machine was doing by how it sounded and how it moved than I ever could with my eyes.

  Dad farmed about 2,400 acres. In perfect condition, a John Deere 9870 combine could harvest about twenty-five acres an hour. It would take us roughly three weeks to completely get our crop in with one combine. With two machines, a little over half that. After our crop was in, Dad did contract harvesting, where we’d rent our services to farmers to harvest their crops.

  The 9870 combine harvester was at the top of the Deere line ten years ago and cost nearly a half-million dollars each. Smaller farmers couldn’t afford such an expensive piece of machinery, so they contracted their harvesting operations out. For Dad, it helped pay for the two very expensive machines that were only used a few weeks a year.

  But this year, the conditions were far from perfect. It had been raining, and we’d had some wind. Some of our crop was down, and if we didn’t get it harvested soon it would start to rot. The problems we faced were two-fold.

  First, our operating window each day was only five or six hours. We had to wait for the dew to dry in the morning before we could start, and we had to stop as the dew began to form in the evening. Harvesting a wet crop was an exercise in frustration as the wet sorghum wouldn’t thresh properly, forcing the machine to work harder and reducing the speed it could travel across the field, while at the same time the wet plant material tended to plug the machine. A wet crop also reduced the compensation for the crop as the silo had to spend more to dry the grain.

  The second problem was if the ground was wet and soft, operating on wet ground ran the risk of getting stuck. Our combines weighed over forty-thousand pounds empty, around sixty-thousand pounds when fully loaded with grain. Even with the massive high flotation tires and four-wheel drive, a combine needed firm ground to operate effectively.

  This year, as soon as the ground would dry enough for us to get into the fields, it would rain again. We’d been dodging the weather for almost a month. We were behind and pushing hard during the breaks in the weather. Dad and I were working the last eight-hundred acres in tandem. Clouds were threatening, but if the rain held off the rest of the day, we’d have our crop in and could relax.

  Because of the push, everyone was helping. Dad and I were operating the combines, Grandpa was driving the grain cart, and Mom and Grandma were driving the trucks taking the grain we’d just harvested to the silo. While one truck was delivering the grain, we’d be hard at work filling the second one.

  If we could get the trucks into the fields, the task would go faster as we wouldn’t have to stop and wait on the grain cart, but with the ground as wet and muddy as it was, the grain trucks would be stuck the moment they left the road. That meant we had to shuttle the grain to the trucks using the grain cart, or stop harvesting and drive the combine to the truck to unload. Driving the combine to the truck was terribly inefficient because our fields’ average yield was around a hundred bushels of grain sorghum per acre. With the combines three-hundred-bushel capacity, that meant we were stopping every two to three acres to unload, and that wasn’t much. I spent more time driving the combine back and forth between where it was harvesting and the truck than I did harvesting the crop. The machines were expensive and earned their keep by threshing grain, not being driving back and forth to unload.

  All this was percolating through my mind as I crept along. If we were having this much trouble, the smaller farmers were having a rougher time. I glanced at the clouds again. If the rain would just hold off the rest of the day.

  I checked the mirror that allowed me to see how much grain was in the hopper. I was nearly full, could feel it in the way the machine moved. I glanced over my shoulder, looking for Grandpa. He was on the far side of the field, creeping along slowly beside Dad as he unloaded and harvested at the same time. I reached up and pulled down the mic.

  “I need to unload as soon as you can get here.”

  “I have to unload first,” Grandpa replied.

  “10-4.”

  That was the problem with wet fields. The trucks held a shit load of grain, the combines a comparatively small amount, and the grain cart somewhere in between. Mom and Grandma spent most of their time sitting around waiting, Grandpa was running his ass off trying to keep up with two combines, and Dad or I would occasionally have to stop working because we were full and had to wait to unload. If we had another pair of hands, we could use the other grain cart and operate with an assembly line efficiency.

  I felt the machine start to settle in an unseen soft spot. I yanked the stick in reverse, trying to back away before the machine began to mire. The transmission howled in protest at the sudden change in direction. With the heavy load I was carrying, it pitched the machine forward, causing it to stand on its nose, its small steering wheels at the back hanging in the air.

  I stabbed the clutch, trying to prevent the giant machine from sinking to its axles. “Well, shit,” I spat.

  I forced the header down, levering the rear wheels back to the ground. The wheels on the back were small but driven, and they might be enough to make the difference. I waited until the machine processed all the grain and shut down the collection and threshing systems to save every horsepower I could. I took a deep breath before I hauled back on the stick and sidestepped the clutch. The machine lunged backwards, the John Deere 13.5-liter engine whistling and roaring as the machine strained to free itself.

  “Come on, baby,” I coaxed as I spun the steering wheel left and right, searching for a little more bite from the rear tires. It was still going down, so I jammed the transmission into forward until I felt the combine stop, then jerked it back to reverse. “Come on, baby, come on, baby, come on, baby, you can do it,” I urged, rocking in the seat as I worked the wheel, unconsciously hoping that throwing my two-hundred pounds around might make a difference in the sixty-thousand-pound machine. I felt the rear tires scrabble for grip on the right, and I tapped on the right brake pedal, trying to twist the machine in that direction as I looked for grip anywhere I could find it.

  Like a hippo dragging its bulk out of a wallow, the combine slowly hauled itself out of its own hole. From the time I’d first tried to back up until I was on solid ground may have taken fifteen seconds, but it had felt like hours. I let out a long, slow breath of relief. That had been close. I’d seen big, fully loaded combines stuck so badly it had taken two or three big tractors to free them. I would have to unload before I went in there again, and then I was going to tiptoe around the edges until I was sure I could cross. Getting stuck could cost us hours as we worked to get the beast out.

  I waited until I could unload and spent fifteen-minutes nosing around as I mapped out the edges of the soft spot. I decided the area was small
enough it wasn’t worth risking getting stuck and bypassed it, willing to sacrifice the twenty or thirty bushels of grain I couldn’t reach.

  We finished the field before the drizzle started, and we drove the machines home in the dark. They looked like two ships brightly illuminated in a sea of darkness.

  Farmers all around were begging for help. Dad had more contract work lined up than we could possibly do, but I had something I needed to do first.

  “Dad, I want to take one of the combines and help the Johnsons for a couple of days,” I said as I fueled his machine after we arrived home.

  His eyes narrowed. “Did he ask for help?”

  “No, but you know he needs it.”

  “So do a lot of others.”

  “I know.”

  Dad and Ken used to be close, but the incident with Ella had driven a wedge between them. “Is he going to pay you?” Dad asked.

  “I’m not going to ask him to.”

  “Then no. I need the machine out there earning its keep.”

  I couldn’t fault Dad for that. “Fine. I’ll pay the contract out of my own pocket.”

  His eyes narrowed further. “Did Ella ask you to do this?”

  “She doesn’t know anything about it, and neither does he. This is my idea and I want to do it.”

  “Boy, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me. Ken’s worried about his crop. I want to help.”

  “What about the others? They’re just as worried.”

  “I know, but if I’m willing to pay the contract and somebody has to wait, why does it have to be Ken? We’re neighbors, Dad. You and he used to be friends. Shouldn’t that count for something?”

  He glared at me. “You’ll pay the contract?”

  “Yeah. I’ll cut you a check as soon as I find out how many acres I work.”

  He took a deep breath and huffed it out. “Forget it. Just go, but I want that machine back here the moment his crop is in, understand?”

  “I’ll call you the minute we’re done so you can send the header trailer. I’ll go straight to the next contract, and you don’t have to pay me.” He still wasn’t happy, but I’d gotten what I wanted.