Wheatyard, Page 3

  ***

  Though I had forgotten to bring the postcard, I remembered the address was on Railroad Street, some number in the five hundreds. I drove past a long line of tiny but well-kept houses, none of which seemed right for him, before reaching the last house on the street, the last vestige of civilization before the vast expanse of open fields and the relentless west wind.

  No well-kept house here. It was a sixties-era ranch, the shutters falling down or missing completely and the gutters dented in from carelessly leaned ladders, none of it painted in at least ten years. The lawn was scraggly and pocked with weeds, the rusty mailbox stood askew, and the screen door hung precariously on its hinges, the steel mesh torn and offering no shield against insects.

  Yes, this had to be Wheatyard's house. The hovel of a distracted genius.

  I steered just off the edge of the street, gravel crunching beneath the tires, and climbed out of the car as I took in the whole pitiful scene. I closed the door quietly behind me. Why I did so—quietly—I couldn't really say. Wheatyard was expecting me, and for once I wasn't particularly late. There was nothing about my presence that required stealth; as it was, he was probably watching me through the filthy front window.

  But he had already been so secretive and guarded about himself, enough to make me sense there was something I needed to uncover, that sneaking up on him somehow seemed like the right thing to do. For all his boisterousness, his bold and unreserved opinions, his devil-may-care attitude, it seemed like he was holding something back, just what I couldn't even guess.

  I strolled up the sidewalk—its meandering cracks populated by scattered villages of weeds, dandelions and other stray greenery—as casually as I could. Seeing the doorbell broken and barely hanging by a single frayed wire, I had just raised my hand to knock when the screen door suddenly flew open and out popped Wheatyard, who halted his stooped-over Groucho entrance and snapped to mock-attention, as if he was a buck private before a five-star general, or maybe a subservient butler facing his billionaire boss. Or so I imagined buck privates and butlers to be—my life was safely, cautiously middle-class, high enough up the ladder to avoid the military but still low enough to only guess what having a servant was like.

  Wheatyard nodded before turning back toward the house. He reached for the doorknob, holding the screen door open with his elbow, then grabbed the knob and yanked the door shut. I caught just a glimpse of the house's interior, which was dark despite the bright afternoon and seemed almost fusty, too much so for an irreverent iconoclast like him. I imagined old family portraits in heavy cherrywood frames, Victorian parlor furniture and moth-eaten old lace, although all I actually saw inside was one small corner of a portrait frame, which my mind filled in with the stern faces of a Midwestern farm couple from a distant era, grimly peering into the camera after another poor harvest and paying for a cabinet photo against their better fiscal judgment. Kind of American Gothic, but even more desperate.

  He turned back to me with a smile, wagging a finger in mock reproach, not unlike the schoolmaster posture he took at the book store while reproving my reading tastes.

  "Uh uh," he said, guiding me away from the door with a sweep of his forearm. "Can't have you invading the inner sanctum. We'll go somewhere else."

  "Where to, then?" Though I was eager to see inside the house, I was also wary of what I might find. So I decided, given his subtle resistance, that his somewhere else would have to do.

  "I've got a favorite spot in town where they keep the beer cold and treat me moderately well. Or at least tolerate me."

  I nodded, leaning presumptively toward the driveway, where toward the backyard I had glimpsed a dented, paint-peeling Chevy pickup. I assumed that, as my host for the afternoon, he would gladly drive us wherever we were going. That just seemed like the right thing for him to do. And of course I hardly knew my away around Tillsburg.

  "We'll take your car," he said assuredly, without a moment of hesitation. "You drive."

  "Sure," was all I said as we walked out to the curb, ignoring his slight. I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised that he expected me to drive. During the short time I had known him, Wheatyard had already confounded my expectations several times, so this latest instance shouldn't have been unexpected and certainly not confounding.

  I cranked the ignition three times before it finally started up, and we pulled away from the curb. Car maintenance simply wasn't in my budget back then, even as critical as reliable wheels were in sprawling Champaign, and all I could afford was an oil change once or twice a year and new antifreeze every November. Fortunately during the summers the car seemed more forgiving, the omnipresent heat keeping everything slick and smooth and functional, though the old battery was often balky. As long as I didn't run the air conditioning too long without giving it a rest, everything would be okay.

  I kept the air off now that we were in town. Wheatyard didn't seem the type to wallow in refrigerated comfort anyway—his sweat-soaked brow and mild body odor suggested that his house didn't even have a window unit. That old pickup truck certainly didn't have air either; he wasn't the type to spend money on a freon recharge every year, not when there were typewriter ribbons to be replaced and manuscripts to be copied and mailed.

  Or beer to be drunk.