Chapter 8
Joe followed the tracks into the timber for six hundred yards before he lost them.
He lost them because the man wanted him to. That was clear from how it happened.
The prints went up through the beetle kill in a straight, unhurried line, and then they hit a stretch of blowdown where the snow had not reached the ground under the deadfall, and they simply stopped, and there was nothing on the other side of it.
Joe circled for forty minutes. He cut the whole perimeter of that blowdown patch twice.
Nothing.
"He got up in the timber," Bill said, when Joe came back down. "Went over the logs and off the snow and then picked a direction."
"That's woodcraft."
"That's a hunter."
Joe stood in the yard and looked up at the mountain.
"Bill, a hunter is somebody who knows how to move through timber. This is somebody who knew, at four in the morning, in the dark, in falling snow, that there was one patch of ground on this whole slope where he could disappear."
"Which means what?"
"Which means he's been walking it," Joe said. "In daylight. Recently. Maybe for weeks."
Crowe was still inside.
He came out at ten thirty and he was a different man than the one who had gone in, looser through the shoulders, and he walked over to where Joe was standing at the shed corner.
Then he stopped, because he saw what Joe was looking at.
He crouched at the prints.
He did not touch them. He put both hands on his knees and studied them for a long moment and then he turned his head and looked at the angle of them, and then at the window, and then back at the timber.
"When?"
"After four."
"You've been up the hill?"
"Six hundred yards. They quit in a blowdown."
Crowe stood.
"That's the same man," he said.
Joe turned. "How do you know?"
"I don't. But it's a man who moves well and picks good ground and does not hurry, and last week a man with those exact habits put a round past your ear from a rock shelf and walked off at a walk." Crowe pushed his glasses up. "Two of those in a county this size would be remarkable."
"You said you didn't know who it was."
"I didn't. I've spent four days on it."
"And?"
Crowe looked at him for a moment.
"Let's go in your shed," he said. "I don't want to say this in the open."
The shed was cold and smelled like sawdust and two stroke mix.
Crowe leaned against the bench and took his hat off and turned it over in his hands.
"How many men do you think I have," he said.
"Twenty two."
"That's the number I put out. It's been the number I've put out since the first week because it's a good number. Big enough that nobody tries anything and small enough to be believable."
"What's the real number?"
"Fourteen," Crowe said. "Fourteen men, of whom about nine will actually do something difficult. The other five are somebody's cousin who needed a place to eat."
Joe absorbed that.
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because I'm about to ask you for something and you'd find it out anyway." Crowe set the hat on the bench. "In the first two weeks I had twenty six. Twelve of them left."
"Left or you sent them?"
"Six left because they went home to family. Four I let go because they were useless and they ate."
"That's ten."
"Yes."
"And the other two?"
Crowe was quiet for a second.
"The other two I put out," he said. "On the fourth of October. Both at once."
"Why?"
"Because they went to a place on the river without telling me and they did something there."
Crowe's jaw moved. "I'm not going to describe it. There were two women in that house and I found out about it on the sixth and I put both men out on the road with their coats and nothing else and I told them if I saw either of them in this valley again I'd shoot them."
Joe stood very still.
"That's what I did," Crowe said. "That's the whole thing I did. I put two men out in a valley with no food and told them to leave, and I did not do the other thing, and there is not one hour since the sixth of October that I have not thought about that decision."
"You should have."
"I know what I should have done," Crowe said. "I've known since about eleven o'clock that same night."
"What are their names?"
"One of them's called Teague. I'd rather not say the other one because the other one's got family in this valley who haven't done anything."
"Crowe."
"I'll tell you if it becomes the thing standing between us," Crowe said. "It isn't yet."
Joe let it go for the moment.
"Is one of them our man on the rock?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"Teague couldn't find his own truck in a parking lot," Crowe said.
"Neither one of them ever hunted a day in their lives. They were shop hands. They were good with a wrench and bad with everything else, and whoever laid on that rock for four days and left one case of match brass on purpose is not a shop hand."
"Then why did you tell me about them?"
"Because you asked me who's out there," Crowe said, "and the honest answer is that I know about two men I created, and one man I can't account for, and those are different problems and I did not want you thinking I only had one."
Joe leaned on the far bench.
"All right," he said. "Ask me for the thing."
Crowe picked his hat back up.
"Pruitt says you want the elevator," he said.
Joe's head came up.
"Pruitt told you?"
"Pruitt told Colby, and Colby talked to my man Ivers at the bottom of the road last night while eleven of us sat there in the dark," Crowe said.
"Colby talks. That's not a betrayal, that's a nineteen year old with a mouth, and if you're going to run an operation with Colby in it you have to plan around him the same way you plan around weather."
Joe closed his eyes for a second.
"Yes," he said. "I want the elevator."
"So do I."
"I figured."
"I've wanted it since the fourth day and I have not touched it," Crowe said. "Do you know why?"
"Tell me."
"Because the second I pull grain out of that elevator with my trucks and my men, it becomes Arlan Crowe's grain."
He set the hat down again. "And then every hungry family in eleven hundred co-op memberships knows exactly who took the thing that belonged to all of them. And then I'm not a man with a towing yard, I'm the man who stole the wheat, and the day somebody organizes against me is the day after that."
"And if I take it, it's Joe Henfry's grain."
"That's right."
"So neither of us can have it."
"Neither of us can take it," Crowe said. "That's a different sentence."
Joe looked at him.
"Go on."
"The co-op has a board," Crowe said. "Seven members. Four of them are still in this valley and alive, and I know where every one of them is."
"You want to ask permission."
"I want the wheat distributed by the co-op, to co-op members, with a scale and a book and a signature on every load," Crowe said, "and I want it to have nothing whatsoever to do with me except that I supply the trucks and the fuel."
Joe stared at him.
"That's not a bad idea," he said.
"It's the best idea I've had since the lights went out and I've been sitting on it for three weeks because I can't do it."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm me," Crowe said. "Because if I ride up to Harlan Batey's house and tell him I want to convene the board, he thinks it's a trick, and he's right to. Because I killed a man in a road and everybody knows it."
"And I haven't."
"You haven't, and you're the Californian, which turns out to be an asset for exactly one thing in this entire world and this is it."
Crowe put his hands on the bench. "Nobody in this valley owes you anything and nobody's afraid of you and nobody thinks you want to be in charge of them, because you've been on that bench nine months growing potatoes badly."
"They weren't that bad."
"Harlan Batey says they were terrible."
Joe surprised himself by laughing.
"So what do you want from me?"
"I want you to go see the board," Crowe said. "Four houses, four conversations. I'll tell you where they are, I'll tell you what each one cares about, and I will not come within a mile of any of them."
"And then?"
"And then if they say yes, they run the distribution and I haul it, and if they say no, I don't touch that elevator and neither do you, and we both watch eleven hundred tons of wheat rot in a bin while people starve."
"You'd accept that?"
"I'd accept it for about three months," Crowe said. "I'm not going to lie to you and say forever."
Joe stood there.
"Why does this matter to you?" he said. "Really. You've got food. You said so on the road."
Crowe picked up his hat for the third time and this time he put it on.
"Because my daughter's got maybe a year," he said. "Maybe two if your wife is as good as I think she is. And the only question I have left in my life is what this valley looks like when she's in it, and whether there's anything in it worth her being in."
He went to the door.
"That's not a strategy," he said. "That's the actual reason. Do what you want with it."
Joe took it to the table that night.
He laid the whole thing out, Crowe's plan and Crowe's reasoning and Crowe's fourteen men and his two, and he did not soften any of it.
The room argued for two hours.
Delores thought it was a trick. Colby thought it was the greatest idea anyone had ever had and volunteered to do everything. Sylvie wanted to know who decided who was a member. Pruitt said almost nothing and then said one thing that reframed the whole discussion.
"There's eleven hundred members," he said. "How many are still here?"
Everyone looked at him.
"That's the question," Pruitt said. "It's not eleven hundred. Half of them were in Heber and half of those walked out the first week. If it's four hundred families, that elevator is a year of flour for every one of them. If it's eleven hundred, it's four months."
Joe got out a pencil.
"Say eleven hundred tons," he said. "That's twenty two hundred thousand pounds. At a pound of wheat a day per person, which is about fifteen hundred calories, that's."
He stopped and did it on the envelope.
"That's two point two million person days," he said.
The table went silent.
"If there's four thousand people left in this valley," Imogen said slowly, "that's five hundred and fifty days."