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Moving to TownbyRobert Rice
At the trial, Lucy Booser told the judge that if her husband hadn’t
insisted on going to the casino, she never would have blown up his tractor. It
was the Indians’ fault, really. They were the ones who started all the
trouble, building that gambling joint just four miles from Lucy and Odus’s
farm. Jackpot Junction, they called it, and no one in southern Minnesota could
talk about anything else.
In the beginning it wasn’t too bad, just a bingo parlor that didn’t
amount to nothing in a shed on the reservation. Lucy herself had no use for
gambling of any kind, but some of the neighbors, it’s true, did play bingo,
and she supposed she could understand how it might not be too sinful to sit in a
church basement on Friday night and spend a dollar or two, as long as it went
for a good cause like the church day school. Not to the Indians, of course. She
was sure most people felt like she did and the bingo joint would go broke.
But then they went and put up the big building, three stories high, white
stucco, and put slot machines in it and card games. People from all over the
state started coming to see what was happening, and lots of them gambled.
“Well, if they’re stupid enough to do that,” she told Odus, “I hope they
lose everything they got.”
When their nearest neighbors, the Gustafsons, started going she let them
know how foolish they were. “Those Indians are just trying to take your
money,” she said.
But Edith Gustafson told her it was fun. Besides, they had a real nice
restaurant there now, it was clean and the food was good and cheap. Over coffee
she described how the casino looked inside and even though Lucy didn’t want
to, she listened in grim wonder.
“In the middle,” Edith said, “there’s blackjack tables, and
it’s open all the way up to the roof. There’s real wood paneling on the
walls, walnut I think, and that green carpet’s so thick it feels like you’re
walking on your lawn.”
“Well our church is nice, too,” Lucy said.
“The best part is the slot machines, though. There must be thousands of
them, all shiny and lit up with lights that flash. They ding and hum all the
time, like some kind of space music.”
Odus put down his coffee cup with a faraway look in his eyes. His whiskers
rasped as he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. Right then and there
Lucy knew she was in trouble.
“You’ll never catch us in there,” she said to Edith, loud enough so
she knew Odus heard. He wouldn’t admit he was hard of hearing and it drove her
crazy, the way he turned the TV up so loud.
“Them Indians,” she said, “they’re just in it because they’re
too lazy to work. They live on the reservation so they can live off us.”
“Maybe,” Edith said.
But Lucy could see she didn’t really agree with her because she changed
the subject.
While she and Edith had a second cup, Odus went outside. To tinker with
his tractor, Lucy knew. Since he retired and rented out the land all he did was
play with that old thing and putter around in his garden. Over the years the
garden had grown bigger and bigger until he needed the tractor to plow it.
“Stop raising all that stuff,” she told him. “We can’t eat it
all.”
But every spring Odus plowed up a little more ground behind the hog barn
and planted a new kind of muskmelon or more sweet corn. Even when it rained he
spent every summer morning there, and when he wasn’t in the garden, he was
messing with that tractor.
“You’re almost seventy years old,” Lucy told him. “You should be
taking it easy. You’ve got no business working that hard at your age. And look
at me. This house is too much for me to keep up. Let’s sell this place and
move to town.”
But when she said that, Odus would get up and go outside, or if it was a
winter night and he couldn’t, he’d turn the TV up and ignore her. Lucy would
have to go into her bedroom to get away from the noise, and she couldn’t help
but feel a little sorry for herself. Nearly fifty years of hard work she’d
given him. All it had gotten her was a bad back and high blood pressure. A cozy
little house in town, having the neighbors over for coffee, taking life easy for
a change--it didn’t seem much to ask.
Even after Odus hired a maid for her, a young Indian woman she didn’t
approve of, it didn’t really change anything and she let Odus know it. “This
place is falling apart,” she said one morning when he came in for coffee.
“Last week it was the roof on the hog barn. This week the well’s flooding.
God knows what it’ll be next week. You can’t keep things fixed up like they
should be. Did you drain that well yet?”
“I ain’t looked this morning.”
“I’ll bet it’s full of water again.”
Odus just looked out the window and chewed his sweet roll, then took a
sip of coffee and set his cup down on the clear plastic she kept over the
tablecloth. She sighed in exasperation, reached over and moved the cup onto his
saucer.
“I think I’ll drive over to Jackpot Junction,” he said.
Lucy couldn’t have been more horrified if he’d told her he was
turning Catholic. “What?”
He pushed back his chair and stood. “I’m gonna see what’s there.
I’ll be back.”
“Are you nuts? You know what Pastor Schultz says about gambling.
What’ll the neighbors think?”
“I ain’t gonna gamble. I’m just gonna look. And the neighbors have
all been there.”
“Not in the middle of the day.”
Odus ignored her and walked into his bedroom.
For a moment she sat at the table, listening to him open and close
drawers looking for clean socks and underwear. Then she stood and wrapped Saran
Wrap around the plate of sweet rolls and spread a dish towel over the salt and
pepper shakers. She picked up her cup and saucer and carried them to the sink,
then pulled open a drawer and searched through the can openers and jar lids
until she found what she was looking for, an old skeleton key.
Odus was standing with his back to her, reaching into his closet for the
white shirt he wore to church, when she pulled the bedroom door shut quietly and
turned the key in the lock.
She tucked the key into her apron pocket and went to the front room
window and gazed out. A bird feeder made out of an old bicycle wheel stood on a
post in the lawn. She had bought it on the spur of the moment at a craft sale in
Montevideo, much to Odus’s scorn. As she watched, a breeze caught the spokes
and turned the wheel slowly. The food cups attached to the sides swung so they
always stayed upright. “The birds like that,” she’d told him the other
day. “When the wind blows it around they get a ride.”
“You ever seen a bird on that thing, Ma?” he said.
That made her mad. It was just like him.
Now she heard the bedroom doorknob turn, then Odus’s voice. “What
the....?” The knob rattled as he pulled on it. “Ma,” he shouted, his voice
muffled. “Come here once. Push on this door. It’s stuck.”
She smiled and watched the bird feeder turn. If the birds would just give
it a chance, she knew they’d like it.
“Ma? You out there?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“Come here and push on this door.”
After a moment she said, “It’s not stuck. I locked it.”
“Hah?”
“I locked it,” she shouted.
Silence. Then a puzzled, “The hell.” More silence. Finally, he said.
“What the devil for?”
“You’re not going to that Indian gambling joint.”
He muttered something she didn’t catch. Then she heard the bed squeak
as he sat down on it.
Lucy smiled to herself and went down in the basement to wash clothes. The
yellow Kenmore automatic washer Odus had bought her sat against the wall,
unplugged. Her old wringer machine got the clothes cleaner. Humming, she
attached the hose to the water faucet and ran water into the washing machine
tub.
At eleven-thirty she stopped and went upstairs to fix lunch. She put the
morning coffee back on the electric range and put white bread on a plate, then
bologna and Velveeta on another and carried them to the table. When the coffee
was hot, she turned off the burner and went to the bedroom door.
“Odus, lunch is ready,” she shouted. “If you promise not to go to
the casino, I’ll let you out.”
There was no answer.
She put her ear to the door and listened but heard nothing. He must have
gone to sleep and she decided to let him have his nap. Pleased with her
generosity, she took the key from her apron and put it in the lock and turned,
and pushed the door open a crack.
Odus wasn’t on the bed. She pushed the door a little wider, stuck her
head in the room and looked around. It was empty. The curtain caught between the
closed window and the sill told her how he had escaped.
Furious with herself for forgetting the window, she swung the door open
so hard it hit the wall. But as she turned to leave she decided not to let him
know she had discovered his escape. She drew the door closed and locked it
again, then sat down at the table and ate two bologna and Velveeta sandwiches.
She had finished the laundry and was just lying down in her room for a
nap when she heard a car drive into the yard. She knew from the sound it was
Odus and resisted the temptation to get up and look. A few minutes later the
kitchen door opened and he came in whistling.
Lucy lay still and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep in case he
checked on her. But he didn’t. He walked past her room, probably with his
muddy shoes still on, and down the hall to his bedroom.
A crash raised her bolt-upright. It sounded like an airplane had fallen
on the house. She hurried to her door, pulled it open and peered out.
Odus had smashed the lock on his door. She stared in shock as he propped
a sledge hammer against the wall and walked into his room, still whistling.
Lucy closed her door and locked it with the skeleton key and sat on her
bed, hand over her mouth. Worse than she had feared. Only a few hours in that
gambling den and they had turned him into a maniac. As she sat wondering what to
do--should she commit him to the asylum over in Wilmar? He was obviously crazy,
a gambling fiend gone violent. But how did you go about committing somebody?
Just call the asylum? At least then she could move into town. As she thought
about what to do she heard Odus come out of his room and walk down the hall, not
whistling now. She held her breath. He paused a moment outside her door, but
then he walked on and she heard the kitchen door open and close, and the screen
slam.
A few minutes later she unlocked her door and opened it. The sledge
hammer was gone. She went to the kitchen window and moved the curtain enough to
peek out.
Odus was bent over in the farthest corner of his garden, pulling weeds
from the carrots. He didn’t look violent now. After thinking a moment she
decided she wouldn’t commit him yet. But she knew he would try to sneak away
to the casino again. Once in the grip of gambling fever a man was helpless.
An idea came to her. She hurried out the front door, tiptoed to the car
and pulled the keys out of the ignition. Then she hid them, along with her own
set, in the basement behind the Kenmore.
Lucy waited, fixing Odus’s meals in silence, watching him out of the
corner of her eye, not even mentioning the broken door. Sure enough, two days
later he came in from the garden, went to his room and changed clothes and came
out whistling, jingling change in his go-to-town pants. From the window she
watched him get into the Ford and hunt for the keys. In a few minutes he got out
again and went over to his tractor.
He unhooked the wires of the battery charger he kept connected to it and
climbed up on the seat. The engine cranked and started with a pop. Then he
chugged away in the direction of Jackpot Junction.
Within an hour he was back and Lucy wondered why a man would bother
gambling at all if he wasn’t going to stay any longer than that. He parked the
tractor, hooked up the battery charger and headed for the house. She stayed in
the basement while he changed clothes, but when he left the house again she came
up and looked out the kitchen window. He had gone to his garden and she knew
he’d stay there until supper.
The tractor sat in front of the machine shed and she glared at it. It was
a huge thing, faded orange with rear wheels as tall as she was and tiny front
wheels angled in at the bottom. The frame had broken once and was held together
by four huge bolts and old welds that looked like puckered scars. The engine
leaked oil in a steady, slow drip and the battery kept running down from a short
circuit Odus was never able to find.
When he’d bought the tractor back in 1948 it had been new, like their
marriage, and she was as proud of it as he was, how it was the envy of the
neighborhood. “You look so handsome up on that seat,” she’d told him, and
he grinned.
But now she resented it, a broken-down thing like that. What did he need
a tractor for anyway? And it was embarrassing, him driving it to the casino.
Next thing she knew he’d be driving it to church. Suddenly she hated it, hated
it like she’d never hated anything.
She put on her oldest overalls, the ones she used to weed the flower
beds, and her work gloves and went over to the machine shed. It was gloomy
inside, the dirt floor shiny and hard from oil and spattered with pigeon
droppings. She didn’t like it and she never went in there if she could help
it.
Lucy pulled the light string and looked around, knowing what she was
after but not sure what it looked like. One winter, years ago, the railroad had
abandoned the right-of-way and put it up for sale. Odus had thought about buying
the ten-mile strip between Redwood Falls and Morton, but in the end he decided
not to.
“Longest farm I ever seen,” he told her, “but it’s only sixty
feet wide. Couldn’t hardly turn the tractor around.”
He had worked for them that winter tearing up track. Somewhere he found
an old case of dynamite and brought it home. Even though he never told her where
he stored it she didn’t doubt it would be in here someplace.
In the back corner behind a step ladder, after she snagged her overalls
on the lawn mower, she found it, an unmarked wooden box with a hinged lid
covered with grease and dust. She moved the ladder aside and pulled up the lid.
The box was full of gray tubes with printing on them that said Forcite 40%.
She
picked one up and looked at it. It reminded her of a Roman candle she’d held
in her hand one Fourth of July, the year Ruth got sick. She stared at the oily
tube, turning it in her fingers, stung by the memory that ambushed her now like
a snake in the flower bed, remembering the suddenness of the fever, their
helplessness, the decision to take the girl to the hospital. And the Studebaker
not starting, and the horrible slowness of the tractor as Odus drove it to the
neighbors' to borrow their car, then the frantic race to town, her child going
stiff in her arms, and then still. Dead before they could reach town.
With a shake of her head Lucy pulled her mind back. She set the tube on
the ground and searched through the case for fuses, and she found what she
thought must be one, a paper box with a hole in the center that said Thermalite Igniter Cord, Type B, 33 1/3 feet. She held the box at
arm’s length, squinting at the directions on the back. Pull off length
required and cut. That seemed simple enough. She wouldn’t need much.
She opened the box and pulled out a coil of waxy green cord, set it down
and went to the garage to get her pruning shears, then snipped off a length of
cord about three feet long. She looked at it, wondering how to attach it to the
dynamite. Any way would do, she supposed. She tied one end around the middle of
the tube and made a nice bow.
Knees stiff, Lucy got to her feet and carried the dynamite to the
doorway. She shielded her eyes, blinking in the bright afternoon light, and
looked toward the garden. Odus was facing the other way and couldn’t see her.
Tapping the tube thoughtfully on her leg, she inspected the tractor.
Where to put it? He had left the seat tilted forward and the battery case under
it open. Wires ran from the battery to the charger, on the ground near one of
the rear tires.
Careful not to get grease on her overalls she stepped up on the footrest
and laid the dynamite on top of the battery. “Just you wait till I get some
matches,” she said.
She was opening a drawer in the kitchen when she glanced out the window.
To her horror Odus was walking toward the tractor. She froze, her hand on the
matchbox. What would he do to her if he found the dynamite? He was violent, that
she already knew, and if he thought she was trying to hurt his tractor, Lord
knew what he was capable of. She held her breath, praying for him to go back to
the garden.
But Odus folded back the hood and started playing with some wires inside.
She stood unable to move, trying to think of something to distract him. She had
just thought of calling out to him that he had a telephone call when he closed
the hood with a clang and shuffled to the back. He bent over and did something
with the battery charger and the tractor exploded.
One moment it was standing there, faded orange in the bright sun and Odus
bent over behind the huge rear wheel. The next moment there was a bright orange
ball of flame and greasy black smoke and the wheel flying through the air, Odus
clinging to it like a life raft.
She ran from the house shrieking, “Not you! I didn’t mean you, just
the tractor! Why didn’t you stay in the garden?”
Jake Gustafson, driving by in his grain truck, saw the explosion and
skidded to a stop as Odus and the tire landed on the lawn, taking out the bird
feeder. Jake stared at the flaming tractor, then at Lucy, then loaded Odus in
his truck and carried him to the hospital. She followed as soon as she could
find the car keys.
The doctors told her it was pure good luck the wheel shielded Odus from
the blast, and that he landed on top of it instead of the other way around. He
had a broken ankle and collar bone, and his ears would ring for awhile, but
he’d be all right. Jake Gustafson called the sheriff.
Odus told the judge it was an accident and he was sure Lucy never meant
to blow him up. He hadn’t even taken the tractor to the casino, he’d gone to
town to get a spare part.
The judge, Leona Petersen’s boy, lectured Lucy about playing with
dangerous materials like she was some kind of child and told her this was
serious business, as if she didn’t already know that. He gave her a night in
jail. The sheriff came and took away the dynamite.
In jail Lucy worried a little about what the neighbors would think and
how she would explain this to Pastor Schultz, but she decided when he knew the
truth he would be on her side, and the neighbors were all gamblers so their
opinions didn’t count anyway. She sat on her bunk listening to two women in
the next cell -- Indians, she was sure, although she couldn’t see them --
complain
about how the casino was being run and talk about voting out management at the
next meeting.
She had to admit she was enjoying jail a little, although she was glad
she had a private room. It had been years since she’d gotten so much attention
or stayed up so late. More than ever it made her want to live in town. And now
that Odus was laid up and might be limping for months, she thought she had a
good chance of talking him into moving.
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