“Must be full a weeds and thistles.”
“It’s good hay. You can drive up there, look at it. But you better be fast, he won’t have it long. So far you’re the only one knows about it.” He gave her Björn’s phone number in Disk, Wisconsin.
“So how come I’m the lucky rancher gets to hear about this great hay?” she said, but her question fell on a dead connection.
She flew up to La Crosse, rented the airport’s last available car, and drove out to Disk. Björn Smith was a thready blond in his forties with a round head and beaky orange nose that gave him the look of a seagull. He showed her the hay, stowed in a capacious, fragrant barn. It was prime alfalfa hay, holding green. She pulled out a handful and looked at it—there was a high proportion of leaf to stem, it was pliable and clean. She noticed it had been cut when in the bud stage. There was nothing like Wisconsin alfalfa hay.
“First cutting?” she asked.
Björn nodded. “I could a sold it at the hay auction for more but Deb said you was a friend and needed hay bad. I guess you got a mean drought over there in Wyoming?”
She twisted her mouth in sardonic agreement, paid him on the spot. There goes almost six grand, she thought.
“I’ll get Deb come pick it up soon’s I can,” she said, folding the bill of sale into her wallet.
“Sooner the better. I want a get out a here.”
“Givin up farmin?”
“Yeah. Goin a film school at UCLA.”
“No kiddin. Like learnin how to make movies?”
“That’s right. I got ideas.”
“Oh,” said Fiesta Punch, “we all got them.” Then, more kindly, “I hope you make it.”
Deb Sipple was in Muddy’s Hole cutting the dust with his eleventh beer and seventh cigarette when Fiesta Punch came through the door and looked around, headed for him as if following a chalk line drawn across the floor.
“Hello, Deb. That’s a filthy habit. Everbody else but you give up smokin. Anyways, I bought some hay up in Wisconsin and I want you to go pick it up as soon as possible. Tomorrow.”
“Westconston! Hell, that’s halfway across the country. That’s the other side a the Mississippi. It’s almost in New York.”
“Not quite. It’s in Disk, just over the Iowa line. As I think you know, so don’t play dumb.” She knew who the anonymous caller had been. “Speed is necessary. Your pal Björn wants to split and I need the hay. It’s a couple trips for you.”
He put on a sly face. “You know I’m goin a bite your red rosy ass with a heavy price.”
“That’s what I come to discuss.”
“I got to ask two dollars fifty a ton.”
“I’ll take it!” She could hardly believe her ears. She had been expecting to hear twenty or thirty dollars per ton.
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