“They got a hotel?” asked Lester.
“Hotel or a boardinghouse. I forget which.”
“It’s a hotel,” Tommy said. “I think.”
“You think they’ll give us a room?” Lester asked.
“Hell, yes,” Frank replied. “Why not? If we can pay they’ll give us a room.”
Wesley understood that Lester’s true concern was over money. A good many families in Mercer County were poor, but the Hoenigs were worse off than most. Their family was large (Wesley could never keep track——were there nine or ten kids?), and whether it was the land it sat on or Mr. Hoenig’s incompetence Wesley never knew for sure, but their farm, year in and year out, was one of the least productive in the area. Lester tried to cover their poverty by pretending not to care about what other boys cared about—new shotguns or rifles, cars, horses, pretty girls, baseball gloves. Frank and Wesley’s mother had stopped giving Frank’s hand-me-downs to Wesley; instead she had Frank give them to the shorter, slighter Lester.
“Me and Frank will pay for the room,” Wesley offered.
“You sure?” Lester said.
Frank picked up on his brother’s suggestion. “The trip’s our idea. Hell, McCoy’s my idea. It’s only fair.”
“Okay by me,” agreed Tommy.
“I still wonder if they’ll give us a room,” worried Lester.
“Frank’s right,” Tommy said. “If we got the money, we’re in. That’s McCoy.”
Frank shook his head. “Pop says it’s not as wide open as it used to be.”
“That’s not what you said last summer,” Tommy replied.
“What?” Lester asked. “What about last summer?”
“We had a baseball tournament over there,” Tommy said.
Wesley interrupted. “It’s hardly even cattle country around there now. Fucking wheat farmers.”
“Where were you?” Frank asked Lester. “How come you didn’t play?”
“Working,” Lester answered. “We was bringing in a crop of hay. Trying to. What there was.” He turned back to Tommy. “What happened in McCoy?”
Tommy leaned toward Frank. “You want me to tell him?”
Frank shrugged.
“How long has it been since we saw another car?” Wesley asked.
“You never see anybody on this road,” Frank said. “Even when the weather’s good.”
“You wonder why they put the money in a road nobody uses,” Wesley said.
Tommy tapped his fingers over his mouth in an imitation war chant. “Woo-woo-woo-woo! You didn’t hear? Frank got himself a little Indian gal in McCoy last summer. Got her good.”
Tommy had stolen a box of cigars from Douglas’s Rexall before they left, and he and Lester had been smoking since they drove out of town. The car was drafty, but cigar smoke still gathered so thickly in the backseat that when Wesley turned around it looked as though Tommy and Lester sat in their own little blizzard. Ahead or behind, Wesley thought, you can’t see a goddamn thing.
Lester leaned toward Frank. “Did you force her? Did you have to force her?”
Frank’s laugh sounded like a bark in the car’s close quarters. “Where did you get an idea like that? Force her. Such language. You read that somewhere?”
Tommy was laughing too. “Shit, she followed him around with her skirt over her head practically. She let him fuck her right by the ball field. In somebody’s truck, wasn’t it?”
“How come I never heard about this?” asked Lester.
Wesley wiped his nose on the back of his glove. “You should’ve. Seemed like everybody in the whole school knew about it.”
“Even Loretta?” asked Lester. Loretta was Loretta Gerber, the girl with whom Frank was supposed to be going steady.
Frank’s laughter stopped. “She better not. If Loretta found out, I’d know someone was telling tales out of school. Someone would get his ass whipped.”
“Hey, she ain’t going to hear anything from me,” said Tommy. “But it’s hard to keep a secret in Bentrock.”
Frank’s smile returned. “I don’t know about that.”
Wesley turned away from his brother and waited. He thought he knew what would come next.
Frank said, “You haven’t got the facts quite right.”
Wesley recognized those words as the same ones that came often from their father’s mouth. When asked about a crime in the county, their father loved to let people speculate on the incident and then to correct them, smiling slyly, with the phrase, “You haven’t got the facts quite right.”
“I’m surprised at you, Tommy,” said Frank. “What with you being there and all. I didn’t fuck that little Indian girl.”
“The hell.”
“I’m telling you.”
Lester punched Tommy in the shoulder. “Now who’s telling stories.”
Tommy cocked his fist but didn’t deliver a blow. “Goddamn it!”
“That’s right,” said Frank. “I didn’t just fuck that little squaw.... I fucked her mama too.”
Tommy fell back laughing. He kicked the back of the seat so hard Wesley could feel Tommy’s boots right through the springs and the horsehair.
“No shit?” said Lester. “The both of them? How did you.... Did you do ‘em at the same time?”
“At the same time, Lester? Fellow would have to have two peckers to do that. Besides, no mama and her daughter are that close.”
“What did the old one look like?” Tommy wanted to know.
“She wasn’t old. She was actually pretty young to have a daughter that age.” Frank took one hand off the steering wheel and rested it on the gearshift. “She wasn’t bad looking. But she was on the plump side. Like squaws can get.”
“Jesus,” said Tommy. “The both of them.”
“It wasn’t easy. Cost me three bottles of Ole Norgaard’s homemade wine. One for the daugher, two for her mama.”
When Wesley heard that he remembered a day the previous summer when he and his brother had ridden with their mother out to Ole Norgaard’s place, a little tarpaper shack just outside Bentrock. Ole, everyone agreed, had a gift for growing fruits and vegetables, and even people who had their own gardens bought produce from Ole. He also made homemade beer and wine, and a good many men in the county swore on the superiority of Ole’s products. Once Prohibition went into effect, their father made no effort to close down Ole. Furthermore, if any local man wanted to make a little home brew or buy a couple bottles of gin when he was in Minneapolis and bring it home with him, the sheriff would not object. However, if an outsider tried to come into the county and operate a still or if someone began to run large quantities of bootleg whiskey down from Canada, the sheriff would stop that in a minute. He did not object to a man taking a drink— he was as fond of Ole Norgaard’s beer as anyone—but he would not tolerate an outsider making a profit on the county’s residents.
On that day, Frank and Wesley waited by the car while their mother went out to Ole’s garden with him. Ole allowed his best customers—and certainly Mrs. Hayden qualified—to pick out their vegetables while they were still on the vine or the stalk or in the ground. Mrs. Hayden had come for sweet corn, and Ole would find a dozen