LITMIR.BIZ

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miles east. The river disappeared. The only way you could tell it was there was by the treetops meandering in the same direction Cash was now driving.

      The social studies teacher, a farm kid who grew up and went to North Dakota State College and got a teaching degree because his dad wanted something better than farm life for his kids, proudly claimed the floods replenished the valley’s two-foot thick, nutrient-rich topsoil.

      Black gold, as the farmers called it. So while the growing season this far north was short—usually from May to August with potato and beet harvest going into September and October—this part of the country, this country that Cash called her own, was known to the locals as the breadbasket of the world.

      Cash had been working as a farm laborer since she was eleven when one of her foster mothers—one in a long line of foster mothers—decided she couldn’t stand the sight of Cash. Something about Cash’s dark hair and perpetually tanned skin next to her blond daughter’s peeling sunburn drove the woman crazy. She banished Cash to the fields to work with the men.

      At eleven, Cash was barely four foot, nine inches and certainly less than a hundred pounds. A shave over five feet is where she stood now and more than a sack of potatoes, she thought. Back then she was smaller than the hay bales she was required to throw or the potato sacks she was told to fill. But she was quick and smart and what she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in sheer determination.

      The men laughed at her size, admired her willpower and soon had her driving tractor and truck that had foot gears rigged with wooden two-by-fours so she could reach.

      When the farm boys teased her about being a girl working with the men and asked why she was driving tractor instead of canning pickled beets, she would always reply, “I need the cash.” Except the only cash she got was from her foster father when he hired her out to the neighboring farmers—he would only give her ten dollars of whatever they were paying. By the end of beet hauling season that first year, Renee Blackbear was forgotten and Cash was the girl-kid farm laborer all the men knew.

      After a season in the fields, Cash decided there was no way she was going back to washing dishes, canning food and dusting ceramic trinkets from the old world. She started getting up a half hour early each morning and doing a routine of sit-ups, push-ups and isometric exercises she’d learned in sixth-grade gym class. All to build muscle strength. She sabotaged her housework by burning holes in sheets while ironing and over-seasoning whole kettles of stew meant to feed a household. While each insured a beating, it wasn’t long before she was once again banished outdoors to work with the men.

      Now at nineteen, Cash worked year-round as a farm laborer. At the end of each growing season, she drove grain truck from sunup to sundown.

      This morning she drove north on Highway 75 on the Minnesota side of the river. One by one, she passed through the small sleeping towns of Kragnes, Georgetown, Perley and Hendrum, nothing moving anywhere except for the occasional pickup truck.

      When she got to Halstad, she turned toward the rising sun, away from the river. She parked at the Anderson farm, climbed into a Massey Ferguson grain truck and headed to the farm’s north forty. She spent the day driving back and forth alongside the combine as it poured wheat into the bed of her truck. When it was full, she drove back to the Anderson farm to unload. The truck creaked and groaned as she levered the bed to dump the grain, then stood guard, watching for overflow. The grain flowed with a thick, soft swoosh into the mouth of the auger, feeding the grain up into a steel bin. The noise from the auger motor overpowered any other sound on the farmstead.

      At noon she ate lunch in the shade of the truck. She chased down a tuna sandwich with coffee from her red thermos, picking wheat chaff off the bread before taking a bite. For dessert, Anderson gave her a mason jar of homemade lemonade and a chocolate chip cookie his daughter had made for her 4-H project. And then it was back to work.

      At twilight she got into her Ranchero and cruised through Halstad on her way south, revisiting the towns of the morning. Cars were parked headfirst in front of the liquor stores or bars in each town. Trucks were lined up at the grain elevators waiting to be weighed. Street lights popped on.

      Cash drove on through Moorhead and crossed the river into Fargo. She ran up the stairs to her apartment, threw her work clothes into a pile on the floor and pulled on some cleaner clothes from the stack on the chair, heading back down the stairs and over to the Casbah.

      The joint was full. Someone had stuffed quarters into the jukebox and a couple of drunks were Walking After Midnight with Patsy Cline. Cash ordered a couple Buds and put her quarters on the table. She played till closing time, losing track of the number of games won and bottles drunk. Some farmer dude grabbed her around the waist and slow danced while stroking her long hair, murmuring ah baby in her ear.

      Jim showed up right at closing. Cash figured he had put the wife to bed, maybe taken her to a movie in Moorhead. She never asked about his wife although rumor had it she had been head cheerleader back in high school. Cash also knew he hadn’t been drafted because his older brothers were already serving. As the youngest brother, he had gotten a deferment to stay on the farm. Now Jim was at the Casbah for his Cash fix. Cash obliged and once again kicked him out in the wee hours of the morning.

      Saturday Cash woke up at sunrise. Years of getting up at five to feed chickens, water dogs, milk cows and cook breakfasts was a habit more ingrained than the hangover from the alcohol she drank each night. Cash swung out of bed and pulled on the jeans she’d dropped on the floor the night before. She grabbed her shirt off the chair by the bedside and buttoned it up.

      She needed coffee. She had a tin coffeepot like she had seen in the cowboy movies. She liked that she could dump in a handful of Folgers, put the whole thing on the hotplate. By the time she’d tossed water over her face and brushed her teeth in the cracked porcelain sink in the small bathroom, the coffee would be boiling. She would shut the hotplate off so the grounds would settle. The coffee could cool a bit while she brushed out her hair.

      While Cash didn’t pay much attention to her looks, all the guys in the bar raved about her hair. It hung below her waist. In one foster home, they had chopped it off so that she had looked like a boy all that year. Even now she shopped in the boys’ section at JCPenny because boys’ clothes were cheaper than girls’ and the boys’ jeans fit her skinny hips better than the ones in the women’s or girls’ department. But the humiliation of having her head shaved stuck with her. Her one vanity was her long, dark brown hair.

      Cash turned on the radio and sat down at the small table in her makeshift kitchen to drink her morning coffee. The window overlooked the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. If she leaned a little forward and to the left, she supposed she could catch a glimpse of the corner of the Casbah. But her attention was caught by the radio announcer talking about a body that was found in a stubble-field thirty miles north of the FM area off Highway 75.

      The announcer was saying that Sheriff Wheaton had been sent out to check on a suspicious pile of rags in the middle of the field and found a body.

      Cash jumped up and pulled on the cleanest dirty socks she could find and put on her tennis shoes. She poured the remainder of the coffee into her Thermos and hooked her keys on the little finger of the hand that carried a white cup. Within five minutes she was on Highway 75 headed north, back on the Minnesota side of the Red.

      Thirty minutes later Cash leaned against her mud-spattered Ranchero and watched Wheaton talk with two men. All three stared down at the flattened stubble. A body lay there, his head facing towards the river, away from Cash. Except for their black suits and Wheaton’s sheriff’s uniform, they could have been any three men discussing next year’s corn crop, the price of wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange or the odds that the Sox might take the World Series.

      Cash reached into the pocket of her jacket for a crumpled pack of Marlboros. She tapped one out and put it to her mouth, fished in her jeans pocket for a book of matches. With a practiced left-hand move, she lit it one-handed by bending a match over the back of the matchbook. It was a trick she’d learned from one of the vets returning from Viet Nam. In a drinking binge at the end of last summer, they had sat drinking out in a cornfield. He had shown her the

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