Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

The Peahen by Twist Phelan

© 2008 by Twist Phelan

“The Peahen’ is an homage to Peter Dexter,” Twist Phelan told EQMM. “In the 1970s and ’80s, before he earned ac-claim for his novels Paris Trout and Deadwood, Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, he cut to the heart of the American character... My story is based on one of those columns, which looks at the tension that arises from the influx of things foreign on all-American endeavors.”

The peahen appeared in Dex’s barn the same day he had trouble with the tractor. It was there when he came back from scraping the driveway. The gravel was always rutted and uneven after a winter under the snowplow. So every year, three weeks after the last melt, Dex ran the scraper over it. He liked how a farmer’s life was regular that way.

Dex knew what kind of bird it was because he’d seen a picture at the library. Not that Dex was a reader. It was August, and there were three patrons ahead of Maeve in the checkout line, and the library was air-conditioned. Dex had flipped through a book that had been left out on a table so the librarian wouldn’t ask him to leave. The book had thick pages, and photos, all of birds.

The Peterses only needed one car. Dex drove Maeve on her errands — to the market, to the doctor, and, once a week, to the library. He had never liked the idea of her alone in town.

The book said a peahen was a female peacock. That didn’t make sense to Dex. It was like saying a doe was a female buck, instead of a female deer. There had to be a word that applied to both. Otherwise what was a peacock? A male peahen?

The peahen in the barn was a dull green. At least it would have been dull on a peacock. For a peahen, it was probably average. Could even be spectacular, for all Dex knew. The book hadn’t said anything about that.

Maeve hadn’t been one for bright colors. At least that’s what Dex had thought. But then she’d started wearing that scarf. Red and purple twined around, colors that raised his pulse just looking at them. The store in town didn’t sell anything like it.

Dex noticed the peahen when he was maneuvering the tractor into the barn (tricky with the scraper attached on the front). While it was the first exotic bird ever to wander onto his property, Dex wasn’t in the frame of mind to appreciate it. His barn and house sat on a slight rise. When he was driving up the incline, the tractor had started making that horrible racket.

The noise upset Dex. He needed the tractor to plow his acreage, plant his seed, harvest his crops. A farmer’s whole life depended on his tractor.

The tractor hadn’t been all that quiet to begin with. Even before the noise started, it was so loud, Dex had trouble hearing anything else when he was driving it. Not birds, not the occasional car down the dirt road, not a person walking to the farm next-door.

It seemed to Dex that the noise meant big trouble. The engine, like the rest of the tractor, was Italian, as notoriously temperamental as those people.

And it wasn’t just the noise. The tractor was a Bendorini, a company that had gone into bankruptcy right after Dex bought the tractor. Another company had bought the name and liabilities. The closest authorized dealership was in Boise.

Dex didn’t live in Boise. He lived in Stanley, a small mountain town almost four hours away. By car. It would take longer if he had to go by tractor.

Not that he expected it would help if he did get there. Dex was pretty sure the dealer wouldn’t repair the tractor, at least not without charging him. That’s because he’d bought the tractor secondhand from his neighbor, Victor Rossi. A used tractor was like a used car. Buy a Bendorini from Victor Rossi, and you had to go back to Victor if there was a problem. Unless Victor had printed As Is on the bottom of the bill of sale. And Victor had.

Dex suspected the problem was either in the engine or the transmission — a flaw in the heart of the machine. The noise — a human-like scream of pain or pleasure — had occurred half a dozen times as he climbed the hill to the barn. Dex never wanted to hear that sort of noise again.

Dex drove his Italian Chapter 11 tractor to the rear of the barn. He killed the engine — with a Bendorini, you didn’t turn a key, you pulled a lever that strangled it. He popped the hood and touched a piece of metal and burned himself. While he held his reddened fingers under cold water, he thought about how things might have been different if he’d bought a John Deere like everybody else.

John Deere was American through and through. No parts from China, no Mexicans putting it together. The company had been founded in Illinois by a blacksmith turned plow-maker nearly two hundred years ago. Dex had worn the company’s kelly-green trucker hats all through high school.

The Bendorini was red. Dex remembered the first time he saw it. It had been last fall, the second week of October. Victor was sitting on the tractor, parked beside the road where his property adjoined Dex’s. Maeve was there, too. Every day except Sunday she walked down the dusty track to check their mailbox, even though there were usually only bills, and those arrived toward the end of the month. Later, Dex would find out Maeve walked other places, too.

His wife had her head tilted back, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. While Dex watched, Victor said something to her, they both laughed, then Maeve walked back up the driveway. Right then, Dex decided he wanted a Bendorini.

“I’m buying a Bendorini,” he’d told Maeve that night when she was putting away the laundry. He liked how she folded his T-shirts so they lined up like kernels of corn in his drawer.

A new tractor cost sixty thousand dollars. Dex didn’t have sixty thousand dollars. Neither did the bank, at least not to lend to him. So Dex had walked down the driveway and bought the Bendorini from Victor for a little cash, plus an acre of plum trees Victor said he’d had his eye on. Dex’s father had planted the trees when he bought the farm fifty-nine years ago. Maeve used to make jam from the fruit.

While Dex ran his hand under the faucet, his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the barn. The peahen had moved to the corner.

If she was bothered by the noise of the tractor — it had stopped screaming now that it wasn’t climbing hills — she didn’t show it. She stared at Dex. He stared at her.

Dex walked over to see what the peahen thought she was doing in his barn. While she wasn’t exactly friendly, she did sidle over so he could see what she was looking at. They both stared at the washing machine.

When their old dryer had given out and they had to buy a new one, Maeve asked if they could get the matching washing machine, too. Dex had put the old washer in the barn. Maeve had used it to wash his overalls and rags and other really dirty stuff. But even on the Sanitize setting, it couldn’t get all the stains out. Dex had to burn the shirt and pants he’d been wearing two weeks ago.

Dex put some rags into the washer, added detergent, and pressed the On/Off button. The light above the button changed from green to red as the washer filled with water. He and the peahen stood there for a while, enjoying the On/Off light. When Dex began to imagine them as a married couple watching the sunset, he realized it was time to go back and look at the tractor.

The peahen stayed where she was. Dex admired her for knowing what she liked and sticking with it. People should be as constant.

He got out his toolbox and looked for his favorite wrench for a few minutes — the big one with the oversized head — before he remembered he didn’t have it anymore. So he took out another wrench and tried to tighten a bolt.

The wrench didn’t fit. Dex went through two more wrenches before he realized the bolts were metric, and he didn’t have metric wrenches. So he went inside and called the dealership in Boise. They referred him to the regional distributorship in Salt Lake, who gave him a number to call in Los Angeles.

Dex called the number. It was either the company that had bought Bendorini out of bankruptcy or a law firm, he wasn’t sure. By that time he was using bad language, language so bad that he felt he should call up his best friend Tommy DeFillipi to apologize for what he’d been saying about Italians. But it had been awhile since he and Tommy had been in touch.

Before he hung up on Dex, the person in Los Angeles suggested the problem might be the tension in the belt. Having no one else to call, Dex went back to the barn to check.

The peahen didn’t move as he walked past. She was completely involved in the washer light.

Dex reached under the tractor. This time he didn’t burn himself because the metal was cool. He fingered the belt that connected the engine to the mower part. It felt all right, but it was hard to tell for sure. Things that he thought should be within his grasp weren’t always. He tried again, then gave up. Dex figured some people were born to fix certain things, and some weren’t. It was like being born Italian. Either you were, or you weren’t.

He thought some more, then decided that if he sharpened the scraper, it wouldn’t have been a wasted afternoon. So he got out a pair of pliers — his wrenches were still useless — unfastened the scraper deck, and slid it out from underneath the tractor.

It weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds. Dex distinctly remembered Victor telling him how easy it would be to take off the deck for sharpening. A couple of bolts, a couple of linchpins, and that was it. Victor hadn’t mentioned how hard it was to maneuver a hundred and thirty pounds. Dex had found this out for himself two weeks ago.

Dex sharpened the scraper blade, caressing the edge with the file, doing it more gently than he usually would. When he was finished, he decided to put the scraper back on. An hour later, sweaty, arms shaking, he finally got one of the linchpins in place. After that, it was easy to reassemble everything else. He’d found nothing that might explain the scream. He had bashed his right hand, though, the one he’d used to swing the big wrench with the oversized head.

After putting away the file, Dex went to the barn entrance. He pressed his palms against his aching back, looked toward his neighbor’s farm. Victor’s place was much larger than Dex’s. Next to the silo was a green tractor. Beyond was five thousand acres of soybeans. Dex had twelve hundred acres of corn.

Soy was a more profitable crop than corn. Easier to grow, too. But Dex’s father had served in the Pacific. “I’m not growing Jap food,” he had told the seed company rep. Dex could see his point. Three months ago, when Maeve started making the new red sauce, he had stopped eating spaghetti.

It would take Dex twenty minutes to walk down his driveway, along the road, then up Victor’s driveway to the big house in the trees. A trail cut behind Dex’s barn in the direction of Victor’s place, but Dex had never used it. New grass was sprouting in the track. Soon the trail would be overgrown. Lifting the keys from the peg by the door, Dex got into his pickup.

Victor’s eyes narrowed when he saw Dex standing on his porch. He didn’t ask him in, but instead talked to him through the screen door. Victor lived alone. From what Dex could see through the screen, his house was tidier than Dex’s. Not as nice as Maeve would have kept it. But close. Dex wished his house was tidy again.

Dex explained about the disturbing tractor noises. Victor started shaking his head before he finished.

“I sold that tractor to you as is,” he said.

Dex was tempted to use bad language again, but didn’t. Instead he asked Victor if he wouldn’t mind taking a look at the tractor. Maybe because he used to own it he would know what was wrong with it.

“You got any metric wrenches?” Dex said.

Dex drove them back to his place. He saw Victor glance at the side yard of the house as they passed, where Maeve used to hang the bed sheets on the clothesline. She said they smelled better when they were air-dried. Dex wondered if that was true, why she didn’t dry everything that way. They wouldn’t have needed a new dryer. Or a washer, either.

“Maeve still at her sister’s?” Victor said, breaking the silence that had descended when they got into the truck. His voice was slightly accented.

Dex grunted. He parked the truck and led the way into the barn.

“What the hell?” Victor eyed the peahen.

“She likes looking at the washing machine.” Dex said.

“It’s a peafowl.” Victor took out his cell phone.

Peafowl. Leave it to Victor to know the word. Dex started the tractor. Victor scowled, pressed the phone against his ear, and kept talking. Dex let the tractor run.

Victor closed the phone. “Sounds fine to me.”

Dex grunted and lifted the hood.

Victor looked over the engine without touching it.

“Looks fine to me.”

Dex felt a rush of anger. The tractor, Dex, nothing was fine. They’d never be fine again, and Victor knew it. Dex picked up the biggest of Victor’s metric wrenches and pointed.

“What about that part there?”

Victor leaned over to see what Dex was pointing at. The wrench hit the base of Victor’s skull with a dull thud that Dex felt in his stomach.

The peahen never looked away from the washing machine.

Dex set down the metric wrench. It had worked just as well as his big one with the oversized head.

He rolled Victor’s body into a tarp, then hoisted it onto the scraper attachment. Pain shot through his lower back. The muscles were still sore from lifting Maeve.

Dex put a sack of lime on top of the rolled-up tarp. He’d have to buy more in Boise. Already he’d picked up the season’s order from the hardware in town.

The sun shone through the barn door. Dust motes swirled. Two hours left in the farming day. Dex climbed onto the tractor. At least the ground wouldn’t be near-frozen this time.

He drove the tractor out of the barn. The peahen didn’t flinch.

It was almost dark when Dex drove the tractor back up the hill. No shriek. Maybe everything was fixed now.

Dex climbed off the tractor. He noticed the peahen still standing in front of the washer, staring at the red light.

“Show’s over,” Dex said. He punched the On/Off button. The red light went off.

The bird stared at Dex as though she couldn’t believe what he had done. As Dex headed into the house to strip off his clothes and burn them, the peahen opened her beak and the air shattered and Dex understood in that moment that the noise had not come from the tractor.

A car bumped up the driveway. A sheriff’s deputy leaned his head out the window. He wore a baseball cap that said Animal Control across the front.

“Hey, Mr. Peters,” he said. “Got a call about a peahen. Do you know where I can find Victor Rossi?”