I stood very still.
“Eat your pie,” he said, gruffly. “I’ll go get Gene.”
Gene Pokorny lived four miles east on a ranch his grandfather had homesteaded. He was fifty-three, a big sunburned man with a beard going gray, and he was the sort who would argue with a fence post for the pleasure of it. He and Tom had gone to school together. They had fought once, in the eighth grade, over a girl who married neither of them, and had been loud, affectionate enemies ever since.
He came in his own truck at noon, with Arlen behind him. I was in the stackyard directing traffic with a clipboard, because I’d had to do something with my hands. Ben was up on a tractor beside me, moving bales into rows with the loader. He hadn’t said a word all morning. I could see his jaw working under the brim of Tom’s old Pioneer cap, which was a size too large and slid down over his eyes.
