Little Threats by Emily Schultz

Author:Emily Schultz [Schultz, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE STARS HELD their own in the dark. That’s all there seemed to be: stars, dark, and, below them, the smell of cow pies. Charles Prangley stood in the field, his white suede spectators sinking in mud and shit, next to a bedraggled farmer in long-sleeved plaid flannel, even though it was August. Mosquitoes tittered at his earlobes and Prangley lifted a hand and slapped. A hum drifted toward them from a long way off. Prangley pivoted.

“Ya hear that, eh?” the farmer said. “That’ll be our gal.”

Prangley squinted into the dark and kicked his shoes between the tomato plants, wishing he’d remembered that, after you hand over your money to bigwigs, you still have to deal with the grunts. He’d met with Blaise Diesbourg so briefly he could barely remember what he looked like. The famous “King Canada” had shaken his hand, taken his money, then shown him to a car that would drive him out to the farm. Even so, Prangley believed himself lucky. Everyone in Detroit, it seemed, wanted to meet with Diesbourg. He was the one with the planes, the one with the plan. He’d smuggled throughout the dry years, and now that liquor was legal again in Canada, his business was that much easier. This farmer, Prangley knew, was just one of the men Diesbourg rented; in fact, King Canada had probably bought this field as a runway for twenty dollars.

But for Prangley, this new business investment was sizable. He’d cultivated the idea for a long time, and concluded that with Bunterbart gone and the men at odds and ends, it was time. If anything, he was late to the party. So he’d cleared out several stacks of bills, leaving behind a huge black space in the casket, put the money in a suitcase, and ferried it to Canada. He didn’t like the way that hole looked. It had been several years since he’d been able to see the wood at the bottom of the coffin.

And now this bearded nobody with his unpainted house and mud under his nails was saying, Watch those beefsteaks, eh, as Prangley tramped between garden rows. But the airplane that would land in this field was Prangley’s—he’d agreed to buy it outright, sight unseen. He listened to it come, rattling overhead, her belly visible: black with a white stripe, like a killer whale.

“Sweet Jesus!” Prangley cursed, clutching his trilby before it could roll off into the dirt. He crouched as the pilot put her down to the ground scarcely ten yards away. The field unfolded in smoke. When Prangley stood up, coughing, the farmer was laughing, a real belly laugh.

“Dirty business,” the man said, clapping Prangley’s shoulder as if they were school chums. Prangley saw now that the haze wasn’t smoke at all, but clouds of thrown soil. “Just chews up the field,” the farmer went on. “Look how many plants he took out. But there’s your pretty girl.”

The pilot was climbing down from the large biplane, goggles already pushed back on his head.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.