Switchback Ch21 pt1

The Mead place wasn’t too difficult to find once Carter had his bearings. He’d left Leyton Falls three miles back and spent the last of those miles dodging potholes on a dirt track that lead him to a farmhouse on five or six acres of flat land which was dedicated to raising turkeys.

          He drove the gravel driveway for a hundred yards with fields on either side. The fields held long low huts without walls, like roofs propped-up on seven-foot stilts, the turkeys under them feeding, hundreds of them, maybe a thousand.

          At close to eight pm he pulled up outside the two-storey stone-built house and climbed from his car in fresh jeans, a black T-shirt, and a dark-brown leather jacket. The Sun was low and ready to slip behind the trees two miles away, but the air still felt humid. To the east the sky was violet and cloudless, and to the west a few wisps of cloud high in the atmosphere glowed orange.

          When Carter knocked the door was answered by an attractive woman in her early forties with dark hair which hung loose over her shoulders. She had high cheekbones and wore no make-up, but Carter didn’t see the need for any. Her eyes were almond-shaped with pupils of dark-brown, like drops of black coffee, and her complexion Latina. She wore light-coloured slacks below a button-down red blouse and her feet were tan and bare.

          ‘Can I help you?’ she said, her accent confirming her heritage.

          ‘Mrs Mead?’

          ‘Yes.’

          He took out his wallet, showed the press card. ‘My name’s Adam Harris, I’m working with Jack Ryland at the Ledger and I wondered if it would be possible for me to speak to your husband?’

          ‘Dennis is out back,’ she said, and pointed left. ‘Just through the gate.’

          ‘Thank you.’

          The gate was wide and wooden and aged and interrupted a dry-stone wall that encircled the immediate area in front of the house until it encountered the chicken-wire fence that ran the length of the driveway. He unhooked a threadbare rope and pushed to hear the gate’s rusted hinges give out a two-tone squeak, and, unsure if turkeys could fly or not, but certain they could run like the wind, he closed it after him.

          At the back of the house Dennis Mead was unloading a pile of twenty-kilo paper sacks of “Heygate Turkey Feed” from the bed of a dented brown pick-up and storing them in a shed long enough to house a Greyhound bus. At the far end of the shed two horses had poked their heads from their stalls and seemed to be nodding in some kind of agreement. Beyond the horses was a bright-orange Chevy Bolt, he guessed wasn’t driven by the man he’d come to see.

          Mead looked about fifty, maybe fifty-three at most, his build medium but solid, just short of six feet with a face sunburned and lined by many years of outdoor work. His hair, slick with sweat and stuck to his forehead, was grey and thinning. He wore calf-high boots and worn jeans and a T-shirt that may have started the day white, but now was grey with dust and dampened like his hair.

          He emerged from the shed and Carter thought he saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes. ‘Evening,’ he said, and slung another sack over his left shoulder.

          That one word told Carter that Dennis Mead wasn’t from this area either. It was plain American English with no particular accent he could detect, mid-western, maybe Utah, maybe Idaho. ‘Good evening, Mr Mead, your wife said I’d find you out here, mind if we talk?’

          ‘Not if you don’t mind following me with one of these.’

          There was probably another fifteen bags of feed to shift, Carter took his jacket off and hung it from the pick-up’s door mirror. He lifted a sack and followed. ‘I’ve always wondered,’ he lied. ‘Can turkeys actually fly?’

          ‘Yes, about fifty-five miles per hour, in fact.’

          ‘So why don’t they? Fly away I mean.’

          ‘They’re basically lazy, plus we overfeed them, and that makes them too heavy to fly even if they wanted to. Is that why you’re here, Mr Harris, to learn about turkey farming? It is Harris isn’t it? Adam Harris?’

          Carter didn’t think Mead had heard him speaking to his wife from all the way back here, but there was that look of recognition.  ‘Has Jack called you?’

          ‘Jack?’

          ‘Ryland.’

          Mead lowered his sack on a pile of fifty others. ‘It wasn’t him,’ he said. ‘It was Sue, one of my sisters, she told me you helped out at my brother’s bar earlier today.’

          Carter lowered his own sack. ‘What makes you think I’m the guy?’

          ‘You’re black, like she said you were, you’re also big, she said that, too. And you’re new around here, so it doesn’t take much to work that one out.’

          Carter shrugged. ‘Your brother was taking a beating and I didn’t like how the odds were stacked, so I evened them out a little, that’s all.’

          Mead lifted another sack. ‘Therefore he’s indebted to you, and so am I. So if there’s anything I can do for you all you need do is ask.’

          Carter picked up his second sack. ‘Jack Ryland asked me to call on you.’

          ‘Now why would a weasel like Jack Ryland ask you to do that?’

          ‘I work for him, until his assistant comes back.’

          Mead lowered the sack, frowned. ‘You mean Clare Morgan?’

          ‘Yeah, she’s on her honeymoon.’ Carter lowered his.

          ‘Is that what Ryland told you?’

          ‘Well that’s why he hired me.’ He went to get another sack.

          ‘Leave that,’ Mead said. ‘I’ve done enough for one day as it is. Come into the house, Mr Harris, I think you and I need to talk.’

          Carter dusted off his T-shirt and plucked his jacket from off the door mirror. He put the jacket over his left arm and followed Mead through a rear door into the kitchen where his wife was wiping down the tops, everything else looked spotless and perfectly in its place. The room was narrow compared to its length but it had all the mod-cons you could fit into it. In one corner a coffeemaker fizzed and bubbled and made the place smell like an expensive coffee bar. Mead stepped forward to kiss his wife and she stretched to meet the kiss.

          ‘Christina, you’ve already met Mr Harris?’

          ‘Yes. Hello again, Mr Harris.’

          Carter smiled, raised a hand. ‘Hi.’

          Mead was at a large square porcelain sink, his hands working up a mass of suds. ‘We’ll be in my office, Christina. Coffee or fruit juice, Mr Harris?’

          ‘Coffee’s good.’

          He rubbed some more then rinsed and took a towel from off the kitchen table. ‘If you’d like to wash up, Mr Harris, we’ll go through,’ he said.

          Christina took Carter’s jacket and hung it on the back of the door they’d just come through. She then pulled two tall coffee glasses from a cupboard and placed them on a tray along with a small jug of cream and a bowl of brown sugar.