Michael laughed quietly.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“That sounds reassuring.”
“Some equipment.”
“Something we can buy cheap, rebuild, sell.”
“Daniel.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Michael leaned forward.
“We are not gambling money we don’t have.”
“I’m using mine.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You have eight hundred dollars.”
“You’re supposed to keep that.”
“For school.”
“For a truck that doesn’t have holes in the exhaust.”
Daniel shrugged.
“My truck sounds powerful.”
“Your truck sounds injured.”
They both smiled.
Then Daniel became serious.
“I’m going to the Harlan auction Saturday.”
Michael frowned.
“Harlan Agricultural?”
“Bankruptcy liquidation.”
“That equipment is going to bring dealer money.”
“Most of it.”
“You’re not buying anything useful there for eight hundred dollars.”
“Then I come home with eight hundred dollars.”
Michael looked at him for a long time.
Finally:
“Don’t fall in love with junk.”
Daniel smiled.
“You raised me in a repair shop.”
“That warning came nineteen years late.”
So Saturday morning, Daniel drove to the auction.
Harlan Agricultural Services had once been one of the largest independent farm-equipment contractors in central Kansas.
They repaired machines, leased harvesting equipment, fabricated specialty attachments, and stored equipment belonging to half a dozen related companies.
After a disastrous expansion and several bad loans, the business collapsed.
The bankruptcy trustee ordered nearly everything sold.
The auction field resembled an agricultural city.
Daniel arrived before eight.
By nine, he had already accepted that his father was probably right.
A damaged skid steer he thought might sell for three thousand brought eleven.
A non-running irrigation engine brought forty-six hundred.
A rusted service truck with two hundred thousand miles sold for more than Daniel’s entire savings.
He kept walking.
He listened.
That was something Michael had taught him.
“Auctions are mostly noise,” his father once said. “The useful information comes from people who forget strangers can hear.”
Daniel listened to dealers discussing machines.
“This pump’s been replaced.”
“That hour meter ain’t original.”
“Transmission was split.”
“Serial falls inside the bad bearing run.”
He learned more in ninety minutes than from weeks of online listings.
Then, at the edge of the equipment rows, he saw the abandoned machine.
Daniel initially walked past it.
Nothing about the exterior suggested value.
Then he stopped.
Something bothered him.
He turned around.
The proportions were wrong.
That was the first thing.
The machine resembled an old self-propelled agricultural processor, perhaps some experimental forage or crop-processing unit, but the frame geometry did not match the age of the body.
The cab looked late 1990s.
The engine enclosure perhaps older.
The axle looked newer.
Daniel crouched.
Grass had grown through openings in the lower frame.
He brushed dirt from the front hub.
The bearings were dirty but not visibly hammered.
That made no sense.
A machine neglected long enough for grass to grow through it should have shown corresponding wear elsewhere.
He moved to the opposite side.
Same condition.
Then he found the identification plate.
Most of it was obscured beneath paint and oxidation.
Daniel rubbed it with his thumb.
Nothing.
He spat on a rag from his pocket and scrubbed.
Letters emerged.
PRAIRIE DYNAMICS ENGINEERING
FIELD SYSTEMS DIVISION
UNIT: XP-2
SERIAL: PDE-X2-0001
Daniel stared.
XP-2.
Not a familiar production model.
Not a Harlan model.
Not John Deere.
Case.
New Holland.
Gleaner.
AGCO.
Nothing he recognized.
He photographed the plate.
No cell reception good enough for a useful search.
An older man behind him said:
“You planning to buy that?”
Daniel stood.
The man was perhaps seventy.