He called the mechanic before he called his wife, the dealership, or the bank. Ray Kowalski answered on the fourth ring, the sound of an air compressor coughing in the background. Tom said, "It's happened again," and Ray did not ask him to explain what he meant. There was a pause while the old mechanic apparently put down whatever he was holding. "Don't try to move it," he said. "Tell me where you're standing."
"Creek Forty. Same place."
"Same field or same exact place?"
Tom looked at the pale strip, the fence post, the overlapping tracks, and the dark rows extending away in every direction. "Close enough to make me sick," he said. Ray told him to keep clear of the tractor until he arrived, then ended the call without offering sympathy or a diagnosis. That was Ray's way. He had never been interested in comforting a man with an answer before he had found out whether the answer was true.
The old mechanic arrived twenty-three minutes later in a white truck with a dented tailgate and a toolbox that rattled whenever it crossed a pothole. He was sixty, broad in the waist, thin across the shoulders, and wore a faded cap with the name of a parts supplier that had gone out of business years earlier. Instead of walking to the expensive tractor, he passed it without looking up at the cab. He stood over the nearest tire track, followed it back several yards, and crouched. Then he took off his cap and examined a narrow depression in the soil as carefully as he would have examined a cracked engine block.
"Tom," he said after a while, "did the other two stop in a straight line?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"The kind I need answered."
"They all stopped in the same field. I already told you."
Ray pointed toward the fence. "Not the same field. I want to know whether the places where they failed make a line across the field. Did you ever mark them?"
Tom had not. He remembered the first breakdown because it had stranded him with the planter still hooked behind his old tractor, and the second because Gary Pruitt had been standing beside him when the borrowed tire split. But he had treated those locations as individual accidents. Until Ray asked, Tom had not thought to compare them. He stared across the dark ground, suddenly feeling that an obvious fact had been sitting in front of him for ten days while he had refused to look at it.
Ray saw something change in his face. "You think about where those machines sat," he said, "and I'll think about why they stopped. Because I don't believe three different tractors suddenly forgot how to be tractors just because you drove them onto the Creek Forty." He stood, brushed soil from his hands, and finally approached the rental. "Something hit each of them hard enough to do damage. I want to find what it was before you put yourself under a fourth machine."