$50 doesn't buy much anymore, but in this town, it buys a front row seat to a man's humiliation.
Trent Larson thought he was purchasing an easy knockout, a local farmer, a heavy bag with a pulse. He never noticed the farmer's eyes, calm, empty, like deep water over jagged rocks. Grease has a way of embedding itself into the whorls of your fingerprints so deeply that no amount of pumice soap can ever scrape it out.
Elijah "Big Eli" Washington stared at his large, dark hands under the harsh yellow light of the barn. Blackened knuckles, a jagged, poorly healed scar cutting across the back of his left thumb. He smelled burnt wiring and ancient diesel, the distinct metallic stench of a combine harvester giving up the ghost. The heat of the July evening pressed down on his broad, powerful shoulders like a physical weight.
Out in the fields, the cicadas screamed in a steady, deafening drone. Big Eli dragged a rag over his hands, doing nothing but moving the grease around. The alternator was shot, sizzled into a useless lump of copper and iron. A replacement was $500.