By the time Kip Rudyard reached North English, Iowa, the road had worn through his boots, his pride, and the last of his gas money. He rolled the Mercury into town on fumes and fumes alone, the Gold Dust Metallic sheen now dulled by the smear of five states and a half-dozen bad decisions. The car had become less a chariot and more a capsule—one that had carried him through sex, storms, soul-searching, and exactly one herbal knockout.
North English greeted him with a blinking yellow light, a co-op with dented grain bins, and an old water tower that read: “Corn Raised, Corn Fed, Corn Proud.” It smelled like wet alfalfa and diesel exhaust. Kip parked near the tavern simply because it had lights on.
The sign over the door said: SHUCK ME SILLY, with a cartoon corn cob winking obscenely. Inside, the bar was all linoleum and resignation. The jukebox wheezed out Conway Twitty, the pool table had a lean, and the men wore ball caps with seed logos Kip didn’t recognize.
He ordered a beer. Something called Davenport Draft, brewed locally, he was told—by men who looked like they considered a windshield crack a badge of honor. The bartender handed it to him with a nod that said: You’re not from here, but we’ll tolerate you until we don’t.
“Where you from, stranger?” a ruddy man asked.
“Texas.”
“You don’t say,” came a second voice, this one with an accent so Midwestern it curled Kip’s spine. “Got a drawl like a barbed wire lullaby.”
They asked about the Mercury. He obliged. They asked what brought him north. He deflected. He should’ve walked out then.
But he didn’t.
Three hours later, he was two sheets to the wind and halfway to hell on the third. The locals kept topping off his glass like they were trying to float him back to Texas on a river of barley.
The card game started slow. They lured him in with the old routine—“just for fun,” “a hand or two,” “we don’t play for much.”
They played at a table in a room behind the bar, dimly lit by a single green banker’s lamp and a Schlitz clock that hadn’t moved since Eisenhower.
The dealer wore bifocals and a smirk. “Your car’s outside, right?”
Kip should’ve known better.
He really should’ve.
But the Mercury felt invincible. Like something no one could take from him.
Until they did.
He woke up in an alley that smelled like sour mash and old regrets. His wallet was gone. His watch too. He still had his boots, though they’d taken his socks.
The sun was already up. He staggered out toward Main Street, his head pounding like a dropped transmission.
The Mercury? Gone.
He asked a busboy at a diner. The kid said he’d seen it on a flatbed headed east. “Probably Des Moines. That’s where the bad ones go.”
Kip laughed, a dry, humorless bark.
“Anything I can do?” the kid asked.
“Not unless you got a time machine in that mop bucket.”
The walk out of North English was long and silent.
Corn on both sides. Miles of it.
Kip walked with his thumbs in his belt loops, every footstep kicking up dust and self-loathing. He thought about the Mercury. The gold paint. The taillights that looked like a promise.
He thought about La Dora’s message. “Follow the freight line to where the shadows stall.”
What freight line? What shadows? All he saw were rows of green and a road that narrowed with every step.
By mile three, he started talking to himself.
By mile five, he stopped caring.
By mile seven, a horn sounded behind him.
The 1941 Dodge D19 pulled over with a gentle wheeze and the subtle creak of springs long past their warranty.
It was Flare Red, or what was left of it—sunbaked and chipped near the trunk, chrome flaking off the front bumper like dandruff. One of the hubcaps was missing, and a shallow dent near the passenger door said the car had lived through at least one bad year.
The window rolled down. The driver looked out.
It was the boy from South Dakota.
Still young. Still silent.
Kip stepped to the window. “You following me?”
The boy didn’t answer. Just nodded toward the passenger side.
Kip hesitated, then climbed in.
The cabin smelled like dust and pipe smoke. The bench seat was surprisingly soft. Kip ran his hand along the dash. Real woodgrain. The heater was busted, but the radio worked just enough to catch a crackled weather report.
The boy drove like a man with nowhere to be and all the time in the world.
They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.
The fields rolled by, and somewhere on the far edge of hearing, Kip swore he heard a freight train echo.
He sat back, closed his eyes, and let the Dodge carry what was left of him.
He wasn’t angry anymore. Not really.
He’d been robbed, swindled, humbled. But he still had legs. He still had questions.
And maybe—just maybe—he still had somewhere to go.
The boy finally spoke, somewhere outside Iowa City.
“Next stop,” he said.
Kip looked over. “What is it?”
The boy didn’t answer. Just gave a small, strange smile.
The Dodge kept rolling. Kip rested his forehead against the glass, watching the cornfields give way to something he didn’t yet recognize.
The last line of the parchment echoed in his mind:
“When the wind turns sweet, you’ll know you’re close.”
He didn’t know where he was going.
But for the first time, he wasn’t looking back.
A thousand of miles away, beneath layers of reinforced concrete below the White House, a conference room thrummed with tension and filtered air. Around a massive oak table sat the men who could end the world before Kip’s next sunrise.
A Marine colonel read off intercepted transmissions. Navy eyes tracked Soviet ships moving steadily toward Cuba.
A general with steel in his jaw spoke low but hard: “If this is real—if they’re armed—ninety million Americans are dead before we finish the week.”
Someone whispered, “I say we blast the bastards to Hell.”
A civilian advisor shook his head. “No. Now’s the time for restraint. A blockade. A warning. Sanity.”
The generals laughed. One leaned forward. “Restraint won’t save us. Only resolve will.”
Across the table, the President finally spoke. Calm. Flat. Boston accent.
“You’re mistaking quiet for weakness,” he said. “And I’ve never seen a dead man win a war.”
But the pressure was building.
And far out on a two-lane road in a fading Dodge coupe, the man no one would expect was already en route.
The real work of saving the world had just begun.
2 responses to “MERCURY, GOLD, AND IRON, Chapter 5”
Been to that bar in the ’70s, The Silky Tassel, owned by a widower named, “Mother”. His daughter would visit occasionally from working the Brass Pole Circuit on the Mississippi. Talk about boosting local patronage… Rumor was she owned an old hotel in Kaskaskia and had ‘shady friends’ from La Crosse to Memphis. The Silky Tassel changed ownership by the ’80s, but the pool table still had a ‘lean’ to it when I was there. One of its legs sat on the end of a loose board. At the other end of that board near the wall, sat a chair at a two person table. Who sat in that chair could make a difference if there was money in the game. Mother retired to Bonaparte down on the Des Moines River. His daughter left Kaskaskia after a flood and moved up to take care of him. North English is more friendly to the thru-traffic nowadays but there is still an alley that smells like sour mash and old regrets.
I always like a guy who has a fine appreciation for detail. And a good memory.