Oil Drop

“Thirty-love.” Ryan grinned. He was truly kicking ass today. Sam was winded and sweating profusely. He did not look like the defending club champ. 

Ryan wound up and served, an ace, just inside the center line, rocketed off the web of his racket. Sam did not even move. He looked at his hands on his racket. “Forty-love”. Ryan skipped back to the service line.  

This time it was a hard-charging return at the net that won the game. That was the match. Ryan reached over the net but Sam ignored him and walked off the court. 

Ryan tapped the net with his racket, shrugged and walked the other direction. He was ready to join Garrett in the club lounge and regale him with the tale of his glorious win. He opened the gate in the fence and started walking toward the club’s gilded clubhouse which looked like a version of a Southern plantation. It seemed out of place in the desolate flat land that was central Illinois, but so did the bright green golf course without any discernible trees around it. Ryan hardly cared. He loved the plain, unremarkable landscape. He was unimpressed by mountains, lakes, forests, and oceans, which for him interrupted the endless flatness and open sky.  

Garrett had covered the cost of the day pass at the club. Ryan would never be a member. He was just a kid working on the Grand Sky Farm about 10 miles outside of town. He had met Garrett in high school, where Garrett drove a new Dodge Charger and played on the baseball team and Ryan tried to stay out of the limelight when ever possible. Garrett and Ryan had been in a gym class together, playing flag football. Ryan had been just keeping his head low when the ball bounced over to him after an errant pass. He tossed it back into the fray, knowing one of the jocks would catch it. And Garrett did, looking over to Ryan at that moment. When they lined up for the next play, Garrett threw the ball to Ryan, who was completely shocked to get a pass. Ryan took off down the field after catching the ball and none of the jocks caught him. Garrett laughed and pointed to Ryan and after class came up to Ryan.  

They had been friends ever since. Garrett pushed Ryan to join the track team and they basically killed time after school before Ryan got picked up by the bus playing any sport they could. Ryan was a natural athlete.  

Garrett was essentially trained at birth by his father to be a jock. Garrett’s father was the offensive coordinator on the U of I football team and was relentlessly aspirational for his only child. As a result, Garrett grew up watching football from the sideline, hearing the whistles and admonitions and quiet words of praise that accompany a college sports team. He loved watching his father but was even more mesmerized by the speed, strength, and violence of football. His 10 year old self never considered it possible that he wouldn’t be a star running back, but when he was 15 it became clear that he was far too skinny and short to be a football player. His enthusiasm and speed couldn’t make up for the fact that when other people hit him with their shoulder pads he was nearly broken in two every time. His mother pulled him off the team after his 3rd concussion and even his father couldn’t bear to keep him playing, so he became a full time baseball player. His father poured his passion for football directly over to baseball for Garrett. Garrett was a shortstop who played harder and smarter than any of his teammates and as a freshman in high school he made the varsity team; as a sophomore he started and led the team in hitting; as a junior he was the MVP of the league and all-State, and he was drafted by the Cardinals in the first round and earned a six figure signing bonus.  

Garrett lived his life with the certainty that he would be successful. He joined the country club within two weeks of signing his contract with the Cards and retained the membership so he and his high school friends could play golf and tennis anytime he was home. His baseball career was shortened by a severe hand injury when he applied a tag on a charging first baseman who was sliding with his spikes up into second base. Garrett had surgery but he couldn’t grip the baseball fully. He reluctantly set aside his dream to play and instead climbed the coaching ranks and was the youngest head football coach at a D1 school at age 29.  

Garrett smiled when he saw Ryan enter the club lounge. “How’d it go?”  

“Dusted him. He tried that finesse crap and I just outran him. How is he the prince of tennis here anyway? The guy has no grit at all. Just wilted when I went up by one set.”

Garrett snorted. “I can’t speak badly of the guy. His family donates six figures to our program every year. I hope he’s not too pissed at me for setting this up.”

“The dude is a punk. He wouldn’t even shake my hand after the match. Looks like I’ll be persona non grata here. You’d better just escort me to the door now!” Ryan looked gleeful. He’d spent his athletic life surprising everyone.

Garrett waved it off. “Let’s get out of here. I finished up the recruiting review and I need to get home and start making some phone calls. Want to come with me to my folks’ house?”

Ryan looked toward the door. The tennis champ was coming in with a scowl on his face. “Nah. I’ll just head back to Mission City. There is a crap ton of rot on the lower 20 acres. Metzger is making me apply my deep knowledge of biology from the 9th grade to try to figure it out. I keep telling him it is just a bad year with all the rain in May, but he’s not listening. Wants me to pull off some sort of miracle.”

Ryan got up and smiled at the tennis champ. “Thanks bud. Good game.” The tennis champ nodded but just glowered. He didn’t otherwise respond.  

“Dude. I said good game.” Ryan wanted to get under the champ’s skin. He was still smiling confidently. Garrett put his arm over Ryan’s shoulder and said, “James, how’s the family? I miss seeing your dad. I definitely need to get back here more often.”

“Yeah, he’s good, Garrett. He’s in Singapore working on some deal there. I’m heading out tomorrow to help wrap it up. I’ll tell him you asked after him.” He turned to Ryan. “What club do you usually play at?”

Ryan snickered. “The country club of life, my man. I used to beat up on the college boys on the outdoor courts near the IM building, but I think this is the third time I played in the last 2 years. Been a bit busy since the freaking tornado last summer.” 

“How so?”

“You know. Rebuilding a barn, mending fences, removing crap that blew everywhere. We lost 6 cows. They just disappeared. Strangest damn thing.”

James looked completely uninterested. He turned to Garrett. “Good luck with season, Garrett. Hope the defense holds up.”

Garrett said, “Thanks James. I’ll drop you a line later in the summer. I hope you all can still make it to the opener.”

————-

Ryan inspected the undergrowth on the soybean plants. There was a layer of white fungus on almost every plant near the ground. The soybeans looked like they were barely able to remain upright. The dirt was crusted and clumped, with furrows cut from the rain that was unceasing for three weeks and now had been replaced by 90 degrees of swampy humidity. Ryan didn’t have any idea what to do. He looked up at Metzger. “What do you think, Mr Metzger? Will herbicide work?”  

Metzger pointed to the sign at the corner of the field. “Certified Organic”

Ryan didn’t really understand why organic soy beans were so important to Metzger. Seemed mostly a royal pain in the ass and by the way, they sold their beans for all sorts of uses including lots of products that never hit people’s stomachs. Seemed stupid to Ryan, but it was like a religious belief for Metzger. “It’s just the way I do things.” Metzger said for the thousandth time this spring. 

Metzger’s daughter, Hilde, looked over to Ryan. “This requires a different way of thinking.” Hilde was the only one among the three of them that actually knew how to run a farm. Metzger had bought the farm after a long career as a software engineer. At the time, it was romantic notion to be a gentleman farmer. It was one of those decisions made in a fit of lunacy and passion. In Metzger’s case, he had reasonable cause for his lunacy. His wife — a real rocket scientist who worked at NASA — had been killed by a sleepy truck driver in the middle of a beautiful spring day while she was riding her road bike on a country road. She had wanted for years to move out of suburban Virginia and get back to her farming roots. Metzger’s grief when she was killed drove him back to Central Illinois and caused him to cash out his stock options and plunk the proceeds on an unremarkable plot of land with a gracious Victorian farmhouse.  The house was what really grabbed him. He did not ever even open the books for the farm before buying the whole property. 

Hilde touched the dirt. She looked at the horizon. She slowly scanned the entire field in a swivel. She picked a plant, shaking the excess dirt off the root to expose the root. She dug a nail in the root. She sniffed the root. She broke in half one of the leaves from the plant and rubbed it on the back of her left hand and looked at the green mark it left. All of this was of course like voodoo magic to Ryan, but he waited patiently. He had a sense she would say something important soon. “Oil. We need to get some oil on these plants. Specifically some really cheap organic soybean oil. Dad, what’s our credit situation with the collective?”  

—-

The next day, Ryan drove up to the farming collective in Urbana Township. Urbana was known for the university, of course, but right off campus was the farming supply and food distribution channel that Metzger joined. The idea of this place was quite simple, buy your supplies (all certified organic) with produce credits. The produce that you supplied to the collective was sold and distributed through a network of local food producers and sometimes through local farmers markets. This was a zero profit program that contributed to the area’s growing reputation for farm to table food. Farmers liked the ‘barter-type’ approach and the collective let credits be paid off over time so the payments never required selling too much. 

Ryan entered the collective rolling a empty dolly. The collective manager waved from the counter near the doors. “hey Ryan, how are the Metzgers doing?”, he said with a slight grin foreshadowing his feeling that Mr Metzger was over his head. 

Ryan shrugged mildly and walked over. 

“They want me to get a whole barrel of soybean oil. Do we have enough credits to get that?”  

The manager walked to the computer and started typing on the keyboard. Without looking up, he said, “You know, I had a dream last night about Hilde Metzger. It was not what you think though,” shaking his head and smiling. “I was at some academic meeting and she was presenting her findings on new methods of spawning shittake mushrooms. She was super impressive. I woke up thinking about how fucked Mr Metzger is but also how she might just save his ass.”

“We do have enough. And looks like your credits from last fall got you enough. Want me to get a barrel?”

Ryan nodded. He was not a fan of the manager who was usually full of unsolicited advice on all manner of life and business and was arrogant in every way.

——-

Hilde showed Ryan how to mete out the oil from the sprayer and not waste any thing. She made it look easy but it wasn’t. 

Ryan was struck, not for the first time, by his affection for and admiration of Hilde, who otherwise if he saw her walking towards him in Champaign, he would never have noticed. 

The wind gusted and the spray dispersed up into the air. Hilde glowered and released the sprayer trigger. She sighed and handed the sprayer to Ryan. 

“I think you get the idea. We need to cover the front acre. I am going to hold off on the back acre to see if this works. Sorta a controlled study if you know what I mean”. 

Ryan understood and smiled. “Yeah, I get it. Are you going to write it up if it works?”

“Honestly, I probably should but no, just trying to learn for us. I have to go check on a few things on the alfalfa field. Come find me when you are done.” She turned and strode to the four wheeler without even looking up at Ryan. 

She was never clear about her intentions with Ryan. Their relationship was not exactly like a boss to a worker — she was there on the farm only when her studies allowed it — but she had no qualms about directing him. And she also once sat with him in the field and had a long conversation with him about life growing up in Champaign that seemed completely out of character from her usual aloofness  

The wind gusted again — he stopped spraying. It lasted a solid 10 seconds and blew the hair on his forearm. Some edge of chill was in the wind and he noticed his skin react. Then he looked up and saw the massive cloud on the horizon with a swirl starting to form. “40 fucking Love” he said out loud before he started scrambling to batten everything down.