McElroy went to his window and, aiming his arm at the “weather van,” flicked off the bewildered smoking "meteroligist" -- and then fell over again.
It was the following morning that he realized, pulling himself off of the floor, the subtext of the conversation with Francis, all the things he wasn’t hearing:
No family. No wife. No home. No money.
Francis had nothing to lose.
Colavec could bribe him.
Francis was a liability.
Obviously they hadn’t gotten to him yet, McElroy noted, because Colavec would have no excuse to wait on any damning information – they’d spring into action and crush the whole uprising immediately. For the next few days McElroy tailed Francis to keep a closer eye on him. Just a precaution. To make things difficult, McElroy was plagued by remittent bouts of dihescence-induced labyrinthitis, a swelling of the ear canal, which in turn had induced Oscillopsia, a vague fuzzing and doubling of vision brought on, according to his doctor, “by mixed signals between the semicircular canal and the eyes. The velocity of the eyes should oppose that of the head, otherwise things get confused.” Driving was dangerous then, but McElroy was stubborn, and as long as he kept looking straight ahead, it wasn’t too bad.
Francis didn't go visiting Colavec, but he did visit every farmer in the orchestra, one by one, like an unannounced salesman -- but only when no one was home. First Soriano, then Jacobs. Richter. Emsweiller. Heinrich. Caruthers. Everyone. He was up to twelve and on his way to twenty-four when Francis made the inevitable turn on exit 31a, headed finally to McElroy's place. He spied Francis aiming a camera into the distance, over the dirt and toward the seed cleaner, just as he had at all the other farms. What were these pictures for? Maybe it was just some strange new type of fun, McElroy hoped, a simple and secret fun as endearing as it was stupid.
Yet McElroy couldn't help but see a sinister line of information moving through varied substrates: seed, farm, light, lens, film, chemical, Francis, himself, the Oldsmobile, more and more distant in a long line of observers. And then what? Where was the information being threaded to, finally? The night sky? The corn?
Besides taking pictures, Francis drove. He’d lead McElroy along highways and back roads sometimes all day, winding and roving across the state, through the sites of old fur trading posts and Jesuit missions, abandoned steel mills and tall-grass prairies. They were followed, too, again, by the Oldsmobile, almost blatantly. McElroy, on the other hand, took precautionary measures to ensure that he was not as obvious as his own shadow. He maintained not a three, but a four car distance at all times -- and never honked.
He probably should have stopped following Francis, but he couldn't shake the feeling that the Oldsmobile wasn't following himself at all, but Francis instead. With a state map in his basement, McElroy tied strings from one point to another, lining the routes with colorful push-pins, tracking where they'd been. Each evening, he examined the angles and lines wrapped over the roads and rivers, looking for some meaning in the aimless wanderings, constantly inventing new keys and legends.
The central offices of Colavic loomed over the whole interlocking web of string in a complex patch of enlaced compounds, like a spider waiting for flies, or a heavy rock swinging gently on a weak tangle of twine, loose and ready to fall to the earth, as if where Colavec sat on the map was not the earth at all but a precarious height.
Or maybe just a false bottom into which someone might disappear.
Either way, that Oldsmobile was always close at hand.
The map remained static, but things took a turn anyway. McElroy waited, parked along a city street, four cars back from Francis, three cars ahead of the Oldsmobile, coffee on the dash. Where would Francis go today and what would it mean? McElroy, feeling a bit of vertigo, grabbed hold of the steering wheel and accidentally honked in a rare lapse of stealth.
A child riding a bicycle fell over in a fit of surprise.
Francis's car shook a bit.
McElroy held his breathe.
The traffic signal up ahead changed again and again, as if signalling a mad call for help or shrieking in anticipation, but Francis made no peep.
Then: carrying a briefcase, the fat man finally stepped from his car in a haphazard disguise -- dark sunglasses, ill-fitting white jacket and pants, a white fedora slung low over his eyes -- and walked directly and confidently toward McElroy’s truck.
Damnit, McElroy thought, I knew I should have kept a five car distance.
He prepared to improvise some kind of feigned surprise and ignorance but wasn’t given the chance. Francis walked past his truck, stopped instead at -- the Oldsmobile? -- leaned into the window, exchanged a few words, and got in the passenger seat.
A moment later, they were off.
Lunch at a Greek diner, burgers, then a trip to Colavec's offices upstate. That briefcase entered the office on Francis’s arm but didn't come out. After being returned to his own ride, Francis led McElroy to a warehouse beside an overpass. Through binoculars, McElroy saw Francis carrying tubs of something: ice cream, chocolate.
McElroy thought of the empty spaces emerging from the flesh in his head.
Francis had gone over.
Security had been breached.
Yet, inexplicably, Colavac didn't do anything. They didn't swoop in with helicopters and FEDs to stop the farmers' enterprise, nor did they threaten to take their farms, to end contracts, to make good on old debts and mortgaged homes. What gives? If they had what they needed, there was no reason for them to wait. Francis, too, let nothing slip. At Sunday rehearsals, he was the same listless fat man. What was Colavec waiting for?
On his way to vainly follow Francis again, McElroy found himself not in front of but behind and Oldsmobile at the entrance to the interstate. That Oldsmobile? He didn't know, so he followed. Answers might be at hand.
No such luck, however. The Oldsmobile drove not to the Colavec offices, but instead to the culdesac of a new real estate development. The houses were white, beige or grey, two stories each. They rested like misplaced stones in expansive lawns, empty and silent. McElroy had the sense of being surrounded, too, by a herd of large creatures, whales perhaps, which rested or grazed on something unseen.
The car idled, and someone emerged, entered one of the houses. In a few moments, he appeared on the roof and, using a pair of binoculars, peered into the distance toward a series of large power lines that strutted confidently across the state like a march of steel-wire wildebeest.
As McElroy looked about him, he saw more culdesacs spreading out from the main culdesac, like a spider web of cracks on glass, like a smashed LED screen, but the black inky runoff was nowhere to be seen, just the empty houses. He felt something rumble, like a door sliding open. The man, no doubt a Colavec employee, returned to his car and drove out of the development, down the highway, and finally to Soriano's farm. Wait.
Was Soriano being followed, too? Shit.