Accidents Happen, Right&;#063;

Originally titled "A Lot of Trees Down by the River", I changed it
to hopefully snag those readers who were afraid they were getting a
story about a bunch of tree huggers or something...

Our problems began two years ago when the sunflower market
collapsed.
Our boss Earl had always been kind of high strung, but what do you
expect
from someone who drinks a gallon of coffee a day?
It became apparent that only one of the two companies that still did
sunflower research would survive. We all
coped with the apprehension that our parent company, the
international
pharmaceutical giant Chemacia, would pull the plug.
Earl on the other hand become a walking bundle of paranoid
schizophrenia. Nothing we did could be done good enough or fast enough
for
Earl. No detail was too small for him to go off on a tirade of
micromanagement if
it wasn't exactly like he thought it should be done. It was a chore to
drag myself
out of bed and stumble in to work for another day of abuse at Earl's
hands.
It all came to a head during planting season. It had been a rainy
spring
and we were having a terrible time getting our test plots planted in a
timely
manner. On a good day planting test plots is a tedious, boring, labor
intensive
task, but with Earl breathing down our necks it was a fiasco. Lee was
driving
the tractor that day. Kelvin, Harry and I were riding on the planter,
dumping
48-count seed packets every seven seconds when the metering
mechanism
sounded its pavlovian buzzer.
Most of our fields were twenty to thirty acre plots, so with our 6
row
planter racing across the field at 2.2 miles per hour, we frequently
had to put in ten or twelve hour days, especially when we were behind
(we were) or when
bad weather loomed (it did).
On this day the planter was rolling by 7:00 AM so we could try to get
our biggest field, the one right behind the office, in the ground by
dark. We were already several breakdowns and three of Earl's screaming
fits behind when 8:00 PM rolled around. If we tried to make another
round it would be nearly dark, so we headed for the machine shed. As we
pulled in the door Earl came flying out of his office. "What are you
guys doing in here?? There's still half an hour of daylight left!! Jump
on that planter and get your butts back
out in the field!!".
As Earl turned and stormed back toward his office I was ready to lay
into
him, but the assistant manager, Floyd, grabbed me by the shoulders and
said,
"Just let it go. If we can get these plots in the ground it will be a
load off Earl's
shoulders and things will settle down."
It was just like Floyd to avoid confrontation with Earl while at the
same
time being the buffer that kept us from killing Earl. We were all
fuming mad,
but back to the field we went.
We put the planter in the ground and started rolling, but about
two
minutes into the pass warning buzzers went off and the seed monitor lit
up like
a Christmas tree. We hadn't been stopped for more than a minute or two
when we heard the sound of Earl's pickup spinning out in the gravel
parking lot as he raced out to see why we had stopped.
He slammed his door so hard I was surprised it didn't fall off.
Veins
were standing out on his neck and forehead as he started screaming at
us. "This planter has to be better prepared when we head to the field.
We can't have all these breakdowns!!" He was waving his arms wildly and
stomping all around the tractor and planter.
"Now just a minute!" yelled Kelvin, who stood a good six inches
taller
than Earl and got right in his face. "There's no way we can prevent
these electrical problems on a hot, dusty day like this."
Earl backed away. "Well you...you...I.....this just can't happen. Fix
it and get this planter moving!!".
Earl circled around the tractor in the direction of his pickup. As
he
walked by the planter on the already planted seedbed, the marker
arm
unexpectedly fell toward the ground. The twelve inch diameter stainless
steel
disk, which cuts the furrow in the ground that the tractor would center
on next
pass, caught Earl square on the middle of the head, splitting his skull
open like a
watermelon at a Fourth of July picnic. Blood gushed everywhere. It was
all over in a matter of seconds.
Lee had been sitting on the tractor. He leapt to the ground but almost
fell
as his rubbery legs nearly failed him. "I didn't touch anything, I
swear!" he
stammered. "The arm just fell on its own!! I'm gonna end up in doing
time in
the big house. And you now what's gonna happen to a skinny little guy
like me in prison! I know I'll end up in a cell with a 300 lb. guy
named Bruiser!"
Harry smacked him on the side of the head. "Shut up! Let's think
about
this for a minute."
"That's right," I said. "If we panic we're screwed."
Darkness was quickly falling as we looked each other in the eye,
trying to
come up with a plan.
Kelvin snapped his fingers. "We'll hide the body. There's a lot of
trees
down by the river. No one will ever find him there."
We thought this over for a second.
"Kelvin's right," I said. "We'll get rid of the body and no one will
ever
know what happened. Everyone knows Earl's a nervous breakdown waiting
to
happen. It's not a stretch to believe he snapped and drove his truck in
the river.
By the time they recover the body we'll be in the clear."
The more we thought about it, the better our plan sounded. We found
a
tarp in the back of Earl's truck and used it to hoist Earl's body into
the back of
his pickup. Harry climbed behind the wheel and fired it up while the
rest of us
crawled in back with the body. With the lights off we followed the
fence to the
back end of the field where it butted up against the river. With all
the rain we'd
had it was running bank full, a good ten or twelve feet higher than
usual.
We found a break in the timber where we backed the pickup too the edge
of the bank. Under cover of the trees the four of us wrestled the body
into the cab of the truck and buckled Earl in. I reached across the
blood soaked body and shifted into neutral. "Any last words?" I
said.
Everyone was silent. The four of us shuffled to the back of the truck
and
without a word gave it a push. The loudness of the splash startled me.
It must have been heard all the way to town. We watched the pickup
gurgle and sink out of sight in the muddy, rain swollen water.
We walked across the field to the planter and drove it back to the
shed.
Thankfully the office was dark. Floyd must have headed home after the
big
blowup. We locked up the building and headed for our pickups.
After everyone had left left the parking lot I sat with my head on
the
steering wheel trying to make sense of it all. We had only done the
logical thing,
taken the path that would least complicate our lives. It wasn't like we
had killed him--it had been an accident, right?

A couple of days later the sheriff came around asking if we'd seen
Earl.
Each of us emphasized that Earl had been under a lot of stress lately
and had
been acting very erratically. In fact, he had been teetering on the
edge of who
knew what catastrophic action.
That was the end of it until mid July when some fisherman spotted
the
pickup. The body was retrieved and he coroner, based largely on our
statements, quickly ruled Earl's death a suicide. Fortunately, Badger
county's crime lab didn't exactly rival the one in Las Vegas.
Floyd took over the station and things improved dramatically.
Without
Earl ranting and raving it was actually fun to come to work again. We
were all
glad to put some time between us and the gruesome event we had
witnessed.
You could almost say that after a while things had returned to
normal.

One day that fall when it was too rainy to harvest, we were in the
shed
doing some housekeeping. I was on the forklift rearranging some
pallets. Lee
was cleaning up the planter when he yelled, "Hey guys, come look at
this!"
One of the hydraulic lines running along the underside of the tongue
had
some kind of a mechanism spliced into it. It looked like some kind of a
valve, but with an electronic device sporting an antennae. "I've never
seen that before. I
swear it didn't used to be there," said Lee incredulously.
"You know guys, some things are just better left alone. Like a
problem
that's so big the best thing to do is toss it in the river and walk
away." Floyd had
joined us in the machine shed.
The silence was deafening as we nervously glanced back and forth at
each other. Then I noticed that he was carrying a device that resembled
the controller for a remote controlled car. Earl flipped a lever on he
controller, and one of the planter's marker arms crashed to the
ground.