The Pink Tractor Pull

*This one came from a deep love of small-town absurdity and the way pride makes us do ridiculous things. Thanks for reading, hope the pig chase made you laugh.*

Charlotte Caulfield was thirty-four years old, recently dumped, and standing in the entry office of the Lander County Fair with a pen in her hand and a form in front of her that asked, in handwriting from 1987 apparently, for her name, her age, and the make and model of her pulling vehicle. She had no vehicle. She had a sore heart, a bruised ego, and a late father's John Deere sitting under a tarp in a shed eight miles out of town, and she figured those things might cancel out.

The breakup had happened eight months ago, and she was not over it, and she was tired of everyone in Meridian knowing she was not over it. Daniel had been her boyfriend for five years, and they had met at the realty office when she was twenty-nine, and he had left her for a woman who sold timeshares in Branson, which somehow made it worse, because Branson. Since then Charlotte had won absolutely nothing. She had come in second at the church bake sale raffle, which everyone agreed did not count, and she had lost a listing to a rival agency because the client said her handshake felt "sad." So when the fair flyer went up at the diner announcing the forty-first annual tractor pull, open to all comers, she read it three times and thought, well, why not, I can win that, probably, how hard can it be.

"Charlotte Caulfield," Isobel Jenkin said from behind the folding table, looking up over her reading glasses with the expression of a woman who had known Charlotte since before Charlotte could read. Isobel was fifty-five, ran the fair, ran the church, and had run most of the town's opinions for going on three decades. "You want to enter the tractor pull."

"That's what the form says, Isobel."

"You don't have a tractor."

"I have my daddy's John Deere. The 4020. It runs."

"It wheezes," Isobel said, taking the form anyway, because fair organizers do not actually refuse entries, they just want you to know they have doubts. "Charlotte, honey, I am going to say this once, out of respect for your mother. Maxwell Dumas has won that pull four years running. Four. He's got that new Kubota with the turbo and the weights and God knows what else, and he has never, not once, lost. Last year he beat a man from Salina who does this professionally."

"I heard."

"You'll be embarrassing yourself in front of three hundred people and one very judgmental pig. My pig. She's up for grand champion and I don't want her exposed to disappointment."

"Then I'll try to lose politely," Charlotte said, signing her name in the space provided, which was roughly the size of a postage stamp.

Isobel stamped the form and slid it back, and if there was a smile hiding somewhere in there, Charlotte chose not to go looking for it. "Saturday, noon, pull lane's behind the feed store. Bring your own helmet, and Charlotte? If that thing backfires near my pig again, like it did in 2009, you're paying for the therapy. Hers and mine."

* * *

Saturday came up hot and dusty, the way August does in Kansas when it has decided to make a point. Charlotte got the 4020 running on the third try, which she counted as a personal record, and drove it the eight miles into town at a top speed of eleven miles an hour, waving at exactly nobody, because her hands were needed for steering and her dignity was needed elsewhere. The fairgrounds smelled like funnel cake and diesel and livestock, and the pull lane had been dragged flat and chalked with a big line that said FULL PULL in letters you could read from the church tent.

Maxwell Dumas was already there, of course. He was thirty-five now, broad in the shoulders the way a man gets hauling feed bags for a living, and his Kubota sat at the end of the lane gleaming like it had been waxed by hand, which it almost certainly had been, because Maxwell waxed things. He owned the feed store, he owned the pull trophy four times over, and when he saw Charlotte rumbling up on a machine older than she was, he took his time taking off his cap before he strolled over.

"Charlotte Caulfield," he said. "Well, hell. You're really doing this."

"I'm really doing this."

"That tractor was old when we were in college."

"It's got character."

"It's got rust with character," he said, and he winked at her, the same wink, God help her, the same exact wink he had thrown her at that party senior year, thirteen years ago, when she had been twenty-one and drinking something with Everclear in it and he had been twenty-two and very confident about it, and they had ended up in somebody's roommate's bed doing something she had spent a decade successfully not thinking about. She remembered it now, of course, because the universe hated her, remembered it in full detail, and she felt her face go hot all the way down to the collar of her shirt.

"Don't wink at me, Maxwell. I'm here to beat you."

"Sure you are." He patted the fender of the John Deere like it was a sick dog. "Pull's at noon. There's a wrench in it for whoever comes in second. Kidding. Mostly."

He walked off, and Charlotte sat on her tractor and rehearsed violent thoughts until her heart rate came down to something farmable.

* * *

Colt Wiseman, who was thirty-two and Maxwell's younger brother and employed at the feed store on the strict understanding that he was never allowed to win anything, had been watching the whole exchange from the shade of the announcer's booth with a paper cup of gas-station coffee and the grin of a man whose plans are working.

"Still got that hydraulics wrench in your truck?" he asked his friend Dante, who ran the sound system.

"Bottom toolbox. Why?"

"Because my brother has been insufferable about this pull since March, and I think his Kubota would benefit from a little less hydraulic fluid. Call it a prank. Call it science. Call it what it is, which is me being funny."

"You're going to get us both killed by a church lady," Dante said, but he handed over the wrench anyway, because Dante was weak.

Colt waited until Maxwell went off to argue with Isobel about lane assignments, which was a standing argument, an annual argument, practically a holiday, and then he ambled over to the Kubota like a man admiring machinery, crouched down at the rear, and opened the hydraulic reservoir. He drained it about halfway into an empty Gatorade bottle, capped everything back up nice and neat, poured the fluid into a storm drain with a clear conscience, and strolled away whistling, because he was, in his own estimation, hilarious.

What Colt did not know, because nobody in this