David Means' Superb "The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934"

Rutu Modan's illustration for David Means' "The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934"

I see in the online version of the June 1st issue that David Means has a new story out. It's called "Two Nurses, Smoking." As soon as the print edition arrives, I'll check it out.

Means wrote one of my favorite New Yorker stories of the last decade – “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” (October 25, 2010; included in his excellent 2019 collection Instructions for a Funeral). It’s about two F.B.I. agents, Lee and Barnes, staking out a hardscrabble Kansas farm, waiting to see if a bank robber named Carson shows up. The opening paragraph is terrific:

Five days of trading the field glasses and taking turns crawling back into the trees to smoke out of sight. Five days on surveillance, waiting to see if by some chance Carson might return to his uncle’s farm. Five days of listening to the young agent, named Barnes, as he recited verbatim from the file: Carson has a propensity to fire warning shots; it has been speculated that Carson’s limited vision in his left eye causes his shots to carry to the right of his intended target; impulse control somewhat limited. Five days of listening to Barnes recount the pattern of heists that began down the Texas Panhandle and proceeded north all the way up to Wisconsin, then back down to Kansas, until the trail tangled up in the fumbling ineptitude of the Bureau. For five days, Barnes talked while Lee, older, hard-bitten, nodded and let the boy play out his theories. Five days reduced to a single conversation.

I read that and I was hooked. The two agents have different takes on their assignment. The young man, Barnes, is convinced that Carson isn’t coming and that the stakeout is a waste of time. The veteran Lee has a gut feeling something is going to happen: “Something big was coming, the wind had said. It was a sure giveaway. Any experienced lawman knew that the wind rising like that had to mean something.”

It turns out that Lee is right. I’m not going to give away the ending. But here’s a taste of the action:

Years later, in the reductive, slowed-down replay of memory, the Buick sedan—stolen fresh off a lot in Topeka—appeared suddenly, having come in off a cat road that ran west and hit the main road a quarter mile from the Carson farm, deep enough in the quivering heat to provide the element of surprise. First, just a glint of chrome radiator, a spark of light where the road bled itself into plowed field. Then, in a matter of seconds, the glint turned into a full-blown automobile, swinging alongside the house, roaring to a stop, rocking heavily as it disgorged three men. 

That “First, just a glint of chrome radiator, a spark of light where the road bled itself into plowed field” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired, brilliantly describing a stakeout that goes awfully wrong.