Kansas Troubles Read Online Free

miles, and the fields we flew over looked like the clichéd image of a patchwork quilt. To be more accurate, they looked like an orderly Corn and Beans pattern or a strip quilt in shades of rich goldenrod and mustard yellow with an occasional sage-green square thrown in just to keep it interesting. Furrows like quilt stitching decorated the plowed fields in crooked abstract patterns that Gabe said helped keep the soil from being blown away by the strong summer winds. Silvery grain silos gleamed like new dimes in the bright sunlight.
    Much sooner than I preferred, the seat belt sign flashed. The pilot welcomed us to the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport and went through his landing spiel, including a weather report I would hear repeated often during the next two weeks—“Mostly sunny with thunderstorms expected later tonight.” He ended his speech with a hardy hello and a joke about tornados and milk cows, the punchline of which was lost in static.
    From my perspective, Wichita didn’t look at all like the Emerald City but just another skyscraper landscape against a sky that actually did appear bigger and bluer than California’s. Bright green fields as round as archery targets dotted the ground.
    “Why are some fields round?” I asked.
    “A more efficient way of irrigating,” Gabe explained. “It’s done automatically, by a pivot arc. On the ground you can’t really tell the fields are round.”
    The pattern of circles within squares would make a spectacular quilt. “Above Kansas” would be a good name. I mentally pieced it together, attempting to keep my mind off my least favorite part of flying—landing.
    The plane hit the runway with a sharp bounce. “Half an hour until inspection,” I said.
    Gabe took my hand and kissed the soft skin on the underside of my wrist. “They’re going to adore you. Look at the effect you had on me.”
    “Initially?” I said doubtfully. We met when I’d been involved in a murder at the folk art museum, and our relationship at first had been less than friendly to say the least.
    He chuckled. “Well, they’ll learn to love you.”
    We claimed our rented give-me-a-ticket red Camaro and started down the freeway toward Wichita. We passed the huge home store and warehouse of Shepler’s Western Wear, a mail-order house I’d ordered from at least a few hundred times in the last twenty-five years. Eventually we pulled on to a two-lane highway heading south. Train tracks paralleled the road, shaded occasionally by huge, dusky-green cottonwood trees. There was no question we were in wheat country when we sped past old concrete grain silos, billboards advertising Farm Bureau Insurance, and a couple of yellow and black highway signs warning “Mowers ahead.”
    “There are trees,” I said with surprise.
    Gabe laughed. “Of course there are. Mostly cotton-woods, but some pines and box elders, and I don’t know what else. What did you expect?”
    “Things to be flatter, I guess. You know, wheat fields like oceans as far as the eye can see. Amber waves of grain. Corn as high as an elephant’s eye.”
    “You’re more likely to find the corn in Iowa and Nebraska, though we have our share. The flat Kansas you’re thinking of does exist over in the western part of the state, but we do have our oceans of wheat around Wichita.” He tapered his eyes, scanning the passing landscape with a farmer’s measuring gaze. “Things are usually drier this time of year. They had good rains last year, so everything’s stayed green.”
    “Except for no hills, it doesn’t look a lot different from home.”
    He reached over and squeezed my knee affectionately. “We Kansans have stumbled into the twentieth century, Benni, no matter what the media would have you believe. Why, I’ve heard a vicious rumor that they’ve even got cable television in Wichita these days.”
    “Not to mention flush toilets,” I said.
    “No wisecracks. You know we got those in the sixties.” He fiddled with the