PART 1

I had seventy-two dollars in my wallet and four hours to kill between Omaha and Chicago.

My knees had been stiff since sunrise, ever since I loaded the last two crates of seed corn onto my nephew’s truck and gave up the farm lease I had held for forty-one years. I was seventy-one years old, sitting in coach on an Amtrak train, wearing my clean pair of work khakis and a brown flannel shirt that my late wife, Martha, had bought me at the farm supply store back in 2012.

I had my ballcap pulled low over my forehead, hoping people would just let an old man look out the window at the cornfields rolling past the glass.

The train stopped in Burlington, and that was when he got on.

He was maybe thirty-five or forty, wearing a sharp navy wool coat, leather shoes that looked like they had never stepped in a puddle, and wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down his narrow nose. He sat down directly across from me in the four-seat booth, dropped a heavy leather briefcase on the seat beside him, and blew out a long breath like the air in Iowa was personally offending him.

He pulled out a brand-new phone with three camera lenses, checked the screen, sighed because the signal was only two bars, and tucked it into his breast pocket. Then he looked at me. He looked at my boots, which still had a faint crust of dried clay around the rubber soles, and then he looked at the brown paper sack holding my egg salad sandwich.

“Slow ride,” he said. His voice was smooth and practiced, the kind of voice that belonged on a corporate conference call.

“Paces itself,” I said.

He tapped his manicured fingers on the small plastic table between us. I could tell within two minutes what kind of fellow he was. He was the sort who couldn’t stand being in a room where he wasn’t the smartest man sitting down. He looked bored, and worse, he looked like he wanted an audience.

“You know,” he said, leaning back and resting an elbow against the window frame, “I always find train rides go faster if you engage the mind. How about a little game to pass the time?”

I reached up, rubbed my thumbnail against the seam of my jeans, and looked at him. “I’m mostly just watching the timberline.”

“Just a simple trivia challenge,” he said, and a tight little grin pulled at the corner of his mouth.

He unbuttoned his coat, showing off a silk tie with small geometric squares. “I ask you a question. If you don’t know the answer, you pay me five dollars. Then you ask me a question. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll pay you five hundred dollars.”

I let the numbers sit between us for a second. “Five hundred against five?”

“That’s right,” he said. He tapped his breast pocket with two fingers, looking very pleased with his own generosity. “A hundred to one odds. Seems fair, considering I’ve got two degrees from Northwestern and you look like a man who spent his life working hard with his hands. I can afford to spot you the handicap.”

He didn’t say the word stupid, but he didn’t need to. He said it with his chin, his watch, and that flat, smug little smile. He thought he was buying an hour of amusement for the cost of a few cheap laughs at an old farmer’s expense.

“All right,” I said quietly. “Go ahead.”

He didn’t waste a second. He sat up straight, laced his fingers together over the table, and hit me with his best pitch right out of the gate.

“What is the exact distance, in kilometers, from the Earth to the center of the Andromeda galaxy?”

I didn’t squint. I didn’t reach for a notebook or pretend to calculate. I reached into my right trouser pocket, pulled out the worn leather billfold Martha had given me thirty years ago, and slipped out a crisp five-dollar bill. I set it flat on the plastic table and slid it across to his side.

He chuckled, picked up the five, and slipped it into his vest pocket like a trophy. “Fair enough. Your turn, old-timer.”

I folded my hands over my stomach, looked him dead in the eye, and asked my question.

“What has three legs while walking, but only two while flying?”

PART 2

The grin stayed on his face for about five seconds, frozen like lard in a winter skillet.

“Three legs while walking, two while flying,” he repeated. He said it casually, leaning back against the seat cushions as if he were just picking through an encyclopedia in his head. “Some species of wading bird? A heron that drags a leg?”

“That wasn’t an answer,” I told him. “That was just thinking out loud.”

“Give me a minute,” he said, his tone sharpening just a fraction.

He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out that expensive phone. He tapped the screen with a quick, nervous thumb, opening up his search browser. The little circle spun in the corner of his screen. Out here in the river bottoms, the cellular towers were five miles apart, and the train was clipping along at sixty miles an hour through the brush. The screen stalled, then caught, and he started typing frantically.

I leaned my head against the cold window glass and watched the telephone poles flick past.

Ten minutes went by. The only sound between us was the rhythmic clack-clack of the train wheels and the tap of his manicured finger against the glass screen. He typed, deleted, typed again, and scrolled. He started mumbling under his breath.

“Mythology… Greek riddle… no, biological anomaly… aeronautical slang…”

Thirty minutes passed. The train slowed down through a small crossing near Mount Pleasant, the horn blowing long and low across the empty soybean stubble. The conductor walked down the aisle, took our tickets, and moved on. The businessman didn’t even look up to show his ticket; he just shoved his arm out while keeping his nose three inches from his screen.

Sweat had started to bead right along his hairline, just below his neat sideburns. His silk tie was pulled loose at the collar now, the top button of his stiff white shirt undone. He had opened a dozen tabs. I could see the glow of Wikipedia articles, biology research papers, and riddle forums reflecting in the lenses of his glasses.

An hour after he had asked his question about the stars, the train rattled across a bridge, and his phone let out a low, pathetic chime. The battery warning popped up on his screen.

He stared at the dead search bar for another full minute. His face had gone from smug to completely red, the color of a fresh sunburn. He shut off the screen, laid the phone face down on the table, and took off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose.

“All right,” he muttered, his voice tight and hoarse. “I don’t know.”

He opened his leather briefcase with a loud, metallic snap. He pulled out a fat money clip, counted through five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, and slapped them down on the table between us. They were so new they barely had creases in them.

“There,” he said, breathing hard through his nose. “Five hundred dollars. Take it.”

PART 3

I didn’t rush. When you’ve spent fifty years pulling calves and waiting on rain, you learn that rushing never makes a good thing better.

I picked up the five hundred-dollar bills, squared the edges against the table, and folded them neatly in half. Then I opened my old leather wallet and slid the bills right behind my driver’s license and Martha’s picture. I tucked the wallet back into my front pocket, buttoned the little flap over it, and sat back, resting my hands on my knees.

The businessman leaned forward, his hands flat on the table, glaring at me like he wanted to bore a hole through my skull.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Well what?” I asked.

“What is the answer?” he snapped, his voice rising enough that an older woman two rows ahead turned around to look at us. “What walks on three legs and flies on two? I just paid you five hundred dollars for that answer. What is it?”

I looked at him for a long, quiet second. I looked at his expensive shoes, his dead phone, and the anger twisting his mouth into a sour line.

I reached back into my pocket, opened the billfold, and pulled out another five-dollar bill.

I set it down on the table, slid it across the plastic, and left it sitting right by his dead phone.

“I have no idea,” I said.

ENDING

For twenty seconds, nobody moved.

The man stared down at the five-dollar bill sitting in front of him. Then he looked up at me. His mouth opened twice, like a bass pulled out of a pond on a hot July afternoon, but not a single sound came out of his throat. His face drained of that hot red color until he was just pale and quiet, staring at a seventy-one-year-old farmer who had just taken him for four hundred and ninety dollars without telling a single lie.

He didn’t pick up the five-dollar bill right away. He couldn’t. Picking it up meant admitting that the game had played out exactly by his own rules, step by step, right down to the last copper cent.

Finally, his fingers reached out, took the bill, and shoved it into his pocket. He turned his face toward the aisle, crossed his arms tight over his chest, and didn’t speak another word all the way into Galesburg. At the next stop, he grabbed his heavy briefcase and walked off the train, leaving behind an empty seat and two hours of pure, unbroken silence.

I pulled Martha’s paper sack out of my coat, unwrapped my sandwich, and watched the afternoon sun slant low across the fields.