“Do you want me to load him?” Innis stood holding the halter line, and his hand was on Smoky’s shoulder. He was an undersize replica of his father and he could not stop smiling in the joy of a clean win and a silver plate.
“No, not right now. Get him back in the stall.” He reached out to take the boy’s hat from his head and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Go stick your head in the horse tank, son. You’re overheated.” The boy’s face was alight with unspoiled pleasure. Ross put his son’s
hat back on his head and tapped the crown. “You and Jugs take him to a stall. Y’all are staying the night here. It would be too dark by the time you got him home. Me and Jeanine are going on. I have to get her back.” He turned to Jeanine. “Word gets around,” he said.
“It was only a ten-dollar bet,” she said. She kept her voice low. “It’s bathtub money.” She smiled up at him and thought of a bathtub full of cool water.
“You were ruined for a normal life.”
“No I wasn’t!” She fanned herself with the race program. “I’m more normal than anybody. More than Mayme.”
He nodded. “The purse was two thousand.”
“Oh my God, you didn’t tell me!”
“It would have been too nerve-wracking,” he said. “My nerves were wracked enough as it was.” He took off his hat and wiped his forehead and put it back on. “Let’s get you a cold drink and get home.”
They waded through the hot sand toward the run-out, and she took hold of his arm to keep her balance. She was proud of him and proud to be seen with him. From the perspective of Baker and the man from the King ranch, who were both lounging in the shade of the run-out, she and Ross would seem to be wavering in the heat distortion. Her hand on his coat sleeve for balance, shifting closer and then slipping away, unsure, her hat shimmering in planes, holding on to his sleeve with an iron grip.
R
oss and Jeanine drove out onto Highway 84 south of Lubbock, into the flat country. The earth was the color of brick and cream. An increasing wind ruffled the roadside dust. The daylight dimmed to a faint gray. There was nothing to see but distant oil rigs, the braced, orthodontic structures of the expansion joints, and the small variations of slope and erosion dotted with blackbrush, and as they drove long flatbeds loaded with oil field equipment appeared on the diminishing black line of the highway and the drivers waved as they passed.
They were following the old Burlington Northern tracks and in the distance a train called out. It was coming toward them and it went past with a rush of dust and Russian thistles dried out to barbed wads flying away from the cowcatcher on both sides. Jeanine turned the window wing toward her face and closed her eyes against the blast and
her hair streamed out away from her forehead.
“I’m taking you to dinner in Abilene.”
Jeanine stuck out her lower lip. “I didn’t know we were going to dinner in Abilene.”
“I know it.”
“Why didn’t Innis come too?”
“Because I want to talk to you.” He leaned back in the seat and pulled his tie loose. They passed a struggling, backfiring bus with peeling paint and missing windows, with children hanging out the window frames and trunks lashed to the top. Their tires sang on the blacktop. A flock of rosy finches, gathering for the fall migration, flashed at the windshield and then tilted away. She thought, not yet, not yet. She felt tears burning her eyelids in the hot wind and she wiped them away with the heel of her hand. The wind roared at the open windows.
“I’m not the person you want to be talking to,” she said. “You need somebody more cheerful.”
“You have a bright, cheerful, and sunny nature, Jeanine. Happiness is your middle name. You spread joy and cheer wherever you go. Secretly inside you are the Bluebonnet Molasses girl.”
“No I’m not.”
He said, “I want you to marry me. What objections would you have to marrying me?” He stared straight ahead from under the brim of his hat. His hand was dropped easy and relaxed over the top of the steering wheel.
She twisted around on the seat. She loved the old Tolliver house. It was their own house with pale mint green walls and the family graveyard. If she left, it would be a door shut behind her. Someday she would marry somebody, after all, and open another door to her husband and to other lives that devolved one inside the other in an infinite progression of lives. But not yet. And still Jeanine felt she
could turn to Ross and put her arms around him and that only with him would her restlessness unwind itself. With him her interior drought would be over. She put her hand on his shoulder for a moment and then turned her face to the hot wind again.
He opened and closed his hard fist. He did not look at her.
“You don’t know what to do with your mind, Jeanine,” he said. “I’m the only man that can save you. I’ll marry you and keep you out at the ranch and you can occupy yourself with four-hundred-pound calves at branding and screwworm caustic and Smoky Joe and fighting with the cook. The fun will never end.”
“What a life,” Jeanine said. She smiled at him. “Being a ranch wife. When does a person get to enjoy themselves?”
“In bed,” he said. “In the hot hours of the night, sweetheart.”
“I knew that’s where this was going.”
“I would guess that you are seeing somebody else.”
“It’s not serious.”
“Then what is it?”
“Just fun.” She wiped her eyes on the hem of her skirt.
“And I’m not.”
“Ross, you are a very serious man.”
She thought about Innis and what was fair to him and what was not. There were two men to think about. The boy made this all so much more important. She sat back again in the narrow seat and put her hand over her eyes. “It’s just that I have worked so hard for that place. We saved it. We got out of the oil fields and saved it.” She dropped her hand in her lap and turned the horse ring around and around on her little finger. She shut her hand up into a fist. “I want my own house.”
“Ah, Jeanine.” He took a deep breath.
“What?”
“Whatever you want, darling, you want it so badly.”
The wind had built up and was pushing the car toward the right,
and loose, dried vegetation bowled along the verge, and she could feel that the temperature had dropped. Behind them, from the northwest, a solid front was rolling down over the flat country. Ross glanced in his rearview mirror, and then fixed his eyes on it. He frowned.
“What the hell is that?” he said. Behind them all through the empty countryside the stiff blackbrush and stripped cotton stalks and the desert willow were bent over and whipping. Jeanine did not notice it or what he had said. She was thinking of something else. She said, “You could take up work as a rodeo clown, Ross. That would fix you being too serious.”
“Yes, well, I am being serious here for the moment, Jeanine. Turn around and look out the back.”
Jeanine turned to look out the back window. “Oh God, Ross, it’s a dust storm.” A heavy, solid avalanche of darkness was moving toward them with its vaporous head vanishing in the upper atmosphere. It was a toppling great mountain on the loose, boiling at its front edge.
“I see it.”
Jeanine instinctively pulled her hat down around her ears. She said, “It’s come out of nowhere.”
The wind lifted sheer curtains of sand and flung them along the highway and they seethed like discontented spirits.
“It’s come down out of Colorado.”
They were approaching a town called Libertyville. The sign said there were fifty people there but it looked like no one had lived there for the last ten years nor would they ever live there again. A small concrete bridge took them over a dry ravine with a sign that said it was the double mountain fork of the brazos. They came upon a lay-by in the railroad tracks and a water tank where trains took on water and the water tank spout lunged back and forth in the wind. Jeanine turned again to look out the back window. The front of the dust storm was solid, it seemed to be made of a thick substance like Bakelite, and it was swallowing up the landscape as it rolled toward them.
Ross slowed and searched for a place of refuge, a shed or a garage. A gas station made of scrap boards was disappearing in the frontal winds, its Sinclair sign swinging back and forth. A board wrenched loose and was tilted end over end down the highway. There was a side-tracked passenger car at the water tank. It was a dark red and in yellow letters it said
ATCHISON TOPEKA AND SANTA FE
. The glass in the windows was muted, scored by sand. Ross drove over the main tracks at the crossing and pulled alongside it.
“Get out,” he said. “We could get buried in that car.”
She held her straw hat brim down around her ears and got out on the passenger side. He came around the front of the Dodge and took her hand. He shoved at the door of the passenger car and it slid back into its slot as the libertyville population?? sign disappeared. The wind built and built until it seemed solid, like floodwater. It sang at the windows with a flutelike sound, and as it increased it howled through the fence wires along the railroad tracks and blew sand in galloping waves down the highway. The wind drove sand grains into the windows with a quick, peppering noise. The old passenger car was vibrating. Ross fought the door back into place. They stood for a moment and she reached out and took his arm as if he were a fence post or a tree that would prevent her from blowing away.
“It’s all right,” he said. “There’s got to be a light here somewhere. They must use this for a crew car.” He went toward the rear of the car. There was a table that folded out from the wall. On the wall was an old sconce that held a kerosene lamp and he lit it just as all the windows went dark. The noise of the wind was so loud Jeanine called out for him and he said it was going to be all right. He carried the lamp toward her, a dim beacon in the darkness. Dust began to pour through a broken window. He took off his hat and jammed it into the cracked and jagged hole.
They waited. He told her not to touch anything because the static electricity could carry enough of a charge to set something on fire. He
turned two seats toward each other and set the kerosene lamp on the floor between his boots and held it there. The metal parts of the seats were washed with vagrant streams of blue light. Jeanine felt her hair crackle. The wind seemed to be taking everything left of the plains earth and blowing it into outer space. The passenger car shook on its wheels.
Ross got up and sat down again beside Jeanine and put his arm over her shoulder and she pressed against him and took his hand. The wind screamed at the joints of the door and they could see the dust shifting in the air in front of them as small spouts of wind streamed around Ross’s hat, and from under the sliding door and around the edges of the windows. It circled around the lamp’s small flame and they were washed in sepia tones from the red dust and the yellow lamplight.
She had only read about things like this. She had seen the photographs but it was the electricity that surprised her, the feeling of being a live wire humming with static. Ross’s hair was thick with dust and she knew that hers was as well. His hat blew out of the broken window with a pop, like a cork being pulled, and slammed into the opposite wall. He got up and shoved it in again and took off his jacket. He came down the aisle and sat down and then bent over and blew out the lamp and said it was using too much oxygen.
It was hard to breathe. Hard to find oxygen in all the powdered air. The wind howled at every crevice. The noise began to disturb her. She felt like running somewhere. There had to be a better place than this old passenger car. It was the end of the world, the dry world from which the king had abdicated and had deserted his people. The old car rocked on its wheels. She felt she was going to suffocate. Ross undid his tie and pulled off his shirt and held the shirt over their heads. She put her arm around him and it felt as if they were both naked in the swarming dust and the heat with their skin burning in contact like the two poles of a battery.
She asked him how long did he think it would last, and he said that it was a cold front coming down off the Rockies and it might last for a day and there might be rain behind it. They had to get out of the passenger car by dark or they would have to spend the night in here. She couldn’t stand it, being trapped inside this dusty prison, she was very thirsty and her throat seemed to be closing up. Was there not any water in this car somewhere? Wait, he said. Just wait. Don’t get frantic, you’ll just use up oxygen and there is not a lot of it. Sit quiet.
Then after an hour the storm passed them by and went south, streaming currents of sand and powder in its wings. It went on into the night, into Central Texas, and it left Jeanine so thirsty she could hardly speak. He pulled on his shirt and jacket and rescued his battered hat from the hole in the window and beat the dust from it on his thigh.
Ross shoved the door open and they went out into the polished air. Sand and dust were still hurrying along in currents at ground level. The pickup was drifted in solid. He needed a shovel. They went out into the dark, down the highway, between the few empty houses. The doors were all shut and locked, as if everyone had left many storms ago. It was a drifted town. Dust stood piled on top of picket fences like a fall of snow, it made crowns over windows and shapes like fan ribs over old concrete foundations. The wind had blasted labels from tin cans, and even now it flowed across the blacktopped highway in light scarves.
“The one day I didn’t carry water,” he said.
“Ross, if we could just find a tank or something.”
“We will.”
They came to the old filling station. The pumps had lollipop heads and had been shut down a long time ago and from its windows faded advertisements for Nehi soda and Quaker State Oil advertised to the empty plains. Ross rattled the knob but the station door was locked, so he took the tire iron out of the bed of the Dodge and broke
the glass and reached inside to turn the knob. He flicked on his lighter and held it up. Jeanine wanted a bottle of Nehi worse than she had ever wanted anything in her life. Dust covered the concrete floor. There was nothing in the interior and so he pulled the door shut again.
They went on among the houses with their broken windows. They opened all the doors that would open. Some of them were locked and some flew open before she even touched the doorknob and some were rusted on their hinges. In each house some family had lived and had hung pictures on the walls and lit fires in the dark against the cold bare plains and the stars in a rainless sky. They had made for themselves these houses like shells and then abandoned them, leaving behind broken bottles and tin cans and two hand-prints in a concrete foundation and beside them an inscription that
SAID MAGGIE AND TOM SEPTEMBER 4 1931
.
There was an automobile that was so old it might have been the first one ever made, rusted into a pile of scrap metal with broken square oil lamps. Picket fences had fallen over. On one door was a chalked message: key. From it an arrow pointed down toward the sill but the door was open inward and it made no sense. They walked on down the highway and he scooped up a tin can and handed it to her. As the sky cleared to stars and wheeling constellations Ross saw a windmill at the edge of the deserted town and took her arm.