A sort of mist hung now in the air, but it was different from the dew that rose from the ground before the drought began. Morning was still far off, but the unrelenting heat drew the minute bits of moisture that existed in the parched soil and carried it away selfishly, cruelly.
The fence curved and wandered off to the east. Julie stopped. After a minute she sat down on the crusty grass and leaned against the corner pole. The rough cedar felt good and strong against her back, and she extended her legs out in front of her and settled into the dirt. The night—even with its smothering blanket of heat—felt good.
Julie thought about how she’d left things with Danny earlier that night, after the telephone call from Nancy. I must have looked stricken—because I was.
“That was Nancy Lewis. I’ve got to go to the office.”
“I’ll drive you—I can wait in my truck while you take care of your business.”
“No—thanks, but no. This isn’t going to be good news.”
“You don’t know that. Look—I’ll wait here, OK?”
“It’s late, Danny. I need to . . . I don’t know. I need some time to assimilate whatever’s going on.”
“Maybe I could—”
“I’ve got to go, Danny.”
Danny had nodded, his eyes still on hers. The deep chestnut gaze looked flat. He had turned and left, the screen door flapping into place behind him.
Julie picked a bug of some kind off the back of her neck and flicked it away. The fireflies were pretty much done for the night, but a few lingerers still flashed and glowed above the parched grass.
Why didn’t I let him wait for me? Why did I chase him off like that—like a casual friend who was getting in the way of something important? What makes me do that? Am I trying to prove how tough and independent I am? I’m not tough at all, and that’s what I need to keep people from seeing. But not Danny Pulver. I want him to see who I am.
He kissed me here, right by this fence post. Holding him was wonderful.
But I wouldn’t let him wait for me.
She pushed herself to her feet, wiping her arm across her eyes.
Unbidden and acutely unwanted, a headline sprang up in Julie’s mind:
Failed Writer Refuses Closeness with Dr. D. Pulver
Spends Life Alone Writing Ad Copy for Al’s Grocery
And Officer Friendly? What’s that all about? I’m about as impetuous as an adding machine—yet I pulled in next to his car at Drago’s as if I was drawn by a magnet. I just met the man!
As she headed down the slope, Julie stubbed her toe on a protruding stone. “Stupid rock!” she yelled, and launched it back up the hill with a swift and well-directed kick. A jolt of pain shot from her big toe up her leg, and she yelped in pain.
Another sound froze her in place—the insistent, blood-chilling burr of small pebbles being shaken in a tin can. Her toe pain forgotten, Julie broke from her statue-like stillness to a full-out gallop down the hill and didn’t slow until she stood panting in front of her kitchen door.
She sucked in huge gulps of the sticky night air, and it seemed to take forever to fill her lungs and slow her breathing. The rattlesnake’s warning sounded again in her ears, as real as it had been a half mile away. She took another deep breath and let her shoulders—her entire posture—slump wearily.
“What a swell night,” she said aloud. She started to her house, favoring the sore toe and limping slightly. “And,” she grumbled, “I’ve been putting off my research.”
Feeling slightly like a martyr but knowing she owed her working stories some thought and some computer time, she planted herself in her chair in front of her desk. She used her News-Express password to access the newspaper’s various subscription-only search engines and typed in a keyword to begin her search, marveling, as she always did, at the efficiency of the system. Almost instantaneously, she was offered well over seventeen thousand citations on her topic, Quarter Horse breeding in Montana. She scrolled through the sites and works offered, sending those she liked to her printer. When the machine stopped its laser-whine several minutes later, Julie collected the pages and settled back in her chair to begin reading. As usual, she fell into her work, unconscious of the passing time.
The next morning Julie was amazed to find she’d slept through the heat of the night without waking. She pushed back the sheet she’d covered herself with, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, swung her feet to the floor—and then stopped. Something was wrong. Instead of the unremitting barrage of light and heat she was accustomed to each morning since the drought began, everything was covered with a subtle grayness, a weak and washed-out hue instead of the normally brassy sunshine. The heat hadn’t dissipated. The air remained dense, making her bedroom seem claustrophobic, as if the walls had closed in on her overnight. She glanced at her bedside clock: 8:03.
Could I have slept the night and the day—and it’s now evening? She shook her head, trying to clear it. I’ve never done that, no matter how tired I’ve been. And Drifter would’ve been carrying on out in his stall and I’d have heard him. This is weird . . .
She clicked on the radio on her dresser. Instead of the mindless babble of the morning team at CWKX she’d anticipated, the voice she heard was deep, sonorous, certainly not local talent.
“. . . Weather Bureau,” the voice continued. “The storm originated in the Dakotas late last night and has been moving east to west at an erratic rate of speed, apparently gathering power. Although the wind velocity is not currently a major problem, gusts up to sixty miles per hour are not uncommon as the mass moves toward upper Montana. Because of the prevailing drought conditions, the dehydrated soil is being stripped from the earth and swept in front of the storm in a monumental cloud that is obscuring the sun in many areas.” The announcer paused for a moment.
“I repeat: if the storm reaches your location, stay in your home. Do not allow children or pets to go outside. Any farm animals that can be brought into barns should be tended to immediately. Do not attempt to drive a car or truck or operate a tractor during the storm, should it reach you. In older homes, stuffing towels around loose-fitting windows is advised. Close all windows and doors as firmly as possible. Electric and telephone services may well be disrupted. We strongly suggest that you fill large jugs, bottles, kettles, whatever you have, with water if your source of water is a well. Again, do not attempt to . . .”
The voice crackled and fizzled away to a steady hum, which stopped abruptly after a minute or so. Julie put on a pair of jeans and a shirt and hauled on her boots, ignoring the throbbing of her toe from its collision with the stone the night before. A sound stopped her in mid-motion: a gentle, sloughing sound like a friendly night rain. But Julie knew immediately that it wasn’t rain. It was wind-driven desiccated soil.
She raced down the stairs and out the kitchen door. Her exposed skin—hands, face, and neck—began itching and then burning within a few steps of her home. It was as if she’d been drenched in an acid of some sort—not caustic enough to raise blisters but strong enough to cause extreme discomfort. Julie’s eyes began to tear copiously, making her vision shimmery and indistinct. Specks of soil almost too small to see felt like fiery cinders in her eyes. She lumbered toward the barn, attempting to shield her eyes with cupped hands.
The wind was strong enough to make her steps a stumbling charade of a normal gait. She stopped, covered her eyes as completely as she could with her hands, and let her tears do their natural job of cleansing. Blinking, she realized, was a part of the process, but each open-and-shut motion felt like her eyes were being scrubbed with sandpaper.
Julie waited a full minute and then peeked out through a minute slit between a pair of fingers. She was surprised to see that she wasn’t facing her barn as she thought she was. One of her stumbles had turned her on a tangent from the building, facing her toward her pasture fence. She corrected her position and charged forward to the barn, hands clasped over her eyes.
She heard Drifter when she was still several st
rides away. He was squealing in that high-pitched, frantic scream that panicked horses find within themselves, and the booming impact of hooves against wood hurried Julie to the big door. She leaned into it, sliding it only wide enough to squeeze herself through, and then pulled it shut from the inside. Although she’d been outside and exposed to the storm for mere minutes, the interior of the barn seemed like a totally different and wonderfully safe world—except for Drifter thrashing in his stall. Julie snapped on the overhead light and ran down the central aisle to her horse’s stall, her eyes again running tears and grinding painfully as she blinked.
Drifter was dripping nervous sweat. He was rearing, striking with his forefeet at the wall off his stall, his panic and his instinct demanding that he do what horses have always done in times of fright—run away from whatever was threatening him.
The artificial light changed the texture of the illumination in the barn, making it something Drifter knew wouldn’t harm him, and Julie’s voice brought him down yet further. She stood outside his stall, talking to the horse, praising him, singing to him. She had been around horses for too many years to go into a stall with one who was coming apart, regardless of how much she loved the animal. Twelve hundred pounds against a hundred and thirty wasn’t an even match.
After several minutes of talking and then singing to Drifter, Julie held an apple out to him. His eyes were still opened wider than normal, and his muscles were as tight as bands of iron, but he accepted the treat. She quickly gave him another, and the familiarity of chomping his favorite treat calmed him noticeably. Julie began preparing the stall across the aisle to hold Drifter as she mucked his usual stall. She couldn’t trust him not to tear the cross ties out of the walls if something spooked him, and was still leery about working in his stall with the horse next to her.
The barn creaked and moaned, indicating the wind was increasing in strength. The massive front door rattled on its track, but both Julie and Drifter had heard that sound before, during the winter, when the wind had shrieked like a ghostly freight train and stinging sleet had flown horizontally past the windows. She remembered the storm that had taken place several Thanksgivings ago—the worst blizzard in 150 years, the Montana Weather Bureau had called it. She’d strung a rope from the house to the barn just before the storm howled in with its eighty-mile-per-hour winds and over five feet of snow. The thought of following that rope, hand over hand in a disorienting blur of white, in wind that would have blown her into the storm like a discarded newspaper if she lost her grip or if the rope broke, made her shudder.
Julie tossed a lead line over Drifter’s neck and led the now relatively calm Quarter Horse into the stall she’d prepared. Drifter sank his head into the feed bucket as she latched the stall gate. The lights flickered. Drifter’s head snapped up; bits of crimped oats and molasses-coated corn dribbled from his mouth as he looked around himself, seeking an escape. Julie began talking again in a low, calm voice, and reached out to touch the animal’s shoulder. The lights wavered again for a quick moment and then, blessedly, stayed on. As Drifter calmed and returned to his feed, Julie walked to a window and leaned her elbows on its frame, staring through the glass at the storm.
It was barely 9:00 in the morning, but the world around her was as dark as the end of a cloudy, rainy day. The swirling of the dirt-laden wind was almost hypnotic. She felt herself being drawn into the maelstrom—her mind being carried along with it. In the semi-darkness of the whirling grit, patterns developed and then became indistinct images. Julie’s shoulders relaxed and she shifted her boots to a more comfortable position without really being conscious of doing so.
The spinning images became a bit more distinct, became at first places—her bedroom when she was a child, her college dorm—and then faces: her dad smiling at her, her first boss after college . . . and Roger. She hadn’t thought of him in a while, yet he seemed to persist in popping, totally unbidden, into her mind every so often.
A half dozen years ago she’d had a man in her life. Roger Phillips was a guy with too much inherited money and too little to do with his time. He’d bought an operating cattle ranch from an elderly couple outside of Coldwater, and he’d set about to increase the profits of the ranch, to make it run at peak efficiency, to make it a model for modern agriculture. He’d fired the four cowhands who had been with the old couple for several years, and hired some drifters whom he could pay low wages. Roger bought stock without knowing cattle, with price per head more important to him than hardiness, fecundity, and weight yield.
Julie, for reasons she still didn’t completely understand, had been fascinated with Roger Phillips. Coldwater had accepted Roger almost immediately. He’d donated large amounts of money to the church, although he wasn’t a member, and financed a trip to Billings for the high school rodeo team to compete in the state finals. He rarely drank alcohol, and when he did so, his choice was a glass of dry white wine. He was well aware of Julie’s faith and her moral beliefs, and he abided by them. Roger was bright—with an Ivy League degree in philosophy—and articulate and very good looking. He treated Julie as if she were a queen—and Julie reveled in it.
Julie had been in a dream world for several months. On her birthday he’d chartered a small jet and had taken her to Helena for dinner at a lavish restaurant, then to a sold-out Sting concert, where they’d had front row center seats, and then back home the same night.
The fascination—the infatuation—had ended for Julie as rapidly as it had begun. Roger Phillips, she abruptly came to realize, was as boring as stacked wood.
The entire episode seemed like it had taken place a long time ago, but it left an imprint on Julie that she knew would be with her forever. In life and in relationships, there was no such thing as a free ride. Fun and games and fancy toys don’t equal real love.
Pulling herself out of the mesmerizing effects of the dust storm required a physical effort. She had to turn her face from the window to reorder her thoughts, to push Roger out of her consciousness, to orient herself to the reality of the day. She picked up a Jan Karon novel from a shelf where she’d left it a few nights ago and dragged a bale of straw down the aisle to Drifter’s stall. The horse was relaxed, snuffling through the flake of hay she’d tossed to him, apparently at peace with the world.
Until the lights flicker or go out again.
Julie sat on the straw and opened the book to the page she’d dog-eared, but this time, Karon failed to grab Julie’s interest. The words swam on the page, and after beginning the same paragraph four times, Julie closed the book. She stretched her legs out in front of her and snuggled her back a little more comfortably. Her injured toe throbbed a bit, but with no weight on it, it felt better. Her eyes felt rough and abraded, and it was less painful to simply keep them closed.
A thump and then the screech of the front door of the barn jerked Julie from her doze. She stood as Sunday squeezed through the opening, followed in a moment by Danny. The collie didn’t dash up to greet Julie as usual. Instead, he stood staring up at Danny, his tail tucked a bit between his rear legs and his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth.
“Whew,” Danny said, rubbing his eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Julie hurried up the aisle to the man and the dog. “Still real bad?” she asked. “I’ve been out here all morning with Drifter.”
“Still bad, yeah,” Danny said. “Animals don’t like this sort of thing.” He pointed to Sunday. “Lookit this poor guy.”
Julie crouched next to the collie and saw his widened eyes and the rapidity of his breathing. Saliva dripped from his tongue to the floor of the barn. She saw, too, that he stood with his knees slightly flexed, like a dog cringing from a punishment. When she stroked him she felt his body tremble. She hugged him closer, and he buried his face against her.
“How were you able to drive, Danny?” She glanced over at a window. “I couldn’t even see my fence through the storm.”
Danny grinned and began slapping dust from hi
s jeans and shirt. “Fog lights and good luck. I was in first gear all the way from Bobby Allen’s place to here. I had to stop a million times when I couldn’t see anything at all.”
“Sounds dangerous. You didn’t have to come . . .”
“I wanted to, Julie.” He crouched down and wrapped both the woman and the dog in a hug.
Julie sighed. “I’m glad you did.”
They stood up together, Sunday still between them.
“What happened at the Express last night? I’d hoped you’d call when you got in.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t. Come on—pull up a bale of straw, and we can talk.”
Danny placed a bale next to Julie’s and sat down. Sunday quivered in front of them, pressed closely against their legs, as Julie related the entire story—including her meeting with Ken Townsend. There was a quick flicker of something in Danny’s eyes when she mentioned the cop, but he didn’t speak.
“. . . and felt like a dummy for kicking that rock, and I came back here and fell into bed, and when I woke up this morning, there was all this.” She waved an arm around her.
Danny fiddled with a piece of straw before he spoke. “I’m really sorry about the story. It was good and effective writing, and the legalities can’t diminish that.”
Julie moved a couple of inches closer to Danny, and their shoulders touched lightly. She dropped her hand to Sunday’s back and kneaded his coat. “It all seems so one-sided, so stupid,” she agreed. “That boy is dead, and I can’t write about what killed him. Of course it was foolish of Dean to drive drunk—but the fact that he was served illegally needs to be pointed out to people so that we can make certain the same thing doesn’t happen again. That’s what’s so frustrating about this—not the fact that my work won’t be published, but that people will know only what happened, not how and why it happened.”
“Maybe another story, Julie? One that comes to the same conclusions a bit obliquely, so there’s no legal hassle?”
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