K. Weiland - Storming

He turned all the way around until Jael was in view once more. “So we really are blockaded. At least it’s not raining here.” He touched the Jenny’s wing. It was only slightly damp from yesterday’s drizzle. “If it got much wetter, we would’ve had to wait for the spark plugs to dry out before we could take off.” He checked the engine, but Earl had already opened all the compartments to let her dry. “Guess that means the drought’s broken, for what it’s worth.”

“You are very slow this morning,” Jael said. She had rummaged through the grub sack and come out with what was left of Lilla’s biscuits. She held up the plate. “For first meal. Now let us go.”

“All right, all right.” He leaned his neck to first one side and then the other to crack it, then trudged after her.

Today, she hurried to the car with barely a glitch in her stride and climbed into the seat, up and over, without bothering with the door.

He cranked the engine, then slid beneath the wheel. “Guess sleeping cold and damp agrees with your joints after all.”

She grinned. “I thought of something that is very interesting.”

“What?” He turned the jalopy around and bumped across the field toward the road. “That being around Earl is what makes you sore?” Earl would say it was Hitch who had the talent for making people sore.

She bit her lip, still grinning. Her eyes sparkled. All in all, she looked far too pleased with herself. “Not Earl. Schturming .”

“How’s that?”

“Lightning is what made me hurt in beginning, yes?”

“Right. Although you’re lucky to be feeling anything, if you want my opinion.”

“Yes, but how it is hurting does not have sense. One hour it is almost all gone, and then I am hardly able to be walking.”

He turned onto the road, headed toward the lake, and gave the car the gun. “You’re the first person I know who’s stayed around to tell me how it felt after getting that close to a lightning strike. Maybe that’s just how it goes.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.” She handed him a biscuit. “It is like you said yesterday. The weather makes people’s bones to hurt. Well, Schturming causes weather, yes?”

He bit past the flour powdered on top and into the fluffy—if cold—insides of the biscuit. “And when are you figuring on getting to the plan part? _Schturming_’s making weather all over the place today.”

“But I am not talking about weather , I am talking about dawsedometer . When it is near, I hurt. And since it is inside of Schturming , that is how we find it.”

“That is… interesting, if it’s true. Kind of like barometric pressure—which this dawsedometer thing probably warps like crazy.”

She made a confused face.

“Barometric pressure. I guess you’d say it’s part of what makes weather. At any rate, it can make people’s joints hurt.” He chewed his biscuit. “But even if that’s true, what’s it get us? You just want to drive around until you start hurting?”

She raised both eyebrows, mouth cocked. “You have better idea?”

“Not really.”

“Then we drive.” She settled back in her seat and pulled out another biscuit. “You will find it. You have luck.”

“You can’t trust luck.”

She looked over at him. Her face was clear except for two serious little lines between her eyes. “I trust you .”

“Well…” He dug around for the right thing to say.

What did he want to say anyway? He had wanted her to trust him. He’d wanted her to like him, almost right from the start. Well, now she liked him and trusted him—and he’d gone and kissed her, and who knew exactly how she felt about that now that she’d cooled down. At any rate, she wasn’t too burnt up about it, from the looks of things.

He cast her a sidelong glance. “You do know you shouldn’t count on me too much, right?”

“This ‘count on’—what is that?”

“It means… depend on, to be sure of something.”

“You are not sure of yourself?”

“Oh, I’m sure. It’s just that what I’m sure of isn’t always what other people want me to be sure of.”

“You are very worried about disappointing people.”

Most of the time, there weren’t any people in his life to disappoint. It was only since coming home that the Groundsworld—as she called it—had started reaching out for him with its expectations and responsibilities.

He guided the car around a puddle. The left front tire hit the rut anyway and bounced hard.

“I’m not worried,” he said. “There’s things I’ve done—mostly long ago, before I left home—that I’m not proud of. I wish they could’ve turned out different. But the truth is, even if I had ’em to do again, they’d happen the same way. I am what I am, and I can’t help it when people expect me to be something else.”

She chewed on that for a minute. “You think you are still same person you were—before you left all this time ago?”

“Sure. People don’t change.” He gave her half a grin, trying to make it a joke. “It’s a common myth.”

She ate her biscuit slowly, watching him. Then she licked the crumbs off her fingers and shook her head. “People change. But it is slow. It is not that they decide tomorrow they will have differences. It is that they decide every day, for many days. Or maybe they do not decide—and it happens anyway, without them even having knowledge of it.” She spread her hands. “It is not change. It is what you call… um…”

“Evolution?”

“Maybe. I do not know this word.”

He steadied the steering wheel over a series of ruts. Maybe she was right. Maybe not. He wasn’t entirely the person he had been nine years ago. Back then, he’d been as sure as shoeshine that running away was the only right choice. But now, a niggle of doubt surfaced.

What would have happened had he stayed? Maybe Campbell would have backed down sooner than risk his crooked dealings being revealed in open court. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone after the Hitchcock farm like he’d threatened. Even if Campbell had held fast, maybe Hitch spending a few years in prison would have done less to hurt the people he cared about. Maybe Celia wouldn’t have gotten sick and died.

He might have a family now. A little stability. A few bucks in his pockets. Would that have been such a bad thing?

His chest tightened. And leave the air? Let gravity chain him to the ground?

He shook his head. “People don’t change. They want to, but they can’t.”

Jael drew in a pained little gasp.

He looked over at her. “Nothing personal.”

“No…” She sucked in another breath, past her teeth. She sat up, rigid in her bouncing seat, both fists clenched in her lap. Her skin had gone tight over her face. Her eyes were wide, her forehead lined. “I am having pain again.”

“What?” He hit the brakes hard, and the jalopy nearly swerved off the road. He leaned his head back and scanned the sky.

Nothing but clouds.

She leaned forward, wincing. “Move slowly.”

He let up on the brake. “If you’re right about this, you’ll deserve Livingstone’s prize all to yourself.”

They crept down the road—four hundred yards, five hundred, then a mile. He alternated his gaze between the road ahead and the hazy sky that stretched out across the lake on one side and the unplanted fields of gray-green sagebrush on the other.

When you came right down to it, this was ridiculous. It was like looking for a mosquito smashed onto the Jenny’s top wing. Maybe you’d find it if you looked long enough, but, even then, it’d be nothing but a fluke.

Jael snatched at his sleeve and pulled his arm, nearly turning the car into the barrow pit. “Wait!”