Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Ross 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.