Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“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.

“Let’s see if this thing will pump.”

Four or five of the sails were missing and the helmet had been shot full of holes by passing hunters, which would have let the dust into the gears and so it did not look promising. He pulled the stick lever and released the brake. The tailpin shifted and the windmill turned its face sideways to the wind and the sails creaked around on their hub. Ross waited until the upstroke and then gave a sharp rap on the water column with the tire iron and water began to pour out of the pipe and into the rusted tank.

“Wait,” he said. He held out both hands and tasted it, and then said it was all right. Jeanine put her tin can into the stream and drank down two cans full and then handed him the can, gasping, and he drank as well. The water poured out over her hands in hiccuping bolts.

“I meant for us to go someplace where they give you two forks,” he said.

She stood with both arms held out to the water. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think anything could be as good as that tin can full of water.”

He took off his hat and held his head under the spout. He held her by the shoulders and kissed her wet face. She put her arms around his waist and stuck her thumbs in his belt and he reached around and took her hands and said Jeanine, you are always messing with me. They had to find some way to shovel out. He slid his hands down her shoulders again and again and felt that if he could not have her then he wished she would choose some other person and quickly. They could not stay there the night and so she would not take off that light print dress and lie down beside him, not yet.

HE SHOVELED OUT with a flat piece of tin and the Dodge truck started up after several tries. At nine at night they came into Amarillo and parked outside the Stockman’s Hotel. They got out of the truck and she dusted him off as best she could with a tow sack she found in the truck and then herself as well.