Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

They were ushered into the restaurant. The maître d’ asked them if they had been caught in that dust storm and Ross asked him if they did not look like it? The waiter came and said a lot of other people had been caught in it and were staying the night at the hotel and did they want a room and then noticed that Jeanine did not have a ring and said excuse me, excuse me.

Jeanine sat down with dreadful precision on the plush-and-ma-hogany chair when Ross pulled it out for her. She put her hands in her lap and gazed at the ranks of silverware and crockery. Things happened around her in a noiseless, air-conditioned hush. Linen-covered tables stretched in every direction. This was a place where people were very serious about eating. The gray-haired waiter impressed her with his willingness to bring her anything she asked for, and to arrange her knives and forks and spoons and pour her a glass of water with ice in it. These were things a woman usually did. He seemed to be quite happy doing it, and Jeanine wondered if he were mentally unfit in some way. He clasped his hands together in front of his white apron and asked if they had kept on driving through the storm and Ross said they had taken refuge in a laid-by passenger car of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe and the waiter glanced at Jeanine’s tangled flyaway hair and said Lord, Lord.

The waiter came beside Ross’s chair to take his hat and then with brisk gestures, bore it away to the hat shelf and said he would get it brushed off.

“Have the steak,” Ross said. “Don’t eat it with your hands.”

“I ought to do it just to embarrass you.”

Ross ran his hand quickly through his hair to relieve the pressure of his hat. He opened the menu and did not read it.

He said, “I won’t quit until I have an answer.”

In the hotel dining room there was a murmuring buzz of voices drifting through the brick arches, but it was hushed and mannerly. Jeanine glanced around herself at all the white linen and silver water pitchers beaded with sweat. Ross reached over the table and took her napkin and shook it out and handed it to her.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Ross, life would be hard at your place.” She wrapped the napkin around one hand and unwrapped it. “There’s more to life than making money.” She spread the napkin on her knee and thought of something lighthearted to say. She couldn’t think of anything at the moment.

“That’s true.” His hand tightened briefly into a fist. “I figure I’ll make it when the war comes and afterwards I’ll go to Texas U. in Austin and take courses in harpsichord music. And, let’s see.”

“I bet.”

“And watercolors. I’ll become a philanthropist. I’ll buy free iron lungs for everybody. Even people who don’t need them but might need them.”

She started wrapping the napkin around her hand again. She said, “My dad cheated on my mother all those years. And she put up with it and he finally went off with some fourteen-year-old.”

“I’m not your dad. You’re twenty-one, I would think you could tell the difference between one human being and another.”

She leaned her head on her fist. “I know as much about men as a hog knows about Sunday. But you know what?” she said. “I love you.”

He shifted his large body in the chair and turned up a fork and looked at the tines. The waiter came bearing a salad with strawberries in it. They were small red hearts crying out to be eaten. At the next table several dusty-haired men were urgently discussing the possibilities of using artillery as a rainmaking device. He put the fork down.

“I love you too,” he said. “I have for a long time.”

She said, “Are these strawberries just for decoration? Or are they rubber?”

“They look real to me.”

When they were done with the steak, she ordered the thickest, sweetest dessert on the menu. The overhead fans shifted her hair in vagrant strands about her head. She smiled up at him over the pound cake and its caramel sauce.

“Last chance, Jeanine,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He sat without saying anything for a moment and then asked her when. She said in a year, in the year 1939, well, more than a year, in December of 1939. She thought of the orchard and the graveyard and all her work and the pain of leaving it, but still, she would close the door behind her. After that, she thought, would come 1940 and 1941, and so on, she would become a stepmother and there would be hard work, children, droughts, one year opening into another and herself and Ross Everett in their own bedroom and the circle of the year turning outside like the sails of the windmill unfurled and taking into its wheel any wind that came.

Jugs and Innis sat on the two beds of the Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Court cabin and listened as the sand hammered at the windows. Innis jiggled his knee up and down. He got up and walked to the door and then walked back again. Smoky Joe was safe in a stall at the fairgrounds. The Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Court was near the new, bald campus of Texas Technological Institute, on the outskirts of Lubbock. Texas Tech, with its Spanish-style buildings scattered over the hard earth and now the visibility was down to a hundred yards and one building could not be seen from another.

“They’re going to be all right,” said Jugs.

“Well, this can give people dust pneumonia,” Innis said.

“I know it,” said Jugs. “But this is a different person.”

“Well, I guess she doesn’t have asthma,” said Innis.

“No,” said Jugs. “She don’t.”

Innis nodded and finally he sat down. He took up the fringes of the chenille bedspread and began twisting them. They couldn’t get anything on the radio because of the static. He thought about Smoky Joe getting dust pneumonia but he had never heard of animals coming down with it. They were trapped in this one room while the wind and dust tried to take the tourist cabin apart. The floor was gray concrete, slick from years of footsteps. Innis sat on the bed and listened to the shrieking wind. The pillow smelled of hen feathers.

He stared at the pictures on the wall and listened to Jugs snapping out a hand of solitaire. One picture was a landscape with deer drinking from a pool and the other was a framed print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The people who owned the place must be Catholic. Jesus himself looked all right, with his mild countenance and an intense gaze in his blue eyes, but he was holding open his red robe and there was a glowing human heart with a crown of thorns on it and Innis found this disturbing and unfathomable. It seemed to him like some terrible surgery. Then he fell asleep and when he woke up in the middle of the night, from a confused dream of burning food on the stove at home, the picture was still there and still without explanation. But the wind had died. They were enveloped in an exhausted silence. Innis sat and listened to it for a long time. He heard coyotes crying in the surrounding hills. They decanted themselves and their warbling, soprano, unstable voices down the draws, unseen in the distance. After a while he fell asleep again.

AFTER TWO HOURS the dust moved on from the southern plains into Fort Worth and then on to Waco, losing material as it went and becoming only a high wind with a fluting noise that called and sang at every window and door in Central Texas. Vernon and Mayme parked in a drive shed in Cisco. The shed was used by the Sinclair oil company and the workmen saw the storm coming and they saw the car with two people in it turn off the main highway and they shoved back the doors for them. Vernon and Mayme got out and sat with the men and shared their big glass jug of iced tea without any ice in it. The men asked them where they were headed, and Mayme said they were going to her home, a farm outside of Mineral Wells. They had been to the baseball game in Eastland, because Vernon got a weekend pass. The Fort Worth Cats had beaten the Coca-Cola team from Eastland and they were just getting into the car when it hit. The dust storm had scattered people, thrown them off the highways and into shelters all over the country in general, sent vehicles and people on foot into odd trajectories. Vernon said his sister-in-law and her fellow were caught out in it somewhere, up by Lubbock, and he was worried about them.