I give my sister a small nod of reassurance and her face relaxes.

“Rocks!” squawks Alden as he holds a saliva-glazed object aloft.”  “Rocks!”

Indeed, it’s another rock.  Plus, while he was drooling all over everything, my nephew managed to acquire a moustache of Arizona soil.

“Oh, honey, no.  Icky yuck.”  Ava bends over and wipes the desert dust from her son’s face.

As I kneel down and remove the rock from his chubby grip he beams at me.  I turn the rock over in my palm.  “This looks tasty.  Mind if I keep it for myself?”

Alden laughs and allows his mother to gather him onto her hip.  He’s a sweet child.  He takes after his mother.

“Where are you going?” Brigitte calls after me because I’ve walked away without a word.

“Just saying hello to my big brother.”

I don’t know if the girls can hear me or not because a wide dust devil has descended in a whirling funnel of sand.

Mini tornadoes. 

That was how I used to think of them until someone told me otherwise.    He always knew what he was talking about when it came to things like that.  Dust devils.  Rocks.  Caves.  I can hear the gruff timbre of his voice. I can remember how his words would be curiously offset now and again by an unidentifiable accent, a product of his nomadic lifestyle.  I don’t believe he was ever aware of it.

I’m still holding Alden’s rock and when I squeeze it the sharp ridges cut painfully into my palm.

Our family should have been able to find another way to survive.  People have managed far more with far less.

I drop the rock somewhere as I walk.  I have no use for it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

OZ

 

I remember hearing once that in the United States there is more land where there is nobody than land where there is somebody.  As I travel across the flat plains of the nation’s heart, I can believe this is true.

As I inch toward the western edge of Oklahoma, the last of the summer dusk is settling into night.  I’ve been this way before, on this very section of the Interstate, traveling in the opposite direction, east instead of west.

Over the last five years I’ve managed to touch most of the major asphalt tongues stretching across the continental U.S.   I haven’t left the country since the day I touched down in New York beside Mina Savage.   Strange, considering I spent such a large swath of my life overseas.  Or maybe not strange.  Maybe I’ve just been thirsty to know the country I was away from for so long.  I can’t explain it.  Maybe on some level it was even because of Ren.

I could keep driving for another six easy hours but suddenly I don’t want to.  Roadside signs promise food, gas, lodging in the town of Sayre so I pull off on the next exit.   The surrounding land is flat, with scarcely a ripple.  No mountains, no shores, no forest, no subterranean palaces.  This is the kind of land that holds no surprises.  What you see is all there is, miles and miles of it.  The simplicity appeals to me.  Right now, anyway.

As I’m gassing up the truck, I catch a strong whiff of barbecue and my stomach lurches in response.  There’s a free standing restaurant about twenty yards off and it looks like it’s seen better days; the harsh prairie winds have licked the red paint off in places and the sign ‘Aggie’s BBQ’ is slightly askew above the narrow entrance, like it might land on someone’s head one of these days.

A pair of thirty-something women stand in the parking lot sucking on cigarettes and murmuring to one other as they watch my truck swing into a spot only a few feet away from where they stand.  I feel their eyes searching me as I head for the door and I point my head down because a conversation isn’t really part of my plans right now.

The restaurant is dark and appropriately smoky for a barbecue joint.  I order a rack of ribs with a soda and devour it quickly in a small booth with seats lined in orange vinyl that might have been cool forty years ago.

The shuffling, wheezing fellow who took my order yells something indistinct back to the kitchen and then begins grimly running a greasy rag over an empty table in wide circles.  The air conditioning is either non-existent or broken; the heat borders on oppressive.

All in all, Aggie’s BBQ has the feel of a lost part of the universe where time isn’t relevant.

I chew my food as Johnny Cash croons mournfully from somewhere unseen, recognizing Folsom Prison Blues only because August Savage had a penchant for vintage country music.  Every time I walked into the big house at Atlantis an antique record player would be belting out music from a corner of the living room.  Somehow it was always on, even if there was no one in sight.

All of a sudden I feel a ripple down my spine and a wild gust of wind rocks the building enough to make the walls creak.

The old man wiping the counter pauses long enough to squint out the dirty window.  “Nothin’,” he scoffs, “not a storm.”

I don’t know if he’s talking to me or not so I tear off another mouthful of tender rib meat and stay quiet.  This area has got to be prime real estate for tornadoes so I would bet the locals are used to looking skyward every time a few clouds decide to hang out together.  I’ve seen one of the telltale funnels myself once, tagging along with storm chasers a few years back at the Kansas/Missouri border.  The clouds gather and link arms before they animate and whip up a nightmare to send to the ground.  It’s horrifying and fascinating, nothing like the harmless compact whirlwinds of dust that dance across the desert.

“No, not a mini tornado.  Dust devil.  Read about them in one of your father’s books.” 

“Doesn’t look devilish to me, Oscar.  Looks happy.  Playful.” 

Funny how scraps of conversation can revisit out of nowhere, things you might not even realize your mind knows until something else triggers the dormant memory.

Just like that I’m no longer in a stifling barbecue joint somewhere on the Oklahoma prairie.  Instead I’m standing beneath a scalding desert sun and beside an incomparable girl, a girl I was never supposed to have and swore I wouldn’t take but did anyway.  I don’t even need to close my eyes to remember how she shaded her face with her palm and squinted at the frisky dust tunnel in the foreground of the Harquehala Mountains.

Playful, she’d called it, and then her sweet, full mouth tilted up as she glanced at me sideways.  I hadn’t kissed her yet and I didn’t kiss her then.  But in that glance she told me she understood what I’d already accepted.

It was only a matter of time.

I would kiss her. I would push all barriers aside and I would get inside of her every which way.  We would say fuck the consequences together and then suffer the mortal wounds of our own stupidity when we learned that reality is far messier.

In reality, consequences fuck you. 

“Hey, buddy.”  The shapeless, rasping old man who took my order is looming over me with a grimace.  He puts a hand to his back and I realize the sour look isn’t for me.  He’s a man who spends his days walking through pain and the fact has permanently wrenched his face into a scowl.

“You forgot your drink,” he grumbles and sets a plastic-lidded cup next to my plate before he trundles off with a dirty dishtowel slung over a drooping shoulder.

After hastily finishing my meal, I toss the trash and nod a farewell to the proprietor.  I don’t imagine Sayre is a real hotbed of tourist activity, particularly not at the onset of summer, so there are probably limited lodging options.

I could sleep in my truck, of course.   I’d done it many times.  But tonight I don’t feel like risking any attention from local busybodies.

It doesn’t take long to find a place with a flashing vacancy sign.  It’s called The Oklahoman and its mid century paint peels from its face but it looks non-threatening enough.  There is a malarial-looking woman behind the pressed wood desk in the lobby.   She frowns when I tell her I don’t have a credit card but cheers right up again when ten twenty dollar bills land in front of her nose.  She touches the money with a ragged fingernail, glances around and then tosses me a card key.