Walking Dunes (15 page)

“Come in a minute?” she asked. “I'll show you my room.”

He was taken by surprise. It seemed such a pathetic request. Show you my room?

He met her mother, a grown-up Sissy with the same mousy hair and weak face, the way Sissy would look one day, all worn out. Mrs. Dossey was in the kitchen peeling potatoes while a baby squalled and banged on a pot practically underneath her feet.

Sissy's room was done up in pink and white. She had frilly curtains, a pink flowered bedspread with a white ruffled border, and half a dozen dolls propped against pillows. It was the kind of room you invented for a girl but didn't know if any really had, a nicer room than the rest of the small house, though the furniture was shabby, and he guessed the trimmings were all from Sears. There were magazine photos of Janet Leigh and Ava Gardner taped to the mirror. Glee liked Ava Gardner, too, and James Dean and Natalie Wood. Glee's bedroom was yellow and light green, with a big mirrored dresser and a carpeted floor. Girls seemed to need stuff like this around them, to remind them they were girls.

“Go on, you can sit on the bed,” Sissy said. The mattress sagged as he sank onto it. She reached into a drawer in her dresser, under some other things, and brought out the notebook he had bought her, bright blue with a kitty on the cover.

She sat down on the stool by her dresser, and began immediately to read in a small piping voice.

There is a boy in my history class with pimples so bad on his neck it looks all blistered over. Once I had a pimple on my chest and it took a long time to come to a head. Every day I'd look at it a bunch of times, wanting it to do whatever it had to do. I felt like I had done something bad to deserve this little sore thing. It burst one night while I was asleep and made a little wet spot on my pajama top. I never had another, at least not yet. I never had any on my face. I guess I'm just lucky
.

Christ! David thought. He could not think of a word to say.

Sissy was looking at him happily, all pleased with herself. “I do have moles, though,” she said.

He tried to think what Morris would say, not that girls in 1850 ever mentioned the body. “The hair on my chest is not much more than fuzz,” he heard himself say. He took a long slow breath. “We all have our flaws and worries, don't we? We all worry about things nobody else notices.”

“One more?” Sissy said, and turned a page. She looked almost perky, now that she had his attention. David thought she must be the strangest girl he ever met; actually, he was beginning to think all girls were nuts. One day he would ask her about the rabbit, and about her dad. Probably she had talked about them until she was sick of it, in the hospital. She read.

Mrs. Munsing, who lives next door, came here from Minnesota when she was a young woman, because of her allergies. She thought the clean high air would make her well. She got married and had children. Her son died of rheumatic fever, and a daughter died of polio. Her husband died of a heart attack when he was only 51 years old. But Mrs. Munsing, who moved here to stop sneezing, hasn't even had a cold in thirty-five years. She told my mother God picked her out especially for suffering, and made her strong so she would live long enough for a lot of it, like Job
.

“Well!” David said. “You could probably make a story out of that.” He meant it too, though it was not the kind of story that interested him, and Mrs. Munsing seemed a dull sort, whatever her sad life. “It's sort of like an O.Henry story, or de Maupassant, ironic,” he said, though those writers were clever, annoyingly so. Irony did not work if you said, Look, isn't this the oddest thing anyway! Irony was not Ripley's Believe It or Not, not Leland's store of amazing newspaper anecdotes. Old Bodkins had told the class once, kids your age have no sense of irony, which he thought might be true because life for Basin kids was so predictable. A sense of irony was like a highly refined sixth sense.
He
knew life was likely to turn around on a dime and show him something he hadn't been expecting. Irony was his mother journeying to New York and coming home as burdened as if she had never left. His father, child of immigrants, finding a way to live in a foreign land. Irony was his sister leaving one tyrant and marrying another. Irony always had something absurd in the heart of it, it relied on gullibility or bad luck. David preferred stories that were tragic and inevitable, where events piled up on one another like a mountain of rocks, until one last event toppled everything. Like
Anna Karenina
.

A bubble of nervous laughter erupted from Sissy. “Oh, I couldn't write a story! When I finish a notebook, I tear it up out at the trash barrel and start a new one. I wouldn't want anyone to read it.”

He felt jerked back to her. “But, how can you? After you've written it all down!”

“You save yours? You write stories?”

“Sure. I mean—I haven't really finished one yet, but I write down ideas.”

“I wouldn't know how to do that. I don't know anything about writing stories.”

“You have to read a lot,” he said. “I could lend you a book, or tell you some to read. Did you ever read
Tess of the D'Urbervilles?
By Thomas Hardy? Oh, it's a wonderful long book. They have it in the school library.”

“I have to read something for English,” she said. “I could read that.” She put her notebook away. He got up and said he needed to get home. “Is it sad?” she asked. “I'd want it to be sad.”

“Sure, it's sad,” he said. “Of course it's just a story. It's nothing that really happened.” He thought he ought to reassure her, so she wouldn't overreact.

As he was leaving the house, Sissy's father came up the steps in long stride, his jeans and boots filthy with dust. He had a toothpick in his mouth. Mr. Basin Low Life, David thought. What did he ever do to her? That's what he wanted to ask her. He wondered if his sister had told Pete Kelton all the ways Saul had mistreated her. He was sarcastic, she could say. Would that rouse sympathy from Kelton?

He ran the last block home as fast as he could, wanting his chest to feel the sprint. He burst into the house and found his father in the kitchen stirring something at the stove. That might mean Saul was in a good mood.

“Hey Dad!” he shouted. “I'm in a play! I got the best part!”

His father turned and licked the spoon before he spoke. He said, “Now won't you be good at that?”

14.

He ate dinner—a stew, with tough undercooked chunks of beef and soggy carrots—and excused himself. His father said David had to go around the house and close all the windows before he “took off somewhere;” it was going to rain. David banged each window shut, satisfied at the sharp sounds. The window in the unused bedroom had been left open for a long while, and dust was piled like a dune on the sill. The whole room had a musty smell. He felt like he would explode if he did not get out of the house. As soon as he stepped out, in shorts and a sweatshirt, he saw that the weather was changing fast. The crackly air made the hair on his arms stand up. He felt a wave of moodiness surge through him. He set off at a steady lope out of his neighborhood, across the main street, and off to the east part of town that had sprung up with the oil boom. Houses and trailers seemed to have been tossed on the caliche plain like dice on a table. The ground was so hard, so soil-less, they had only to pave it with a huge sheet of asphalt that ran up against the curbs, gutterless. For dozens and dozens of blocks in any direction, houses sat on a wasteland. There were no trees, only the scruffiest of bushes, sometimes a sad attempt at a yard, usually gone to stickers. Here and there, semis and oilfield equipment were parked on the residential streets. He passed a yard closed in with cyclone fencing; several Dobermans flung themselves at him, clanging against the fence, growling and barking ferociously.

The wind was gusting and the sky was full of dark clouds. The air had a funny electric smell, something besides the dust that was picked up and blasted in his face at intervals. He ran harder. He ran to dare his chest to hold his heart.

Glee was having a slumber party for the pep squad girls. He turned and ran back across town to her house, slowing down the last couple of blocks, until, as he approached, he was walking heavily, his hands on his hips, bending over to gulp air. He stopped under a sycamore across the street, standing where the sidewalk would have been if there had been one. There were lights on in every room of her house, and he could hear the McGuire Sisters singing “Sugartime.” The curtains had not been drawn, and he saw girls moving around in the living room. Two of them were dancing together. A gust of wind came up and blew leaves around his feet; he saw the curtains shudder in the big living room picture window.

Suddenly the front door opened and girls poured onto the walk. He realized they had come out to look at the sky, which was black and dramatic. What had been on the ground—leaves, dust, bits of paper—was now in the air, caught in the odd sporadic gusting, and the air itself had a quality of it, a smell and a feeling, that made him sense danger in the offing, the air you expected in certain scenes of very dramatic movies, just before the heroine's lover's plane was downed over the Atlantic. It was a condition of the plains that came in the fall, and even more frequently, more dramatically, in the gusty spring, when it was not so cold as to drive you inside. Sometimes it was like this before a great dust storm, sometimes before a rain.

The girls were dancing around in the yard like witches, waving their arms and twirling. He was startled by huge drops falling on his face and arms, and he saw that that was what had brought them out, the beginning of rain, that and the wind. They had heard it, or smelled it, before he saw what was happening, although he was out in it.

One of the girls was pointing at him, and then they all turned his way, one by one, laughing and peering out, their heads stuck forward like geese. Glee was one of the last to turn; girls gathered around her. She broke from them and started walking across the yard and into the street, holding her hair back from her forehead with her hand. She was in shorty pajamas. They were all in pajamas or long tee-shirts. “Davy?” she called. “Is that you, Davey?”

He ran, hard as he could, straight into the wet wind. He had just turned onto his own street when the sky seemed to open and great sheets of water cascaded onto the street and onto and over him.

Glee called, whispering into the phone. “Why did you run away? Why were you there?
What were you doing?
”

He held the phone and could not think how to answer. He saw himself as she had seen him, a stranger looking onto her party, a voyeur, or worse. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he told her.

“Everybody SAW you!”

“Tomorrow, Glee,” he said wearily. The rain was pounding on the roof, he could hardly hear her. He wanted to crawl into bed and pull a quilt over his head. So he did.

It rained all night without letting up, and through the next morning. It was early afternoon when it eased to a lighter rain, and late afternoon before it stopped.

Around three o'clock, Leland came in his father's pickup with the big wheels, splashing through water inches deep. They went by Glee's. The water had covered her lawn and lapped against her first step. David waded up to her door. The other girls were gone; her stepfather had taken them all home the night before, soon after the rain had begun. David carried her out to the truck. She was delighted. She was still puzzled; when she said, “I still want to know—” he put his hand lightly on her mouth and said, “Shush,” and she did. As soon as they were in the truck—he scooted to the middle, himself—he turned to put his hands on her neck, and kissed her tenderly. “I am flooded with love for you, my sweet,” he said in a throaty, melodramatic voice. She stared at him for an instant, then burst into giddy laughter. “You're so silly!” she said, “You're so silly!”

All over town, cars and trucks were cruising through the shallow water. Drivers leaned out and yelled at one another cheerily. There was a festive air, as if the cars were heading somewhere for a parade or a rodeo. Some cars were stranded, unable to push through. People's yards lay under water. Little kids were everywhere, splashing and yelling in the light rain; some had climbed up on car hoods, stretching themselves tall for a better look, as if they stood on a high knoll. David saw a big red collie swimming down a stretch of low culvert. It was warm. When they crossed the county road and headed east, into the newer, stark section of town, the flooding worsened. There was no place for the water to go, and so it had simply risen, on many streets, right into people's houses. Leland parked and asked if they wanted to get out and go see worse.

“What does that mean?” Glee asked in a squeamish little-girl voice.

“The next block over is Chesterfield, where my cousin lives. He says neighbors have boats out.”

Glee made a face, but crawled down out of the truck. They sloshed across someone's yard and around the block. Glee's bangs flattened on her forehead in the misty rain. The street where Leland's cousin lived converged with another street in a low-lying intersection. The water had filled the space, making a considerable pool that lapped up over the four corner lots, toward the houses themselves. There were people standing knee deep in water, gesticulating and shouting at one another, and children splashing. There were several little fishing boats out in the middle.

David went back to Glee's house with her and spent the rest of the afternoon lying on her bed while she played records and jabbered about school and her friends and the games that were coming up. Of course Saturday's home game against Amarillo was cancelled because of the flooding. “So what should we do?” Glee asked him. “With the evening?”

He crooked his finger to beckon her to the bed. She glanced at the door, which was closed but did not lock. Her face flickered with a smile; she tiptoed across to him and sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled her arm so that she fell across him. “They won't come in, will they?” he asked.