Laura VanArendonk Baugh
Uncle Edgar died yesterday afternoon. Ellie died last night.
Uncle Edgar died of the dust pneumonia. I didn’t mind so much as I should have. Aunt Ruby used to say that a man got to doing things when he was deep in hurt so he could still feel like a man, and we shouldn’t hold what he did against him. Mama would say back that we were all in the hurt together, him and us three women, and that didn’t justify the wrong he did, that hardship only showed the real material of a man the same way dust and sand showed the real material of a house or car when they scoured the paint off. Then Mama got suffocated outside in a storm and Aunt Ruby left on a rope over the kitchen rafter, and it was just Uncle Edgar and me, and it didn’t matter why he was the way he was.
Ellie died of despair, I guess. It wasn’t even a storm, so she didn’t suffocate the way all the birds and small creatures did when the dusters blew. She was the last chicken left, only laying when she felt up to it, and I guess she felt the same as Aunt Ruby.
Looking down at her feathered body, I felt everything I should have felt when Uncle Edgar had stopped wheezing, that I’d felt when Aunt Ruby had given up on us, when Mama lost her way back to the house. I’d had to be strong then, helping the others left with me and without any time to grieve before the next duster, or the next lost cow, or the next neighbor’s illness. But now that they were all gone, family and cows and neighbors, now I had no responsibility to anyone and no time but my own, it all caught up to me at once, and I cried for that silly chicken as if she were my sister.
I laid her body on the bed with Uncle Edgar, and I went out of the house and I started walking south.
I don’t know why I went south. Town was east, and since the phone company had been out of business for two years and we hadn’t been able to buy gas for the farm truck for eight months, I would have to walk in to get someone about Uncle Edgar, and just hope the cemetery wasn’t still so deep in dust they couldn’t find the headstones or dig a new grave. But instead I wanted to just keep walking away and let the dust drift up over the house and bury him and Ellie together. So I walked south,, south to where Route 66 cut through the overturned plains and led west, west toward California and rain and fruit-growers and jobs and money.
I guess I went south because it was toward the Road of Flight.
I walked through the night, and the stars were visible. I folded my arms against my body, lean with stretching provisions, and imagined in the dark there were rainclouds above me and any moment I would feel the cold kiss of water against my dry, abraded skin.
But the world is full of sin, as the preacher said when I made it into church a few weeks ago, and we had sowed the wind and were reaping the whirlwind.
Dawn came, and I did not know exactly how far I’d gone. I walked on ’til I came to a crossroads where the road sign was lying down in the dirt. I stopped and stood at the crossroads, and I wondered if it mattered at all which way I went.
After a moment, I went to brush the dirt off the road sign to read it, and a spark jumped four inches from the metal sign to my outstretched fingers like snakebite.
Oh, no, not now, not so far from home… I turned and saw the mountains crawling toward me.
They weren’t mountains, of course, only that’s what the mind tries to make of a wall of dirt two miles high and stretching as far as you can see to the ends of the earth, twisting over itself faster than a truck can drive. There’s no sight like a black blizzard coming at you.
I spun and looked for shelter, any shelter. I spotted an abandoned farm about a half-mile up the new road, and I ran.
***
There were others running to the old farmhouse, too, coming from the east, a figure on a laboring horse and three men running alongside.
I heard someone else shout behind me. “Can we shelter with you?”
I looked over my shoulder and saw a young man carrying a child, running as fast as he could with the weight of her. “It’s an abandoned house,” I called back. “We can share.”
It was a poor house, a dugout with a roof and a single ground level room at one end. I made for the sunken door, hoping the previous tenants had done the right thing and left it unlocked for others in need. They had. I pulled the door back against its little drift of dirt and waved the man inside.
I didn’t know him. He was nice-looking, I guess, with yellow hair and a good jaw, covered in dust but that wasn’t unusual even when there wasn’t a duster closing in. The girl, maybe four years old, had a flour-sack dress and hair to match his.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m Robert. Bobby to friends, which includes anyone who shares shelter.”
“Tilly,” I said, and I didn’t put out my hand because of the coming storm’s static electricity. “I’m not from here, I just saw the storm.”
He nodded. “Nor us either. We’re headed down toward 66, to hitch west.”
West.
Could be he was easing the burden on his family, one less mouth to feed and maybe a paycheck in California to send home. No one needed extra hands when there was no farming to do. But that wouldn’t explain the girl. “You lost family?” I ventured.
His lips thinned. “Nope, I’ve still got Peggy here. She and I are family.”
Peggy clung to his neck, her wide, dull eyes assessing me, and I knew the words were for her as much as me. “That’s good,” I said, and didn’t mention I’d lost the last of mine the day before.
The room we stood in was still furnished with a few chairs, a table, a bureau, and an empty shelf. There was a door to the left, probably to the bedroom, and to the right a short set of steep steps, nearly a ladder, to the ground-level room. There were a couple of high windows, but they wouldn’t be any good in a few minutes. “Let’s find some lights, if we can.”
Bobby lowered Peggy to the ground and began to prowl the sparse room with me. The door to the bedroom swung open and a woman stepped through. “You’re not the ones!” she said, a little angry.
I jumped half out of my skin. “I’m sorry! We thought the place was empty. The yard is so—we thought it was abandoned.”
“It was,” the woman said. “We came. You’re not the ones.”
I didn’t know what to make of this. “We just need shelter from the storm.” Surely no one would deny us that.
A second woman came from behind the first, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, sister,” she soothed. “They will come, and these will be no trouble, only an extra treat. Be patient.”
The first nodded, her eyes on us. “But don’t be any trouble.”
“No trouble,” I assured her. “No trouble at all, just waiting out the duster.”
The windows began to rattle, and the familiar hiss of dust against the glass began like a chill against the spine. The second woman carried out two oil lamps, lighting both and setting one on the table and the other on the bureau. Peggy sat on the floor, her back to the earthen wall.
The door opened again. “Hello!” called a man, ducking to enter. “Give us shelter, if you please!”
He was an ugly man, with an upturned nose and ears too large for his face, and he carried a farm rake inside with him. As he stepped inside, someone opened the outer door to the upstairs room and led the horse in. It was covered in dirty sweat, streaked with muddy rivulets, but I could see it was grey beneath the grime. It looked like all the stock now, lean and hungry.
“Is there any water?” called down the bald man with the horse.
The first looked at us, and I shook my head. “We’ve only just come in.”
“There’s a tank outside,” said the first woman, still standing in the doorway. “In the storm.”
The man beside the horse sighed. “I suppose it can wait,” he said, and he put a hand on the horse’s lowered neck. The horse sighed with weariness and looked at me, and I had the awful feeling it was judging me as a person would. I wiped my dirty hands on my dirty dress.
Two more men came in through the low main door, arguing. “It is no ordinary storm,” said the shorter of the two. He did not remove his hat.
“Dust storms are hardly unusual,” returned the taller, slighter man. His voice was soft and cultivated, like one of the movie stars I used to see at the Artcraft in town.
“Come in, come in,” muttered the first woman, still in the bedroom doorway, and I could not tell whether she meant to welcome us or resented our intrusion.
The light abruptly fell as if the windows had been blocked with boards, and the storm struck in full fury. The room darkened to midnight hues, with only the two lamps shedding rings of fragile light.
Peggy put her hands to her ears as the wind howled and whistled about the corners of the house. The dirt made it louder. The man with the eastern accent stooped slightly toward her. “It’s all right.”
Bobby shook his head. “Sorry, she’s just not much for strangers.”
“Hello, hello,” said the first newcomer, settling next to me. I didn’t like him, which was uncharitable of me in such a situation, but it was true. He reminded me of Uncle Edgar, half-drunk and impressed with himself. “Hello. We’re not strangers, no. That’s Trip, there, and that’s Rocky.”
Trip was a slight man, almost feminine in figure and prettiness, but with an air of authority in the little group I could already catch. Rocky was ugly and short, with a simian grin that looked like it should have manure stains. He was picking his teeth with a tiny red toothpick. Who bothered to paint a toothpick?
“And that’s Sandy.”
The man beside the horse raised a hand and started down the steep steps. Bobby grinned. “We’re all sandy these days. I’m Bobby, that’s Tilly and Peggy.”
“And you can call me Tumbleweed.” The man with the upturned nose beamed at me and leaned to bump me with his shoulder. I resisted a shudder. His eyes traveled over me like they might leave a greasy trail. Then he looked at the women who had come from the bedroom. “And who are you ladies?”
“Charlotte,” said the first. “I’m Charlotte.”
“Jessica,” said the second. She smiled, showing teeth.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, at least half for an excuse to look away from the man who had called himself Tumbleweed. “Thank you for letting us share your home. I’m sorry I thought it was abandoned.”
“That’s quite all right,” answered Charlotte, but she did not smile, nor even look at me. Her eyes were on Trip.
Trip did not notice. He was looking up at the weary horse, which gave a loud groan. Its knees folded as if it wanted to collapse where it stood.
“He needs water,” Trip announced. “You too, Sandy.”
Sandy nodded.
“But that storm is brutal,” Rocky protested. “Black Wind Demon is looking for you.”
I stared at Rocky, who had seemed sane enough a moment before. But then, how could I argue? I had seen the winds and the vanishing earth drive folk to madness, and whether the wind had made Rocky believe in demons, or whether the wind was a demon to destroy our lives, who was I to say?
“Here’s water,” Sandy said, bending over a small lidded barrel in the corner. “It’s nearly full.”
Charlotte let out her breath in something almost like a hiss.
Sandy set aside the lid and dipped water. He drank the first dipper in one long motion, smacking his lips at the end. The second dipper he poured over his head, laughing, and shook the droplets free.
“You’re a mess,” complained Tumbleweed.
“You’re a pig,” answered Sandy without looking. “Leave the lady alone.”
Tumbleweed harrumphed and looked away from me, but he did not look repentant.
Sandy bent and lifted the barrel of water, grunting slightly with the effort. “Tilly, will you help me with Yulong?”
I stood. “Is that the horse?”
“Yes.” He carried the water up the steps, and I followed. I expected him to pour water into a bucket for the horse, but I did not expect him to half-fill a second bucket and wet two rags in it. “The storm could last for hours,” I said. “We might need the water before it’s over.”
“He needs it now,” Sandy said, and he began wiping the dirt from the horse’s sweaty coat.
I thought it a waste of water—surely the horse could remain dirty like the rest of us for the duration of the storm—but the bucket was already wasted, so I went ahead, dunking a rag and starting at the crest of the horse’s neck, rubbing so that water ran in rivulets through the dust.
The horse clearly enjoyed it, sighing with pleasure. I dunked the rag and rubbed again, and it seemed to skitter over the neck. I pulled back the rag and probed with my free hand, and instead of slick wet hair I felt smooth scales, like on the snakes we used to hunt before the mice died.
I jumped back, startled, and stared. The horse turned to glance at me with one eye, and the place I’d cleaned shone with brief iridescence in the lamplight. Then the horse shook his head wearily and relaxed again, and it was only a dirty horse with a clean spot standing beside a confused woman who had lost her last family and last chicken and had not eaten or slept.
The wind beat at the dugout. Trip pulled feed sack rags from the top drawer of the bureau and began passing them around. Bobby spread the first over Peggy’s head, and she tugged it down around her face. Rocky and Tumbleweed accepted rags and tied them about their faces.
Bobby and Trip, their own masks in place, began tucking rags into the gaps and chinks of the walls above ground, slowing the puffs of fine grit into the house. Sandy and I rinsed the horse until we’d emptied the water he’d allotted, and then I descended again to the main room and took a seat at the table. I looked at Peggy, with her knees to her chest below the hanging rag. She knew how to wait out a duster. She had never known a time without dusters.
Tumbleweed touched my hand. I got up and went to sit beside Charlotte, settling on a bench by the wall. “It’s a nice house,” I said in desperation.
“Isn’t he a pretty boy?” she murmured.
I followed her eyes to Trip. “Yes,” I agreed.
“So fine,” murmured Jessica from my other side.
I nodded awkwardly, glad their voices wouldn’t carry over the dirt scraping the walls. “Yes.”
“Don’t you just want to eat him up?” asked Charlotte, and she licked her lips.
“Um.” This was more than I was comfortable with. I raised my voice. “Say, this is quite a storm, right?”
No one answered, for dusters were familiar monsters by now, but the storm was indeed one of the fiercer ones I’d seen. The dugout’s sturdy position meant we had only a fine spray of dust pushing through cracks, but the black blizzard pushed at us like a dog clawing at a dune where a rabbit’s hid.
“He’s looking,” Jessica complained.
“Looking for what’s ours,” Charlotte agreed.
I felt uncomfortable beside the women. It wasn’t kind of me; there were plenty who had gone half-mad with the wind and the dust and the hunger and the hopelessness. More than a few had done the same as Aunt Ruby, and I should have been glad Charlotte and Jessica were only odd. But sitting by them felt eerily like sitting beside Tumbleweed. I got up and helped to push rags into the high walls.
“I tell you, this is no ordinary storm,” Rocky was saying again to Trip. “He’s looking.”
Startled by the echo, I looked from Rocky to the two women. Rocky glanced at me as I looked back at him. His eyes were gold—not yellow, not hazel, but gold, and faintly burning like embers. The room rocked around me.
I tore my eyes away and looked back at the women, staring hungrily at Trip across the room. “Soon, sister?” asked Charlotte.
Rocky followed my gaze, and then his golden eyes popped wide and he pointed. “Spiders!”
I jumped at the sudden shout and then caught back a laugh. I’d never seen a grown man, even a short fellow like Rocky, screech at sighting a spider. It was a laugh we needed, trapped in—
“Spiders!” he repeated, and he leapt toward the women like a cat at a mouse.
“No!” shouted Trip.
But Rocky was midair and spinning his toothpick between his fingers, and it grew as it spun into a staff as long as his height, red with golden caps at each end. He gripped it with two hands and smashed it onto Jessica’s head with a sickening crunch that made my stomach twist and drop. Jessica folded to the dirt floor like a discarded rag doll.
“No!” repeated Trip, and this time it was a wail of despair.
Bobby lunged for Peggy, pulling her close with the rag still over her face. Sandy and Tumbleweed stood in quiet surprise, mouths slightly open. Charlotte folded and stared at her fallen sister, shocked into immobility.
Trip brought his hands together, palm to palm at his chest, and closed his eyes. As I stared in mute amazement, he began to chant something low and fast, words which tumbled like the wind outside and blew past my ears.
Rocky shrieked and dropped his red and gold staff, squeezing his golden eyes shut and clutching at his hat. He dropped to his knees and tore at the hat as if it were burning him, but it clung to his head. “I saved you!” he cried, twisting to look at Trip. “I saved you!”
Trip opened his eyes. “You killed a woman!”
“Look at them! Really look at them!”
Bobby clutched Peggy close, backing to the dirt wall. “What’s going on?”
And then Charlotte turned on us, pulling her mouth unnaturally wide in a hideous shriek to expose black fangs. She flung out her arms, and there were too many of them. She sprang at Rocky with hissing rage.
Rocky rolled, releasing his hat, and everyone scrambled backward in the too-small room. Tumbleweed reached for the rake he’d left against the wall, and Sandy took a protective step closer to Trip.
“I’m sorry,” gasped Trip.
“You never listen to me!” snapped Rocky, and he surged upward to punch Charlotte under the jaw. Her head snapped backward, but three of her arms caught him. Her body swelled as she bent forward, a dark carapaced torso tearing out of her calico dress.
Tumbleweed stepped forward and swung his rake in a great horizontal sweep, clipping Charlotte as she ducked. She snarled and snapped her fangs at him, raising two limbs. Rocky wriggled one arm from her distracted grip and reached for his red staff. He planted one end in the floor beneath Charlotte and shouted. The staff burst upward, extending from the ground and punching through the chitinous body to the dusty ceiling. Charlotte shrieked and thrashed.
I couldn’t breathe. An arm pulled me close, and I realized I’d backed into Bobby and Peggy. We stared as the spider-woman shivered and then went limp, sliding down the pole like a demonic carousel figure.
The wind howled as we all stood still for a moment.
“What was that?” I asked, my voice trembling. “What are they?”
Rocky pulled free of the misshapen woman and stepped onto the body, gripping the staff with one hand. He spoke a word, and it drew in each end, shrinking into a rod in his hand.
Trip looked at us, and his expression melted into sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you saw that. I’m sorry you were caught up in our troubles. I’m sorry.”
Rocky coughed and folded his arms across his chest.
“And I’m sorry I used the headache chant,” Trip added to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
I forced my voice above his. “What are you?”
Trip stopped, looked at us, sighed. “We are on a journey west.”
“Lots of people going to California,” I said. “Most of ’em not fighting giant spider-women.”
“True enough,” he answered. “We’re on a mission from heaven. Not everyone wants us to complete our journey.”
Bobby had to try twice to ask. “So they are—demons?”
“Not the demons you mean, but yes, something inhuman.”
“So you killed them?”
I answered before Trip could. “They said they wanted to eat you.”
To my surprise, Trip only nodded solemnly. “If they devour my flesh, it will render them immortal.”
Bobby laughed, a high, nervous sound.
Trip smiled patiently and turned back to the dead women, or what had been women. “Should we put out the bodies?”
Tumbleweed leaned his rake against the wall again. “I suppose we can chuck them out the door. A moment of wind and dirt is better than staring at them for the next few hours.”
Bobby opened his mouth as if to protest and then hesitated. I understood. It seemed wrong to toss a body into the storm without dignity or ceremony; even Uncle Edgar had been left in order on the bed. But one was a great spider, almost too large to fit through the door, and the other allegedly the same, and they’d come to this abandoned farm to devour the soft-spoken Trip. It was surreal.
Tumbleweed pulled a couple of pincer-arms over his shoulder and dragged Charlotte to the door, where Sandy unlatched it and caught it against the wind. Bobby shielded Peggy while they worked the great corpse outside. Rocky tossed Jessica out after, and they pushed the door against the wind.
For a long moment, we sat in silence.
“I saw the spider,” I said at last, “and I know what they wanted, so I’m not going to call you murderers. But tell me if Bobby and Peggy and I are safe.”
Trip smiled sadly. “You are safe from us, child.”
“I’m not a child. I’ve run our farm, what there is of it, since Mama died.”
“I did not mean to belittle you. You have a strong spirit to have endured here.”
I snorted despite myself. Endured. It was that we did not have a choice. We could die, or we could wait to die.
Or we could go to California.
I looked at Bobby, still holding little Peggy, and I wished someone would hold me as protectively. To have just a moment where I could not fear the wind or the bank or Uncle Edgar…. What were spider-women, after years of fear?
Peggy lifted her rag and looked at Rocky. “You could see them.”
He nodded and popped his golden eyes wide in a silly monkey face. “I can see evil.” He resumed his normal expression and glanced at Trip. “But not everyone believes me.”
“Can you see who’s outside?” Peggy asked.
We spun together and looked toward the high windows, dark with the midnight of the storm. If someone were there, it was impossible to see, magical golden eyes or no.
Bobby bounced Peggy in his arms and squeezed her. “There’s no one outside, baby girl. Just the storm.”
Rocky looked at Trip. “I told you, it’s his storm.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but the black blizzard outside made the words plausible, and I shivered.
Peggy tugged the rag over her face. “I saw someone. At the window.”
You couldn’t see a train outside. She had imagined it. I sat down at the table and faced the far end of the room, drawing a calming breath through my protective rag.
Something banged into the side of the house.
It should have been nothing, less than nothing. Things blew around all the time during a storm. It was only that it came on the heels of Peggy’s words, and that I’d just seen a spider-woman try to crush Rocky so it could eat Trip.
I turned my head to catch a glimpse of the others, and they were staring at each other in the kind of trepidation where no one wants to speak it first.
“Someone’s outside,” I said, “right?”
“It could be someone else needing shelter,” Bobby said. “Like us.”
Or it could be another spider-woman.
But I thought of Mama, lost in the storm and unable to find shelter, until she suffocated and died. If there were someone outside—
“We have to look,” I said. “We have to see if someone’s out there.”
Sandy reached for a spade left in a corner. “I will look.”
But at that moment we saw it, a blackness against the dark, pressing outside the window. It scraped the glass, a texture rubbing against the dust, and I had the terrible sense it was probing. And then it moved on and we could not see it.
But it had not gone.
“Oh, God, please,” whispered Bobby.
I looked at him, and then at Trip, the leader, the one the monsters wanted to eat. “What’s that?”
He sighed and looked at Rocky, who answered, “Black Wind Demon.”
I was confused. “The storm?”
“He is a person,” Rocky said, “but he is also the storm. In a way.” He shrugged.
“This is why Yulong has been suffering,” Sandy said with a sympathetic glance at the horse. “Since we came to this place, with the drought and the storms of dust. He came ahead to wait.”
“The storms came years ago,” I said bitterly.
“We’ve been traveling this way for years,” Tumbleweed said with a shrug.
“And he wants you?”
“All of us,” Trip said, “but mostly me.”
“So he can eat you and be immortal.” I fought fear with skepticism. “Does that mean you’re immortal?”
Trip laughed. “Of course not.”
“Of course not,” I repeated, as if it made perfect sense in a black blizzard tearing apart the very ground around two dead spider-women.
“What if it gets in?” Bobby’s voice was tight, his eyes on the window.
“He hasn’t found a way in yet,” Sandy answered, tracing the perimeter of the house with his gaze.
“What are we going to do about him?” The question was expectant, and I turned to Bobby with fresh respect. He set Peggy down. “That door won’t hold against someone who really wants it down.”
“Black Wind Demon has waited years for us,” Rocky said. “He will take his time now.”
Something crashed into the outside of the house, and the boards and packed earth shook visibly.
Rocky’s gold eyes narrowed and he glared at the wall.
“Find rope,” Trip said.
Why had I set off from home without so much as a handkerchief? I had a pocketknife and twelve cents in my dress. I had walked straight into a duster with nothing. Foolish, idiotic, stupid.
But Bobby found a short coil of rope in the bottom drawer of the bureau beside two dead mice. “What are we going to do?”
“I hope nothing,” Trip answered.
It struck the wall again. Sandy reached for his spade and Tumbleweed his rake.
Peggy lifted her rag. “I’m scared.”
Bobby scooped her up. “Hold on to me, baby girl.”
The wall shook again, and sprays of dust pushed through fresh cracks. Trip stood, and Rocky stepped in front of him.
“We can’t stay here,” Tumbleweed said quickly. “We have to get out. Go out the back while he’s trying this side.”
“He’ll see us,” Sandy protested.
“Even he won’t see anything in this storm. If we stay here, we’re sitting ducks.”
“There’s a barn behind us,” Bobby said grimly. “About a hundred feet. I saw it when we were running here. Will he follow us?”
Trip shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”
“He can’t see us when he’s the storm,” Rocky said. “He’s got to sniff us out himself. He probably found this house following the spiders.”
The wall cracked and the air began to cloud.
“The rear window,” Tumbleweed said.
“What about Yulong?” asked Sandy.
“Leave him!” barked Tumbleweed, already starting for the window.
Sandy looked distressed. Bobby caught my arm. “Here.”
I tied the rope about my waist and tried not to think of Mama caught against a barbed wire fence. Bobby tied on next and pushed Peggy’s hands against the rag over her head. “You hold that tight,” he cautioned her. “Really tight.”
Tumbleweed boosted himself to the window’s height with a chair and levered it open with his rake. The storm rushed in like a torrent of angry bees. He shielded his eyes and, with a wet rag over his nose and mouth, crawled outside.
“You know where the barn is?” shouted Trip.
Bobby nodded.
“Then you two next.”
I held Peggy while Bobby climbed out the window and then passed her to him. She curled like an infant against the wind but it was too loud to hear if she whimpered or cried. I followed them.
The grit slapped into my face like sandpaper, and I bent my head away from the blast, hiding as best I could behind my shoulder. My bare legs screamed with the sting of the storm. I ducked behind Tumbleweed, leaning against the wind. Bobby pointed and Tumbleweed started into the dark.
The barn was a hundred feet, Bobby had said. I don’t know how far we had gone—distance is a hard thing in a storm—when Tumbleweed stopped suddenly. I heard his curse even through the howl of the wind and then he bolted back toward the house, quick as his namesake.
I did not understand, half-turning to squint after him. Had he given up on finding the barn? Bobby pushed into me from behind and shouted. “Keep going?”
I took six steps before I saw the bear.
It was a huge bear, with dark fur rippling in the duster winds and claws that extended a hand’s-breath from its dinner-plate paws. I could not imagine a bear so large outside of nightmares, much less in the stricken panhandle where even rabbits died for lack of food. I stood still, paralyzed with confusion and fear.
The bear rose on hind legs and swung its head around as if to search the lot, heedless of the wind and flying dirt that blinded me. It roared through the howl of the wind, and it seemed to me there were words in the sound. Tang Sanzang!
Some folk, when things were getting desperate, had said they’d seen the face of Jesus or Satan in the black rolling clouds.
I groped for Bobby’s arm. I knew when he saw it by the way he went rigid in my grip. That meant I was not imagining it.
“Help,” I said, though it was not possible anyone could hear me. “Bear.”
But then there was a rush of motion beside us, and I saw Rocky. His golden eyes burned in the dusty dark and he did not shrink from the wind. He pulled his toothpick from his bared teeth and it grew into a staff as long as his height, red with golden caps at each end.
“Come back!” shouted Bobby. “I’ve got Trip!”
I stumbled, trying to squint through the storm at Rocky rushing the bear. I kept going in what I prayed was a straight line, one arm over my eyes and one hand outstretched, reaching, hoping, grasping for—
The house.
I kept my hand on the wall and crept alongside, searching for the broken window. Something grasped my ankle, and I gulped a mouthful of dust to scream before I realized it was Sandy. He helped me inside and turned to the others.
We all crowded away from the gaping window, a dirtfall choking the air, and Sandy put a protective arm around Trip. “Are you all right?”
Trip nodded, choking and spitting black mud like the rest of us. “Where’s Tumbleweed?”
“That pig,” growled Sandy. “He’s probably hiding somewhere.”
“What about Rocky?” I asked, coughing.
“He’ll be all right,” Trip said, but he looked worried.
Sandy closed the window, leaving Rocky and Tumbleweed on their own. Dirt and wind still sprayed through the damaged front wall.
“That is a bear,” Bobby said, pointing in the direction we’d come. “A bear.”
“That is not a bear,” Trip corrected him quietly, or as quietly as possible over the wind. “Or not only a bear. Rocky said he would lead him away and kill him.”
“Why not kill him now?” asked Bobby, and I saw his face change when he realized the answer for himself. Rocky couldn’t be sure of killing him, so he had to lead him away first.
The horse Yulong nickered nervously.
Peggy started sweeping dust off the chairs and table. It was almost cute, had it not been so hopeless.
Hopeless. I turned into the bedroom and dropped on a crude stool, hopelessness sapping my energy.
“Tilly.” Trip came and squatted in front of me. He took my hand, but it was not oppressive or leering as when Tumbleweed did. He held it firmly but gently, as if comforting a child. “I am so sorry you have been caught up in this.”
I shook my head. “The storms come to everyone.”
“Not this storm, it seems.” He cast a worried glance at the ceiling.
“The land is full of sin,” I said without thinking. “You said heaven sent you on this journey. The world is being scoured clean, imperfections sanded away.”
“Oh, child,” he said quickly, and his voice brimmed with sympathy and concern, “you are right and you are wrong. The world is full of sin, indeed, and it is sin which causes suffering, often even that suffering which appears to be from nature and from heaven. It was not greed which brought the wind, but it was greed which stripped the land to be carried away.”
I nodded. The new soil conservation men had explained the mistake of turning the sod and destroying the bison grass.
“But whether heaven sends the wind or the rain, it is not the end. There is more to understand than the price of a bushel of wheat. Sometimes we must lose what we think matters to find what does matter.”
Anger rose in my chest. “You talk in pretty riddles just to hear your own cleverness. We’ve lost everything, even the things that matter. My uncle died yesterday, and he was the last of my family. The farm is wasted and gone. The fields are empty, the stock long dead. There is nothing left that matters.”
Trip looked down. “I am truly sorry.”
“I want to go west,” I said, surprising myself. “I want to go to California, where there’s water and work. Where there’s money.”
He squeezed my hand. “Treasure a handful of dirt from your home, but love not foreign gold.”
“Oh, I’ve got more than a handful of dirt just in my pockets,” I snapped.
Trip released me and stood. He turned, sighing, and took a stack of baskets from atop another stool. He hooked a foot and dragged it nearer, sitting on it with the three baskets on his lap.
“What will you find in California?” he asked gently.
I rested my face in my hands, elbows on my knees. “I don’t know. A job. People.” I choked. “Hope.”
“What if you found hope here?”
I didn’t have the energy to laugh derisively or the tears to cry. I had used those all up, that well dry with the dust that was burying us.
Peggy pushed through the half-open door. “What’s in the baskets?” she asked.
Trip glanced down. “It’s hard to guess,” he said. “What do you think is in the baskets?”
Peggy grinned, a child amusing herself in the middle of futility. “In the first basket is…a ruler! For measuring things!”
Trip made a show of tipping the basket to look. “What do you know? Look at this.” He drew out a playing card, the nine of hearts. “This is exactly three and a half inches long, so now you can measure anything.” He handed the card to her.
She clutched it like a prize. “What’s in the second basket? I think it’s a…treasure!”
Trip drew out the reveal, making me smile a little too. “You are correct! Here is a diamond!” He handed her the ace of diamonds from a half dozen cards, all that remained of the deck.
“The third basket has a map!”
Trip looked inside and made a comically large frown before inverting the basket. “I think a pirate stole the map!”
There was a ferocious crash against the roof and Peggy jumped, dropping her cards. Trip rose and scooped her into his arms in one motion, retreating to the main room. Sandy had the spade in hand, looking up. Bobby, without a weapon—who would have thought to need one against the storm?—reached to take Peggy from Trip.
The window shattered inward and Rocky sailed in on a cloud of dust, which dissipated as he tumbled to the floor. He was badly beaten, with bruising and blood on his face beneath his indestructible hat. “He’s coming,” he gasped, spitting dirt. “He knows you’re here, he wouldn’t follow me. Get out, I’ll hold him here.”
But the bear was already at the window, roaring with the wind and clawing into the dugout with streams of dirt. He was the bear and the storm, and we could not outrun him even if we could get out of the house.
Bobby turned and shielded screaming Peggy. Sandy rushed forward with the spade and hacked at the reaching forelimb, slowing but not stopping it. There was a terrible sound from the horse in the attached room. The bear pushed through the window, collapsing the dugout upon itself, and a tumble of support stones fell upon Rocky, pinning him and throwing his red rod to the back wall. He screeched in pain and rage. The bear crawled forward, jaws wide like no normal bear, pushing toward us as we scrabbled backward.
The bear ignored Sandy and Bobby for Trip and me. Trip tried to push me down and behind him but there was little room to maneuver in the fallen dugout for us or the bear. It pressed forward, snarling a pleased grin, and stretched a forelimb for Trip, dirty claws extended like scythes to hook and harvest. Trip straightened and closed his eyes, pressing his palms together at his chest.
I snatched the short red rod flung from the stony tumble and jammed it against the ground, stepping across the end to hold it in place. “Rocky!”
Rocky snapped a word. The red staff kicked against my instep like a shotgun and extended, stabbing deep into the hollow exposed by the reaching arm. The bear screamed and recoiled, but the staff did not break with the motion. The bear thrashed and choked blood and threw back its head, raging, and then it folded to the ground and faded to dark dust.
We stared, except for Rocky, who was swearing at the rocks and wriggling free, somehow unharmed. Trip put a hand on my shoulder where I still crouched to hold the staff and shield myself from the bear’s convulsions. “Are you all right?”
His voice was too loud. I could hear Rocky’s swearing clearly, and even Peggy’s crying in the far corner. The wind was slowing—still there, still blowing, but without the same ferocity.
“I’m okay,” I said through the dirt in my mouth.
Rocky crawled free and took the hand Sandy offered to stand.
“Where is Tumbleweed?” Trip asked.
We spilled out of the house by its several new routes, careful of loose stones and nails. Our feet pushed through loose dirt, making deep prints. Sandy went to a drift against the side wall and stabbed it roughly with his spade. A squeal came from within, and Tumbleweed roused himself and uncovered his head as dirt streamed off the tarp he’d made of his coat. “Is he gone?” he asked, looking only a little ashamed.
“Dead,” Rocky confirmed with a smug grin. He did not so much as glance at me, but Trip and Bobby gave me meaningful smiles.
An angry whinny came from inside and the wooden planks of the upper room bowed as Yulong kicked the wall. The wood splintered with the next kick, and I saw a glimpse of hooves. Then Yulong turned and leaped through the opening he’d made.
We stepped back as the horse jumped free, and he ran about the lot in the fading wind, kicking at the lightening sky as if to punish the storm in his freedom. Sandy ran for the windmill now visible near the barn we had not reached. “The tank!” Sandy shouted. “Open the tank!”
Rocky dashed with him and the two of them pulled back the heavy cover which shielded the enormous water tank, though nothing escaped a duster. Yulong galloped toward the wide circular tank, thirsty like all of us after the storm. But he did not slow to drop his head to the windmill’s water—he jumped the side of the tank, plunging into the water and making Sandy and Rocky turn away from the splash. Peggy shrieked a laugh and clapped her hands as he disappeared to wallow in the tank.
I chuckled and followed the horse, more than ready for water myself, to bathe my eyes and nose and mouth clean.
Something surged upward from the water. It was not a horse. It streamed into the sky like an enormous snake tearing free, the tank walls its old skin. My jaw dropped as I looked up, up into the yellow-gray sky and saw a serpentine dragon twisting through the remaining ribbons of dust, playing in the clouds as the horse had played on the ground. It gleamed white and iridescent, fish scales in the sun.
Sandy punched a fist into the sky. “Yulong!” Then, grinning, he sat on the wall of the tank and threw himself backward into the water.
I half-expected him to emerge as something else, too, but he sat up as himself, laughing joyfully. He splashed Rocky, who splashed him back, and muddy water went everywhere.
I gaped at the sky again, looked at Bobby staring just as stupidly upward, looked at Trip who had folded his arms over his chest and was laughing. I decided that as long as I was going to be confused, I might as well feel better, and I started for the water tank.
Trip caught my upper arm. “Wait. I think, now that Black Wind Demon no longer holds this land and he has had water, Yulong is feeling better.”
I did not know what that meant. Yulong executed a neat convoluted loop in the sky and soared upward, and as I craned my head up to watch, a drop struck me in the cheek.
A water drop, from the sky.
Rain.
No, it was merely the dragon shedding the tank’s water, of course. I took a step toward the tank, and another drop struck me. I looked up as Yulong twisted and dove.
The sky opened, and water fell.
“Rain!” I cried before I could help myself. “It’s raining!”
Yulong wove his dance through the sky and falling water pelted the last of the airborne dirt to the ground. I clapped my hands and spun in place and danced in the rain, just as Bobby and Peggy were doing beside me.
I spun and hugged Trip. “It’s raining!” I laughed and rubbed filthy water from my face.
Bobby rushed to join us, and the thin mud running down his cheeks was the most beautiful thing. “Rain! Will it stay?”
“Black Wind Demon is gone.” Trip put his arms about us, pulling us close. “Treasure the dirt of your home,” he said.
Bobby nodded. “If there will be rain again….”
“I don’t want to go to California,” I said. “I want to stay here. I have a farm.” With Uncle Edgar’s death, I was the heir.
Bobby nodded and his joy faded a bit. “Bank’s got what we had. I still need to go west.”
I was one person, I realized. Not enough to run a farm. “I need a hired hand,” I said. “And maybe a girl to help in the house while the hand and I replant. There’s a lot of dust to sweep out.”
Bobby grabbed my hand and pumped it. “You’re a champ, Miss Tilly.”
“As happy as I am for the both of you, we do have to go west.” Trip raised his hands to his mouth. “Yulong! We have a journey!”
The dragon twisted and plunged to the ground, streaking through the rain. It pulled up just before the ground, writhed into itself, and landed as…gosh almighty. It was a Duesenberg, long and sleek and straight out of a movie. Its paint gleamed white—no, not merely white, iridescent, a flash of dragon scale.
Trip laughed his approval and then called, “Rocky! Sandy! Tumbleweed! Let’s go!”
They came, laughing at the car, and piled into its roomy interior without regard for how their wet and dirt spread across the creamy seats. Peggy ran up and rubbed the fender in open-mouthed awe, and Yulong gave a friendly snort which made her leap back and then giggle.
Trip gave us a wave. “Take care. Thank you for your help.” He pointed toward where 66 waited to carry them away to California. “To the west!”
The Duesenberg purred like the largest lion ever invented and leaped forward, spraying dust behind.
Bobby, Peggy, and I watched until they disappeared—it did not take long with that horsepower—and then we turned to the road ourselves. We had a farm to return to.
***
Laura VanArendonk Baugh loves writing with all kinds of folklore and so appreciated the chance to engage with the world’s best-known folk tale (if less familiar in the Americas), of the Monkey King and the Journey to the West. Bringing it to the Dust Bowl was a play on the westward journey she thinks Xuanzang/Tripitaka and his friends might have appreciated. She can often be found writing tales of youkai or weaving epic fantasy or eating dark chocolate. You can find more of her award-winning folklore-based and original fiction at www.LauraVAB.com.