The Hunt aka 27 (35 page)

Colebreak, Kansas, lay in the southwest corner of the state. The three-story courthouse was the tallest building in town. It provided a core to the tiny hamlet around which clustered half a dozen stores. The only tree to speak of was in the front of the courthouse building and the bench under it provided a meeting place for whittlers to cut and chew and trade lies on Saturdays while their wives did the shopping. The population of the town itself was 250.

Three men sat on the bench
Jack Grogan and Dewey Winthrop were playing checkers, the board laid out between them. The third man, Hiram Johnson, was carving a whistle out of a tree branch for his grandson. It was a Thursday. Armistice Day. Uncommonly hot for November, the temperature pushing 85 degrees. The town was almost deserted.

“Must be the holiday,” Grogan said. “Everybody’s at home or gone to a parade som’ere’s.”

“You hear?” Hiram answered. “They canceled the parade over to Lippencott.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Sand blizzard. They say it’s worse’n that winter fog three years ago. Can’t see a foot in front of yuh.”

“Who says that? Harvey Logan, bet.”

“Right, was ol’ Harve.”

“Shit, you can’t believe a word he says,” said Grogan. “He’ll stand in the rain n’tell you the sun’s s
h
inin’.”

“All I know, they canceled the parade. All them vets over there in their overseas caps with their
m
edals pinned on and the high school band and all went in the auditorium over to the school t’wait it out.”

“If it
’s like over in Tulsa last summ
er, it ain’t gonna blow
over,” said Dewey. He pursed his lips and a black streak of tobacco juice squirted into the grass.

“1 heard they had a black blizzard so bad it turned day to night in Chicago,” Hiram said.

“Yeah,” Dewey chimed in. “Read in the papers they could see it in Albany, New York. New
York!
Why hell, that’s half the country away.”

“Aw hell, Hiram, you don’t believe that, do you?”

“Papers don’t lie.”

“Sez who?”

“Not about somethin’ like that they don’t.”

“Shit.”

They saw the LaSalle a mile away as it came down the flat highway toward them, churning up dust behind it. It looked yellow from a distance but as it drew closer they could see the car was pale blue, its paint covered by a thick cake of dust. The car pulled into town and stopped at the square. The driver, his tie pulled down from an open collar and his shirtsleeves rolled up, got out and brushed dust off his pants. Sweat stains spread down under his arms almost to his waist.

Drummer,
thought Hiram.

The driver pulled his shirt away from his sweaty chest and strolled over to the Pepsi machine in the vestibule of the courthouse and dropped a nickel in.

“Sure hot for November,” he offered.

Hiram nodded.

The drummer took a deep swig from the bottle and swished the fizzing cola around in his mouth before swallowing it.

“Whatcha sellin’?” Grogan asked.

“Ladies’ wear,” the tall man said with a smile. “Not doin’ too well, either.”

“Seen any dust?”

“Everywhere. Not like what they had south of here yesterday but I’ll tell you, I had to close up m’windows and I damn near fainted from the heat. Dust just seeped right through around the windows. Hell of a note.”

He shook his head and took another swig.

“Where you from?” Hiram asked.

“St. Louis.”

“Long way from home.”

“Well, it takes a big territory and a lot of travelin’ to make a livin’ these days.”

“I heard you say that, all rightee,” Grogan agreed. “Nice car.”

“Was before I hit that wind yesterday. Look here, like sandpaper. Took the finish off m’hood.”

He wiped his hand across the front of the car, sweeping a small dune of dust into the air. It was just as he said, the blue paint was nearly sanded off.

“Damn, would yuh look at that,” Grogan said.

“Where you headed?”

“Thought I’d make Lippencott and spend the night. I forgot it was a holiday t’day.”

“F’get it,” said Grogan shaking his head.

“What’s the matter?”

“Black blizzard. Had to cancel the Armistice Day parade. Tell me you can’t see your feet, it’s so bad.”

“Could be blowin’ this way,” Hiram said.

“You know that for a fact?”

“Just talk,” said Grogan. “He’s been on the phone with old Harvey Logan.”

Hiram shook his head. “Could be blowin’ this way,” he repeated.

“I’d sure find out,” the drummer said. “It can kill you, y’know. Dust is so thick it’ll just choke your life out. If it does come, you need to be inside. Maybe wrap a hanky around your nose and mouth.”

“I heard of a man who got caught outside and actually vomited dirt, it was that bad,” said Hiram.

“There you go again,” said Grogan.

“Well, if it’s blowing in Lippencott I’m not going near there,” said the drummer, walking to the edge of the sidewalk and looked west, down the ribbon of black top toward Lippencott. “Got a hotel?”

“Back down the road about ten miles. Bradyton.”

He squinted his eyes, focusing on the horizon, looking for the ominous wave of sand and wind chat had plagued these prairie towns for months. The previous summer, the ‘neat in Kansas had stayed at 108 for sixty days in a row and there had only been twenty inches of rainfall in th
e
year. That had started it. The earth, weary from years of poor farming practices, dried up, cracked, turned to shale, then to dust. Then heavy winds came and like a giant hand scooped the earth up and threw it into the air. The clouds of dirt tumbled over each other like waves, built into towering black oceans of dirt, engulfing everything. Roads disappeared before the clouds. Homes were buried in mountainous dunes. Whole towns vanished in a night, buried under the sea of sand. Animals suffocated in their tracks and people died of pneumonia, their lungs ruined by the sod. In nine months, one hundred million acres of topsoil had blown away. The deadly bowl spread from Texas north to the Colorado border. The prairie land looked so much like a beach that a reporter for the
Tu
l
sa Tribune
had written: “I was driving and suddenly the road disappeared. Then I saw the roof of a house, just the very peak of it, sticking up through what looked like dunes at the beach. I almost expected to smell salt air.”

The drummer had driven through a small wind storm the day before and that was bad enough. Now as he watched, the black cloud obscured the horizon and grew like a great broiling, black thunderhead. There was no sound yet, just the ominous towering black cloak swirling before gale winds, towering up into the sky even as he watched it. It was headed straight for them.

“My God,” the drummer breathed.

The three townsmen joined him at the curb, followed his eyes and saw the deadly cloud. As they watched it kept swirling higher into the sky, darker than a storm cloud, darker than dusk.

“God a’mighty,” Hiram breathed.

“Is it comin’ this w-w-way?” Grogan stammered, his eyes bulging at the sight of the growing cloud.

“It ain’t goin’ on vacation,” said Dewey.

“I got t’get home,” Hiram said. “God, don’t tell me we’s gonna get what Tulsa got!”

“It’s comin’, it’s comin’,” Grogan cried as the three men scurried for their vehicles. The drummer stood hypnotized, watching the storm of sand build. Then faintly he heard the wind, a low rumble, almost like thunder. It was probably fifteen miles away, he thought, and it’s already twenty thousand feet high. He bought another Pepsi, got in the car and roared away, back the way he had come.

He drove back toward Bradyton ignoring the thirty-five- mile-an-hour speed limit. Behind him, the giant wave of dirt seemed to chase him down the highway. The drummer wrapped a handkerchief around his face and kept the windows open because of the heat. Farm after farm on both sides of the road was deserted. Signs flapping on the front doors told the world the bank now owned the property. Once he passed a farmer, his wife and their two children, rushing in and out of their small frame home, valiantly struggling to pile possessions on a battered old Model T. The wind was already whipping sand into twirling dervishes around them.

He was three miles outside Bradyton when he noticed the gas gauge. The needle registered empty. He tapped the gauge with his fingers but the needle was frozen on “E.” Panic coiled in the pit of his stomach. The black blizzard was already on his tail. Ahead of him, he could see maelstroms of sand whirling onto the highway and he could feel the wind buffeting the car. Then, through the whorls of sand and wind, he saw a small filling station beside the road. He whipped the LaSalle off the road and parked beside the pumps. It was a Sinclair station, a small building of corrugated tin and wood, already shuddering before nature’s onslaught. He ran to the door and beat on the glass, then cupped his eyes and looked inside. The place was deserted. He found a rusty old tire iron and smashed the window. It was obvious the owner had left in a hurry. The cash register drawer was open and the power had been turned off. The drummer ran back outside and smashed the Yale lock off the single gas pump and started filling the tank, trying to shield the tank opening against the whirling sands.

The great black wave descended on him, howling like a wounded animal, suddenly turning day to night. Sand ripped at his face and hands like tiny razor blades. He drove the car to the front of the building and pried the lock off the garage door, pushing and shoving it open against the banshee gale. Finally he got the car inside. The wind slammed the door closed behind him. Darkness descended over him like a dark cloth. He turned on the car lights and went back into the office, grabbed a handful of crackers and candy bars and stuffed them in his pockets. He used his crowbar to force open the soda machine and took a half dozen bottles back into the garage. He got in the car, wrapped his jacket around his face, closed the car windows and huddled there.

Outside, a great sea of earth thirty thousand feet high, forty miles wide and nine miles deep, swept down on the small building, engulfed it, assaulted it, battered it mercilessly with sixty- mile-an-hour winds. Around him he could hear metal screaming, things clattering against the small building, timbers groaning. An edge of the roof fluttered loose of its nails and the gale roared under it, peeled it back like the skin of an orange, and whipped it away. Sand poured through the gaping hole in the roof like water. The car began to rock before nature’s wrath. The drummer held on to the steering wheel, his eyes closed and his teeth clenched, while the car rocked harder and harder. Fine silt started to ooze in around the windows.

Finally in abject fear and frustration, the drummer cried out:

“Stop!... Stop!.
. .
Stop!.

It was midnight-dark and the nightmare continued.

The drummer cursed himself for taking the job. He had spent three months, driving first through the South, then north beside the big Mississippi to St. Louis. He had spotted the ad in the Sunday newspaper and had taken the traveling job because it seemed perfect. He would be on the road all the time, traveling from one hamlet to the next in the prairie states.

“All you need,” said Albert Kronen, the man who answered the phone, “is an auto and a silver tongue.” His territory included Kansas, northern Oklahoma and so
ut
hern Nebraska. He could stay on the road for months at a lime, displaying his wares—girdles, cotton stockings and panties, simple frocks—in village after village. Perfect. No time clock to punch, no schedules to meet. He would be on his own.

Kronen did not mention the black blizzards, the towering waves of death that were turning the plains states into deserts and villages into abandoned ghost towns a
n
d blowing the farmlands to the winds.

The car rocked harder. The rest of the corrugated roof tore off with a mighty screaming sound and the drummer huddled deeper in his seat, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, his eyes squeezed shut to keep out the fine sand that filtered through every slit and opening in the car. How long would it last? he wondered. How long
could
it last?

The wind howled for half an hour before passing as quickly as it had arrived. It became deathly still. The drummer sat at the wheel of the car with the taste of dirt in his mouth. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw an apparition,
a
dusty clown face with two black potholes for eyes. He brushed the dirt off his face with his hands and got Out of the car. A shower of dust poured down from the top of the car when he opened the door.

Gray sunlight poured through the gaping holes in the roof of the garage. The door was jammed shut. He put his shoulder against it and battered it open a foot or so and squeezed through. Dunes of sand greeted him. Drifts of it slanted down from the sides of the battered building. The road was an indented sliver stretching toward Bradyton. He sank to his ankles as he walked to the front of the filling station. He found a large metal sign half-buried near the pump and pulled it free. A rugged-looking cowboy with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth smiled up at him from the sheet.

The drummer laughed aloud when he read the slogan.

“I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”

The drummer looked around.
I c
ou
ld use a camel myself right now,
he thought to himself.
But not the kind you smoke.

He used the sheet to shovel the sand away from the garage door and make tracks to the main road, ate a candy bar, washing it down with a bottle of soda pop, and backed out onto the highway.

A man who could have been forty or eighty stood near the entrance to the Bradyton House, a three-story yellow brick building in the center of town. He wore bib jeans and his fists were pressed against his chest. The man stared past the drummer, his face caked in dust, his eyes and mouth black scars in the powdery facade. He was shaking uncontrollably.

“You all right?” the drummer asked.

“N-n-never seen anything 1-1-like it,” the old man stammered, his terrified eyes gazing straight ahead in a fixed stare. “D-d-dirt falling from the sky. Hell on earth. Hell on earth.”

A woman, her skin leather-tanned in color and texture, was sweeping up sand that lay in ripples across the linoleum floor. Oiled rags were stuffed in the sills and sashes of the windows. It was a pleasant lobby with several sofas and easy chairs and a scattering of magazines and newspapers. A door beside the tiny desk led to a restaurant.