Chapter 4: The Storm Building
The monsoon came to Juniper Flats the way it always came: politely at first, and then all at once, like a man who's been holding his temper since breakfast.
By ten in the morning the sky over the western peaks had started to build — towers of white going up anvil-headed and dark at the belly, black sliding into green at the base, the particular green that old-timers in that country respected the way sailors respect a certain calm. The light went strange and coppery. The dust devils walked the flats and quit early, as if they'd seen something. Evie's knees, which had opinions about weather older than the weather service, told her by noon that this one meant it.
The weather radio on the counter talked all afternoon in its flat robot voice about flash flood watches, then warnings, then the naming of roads, mile by mile, the low places first. Evie moved through the house and yard with the unhurried order of a woman who has battened down for sixty storms and buried a husband between two of them. Porch chairs in. Shutters latched on the west side. The barn door dropped into its latch and pinned. In the barn, under the workbench canvas, Walter's tools slept in their rolls, and she laid her hand on the canvas once going past, matter-of-fact as closing a gate.
In the carport the sign hung over the bench, MARSH — NO MAN PAYS TO GET HOME, its paint chalked by forty desert summers, and under it the tarp over the firewood slapped in the rising wind until she weighted it with a brake drum.
Hank called at four. "You seeing this sky, Evie?"
"I'm seeing it."
"That wash is going to run by dark. You want me to come sit it out? My place sits higher, but yours has the better coffee, and I've about decided—"
"Hank Breslin, I have ridden out storms in this house since before the county paved the road. I am fine. You keep off that crossing, you hear me? You mind your own roof."
She heard him decide, again, to lose the argument. "I'll call at dark," he said. "You answer."
The wind arrived an hour ahead of the water, as it does — a long pressure out of the west full of dust and the smell of creosote and distant rain, the desert's one perfume. The mesquites along the wash bent and stayed bent. Evie stood on the porch in it a moment, holding the door frame, watching the sky over the peaks go from green-black to a darkness that had weight, and the first far thunder rolled down off the mountains and into her ribs.
Forty miles west, on the interstate frontage road, six motorcycles ran ahead of the storm wall in a loose, practiced formation, and from their mirrors the end of the world was gaining at about a mile a minute.
The Desert Covenant Riders had been on a run up to the high country — a charity ride for a children's hospital in Tucson, the kind of ride the Covenant did twelve of a year. Cole Rafferty rode point at fifty-two the way he'd ridden point at twenty-five, by instinct and by the trust of the five behind him: Marcus Oyler, called Preacher, sixty, who could quote scripture and torque specs with equal authority; Rosa Jimenez, forty-five, who ran the club's books and its conscience; Tom Beckett, forty-eight, quiet, huge, with hands like catcher's mitts; and the Pruett kids, Wade, twenty-nine, and his sister Lucy, twenty-six, riding the last two bikes the way they'd ridden everything since childhood — close, competitive, and entirely without fear, a quality Cole was working on in both of them.
The storm wall behind them was a quarter-mile high and the color of a bruise, eating the road behind them in bites. Cole had watched weather all his life, on bikes and before bikes, and he did the numbers on this one and didn't like them. They could not outrun it to the next town. The washes would cut every road in the basin inside the hour, and a motorcycle in two feet of running wash water is a boat with delusions.
At the exit for Juniper Flats he raised one fist and pointed, twice, hard — the hand signal that brooked no debate — and led them down off the frontage road and onto the state route, east, toward the lights of the Flats, with the wall crowding the sky behind them.
"There's a town," he told the wind, and then, because he knew this country from a long time back, from another life entirely: "There's a woman in it who takes people in. If she's still there. If she's still — "
The road dipped toward the wash crossing. Ahead, through the first spatter of rain, he could already see the water beginning to move in the low place, brown and quick, carrying sticks.
Chapter 5: The Knock in the Rain