“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 the 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
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:
