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 southern 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 and 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
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.
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.
The woman looked up as the drummer entered.
“Come to stay the night?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“You’re in luck. Kin have any room in the place.” She set aside the broom and walked behind the desk, spinning the registration book around so it faced him and handing him a pen.
“Four dollars the night. Includes clean sheets, sink and commode in the room, bath at the end of the hall. Breakfast is on the house.”
“Very reasonable,” he said wearily and scribbled his name on the ledger. She whirled it back and read the name aloud.
“John Trexler, St. Louis. Tell you what, Mr. Trexler, I can tell you’ve had a bad afternoon, as we all have. Why don’t you just go on up to the top of the stairs and take the suite. Has its own bath and shower. I should be able to feed you in an hour or so. We should have the kitchen back open by then.”
“That’s very kind of you,” the drummer said. “Thanks.”
He carried a couple of newspapers up with him and sat in a steamy tub, leisurely reading a four-day-old
He got out of the tub, toweled off and dug his atlas out of the suitcase. Aspen was a mere dot in the middle of the Rocky Mountains about 150 miles west of Denver. Trexler sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Twenty-seven had found the perfect place to once again settle down.
BOOK FOUR
