Whirlwind

THREE

Twilight promised the desert, and the city at the base of the Sandia Mountains, a pleasantly cool evening. The heat had already begun to dissipate, and a wandering breeze raised wobbly dust devils along the interstate that stretched from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Snakes sought their dens. A roadrunner streaked through a small corral, delighting a group of children who didn't want to leave their riding lessons, A hawk danced with the thermals.

On the low bank of the Rio Grande, beneath a stretch of heavy-crowned cottonwoods, Paulie Deven snapped pebbles and stones at the shallow water, cursing each time he hit the dried mud instead.

He hated New Mexico.

The Rio Grande was supposed to be this wide awesome river, deep, with rapids and cliffs, all that good stuff.

But not here. Here, he could almost spit across it, and most of the time it hardly held any water. You could forget about the cliffs, and rapids were out of the question.

He threw another stone.

Behind him, he could hear muffled music coming from the trailer his parents had rented from the developer until their new house was finished. That was supposed to have been three months ago, when they had arrived from Chicago. But some kind of permits were wrong, and then there was some kind of strike, and, and… He snarled and threw another rock, so hard he felt a twinge in his shoulder.

He thought he was going to live in the West. Maybe not the Old West, but it was supposed to be the West.

What his folks had done was simply trade one damn city for another. Except that he had belonged back in Chicago; back there the kids didn't get on his case because of the way he looked and sounded.

A light fall of pebbles startled him, but he didn't look around. It was probably his pain-in-the-ass sister, sliding down the slope to tell him Mom and Dad wanted him back in the trailer now, before some wild animal dragged him into the desert and ate him for breakfast.

Right.

Like there was anything out there big enough to eat something built like a football player.

"Pauhe?"

He glanced over his left shoulder. "You blind, or what?"

Patty sneered and plopped down beside him. She was a year younger than his seventeen, her glasses thick, her brain thicker, her hair in two clumsy braids that thumped against her chest. He wasn't exactly stupid, but he sure felt that way whenever she was around.

She pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. "Not much of a river, is it?"

"Good eyes."

"They're fighting again."

Big surprise.

Ever since they had moved into the trailer, they had been fighting — about the house, about the move, about his Dad being close to losing his job, about practically anything they could. A damn war had practically started when he'd taken some of his savings and bought himself an Indian pendant on a beaded string. His father called him a goddamn faggot hippie, his mother defended him, and Paulie had finally slammed outside before his temper forced him to start swinging.

Patty rested her chin on her knees and stared at the sluggish water. Then she turned her head. "Paulie, are you going to run away?"

He couldn't believe it. "What?"

She shrugged, looked back at the river. "The way you've been acting, I thought… I don't know… I thought maybe you were going to try to get back to Chicago."

"I wish." He threw another rock; it hit the mud on the far side. "You ever think about it?"

"All the time."

That amazed him. Patty was the brain, the one with the level head, the one who never let anything get to her, ever. He hated to admit it, but he had lost count of the number of times she had saved his ass just by talking their folks into forgetting they were mad. Running away, running back home, was his kind of no-brain plan, not hers.

The sun died.

Night slipped from the cottonwoods.

A few stray lights from the trailer, from the handful of others on the other lots and the homes on the far side, were caught in fragments in the river, just enough to let him know it was still there.

Suddenly he didn't like the idea of being alone. "You're not going to do it, are you?"

She giggled. "You nuts? Leave this paradise?" She giggled again. "Sorry, Paulie, but I've got two years till graduation. I'm not going to screw it up, no matter what." She turned her head again; all he saw was her eyes. "But then, I swear to God, I'm going to blow this town so goddamn fast, you won't even remember what I look like."

He grinned. "That won't be hard."

"And the horse you rode in on, brother."

"I hate horses, too. Their manure smells like shit."

A second passed in silence before they exploded into laughter, covering their mouths, half-closing their eyes, rocking on their buttocks until Patty got the hiccups, and Paulie took great pleasure in thumping her back until she punched his arm away.

"I'm serious," she insisted, her face flushed. "I'm not kidding.

"Yeah, well." He watched the black water, rubbed a finger under his nose. "So am I."

Angry voices rose briefly above the music.

A door slammed somewhere else, and a pickup's engine gunned to launch the squealing of tires.

Off to their left, beyond the last tree, something began to hiss.

Paulie heard it first and frowned as he looked upriver, trying to see through the dark. "Pat?"

"Huh?"

"Do snakes come out at night?"

"What are you talking about? What snakes?"

He reached over and grabbed her arm to hush her up.

Hissing, slow and steady, almost too soft to hear.

"No," she whispered, a slight tremor in her voice. "At least, I don't think so. It's too cool, you know? They like it hot, or something."

Maybe she was right, but it sure sounded like snakes to him. A whole bunch of them, over there where none of the lights reached, about a hundred feet away.

Patty touched his hand, to get him to release her and to tell him she heard it, too. Whatever it was.

They couldn't see a thing.

Overhead, the breeze coasted through the leaves, and he looked up sharply, holding his breath until he realized what it was.

That was another thing he hated about this stupid place: it made too many sounds he couldn't identify, especially after sunset.

Every one of them gave him the creeps.

The hissing moved.

Except now it sounded like rapid, hoarse whispering, and Paulie shifted up to one knee, straining to make out something, anything, that would give him a clue as to who was out there and what they were doing.

Patty crawled up behind him, a hand resting on his back. "Let's get out of here, Paulie, huh?"

He shook his head obstinately. It was bad enough he was here because his folks had had some shit-for-brains idea about starting over, when they already had a perfectly good business back up North. He definitely wasn't going to let the buttheads here frighten him off.

City boy.

They called him "city boy" at school, their lips curled, their voices sneering, unimpressed by his size or the glares that he gave them.

Yeah, sure. Like this wasn't a city, right? Like they didn't have traffic jams, right? Like people didn't shoot and stab and stomp each other here like they did in Chicago, right?

The dark moved.

The hissing moved.

"Paulie?"

He swayed to his feet, trying not to make too much noise: His hands wiped across his jeans and curled into fists. Now they had made him angry.

"Paulie, come on."

"Go back up," he ordered without turning around.

Something had definitely moved out there, probably a bunch of wiseass kids trying to creep toward him. He took a sideways step up the uneven bank; his foot nudged a short length of dead branch. Without taking his eyes off the dark, he reached down and picked it up.

"Paulie."

"Go up!" he snapped, louder than he'd intended. "Damnit, Patty."

Staring so hard made him dizzy. It was like trying to pin down the edges of a black fog.

His free hand rubbed his eyes quickly and hard, but nothing changed.

There just wasn't enough light.

This, he thought, is really dumb. Get your ass outta here before something happens.

An arm snaked over his shoulder, and he bit so hard on a yelp that he choked.

Patty's hand opened to show him the dim gleam of a gold cigarette lighter. He took it and half-turned, his expression demanding to know when she'd started smoking. He realized the ridiculous timing when she flashed him a not now, stupid grin and jerked her chin to turn him back around.

His own smile had no humor.

He shifted the branch club until it felt properly balanced. Then he took a bold step forward and squared his shoulders. "Listen, assholes, you want to get lost, you want to get hurt, your choice."

No one answered.

Only the hissing.

He held the lighter up and sparked it, squinting against the reach of the flame's faint yellow glow until his vision adjusted. There were shadows now that slid away and slid toward him as he raised the light over his head and moved his arm from side to side. The trees moved; the leaves turned gray; the bank took on contours that didn't exist.

"Hey!"

Another step.

"Hey!"

Another.

The breeze touched the back of his neck and twisted the flame to make the shadows writhe.

They kept coming, still whispering, and he gripped the club more tightly, angling it away from his leg, ready to swing at the first face that broke through the dark into the light. It wouldn't be the first time he smacked a homer with just one arm.

A low branch brushed leaves across his right cheek and shoulder before he could duck away.

He thought he heard Patty snap his name, but he wasn't sure. All sound had been reduced to his sneakers sliding over the ground, to the breeze rucked into the branches, and to the whispering.

He frowned.

No; it wasn't whispering.

It was, as he'd first thought, hissing. But strange. It wasn't like snakes at all, but like something… no, a lot of things brushing roughly over a rough surface.

Voices whispering.

He faltered, and licked his lips.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't people out there, and Patty said it probably wasn't snakes, and it sure wasn't the river.

So what the hell was it?

The breeze moved the leaves, and he looked up quickly, looked back and smiled.

That's what it was — someone dragging a branch along the ground. Leaves; the hissing was the leaves.

Growing louder.

Suddenly the lighter grew too hot to hold. He cursed soundlessly and let the flame die, whipping his hand back and forth to cool his fingers off, and the metal, so he could use it again in a hurry.

Tuning now was everything.

He would wait until the asshole was close enough, then he'd turn on the light and swing at the same time. The jerk would never know what hit him.

He listened, a corner of his mouth twitching, his body adjusting slightly so that he was almost in a baseball stance.

Batter up, he thought; you goddamn freaks.

Louder.

No footsteps yet, but that didn't matter.

He checked back, but couldn't see his sister; he looked ahead, and made out a faint shadow that, because of virtually absent light, seemed taller than it ought to be.

Louder.

Very loud.

City boy, he thought angrily, and flicked on the lighter.

He didn't swing,

His sister screamed.

He couldn't swing.

His sister shrieked.

So did Paulie,