told him her name. He told her yes, he knew, it was a beautiful name too, and then she took her brother’s hand and they picked their way out through the rubble, and he had no idea then where he was going to take them, what he was going to do. Just that they were holding his hand, that they were alive, warm, and that they would be enough.
ONE21 March 1999, Nazareth, Texas
She was walking in the ditch, along the road that went away from the high school. It was two-thirty. She was wearing a skirt that hugged her legs. It came down to the tops of her boots. Jim Doe smiled, closed his eyes, opened them. She was still there, against the backdrop of the baseball field. He coasted alongside, the gravel dancing behind him. Past her and all around her to the north was a dryline. It had been building for four hours now. Jim Doe had been watching it even before he came on shift.
He rolled the passenger side window down.
“Deputy Sheriff,” she said, looking at him once, and not head on.
“Going to rain,” Jim Doe said, easing through the tall grass.
She smiled. “Guess I’ll have to get wet then.”
Terra. Her name was Terra, Terra Donner.
Jim Doe told her to get in, and she did. The Bronco was pointed out of town already, into the miles of scrub land nobody lived in because nobody wanted to. Through the windshield the sky was blue and heavy, and, looking through the line of tint that ran level with the rearview, Jim Doe could see what the clouds would look like by four, with the sun burning into their backs: worse. He looked over at Terra, snugged into her seat belt. It crossed between her breasts like a bra commercial. They met like this sometimes, on accident, but not. He was twenty-five. He’d been warned.
“So what about prom?” she said.
Jim Doe smiled. They were easing up county road 526 now, with the high tension wires, the caliche dust hanging behind them for too long in the damp air, then becoming dirt when they crossed 614—the roads Jim Doe had grown up on—then almost catching up with them when they dog-legged over to 527 along with the wires, down to 608.
Still standing there, on the left, were the black metal ribs of a barn, and, just before them, four broken-down houses, for the hands the barn had once made necessary. They were all in a row, the houses, each with a utility pole behind it. Full of birds now, and worse. The walls showing the chickenwire behind the stucco. An old, rounded refrigerator dragged out of one of them, laid on its back to rust. Jim Doe liked it here because it was the highest place around. If you could keep the horizon from trancing you out, there wouldn’t be anybody sneaking up on you.
He leaned forward, clicked the two-way radio up. Because, technically, he was on duty. But this was Nazareth, on a weekday.
“Look likely?” Terra asked, lifting her chin to the north.
Jim Doe shrugged.
Below them a four-wheel drive Case, still shiny from the showroom floor, was pulling a four-bottom breaking plow across three hundred and twenty acres of winter wheat. That was the way you could tell it was March again: large blades slitting the earth open.
“Storm, you mean?” Jim Doe said, no eye contact, “Or the dance.”
Terra looked to him. Her seat belt was off now, rolled back up into its nest by her head. The lines above them humming with tension.
“Just as chaperone,” she said. “Protect me from those . . . Mitch and Jacob and them.”
“Protect you,” Jim Doe said. Last week he had pulled the prom car into the grocery store parking lot over in Dimmit. It was a 1982 Corvette, its nose and taillights almost touching. The telephone pole it had slammed into had hooked the plastic of the passenger side door panel onto the ball of the gear shifter, never mind Molly Jankins, who had been sitting there. In Jim Doe’s day, he’d stood in the parking lot of the grocery until dawn sometimes, with his friends, careful each time to leave their beer cans on the lip of the trailer under Molly’s door, like they owed her that.
“You know why they take your picture at prom?” he asked Terra. Both his arms were folded over the wheel, his fingertips touching the plastic housing the speedometer and tach were set in.
Terra stared at him. He could feel it. “I’ve never been,” she said.
“But you know.”
“Because your mom’s dressed you all up,” she said, finally. “Done your hair for like two hours.”
Jim Doe was still nodding. “It’s because everybody thinks you’re going to die that night.” He looked at her. “They just want one last picture.”
Terra breathed out through her teeth. Like this had happened before: Jim Doe.
The windows were fogging up on the inside. After she was gone, Jim Doe knew he would be able to see the individual hairs of her head in the passenger side window, where she was leaning against it now. The sheriff’s department had been pulling that Vette around for nine years already. Jim Doe had been doing it for three, ever since Gentry signed him on.
“What class are you missing?” he asked Terra.
“Geometry,” she said.
“Wilkins?” Jim Doe asked.
“Wilkins,” Terra said.
Jim Doe wondered what the dryline in front of them would look like on Doppler, or thermal-enhanced from a satellite. It was rolling now, more black than blue. The Case below them was stopped, the farmer standing out on the fender, his hat lifted so he could see the lightning better. It was like static electricity under a blanket at night. You wonder if it’s been like that forever. What your grandparents thought about it, what they didn’t.
For a moment the radio under the dash flickered with static: a truckdriver barreling down 87 out of Amarillo. He was talking about the hail. It was dime-size, coating the road white, like driving over marbles. Crunchy ones.
“Think it’ll make it here?” Terra said. “The hail?”
“Better now than later,” Jim Doe, nodding down to the Case. “For him.”
“Don’t you ever think about me?” Terra said then, just all at once.
Jim Doe didn’t answer. He was trying to dial the trucker back in.
Terra hitched her elbow up on the armrest. It was always like this. Jim Doe looked up to her.
“Sometimes,” he said, and then the dial rolled across Sheriff Gentry’s voice.
“—Chief?” Gentry was saying, “Chief?”
Jim Doe shook his head in wonder. He palmed the mike.
“This is an open line, you know,” he said. “Sheriff.”
“I’ll call you a damn red-ass Indian on the six o’clock news, if you want,” Gentry said.
Like any of the Lubbock stations would send a van this far out.
Jim
