The Return

	The reflection of the many colors of lights, from both the city and the cars on the highway, made squiggly patterns on the pavement as they sped along in the ever-increasing rain.  The light mist had thickened to where it was now a downpour, and the windshield wipers could barely keep the road in sight.  The spray from the tires made the cars in front of them look like hydroplanes, as they sliced through what was rapidly becoming a shallow river that they had to navigate as they continued East.  When they got to the Mercer Island tunnel, it was a welcome reprieve from the drenching rain, but it only lasted a few minutes, and when they returned to the open, the rain seemed even worse.  When they reached Issaquah, the divided highway changed to two lanes in each direction, and the oncoming traffic washed up a tidal wave of water onto the little Volvo.
	"I hope this doesn't turn to snow, going over the pass," Fred said.
	"Really.  You don't have snow tires, do you?"  Ellis asked.
	"I don't even have tread," Fred answered, peering intensely through the blurry windshield, trying to make out the road in front of them.
	"That makes me feel a lot better," Ellis said sarcastically.  "We can take our choice between getting stuck before we get over the damn pass, or we can wait and get a flat tire on the other side."
	Fred glanced over at Ellis between swipes of the windshield wipers, and chuckled.  "Why wait.  There's no reason we couldn't have a flat right here.  Then we could get soaking wet, changing it in the rain."
	"Yeah right!"  Ellis added, "and then we could still get stuck in the snow, and freeze to death as well."
	"That's a cheery thought, Ellis," Fred said, reaching into his shirt pocket, and producing one of the joints he had rolled before they had left his sister's.  "Here, light this."  He held it out where Ellis could take it.
	Ellis took the joint and reached in his pants pocket for matches.  "Might as well get high, can't see where we're going anyway, huh," he said.
	"I think this rain's letting up a little, besides, I'll do better if I can mellow out a little.  This is too intense.  I'm getting white knuckles and a stiff neck," Fred said, shrugging his shoulders and stretching his fingers a little, as he reached for the joint, Ellis had lit and was handing him.
	Fred took a long drag off the joint and handed it back.  The normal routine followed, and they traveled quietly through the moist darkness, as they rose higher into the Cascade Mountains, as well as higher into their sense of being.  The rain had diminished considerably and the "I-90 River", they were traveling, had receded back into the dark forest along the sides of the still wet road.  The spray from the oncoming traffic had ceased to be a bow wave, and was now merely a fine mist that defused the red and yellow-white lights in front of them.  The combination of the joint they had smoked, mixed with the moving lights on the tree lined highway in the surrounding darkness, made it seem as though they were climbing ever upward inside a drain pipe.
	Suddenly the red glow of the taillights on the car, some fifty yards, in front of them swerved and then spun around, becoming two bright white beacons that closed in on them as they sped along.  Fred hit the brakes and turned away from the lights just in time, and they slid past them, only partially in control of the Volvo.  Ellis, who had been off in the tubular world of tunnels and drain pipes, came back enough to gasp as they swerved past this obstacle and fishtailed for several hundred yards before Fred could get the car under control again.  "Holy shit!  What was that?"
	"Black ice!"  Fred answered.  "That car lost it, and God damn near got us.  It's slicker than hell up here.  It's gotten colder and the rain's frozen into black ice."  He slowed down some and drove along steadily for a few minutes in silence trying to relax a bit from the rush caused by the near miss.  They were nearing the top of the pass, and the black roadway was now lined with a small pile of snow that had been plowed up earlier in the day.  He was glad to see the snow on the side of the road instead of on it, and knew if they could make it another couple of miles, they would be over the top and would have clear sailing the rest of the way home.  Fred's thoughts of the car that had nearly brought their voyage to an untimely end faded into the past as they rolled along in the cold darkness.  He listened to the re-built engine in the Volvo, and felt that it sounded good, as it pulled them the last little bit up the pass.  There it was, the elevation sign that read 3010 feet.  It seemed to him that they had been driving up hill for more than three thousand feet, but then the sign wouldn't lie, and the important thing was, that there wouldn't be anymore snow or ice on the road the rest of the way home.
	"It's cold up here," Ellis said, as he reached forward and slid the heat control all the way toward hot.
	"Turn the fan up a notch, but don't change it off defrost or the windows will fog up," Fred advised.  "That was quite a scene back there in the parking lot.  God damn, those bikers are going to be pissed when they get outside and find that mess."
	"If they ever get outside.  Those dudes that went in as we were coming out didn't look like they had a friendly pool game in mind."
	"I would guess that there aren't any unbroken pool cues left in the place by now.  There may not even be any unbroken bones in the place.  Damn, I sure would like to have seen what transpired in there after we left, but we surely would have ended up in the middle of what probably is a really awful mess right now."
	Ellis stretched his arms and shoulders, and yawned.  "Yeah, I'll bet the cops are in there right now trying to untangle things as we speak."
	"Probably, and I sure wouldn't want to be part of that.  I'll bet those old men at the big table, slipped out the back and were long gone by the time the police showed up.
	The Volvo sounded good as it descended the east side of the pass.  With the lodge behind them, they slid past the several ski areas that lay quietly waiting for enough snow to start up their chair lifts and open for a winter, of hopefully high profits.  The ski resort business, like farming, depends on the weather for its profits and losses.  The previous year, there was little snow, and it left the slopes early in the spring, leaving both the business owners and the skiers feeling cheated by the season.  It was too early in the fall to tell what was going to happen yet this year, but the white skiff on the ground could only be a good sign.  The sky was all but clear on the east side of the pass, and a nearly full moon shined through the few remaining scattered clouds.  The highway leveled out when they reached Lake Keechelus, and for the next five miles they drove silently along with the reflection of the moon beside them on the surface of the lake.  Leaving the lake, they climbed again slightly before descending into the Yakima River drainage.  They followed the river for many miles, through Easton, and Cle Elum, and then finally Ellensburg, before the river tuned South and left them alone in the dessert.  The clouds were completely gone, and the moon shone down on them brightly as they made their way up the long slow climb to Ryegrass, where the road broke off sharply and dropped quickly into the coulee that led to the Columbia River at Vantage where they crossed.  Crossing the Columbia put them on the east side of the state for sure, and Fred felt a measure of safety flow over him as they started up the steep roadway toward Royal City and the long straight highway that continued east.
	A mother coyote with a pup, casually crossed the highway in front of them, and clambered up the rough-cut that held the road from wandering aimlessly about the treeless terrain.  The moon lit up the steep hills they were traveling through, and cast living shadows from the sagebrush as they blew in the brisk breeze.  Ellis, without a word, took his tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and began rolling a crude cigarette.  He thought about how long he had been rolling his own cigarettes, and wondered if they would ever look as straight and uniform as the ones the old man in the park had rolled many years before.  It seemed to Ellis that he wasn't getting any better, and he concentrated on the directions the old man had given him.  Once the tobacco was in the paper, he curled the near side of the paper around the tobacco and pressed gently in the center with both thumbs.  With one smooth motion, he rolled both the paper and its contents between his thumbs and fore fingers, producing a white cylinder.  He licked the gummed edge of the paper, and finished up with the best cigarette he had made in a long time.  He proudly placed it between his dry lips without twisting the ends, and lit a match.  He was surprised to find that it didn't taste any better than the scraggly ones he usually rolled, and he leaned forward to crack the wing window for a bit of ventilation.
	Fred looked over at Ellis and his cigarette glowing in the soft dim light of the full moon.  "That stinks!" he said, reaching into his shirt pocket for another joint.  "Here light this.  If you can smoke, then so can I.  At least I'm smoking something worth while."  Ellis lit the joint, taking in a large quantity of smoke as he did so, and handed it to Fred without a word.  "I suppose you want some of this as well, you smoke hound."
	"Why not?"  Ellis asked letting out a huge cloud of marijuana smoke that filled the Volvo.  "I can smoke as many things at once as I can hold."  He held out his hand for Fred to hand him the joint.
	Fred looked over at Ellis with a scowl that turned slowly into a smile and then handed him the joint.  "I wonder if John and Duncan have quit school yet."
	"Gotten kicked out is more like it," Ellis said.
	"They don't kick you out for just not going, they'll have to quit or flunk out."
	"I think Duncan actually gets better grades if he doesn't go to class.  When he goes, he gets pissed off at the teacher and writes some paper that gets him in trouble and drops his grade."
	Fred looked out his side window and watched the shadows of sagebrush dance with the wind for a while as he and Ellis rolled smoothly along in the Volvo.  They had reached the top of the steep canyon that led from the Columbia River to the irrigated fields of the Royal Slope above.  Here, they traveled through a rocky desert that some millions of years ago lay in the path of billions of gallons of water making its way, from what is now Western Montana, to the ocean.  This aquatic exodus took place in a matter of several hundred years, and washed enough soil out of the area to make up most of Vermont.  The hydraulic action washed the land clean of all its soil and left the basalt beneath it exposed to the elements.  Time and wind have returned much of the soil to this area, creating a huge desert rock garden, which few people appreciate for its own nature.  In the early fifties we began pumping water onto this fragile ground, and found it would grow almost anything.  Today, because of our gluttonous requirements, we find this desert scattered with more and more green areas of farm ground, where nature had once made other plans.  The stiff wind seemed to push the Volvo along before it, as it whipped up the bare soil from the cultivated fields into clouds of dust that made their way across the desert, finally settling out in the fields and streams to the East.
	With a soft breeze of his own, Ellis let out what was left of the last hit he had taken off the joint he and Fred had been smoking.  The cigarette he had lit, and ignored in favor of the joint, had gone out and rested, dormant, in one hand, as he reached to take the joint from Fred with the other.  He put the cigarette in his mouth, lit it from the glowing coal of the joint, and then handed the joint back to Fred.  "Here, I don't want anymore of that," he said, and the two of them merrily filled the car with a mixture of smoke that finally obscured their view, and they had to roll the windows down and air out.
	 "You got something I can use for a roach clip?"  Fred asked, looking over at Ellis.
	"Yeah, I can handle that," Ellis said, taking a book of matches from his pocket and tearing off half the cover.  "Here, give me that."  He took what was left of the joint and rolling it into the scrap of matchbook cover, handed it back to Fred.  "Here, hold it right here, and it should hold together."
	Fred took the roach, matchbook cover and all, from Ellis and immediately dropped the burning roach onto the seat between them.
	Ellis reached down and picked up the roach, took one last drag on it, as best he could, and pitched it out the open wing window.  "There isn't enough left of that to risk wrecking the car for.  You know, everyone hates this part of the trip across the state, but I kind of like the desert.  I really think it has a beauty of its own.  The sky is so big, and you can see for so far."
	"You can see a long ways, but there's nothing to see," Fred interjected.
	"There's lots to see," Ellis jumped back in.  "It's just like the forest, but maybe a little sparser.  There are plants to look at everywhere; they're just shorter.  Sagebrush is just as attractive as a damn pine tree, and there are lots of flowers, especially in the spring, and I really like all the rock outcroppings.  All the irrigation makes for some variation that wasn't here twenty or thirty years ago, but you know, I think I like it better dry and desert-like, the way 'Ma Nature' made it, before we started messing with it."
	"Well, I'd agree with the natural desert being better than what we've made of it, but I'd still rather look at the forest and a river or a lake," Fred began.  "You know it really is awful the way we keep expanding our influence over, and use of every natural thing we can.  As soon as we figure out a way to denature an area, we do so, whether we need to or not.  All we do is grow more food that we don't really need, and then the price to the grower goes down so it's harder for him to make a living, and in turn he thinks the solution is to grow more.  It's a vicious circle that just makes matters worse and worse."
	"The way all our economic systems work these days, the solution to over production, is to create a larger market, and the easiest way to do that is to produce more people, and pretty soon you need more food and other shit again, and then you need more people again, and it never fucking ends."
	Fred pulled smoothly into the oncoming lane to avoid a small dark shape on the highway, and then returned to the right side of the road.  "As a culture, we never really tackle the problems that matter the most.  We seem to take a stab at controlling crime, even though it makes very little difference.  The government works damn hard trying to stamp out marijuana use with little or no effect.  In fact our government along with all the others try to control nearly every aspect of our lives, except for the one thing that would have the greatest positive result.  We are all afraid to even look into the possibility of controlling our own reproduction."
	"Boy that's the God damn truth!"  Ellis jumped in.  "We might worry about the minor social effects of unwed mothers or poor people not supporting their families, but we never really stop and admit that every child born is really just one more mouth to feed, one more body to house and cloth, and one more person using the limited resources of the planet.  We never really look at the big picture.  Nobody has the nerve to question the idea of procreation at the base level.  Take a look at the reality of man, and his role in the total ecology of the earth.  We use far more of the earth's resources than any other animal, in fact I would say that we use more resources than all the other animals put together."
	"We also create more waste than any of the other animals," Fred threw in.
	"That's right, and besides that, we just plain shit in our own nest in a way no other animal would even consider.  Even in death we spoil what's left of us, so the worms and bugs at the bottom of the food chain get poisoned when they try to eat our remains.  We have an unrealistic idea of our own importance in this whole scene.  All the plants and other animals on earth seem to work together to paint a picture of unity and form, with balance and harmony, but mankind has become the big mistake of 'Mother Nature'.  Maybe we have been introduced, purposefully, to throw this big painting out of balance, and bring the Garden of Eden to a timely end.  Maybe Tom's right, and our job is to use up the world, and fill all our holes with noxious, toxic wastes that poison everything, including us.  It may be our true calling to destroy as much as we can, and those not giving their full measure to the destruction are slackers, and should be whipped at the very least."  With this, Ellis leaned back in his seat and took a long drag on his cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the still confines of the Volvo.
	"You're doing your share to poison us all with that smelly cigarette," Fred remarked with a chuckle.
	Ellis glanced over at Fred with a slight scowl, and leaned forward, opening the wing window a little wider.  "Then I don't need to be whipped," he said.  "How about you, are you doing your share toward bringing an end to this little experiment of the Gods?  I  . . ."
	"It's God," Fred cut in, "or should I say, it is our perception of God that's pretty much to blame for this flaw in our general attitude of how we treat the earth.  I'd say it comes predominately from Western religions.  They even wrote a book about it;  'The Holy Bible', or was that, 'How to get out of balance with nature, and stay there."
	"That's true," Ellis agreed.  "Wasn't it Abraham, or Moses, or one of those old dudes, that God supposedly told, he had made the whole earth just for man.  He put the place at our disposal, and we've taken the disposal part a little too seriously."
	"Hell, I don't know, it may even go back to Adam, but the flaw is that we have tricked ourselves into believing that man's word is really God's word.  What we've done is create a religion to justify this flaw, and we've even created a God, or at least a concept of God that caters to our baser nature."
	"If you put yourself first, you end up last," Ellis threw in.
	Fred glanced over at him with a puzzled look, and asked, "Where'd you come up with that?"
	"Oh, I don't know, it just seemed to fit in with what you were saying about the 'Good Book of Rumors'.  It should be in there somewhere, but I'll bet it's not.  It would be too simple to fit in with the big poem."  Ellis stretched, and yawned, and let out a long deep breath.  "I gotta take a leak."
	Fred looked in the rear view mirror.  The road was as empty behind them as it was in front, and he pulled off onto the wide shoulder of the road.  He turned off the lights and they both got out, leaving the car idling smoothly while they watered the parched semblance of soil along side the road.  The wind whipped along in the direction they were headed, carrying with it tumbleweeds and dust.  The moon, now nearly straight over head, was the only light and it cast an eerieness onto the desert, spreading out before them for miles in all directions.  The only break in the varied unity of the desert was a low ridge of hills that poked up several miles to the South.
	"I'm sure thirsty," Fred said, buttoning up his fly.  "I wish we'd bought some pop or something back in Vantage."
	"We should be in Othello pretty soon, and we can get something there at one of those truck stops, right off the highway."
	Fred walked back around to the driver's side of the car and opened the door.  "Well, let's hit the road then.  I could probably go for a couple beers at this point."
	Ellis got in his side, shut the door and they were off.  "That's a cold wind out there.  It feels like it's bringing winter with it.  I hope we get a ton of snow this year, but I hope it's not so cold as last year.  I nearly froze last winter.  I guess I can wish what I want, and the weather will do what it wants anyway."
	Fred's thirst seemed to push the Volvo along faster than before, and Ellis was reminded of an old song from the past that had 'telephone poles going by like a picket fence'.  He couldn't remember any more of the song than that line, nor could he remember who wrote it, but it seemed to fit, and it gave him a little flash of nostalgia for a moment before his thoughts returned to the cold beer he would soon be washing the desert dust down with.  The long straight road made a soft gentle turn as they passed the run down trailer court on the western outskirts of town.  They crossed the overpass that ran over the railroad tracks and the highway south, and they were there.  The Volvo turned left onto the main drag that led into down town Othello and pulled up in front of the first of the all night truck stops.  Ellis opened the door and stepped out of the car.
	"What kind of beer do you want?" he asked.
	"Cheap," was Fred's only reply.
	Ellis shut the door and headed into the truck stop.  Fred shut off the car and leaned back, stretching as many muscles as he could from his seated position.  There was a large clock on the wall over the door, and it showed the time to be five minutes after twelve.  They had been driving for about three and a half hours and were a little over half way home.  Fred felt tired and stiff.  He was beginning to nod off occasionally, and hoped that a couple of beers would help him stay awake, even though he knew the odds were against it.  The truck stop was bright and colorful.  It sold the usual things; gasoline and diesel, beer and pop, snack food, and trinkets.  Fred could see Ellis at the counter with the beer.  He was showing the clerk his identification, trying to prove he was old enough to buy the beer.  Ellis looked underage to most clerks, or at least close enough for them to make him show his ID, and since his drivers license had expired two years before, and his only other ID was a concealed weapons permit, he was always viewed with suspicion, and not only for his questionable age.  Presently Ellis turned and headed for the door with a six pack of Cascade beer and a pouch of Bugler tobacco.  The clerk waved and called something after him.  He had forgotten his change.  Fred smiled and shook his head, wondering if Ellis would remember what car he had gotten out of when he reached the parking lot.
	Ellis opened the door to the Volvo, and climbed in.  "Shit!" he said.  "I almost left the change from a twenty in there.  That would have been a real bummer.  We're going to need that for gas to make it the rest of the way home.  Speaking of which, this might be the last open gas station the rest of the way back."
	Fred looked at the gas gauge, and then looked at the price of gas on the pumps next to where they had parked.  There were three gas stations within sight and he could read the prices on each of them.  The other two were full service, and their prices were several cents higher than the self-serve station where they were already.
	"We better get some," Fred said starting the car and pulling in front of one of the pumps.  "It's cheaper here, so I think we'll fill it up."  They both got out and Fred pumped the gas while Ellis began rolling a cigarette.  Why don't you go pay her, while I check the oil and water?  Oh, get me a candy bar while you're in there too.
	Ellis went back inside, paid for the gas and bought two Snickers bars.  When he returned, Fred had the car running, and they turned out onto the highway and headed for home.
	The moon had progressed along its nightly journey to where it was a little behind them as they traveled east.  The wind had continued to pick up and was now blowing a near gale, pushing them along in front of it like the tumbleweeds.  The dust and dirt from the roadside was swirling along with the tumbleweeds, and beginning to obscure Fred's vision.  They stopped at highway 17 to wait for a line of semi-trucks headed south to the Tri-Cities.  As they crossed the highway into the blowing dust on the dark road in front of them, Fred turned to Ellis and asked, "Open us up a couple of beers, would you.  We should have seen the last of the cops, until we hit Whitman County.
	Ellis popped the tabs on a pair of the smooth cans and handed one to Fred, who immediately took a long drink.  He let out a sigh and looked over at Ellis, who was just sitting there staring out the window at the moon lit desert.  "Hey!  Are you with us?" he asked.
	"Oh, I was just wondering how many tons of soil this wind is moving, and to where."
	"Probably more than you can imagine.  I'm more worried that if it gets much worse, we won't be able to see at all to drive."
	"It beats the shit out of snow, don't you think?"  Ellis asked
	"Well, at least it's not slick, but it's worse, as far as trying to see.  I had to pull off the road and stop, for Goddamn near an hour, one time."
	"You were lucky some asshole didn't come along and smash into you while you were stopped."
	"No shit!  Last fall about this time, Duncan and I were coming back from Tacoma, and it got so bad I finally had to pull off the road.  I was so worried about getting rear ended, that I drove, blindly, way out into some farmer's field and parked."
	"You were lucky you didn't get stuck."
	"We did, but we pushed it out ourselves.  It's really weird to just sit there in the car when there's nothing but blowing dirt outside."
	You mean like right now?"  Ellis asked.
	"No shit!  It's getting pretty bad.  I wish I could get off the road somewhere.  That damn guard rail kinda has us hemmed in."
	The blowing fields had settled in on them so thickly that visibility had been reduced to several feet in front of the car.  Their headlights glared back at them, making it even worse.  An occasional tumble weed would bounce off the car as it made its way to the East along with everything else that wasn't firmly hooked down.  Ellis knew that it was dust storms like this that had been building his beloved Palouse hills for many thousands of years, and he wondered if these storms could keep up with the farming industries present destruction of them.  It seemed clear that if the plows continued to keep the desert opened up and the wind continued to blow, the natural aspect of this area couldn't last for long.  Mankind's intervention, in what Ellis felt to be the natural order of things, had once again twisted and warped the intentions of Mother Nature, or "The Big Mother" as he liked to think of her.  It wasn't that this Big Mother was always even-handed and gentle in her dealings with our world, but she was certainly in contrast with the greedy self-interests of man.  In fact, the flood that formed the bulk of this desert they now traveled through, was more violent and destructive than anything man can even imagine.  Nature's violence however, is a creative destruction that builds as much as it destroys.  The Big Mother's forces ebb like the tides, bringing life to one corner of our world as she whisks it away from another.  Fairness is not in the vocabulary of nature.  She exists from out of the energies of time, and time alone.  There are no reasons or values that can be attached to her, and she will ultimately provide or withhold at her own discretion.
	Fred looked over at Ellis.  "Jesus Christ, I wish this damn dust would quit," he said.
	"This damn dust is re-building the hills around the farm," Ellis threw in.
	"Maybe so, but I can't see a fucking thing, and the guard rail won't even let us pull off the road."
	Ellis looked over at the guardrail.  Their forward progress had been reduced to less than half the speed of the wind, and the guardrail was a faint blur, crawling along beside them.  "If you just stay as close to the guard rail as you can with out hitting it, we should be okay."
	"Yeah, I can try that, but what happens when the guard rail quits?"
	"Well, I guess we have to go back to pretending we know where we are."
	They drove along, at about twenty miles an hour for some time, with Fred straining to keep the guardrail at the right distance from the car.  Suddenly, without warning, a faint glow of dirty, yellow-brown light loomed up in front of them, became brighter and brighter and then whooshed past them, leaving them, once again, alone in their dusty little sphere of existence.
	"Holy shit!  That guy was going fast enough," Fred exclaimed.  "That's the kind of asshole that scares the shit out of me, coming up behind us."
	Alone was the right word for it.  There was nothing but the faint impression of the guardrail and the dust itself visible, and even they were questionable as to their reality.  The wind howled, the dust blew, and the Volvo rolled slowly along, pushed more by the wind than it's motor.  Fred turned off the headlights, and tried running along, guided only by the parking lights.  The guardrail glowed faintly in this dim light, but his visibility was better without the glare from the bright headlights on the blowing dust.
	"That's better, don't you think?" he said.
	"Lots better," Ellis agreed.  "The guard rail is the only thing that matters, and now it's the only thing we can see.  I wonder where we are.  This is really weird, it's like being lost."
	"Hey!  Where's the fucking guard rail!"  Fred exclaimed, turning the car to the right slightly.
	He pulled on the headlights, but they didn't help.  The railing, their only clue to where they were, was gone.  Fred took his foot off the gas pedal, but nothing changed.  They still moved along at the same slow speed.  They really were being pushed along by the wind.  Suddenly the Volvo pitched upwards, then back down.  Ellis bounced along with the car, hitting his head on the roof.
	"Jesus Christ!" was all he could say.
	Fred gave the car a little gas and turned back to the left, hoping it would get them back to the highway.  The car lurched, pulled hard to the left, and dug into the soft sand along the side of the road.  Fred put the car in reverse.  It went nowhere.  He put it in first.  It went nowhere.
	"Well we're stuck," he said, looking over at Ellis with a smile, "but I think we're off the road."
	"It looks like it, or should I say it feels like it," Ellis said, rubbing his head where he had hit the roof of the car.  From out of the darkness and the howl of the wind, he could hear another sound.  "What's that?" he asked.  "That sound, do you hear that?"
	"Yeah!  It sounds like the fog horn at Walker Point," Fred said.
	"We really are lost if that's the case," Ellis laughed.  "There it is again."  It was a little louder and longer this time.  "You ready for another beer?" he asked Fred, who mumbled something positive.  He opened two more beers, and reached into his shirt pocket, producing another joint.  Fred reached forward and turned off the headlights, leaving them totally in the darkness of the dusty desert.  The horn sounded again, closer this time.
	"That sounds like an air horn from a semi-truck," Fred said, looking back in the direction they came from.  He could see a faint light that was getting brighter.  The horn sounded again as the light approached where they sat stuck along the side of the road, and then went past them leaving a little red glow that faded quickly in the blowing dust.  "Semi-truck all right, if he was in the right place on the road, it would put us about fifty feet off the highway, don't you think."
	"That sounds about right," Ellis agreed.  "We should be pretty safe here until this wind lets up, so we might as well just sit back and drink and smoke."
	"Sounds good to me," Fred said.  "I'm not going to even look at how bad we're stuck until the wind lets up.  I guess I couldn't see much anyway, it's too dark even to see you sitting right next to me."  The darkness was complete.  The nearly full moon was totally obscured by the dust storm, and no other light had found its way into the cozy little Volvo.  The wind continued to howl, and occasional gusts shook the car violently, making Fred and Ellis wonder if they were actually sitting still.  Fred took a long drink from his beer, and looked into the blackness where Ellis sat.  "Well, might as well make ourselves comfortable.  By the way, where's that joint you had a minute ago."
	"Oh, right here.  I kinda spaced out and forgot it."  He poked around in his pockets and finally found a book of matches.  The small flame of the match filled the compartment of the Volvo with light, and they both squinted, pulling away from the bright little blaze.  "Wow!  That's bright," Ellis said bringing the match up to his face.  He lit the joint and waved out the match, leaving them once more in darkness.  Now, however, there was the soft red glow of the joint that made its way from side to side of the car with the rhythm of their breathing.
	"I sure hope this wind doesn't make us the center piece of a new sand dune out here in the middle of nowhere.  We wouldn't have to worry about that if we were in the forest somewhere," Fred said as he passed the joint to Ellis.
	"No, but we could become the centerpiece in a pile of blown down trees," Ellis replied.
	"I suppose you're right.  I wonder how long it takes to make a sand dune."
	"About two days," Ellis replied, not really having a clue.
	"You mean we'll just get half buried, huh," Fred asked.
	"Yeah, probably about up to the windows, unless the wind blows for two days," Ellis said with a chuckle.
	"I don't even want to think about it," Fred said.  "Give me another beer.  I'm just going to get drunk and worry about it if we're still alive when the wind quits, if it ever does."
	"Drink em up Fred.  You gonna get out when you have to piss, or you just gonna piss your pants?"  Ellis chided him, as he handed him a beer and fumbled around to find his tobacco.  He not only fumbled finding his tobacco, but he fumbled making a cigarette.  Though no one saw it in the nearly complete darkness, it looked more like a small scrap of wadded up newspaper.  It did, however, produce the same results as if it had been rolled perfectly.  It tasted fine, it satisfied Ellis' need for nicotine, it poisoned them both, and it got the appropriate disgruntled remark from Fred.
	"Are you really going to smoke that stinky fucking thing in here?" he said with a smile that Ellis couldn't see in the darkened Volvo.  "Hell, go for it.  We can just smoke ourselves into a fucking puddle.  They say smoke's a good preservative, so when they dig us out of this sand dune, in a million years, we'll at least be well preserved.  He then took the joint he had been smoking alone, while Ellis rolled his cigarette, and drew pictures in the darkness with the glowing coal.  It traced brightly in the air, but lasted for only a moment and then faded away.  Ellis lit another match that flooded the area with light for a moment before darkness returned even deeper as he blew it out with one smoky breath.  They both sat smoking quietly for some time.  The wind raged outside, rocking the car from time to time with a lulling motion that finally nudged the two of them into a state of drowsiness that let time pass on unattended.  When they finally returned to complete consciousness the wind had subsided and the sun was beginning to brighten the eastern sky.
	Fred reached forward, gripped the steering wheel, and pulled himself into an upright position.  He yawned a couple of times and then turned to Ellis, who was just beginning to rouse himself.  Ellis yawned as well and stretched his arms and legs as best he could within the confines of the tight little Volvo.
	"Wow!  We're still here," Ellis remarked.
	"Yeah, we're here, and we could be here for a while too.  Look at all the sand."
	The sand had piled up against the car to where it was a couple of feet deep on the lee side, and Ellis' attempts to get out were thwarted by the drift.  They could see the highway about fifty feet in front of them, and with the exception of the drift they sat in, the road looked accessible.  Fred cautiously opened the door on his side of the car and got out.  Ellis slid across the seat and got out as well.  The wind had died completely, and the calm dawn air hung on them heavily.  They walked silently around the Volvo as if it was a sculpture in a museum.  Fred got down on his knees and peered under the car, inspecting both the car and the depth of the drift.  Satisfied with what he found, he stood up and turned to Ellis, who was watering a dry specimen of sage.
	"This doesn't look too bad.  I think if we scuff a little shit away from the tires and you push, I can drive right out of here."
	Ellis zipped up his pants and turned back toward the car and Fred.  "Let's give it a try," he said, as he reached down and picked up a board about three feet long that lay mostly exposed from the sand.  The two of them began scooping the sand and dirt away from the tires.  Fred had only his hands to work with, but the loose material moved easily, and in a few minutes they had the Volvo pretty well exposed and ready to go.  Fred walked to the front of the car, and opened the hood.  There was only a skiff of sand and dust in the engine compartment.  He pulled out the dipstick and checked the oil.  It too looked fine.
	"Everything looks okay to me," he said, shutting the hood, and getting into the driver's seat.  He gingerly turned the key in the ignition.  The newly rebuilt engine started immediately.  Fred sat there for several minutes listening to the sound of the motor.  He shut the door and rolled down the window.  "Okay Ellis, cross your fingers and give me a push."
	"You got it," Ellis called back.  He pushed as hard as he could.  Fred gave the car a little gas, and let the clutch out slowly.  The little Volvo hesitated for just a moment, and then moved forward.  Ellis continued to push until the car picked up enough speed to make it hard for him to keep up, but by then Fred was in complete control, and soon the car sat safely back on the highway.  Ellis followed at a trot.
	"Shit that was sure easy," he said as he opened the passenger door and got in.
	"Wow!  We made it," Fred said, pulling away from the side of the road.  "I think we're just a few miles out of Washtucna.  What time do you think it is?"
	"I don't know, about five thirty or six.  We should be home before noon.  That should freak out John and Duncan, they'd never expect us to show up early in the day.  What the hell day is it anyway."
	"You mean day of the week, or date?  Fred asked.
	"I don't know, either."
	"I don't know the date, but I think it's a Saturday.  Is there anything to eat in here?  I'm really hungry.
	"There's nothing, but one beer left," Ellis said, taking out his tobacco and carefully tearing a paper from the little packet of cigarette papers he kept in his shirt pocket.  "There's a little roadside store in Washtucna that should have something to tide us over until we get home."
	"I'll bet it's not open this early," Fred said.
	They drove along quietly for a few more minutes, and then rounded a wide sweeping corner and headed down the long steep hill to Washtucna.  They could see the little store at the bottom of the hill, sitting in the middle of a large empty parking lot.
	"It sure doesn't look open," Ellis said, blowing a large cloud of cigarette smoke out into the cab of the car, causing Fred to crack open his window.  As they got nearer to the foot of the hill, they could see a single nineteen fifty-three Chevrolet pickup truck parked around the far side of the building.  The lights were on inside and there was someone sweeping the floor.  They pulled into the parking lot and parked.
	"How much money do we have left," Fred asked, opening the door to the car.
	"Lots," Ellis said.  "I think we have about twenty-six dollars and some change.  Plenty enough to keep from starving before we get home."  He got out and followed Fred into the store-restaurant.
	It was warm inside and the smell of fresh coffee filled their nostrils.  A woman in her forties looked up from her sweeping and said, "Good morning, If you'd come by any earlier, you'd have missed me.  Coffee's not quite ready, but it will be in about a minute, and there'll be hot cinnamon rolls in just a few minutes.  Where you boys comin' from anyway?"
	"Seattle," Fred said.
	"Got caught in that dust storm last night, back about fifteen miles or so," Ellis said, walking over to a small wood stove that emanated heat from the center of the room.  "We finally drove off the road and spent the night trying to become a sand dune."
	The woman laughed, walked over to a rack of cards, straightened one, and then went behind a long cluttered counter to check the coffee.  "Those dust storms are frightful.  We don't get'em down here like they do up on top of the hill," she said, pointing back up where Fred and Ellis had just come, "but folks up there have to pull off the road all the time, when the wind comes up like that.  Just last year, I had to spend the whole night sitting beside the road, waiting for some fool to smash into me from the rear.  That's the worst part about 'em, most folks just keep right on driving, and some don't even slow down.  My husband drives the ambulance, and they get a couple calls a year from some meat ball smashing into a car that had sense enough to pull over in the storm.  In fact, one time . . . "
	She went on for some time telling storm stories, while Fred and Ellis warmed themselves next to the stove that sat in the center of the room.  She tidied up a bit while she talked, or at least she moved things about on the counter.  Presently she poured three cups of coffee, and then turned to the back where the oven held her freshly baked cinnamon rolls.
	"Oh, you boys will have a cup of coffee with me won't you?  I think the rolls should be done by now.  Coffees on me, and the rolls are a quarter."
	She opened the door to a large commercial oven, took out the first of three big flat pans of cinnamon rolls, and closed the door again.  She squeezed a couple of them and came back to the counter where she set them next to the coffee.  Taking a very large butcher knife from under the counter, she cut the rolls apart where they had fused together in cooking, and set three of them off onto little paper plates.
	Ellis reached into his pocket and produced two quarters.  Setting them on the counter, he picked up one of the plates with a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee, and returned to the center of the room, where he sat down at a table near the stove.  Fred picked up his roll and coffee and sat down as well.  The woman returned to the oven and took out the other two pans of rolls, and placed them on the counter, where she cut them like the others.  Once cut apart, she set them aside under a glass case at the other end of the counter, and took her coffee and cinnamon roll, walked to the table where Fred and Ellis were, and sat down.
	"You boys headed somewhere in particular, or just wandering around the country?"
	"Nothing so exciting, we're just headed home, the other side of Colfax on a little farm," Ellis answered without hesitation.  "We just finished school at the University, and are working on what ever comes next, I guess."
	"Most folks go get a job," she said, as if to cast doubt on their ability to do so.
	"We've had several of them since we left school, but none of'em seem to feel good enough to keep very long," Ellis offered openly.  "Frankly, I'd rather travel around a bit and see the world for a while before I worry too much about working myself to death on one job."
	The woman smiled and took a drink of coffee, holding it in her mouth for a moment before swallowing, and then turned to Fred and said, "It's jobs, steady jobs, that keeps America what it is, out in front.  You can't help your country out bumming around from place to place, just looking and dreaming."
	"Yeah, I suppose we should get some kind of job that helps in the war effort," Fred responded with a touch of sarcasm.
	"That sure wouldn't hurt.  Our boys are over there dying for their country right now, as we sit here drinking coffee," she said as she took the last bite of her cinnamon roll.
	"You know, you can turn on the television, and on one channel watch that game show 'Dialing For Dollars', and then turn the channel, where you can watch 'Our Boys', 'Dying for Dollars'.  I wonder if they're the same dollars," Fred said, taking the last drink of his coffee.  "That's real good coffee, you got any more?"
	"Sure," she said, getting up and walking to the counter for the coffeepot, "but those kids are dying for your freedom.  They're dying so you can do whatever you please.  Those 'commies' would love to come over here and run all our lives for us."
	"Sure, and we'd love to go over there and run their lives for them.  In fact we're already over there trying to do just that," Ellis threw in, which brought a serious frown to the woman's face.
	She refilled all three coffee cups, and returned the pot to the counter.  She picked up one more cinnamon roll, then came back, and sat down.  "We're just over there to keep those people free from communism.  If we weren't over there, those commies in the North would just take over the whole place."  She took a bite of her roll and washed it down with a gulp of coffee without hardly chewing at all.
	"So, instead of the commies taking over this little place," Ellis began with his mouth still full of cinnamon roll, "we're going to move in and take over the place ourselves, but for their own good.  I think not.  We're there to protect our own economic interests, and we don't care one bit who we hurt in the process.  In fact, Nixon and his crowd don't care if they kill a million of our own boys to shove their way into some other part of the world.
	The front door opened, and a man in coveralls walked into the restaurant.  He was in his early fifties, and had short-cropped hair that had been planed off to the same height on top, like a freshly mowed lawn.  It made Ellis think of a short landing strip, like those used for crop dusters, or maybe even a place to land a helicopter.
	"Hi Millie," he said, "it's cold as hell out there this morning.  Hope your coffee's good and hot."
	The woman rose and headed for the counter.  "Sure is Pete, got some damn good rolls too, just out of the oven, only two bits a piece."
	"I swear Millie, I don't know how you can sell those things for so little.  The president of these here United States don't get food as good as that which comes out of your oven."
	"You get your cows all fed and ready for another day?" she said, blushing a bit from the compliment.
	"I even fixed a hole in the fence where some damn hunter tore shit up.  I'm gonna have to post my land, if them hunters don't stop tearing stuff up.  It didn't used to be like this when we was kids, Millie.  Goddamn kids these days, don't respect nothin.
	"I just can't figure out why either," Millie said, putting a roll on a plate and handing it to him, "kids these days got most everything they want."
	"That's the damn problem," he remarked, turning to Fred and Ellis.  "You give'em everything they need, and then they start wantin all kinds of shit they don't need at all."
	"That seems to be the problem all over the world," Ellis spoke up.
	"What's that?" the man said, moving toward the warmth of the stove.
	"The problem," Ellis continued, "or at least part of the problem, is that most everybody, everywhere wants all kinds of shit they don't really need.
	The man set his coffee and roll on the table and held his hands out to the stove to be warmed, and turned to Ellis.  "What do you mean, everybody?"
	"Pretty much just that," Ellis answered, everybody from the poorest beggar in the streets, to the richest fat cat you can think of.  They all want more than they need, and the richer they are the more they seem to want.
	"You think so, huh," the man retorted.  "What you think all those rich folks want?"
	"More," Ellis said.
	"More what, money, food, land, just what do you think they want more of?"  The man sounded exasperated now, and he reached out, picked up his coffee and roll from the table, took a bite from the roll, and continued with his mouth full.  "And what do you mean, everywhere?  Everywhere else but here, they just want to be like us, and have what we have.  You don't know how lucky you are, boy.  You could just as easily been born in Viet Nam, and had the damn commies breathing down your neck, right now.  It's those rich people you're talking about that are payin for that war, so we can keep the world free from shit like that."
	Ellis could see that there was going to be no pleasing this man called Pete.  He had sucked in to the propaganda put out by our government to keep us all in fear of communism and those small 'Third World' countries that were struggling to free themselves from centuries of colonial ties.
	"I think," Ellis began, "that most rich folks, after they get so rich, just want power, power over other people.  The power to make other people do what they want, not cause they don't like what they're doing now, but just to be able to call the shots.  And America wants to call all the shots for the whole world."
	"Humph," he said, turning from the stove and heading toward the counter, where Millie was making preparations for the breakfast crowd that was soon to come, "You're nuts.  In fact you're just plain crazy.  I'll bet you been fed too much of that bullshit at one of them 'schools of higher education'.  Higher education, my ass, you should've just gone out and got a damn job, and helped build our country, instead of sucking the strength out of it, with all that crap they try and feed you over there.  I know all about them Goddamn colleges.  I got a son that went to one of'em.  He was a hell of a good kid when he left here, but it didn't take a year, and they'd filled his head up with all kinds of malarkey, and now he's in some commune in Arizona stoned on some damn thing or other.  And you two look like you're headed in about the same direction.  If you don't like the way our country does shit, then you ought to just get the hell out of here so the rest of us can get on with our lives."
	"Love it or leave it!"  Fred spoke up, as he stood and slid his chair back under the table.  "I'm afraid I love it too much to leave it, but I love the land itself and the people, not the government or some damn scrap of cloth, we call a flag.  I love it enough to stay and try to change it, not just let it sit and rot.
	"Love it," Pete shot back.  "Love it my ass, you don't love nothin', and you don't even know nothin', especially about our government.  We got the strongest country in the world, and it's the best too."
	"Yeah, I suppose that since we're the strongest, we must be right too."  Fred spoke softly, thinking the man might calm down a little.
	"Of course," Ellis threw in, "Might makes right."
	"You God damn right!"  Pete shouted.  He was riled up now, and the veins in his neck were starting to show.  "If the government thinks we should be in Viet Nam, then God damn, we should be there, and it's you two lazy ass's job to go over there and do what you're told."
	Fred had gone over to a rack full of candy bars, and seemed to be selecting one for the road,  "If you're so all fired up about this stupid war in Viet Nam, then why the hell don't you go fight the damn thing?"
	"I fought the last war," he sputtered.  "I fought that war to make it free for you, and the rest of your lazy bunch.  Now it's your turn to keep it free, but you and the rest of your chicken shit buddies ain't got guts enough to do your job.  You think nothin's your job."  He was so mad he was shaking, and he left a trail of coffee on the floor as he moved toward the candy rack, where Fred had just picked out a Mars Bar.
	"This war isn't going to make anybody free," Ellis chimed in.  "This war is only going to decide who gets to run the show in one tiny little country.  It's only going to kill a lot of innocent people on both sides, and end up with the people of Viet Nam no better off, either way."
	"Jesus Christ!"  Pete shouted, closing in on Fred at the candy rack.  "You God damn punk kid.  You ain't got enough backbone to stand up straight, let alone fight for your country."
	Fred turned away from the man, reaching into his pocket for change to buy the candy bar.  The man reached out and put a rough hand on his shoulder.
	"Don't you walk away from me when I'm talking to you, you little punk.  Millie here lost a son over there in them jungles, fighting for the likes of you.  He died for . . . "
	"Nothing!"  Fred said, turning back toward the man.  "He died for nothing.  This war's only going to kill innocent people."
	"You sure got a smart mouth, both you punks got smart mouths.  What you got to go with them?"  He poked Fred in the chest with his index finger.  Fred took a step back.  The man poked again.  Fred took another step back.  Pete poked at him a third time, but this time Fred was up against the candy rack and there was no place to go.  He poked again.  Fred reached up to his chest with his right hand and took hold of Pete's index finger, bending it back sharply.  Pete flinched and bent a little at the knees.  Fred let go of his finger and gave him a good strong push backward into the table and chairs near the stove.  His feet became entangled with the legs of a chair and he fell, more from his own awkwardness than the push, but never the less, he ended up sprawled on the floor.
	Ellis could hardly believe his eyes.  He got up out of his chair and slid it under the table.  Pete was on the floor between him and the door.  As he stepped around to the side of the table and headed in the direction of the door, Pete began to get back up.
	"You've had it now, I'm gonna kick the . . ."
	Once he got both feet back under himself, he headed for Fred again.  This time Fred met him half way, and with a tight fist, he hit the man square in the mouth.  It knocked him down flat on the floor, where he lay motionless for a few moments.
	Fred took a step toward the counter, where Millie stood speechless with her mouth about half open, and said,  "I'm sorry about this ma'am," he then reached into his pocket and produced a quarter for the candy bar, and headed for the door.
	"Hey!"  Pete called from the floor.  "You chicken shit little bastard.  Where you think you're goin, I ain't done with you yet."
	Fred continued in the direction of the door, but turned to address the man as he picked himself up from the floor a second time.  "Yes, you are done, buddy.  You just stay away from me."
	Pete didn't think so.  He stood up and went after Fred again.  Ellis had barely stepped outside, when Pete grabbed at Fred's arm and pulled him away from the door.  He took a swing at Fred that barely missed, and then took hold of him with both hands.  Fred felt himself come off the ground and fly a short ways back into the room.  He landed partially on a table that immediately collapsed under his weight and left him sprawled on the floor.  The man hesitated just long enough for Fred to pick himself back up, and then he charged.  Fred moved out of the way and Pete went past him in a rage.  When the man turned back toward him, Fred was ready, and he swung his clenched fist as hard as he could, hitting the man a solid blow on the side of his head.  This time the man went down very hard.  He was out, knocked out cold.  Fred stood over him for a moment, and after apologizing again to Millie, he left the restaurant.
	Once out in the cool fall air Fred felt like the incident was long in the past.  It was almost lost to memory.  He casually walked to the Volvo, got in, and started the engine.  When Ellis had gotten in, he calmly backed away from the building, pulled out of the parking lot, and headed for home.
	Neither Fred nor Ellis spoke for several minutes.  The only sounds were those of the tires rolling along the not so smooth pavement and that of the engine working hard under the hood.  Ellis couldn't get the recent fracas in the restaurant out of his mind.  It seemed like so very long ago, and so unreal.  One minute they were talking, and the next minute some belligerent red neck was pushing them around.  Fred on the other hand, could think of anything but the fracas.  He listened to the motor purr.  He thought he could hear each cylinder fire in turn as the pistons reached the top of their stroke.  There was a little flicker out of the corner of his eye as each guardrail post went by at the edge of the road.  Magpies scattered from a road-killed pheasant that lay in the center of the highway, and he could feel a kind of spinning motion take effect every time his thoughts neared the incident back in Washtucna.  It was an uncomfortable feeling and he pushed it away each time it came near.  He also pushed a little harder on the accelerator each time these cloudy thoughts began to solidify into something recognizable.
	"Jesus Christ, Fred," Ellis burst into his already full and swirling consciousness, "you're going eighty miles an hour."
	Fred looked down at the speedometer, and sure enough, he was going all of eighty and a little more.  He took his foot off the gas and the needle began to fall back until it read sixty, where he let it even out.
	"You like that better?"  Fred said, looking over at Ellis with a grin.  "You didn't know the old sled could go that fast, did you?"
	"I hadn't really thought about it.  It didn't feel like we were going that fast, but with those shitty tires of yours, I'd hate to have a blow out going that fast."  Ellis reached into his pocket, and taking out his tobacco, began to roll a cigarette.
	They were still traveling through the desert, but it was different now.  There were wonderful rock formations poking up out of the dry sandy soil.  Columnar basalt monoliths, like those one sees in cheap westerns, had resisted the force of the billions of gallons of water that had rushed by here tens of thousands of years before.  They stood out like sentries in the otherwise barren landscape.  To the North, they traveled for nearly a mile, next to a fifty-foot high rock cliff, man made when the highway was moved away from the river several years before.  Less than a hundred yards to the south was the Palouse River, meandering in wide sweeps across the full width of the nearly flat flood plain that lay most of a mile wide between higher rocky ground on either side of the valley.  Off in the distance, stood the nearly forgotten little town of Hooper, perched on a small peninsula of slightly higher ground protruding well out into the flood plain from the far side.  The new highway had bypassed this, once small, but thriving community, and from the present roadway, there was nothing left of it to see, but one or two buildings and a large grove of trees.  Presently, they came to a concrete bridge, where they crossed the river, and headed up the gentle slopes that would soon become the rolling Palouse Hills.
	"Well, we're in Whitman County now," Fred remarked, breaking the silence.  "We better look out for the fucking sheriff, and his bunch of bullies."
	"No shit!"  Ellis agreed.  " Those assholes would love to bust us with this tuna.  They'd probably just throw away the key, and let us rot in their dungeons."
	"Yeah, I know, and those people back in Washtucna might have called the cops, and they're probably looking for us right now," Fred worried.
	"Maybe we should take back roads the rest of the way," Ellis joined in Fred's worry.  "In fact there's one ahead, right now, off to the left."
	"Yeah, but it's the wrong way.  We need a road on the right, so we can stay South of Colfax when we get there," Fred reasoned.  "Don't worry there'll be one in a couple miles, at that little fishing pond up ahead," he paused trying to think of the name.  "You know, the juvenile pond, what's its name?"
	 Ellis had just lit his cigarette.  "Pampa," he said as he exhaled a large breath of smoke, filling the car with a noxious cloud and choking himself in the process.  "Pampa Pond.  Yeah, there's a turn off right past it.  Man, that goes way the fuck out of the way, clear to that little town of Hay, before you can turn east again."
	"Yeah, I know, but I'll bet there's a 'farmer road' that'll take us that way long before we get to Hay."
	"There should be," Ellis agreed,  "hope it's been dry enough, over here that we don't get stuck on one of those dirt roads.  I guess we'll find out."
	Sure enough, just past Pampa Pond, there was a gravel road to the right.  It took them South through marginal farm ground, an area where the desert began to turn into the rolling hills of the Palouse region.  The soil here was sandier and lighter in color, and the wheat and barley crops yielded far less than those grown, even a little further East, where the soil was rich and lay heavy with the qualities needed for those high yields of the central Palouse.  The road was straight for as far as the eye could see from the tops of the low and gently rolling hills.  They drove for several miles, kicking up a trail of dust, that hung over the route behind them like a thick blanket, before coming to a smaller road that turned off to the East.  Fred turned onto this road and stopped.
	"What do you think?" he asked.
	"Hell, from the dust we been makin, I'd say sure," Ellis responded.
	"Oh shit, it's plenty dry enough," Fred said, "but do you think it'll take us anywhere near where we want'a go?"
	"Fuck, I don't know, I've never been here before, but it is goin' East, and as long as it doesn't go back out to the highway, it should be okay."
	Fred eased the Volvo into gear and pulled forward along the dirt road before them.
	This road as well, was straight for a ways, but one could see that it turned off to the South again in less than a mile.  The road itself was dirt, packed hard from the many tires that had traveled here.  There was no asphalt or gravel, nothing but years of traffic had been added to these soft, rolling hills to cause the roadway to be where it was.  Dust billowed up behind them as they rolled along this smooth trail, and the still morning air left it hanging like a curtain that slowly faded in the distance behind them.  Presently they came to where the road turned off to the right and dropped down into a tree-lined gully to the south.  These trees were the only sign of life other than the barely sprouted fall wheat that gave a green tinge to the dry ground spreading out before them in all directions.  As the Volvo wound its way down this twisty dirt path, deeper into the gully, the trees and bushes grew taller and thicker, until first, their shadows crisscrossed and covered the road, and then the branches themselves enveloped the roadway.  They drove for nearly a mile through the tunnel formed by this thick underbrush, all the time headed slightly down.  The road crossed a barely moist creek bed several times along the way.  These crossings were not accompanied by a bridge or culvert, but were merely rough rocky spots in the roadway where the collected runoff from the fields above made its way along the gully.  Several rabbits and a deer crossed in front of them as they proceeded along the dirt road.  Magpies abounded, sometimes only one or two at a time, but other times in groups of six or eight.  They all seemed to fly over and around the car as it passed by, as if they were curious of the little Volvo that had wandered into their territory unannounced and without permission.
	"Jesus, I've never seen so many Magpies in one place," Fred finally said.
	"Their waiting for one of us to get out and take a piss, and then they're going to swoop in and have breakfast on our eyes, like in that Hitchcock movie," Ellis mused with a chuckle.  I'm going to have to chance it pretty soon though, or else piss my pants.  That coffee back in Washtucna has finally come through."
	"I'm going to have to join you," Fred agreed, craning his neck to look out the side window of the car, as if to see if it was safe to stop.
	They had come to a small plank bridge, some fifteen feet long and maybe half as wide.  There was a trickle of water running under the little bridge, and several large willow trees grew up out of the streambed on either side.  Fred pulled the Volvo off to the side of the narrow road just before the bridge and stopped the motor.
	"Well do we dare get out?" he said looking up into the willows, where at least a dozen large Magpies had congregated, nervously hopping from branch to branch, establishing their hierarchy.
	"When you gotta piss, you gotta piss," Ellis said opening the door and stepping out onto the edge of the roadway.  The birds squawked and clattered loudly in protest of the invasion made by this tri-colored tin box and the two-legged critter emerging from it.  Fred got out as well, walked around the car to the side of the deserted road, and looked up into the trees where the Magpies were still hopping from branch to branch and screeching down at the two of them on the ground.  Fred jumped up and down and yelled loudly at them, waiving his arms.  This produced nothing in the way of change in the birds except perhaps they squawked louder.
	"You want them out of here?"  Ellis asked, looking around on the ground.
	"Yeah, they give me the creeps," Fred answered.
	Ellis took several steps down off the edge of the road and picked up a stick about four feet long and stepped back up beside Fred.  "Watch this."  He held the stick up to his shoulder as if he had a rifle and pointed it at the flock of Magpies.  There was a loud screeching and they all flew away at once.
	"Wow!  That was cool.  Fred said, preparing to water the edge of the road.
	"I learned that when I was a kid," Ellis said laughing.  "We used to hunt anything that moved in those days, and if you had a gun, those magpies wouldn't let you within range, but if you didn't have a gun, they'd nearly land on your shoulder."
	"Smart birds."  Fred finished up his watering job and walked down the slight embankment to the small creek.  He squatted down and put his hand in the shallow water, swishing it around a bit stirring up a bit of silt.  He stood up again, walked back up the bank, and reaching in his shirt pocket, produced a joint that had been broken in half, and clung together only by a scrap of the paper that hadn't yet torn.
	"That god damn Pete guy busted our last joint."  He finished tearing the joint apart and held the two halves out for Ellis to see.  "Which one do you want?  They're about the same size at least."  Ellis took one of the halves, and Fred continued.  "Boy that was a weird scene back there in Washtucna.  That guy just wanted to fuck with us.  I hate that 'love it or leave it' bullshit, and I have to admit that I kinda came unglued when he started poking me on the chest."
	"Yeah, I hate that too," Ellis said.  "My dad used to do that when he got pissed at me."
	"Mine too."
	Ellis took out a book of matches, and lit both his and Fred's half of the joint and they both sat down at the side of the road to smoke themselves into a new dimension.  The leaves had mostly fallen, and lay scattered on the ground.  Little piles of them had blown up against anything that would hold them from blowing along with prevailing winds.  The magpies that had all left began to return one at a time.  They stayed high in the trees, and kept moving from one branch to another, making certain not to become a good target.
	"They say you can teach one of those noisy things to talk," Fred said pointing up into the tallest of the willows, where six or eight of the magpies had re-gathered.
	"Yeah, a guy I knew when I was a kid had one that could talk, sort'a.  I guess you have to split their tongue or something before they can talk much though.  I had big ideas of making a pet out of one of'em one time, and I spent half the spring trying to catch one.  I finally did too, and I made a cage and kept it out back of the house.  I fed it hamburger and leftovers, but it stunk so bad my dad finally made me let it go.  It hung around the neighborhood for quite a while and made one hell of a nuisance of itself before one of the neighbors shot it.  God, that pissed me off.  I got even with the fucker though.  He didn't think I knew who shot little Blacky, that was its name, but I did, and one time when the guy was out hunting about ten miles or so from town, I found him and let the air out of all four of his tires.  He had to walk all the way back to town and then pay someone to go get his truck."  Ellis laughed just to think of the incident.
	"Well shit!  I suppose we should point ourselves toward home again," Fred said yawning and standing up.
	"I suppose so.  How long we been gone you think?
	"Jesus I don't know.  I'd say two weeks or so.  We left on a Friday.  I know that, cause John was going to take pictures of a football game the next day, and those games are always on a Saturday, and we only had one weekend over there after we started painting for Tom.
	"Yeah I think that's right."  Ellis too got up and stretched.  They both got into the car and headed east, or as nearly so as this little dirt trail was headed.
	Presently they came to a gravel road and had to decide which way to go.  Left, they thought would dump them back out on the highway, so they turned right, and then took the next dirt road to the left.  They kept up this general choice of directions for about an hour, until they came to a paved road.
	"Oh shit, now what?"  Fred asked, stopping at a stop sign that leaned away from the nearly constant westerly winds.
	"I think this is the main road down to Central Ferry and then on to Walla Walla," Ellis answered.  "I think we better turn left and hope there's another side road off this before we hit the main highway again."
	Fred pulled out onto the pavement, and they traveled generally North for several miles before they came to another gravel road heading east.  This road was well-traveled and it took them in just the direction they wanted to go for about ten more miles, until they came to another paved road.
	"Shit!  I've been here before," Ellis said.  "This is the road down to Penawawa.  Two other guys and I tried to dig up some old settlers grave down there when we were in high school."  Fred gave Ellis a nervous glance and Ellis continued.  "I recognize that farm house across the road.  We're only a couple miles from the highway, so we better take a right and then take the next left in about a mile or so."
	Fred pulled out onto the pavement, and sure enough Ellis was right.  There was another gravel road headed east again in about a mile.  They turned off and headed up Little Penawawa creek, which meandered along peacefully through a shallow valley full of deciduous trees and bushes.  They passed several small farmhouses that lay barely out of the spring flood plain.  They even met another car on the road, the first in several hours.  Slowly they climbed out of the valley to higher ground where they could see for miles in all directions.  Fred stopped the car for another piss break and they both got out.  They stood firmly in the midst of the Palouse hills by now, and the only signs of the desert were seen in the distance from where they'd come.
	Looking back to the West, this land they had just meandered through seemed to flow out level and flat, like the vacant lot where Ellis used to play baseball in his youth.  This dry land with all its variations now took on a very different appearance when viewed from a distance.  The rock formations, the little gullies, and the expanses of sagebrush all flowed together into a homogenous table top with a slightly soiled and wrinkled linen cloth.  Looking east, the subtle hills of the Palouse rolled on into the distance like the gentle rattling of snare drums at a military funeral.  These soft forms could have passed for satin pillows piled up in the harem's quarters of some middle eastern prince.  They reminded Ellis of the smooth mottled skin he carelessly caressed in his dreams.  These voluptuous moving hills had skin tone, like a sleek strong deer.  Ellis looked out over this beckoning expanse of the Palouse, and he felt something murmur deep within his physical center that made him know, now, for the first time, but for sure, that he had come from somewhere deep within the loins of this land, this living rolling land.  It was his land, and he was part of it, and it was his duty to protect it from the ravages of his own kind.
	"What's that poking up over there?"  Fred asked, jerking Ellis away from his thoughts, almost like he had spoken out of turn.  Ellis fought briefly to recover that feeling of kinship with his hills, but Fred had managed to slip a barrier between him and his emerging realizations.
	"What's what," he answered.
	"That over there."  Fred pointed off to the Northeast where a portion of the earth seemed to have poked up through the low hills and then clothed itself in firs and pines for protection against the elements.
	"That's Kamiak Butte," Ellis announced, and then pointing farther to the North, "and that's Steptoe Butte."  Both of these granite buttes rose up nearly a thousand feet out of the blanket of basalt that had covered the rest of the area long before the floods dumped much of Western Montana into the path of the wind, from where, whipped up into clouds of dust, it blew in as a thick layer of rich loam soil that has become the basis of life for the Palouse.
	"Where you think we live?"  Fred asked, looking off across the expanse of hills.
	Ellis looked too, studying the way they rose and fell, forming little valleys that carried water down to the creeks and eventually the rivers.  "Somewhere over there," he said pointing almost due East.  "See how all the land seems to go down to that strip of trees over there four or five miles.  I think that's Union Flat Creek, and we live just the other side of it, kinda over the next hill, up one of those draws."
	"Well shit, I know that," Fred said indignantly.  "Which one of those draws, is what I want to know."
	"Fuck, I don't know.  I can't hardly see that god damn far," Ellis shot back.
	"Shit, we're less than ten miles from home," Fred said as he walked back around the car and opened the door.  "Let's go."
	They both got back into the Volvo and headed off on their last leg for home.

Home Again

	They rolled down off the high point where they had stood and headed into the steepening valley formed by the many thousands of years of Union Flat Creek carving its way along through the basalt.  At first they dropped slowly, winding around the smooth hills, tinged green by the fall wheat that was beginning to emerge from the rich brown soil.  This green cast to the ground was stronger at the bottoms of the hills and faded to nearly nothing along the ridges where the topsoil had been washed and blown away, leaving the lighter colored clay exposed to further erosion.  After several miles of this gentle descent, they came to where the ground broke off steep, and the road quickly dropped nearly two hundred feet as it wound back and forth along the low cliffs that rimmed the narrow valley below.  Lined with firs and pines that stood tall and straight on either side, the valley lay flat some several hundred yards wide, and they traveled along wrapped in the comfort of this familiar place and the security of knowing they were nearly home.
	Before the white man began to transform this land into the monoculture that seemed to fit his simplistic view of the world, this small valley was a cornucopia of epicurean delights that fed both the native peoples and the wildlife that were part of the whole picture in those days.  Now, any land, that is flat enough and dry enough to farm, is plowed and planted in wheat, soft white wheat, that is mostly sold to third world countries where it is made into sticky pasta, and becomes one of the basic ingredients in over-population.  Despite our attempts to tame this strip of land, there still remains enough of its natural tone to provide a kind of warm coziness for the people that have chosen to live here.  The creek itself has a magnetism that has drawn settlers, past and present, to those low damp areas within its spring high water lines.  The creek's annual swellings have lapped up at the footings of many of these homes and into the living rooms of some.  Year after year the families that dwell here look forward with trepidation to the coming of spring and the mixed blessing it brings with it.
	The narrow gravel road crossed the creek and then hugged the less steep banks of the East side of the valley as Fred and Ellis traveled the last mile or two north to where their road took off and headed East again, up out of the valley to where they lived just back from the breaks.  The Volvo turned right, nearly on its own, and headed up the steep pitch of the ungraveled field road that would soon bring to an end their three hundred mile trek across the state.  The road made its way through the trees and bushes and over a rocky outcropping before emerging into the open, recently tilled, and seeded wheat fields.  The plows had come so close to the road that they had rolled fist sized clods of top soil out onto the traveled pathway, where they would remain until either tires flattened them into the hard packed road, or the soon to come fall rains washed them away for good.  They reached the top of the hill and there it was.  Smoke rising from the chimney and sitting in the midst of its own dilapidation, the farm was a welcome sight as they pulled into the driveway.
	The dogs stormed out of the house, across the yard and into the driveway, where they did the usual welcome home dance for the little metal box on wheels and its occupants.  Ellis' dog Punt was in front of course, after he growled and fussed sufficiently to make sure the others stayed behind him.  The other two dogs, also both males, and belonging to a fellow that didn't even live there anymore, were a matching pair of beautiful yellow labs.  Although they looked very much the same, they had nearly opposite temperaments.  Sundance had a type "B" personality, and nearly always brought up the rear with a smile.  Birthday, on the other hand, was an aggressive animal that had teetered back and forth with Punt for the alpha dog role, before Punt nearly killed him in the final confrontation.  Since that time he kept his place as number two, with only occasional bouts of flared tempers between them.
	The barking, and dancing, and general furor of the dogs brought Effie the pig out from under the haymow.  Her oinks and squeals could be heard long before she emerged from the barn at full gallop, her teats flopping from side to side like tassels on the skimpy skirt of a Go-Go dancer trying to arouse a sleepy-eyed crowd of drunken dentists at a convention.  When she arrived in the driveway, she joined the dogs in their dance, squirming and squealing and occasionally snapping at one of the dogs, which kept their distance from her sharp teeth.  As the dance subsided, Fred and Ellis got out of the car, greeted the dogs one at a time, and then patted Effie, who gave out some affectionate little oinks that revealed her true loving nature.
	The house looked the same as when they had left.  The paint had long since faded and fallen from the lap siding, and the corner moldings were broken or missing.  A Jefferson Airplane album was on the record player, and the volume was turned up far enough that it made the windows bulge.  The shrill, but melodic sound of Gracy Slick's voice penetrated the walls and surrounded the old farm house in a sensual film, that formed a comfortable envelope to come home to.
	Stepping up onto the porch, Ellis could see a woman scurrying around in the kitchen.  She had the chairs upside down on the kitchen table and was mopping the floor when he opened the door and stepped in.  He only got one foot in the door when she turned quickly toward the door and held her hands up in a gesture that left no question that she didn't want him to come any further.
	"Stop!"  She shrieked, over the wail of Gracy Slick's rendition of 'Somebody To Love'.  "Don't you dare track in here across my clean floor."
	Ellis stopped in his tracks, backed out of the kitchen, and went to the parlor door that lay only a few feet farther along the porch.  He opened this door carefully and poked his head in a few inches to see if it got bit off, and when nothing happened he went on in with Fred behind him.  The song on the record player had come to an end, and the quiet was only broken by the sound of the mop swishing across the kitchen floor and the scratches on the record between songs.
	"Hey, we're home," Ellis called out to whoever might be there, and as the record began the next song, he could hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs.  Moments later, Duncan rounded the foot of the stairs with a broad smile, and went straight to the record player to turn down the volume.  He fumbled just as he got there and banged the player hard enough to skitter the needle across the surface of the record, making a screeching sound that sent shivers up everyone's spine.  He finally found the right knob and the volume dropped to a murmur.
	Duncan turned back toward them and then shouted.  "Hey John, Fred and Ellis are back."  John thumped down the stairs as well, and the four of them stood grinning at each other in the middle of the parlor.  "Oh, that's Francine," Duncan said, gesturing toward the kitchen.  "She came home with John the other night, and has been cleaning the place ever since."
	"That's not true," John said and then turned toward the kitchen.  "Hey Francine, come meet our other roommates."
	"In a minute," she answered, "I'm almost finished with the floor.  Don't you guys track in here now."
	Fred flopped down on the stained and moth eaten couch, put his feet up on the coffee table, and looked around at the unusual order that seemed to fill the room.  There were no dirty clothes lying around on the floor.  The furniture had been rearranged, and there was a kind of sterility to the lack of normal clutter he was used to.  "What the hell happened to this place while we were gone?  It looks like a tornado came by and sucked all the good shit out of here."
	Duncan rolled his eyes and nodded toward Francine in the kitchen.  "Tornado is about right.  We're on a new program around here these days.  Francine's a clean freak and thinks she can whip this place into some kind of shape."
	Francine finished her mopping, set her mop in the bathroom and joined the four of them in the parlor.  "That's right, and it's going to stay clean too.  In fact we're going to start taking our shoes off when we come into the house, and the dogs won't be coming in anymore either."
	"I think we need to burn one and think about this before we make any rash decisions," Ellis said, and then looking over at Duncan, he continued.  "You guys smoke all the pot while we were gone."
	"Not quite, but we're on tight rations," Duncan said, opening a small candy tin on the coffee table where there was a small amount of marijuana and some papers.
	"Well roll up a big fat boy, cause we brought home a fresh supply and we don't need ration stamps for a while," Ellis said laughing.
	Duncan had already begun the "ritual of the joint' as he called it by laying a piece of paper out under his working area, and pulling a single yellow leaf from the packet of wheat straw papers that were in the tin.  Without looking up he asked.  "Should I make it a double paper job or just make two of them."
	Ellis, who had flopped down in the smaller of two overstuffed chairs that sat in opposite corners of the small room, looked over at Duncan and saw he was still using the same thick, nasty tasting cigarette papers that he was using before they left, and couldn't help but comment.  "You're still using those same shitty papers.  Here," he said, throwing his packet of thin papers onto the coffee table.
	Duncan pushed them aside.  "I like the color of these better.  They look more like joints when I get done with them."
	"They look more like fucking bananas, if you ask me," Ellis said, smiling at the thought of a whole bunch of Duncan's yellow joints hanging from a little miniature banana tree.
	Everyone laughed, but Duncan, who took another leaf from the packet of papers, and licking the gummed edge, attached it to the bottom of the first paper, making a single cigarette paper twice as wide.  He then looked up and smiled.
	"I'll show you fuckers what a 'Duncan Special' looks like," he said, as he hooked a third paper to the first two and began to fill the triple paper with the rest of the crumbled green leaves from the little tin on the table.
	"Oh Shit!"  Ellis interjected.  "He's going to give us a triple dose of wheat chaff and yellow dye.  Duncan, you should be knocked in the head."  He laughed again, and put his feet up on the other end of the table from Duncan's serious work on the giant joint.
	"Speaking of knocked in the head, Fred did a little of that on our trip," Ellis said gesturing toward Fred.  "Tell'em about the loading dock guy, Fred."
	Fred began, and even though Ellis had a hard time letting him tell the story his way, in the end, it was told along with that of the rest of the trip.  Fred sat on the couch next to Duncan, John and Francine wedged themselves cozily into the large blue overstuffed chair opposite Ellis, and Ellis sat, and bounced, and paced in his usual animated way throughout the entire story.  The rest of the little group sat quietly entranced for over an hour, partly by the story, partly by Duncan's 'Giant Joint', and maybe even partly by, what Ellis called, an overdose of yellow dye.
	About the time the story began to slow down for lack of interesting tales, the room had cooled off to where they all felt the cold.
	"Look in that stove next time you walk past there."  John said, as Ellis paced back and fourth in front of the stove.
	Ellis opened the ornate cast iron door of the parlor stove and announced, "shit, it's almost out.  Is there still any wood out there on the porch?"
	"A little, but we're going to have to start hauling coal again like last year," Duncan answered.
	Ellis went out onto the porch, picked up several pieces of wood from the nearly depleted woodpile, and returned to the still open stove.  "Where we going to get coal?" he asked.
	"The college has a pile about half the size of Kamiak Butte.  They shared it with us last year, and I figure that they'd be glad to again this year," Duncan answered laughing.
	"Yeah, what they don't know won't hurt'em, I'd say, and besides, our taxes and tuition paid for it anyway."  John threw in.
	"You mean you're going to steal coal?"  Francine asked in a tone that showed her disbelief.
	"It's not really stealing."  John said.  "It's kind of part of our education.  I think it just comes as part of our tuition, you know.  We have to get something for our money."
	"You just back up to the pile and fill the trunk, or what?"  Ellis asked.
	"We have," John laughed, "but usually we just go by and fill a backpack or a grocery bag."
	"Jesus Christ!"  Duncan burst out.  "Remember the time we had the car backed up there, and the night watchman or whoever caught us?"
	"Oh fuck!"  John shuddered.  "And then he came over and helped us shovel."
	"No shit, I thought we were cooked, and then he just helped."  Duncan got up, slid around the backside of the coffee table, and headed for the kitchen.  "In fact he showed us where to hide the car so we could haul as many sacks as we could carry."
	As soon as Duncan put a foot down in the kitchen, Francine yelled at him.
	"Hey!  You better have clean feet.  I just mopped that floor, and I don't want it all dirty again cause one of you got dirty feet."
	"Jesus Christ Francine, I haven't even been outside yet today.  How the hell could I have dirty feet?  Besides, I'm hungry.  You guys hungry?  Maybe we should cook up those eggs John and I found in the dumpster yesterday."  Duncan had opened the refrigerator and stood staring into it's near emptiness.  There were four egg cartons, a hunk of cheese, some butter, and a bowl of something unidentifiable that had begun to grow hair.
	"Holy shit!  Where'd all the stuff that was in here go?  This thing was almost full last time I looked."
	"Everything was dead in there, so I threw it all out."  Francine squirmed in the chair next to John, trying to twist around to see into the kitchen.  "You don't want to get sick on rotten food, do you?"
	"God damn, there was a lot of good shit in there, like those potatoes, left over from last night's dinner, and the green peppers.  And then there's this."  He took the bowl from the refrigerator, and walked back into the parlor, where he held it out to Francine.  "What's this shit, if it's not dead?"
	She leaned forward out of the chair and looked fiercely up at Duncan.  "How the hell should I know.  I've only been here two days, and that bowl of dead shit looks like it's been in there for two fucking years.  God couldn't tell what the hell it is anymore."  She leaned back into John's lap, made a little snugly motion with her shoulders, murmured something into John's ear, and closing her eyes, made it clear she felt finished with the subject.
	"Well then, why didn't you throw it out with everything else?" he responded, not letting the matter drop.
	Francine sighed a short little disgruntled snort, and without opening her eyes, said, " I thought it might make you sad if there was nothing in there to remind you of what a slob you really are, and I didn't want you to be whiny, and now here you are, sniveling."
	"Oh, I see, we're going to get nasty about it, are we."  Duncan set the bowl on the table and went back to the refrigerator for the eggs.  "I guess we'll just have to have eggs without the potatoes and onions then."
	"Actually the potatoes from last night are out on the porch, and if the cats didn't get up there they should still be okay."  She got up and went after the leftovers.
	Duncan fumbled around trying to find a frying pan and finally stumbled across one hanging on a nail behind the wood cook stove.  "God!  Now she's rearranging the delicate order, we have so carefully set up around here."
	Francine came back in with the leftovers, went to the refrigerator, took out the butter, and placed them both on the counter where Duncan was about to begin breaking eggs into a dry frying pan.  "Here, if you put a little butter in there first you might get that shit back out of there to eat later.  Besides, you might want to cook the potatoes and onions before you put the eggs in."
	She came back into the parlor shaking her head.  Instead of snuggling back in with John, she went over to the stove, took a peek inside, and then stood in front of the open door warming her hands.
	"Hey!  Somebody push her in that stove as long as it's open," Duncan yelled out from the kitchen.
	"That's nice, after I just saved your dinner from lining that pan for ever."  She shut the stove door, hugging herself around the shoulders and then turning around, she gave off a little shiver.  "I think I'll go get under the covers where it's warm and read," she said to no one in particular, then turned and went up the stairs.
	"You're going to miss a gourmet dinner," Duncan called from the kitchen.
	Her fading footsteps were her only answer.  John sat quietly in front of the television for a few minutes and then got up, went to the stove and looked in.
	"I think I'll go up and join Francine," he said, closing the stove.
	"So much for reading," Ellis commented, grinning at him.
	John smiled back, but didn't say a word and headed up the stairs.  Fred began to snore lightly on the couch, and Ellis got up and went into the kitchen."
	It is getting cold out," he said.  "It could snow any time I suppose."
	"Yeah, the TV says it'll snow tonight and most of the next two days.  You guys got back just in time."
	"What about that coal pile?  Is it cool to take that shit?
	"Well, not really, but if we don't get too carried away, we can probably stay warm all winter from it."
	"Maybe we ought to get a bunch before it snows."
	"Yeah, I wouldn't mind going into town and looking in the dumpster.  Saturdays can sometimes be good.  Mostly cause nobody checks on Saturdays, but I have found some really good shit on the weekend."
	"We need a shovel or what?"
	"Mostly sacks, but a shovel would help fill'em.
	"So you don't really just back up to the pile and shovel."
	"Not usually, in fact I think we only did that once."
	"When you want to go?"
	"As soon as we're done here.  Shouldn't take more than about half-hour.  What time is it anyway?"  Duncan had the potatoes grated and in the pan, and headed for the wood stove in the parlor.
	"I think it's about two, but it may be later."
	"It doesn't look like Fred will want to come along, and John and Francine will probably be too busy exchanging body fluids to go anywhere, so I guess it'll just be the two of us.
	"I think I'll go out and get all Fred's and my shit out of the Volvo."  Ellis stepped out onto the front porch where Effie lay sprawled across the full length of the old couch.  Birthday and Sundance lay curled into a near knot on a carpet scrap at one end, and Punt sat like an Egyptian statue at the other.  The air was still, and high thin clouds had covered the previously open sky.  Punt met Ellis at the edge of the porch, put his cool moist nose into his hand, and then charged off into the yard, where he made a brief, false chase after a pair of chickens that had strayed too near what he considered his rightful domain.
	Ellis dug around in the car for what few things he and Fred had taken on their trip, and removed them to the back porch, where he piled them all in one large heap against the door into their part of the house.  He then returned to the Volvo and after lifting the spare tire, the jack, and the other tire changing tools from the depression that had been designed to keep these things out of the way, he took out the bag containing the marijuana they had spent most of their last few dollars on.  This he took into the kitchen, where he set it on the table in front of Duncan.
	"Check this shit out," he said, dumping the contents of the plain brown sack out onto the table.
	"Is it any good?"  Duncan remarked, picking several of the smaller plastic bags up in turn and fondling them as if they were priceless artifacts from a bygone age.  He then opened one of the bags and poking his nose into it, he took a long deep breath.  "God that does smell good.  We better roll up a couple for our trip to town, don't you think?"
	"Good idea."  Ellis sat down at the table and began rolling joints.
	Duncan went into the parlor and checked the potatoes that were cooking on the stove.  They were nearly done, and he went back into the kitchen for the carton of eggs.  He broke a half dozen of the eggs into the pan full of potatoes and stirred this new alloy with a fork.  The combination of the leftover potatoes and the eggs quickly became a slimy mess that soon began to congeal with the heat from the fire.
	"Hey Fred!  You want some spuds and eggs?"  Duncan spoke softly as if he didn't really want to disturb Fred, who still snored softly, half sitting, half lying on the moth eaten couch.
	"Hum, no, you go ahead."  He half mumbled as he stirred briefly, and then stretching full length on the couch, he continued his subconscious imitation of a purring cat.
	Duncan walked to the foot of the stairs and yelled to John and Francine.  "Hey!  You two warm yet?  There's food down here if you're still hungry.  And Ellis has a pile of brand new joints ready for battle."
	There was no answer from upstairs and Duncan returned to his frying pan shaking his head.
	Ellis had rolled a half dozen or more joints by now and walked into the parlor.  He opened the candy tin on the coffee table and looked up at Duncan who was attempting to scrape his freshly cooked mass of starch and cholesterol off the sides of the frying pan.  "How many of these do you think it will take to get to town and back?"
	Duncan looked over as Ellis held out a handful of nice uniform joints with their ends neatly twisted to hold any of the contents from falling out in transport.  "They're kind of skimpy looking don't you think?  We better take four of'em, just in case we get hung up somewhere."
	Ellis put four of them in his shirt pocket and the remainder in the candy tin, and returned it to the table.  He then picked up a ragged blanket from the arm of the chair and threw it sloppily over Fred.  "We don't want Fred to get chilled while we're gone."
	"We aren't gone yet," Duncan said returning from the kitchen with a plate.  "We gotta eat this shit I cooked here before we go anywhere.  You better go get a plate."
	Ellis dished up some of the mixture Duncan had nearly cooked to death.  It had not been seasoned and tasted a little like the wheat paste that Ellis used to take a lick of every now and then when he was in grade school.  Not that wheat paste tasted bad, but it was a bit bland for food.
	"Hey Duncan!  Where's the salt and pepper?  This stuff could use some."
	"We're out of all that kind of shit for perking up stuff.  Fact I promised Francine I'd try and find something next time I'm in town.  We can just buy some salt, but some of that other shit is kind of expensive.  To bad old Tall Paul isn't here anymore, he'd a just stole anything we needed along that line."
	"Who's Tall Paul?"
	He lived here for a while last summer, before he got busted for trying to steal a cow from one of the neighbors."
	"Cows are kinda big."
	"Yeah, he had a rope around its neck and had led it almost all the way back here from clear on the other side of the damn highway.  I guess the farmer's wife saw him take it and called the sheriff.  They caught up with him just up the road.  Fred and I saw it all from the front porch.  He nearly made it back here with the damn thing when they nabbed him.  I don't know what he'd have done with it when he got back here.  I don't think he could have killed it, and I know none of us could have.  It was pretty scary, cause we had a bunch of fucking sheriff's deputies hanging around here for a couple of days.  Paul had been living in that old building out by the driveway and they went through it pretty thoroughly.  We thought they were going to search the house, but they never got around to that.  They just took all his shit out of the shed, threw him in jail, and we haven't seen or heard from him since.  I think they must have had some other shit on him as well.  Anyway, if he were still around, he would've got all the spices you wanted." Duncan laughed at the thought of light-fingered Tall Paul."
	The two of them finished up their meal, and set the plates carelessly on the counter without rinsing them.  Duncan informed the lovebirds upstairs that he and Ellis were leaving for town, and that there was still food for them in the kitchen, and pot on the coffee table.  Effie had gotten down off the couch on the porch and had begun rooting at the kitchen door.  Ellis walked over to the door and kicked it several times, and she quit rooting and began squealing loudly.  Fred moaned a little from the couch, but he didn't stir, and the two of them headed out the back door for Duncan's Toyota station wagon.
	The station wagon was one of those compact little red numbers that came over from Japan before the great flood of imports.  It must have dated from the early sixties, and it still had a look and feel of the Imperial Japanese Army to it.  It was squareish, utilitarian, and absolutely void of style.  It did run well most of the time and got far better gas mileage than any American cars, and most European cars of the day.  The two of them got in.  Duncan started it up, and they headed out the driveway, turning left onto the dirt road that Fred and Ellis had traveled only a couple of hours earlier.  Within several hundred yards the came to a fork in the road, and instead of heading over the hill into Union Flat, they turned to the left and followed the ridge for several miles and soon came out on the highway that connected Colfax with Pullman.  They headed to the right and were soon flying along at sixty miles an hour with the rest of the traffic on the road.
	"Sounds like you two had a pretty good time in Seattle."
	"Yeah, but it's better to be back over here again.  I don't like all those people in my face all the time."
	Duncan laughed.  "You're such a hick, you just need to ignore all of them.  Just block them out.  I don't even see'em, when I'm over there."
	"Yeah, I suppose.  But I didn't grow up over there breathing all their farts, and listening to all their fucking car horns, and sirens, and all the just plain roaring of the goddamn place.  I can't get that used to it.  I don't think I ever would in a hundred years.  It kinda scares me a little even, like I might feel better if I had a fucking gun or something."
	Duncan laughed again, and held out his hand.  "Let's smoke one of those 'tunas'.  You're not only a hick, you're a paranoid hick."
	Ellis smiled at the truth in Duncan's statement, and looked out the window as he took one of the neatly rolled joints from his pocket.  He struck a wooden match on the side of the ashtray, held it in front of himself for a moment, looking to see who else might be watching from out on the highway, and then lit the joint, satisfied they were alone.  He took a long deep drag and held it for a long time, while his eyes and thoughts drifted back to the rolling wheat fields, that now seemed to flow past him as he sat quietly in the car.  Occasional farmhouses came and went, along with the many out buildings that accompanied them.  Most of these farmhouses were built around the turn of the century or before.  They were large majestic structures with bits of bric-a-brac about the gables and along the large porches.  Old stands of pine and fir had usually been planted around the homesteads by the original settlers and they now stood like sentinels, guarding the residents from the cold winds of winter as well as the hot sun of August.
	A mature, male, Marsh Hawk hovered three or four feet off the ground at the edge of the road in search of some small animal.  The hawk had set the pitch of his wings as to hold himself motionless in the breeze that would soon be bringing snow from the West.  Like Duncan and Ellis, the hawk had important duties to perform before these snows moved in and covered his hunting ground for the winter.  As smoothly as the pneumatic door on a Greyhound bus, the hawk folded his wings and dropped to the ground.  He touched just briefly, and then again spreading his wings, was pulled upward with something small and furry held tight in his sharp talons.  The full breeze once again pushed up under the hawk's well-trimmed wings, and he soared effortlessly upward to where he landed on a power pole with his prize.
	They came to the top of one of the many hills, and could see the cozy little town of Pullman lying in the tight valley below.  The university buildings clustered so densely on one of the steep hills rising up out of the valley that they seemed to be one large brick building.  The trees that scattered the area seemed to be growing more from the buildings than between them.  A thin layer of wood smoke hung over the town like a light jacket and the sun setting behind them cast a pink glow to the whole scene.  The little Toyota passed a number of scattered ranch style houses on the edge of town as it made its way down the long hill that would soon end in the very center of Pullman's business district, which consisted of several dozen retail shops, restaurants, and saloons, clustered into about a six block area.
	"Let's go by the dumpster first, and check out the weekend pickings," Duncan said, as he turned to the left and headed North on a side street that would bring them to the back of the grocery store.
	"Sounds good.  I wouldn't mind going by Dave and Carol's place, to see if Dave's sister is still staying with them.  I'd like to get to know some of her parts a little better, if she'd let me."
	"I wonder what parts those are."
	"Right!  Use your imagination.  I think she kinda likes me though."
	"I can't imagine why."
	"You know, studly, suave, lovable."
	"I'd say more like short, scruffy, and smelly, if you ask me."
	"No one did, and I'm not smelly, am I?"  Ellis asked sounding a little concerned.
	Duncan laughed as he took an unopened pack of Winston lights out of his shirt pocket and tapped it firmly on the dashboard of the car.  "No, not really, but you are short and scruffy."
	Ellis looked himself over as best he could, sitting in the car.  "Huh.  So this is scruffy.  I always thought I was stylish and you guys were just lagging behind the times."
	Duncan lit his cigarette and pulled into the back of the Safeway parking lot.  The dumpster sat there with the top open and two cardboard boxes sitting next to it.  He pulled up within a few feet of it and stopped.  The two of them got out and Ellis went to the boxes first.
	"Wow!  Look at this shit."  He picked up the top box and held it out for Duncan to see.  It was nearly full of out dated vegetables.  There were about a half dozen green peppers, most of a dozen over ripe tomatoes, a pile of carrots, some potatoes, and quite a number of yellow onions.  All of these were a bit too soft to look nice on the shelf, but plenty good enough to eat.
	"Boy, what a find," Duncan exclaimed, bending down to open the second box.  "I'll bet that Sam guy that does the produce set these aside so they wouldn't get slimed in the dumpster."
	The second box had two dozen eggs, a lot of apples, four or five kiwi fruit, and some cans without labels that had been badly dented.
	 "Good score," Duncan said, walking to the back of the Toyota and opening the rear hatch.  Let's throw that shit in here and go buy some salt.
	Ellis was standing on his tiptoes looking down into the dumpster.  "There doesn't seem to be anything in here that looks good, unless you want a broken box of dish soap or a worn out broom, or maybe you could use a large number of perfectly good tampons in a slightly shredded box."
	Duncan had put both boxes into the back of the car, and stood ready to close the hatch.  "No.  I think I'll pass."
	"Actually, I wouldn't mind having the broom, for the handle.  It looks like a good heavy stick."  Ellis grabbed the broom, which lay within easy reach.  "You never know when you might need to give something a good whack."
	"Hey!"  Duncan walked back over to the dumpster, and peered in over the edge.  "You know, Francine might like those tampons."
	"You don't think she'd care where we got'em?"
	"I don't know.  She eats food we dig out of here, so I suppose she wouldn't care.  We better get'em."
	Ellis climbed over the side and handed the badly damaged box to Duncan, leaving the few that had spilled out where they lay.  "We can always supplement the coal supply with them if she doesn't want'em."  Climbing back out, he picked up the old broom and placed it in the back of the Toyota.
	Duncan set what was left of the box of tampons carefully next to the other two boxes, and he and Ellis got into the car.
	Duncan pulled the Toyota around to the front of the store and they got out again.  Once inside, they headed for the seasoning isle.  Duncan picked up a five-pound bag of salt, while Ellis stood starring at the many spices that filled a whole section of the isle.
	"I never really noticed how many spices there are," he said.  "How would you ever know which one to use for what?"
	"I know, but if you knew anything about cooking you'd know what to do with them.  I suppose we ought to get some pepper at least."
	"Shit!  There's three or four different kinds.  Which one do we want?"
	"Just plain old pepper would probably be best."
	Ellis reached out, grabbed a tin off the shelf and handed it to Duncan for his approval.  "Here, how about this?"
	"No.  That's whole peppercorns, and we don't have a grinder.  You better get some already ground up."
	Duncan put the tin back on the shelf, and Ellis took down another.  This time he had a tin of coarse ground black pepper.  "Here, will this do?" he asked.
	"Yeah that's great.  I want a donut or something, let's go over to the bakery."
	They each picked out a donut and headed for the check stand.  The line was long, but after what seemed like forever, they paid for the few things and headed out the door to the parking lot.  Duncan opened the back hatch and set the sack in next to the boxes they had retrieved from the rear of the store.  They got in and he started the car, but didn't move.
	"Where do you want to go?  We should probably wait till it's dark before we get coal, but that won't be long.  You want to go up to Dave and Carol's and see if that girl's there?"
	"Yeah, that'll at least kill a little time, and I might even score a few points for the future.  She was talking about moving up here from wherever she and Dave grew up, somewhere in California I think.  I just need to keep my nose in the door so to speak.  I wouldn't want her to forget me altogether.  You know, out-a-sight, out-a-mind.  Maybe they would like a few green peppers or some of the eggs we just scored.  You know they'd like to burn one with us."
	"See, I knew we'd get hung up somehow.  It's a good thing we brought four of those joints."
	Duncan pulled the Toyota out of the parking lot, and into the steady stream of Saturday afternoon traffic.  He maneuvered the car across three lanes to the right, where he could turn onto a less traveled road.  They headed up a steep hill, made several more turns and stopped in front of a large two-story house with a screened porch all along the front and one side.  There were two Volkswagen Bugs parked in the driveway.  One with California plates, looked to be in much better shape than the other.  The front yard was covered six or eight inches deep in leaves that had fallen from the four large maple trees that nearly obscured the house from view.  They got out, went to the back of the car, and opened the hatch.  Duncan reached into a box, came out with a dozen eggs and handed them to Ellis.  From the other box he took two of the green peppers and some carrots, and closing the hatch, they headed for the house.  The dry leaves rustled as they waded through them, and Duncan kicked wildly at a small pile that someone had raked up near the porch.  Ellis opened the screen door to the porch and they stepped in.  Duncan knocked on the door, and a male voice called for them to come in.
	Duncan opened the door and they both stepped into a very full room.  The room was so full of furniture, there was barely room to walk around.  Anywhere there wasn't a couch or overstuffed chair, there was a table, and anywhere there wasn't a table there was a lamp.  The room wasn't piled full of things at random like those messy cluttered places where Ellis had always lived, but it was purposefully decorated full, to the point that there was little or no room for anything else.  The walls were hung with drawings and paintings, some prints of the old masters, and some originals from local artists of far less prominence.  There was even a small painting that Ellis had painted before he was excommunicated from the University Art Department a few years before.  A record player uttered a scratchy rendition of an early Beatles' song that mixed with the canned laughter of a situation comedy on the television to create a sound that reminded Ellis of the cluster of magpies he and Fred had seen earlier in the day.  Dave, half sat, half lay on one of the couches with his feet up on a small low table that rested in the center of a ring of furniture.  He had a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
	"Hey man!  What's up?"  Dave looked up and smiled, but didn't move.  "How was the big city?" he said, more to the television than to Ellis.
	"Not bad.  Actually we had a pretty good time.  Had to get a job for a while, just to get out of there, but other than that it was okay.  Even the job was kinda fun."  Reaching in his shirt pocket, Ellis took out one of the joints and held it out to Dave.  "Got any fire.  We scored some pretty good 'tuna' while we were over there."
	Dave reached out and took the joint from Ellis, lit it off his cigarette, and after taking a long drag, handed it back.  Ellis took a hit and handed it to Duncan.  Dave let out a cloud of smoke with a thick cough that seemed to expel half his bronchial tube, and continued to cough and choke until he took several drinks from the beer he had been holding.  "Jesus Christ!  You gotta be careful with that shit."
	Carol came in from one of the other rooms.  "Is somebody trying to die in here or what?"  She looked around and noticed Duncan, Ellis, and then the joint that by now was back in Dave's hands.  "I thought I smelled something good going on in here.  You guys can't be smoking that shit in here without me."  She deftly reached down and plucked the joint right out of Dave's mouth.  "Hey Molly!  Get in here.  There's brain food going up in smoke in here."  She took a long drag herself, and just as she finished, Molly appeared to take the joint from her.
	Ellis immediately eyed Molly as she came in.  Their eyes met briefly as she handed the joint off to him and they both smiled slightly.  She was one of those girls with a beauty that hung just under the surface.  Although she didn't meet the standard criteria put forth by modern sexually-oriented advertising, she had an earthy, natural attraction that Ellis found very energizing.  She stood about five and a half feet, just slightly taller than Ellis, and even that seemed attractive to him.  She was big boned and muscular.  He could tell that if there was hard work to be done, Molly could certainly pull her own weight.  Her skin was not smooth and flawless like some of the other girls he knew, but it was real, and showed many of the trails she had traveled.  Ellis thought she was probably a year or two older than he was and that too, was cause for interest.  An older woman might show him a thing or two that he needed showing.
	"Oh here!"  Ellis said, holding out the eggs to Carol, and reached for the vegetables that Duncan held.  "We just went by the dumpster and got a bunch of good shit."
	"Oh wow!"  Carol said, reaching for the eggs.  "You don't often find eggs in there."
	Duncan handed over the few peppers and carrots to her as well; who now had the whole mess cradled in her arms.  "Yeah, eggs don't end up in there too often," Duncan said, "but this is maybe the fourth or fifth dozen we've found in just a few days, and this time anything good was all in a box beside the dumpster."
	Molly looked a bit puzzled by all the dumpster talk, and asked, "You mean garbage dumpsters?"
	Dave had taken a drink from his beer and tried to talk and drink at the same time.  He choked, spraying beer into his lap as he did so, and finally managed to speak.  "That's right, they climb down into the filthy things and then come out with all kinds of shit they try and pass off as food."
	"Oh shit Dave!"  Carol scolded, tossing a green pepper at him as he lay back on the couch.  "Look at that and tell me what's the matter with it."
	He batted it away with one hand, and it bounced softly on the couch.  "It's fucking filthy.  That's what's wrong with it.  All that shit's filthy, and you're filthy when you get done crawling around in there.  You probably risk getting the plague even going near one of those fucking things."
	"You dip shit!"  Carol said, heading for the kitchen with the armload of vegetables.  "Have you ever heard of water?  That's that stuff you squirt all over you twice a day."  She looked over at Duncan and Ellis.  "Can you believe it, 'Mr. Clean' here, takes two showers a day now.  He says, those nasty little germs work so fast, that you can't let them sit around for a whole day, or they'll make you sick or something.  What is that Dave?  What is it that they do if they sit around too long?"
	Everybody laughed but Dave, who sat up straight, set his now empty beer bottle on the table and standing, moved toward the kitchen as well.
	"Oh fuck you Carol!"  He said smiling as he walked passed Ellis and Duncan.  "When we all get done fucking around with school, and parties, and all the rest of this shit, I'm going to get rich as hell, and you have to be neat and clean to do that.  In fact I'll probably have to support the whole lot of you scruffy fuckers."  He paused long enough to open the refrigerator and then went on.  "In fact I might as well start right now.  You assholes want a beer as long as you're here."
	"Sure, why not," Duncan said with a laugh.
	"Jesus Christ, you're nice Dave."  Carol jumped in.  "Duncan and Ellis just brought you your fucking dinner.  I'd say they might be subsidizing you at this point, not to mention the vast quantities of all of our water you waste with two showers a day.  How could you get that dirty just sitting around on the couch drinking beer, and smoking dope?"  She took the two beers for Duncan and Ellis, still standing in the living room, and headed that way.  "By the way that's good pot you guys brought.  Is there going to be any of it around we might score?"
	Ellis reached into his pocket and produced another joint.  "Yeah, I think so.  We kinda have to get together at the farm, and figure out how much it'll take to get through winter."
	He took the beer she handed him and gave her the joint.  "Thanks.  Here, I have a match somewhere."  Fumbling briefly in his shirt pockets Ellis produced a book of matches and lit the joint that was now planted in Carol's mouth.  She took a hit and passed it to Molly, who had been standing in the same place since they had finished the first joint.  Molly took the joint and looked blankly at it for a few moments, and then realizing she was already too stoned to move, she handed it to Ellis without taking a toke of her own.  As their hands touched in the passing of the joint, Ellis felt like he saw little blue sparks jump between them.  Molly's blank expression cleared, and she looked deeply into Ellis' slightly blood-shot eyes and smiled.
	"Have you been doing any carving since I saw you last?" she asked, pointing to a small wood carving of a fish sitting on a bar stool that Ellis had carved some time ago and given to Dave and Carol.
	"Not really.  I didn't have time while we were in Seattle, but I am going to again soon."  Molly looked like she might fall down any second, and Ellis took a couple of sideways steps along the couch he stood in front of to make room for her to sit down, and gestured for her to do so.  She plopped down on the couch, nearly disappearing into the soft, blue, velvety, overstuffed cushions, and Ellis sat down beside her.
	"Thanks!  I needed that.  I was about to fall down.  I think I got too stoned.  I don't know how you guys can smoke another one of those."  She leaned back deeper into the cushions, closed her eyes, let out a soft sigh, and turned her face toward Ellis.
	"Are you going to spend the winter up here?"  Ellis asked quietly.
	"I don't know yet," she said, opening her eyes briefly and giving Ellis a soft smile.  "I'm thinking about it, but I have to figure out how to support myself.  I guess I have to figure that out whether I stay here or go back to California.  I have a job down there, but I hate it, and I'd rather be farther away from my ex-husband.  I guess he's not officially an 'ex' yet, but he sure is in my life.  What an asshole.  I can't believe I ever married him.  I even knew what a fucker he was before, but I guess I thought he'd change.  He did too, but he just got worse."
	"Was he abusive?  Ellis asked.
	"Some."
	"That's a bummer."
	"I'll tell you the whole story sometime when we have a lot of time," she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them tightly against her body.
	Ellis looked over at her, now sitting in a near fetal position, and he felt a sense of warmth for her that went beyond the physical attraction that he had come here with.  "I think I'd like to have a lot of time - - with you," he said, in almost a whisper.
	"Me too."
	The joint had gone around the room and returned.  Carol had to poke Molly on the shoulder to get her attention, and even then it took two pokes.  "Hey!" she said.  "We're trying to smoke a joint here, and you two are sitting there whispering to each other.  Get with it here."  She smiled as she held the joint out for Molly.
	"Sorry," Molly said, as she received the joint from Carol and took a small toke before handing it to Ellis.  Ellis too took a hit and passed it on.
	 As the joint continued around the room, Ellis and Molly sat immersed in each other's space.  Even Carol's teasing had subconsciously pulled them together, and as the rest of the group finished the joint and talked lightly about the latest Beetles' album, the two of them silently reached out into the swirling ether for a glimpse of the other's soul.
	Molly sat motionless with her eyes closed and her head resting on her knees.  Her thoughts skipped from one plane to the next, in random jumps and bounds, until she felt a sense of weightless, timeless, selflessness, which took her out of her body.  Everything went out of focus and she seemed to rise out of herself, floating away from the couch where she and Ellis were sitting.  Looking back, she could clearly see Ellis and herself sitting on the couch, but the rest of the room remained a blur.  Even the sounds of Dave, and Duncan, and Carol talking and laughing were muted and obscured to the point where they became a kind of white sound that helped hold her vision, of she and Ellis, clear within her present consciousness.  She could see deep into the center of her thoughts, with a clarity that she had never experienced before.  All the walls she had built around her most basic inner thoughts, for their protection, were stripped away.  She could see, no she could feel the root level of her being.  It was like she had become aware of some kind of binary code that controls ones very existence.  Not only was she aware of these things for herself, but she could see Ellis in nearly the same light.  She could feel the sincere simplicity of his motives, and see the nakedness of his emotions.  She blushed, thinking of her intrusion into his most private parts.  She had gone looking for his soul, and now that she had come this close, her own modesty held her back from entering any deeper into what she felt was a private sanctuary.  She could see right into Ellis, like he was a clear glass sculpture.  All his various aspects danced openly in full view to her, but she turned away, afraid of violating this personal space.
	A slight involuntary muscular spasm jerked her internal clock back into motion, and as she slid gently back into her body, she opened her eyes and looked at Ellis, still lingering somewhere near the edges of his own vision.
	"Do you have a few minutes?  I want to show you something," she said, putting her hand on his arm.
	The sound of her voice lifted him out of a swirling cloud that had gathered him up in its magnetic field and spun him into confusion.  The soft touch of her hand on his arm stopped his spin and returned him to the present time.  He opened his eyes and looked blankly at her.
	"Come here a minute," she said.  "I want to show you something."  She unfolded herself and scooted forward on the couch.
	"Sure."  Ellis acted automatically, and as she rose from the couch, he did too.
	"We probably ought to be getting coal pretty soon," Duncan said, looking at Ellis.
	"Yeah, in just a minute, I'll be right back," Ellis said, following Molly from the room.
	She went into the kitchen, opened the door to the basement, and after turning on the light started down the steep stairs.  Ellis closed the door behind them and they descended the stairs together.  The basement was poorly lit and the open joists revealed the plumbing and wiring for the floor above, and cobwebs hung down wherever Molly had not walked on her way to her room.  Just as she seemed to disappear into the dark shadow cast by an antiquated oil furnace, she pulled a short chain hanging from the low ceiling, and a second light came on illuminating a door.  Molly opened the door and turned on another light within a small room.  She went in and gestured for Ellis to enter as well.
	He found himself in a bright warm room full of color.  There was a bookshelf half full of paperback books on one wall.  Against the opposite wall, a maroon, velveteen, wing back chair sat next to a small cluttered desk.  The fan from an electric wall heater purred quietly on the wall from where he had entered, and on the far side of the room sat the bed and at its foot was an old chest of drawers with a built in closet above.  One of the closet doors was partially open revealing several brightly colored blouses and a heavy wool coat.  The bed had an old hand-quilted spread laid over it along with several small pillows.  Above the bookcase, taped to the knotty pine paneling that made up the walls, was a large picture poster.  It depicted a young man and woman, hand in hand, strolling along a deserted beach.  With smiles of obvious joy and their pant legs rolled to the knees.  The feathery foam from a spent wave licked at their bare toes in the sand.
	Molly closed the door and sat down on the edge of the bed.  She picked up one of the pillows and hugging it close to herself, pulled her legs up onto the bed in a partial lotus position.  "I don't know what I wanted to show you actually, unless it was just my whole room.  It just seemed closed in, up there.  I had to get out of there."
	"I see you brought a good winter coat," Ellis said glancing at the open closet door and sitting on the arm of the wing back chair.
	She nodded and nervously looked around the room.  Her eyes finally came to rest on the poster above the books.  After a few moments she looked at Ellis and said,  "I wonder - - - " she paused, looked back at the poster and tried again.
	"I wonder - - if -"  Once again she stopped.
	"Do you think that could be us?"  Ellis blurted out.
	She looked back at him, her tensions, from the previous moment, drained away, and she smiled.
	"Maybe," she said.  "Maybe, if we're lucky."
	Ellis got up and walked across the room.  "It may be a little cold for the beach, even if we did have one, but I think we can walk in the snow pretty soon."  He put his hand on her arm.  She loosened her grip on the pillow and put her hand on his, and he bent forward, giving her a gentle kiss on the forehead.  She tipped her head back slightly giving him a light kiss on the corner of his mouth, and when he kissed her back, she reached up and pulled him toward her.  Ellis had leaned forward farther than his balance would allow, and he toppled over on top of her.  They untangled a little, lay there for a moment looking at each other and giggling, and then kissed once more.
	Suddenly they heard Duncan's voice calling down the stairs from the kitchen.  The closed door, the distance, and the whirring of the heater fan muffled it, but they at least heard the words 'snowing', and Ellis' name.
	"Well shit!  I suppose it's time for me to go get coal."  Ellis rolled onto his back, took Molly's hand in his, and sat up.  "Yes, I think that could be us," he said nodding at the poster and looking at her.
	She smiled up at him from where she still lay on the bed, and squeezed his hand.  "I hope so.  It would be nice to have a fun relationship for a change."
	"Good!"  Ellis let go of her hand and stood up.  "Look, let's get together and spend some time real soon."
	Molly slid to the edge of the bed and stood up as well.  "Yeah, when can you come back to town?"
	"Well, I'm kind of at Fred and Duncan's mercy, unless I just walk out to the highway and hitchhike, but they come in pretty often.  They should come in every day to school, but they don't usually."
	He started to open the door, but then stopped and turned back toward her.  They looked at each other, no; they looked into each other.  It was a long warm look.  They both smiled.  It was a kind of sad smile, but only because they had to part.  As they studied the faint lines in each others face, their hands touched first, and then each sliding a hand up the others arm, they became closer and closer until there was nothing else to do, but embrace.  Their lips touched lightly at first, and then slowly, as they found their way around, they pressed against each other a little more until their lips thinned slightly from the pressure.  After a short reconnaissance from both sides, they pulled away a little and then parted.  Ellis turned, opened the door, and went out of the room, holding the door for her.
	The basement door opened, and once more Duncan called from the head of the stairs.  "The snow's coming down hard, Ellis.  We gotta get that fucking coal, if we're going to."
	Yeah, I'm right here.  We're coming up right now.  Hey, when you coming into school next?"
	Duncan had already turned and walked back to the living room, not hearing Ellis' question, but Ellis knew whatever he said now, would mean very little later, so he didn't ask again.  Molly shut the door and the two of them made their way to the stairway.  They stopped once more at the foot of the stairs, in an attempt to absorb a little more of each other's spirit.  It was not easy to pull away, but finally Ellis unwrapped himself from her warmth, and took hold of the stair railing and pulled himself up the first few steps.  Molly followed, and they soon stood, a little flushed, in the living room with the rest of the group.  Ellis could see, looking out the window that Duncan was right about the snow.  It was coming down hard.
	"I'm ready," Ellis said, looking at Molly one more time.
	"Gosh, thanks for the eggs and stuff.  Hope you guys don't get stuck on the way home."  Carol said, as she gave Duncan a pat on the back.
	"Yeah, I hope that shit don't kill us," Dave remarked with a little chuckle.
	"All them baths, and now he's afraid of good food, he's kinda turning into a wuss.  Don't you think?"  Duncan tried to keep a straight face as he said this, but he let a little sardonic grin curl the corners of his mouth.  Everyone laughed, but Dave, and Duncan opened the front door and stepped out into a near blizzard.  Ellis, who was lagging behind, reached out, gave Molly a short squeeze on the hand, and headed for the door as well.
	"See you guys later.  Soon Molly."  He gave her a look that ended in a soft smile, and went out the door, shutting it behind him.
	"We better get that coal and get the fuck out of here, while we still can," Duncan called from the sidewalk.
	Ellis was just reaching the foot of the several stairs leading down from the porch.  Although his heart and thoughts were still lingering inside with Molly, he knew how a snowstorm could affect them.  "Yeah, you're right.  It won't take too much of this to close the spring road for the rest of the winter."  They both got into the Toyota, and Duncan drove down the back way to where the University stored its coal.
	The pile was two or three hundred feet long, half as wide, and at least thirty feet high.  It was a mountain.  They pulled up next to the pile, and stopped.
	"Put the back seat down, and I'll get the sacks."
	"Okay."  Ellis began to struggle with the back seat.
	"That little lever over there.  Pull it up."  Duncan pointed to the side of the seat.  Ellis finally figured it out, and the seat rocked forward and lay down out of the way.  Duncan fished several gunnysacks and a little army surplus folding shovel out from behind the front seat and went to the back where he opened the rear hatch.  He pushed the broken box of tampons up against the front seat, put all of the food into one of the two boxes, and pushed it forward as well, making plenty of room for the coal.
	"Here, let's fill this box first," Duncan said.  "We should have got a couple more while we were at the dumpster."
	"Next time."
	Ellis held the box while Duncan shoveled in as much coal as the two of them could lift into the back of the car.  He then held the sacks open to be filled and set them, three in all, into the back as well.  They worked fast, but not frantically, and said nothing.  Duncan helped load the last sack, threw the shovel in behind it, and closed the hatch.  They both got in, and drove away.
	"How long will that last?"  Ellis asked as they pulled back onto the street, and drove cautiously in the ever-deepening snow toward the edge of town.
	"The coal?  It depends how warm you want to be, but it should last for three or four days, if Francine stays away from the stove.  She likes to keep it roaring."
	"What's the skinny with her, anyway?"  Ellis brushed snow from his thin beard, and took off his hat, shaking the snow onto the floor of the car.  "She's kind of a neat freak, isn't she?"
	"Yeah, she'll get over it if she lasts that long.  I really don't think she's going to be around too long though.  I've never seen John hang out with any one chick very long, and I don't think he's any more serious about Francine than any others he's brought home for their short little stays.  They kinda hang out for a while and then they just seem to move on.  There's no fuss, no fight, or nothin, they're just gone one day, and John just says, 'oh yeah, we just got tired of each other,' and that's all there is to it."
	"She doesn't even want the God damn dogs in the house.  What the fuck kinda deal is that?"  Ellis sounded a wee bit fussy, even though he laughed as he said it.
	"I just wouldn't pay any attention to her, bout that.  Shit, if she gets too crabby about it, we can always start letting the pig in the house, and she'll be glad to have just dogs lying around."  They both laughed, but hoped it didn't come to that.  No one wanted Effie rooting around in the house or lying on the inside couch.  It was bad enough to have her always taking up the couch out on the porch.
	By now they had reached the edge of town, and were headed up the long hill leading out of town toward Colfax.  The snow was coming down hard enough that it was difficult to see, and it had accumulated to about a half inch.  The road was getting slick, but Duncan had good snow tires, and so far they were getting along fine.
	"Shit, I can't hardly believe it.  Yesterday, Fred and I couldn't even see this well, because of the dust, and now here we are again, but this time it's snow.  God I hope we don't have to pull off the road again."
	"We won't have to pull off, but I suppose we could slide off."
	Ellis moaned at the thought of that, but didn't say anything, and they drove along in silence.  The headlights reflecting off the snow coming down did make it hard to see, or at least to see very far and when the lights were on bright, it was even worse, so Duncan drove slowly, keeping the lights dimmed.  The lights from oncoming cars made it even more difficult to see, but there weren't very many, and after twenty minutes or so, they came to the turn off.  Duncan turned left onto the side road that went by the landlord's before branching off onto the dirt road that went by the farm.
	"Shit!  You think the spring road's still open?"  Ellis asked, hardly believing Duncan would try the shortcut.
	"I thought we'd give it a try.  You feel like pushing anyway, don't you?"
	"Oh fuck, I can push, but the way it's blowing, you know how it drifts some places back in there.  We could end up buried completely."
	"You worry too much, Ellis.  It's only been snowing a little while.  There couldn't be that much snow back there yet.  We'll be okay."  Duncan laughed, and plowed on to the turnoff to the narrow dirt road that meandered its way along the edge of Rebel Flat to where they lived, about three miles in.
	"Well I fuckin hope so."  Ellis shook his head and pulled the last joint out of his pocket, lit it and handed it to Duncan.  "If we're going to get stuck, we might as well be able to blame it on drugs."
	"Sounds good to me," Duncan said, taking a long hit on the joint and handing it back.
	Ellis had begun rolling a cigarette, and when the joint came back so soon, he waved it away.  "Hang on to that for a minute, and let me get this rolled."
	Once he finished the cigarette, he resumed smoking his share of the joint, and they drove along nervously in silence for a little while.  The snow had drifted some into the low spots in the road, but nothing deep enough to worry about yet, however, the worst was yet to come.  Close to the farm, was a long low straight stretch, which had been known to fill up two or three feet deep for several hundred yards.  This was the spot that could stick even a four-wheel drive vehicle until spring.  Even then you'd have to wait until the mud dried up before you could drive out on your own.  The idea of trying to talk the landlord into bringing a tractor back there to haul them out, didn't appeal to either of them, but Duncan drove on, with the faith of a true believer leading the way.  Most of the road lay along the ridge where the wind kept it blown mostly clear of snow, but every time they dropped into the shadow of a hill, there would be a drift that piled snow anywhere from six inches to a foot deep.
	"Here we are," Duncan said, as they came around a sharp corner.  Lights from the farm were in sight, about half a mile in the distance.  "Cross your fingers, here comes the worst part of the road."
	Once around the corner they headed down a steep hill for about a hundred feet and then the road leveled out for several hundred yards.  Duncan accelerated as they went down the hill.
	"Jesus Christ!" was all Ellis could say.
	The Toyota fish tailed down the hill and slid around the corner at the bottom.  It was still snowing hard, and visibility was next to nothing.  Duncan kept his foot on the gas pedal, and at first they gained speed.  Once they turned the corner, however, the snow gradually got deeper and deeper until it reached nearly a foot.  It sprayed up around the car, making them feel like they were in a tunnel.  The rear of the car swerved back and forth, and they began to loose momentum.
	"Oh shit!"  Duncan yelled, with his right foot still holding the accelerator tightly to the floor.
	"Let up a little.  Jesus Christ!  Let up!"  Ellis screamed.
	The road headed slightly up hill.  The car slowed even more, and just before they came to a stop, with the tires still spinning wildly, they pulled up out of the deep snow, and onto a patch of bare ground.  The tires caught hold, and the Toyota lurched forward out of control.
	"Oh shit!"  Duncan yelled again, slamming on the brakes.  Everything slid to a stop.  The car stopped some thirty feet or so, farther down the road, but still on the road, and everything in the Toyota ended up somewhat farther forward.  Ellis ended up with a, something less than gentle, introduction to the dashboard, and the coal slid up against the back of the front seats and into the box of food.  A couple carrots and several potatoes popped out of the box and bounced into the front seat.
	Ellis pushed himself away from the dashboard, took the bent cigarette out of his mouth, and turned to Duncan.  "Jesus Christ, Duncan, are you about done."
	"Done!  Fuck, did you see how deep that snow was?"  He couldn't believe Ellis was giving him a hard time.  He put the car in gear again, pulled slowly forward around a slight corner and the last several hundred yards into the driveway.  "I kinda thought that I did pretty damn good, just to get us home.  I think that might be the last trip on the spring road this year."
	"Well you scared the shit out of me," Ellis said, as he relit his cigarette and opened the door to the car.  The wind whipped snow into the front seat, as he stepped out into the inch or two of snow that lay in the flat driveway.  "Shit Duncan, There isn't hardly enough snow here to worry about."
	"You little shit head, you're lucky you're not out there trudging home right now," Duncan reminded him,  "and if it hadn't been for my superior driving skills, you would be, not to mention the coal and food and Francine's tampons.  You'd be packing that shit home too."
	"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did great, and I'm just glad we didn't die while you were doing so good."  Ellis laughed, but Duncan could tell he was still fussy about ending up as part of the dashboard.
	All three of the dogs were bouncing in the front yard as they went around to the back of the car and opened the hatch.  They had to reach forward and slide the sacks of coal back, before they could lift them out and haul them up the short walkway to the rear porch, that separated the front and back halves of the house.  When that was done, Duncan took a flashlight from under the front seat, and groped around looking for the vegetables that had come out of the box when he had stopped so abruptly.  Finding them along with the several tampons that had skittered around in the slide, he put them all into the food box and took it from the car to the house.  Ellis grabbed the box of tampons and followed.  They stomped most of the snow off their feet loudly on the porch and opened the back door.
	"You better wipe your feet before you come into my kitchen," Francine called from the parlor.
	Duncan paid no attention to her and put the box of food down on the kitchen table.  Ellis laughed and did the same with his box.
	"I mean it you two.  I just mopped that floor this morning."
	"Oh shit Francine, quit worrying about the God damn floor.  A little snow isn't going to hurt it any.  Have you guys eaten yet?"  Duncan went into the parlor and flopped down on the couch next to Fred.  No one answered him.  They all seemed to be engrossed in something barely visible on the television.  Ellis looked through the food box and sorted out the potatoes and carrots from the green peppers and tomatoes, which surprisingly enough, had not been affected by the coal sliding into them.  He then gathered up the broken box of tampons and walked to the parlor door.
	"Gosh Francine we even brought you a special present, if you want them."
	"What the hell is that?" she asked, looking up from where she sat wedged into a large chair with John.
	"It's just what it looks like.  We found'em in the dumpster at Safeway.  They looked perfectly all right to us, so we grabbed them.  If you don't want'em we can just burn'em."
	"Jesus Christ!  You expect me to use tampons you drug out of the garbage?  You might as well have brought home used ones."  She got off John's lap and went into the kitchen to look at the box of tampons Ellis had set back on the kitchen table.
	"It doesn't make any difference to me.  You can do anything you want with them.  We just thought you might be able to use'em.  They sure look clean and new like to me."  Ellis walked back into the parlor and opened the door to the stove.  "Looks like the stove could use a little coal."
	"You guys get coal?"  Fred looked away from the television for the first time.
	Duncan put his feet up on the coffee table, and looked up at Ellis.  "Yeah we got a bunch of coal, and if it had been up to Ellis we'd be hauling it through the snow from about a half mile back."
	"Alright!  All right!  You did a good job getting us home through the snowdrifts.  It's just that you tried to kill me at the same time.
	Duncan looked at John and then Fred, and laughed.  "Oh fuck, he's just pissed because I put his cigarette out on the dashboard."
	"Yeah!  With it still in my mouth."  There was a scratch at the front door.  Ellis walked over, opened it, and all three of the dogs strung in.
	"Don't let those dirty dogs in here," Francine yelled from the kitchen.
	No one paid any attention to her, least of all the dogs.  Punt went directly into the kitchen and shook the snow off himself.  Francine screamed at him, but he just wandered into the bathroom and lapped away at the water in the toilet bowl.  Birthday and Sundance shook off in the parlor and lay down, one on the couch between Fred and Duncan, and the other on the floor next to the stove.
	Ellis walked through the kitchen, picking up an empty three pound coffee can, and went out onto the back porch.  He scooped the can full of coal from one of the sacks, and returned to the parlor, where he dumped the contents of the can into the still open stove, and shut the door.  "There, that ought to hold it for a little while."
	Francine picked up a cheap romance novel she had been reading, from the kitchen counter and returned to the parlor, still sulking about the dogs, or maybe more so, because no one had paid any attention to her.  She sat on the arm of the chair John was in, and turned toward Duncan and Fred.  "I'm serious about those dogs.  They're not going to be in the house.  They're not even  - - "
	Duncan looked up, and cut her off.  "Whoa, Francine.  We've been here for a couple years or so, and the dogs have been here even longer, and they've been in the house all that time too, and - - and I guess what I'm trying to say is, that the dogs will be staying in the house, as always, and that's that."  He held his hands up, as if to gesture that discussion was closed on the subject.
	Francine flashed a wicked look at Duncan and then Ellis who still stood warming himself by the stove.  "But they're so dirty and smelly.  Tell them how dirty they are, John." she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, and then caressing his neck.