Chapter 53
SLOANE
For a moment after the door bars shut, I can't see much at all.
Then my eyes adjust and the barn resolves into shapes — the pigs milling at our feet, the pale rectangles of the two small windows, Maggie an arm's length away, breathing hard.
Outside, where there was a blue sky ten minutes ago, there's a brown murk pressing against the glass, and the light coming through it is the color of weak tea.
It's the middle of the day and it looks like dusk underwater.
Maggie pulls a cord, and a single bulb comes on overhead. It doesn't do much, just throws a small yellow pool over the pigs, leaving the corners of the barn in shadow.
"Okay," she says, mostly to herself. "Okay, we're in. Everyone's in."
I become aware of the sound. I'd been too busy to hear it, and now it's all I can hear — a low roar against the walls, the wind, rising and dropping and rising again, and underneath it a constant fine hiss, like someone pouring sand against the windows, which is exactly what it is.
No rain. I keep waiting for rain because that's what a storm sounds like in LA, and it doesn't come. A bang comes from outside.
"What was that?"
"Gate, probably. Or a bucket." Maggie's wiping grit out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. "Nothing important."
I've been in storms and I've even sat through an earthquake that emptied the wine glasses off the shelves.
I once watched a palm tree come down across a friend's pool in Malibu and I'm not someone who panics at weather.
But I've never been sealed inside a wooden building in the middle of the afternoon while the day turns brown and a wall of dirt screams at the walls.
The strangeness of it is unsettling. The dark at the wrong time of day, and the sense of the whole world being shut.
I look at Maggie and thankfully she looks calm. "How long does it last?" I ask.
"Not long, usually. Ten minutes, twenty. The front passes and then it's just wind for a while." She picks her way through the pigs toward the back wall. "But while we're stuck in here we need to cool off. Feel that?"
I do. With the door shut and the windows shut and fourteen pigs and two people sealed in, the air's gone thick and close.
"Pigs can't sweat," she says, crouching to grab the hose she fed in. "They cool down by getting wet. Shut in here in this heat, they'll overheat if we don't keep them cool. So." She cranks the tap and the hose coughs and produces a thin, unenthusiastic stream. "It's not much but it'll do."
She starts with Dolly, who's pressed against my legs and trembling. The water runs over the old pig's back and Dolly releases a long, shuddering grunt and leans harder into me. I put my hand on her and feel her start to settle.
"She trusts you," Maggie says, moving the hose along Dolly's flank. "Dolly panicked and she trusted you."
She works her way through them, Barbara and Gerald and the rest, the feeble stream wetting them down one by one.
The panicked milling slows, and the grunting drops to something more contented.
The barn smells filthy, there's grit in my hair and down my back, my white T-shirt is brown and I don't care even slightly.
Maggie straightens up, the hose still running in her hand. Sweat's running down her temple, her shirt's stuck to her, and there's a smear of dirt across her face, but she's grinning.
"You're a mess," she says.
"So are you."
"You want some of this?" She lifts the hose.
"God, yes. Please."
She turns it on me, and the water's cool against the back of my neck. I make a sound that's frankly indecent, tipping my head and letting it run over my shoulders. When I open my eyes she's watching me with an expression that makes my temperature rise all over again.
"My turn," I say, and I take the hose off her.
I run it over her — her neck, her shoulders — and she closes her eyes as the water soaks the front of her shirt through. The cotton goes transparent and clings to her. I'm only human, so I stare at her nipples through the wet cotton, drawn tight, the curve of her breasts shifting as she breathes.
"You'd win a wet T-shirt competition for sure," I say. "I really don't mind this storm at all."
Maggie laughs and wrings out her hair. "Let's see how you feel about that when we get back out. It won't be pretty."
She takes the hose back and gives the pigs one more shower each before we sink down side by side against the wall in the straw. Dolly settles against my other side with a groan and shuts her eyes. The wind howls, the sand hisses, the light bulb sways and the heat presses down.
"This is insane," I say after a while.
"Yeah." Maggie turns her head against the wall to look at me. "You're handling it well. I half expected you to be hiding in the corner."
"I've got an excellent distraction." I smile and lean in to kiss her, brushing my lips against hers and then pressing in firmer when she turns into me.
Maggie's hand wraps around my waist, and I shift and straddle her.
Her grip tightens, her thumb stroking against my ribs under my wet T-shirt.
I bite her bottom lip and feel her smile against my mouth, and we make out until I lose track of how long it's been.
The roar peaks and holds and then, slowly, starts to drop. The brown murk on the glass lifts by degrees, and the wind settles into ordinary gusts.
Maggie finally pulls away to listen, her hands moving to my back and caressing me. "That's it," she whispers. "It's passed."
I don't move off her. The storm's done but I'm not, and from the way she looks at me I don't think she's in any hurry either. But also I'm flushed and overheated and the poor pigs need to get back outside.
"Let's finish this later," I murmur against her lips. I kiss her one more time before I stand and offer my hand to pull her up.
Maggie opens the door and I'm not prepared for the damage.
Everything is brown. A fine layer of pale dust has settled over the entire world, the kind that gets into every crease and corner of everything.
The drive, the fences, the water troughs, the goat playground, the leaves of the oak — all of it the same matte tan, like someone's dropped a filter over the whole farm.
The pig pool is a flat disc of sludge and the light's coming back faded and strange, the sun pushing through the haze still hanging in the air.
"Right," I say, looking at the wreck of it. "I get why this place is called Duster."