Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom Read Free

don’t expect you to believe me, lad,” he said in the dream. “Not yet. But when it happens, remember I warned you. And remember this, too: you will love again.”
    A jet from the Air Force base in Cheyenne broke the sound barrier above the ranch and Duncan looked up to watch it pass. When he turned back his father, Tiffy, and the Cadillac were gone.
    Duncan awoke to rain and thunder. He lay in bed and wondered what Sean Delaney would think of him now. The only worthwhile things he had done in his twenty-one years were paint with Benjamin and fornicate with Tiffy. His father would probably be proud of the first and impressed with the second. But what would he think of Fiona’s ultimatum?
    He would spit in the dirt.
    All his life Sean Delaney had asked for nothing and expected less. But Fiona preferred the safe way, and Duncan was as much her son as he was Sean’s. He lay in bed, fears chasing hopes through his head like dogs after rabbits. He watched lightning strike through his window. He listened to thunder and the rain against his roof. He closed his eyes.
    It took him a long time to fall asleep again.
         
    Duncan spent the next morning doing chores. He mended fence on the west end and dug out a drainage ditch clogged with branches and mud after the hard rain of the night before. At one o’clock he read the help wanted ads as he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and drank a beer. None of the ads interested him and he threw the paper in the trash. He called Tiffy three times but she never answered.
    After lunch he cleared brush from around the stable and tended the horses. He saddled his mare and rode out to the Circle D’s lone oil rig, where he greased the pump and checked the motor. The well produced less than ten barrels a day, but Fiona wanted to do her part to reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil. Duncan was glad to tend the pump. He wanted to do his part too. He was riding back to the stable when a flash of sun on metal caught his eye. He reined his horse and circled until he saw the glint again. He followed the reflection across the grass to the edge of what was once a good-sized crater.
    It was not much now, maybe seventy feet across, a shallow, grassy soup bowl in the earth with a rainwater puddle in the middle. Duncan got down from the mare and plucked a silver earring from the grass. It was an inch long and shaped like a jumping trout with small sapphire eyes. He knelt and looked around him, the wet grass soaking unnoticed into his jeans.
    The air force people did a good job cleaning up after the crash, but in the twelve years since, Duncan had found numerous jagged metal pieces and Plexiglass shards and lengths of melted wire. When he was ten, he found a tooth there. He had cried until Woody convinced him it was a buffalo molar. That took some time, because it was a big tooth, and Duncan remembered his father as a giant. He had not gone there for a long time after because of the things he might find.
    But the scorched earth had grown back green and twelve winters had washed the rocks clean and neither grass nor rocks had been black for years. All that remained of the crash was a grassy rut where the jet had plowed the prairie, leading to a dent in the earth where it finally exploded in a brilliant, futile burst. Duncan dropped the earring in his pocket, mounted the mare, and started back to the house.
       
    Duncan had just walked through the front door when he heard the Purgatory Truck turn off the highway. He popped two beers and stepped onto the porch. Benjamin braked in a dusty whirlwind and leaped out. He stopped when he reached the porch steps.
    “Jesus God!” Benjamin declared. “And Fiona says I stink!”
    Duncan gave him a beer and went to his room. The earring fell from his pocket when he took off his jeans. He set it beside a picture of him and Tiffy taken at the rodeo when they were high school seniors. Neither had changed much since, though Duncan shaved twice a week now instead