Whirlwind Read Free Page B

pleasantly cool evening.
    The heat had already begun to dis-sipate, and a wandering breeze raised wob-bly dust devils along the interstate that stretched from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Snakes sought their dens. A roadrunner streaked through a small corral, delighting a group of children who didn't want to leave their riding lessons, A hawk danced with the thermals.
    On the low bank of the Rio Grande, beneath a stretch of heavy-crowned cottonwoods, Paulie Deven snapped pebbles and stones at the shallow
    water, cursing each time he hit the dried mud instead.
    He hated New Mexico.
    The Rio Grande was supposed to be this wide awesome river, deep, with rapids and cliffs, all that good stuff.
    But not here. Here, he could almost spit across it, and most of the time it hardly held any water. You could forget about the cliffs, and rapids were out of the question.
    He threw another stone.
    Behind him, he could hear muffled music com-ing from the trailer his parents had rented from the developer until their new house was finished. That was supposed to have been three months ago, when they had arrived from Chicago. But some kind of permits were wrong, and then there was some kind of strike, and , . . and . . . He snarled and threw another rock, so hard he felt a twinge in his shoulder.

    He thought he was going to live in the West. Maybe not the Old West, but it was supposed to be the West.
    What his folks had done was simply trade one damn city for another. Except that he had belonged back in Chicago; back there the kids didn't get on his case because of the way he looked and sounded.
    A light fall of pebbles startled him, but he didn't look around. It was probably his pain-in-the-ass sister, sliding down the slope to tell him Mom and Dad wanted him back in the trailer now, before some wild animal dragged him into the desert and ate him for breakfast.
    Right.
    Like there was anything out there big enough to eat something built like a football player.
    "Pauhe?"
    He glanced over his left shoulder. "You blind, or what?"
    Patty sneered and plopped down beside him. She was a year younger than his seventeen, her glasses thick, her brain thicker, her hair in two clumsy braids that thumped against her chest. He wasn't exactly stupid, but he sure felt that way whenever she was around.
    She pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. "Not much of a river, is it?"
    "Good eyes."
    "They're fighting again."
    Big surprise.
    Ever since they had moved into the trailer, they had been fighting:—about the house, about the move, about his Dad being close to losing his job, about practically anything they could. A damn war had practically started when he'd taken some of his savings and bought himself an Indian pendant on a beaded string. His father called him a goddamn faggot hippie, his mother defended him, and Paulie had finally slammed
    outside before his temper forced him to start swinging.
    Patty rested her chin on her knees and stared at the sluggish water. Then she turned her head. "Paulie, are you going to run away?"
    He couldn't believe it. "What?"
    She shrugged, looked back at the river. 'The way you've been acting, I thought . . . I don't know . . .
    I thought maybe you were going to try to get back to Chicago."
    "I wish." He threw another rock; it hit the mud on the far side. "You ever think about it?"
    "All the time."
    That amazed him. Patty was the brain, the one with the level head, the one who never let any-thing get to her, ever. He hated to admit it, but he had lost count of the number of times she had saved his ass just by talking their folks into for-getting they were mad. Running away, running back home, was his kind of no-brain plan, not hers.
    The sun died.
    Night slipped from the cottonwoods.
    A few stray lights from the trailer, from the handful of others on the other lots and the homes on the far side, were caught in fragments in the river, just enough to let him know it was still there.
    Suddenly he didn't like the idea of being