"Thanks, Chicky," I mumbled. My cap slid forward onto my nose and then back to its original position. Dr. Phyllis leaned an elbow on the top board of the fence and turned her mask and spectacles toward Arty. She propped a white-gloved hand on her hip and nodded. I licked the last of the frosting out of my teeth and let it trickle down my throat.

"I wonder where the twins are," said Lil. The cake was beautiful. Lil had cut it into the shape of two hearts that interlocked.

I gave the word to Horst and he went right away. He took a pair of musclemen along to help pull the little trailer. I sat on the step of the cat van, smelling the Bengals and waiting for Papa. There were a few cars moving on the distant street now. A barbershop had its door open and a curtain of red and white fly strips hung limp. The guards were drinking from big Thermoses at the end of the lot. It felt odd to be parked without the gates and the booths and the tops going up around me.

After a while Dr. Phyllis marched by, followed by Horst and the two bullies pulling the covered trailer. She had them park it next to her big van. Then she went inside her van. Horst came to me slowly. He dropped heavily onto the step beside me. "Horse thieving now!" he said.

"Papa will find its owner and pay for it." The men were grunting and cussing inside the little trailer. The old horse would not get up.

"I wouldn't feed that critter to an alley cat. Grey meat and little of it."

One of the young men jumped out and stood at the tailgate to pull. With his hands wrapped in the dung-fouled tail he crouched and crab-walked backward. The pale, gaunt flanks hove into view. The flabby hooves and rear legs fell out onto the ground. The blond man inside the trailer was pushing from the other end. The horse rolled out and lay on the ground. Its head flopped down on the end of the long neck and lay still. The white flapping nostrils flared and drooped. The blond man hopped out of the trailer with a rope hackamore and fitted it onto the limp head. He clipped a rope to the chin ring and ran it to the axle of Dr. Phyllis's van.

The guards were moving slightly, standing up, putting their Thermoses behind their stools. A big man crossed the street and walked across the rutted stubble of the lot. Papa. The two guards walked halfway to the vans with him and then went back to their posts. Papa came on. He looked angry.

Burkburnett had forbidden our opening on Sunday. We'd have to wait until the following day. Al was p.i.s.sed off. He was cursing the cowardly advance man who had done a bunk the first time he ran into a snag. "Missing Friday and Sat.u.r.day in Wichita Falls and having to open on the slowest day of the week in a town that couldn't buy a week's worth of toilet paper for the crew!"

I told Papa what Arty wanted. Al groused but then went off to look for the owner of the horse.

At lunchtime, Lil realized she hadn't seen the twins since breakfast. She flew into a panic and went jittering around on her high red heels with her hands clutching her own shoulders. She teetered from guard post to guard post questioning the big blank-faced men. "Ain't seen 'em, ma'am. Couldn't miss 'em if they'd come this way." And they'd switch their chaws and wobble their eyes anxiously as she skittered away, hoping that the little freaks hadn't slipped by them while they were swapping lies about hot nights in Baton Rouge.

Papa was somewhere talking to a man about a horse and I trailed after Mama piping, "Maybe so," and "Ah, they're all right!" and "Maybe they're buried in the meat yard, shall I get some shovels?" in my most rea.s.suring way as she burbled through her Mom's-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight. Lil had got to the finger-twisting stage and all the red-haired girls turned out to look. We opened all the empty boxcars on the rail siding and examined all the padlocks on the big sliding doors to the packing plant and were on our way back through the camp line, stopping at every van, trailer, and truck camper. The whole show was on hold because Papa hadn't given the set-up order yet, and Arty was occupied with something else.

Mama decided the twins were having a nap in their own room and we were on our way to look when I noticed the sky. It was a vague milky sheet. Far off at the dull edge of the plain, a blood-red line lay between the earth and the sky. As I watched, the red thickened to a bar and then a band, climbing the sky.

Arty and Chick were next to Dr. P.'s van at the end of the line. Dr. P. herself, arms c.o.c.ked to plant her white gloves on her white hips, stood in front of Arty's chair nodding her mummy-wrapped head. Chick looked like he was hiding behind Arty's chair.

The wind was picking up. It riffled Chick's hair and pushed Dr. P.'s skirt flat against her legs. Off to the side the old horse lifted its head on a curved and quivering neck, scrabbling at the earth with its mushy front hooves, trying to get grip enough to heave itself upright.

Horst trotted by me with the two guys who had moved the horse. I started to run. I could see Dr. P. opening her van door and waving for Chick to go in. Chick looked at her but both his hands were fastened to the arm of Arty's chair. Arty's chin was jerking toward the door and the doctor. Arty was telling Chick to go with her.

"We're gonna shove that maggoty goat back into the little trailer!" Horst yelled at me as I pa.s.sed him. It was too far to Dr. Phyllis's van and I was too slow. Her door closed on Chick and he was inside, alone with her. Arty had the bulb control in his teeth and was wheeling merrily toward me when I grabbed his chair arms.

"What'd you do that for?" I puffed. "What's she gonna do to Chick? Don't leave him with her!"

"Push me home! He's all right. Come on! Double it! Run!"

I grabbed the chair handles automatically and slogged toward his van, still craning my neck to look back at the blank closed side of Dr. P.'s white van. Horst and his helpers were torturing the decrepit brute back into the trailer. I stopped pushing. "Arty, what is she doing to Chick?"

His smooth-skinned head bobbed at the side of the chair. "Milk and cookies. Teaching him to play checkers. Move it! I have to p.i.s.s so bad I can taste it."

I threw myself forward, plodding, watching my feet stir the dust into the wheel ruts and noticing that the odd, thin light from the sky threw no shadows at all.

Mama was frantic. Papa was trying to tell her about the fat, bristly tick of a man who owned the horse and had tried to convince Al it was blood stock and would be a three-year-old in prime fettle as soon as it got some oats in its belly. Mama was whipping over every surface in the van looking for a note. A ransom note from the kidnappers or a farewell note from the runaway twins. "I left a note in my mother's sugar canister when I ran away," she muttered. Papa followed her, rambling on about the "used cayuse peddler" and finally noticed something amiss. Mama turned to him with clenched fists and a flaming face.

"Help me find them!"

"What the ... ??" Papa s.n.a.t.c.hed at her wrist, turning her arm over, checking the number of injection tracks. I saw them toppling into anger.

"Papa, the twins are missing."

"Ah, the flabby-gashed mother of G.o.d!" howled Papa as he sailed out the door trailing Mama. The wind slung the door wide with a flat whack and rushed into the van. I pushed the door closed behind me and took the two steps to Arty's van. I turned the k.n.o.b without knocking and slid inside. Silence. Carpet. The clean, rich room dim except for a yellow pool of lamplight where Arty lay calmly on a wine velvet divan with a book. He watched me wrestle his door closed.

"Do you know where they are?"

He shook his head. "But you can soak some towels and pack the windows and door frame for me. Help keep the dust out." His eyes fell back to his book.

I wet towels in the tub, wrung them out, and punched them into the window frames. Through each window I could see the crew moving the vans and trailers, turning them end-on to the coming wind. There was movement in the windows of some of the other trailers as other hands tucked wet rags or papers against the cracks.

"Shall I go get Chick?"

Arty looked at the clock. "He'll be coming here in a few minutes. He'll make it before the dust comes down."

"There he is." I could see him through the window, holding hands with a red-haired girl as he ran to keep up with her long legs. They were ducking their heads, hunching into the wind, the red-haired girl with her free hand holding her high-rise hair, which blew up and back around her groping fingers.

"Did you ever wonder," Arty asked, in his coolly speculative tone, "why he doesn't fly? He should be able to."

I yanked the door open as the pair hustled up the steps.

"Oly dear!" said the red-haired girl. "Crystal Lil wants you, honey! Chick found the twins. Come on." I was staring at Chick, looking for bruises, psychic scars, electrodes planted behind his ears. Nothing. He was caught up in the excitement of the wind.

"Leave him with me!" Arty yelled from the divan. Chicks eyes sprang eagerly past me, his face opening, pleased. He trotted in as I pulled the door shut.

The redhead grabbed my hand. Hurrying. The wind pushing so I felt my weight lifting away from me. The sky was a deep rust above us and the shouts of the crew around us were shredded to yelping bits that flipped past like no language at all. "Where?" I bellowed.

I thought she said, "The Schultzes!"

We blew past the generator truck, the refrigerator truck. I saw Horst shoving a wad of wet paper into the ventilator slot of the cat wagon and then the sand hit us. The red-haired girl screamed a short, high whistle interrupted by coughing, hers and mine. It was needles from behind, 3 million ant bites blistering the back of my neck, burning through my clothes. In front it was worse. A hot cloud of granulated suffocation filling nose, mouth, and eyes with dry powder that stuck to any moisture. It liked the roof of the mouth, the caves behind the nose, and especially the throat.

The refrigerator truck toppled onto its side behind us. We ran and the wind tried to make us fly.

The ten-toilet men-and-women Schultz was broadside to the wind. The same heaving gust that flattened the redhead and me toppled the Schultz off its trailer. On my belly in the dirt with my face buried in my arms, I felt the crash more than I heard it. Then a hand was pulling me up, and slipping my blouse up to cover my nose and mouth. The redhead rushed me along, her own blouse snugged to her face with the other hand. The fine dust sifted through the cloth but I could breathe a little. The wind ripped up my back, raking my hump, clawing at my bare head. My cap had blown away with my sungla.s.ses. There was no sound - the blank roar of the wind-borne sand was seamless.

Hands hoisted me at the armpits and I fell, free and blind, but landed before I could yelp. Inside. Out of the wind. The redhead had found the door at one end of the Schultz and got me through it. I sat in the dark, painfully blinking sand out of my eyes with tears. The deep boom of the wind beat at the tin wall as I lay against it. A warm body lurched into me, collapsed beside me. A hand felt my head, my hump. The air was soft and thick with floating dust and the sick, sweet tang of chemicals and worse. The redheads warm voice breathed in my ear, "I'll bet this c.r.a.pper hasn't been pumped since Tulsa."

It wasn't actually a Schultz-brand portable toilet. It was a Merry-Loo in a truck box with five booths on each side, self-contained cold-water supply for washbasins, MEN on the port side, WOMEN to starboard. Papa had picked it up cheap with its own truck trailer. It was built of thin fiberboard and was so light that a car or a small pickup could pull the whole rig.

"Yuck! I'm leaning on a slimy urinal!" The redhead scooted over, pushing me into the corner. My head banged on something hard and I reached to feel pipes and chilly porcelain, dripping. The sink. My eyes were flushing out sand and I began to see well enough to know that it really was dark in there.

"The twins and your mom are on the other side. We're on the men's side. If they're still there ... Lill Lily!" she shouted.

"Mama!" I yelled, and then coughed with the red dust rasping deep in my pipes. The murk fuddled me. The room was on its side. The sink above me hung the wrong way. If I turned on the tap, the water wouldn't fall into the basin, it would pour onto my head. We were crouched on a wall with the linoleum floor at our backs. What little light there was came in a brown-gravy mist through the plastic skylight in what was normally the roof but was now the far wall. The sand-heavy wind cast dark, rushing shadows across it. Just beyond the urinal that lay beside us, the booths began. The liquid seeping from the cracks reminded me that all the toilets were lying on their backs.

"They're above us." The redhead was standing up on shaky denim legs. "Wow! I'm a little woozy!" Fluid was dripping down from what was serving as the ceiling. "Look, that wall is popping!"

The tab-and-slot construction of the fiberboard wall was loose at the corner above us, drooping. "Here, climb up and pull on it."

She hauled me up by my hands, balancing me as I climbed to her knee, her hip, her back. "I'm gonna stand up now," she warned. I stepped onto her shoulders, propping myself against the wall, and tore at the loose flap.

"Mama! Crystal Lil!"

"Hey," from the dark above us.

"Oly, get out of the way. We'll lower Mama to you. She's hurt. Her chest." It was Elly up there in the dark. I gave the redhead a few extra bruises sliding down. She caught the long, white legs that slid out of the ceiling. Mama's favorite yellow-flowered skirt was torn, and the blue veins on the backs of her thighs glittered oddly in the dimness. She moaned feebly as she eased downward. "Mama?" Her arms came last. The twins let go and she fell jerkily into the corner with a yelp.

"A light," Mama said.

The twins lowered themselves through the hole and dropped beside me. They were sodden and they stank. Their hair and clothes were damp with the blue ooze from the chemical toilets.

"It's all our fault," Iphy whimpered. "My fault is what she means," said Elly. They crouched over Mama and the redhead leaned over her, gently pushing Mama's shock of white hair back from her forehead. Lil was wandering in her head.

We stretched her out flat under the sink and the redhead tore a sc.r.a.p off the yellow-flowered skirt to lay over Mama's nose and mouth so she could breathe in the floating dust.

The twins were filthy. "Nothing broken?" asked the redhead. "Then sit over there. That smell makes my sinuses ache. c.r.a.pper dumped on you, eh?"

"I acts," Mama announced calmly from the floor. "Me is acted upon." We all looked at her.

"Is that grammar?" asked Iphy. Mama laced her fingers together on her belly as though she were napping in her own bed.

"I don't know. It may just be talk." The redhead picked at a sc.r.a.pe on her elbow. "I'll go look outside in a minute. It might be letting up."

The wind was gusting now, taking breathing breaks between attacks. There was a little more light. The twins slumped on the floor against the first booth. Their faces were as blank as uncut pies. Their eyes stayed fixed on Mama.

"Happy birthday!" I grinned. Their mouths crimped painfully.

"Were you in here all morning? Mama was worried."

The two matching faces nodded slightly. The redhead chuckled and whacked at the knees of her jeans, shedding puffs of dust. "It's their first time bleeding. They thought they were dying."

Elly glowered, eyebrows bunching downward. "We knew what it was." Iphy's eyes tilted up anxiously in the middle, "We didn't know it was going to happen to us, though. We don't feel good. And it's scary. Elly didn't want to come out but I did. I tried to get her to come out but she wouldn't."

Elly shook her head impatiently. "How long do these things last? All night? Or what?"

Lil's voice came from under the rag, "I would have told you more but I wasn't sure it would happen to you."

My heart was beating a panic in my ears, "Mama, will it happen to me?"

Iphy licked at her muddy lips, "Elly wouldn't come out even when Chick and Mama found us. She wouldn't let me unlock the door. Mama told Chick to unlock the door and bring us out but he wouldn't. Because we didn't want to. But it wasn't both of us. It was Elly. Our legs went to sleep sitting on that toilet."

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

"Ah, Elly, loosen up. Don't be so crabby," groaned the redhead. She patted my head. "Your mama sent me for you so you could crawl under the door of the booth."

"I would have kicked you if you'd tried," snarled Elly.

"For Christ's sake, girl, why make so much of a fuss?" The redhead was exasperated. "It happens to every female."

"Yeah? Well, it changes things for us. It throws in a lot of new stuff to think about."

A truck horn started blaring nearby. Its flat voice, thinned by the wind, repeated itself monotonously. Mama opened her eyes. "Dear Al is so impatient."

"He doesn't know where you are." The redhead stood up. The whites of her eyes were blatant in her dust-clotted face. She reached above me to the k.n.o.b of the horizontal door and pushed it open. The clogged sand in the sill rained down. A rip of wind circled the room, rubbing grime into our faces.

"All right, ladies, party's over. Everybody out."

"I'm so glad I had that cake in the refrigerator," said Crystal Lil. "We wouldn't have had a bite if I'd left it on the counter."

We were having the twins' birthday party on Mama's big bed. She lay propped mightily on pillows with Papa's elegant bandage wrappings showing through the front of her kimono and her fresh-washed hair frothing like egg whites above her naked, unpainted face.

We vacuumed for an hour and still the red dust drifted in the air. But now, having showered in relays, wearing clean clothes, we could blink our sore eyes and pick the dry, gritty boogers from our noses in exhausted contentment. Papa, leaning against the pillows next to Mama, winked his scoured red eyes at us. "You girls look a bit better now. Less like a demon crew and more like hungover angels."

Arty and Chick, of course, were clear-eyed and boogerless, having spent the storm in Arty's air-conditioned van. We all ate cake and traded long, absurd, and compet.i.tively exaggerated accounts of How Terrifyingly Near to Death the Sandstorm Brought Me. Papa's version had him wandering from trailer to van hollering questions against the wind and getting unsatisfactory answers and "wondering where, by the shriveled s.c.r.o.t.u.m of Saint Elmo, you'd all been blown to." He took refuge in the generator truck and got the bright notion of sounding the truck's horn, "like a foghorn, so, if you were wandering in that fiend prairie, you could home in on it."

"Save a big piece for Horst," Iphy ordered, "and one for the redhead who helped us. What was her name?"

"Red."

"All the redheads are 'Red,' sc.u.mmy! They have regular names, y'know!"

Arty had soothed and entertained his (newly discovered) little pal during the storm by letting Chick read aloud to him from Arty's ancient greeting-card collection. When the wind shifted and Arty's van considered tipping over, Chick prevented it.

Chick did not have a story. Chick did not eat his cake. His plate sat on his lap as he stared around at each of the fascinating taletellers in turn. He wasn't enjoying himself but he didn't say anything. Only after we'd kissed Mama and Papa goodnight and were drifting off toward our beds, Chick caught up with us in the narrow place beside the twins' door, looking up at them sadly.

"What is it, sweets?" asked Iphy.

"I knew where you were. I should have brought you out, huh?" His eyes were growing in his face like the size of the question. Elly smoothed a hand across his hair.

"No, Chicky, you did just right."

"If I had got you out like Mama wanted, you would all have been home like me and Arty. Mama wouldn't have got a broken rib. You wouldn't have got scared."

I let go of his hand and punched him softly on the arm. "Don't feel guilty about me, I had a great time!" and I sagged off to my warm cupboard, leaving the twins to console him or not.

I was standing on Arty's dresser polishing the big mirrored one-way window to the security booth. He was lolling on his new velvet divan leafing through a torn magazine retrieved from the pile in the redheads' trailer.

"If I were an old-money gent with a career in the family vault," Arty proposed, "and heavy but discreet political influence, how would I dress?"

I looked back over my hump to see if he was pulling my leg. He had his nose in the magazine so I answered, "Quietly."

"But what's quiet for a man with my build?"

"I don't know." I climbed down and wiped my footprints off the dresser top. "A tweed T-shirt? Gabardine bikini trunks? Charcoal silk socks?"

"Socks." He stretched his bare hip flippers, flexing each of the elongated digits separately. He hated socks. "But I suppose they'd be warm." He kept turning pages. "Oh, Toady. Why were the twins hiding in the latrine?"

So that was it. I dropped my cleaning rag and hopped onto the divan, grabbing his lower flippers.

"I'll tell you if you'll tell me about Chick and Doc P."