Dark of the Moon

Bluestem while the courthouse was open. Walking along with Lannie McCoy, the prosecutor in the case, they’d decided that the wise course would be to get sandwiches and beer at Cat’s Cradle, a downtown bar.
    They did that, and some cops showed up and that all turned into an enjoyable nachos, cheeseburger, and beer snack. One of the cops was very good-looking, and at one juncture, had rested her hand on Virgil’s thigh; perfect, if her wedding ring hadn’t shown up so well in the bar light.
    A sad country song.
     
    H E LEFT the Cradle at six-thirty, went home, dumped a load of laundry in the washing machine. With the washer rattling in the background, he sat on a rocking chair in his bedroom and finished sewing a torn seam on a photography vest. Sat in a cone of light from his bedside reading lamp, sewing, and wondering about the married cop who’d come on to him; thinking a bit about loyalty and its implications, and the trouble it could bring you.
    Feeling a little lonely. He liked women, and it had been some time since the last one.
    When he finished with the vest, he hung it in his gear closet—guns, bows, fishing and photography equipment—took a shotgun and two boxes of shells out of his gun safe, laid them beside an empty duffel bag. He half filled the duffel bag with underwear, socks, and T-shirts, three pairs of jeans. Still waiting for the washer to quit, he went out on the Internet, looking for a letter from a magazine publisher. A letter was supposed to be waiting for him, but was not.
    He pulled up a half-finished article on bow hunting for wild turkeys, dinked with it until the washer finished the spin cycle, then closed down the computer, threw the wet clothes in the dryer, and took a nap. The clock woke him. After a shower, as he was brushing his teeth, he heard the dryer stop running. His timing was exquisite.
    He took the clothes out of the dryer, folded them, put some of them away, and some of them in the duffel bag. He threw the bag in the back of his truck, locked the shotgun in a toolbox, stuck a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol under the front seat, and at ten minutes after ten o’clock, he was out of town, headed southwest down Highway 60.
    An hour out of town, he could see the clouds bunching up in the west, lightning jumping around the horizon, while a new crescent moon still showed in his rearview mirror. He hit Windom as the wind front from the first squall line skittered through town, throwing up scrap paper and dead leaves. July was the second-best time on the prairie, right after August; the world began to smell of grain and the harvest to come.
    He stopped at a convenience store for coffee. The long-haired clerk said, “Gonna rain like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock,” and Virgil said, “You betcha.” He took a leak himself, got back in the truck as the first fat drops of rain hit the windshield, still moving southwest. He cut I-90 at Worthington, got another cup of coffee, and headed west.
    Into the Old West, he thought.
    The real Old West. The Old West of the Sioux, of the high, dry prairie, of the range, of horse and buffalo country, got started somewhere between Worthington and Bluestem. By the time he got there, to the Old West, the rain was thrashing the 4Runner; another deluge in what was already a record-wet summer.
    There weren’t many lights this far out, but with the storm, I-90 closed down to a tunnel, nothing ahead, only a dim set of headlights behind him, and an occasional car or truck in the eastbound lane. He kept one eye on the white line on the right, aimed the car into his headlights, and hoped he didn’t run off the road.
    Listening to satellite radio, Outlaw Country. Switched over to jazz, rotated into hard rock, and then back to country.
     
    T HINKING ABOUT IT LATER, he didn’t really know when he first became aware of the spark.
    The spark started as a mote in his eye, above the right headlight, deep in the rain. Then it took on a more graphic quality, and he noticed it, and noticed at the same time that it had been out there for a while. The spark was a bright, golden hue, and unmoving. Another three miles and he identified it: a fire. A big one. He’d seen a few of them at night, but this was up in the sky .
    How could it be up in the sky, and not move?
    He flashed by an overpass, then caught, a half mile to his right, the red lights of the Jesus Christ radio station: a five-hundred-foot tower—they build them low on the