Spencerville

coffee. Got to go.”
    He left through the back door.
    She stood, went into the kitchen, spit in the sink and washed out her mouth, then ran into the shower.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Cliff Baxter drove around Spencerville, feeling very good. He had, at the moment, two women, which was enough for one time: Sherry, mostly for oral sex, and a separated woman with kids, named Jackie, trying to live on what her husband sent her from Toledo. Jackie had a nice bedroom and a good bed, and she was a good lay. Cliff always brought groceries, compliments of the local supermarket. He had a third woman, he realized, his wife. He laughed. “You are all
man,
Cliff Baxter.”
    The mobile phone rang, and he picked it up. Sergeant Blake said, “Chief, I had Ward drive by Landry’s place with binoculars, and he got the license number.”
    “Okay.”
    “So I called these clowns back in D.C., and I gave it to them.”
    “Good. What we got?”
    “Well… they said this plate was some kind of special thing, and if we needed to know more, we got to fill out a form, tellin’ why and what it’s about—”
    “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
    “They faxed me this form—two pages.”
    “What kinda shit is that? You call those sons-of-bitches and tell them we need a make on this plate now. Tell ’em the guy was DUI or somethin’, can’t produce a registration or nothin’—”
    “Chief, I’m tellin’ ya, I tried everything. They’re tellin’ me it’s somethin’ to do with national security.”
    “National…
what
?”
    “You know, like secret stuff.”
    Cliff Baxter drove in silence. One minute he’s on top of the world, pipes cleaned, feeling good, and in charge. Now this guy Landry shows up from outside, from Washington, D.C., after how many years…? Twenty-five maybe, and Cliff doesn’t know a thing about him, and just finds out he can’t even get a make on his car registration or driver’s license. “Who the fuck is this guy?”
    “Chief?”
    “Okay, I want this bastard watched. I want somebody to swing by his place a couple times a day, and I want to know every time he comes to town.”
    “Okay… what are we lookin’ for? I mean, why—?”
    “Just do what the hell I tell you.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Cliff hung up. “The man fucked my wife, that’s why.” And people in town knew, or they’d remember, or they’d hear about it soon enough. “I can’t have that. No, siree, I cannot have that.”
    Several plans of action began to form in his mind, and he remembered something old Judge Thornsby once said to him—“Sometimes a problem is an opportunity in disguise.”
    “That’s it. This stupid bastard came right onto my turf. And what I couldn’t do twenty-five years ago, I can do now. I’m gonna kill him… no, I’m gonna cut off his balls. That’s it. Gonna cut off his balls and put ’em in a jar on the mantel, and Annie can dust it once a week.” He laughed.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    A hot, dry wind blew in from the southwest, originating within some ancient weather pattern that once swept prairie fires across the grassy plains and stampeded endless herds of buffalo, blind with panic, into the Great Black Swamp where their bones were still turned up by plows. But now the wind blew through a million rows of corn and a million acres of undulating wheat, through the small towns and lonely farmhouses, and across pastures and meadows where cattle grazed. It swept across Indiana and into Ohio, and over the Great Lakes, where it met the arctic mass moving south.
    By mid-September, when the west winds died, Keith Landry recalled, you could sometimes catch a whiff of the north, the smell of pines and lake air, and the sky was filled with Canada geese. One September day, George Landry said to his wife, Alma, “It’s time we got smart like the geese.” And they left.
    The history of most human migration, however, was more complex, Keith thought. Humans had adapted to every climate on earth, and in ancient times had populated the world by their wanderings. Unlike salmon, they didn’t have to return to their birthplace to spawn, though Keith thought that wouldn’t be a bad idea.
    Keith was acclimating himself to the almost suffocating dryness, the fine dust, the constant desiccating wind, and, like most northern Ohioans, he was thinking about the winter long before it arrived. But acclimating to the weather was easy; acclimating to the social environment was going to be a little more difficult.
    It had