Free Frail by Joan Frances Turner Page A

In the dream. She laughed, and said she’d unlatched them herself. As a joke. Run, Amy, she said. Run very fast.

FOUR
    T he next day was even hotter, a little bit of July in April; the air felt liquid and huge shaving-foam banks of clouds drifted slowly through the sky, growing taller as they wandered, with trailing underbellies like columns of dark blue smoke. That was something neither of us had, a raincoat or umbrella. I let her pick the music, some eighties New Wave compilation—those synth keyboards were twice as grating as her laughter, but I owed her. I’d slipped the Good Terrorist CD into a zipped jacket pocket, that and a Victims of the Dance CD still sealed in plastic. Souvenirs of old times until all the batteries ran out.
    “I don’t like that sky at all,” Lisa said. I could see the clouds changing too, the white candy tufts dissolving into a sticky mass of dark sugary gray rolling over the sun. “It’ll soak everything in the carts.”
    “What about the tarp?” I asked, knotting my jacket sleeves tighter around my waist. Lisa had an extra pair of sneakers that as good as fit me, and I’d sprayed so much athlete’s foot powder inside my socks that every step was cool and squishy like I was walking in fresh mud. It still hurt like hell to grip the cart handle, but the sweat bath from those gloves was worse. “If we move the paper stuff into one cart, and cover it—”
    “Let’s pull over here. You look ready to drop anyway.”
    In a sickly patch of field, a WARNING! KNOWN ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! sign still sticking out of the ground, we pulled all the Kleenex and toilet paper and Triscuit boxes and winter coats from one cart, stuffed all the canned goods and anything that could take a soaking rain into another, threw the tarp over the first cart and tucked in the edges and sat down on the grass, me shoving cold canned ravioli in my mouth as hard and fast as Lisa. Midmorning, maybe ten or eleven o’clock; another thing neither of us had was a watch. The sky had gone the color of slate, the backlit clouds thicker and darker every passing minute.
    “The tarp’s not long enough,” Lisa said, as she demolished a snack cake. Stale flaked coconut stuck like dandruff to her jacket, her sweater. “The rain’ll get in the sides, but it’s better than nothing. Whatever’s left is yours, when we get to Elbertsville. It’ll make it easier, I bet, if you have stuff to give everyone.”
    I scraped the spoon along the bottom of the can, trying to dislodge a last ravioli—raviolo?—stuck in bright red glue. “I need to stop,” I said. “Everything hurts.”
    The CD player kicked back to “Digging Your Scene” and Lisa snapped it off. “There’s some houses down past the trees. I don’t want to wake up soaked.”
    We trudged through dead grass full of pull tabs and depleted lighters and cigarette filters devolved back to soft pussy willow tufts. It wasn’t a whole subdivision, just nine or ten dilapidated houses, some still with the Tyvek sheeting nailed to their plywood sides, plunked down in the middle of a field with a half-finished road stopping dead in the grass before them. This used to happen all the time: Developers went and built outside the designated safe zones, there’d be an “environmental incident,” the thing would sit there half-finished forever while the developer settled all the lawsuits. Steak houses, kids at school called them, when the homeless people moved in.
    There was a faint, full rumble in the distance, like a sluggish winter car engine finally kicking to life. The storm, a huge one, was moving in fast from the west. I followed Lisa, letting her fight with both sets of cart wheels leading down the embankment, and went straight for the first house: huge, hollow, that pasteboard look of a crappy town house masquerading as a mansion. The front hallway had a neck-craning ceiling, two stories high, a light fixture studded with pink glass