He was three miles outside Bradyton when he noticed the gas gauge. The needle registered empty. He tapped the gauge with his fingers but the needle was frozen on “E.” Panic coiled in the pit of his stomach. The black blizzard was already on his tail. Ahead of him, he could see maelstroms of sand whirling onto the highway and he could feel the wind buffeting the car. Then, through the whorls of sand and wind, he saw a small filling station beside the road. He whipped the LaSalle off the road and parked beside the pumps. It was a Sinclair station, a small building of corrugated tin and wood, already shuddering before nature’s onslaught. He ran to the door and beat on the glass, then cupped his eyes and looked inside. The place was deserted. He found a rusty old tire iron and smashed the window. It was obvious the owner had left in a hurry. The cash register drawer was open and the power had been turned off. The drummer ran back outside and smashed the Yale lock off the single gas pump and started filling the tank, trying to shield the tank opening against the whirling sands.
The great black wave descended on him, howling like a wounded animal, suddenly turning day to night. Sand ripped at his face and hands like tiny razor blades. He drove the car to the front of the building and pried the lock off the garage door, pushing and shoving it open against the banshee gale. Finally he got the car inside. The wind slammed the door closed behind him. Darkness descended over him like a dark cloth. He turned on the car lights and went back into the office, grabbed a handful of crackers and candy bars and stuffed them in his pockets. He used his crowbar to force open the soda machine and took a half dozen bottles back into the garage. He got in the car, wrapped his jacket around his face, closed the car windows and huddled there.
Outside, a great sea of earth thirty thousand feet high, forty miles wide and nine miles deep, swept down on the small building, engulfed it, assaulted it, battered it mercilessly with sixty- mile-an-hour winds. Around him he could hear metal screaming, things clattering against the small building, timbers groaning. An edge of the roof fluttered loose of its nails and the gale roared under it, peeled it back like the skin of an orange, and whipped it away. Sand poured through the gaping hole in the roof like water. The car began to rock before nature’s wrath. The drummer held on to the steering wheel, his eyes closed and his teeth clenched, while the car rocked harder and harder. Fine silt started to ooze in around the windows.
Finally in abject fear and frustration, the drummer cried out:
“Stop!... Stop!. . . Stop!.
It was midnight-dark and the nightmare continued.
The drummer cursed himself for taking the job. He had spent three months, driving first through the South, then north beside the big Mississippi to St. Louis. He had spotted the ad in the Sunday newspaper and had taken the traveling job because it seemed perfect. He would be on the road all the time, traveling from one hamlet to the next in the prairie states.
“All you need,” said Albert Kronen, the man who answered the phone, “is an auto and a silver tongue.” His territory included Kansas, northern Oklahoma and southern Nebraska. He could stay on the road for months at a lime, displaying his wares—girdles, cotton stockings and panties, simple frocks—in village after village. Perfect. No time clock to punch, no schedules to meet. He would be on his own.
Kronen did not mention the black blizzards, the towering waves of death that were turning the plains states into deserts and villages into abandoned ghost towns and blowing the farmlands to the winds.
The car rocked harder. The rest of the corrugated roof tore off with a mighty screaming sound and the drummer huddled deeper in his seat, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, his eyes squeezed shut to keep out the fine sand that filtered through every slit and opening in the car. How long would it last? he wondered. How long could it last?
The wind howled for half an hour before passing as quickly as it had arrived. It became deathly still. The drummer sat at the wheel of the car with the taste of dirt in his mouth. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw an apparition, a dusty clown face with two black potholes for eyes. He brushed the dirt off his face with his hands and got Out of the car. A shower of dust poured down from the top of the car when he opened the door.
Gray sunlight poured through the gaping holes in the roof of the garage. The door was jammed shut. He put his shoulder against it and battered it open a foot or so and squeezed through. Dunes of sand greeted him. Drifts of it slanted down from the sides of the battered building. The road was an indented sliver stretching toward Bradyton. He sank to his ankles as he walked to the front of the filling station. He found a large metal sign half-buried near the pump and pulled it free. A rugged-looking cowboy with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth smiled up at him from the sheet.
The drummer laughed aloud when he read the slogan.
“I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”
The drummer looked around. I could use a camel myself right now, he thought to himself. But not the kind you smoke.
He used the sheet to shovel the sand away from the garage door and make tracks to the main road, ate a candy bar, washing it down with a bottle of soda pop, and backed out onto the highway.
A man who could have been forty or eighty stood near the entrance to the Bradyton House, a three-story yellow brick building in the center of town. He wore bib jeans and his fists were pressed against his chest. The man stared past the drummer, his face caked in dust, his eyes and mouth black scars in the powdery facade. He was shaking uncontrollably.
“You all right?” the drummer asked.
“N-n-never seen anything 1-1-like it,” the old man stammered, his terrified eyes gazing straight ahead in a fixed stare. “D-d-dirt falling from the sky. Hell on earth. Hell on earth.”
A woman, her skin leather-tanned in color and texture, was sweeping up sand that lay in ripples across the linoleum floor. Oiled rags were stuffed in the sills and sashes of the windows. It was a pleasant lobby with several sofas and easy chairs and a scattering of magazines and newspapers. A door beside the tiny desk led to a restaurant.
The woman looked up as the drummer entered.
“Come to stay the night?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“You’re in luck. Kin have any room in the place.” She set aside the broom and walked behind the desk, spinning the registration book around so it faced him and handing him a pen.
“Four dollars the night. Includes clean sheets, sink and commode in the room, bath at the end of the hall. Breakfast is on the house.”
“Very reasonable,” he said wearily and scribbled his name on the ledger. She whirled it back and read the name aloud.
“John Trexler, St. Louis. Tell you what, Mr. Trexler, I can tell you’ve had a bad afternoon, as we all have. Why don’t you just go on up to the top of the stairs and take the suite. Has its own bath and shower. I should be able to feed you in an hour or so. We should have the kitchen back open by then.”
“That’s very kind of you,” the drummer said. “Thanks.”
He carried a couple of newspapers up with him and sat in a steamy tub, leisurely reading a four-day-old Kansas City Star. In the Help Wanted section, an item immediately caught his eye.
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
For qualified men only, a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new winter resort. Must be expert skier and mountain climber and have training in survival tactics. Weekly salary, room and board. Inquiries: Snow Slope, Aspen, Colorado.