“You must be a throwback or something. A mutant. Those woolhats or rednecks, whatever…I’ve lived here twenty-five years and I’m still a foreigner. I guess they’re waiting to see if I stay or not.”

“I guess some of them are peculiar all right.”

“Peculiar? Trifling is the word I had in mind. I had that shack up by the mouth of the creek and rented to a fellow named Warren one time. Boy, he was industrious. He liked to sit on his front porch and watch his garden grow. Only moved when the shade did or his wife yelled supper. Used to brag about that garden. ‘Fine garden,’ he’d say. ‘Fine garden.’ I was up there once when it all come in and I think he had maybe four head of cabbage. I could have carried off the stringbeans in this helmet and only made one trip. He only had about eight kids so I don’t know what in hell he planned to do with the excess. Can it for winter, maybe. Truckcrop it out.

“And honest? While I built this house I lived over across the creek in a little place I threw up temporarily. When I moved I hired a couple of these fellows to help me. I lost a Browning automatic shotgun I wouldn’t have let go for three hundred dollars. A pair of riding boots I bought in Spain and a silver-inlaid handgun my wife gave me. You understand we’re talking about two or three hundred yards here. I hate to think what would have happened if I was moving to the west coast.”

That night Weiss took him home. “There’s nothing else do to inside,” he said. “If this mess is still going on in the morning don’t even bother to come out. I can feed myself. There’s no point in soaking yourself getting here just to wait until feeding time.”

The creek was already yellow and ominiouslooking and had picked up speed and small sticks and debris that spun in gouts of foam. The branch behind Oliver’s house came out of its banks and fanned into his piglot, festooning fenceposts and saplings with drifts of dead brush and cartires that looked like buoys left to navigate a world going to water, and from where he stood in the hall of the barn he could see it lapping upward out of the hollow.

A disgusted Dallas Hardin counted two days’ receipts and grew tired of the company of Pearl and the girl Amber Rose and went out into the rain and stood on the lip of the pit and it seemed to him that he could hear turbulent waters deep in the earth. A change in the earth’s pulse, a quickening, a curious occult change. He looked up at the leaden sky. He looked west and there was just more of the same as if the earth’s weather had coalesced in this mode. “Then rain some more, by God,” he told it.

It did. The third day the bridge between Mormon Springs and town wrenched free of its concrete pylons with shrieking of timbers and lurched into the canefield at the creek’s edge spinning lazily in the calm eddies, drifting into the swift mainstream of the creek, where it picked up speed and went spinning crazily downstream like a calliope snapped free of its moorings.