IGMS Issue 15 by IGMS

Author:IGMS [IGMS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hatrack River Enterprises
Published: 2009-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

The sky was just pinking up with dawn, clear and cold outside the heated cab, when they rattled over a rough patch in the road. Deaver wasn't awake and then he was awake. First words he said were from his dream even as it skittered away from him just out of reach. "It's your stuff," he said.

"Don't get mad at me about it," said the woman sitting next to him. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn't Scarlett's voice.

In the night sometime the pageant wagon people must have stopped and switched places. Now that he thought about it, Deaver had half-awake memories of Scarlett and other people talking soft and the seat bouncing. Marshall and Scarlett were gone, and so was Ollie. The man at the wheel wasn't one of the people Deaver saw last night. They had called Ollie their second son; this must be his older brother. The young girl he saw on the back of the truck last night -- Janie -- she was asleep leaning on the driver's shoulder. And next to Deaver was about the prettiest woman he could remember seeing in his life. Of course women got to looking nicer and nicer the more time you spent on the range, but it was sure she was the best-looking woman he ever woke up next to. Not that he'd ever say such a thing. He was plain embarrassed even to think it.

She was smiling at him.

"Sorry. I must have been --"

"Oh, it was some dream," she said.

I look at you and think maybe I'm still dreaming. The words were so clear in his mind that he moved his lips without meaning to.

"What?" she asked.

She looked at him like she'd never look at another soul until he answered. Deaver was plain embarrassed. He blurted out something like what he was thinking. "I said if you're part of the dream I don't want to wake up."

The man at the wheel laughed. Pleasantly. Deaver liked his laugh. The woman didn't laugh, though. She just smiled and crinkled up her eyes, then looked down at her lap. It was the absolutely perfect thing for her to do. So perfect that Deaver felt like he was starting to float.

"You've done it to this poor ranger man already, Katie," said the driver. "Pay no attention to her, my friend. She specializes in enchanting handsome strangers she discovers in the cab of her family's truck. If you kiss her she turns into a frog."

"You wake up very sweetly," said Katie. "And you turn a compliment so a woman can almost believe it's true."

Only now did Deaver really come awake and realize he was talking to strangers and had no business saying what came to mind, or trying to make his jokes. In the roadside inns where he used to stop while he was driving a scavenger truck, he always talked to the waitresses like that, giving them the most elegant compliments that he thought they might believe. At first

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