Round Rock by Michelle Huneven

Author:Michelle Huneven
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307787972
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

AS LIBBY turned up her road, she saw white and yellow lights hovering and swirling in the sky. Is this what UFOs looked like? The lights seemed to come from the area of her trailer. Would she be captured, probed, and then spend the rest of her life trying to convince people that such events actually occurred?

The lights, she soon saw, came from vehicles parked in front of her trailer. Trucks. Large trucks. Fire trucks. And Billie’s great white Chevy.

Her first impulse was to drive away, come back, and have it all be different.

Billie’s foreman, Rogelio, had been out on patrol when he smelled something. He drove up to investigate and saw smoke seeping from the trailer, called the fire department on his CB, then busted down the door on the off chance Libby was inside. “The fumes could’ve killed him,” one fireman told Libby. “Just be happy you weren’t in there asleep.” He snapped his gloved fingers. “It happens that fast in these tin cans.”

The firemen had thrown what they could onto the deck, covered it with a tarp, then gone back in and sprayed like hell. Now they shined spotlights so she could see to gather up some things.

“Get everything of value out of here,” the fireman said. “There’ll be looters before morning.”

“Looters!”

“They come out of the woodwork.” He nodded toward the olive grove, as if that leafy darkness were full of eager eyes.

Billie and Little Bill helped her pile as much as they could into the Chevy. Her musical instruments were safe, and a lot of her furniture seemed fine except for a terrible acrid smell. They worked for an hour or so, loading what they could, locking the rest in the sodden trailer. Back at the Fitzgerald adobe, Billie and Libby drank scotch in the library. “I must be numb,” Libby said. “It just doesn’t seem so bad. Not as bad as it could have been.”

Billie put Libby in what she called the guest suite, two lovely wheat-colored rooms on the second floor. Wheat carpeting and curtains, wheat sofa and bedclothes. There Libby dreamt of trash heaps swarming with looters shaped like giant sow bugs. One turned, and the face in the gray carapace was Lewis’s. She woke, kicking at the sheets. What had they even been fighting about?

While Billie was out doing irrigation, Libby dressed and drove back home. In the colorless dawn, the trailer looked bombed. She walked around it slowly. Where the south wall buckled away from the east wall, she could see into a cavern of spongy soot. Side windows had been blown out by the heat. Insulation hung from the ceiling in pendulous stalactites. One willow was scorched, its leaves yellowed and crisped.

At least the trailer had contained most of the fire. One fat flying spark and the hillside would’ve ignited as if sprinkled with gunpowder. Chaparral actually flourished with fire, since many of its plants and grasses reseeded only after a burn-off. Even this fire, Libby thought, wasn’t necessarily a tragedy.

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