Heavy Weather

But there's no way I need Mexican police to deal with my own sister." He rubbed his greasy, stubbled chin. "At least, I never did before. What the hell has gotten into you?"

"Plenty. A lot." She nodded. "You'll see."

"What did you do to your hair?"

She laughed.

"You gave up dyeing it," he concluded. "That's its natural color, right? Brownish. Did you stop paying people to cut it?"

He'd struck home. "Oh, that's really good, coming from you, Alejandro. Yeah, I look like a derelict, don't I? I look like a displaced person! You know what you look like, handsome? You look like you washed up five days after a hurricane surge. You look like a goddamn Cadaver." Her. voice rnse.i'I just dragged you back from the brink of the grave! I'm dressed up for committing a felony, you moron!"

"You used to dress for the couture circuit, Janey."

"Once," she said. "I did a few designs, one season. Boy, you never forget."

"Your hair's been red ever since I can remember."

"Yeah? Well, maybe I needed red hair once. Back when I was into identity crisis.

Juanita picked at her hair for a bit, then frowned. "Let's get something straight right now. I know you can go back over the border if you want to. I know all about your scene, and I know all I wa

Alex considered this proposal at length. Then he spoke up. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah! This car is going to take us into camp, and I'm going to show you the people that I live with. They're probably going to really hate your guts. They didn't much like me, either-not at first." Jane shrugged. "But they're alive inside, Alex. They have something to do that's really worth doing. They're good people, they really are. They're the only people I've ever met that I really respect."

Alex mulled over this bizarre news. "They're not religious, are they?"

She sighed. "No, they're not religious."

"This is some kind of cult thing, though, isn't it? I can tell from the way you're talking. You're way too happy about this."

"No, I'm not in a goddamned cult! Well, okay then- yes, I am. The Troupe's a cult. Kind of. But I'm not brainwashed. That's not the story."

Alex parsed this statement and filed it away. "So what's the story, then?"

"I'm in love." Juanita dug into her bag of granola. "So there's a big difference. Supposedly."

"You're in love, Janey? Really?"

"Yeah. I really am."

"You?"

"Yes, goddamn it, of course me!"

"Okay, okay, sorry." Alex spread his hands. "It's coming clear to me now. I'm starting to get it. New boyfriend doesn't like red hair?"

"I just stopped doing red hair. A year ago. It didn't fit anymore."

"So what does boyfriend like? Besides you, presumably."

"Boyfriend likes really big tornadoes."

Alex sank into his seat.

"His people are called the Storm Troupe. We hack h~eavy weather. And that's where I'm taking you now."

Alex gazed out to his left. Dawn was smearing the horizon. The eastern stars were bleaching out, and lumps of dark poisonous gray green-cedar and juniper brush- were emerging from roadside darkness. Alex looked back at his sister. "You're serious about this?"

"Yep! Been hacking storms quite some time now." She offered him her paper bag. "Have some granola."

Alex took the bag, dipped into it, and ate. He was hungry, and he had no prejudice against government-issue chow. It had the complete recommended dietary allowances and the stuff was so bland that it had never irritated any of his various allergies. "So that's really what you're doing, huh? You chase thunderstorms for a living these days?"

"Oh, not for a living," she said. She reached down and clicked off the map light, then stretched, briskly tapping her fingernails against the fabric roof. She wore a short-sleeved shirt of undyed cotton, and Alex noted with vague alarm that her freckled arms were lithe with muscle. "That's for TV crews, or labcoat types. With us, it doesn't pay. That's the cool thing about it. If you're in the Troupe, you just do storms."

"Damn, Janey!"

"I like doing storms. I like it a whole lot. I feel like that's what I'm for!" Juanita laughed, long and high-pitched and twitchy. Alex had never heard her laugh like that before. It sounded like the kind of laugh you had to learn from someone else.

"Does Papa know about this?"

"Papa knows. Papa can sue me. You can sue me too, little brother. If you boys don't like how I'm living, then you can both kiss my ass!"

He gri

"I took a big risk to do this for you," she told him. "So I just want you to know"-she placed her hand against the side of his head and looked into his eyes-"I'm not doing this for you because I think you're cute. You're not cute,

Alex. And if you screw things up between me and my Troupe, then I'm finished with you, once and for all."

"I never asked you to do any of this!"

"I know you didn't ask me, but nevertheless, if you mess with me and Jerry, then I'm go

Alex found it hard to take this wild threat seriously, though she was clearly very sincere. It was the old story. As far as Alex figured it, all the trouble he'd had with his sister in the past was entirely her own doing. She'd always been the one barging into his room to bend his arms, break his toys, and bark out orders. Sooner or later all their encounters ended with him prying her fingers from his throat.

He, on the other hand, almost never tried to interfere in the near hysteria that Juanita called her daily life. Just watching his sister go at life, repeatedly cracking brick walls with her head, made him feel tired.. He'd always allowed her to caterwaul her way to hell in any wayshe pleased.

Now she seemed to think that she was going to run his life, since Mama was long dead, and Papa on the ropes. She'd soon be disabused of that notion.

"Take it easy," he advised her. "Your love affair, or whatever it is that you've got happening now, is strictly your own lookout. I got nothing against this Jerry character." He chuckled. "Hell, I pity him.~~

"Thanks a lot. His name's Jerry Mulcahey. Doctor... Gerald... Mulcahey."

He'd never seen a look like the look on Juanita's face as she recited that name. It was like a cross between a schoolgirl's crush and the ultravampish look of a bad actress on a Mexican soap opera. Whatever it was that had bitten her, it had bitten her really bad. "That's fine, Janey," he said cautiously. "I don't have any grudge against him, or any of your hick weirdo friends. Just as long as they don't try to step on my neck."

"Well, they will step on you, Alex, and I'm asking you to put up with it. Not as a brotherly favor to me or anything-I wouldn't ask for that-but just because it's interesting. Really interesting, okay? And if you can manage to stay upright for a while, you'll learn something."

Alex grunted. He gazed out the window again. Dawn was becoming impressive. The Texas High Plains were bleak country by nature, 'but nature had packed up and left sometime back. The stuff growing by the side of the road looked very happy about this. They were passing kilometer after kilometer of crotch-high, tough-stemmed, olive-drab weeds with nasty little flower clusters of vivid chemical yellow. Not the kind of hue one wanted in a flower somehow; not inviting ot pretty. A color ort might expect from toxic waste or mustard gas.

Out beyond the roadside flowers was the collapsed barbed-wire fencing of a dead cattle ranch, the long-deserted pastureland overrun with mesquite. They passed the long dawn shadows of a decapitated oil pump, with a half-dozen rust-streaked storage tanks for West Texas crude, a substance now vanished like the auk. The invisible to