Dust by Joan Frances Turner Page B

mushiness, but I didn’t care. Things were easy between him and me like they weren’t with anyone else but Joe. “You’re not going to die.”
    “Course I will, I’m—” He frowned. “Well, hell, I got no idea how old I am now, but damned old, I know that. It’s long past time. Sick of being sent on watch rounds, just so she can get rid of me. Sick of everything.” He sighed, studying himself, the crumbling silhouette of his bones. “You’d never believe it now, pet, but this arm”—he made a joking flex of the biceps he didn’t have—“this arm could bend an iron streetlamp post barely trying. These legs could kick through concrete, just like yours. That’s why they wanted me. Now they’re just waiting to be rid of me. So I’ll go.” His voice was light and pitiless, almost reveling in the pronouncement of death, but his face grew wistful. “All I wish is I could see my beach again.”
    “It wouldn’t be the same.” Florian had lived for a while, a long while, in the woods around the Indiana Dunes, way back when they were just unprotected piles of sand and not a park. “I know nobody’s supposed to live out near there, but you hear stories sometimes about—”
    “There was always hoos out there making one kinda trouble or another, that ain’t nothing new. I remember when some damned fool company just took one of the biggest sand dunes away, two hundred feet high and they hauled it all off in boxcars to melt it down, make glass jars out of it—I said I miss my beach, not their beach. Hasn’t been my beach in forever.”
    He stopped to rest near the shell of a dead tree, a blackened stub that made me imagine a long-ago lightning bolt. “That sand could hurt a rotten foot, all gritty, but there was still something about it, you lay down in it to sleep and woke up every night feeling good. All those woods, barely a soul in ’em, and that big long slope down to the shore and the shore was nothing but waves that kept rolling in, real soft. Like a lot of drowning people’s hands laid all in a row, touching the sand and then getting pulled under all at once. All kinda flowers to look at, stuff you never seen anywhere else, and too many birds to count.”
    He watched the Great River meander past us, all slow-moving liquid mud. “The Indians left us alone. Well, they’d get mad when we raided their muskrat traps, but a body’s gotta eat. Then they made ’em all leave. Built railroads and steel mills right there on the sand. Beach houses. Couldn’t make us leave, though. They only thought they got rid of the Indians, the ones that tunneled up all came back too. Dozens of us, and we never had much of any fighting, ’cept when we got bored. Time just kinda stopped there. Every day the same as the next—”
    “Yeah, not at all like being out here.”
    “Every day just like the next.” Florian was long gone now, that look on his face old people get when they’re all excited about something that happened before you were born. At least he didn’t expect me to act excited too, like Grammy Sullivan would. “All flowing together, just one big day and one big night. All peaceful. And I don’t know what it was, but you broke down so slow there, your body did. Took a good thirty, forty years before I found even the first bug on me. Hoos would see us and think we were still them, before they saw how we walked. Seemed like we all barely rotted at all.”
    He sighed. “If you ever get there, pet. I won’t say heaven, but it was more beautiful than anything else.”
    I’d never seen the Dunes except in photographs, growing up. Too dangerous, though sometimes kids would go to the unincorporated areas on a dare. A few from the class a year ahead of mine did that and never came back. I knew I was meant to feel sorry for them, but it was kind of hard when all it meant for the rest of us was more goddamned safety drills and this was after we’d already suffered through it all in Safety Ed: endless