Faye Reynolds watched another dust storm from her apartment window. She was absolutely suffocating, this happened every single day, nothing ever changed in this dirty, little town. The storms would start low in the west and build up until they formed the big, red, fat clouds that came flooding into Kent County like a clay tornado. Faye couldn’t figure why anyone would want to live in a place like this. Nothing here, but a bunch of SOBs. It wasn’t her choice, she was here by default. Faye had to be near her mother until she passed on and besides, she probably couldn’t even afford to live anywhere else.
Faye looked across the patch of bare dirt that she called her yard to her neighbor’s patio. Old man Clovis. He hadn’t made it outside today to hang out his one pair of underwear and his plastic bread bag on the clothes line. And what was he doing hanging out a bread bag anyway? Why would anybody want to wash out those and keep them? He was just an old, fat fool, who stayed busy trying to hide that ratty little dog of his from the landlord.
“Look at it,” Faye said to herself….”Just look at it…”
When the dust got up like this, she could smell it. Faye had things in her nose. The doctor had talked to her mother about them when Faye was little. Said she’d always have headaches. She had been small, alright, but Faye had heard them whispering about her in the next room, about how the things in her nose could cause blindness and insanity. Faye wasn’t sure about that, but she did have those headaches almost every day.
And there was always those darn dust storms. That was on the one thing in Kent county that one could count on. It meant more laundry. You had to keep laundry clean. That was important. Clean laundry and clean hands. Faye remembered her days working in the local laundromat when she first came back to this town. She stood on those concret floors, all day long, washing other people’s clothes. Faye also remembered having to clean the washers and the dryers. Bleach did a good job on that, in fact she mopped her own floors in bleach every few days. It killed the germs. So Faye remembered being on her feet all day and then walking home. Now Faye did her own laundry. She would have to take down all the curtains and the bedspreads and wash them. And wash the sheets, and the towels too. The red Kent county dirt, it got everywhere. That dirt just stuck to a person. It would blow all day and the day after that and probably even the next day. Dust would cover everything in the town with a thin, red layer. Maybe someday it would blow that little pathetic place away. Until that time, the town would just have to sit idly by and watch itself being buried alive.
Maybe Arizona was the answer. The dust didn’t blow there, not the way Faye remembered it anyway. She lived out there when she was a young woman with her husband. He was an alcoholic and wanted to come home and raise hell every night. Oh, he was dead now, fifty years of drinking got to the kidneys. When he left the VA hospital for home, he took back to his old habits and called up a drinking buddy and that’s what did him in. But no great loss, too many memories of him being thrown out of cars, falling into ditches or falling onto the pavement somewhere. That was him, just falling into darkness and never really hitting bottom. Faye couldn’t miss night after night of endless beer joints and womanizing. She could well do without all that. In the end, even that kidney machine couldn’t save him.
Faye did miss driving down the farm roads in Arizona with Uncle Claud. He was always talking, never watching where he was driving, “dad blame this” and “dad blame that”. That was uncle Claud. The only one out of her husband’s family that wasn’t a drinker. He was a good man and provided a fond memory of a small slice of happiness in her life.
“Ring Ring” ....the telephone.
“Hello” said Faye.
“Faye, were you asleep?”
