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street from their rent house in Conroe. Smoky was both defiant and lonely in all the trash thrown into the oil-soaked earth, alert and suspicious among the broken toilet seats and greasy paper sacks.
    “We got our speed demon, Jeanine,” he said. “We’re going to run the competition around here into the ground. He’s blazing hell at four hundred forty yards. He just needs a hit over the head once in a while.” He said this carelessly, as if it were a matter easily taken care of with a two-by-four or a section of pipe. “I think he can stay the longer distances. We can win some money with this horse, Pistol. And I don’t want you trying to handle him. He’s dangerous.”
    “I don’t want to take care of him,” said Jeanine. “I got other things to do.” The brightly printed flour sacks were hard to get. Many othergirls had figured out the place to get them was at the bakery or the big hotels in Conroe, where bakers and cooks emptied them and then piled them in the storage rooms. It took six flour sacks to make a dress, and you had to get them all matched. Jeanine was at present working on collecting a pattern in aqua and dark blue. It had a risqué slash of red in it.
    She tossed her new short bob in a way that made the blunt ends fly up. She made astonished gestures at herself in the cracked mirror.
    “Either that or he starves.”
    Whatever her father took up it was bound to go wrong. They would move and leave Smoky Joe behind somewhere. They would lose him. He would die of sleeping sickness, he would break one of his legs. It was the same for everybody. The feeling that things were falling apart and that nothing worked. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed over in Louisiana, a hundred miles away, and for ten cents you could see the tan Ford V-8 shot all to pieces, it still had blood and the stain of brains all over the seats. The baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. Not even rich and famous people could protect themselves from alien beings creeping in during the dark hours and destroying your life. Even if you were virtuous. Nothing was stable or safe. Even the earth itself lifted into the sky of the high plains of Texas and Oklahoma and blew into dust storms as thick as airborne petroleum.
    Jeanine had a sample tube of lipstick in a harsh red and with it she made herself several new kinds of lips. She was interested in young men. Young men were attracted by good hair and open-toed shoes with inch-and-a-half heels and dresses with the new drooping shawl collars, fall fashions of 1934. They wanted to go places and see things; you could see a demonstration of how they faked the play-by-play ball games in front of the Conroe radio station, where a man knocked two pencils together to imitate a base hit. That was free. Play ball! the announcer shouted into the microphone, and a man spun crowd soundson a record. She understood that her father slid from addiction to addiction, a shape changer, and nothing would hold him in one place for long, and she knew this with a childlike combination of disillusion and forgiveness.
    “Horse, you are in for a hard life,” she said. “Hope you like potato peelings.”
    She and her father walked away and Jeanine turned back to see the dark horse staring after her with his ears up, a frightened young stallion only two years old, who did not know where he was nor who had bought him nor what was to happen to him.

C HAPTER F IVE
    A t a race outside of Conroe they made the immense sum of fifty dollars. Jeanine began to think of how she could keep a part of it for herself. Her Conroe High School boyfriend had just abandoned her in favor of a girl who was from Conroe and had always been from Conroe. Jeanine did not know why. This was the worst of it. And in other places people had no idea why. On the front page of the Conroe newspaper that morning was a strange photograph of the cold black dust storm of April 1935 that turned the Texas and Kansas plains