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on the bed but not yet getting up. “Mom wants me at the hospital. Do you need the car tonight?”
    â€œAll summer I walk. Now the car is mine again.”
    â€œYou’ll have to take me.” David thought how ridiculous his father looked standing there with his hairy chest showing, being stubborn about the car.
    â€œYou could walk. Your legs don’t work already?” It was over two miles to the hospital. David had walked it lots of times.
    â€œIt’s supper that’s the craziest time,” he argued. “If I’m going to help, she needs me now.” He pushed himself up and swung off the bed. “I’ll unload in the morning.” His shirt was soaked under the arms. “Just let me pull on a clean shirt.”
    â€œClean up for the loonies,” his father grumbled. He went through the house ahead of David and out to the car, still bare-chested. “Where’s the cash box?” he asked when David scooted into the car.
    David jerked his hand back and pointed with his thumb to the piles of clothes. “Under the green wash pants.”
    They didn’t speak for the first ten blocks. Saul’s arms glistened with perspiration. Finally David said, “I’m sick of summer.”
    Saul grunted. “Just wait for winter dust,” he said, meaning the wild storms when the wind blew dust so hard it was like ground glass, sometimes mixing with rain to splatter mud. His father hacked and wheezed all winter. It was not the dust, or the cold, that brought on David’s attacks. His bad moments always came from moments of stress; he was deeply ashamed of his weakness.
    â€œAt least we’ll get rain then,” David said, “if we’re lucky. He was happy to have his father talk to him about anything.
    â€œI’ll pay you in the morning,” his father said at the hospital. “After you unload.”
    â€œSure, Pop.” David thought Saul looked foolish, driving half-dressed. “Where am I going tonight?”
    The air was perfectly still. He could smell dust. It was hot and bright, the orange brightness of late afternoon. He looked out at the town. Most buildings in Basin were a single story, except the hospital, the high school, a couple of office buildings, and the Alamo Hotel, at eight stories the city’s only “skyscraper.” Looking into the sun, David saw the city fade and waver like a mirage. In half a moment he saw only sky and light. The sky was vast; it would hold light until ten or later. Once it was dark he always felt the city had sunk even farther away from the sky, making it seem larger. He felt, at certain times, that he lived in the very bottom of a huge bowl, aptly named Basin. Yet the truth was he lived on a high plain, and the basin was below and inside it, the heart of an ancient sea that extended all the way to Kansas. And in that sea, pooled in the rocks that had accumulated over timeless time, was clear and bountiful water, so that, if you got at it, you could live here, where it looked as though nothing could live. And there was oil, which seemed to matter more, so that the people in this city—more than 20,000 of them—could live small lives digging and refining it, and the lucky few whose oil it was could live in the next city over, which was neater and prettier, or in Dallas, which was a real city, or if in Basin, then in a part of town that was an oasis of trees and grass and elegant houses, some of them surrounded by stone walls.
    He shook his head to clear it. If he thought about it—and “it” was nothing more than luck, fate, to be born what you were born—he would grow bitter, like his father, or stoic, like his mother. He would become crazy, like the old geezers he was going to see right now. It was not right to seethe; anger dragged you down. It was only right to hope, and strive, and escape. He had not lost yet, he was not defeated; he had not entered the