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again.
    His father stared at it for a moment. With a shudder, he thrust his fingers through the firefly, yanked them back and stared at them. “It scares me,” he whispered. “I don’t understand it any more than I understand this damn, never-ending drought.” He looked at Jeremy suddenly. “You scared the pants off Ted. He’s not going to forgive you for that. I don’t think everybody believed what the Reverend had to say, but enough did, son.” He sighed. “I don’t have any good answers. Maybe there aren’t any — not good ones.” He met Jeremy’s eyes. “I’ve got to look south for Greely,” he said. “Which way do you think he’d head? Down Willow creekbed — or by the main road to La Grande?”
    Jeremy hesitated for a moment, then straightened his shoulders with a jerk. “I think he went down the main road,” he said and held his breath.
    His father shaded his eyes, stared at the dun fold of Willow creekbed in the distance. “There aren’t any good answers.” He sighed. “I’ll look for Greely on the main road,” he said.
    * * *

CELILO
    D an Greely limped slowly eastward, along the old highway. The empty bed of the Columbia River dropped away on his right, a huge gash of cracked clay and weathered gray rock. The Pipeline gleamed dull silver, half buried in the middle of the riverbed in this stretch. The Drylands lay at his back, The Dalles ahead, down the riverbed, hidden by the high walls of the Columbia Gorge. A semi roared past, a single rig, maybe a local making up with a convoy. Not much traffic. Dan wiped sweat and grit from his face, shaded his eyes against the glare of the setting sun. Those were the old falls, up ahead. Already. He lowered his head and limped on. It had been a long time since he had been back here.
    Those ledges of stone looked the same, as if the heat had dried up time in this place, preserved it, like the shriveled carcass of a coyote he’d found out in the Dry once, a year old or a dozen years. He sneaked a glance at the dusty ledges of the long-dead falls.
    Someone stood on the edge, where the rocks jutted out over the deepest part of the riverbed. Dan caught his breath, thought he saw the flutter of black hair on the hot wind.
    Amy was dead. Long dead. The figure was gone, had been nothing but a shimmer of heat, he told himself, a trick of mind and memory and heat. He wrenched his eyes away from the falls and his foot turned as a rock rolled beneath it. His pack pulled him off balance and he hissed through his teeth as his weight came down on his bad knee. The sudden searing pain caught him by surprise, kicked his feet out from under him. Tires blurred by in a rush of motion, inches from his face as he sprawled onto the crumbling asphalt.
    Brakes screeched and doors slammed. “Hey, you all right?” Footsteps scraped on sandy asphalt. “I damn near ran over you.”
    “My knee.” Dan breathed shallowly, sweating.
    “Let’s see.” A man squatted beside him, lean and weathered brown. “Jesse, come take a look, will you? You got the touch for this sort of thing.”
    A woman joined him, older, with a lined, sun-dried face and a thick braid of gray hair.
    “I twisted it some days back. Just now . . . stepped wrong. Or something.” He sucked in a breath as the woman squatted beside him and began to prod and twist his knee gently. “That hurts.”
    “Might be just a sprain.” She didn’t relent with her probing. “Might be you finally tore something. Can’t tell with joints.” Her faded shirt flapped in the wind as she shrugged and rocked back on her heels. “A splint’s the best you can do. Get off it and give it some rest. It’ll get better or it won’t.” She said it resentfully, as if Dan had asked her for a handout.
    Well, he hadn’t asked her for anything. “Could you folks give me a ride into town?” he said through clenched teeth. Although what he’d do there if he couldn’t stand or walk, he didn’t have a clue.
    “You heard