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“Daugharty’s characters convince.” Entertainment Weekly

  A Righteous Wind

  By

  Janice Daugharty

  For Scott and Sharon Waynick, who whole-heartedly approved of my using them as models for Shelton and Elaine. Though fiction through and through, this novel is based on Scott’s account of his recent religious conversion. To God be the glory!

  Acknowledgements: Dr. David Jeremiah, whose book, WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON? along with the Holy Bible, inspired and informed this novel.

  Cover Art by Wes Sewell

  “We have a righteous wind at our back.” Barak Obama

  Copyright 2011 Janice Daugharty

  A Righteous Wind

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Shelton, napping on the couch in the living room, wakes to a wet kiss on his cheek from their Bull Terrier, Dixie. Pink tongue, bulb eyes and pop-up ears.

  “Hey, girl, what’s up?” One hand on the dog’s broad head, Shelton sits, cowboy boots planted on the floor like empties. “Huh! How’d it get dark so quick?”

  He stands, stretching, black-haired arms reaching for the ceiling, palming at it—one two, one two. He quit exercising for real after he lost his job and reasons daily, why start now? Mostly, he lies on the couch and rests till he gets sleepy and then he sleeps and then he wakes up and then he sleeps some more till Elaine gets home from work. Oh, and sometimes he watches TV between naps.

  All windows are open and the whistling of spring frogs brightens the dark. A mild breeze floats the white curtains like clouds. Otherwise, the boxy room is colorless and close. An unlit vanilla-scented candle on the table at one end of the couch reminds him of something sad but he can’t remember what, only that if he doesn’t get outside quick his sinuses will flare up and he’ll be sneezing for hours.

  “Where’s Mama, Dix?” He pats the dog’s head. Dixie whines, trotting away toward the screen door off the kitchen, taking the whine with her. Her bobbed tail wags, wiggling the entire length of her stocky brown body. She looks like a cute fat pig from behind.

  “Okay,” Shelton says. “She’s out with the goats, right?”

  Walking toward the door, he slides one hand along the bead-board wall and flips the light switch at the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Lights out. Well, guess you have to pay the bill or that’s what happens.”

  The dog paws at the ripped screen door, raring and rattling it in its frame. Sounds like the whole back wall is falling apart and Shelton wouldn’t be surprised.

  “I’m coming, Dixie.”

  He springs wide the door and the dog wambles out and down the plank laid across the joists of the porch floor to the west side of the small frame house.

  “Hey, Lane!” he calls from the kitchen doorway. “Elaine!”

  Mosquitoes fog around his head with a winding-up sound; he waves them away.

  He can’t see the goat shed and pens because of the tumbled porch roof blocking his view, a couple of yards away from the porch floor frame. After the roof fell, Shelton had decided to leave the floor and call it a deck. Then Elaine pointed out that it didn’t really look like a deck with the six broken posts standing. So, he tried to kick the posts loose and when they wouldn’t budge, he looked for a hand saw but couldn’t find one. And of course there was nothing to do about the posts so he started prizing off the floor boards with a crowbar, giving up the idea of either deck or porch. Then the weather turned cold and he had to go inside to warm up. Then it got hot and he had to stay inside under the air-conditioner. He’s lost track of all the reasons why he never rebuilt the porch to something nor reduced the porch to nothing.

  Regardless, the pile in the yard is a jumble of bent tin sheets and crisscrossed boards for them to have to walk around to get to the goats. Now he can hear them shifting and blowing against the backdrop of darkening woods, and he can smell them, a puckering smell like skunk, accusing him.

  Dixie trots back along the plank, whining.

  “Not here yet, huh? Well, let me get my cell and we’ll call her.”

  For some reason their cell phones seldom work inside and work best when sitting beneath a tower. He spends a lot of time thumbing numbers in that never go through to the long-distance friends he made while traveling as a commercial real estate agent. Mostly, he does this when he’s bored, but sometimes just for a change in his daily routine.

  Shelton goes back into the kitchen, a narrow strip of a room, smelling of either mushy onion or butane gas, between the living room and the back porch, or what’s left of it.

  At the southwest corner of the house, Shelton can see that the chute between the woods and the house is empty where Sharon usually parks. He goes still, listening, hearing only the frogs peeping and the goats snuffling and the way-off rumbling of what sounds like a train. A train? Why would he be hearing a train when there are no tracks within fifteen miles of the house?

  The woods to the west, where the sun is hiding, is edged in amber, and he’s surprised at how much brighter it is outside than in. He sits straddled the end of the plank, small silver phone in hand, and pecks out Elaine’s number with his thumbnail. Hum of nothingness, same as inside the empty house with the power off.

  “Don’t tell me.” He claps the phone shut and slips it into his short gray t-shirt pocket with “Emory University” on the front. “Phone’s out too,” he says to Dixie, now wandering beneath the rectangles of floor joists.

  Small black mosquitoes swarm, light and bite. He smacks one on his bearded cheek and tries waving them away again. Then out of habit he finger-combs his fine black hair into a short stub on back of his head, measuring it; he’s thinking about growing it out long and wearing it in a ponytail, just for the heck of it. His senses feel dull after sleeping; he’s not hungry though he should be. He feels stupefied and soulless and he cannot think what to do with himself until Elaine gets home to jumpstart him.

  A dark toad hops on the raw dirt and Dixie hops after it, bumping her head on a termite-riddled rafter. Shelton laughs and the laugh stretches into a yawn. He stares out the front at the dirt road, looking for headlights on the white sand. His eyes feel grainy and dry and the longer he looks the more he cannot determine whether he’s seeing lights or sand.

  There’s a tang of smoke on the air and above the woods in the west a tail of smoke. Spring and fall, timber farmers in the area are always control-burning their woods, until the EPA comes down on them. Then they pay their fines and stop burning for a while, and then they start all over again.

  “Let’s go feed up for Mama, what you say, Dix?”

  When he gets through with the goats, if Elaine’s not home, he’ll go looking for her. The tires on her old jeep are way past due for a blow-out.

  Chapter 2

  Black dark and still the lights aren’t on and Elaine isn’t home and the phone is either not working or has been cut off because the bill wasn’t paid.

  Shelton, following the smoky beam of his flashlight, Dixie right beside him, heads for his old pickup behind the house to go look for Elaine. He suspects that she is broke down along the highway from Valdosta, twelve miles from where she works. If she’d had a flat tire she would have changed it and been home by now.

  She’s not the kind of woman to wait for a man to do the dirty work. Shelton can be thanked for that, he supposes. But carefree, or care-less, as he usually is, his chest feels tight, his fingers tingle and his face is numb from holding his breath. He tries picturing her laughing and mock blessing-him-out, as she says, but for some reason he can’t quite get the picture to focus.

  It had been easy enough while it was still day-light to be flip about the situation, but with the dark came a swelling up of fear and guilt over his carelessness. He should have checked out the jeep more often; he should have set out looking for Elaine an hour ago. Instead, after feeding the goats, he’d gone back to his plank and sat and drummed his fingers on the wood till dark caught him.

  Mosquitoes and night bugs churn in the beam until he switches the light off. He opens the balking truck door and slides in, turning the key in the ignition to light up the dash.

  Sitting on the edge of the pickup seat, he stares at the dim-lit panel. “About enough gas to get to the highway.”

  Dixie prances in the crackling vinyl seat on the other side. Shelton does not recall loading her up and wonders if he’s going crazy. Actually, he’s been acting crazy for a while and maybe a good scare like this will jolt him out of whatever he’s been going through. He just hopes the price isn’t at Elaine’s expense.

  “Calm down, old boy,” he says to himself and Dixie sits, panting and whining.

  Backing out of the yard to the dirt road, seeing the headlights flowing over the piled boards crowned with a peak of tin, he feels guilty for not having hauled it off as Elaine had asked. Okay, begged, pleaded. To make her point, she’d cordoned the area off with yellow DANGER tape, but the goats had long ago done away with the tape.

  Elaine has never once accused Shelton of being lazy—never once. She knows it isn’t his fault that he’s been let go from the commercial real estate group he worked with. She knows he’s tried everything to get work—well, maybe not everything. He hasn’t told her about all the jobs he has turned down because he’s worked his butt off at Emory University, in Atlanta, for two degrees—political science and English—and he isn’t about to work as a flunky at some filling station or restaurant.

  Almost halfway to the highway and he can see smoke streaming in the headlights ahead. Spot
s of light through the trees each side of the road look like many setting suns, or like control burns seen from a distance on a dark night. No, nobody would be control-burning this near the highway, unless the wind had picked up and the fire had grown out of control.

  “Well, something’s burning,” he says to himself.

  Over the scold of the truck’s engine, Shelton can hear what sounds like sirens, or maybe horns of automobiles. Or maybe both. It’s a spinning out of this world sound, riveting and drawing him into it. He wishes he didn’t have to go into it; he wishes he were back on his couch with Elaine doing dishes and getting ready for work the next morning. She might even snuggle with him on the couch and watch TV.

  Arms hooked on the steering wheel he rolls his shoulders to loosen them up. Whatever is waiting for him, he has too drive right into it—this is the real world, this is what real men do in a crisis.

  Dixie whimpers.

  “What’s up, girl?” Shelton figures the dog has been hearing this blaring and blatting for awhile now and that’s why she’s been carrying on.

  At the highway, left and right he can see jack-knifed lights glaring and radiating and fires burning close to the ground but nothing moving till he starts north toward Valdosta and sees police cars and EMT wagons and people running to and from trucks and cars—some wrecked, some only parked, others burning.

  “Probably a bad wreck, that’s what’s holding her up.” But he has only to glance in the rearview mirror to know he is wrong—north and south are the same: lights, fires, sirens.

  If he were a praying man, he would pray now. He feels dark and dry inside. In fact, even with all the light outside from fires and headlights the scene looks dark.

  Through the thick smoke, he sees people running and walking along the road shoulders. They look stunned by light, groping, with no place to go. Only walking to be walking and when they wind down they will stop.

  Again, he feels panic rising like bile in his throat. It’s all he can do to keep from turning back. And who would blame him if he did? He’s almost out of gas and the smoke is killing his sinuses and Elaine could be home by now, wondering where he’s at. No, he has to look for her first. He has to quit thinking and just act.

  Soon, passing the dark municipal airport on his left, he sees a burning plane, so lit up that he can make out the guttering insides through the little round windows.

  “Okay, a plane crash.” But that doesn’t explain the breadth of the wreckage. Terrorists’ attack?

  All at once he is onto a buckled section of highway with his headlights bridging a deep hole, about a half mile wide and as long, and he has to back and drive down in the ditch on the right side, skirting a stooped wire fence held up by dog-fennel and honeysuckle vines. When he starts up the ditch to find where the highway levels off, he almost rams a new black car parked with its wheels smartly swerved like a showroom display.

  Dixie dances in the seat, staring out the window, then through the windshield. Her thick body is cocked as if she’s getting set to attack.

  “Down, girl.” All he needs is for Elaine’s precious dog to get her neck broke when he hits the brakes.

  Farther on, nearer Valdosta, which looks lit up like hell, he has to weave between parked and wrecked cars on the highway.

  The wailing of sirens is continuous, various, piercing as whistles.

  Peering through smoke, choking on it, he sees on his left Elaine’s blocky brown jeep parked on the highway, headed in the direction of home. He dives the truck down into the ditch, on the other side of the jeep, bouncing the dog to the floor, a walloping, thrashing and scratching sound that makes Shelton cringe at having inflicted pain.

  Letting the dog go where she will, Shelton swings open the door before the truck stops good and runs through the tall grass to the jeep.

  He yanks open the passenger door, shouting, “Elaine! Elaine?”

  The roof light flares and the door-open warning does its ding ding ding in rhythm with the sirens.

  Her green canvas bag with a pharmaceutical company’s logo on it is standing in the black vinyl passenger seat, keys still in the ignition. Her black and red cell phone is next to the bag where she always places it when driving home, so that she can call Shelton quickly in case of an emergency. This is an emergency, right?

  Shelton flips the phone open and thumbs his own number. A blank. Not even a hum.

  He kneels on the seat to reach over and start the engine to check the gas, but it is already switched on, has been left switched on, and the tank registers empty, the red needle below the E, flat.

  Chapter 3

  Shelton steps back to shut the door and the dog sidles past him and hops up on the jeep seat.

  “Come on, girl. Let’s go find Mama.”

  The dog just sits, certain that at last she is in the right place and Elaine will pop through the other door and drive them home and scratch her belly and give her a treat.

  “Let’s go, Dix. We’re running out of gas.” Shelton has to yank the dog’s collar to get her out of Elaine’s jeep and directed toward the idling truck in the ditch.

  It is cool out but he feels blistered from the heat of burning cars. The sky is muddy, no stars. And the spaces between the burning and the crisscrossing headlights is darker contrasted with the light. He honestly can’t tell whether he’s having a panic attack or whether this feeling of heat and darkness contrasted with light is a normal reaction to all that’s going on around him. Maybe he’s dreaming.

  Holding fast to the dog’s collar, Shelton shouts again, “Elaine! Elaine!”

  Materializing out of the smoky dark is another car a couple of yards behind the jeep.

  Shelton loads the dog up in the truck, switches off the engine and slams the door shut, then runs back up the ditch to the car. “Elaine! Elaine!”

  Nobody is inside the car, as far as he can tell, and when he tries opening the doors they are locked.

  A few more yards up the road he spots a southbound car burning, almost burned to a hull. Choking on smoke and disoriented by the wailing of sirens, he calls, “Elaine! Elaine! Where are you?”

  Nothing makes sense. He decides to go back to the truck and drive south to a convenience store where he sometimes buys gas. Then he’ll go into Valdosta and try to find out what is going on.

  The smoke is so thick that on his way to the truck he bumps into the rear of another parked truck, windows down and radio blaring an alert warning.

  He opens the driver’s door and reaches across to turn the radio dial but it’s a straight line of the same alert—be-ip, be-ip.

  Frantically, leaving the truck door open, he sets out up the smoky highway to get to his own truck. Even amidst all the wailing of sirens in the distance, and now and then an automobile gas tank exploding, he can hear the dog barking continuously.

  He gets in the truck, shoving the dog away from the open door. “It’s okay, girl. It’s okay.” His voice sounds hoarse and shaky. It’s not okay.

  Driving slowly, weaving among the dark and burning cars, some with headlights on but not moving, he makes his way toward the convenience store. His hands are shaking on the steering wheel. The people he’d seen when he first started up the highway are all gone. But where?

  Suddenly, in the rearview mirror, he sees red lights flashing on top of what looks like an EMT wagon. That boxy shape. Flashing, coming on.

  He pulls off to the side of the road and steps out, shouting to the dog, “Stay!” Arms overhead and waving he walks out to the middle of the highway. The screaming wagon slows, then just as Shelton is about to approach the driver, it slews around him.

  “Hey, wait! What’s going on?”

  He had seen the silhouettes of two men in the front as they drove around him and couldn’t decide whether he was reassured by seeing humans or discouraged, because for all the commotion outside they may as well have been zombies.

  He almost misses the turnoff to the convenience store because of the smoke, and too, a raw burned hull of a small car is blocking the entrance. The blistered paint is a smoking primer gray, ready to repaint. Shelton has to drive down a ditch and up to get to the black-top parking lot.

  No lights anywhere. The gas pumps are switched off. Not a good sign. He has to have gas to go look for Elaine; he’ll go to the hospital first, if he can get gas. If not, he’ll try to make it home. His mind is a jumble. He pulls up to the front of the store, headlights glaring on the glass front. Again, he takes his cell phone from his shirt pocket and flips it open. Dead. “This is crazy.”