Kellogg, Idaho
Kellogg, Idaho groaned in the night. Whatever it was sounded close but could have been far away. They all heard it. In the middle of the night there was nothing else to hear in the tinny hallway except the shudders and heaves of labored air conditioning. In a...
Duvall, Washington
Duvall, Washington would always be the center of the world for her. She wore a sweater of unknown odors, all from the past, woven in a comforting blur. Only the three redtail hawks had an inkling of how she felt. On one hand her feelings made no sense, but she was...
Clovis, California
Clovis, California echoed with a clatter of castanets. In a malevolent roadhouse on the edge of town, their rhythm rose and fell like the price of a pump and dump penny stock. At first the rattling was slow and full of foreboding. Then the tempo quickened. When the...
Goodyear, Arizona
Goodyear, Arizona no longer had cotton fields. They were gone. Not long ago Pima cotton stretched out to the flaming edge of the hot white sky. They’d been scraped bare for tract homes, no more high yield high quality crops trucked out of town. Farmers made long...
Carlsbad Caverns National Park
Carlsbad Caverns National Park has been a World Heritage Site since 1995. Since 1986, when explorers found more to the Lechuguilla Cave than previously thought, the mystique of the park has taken on new length and depth. The Lechuguilla Cave actually runs longer and...
Coaldale, Nevada
Coaldale, Nevada cheered him up. When the moon bathed his soiled skin and stardust fell, the town reminded him things weren’t so bad after all. Not that he hadn’t been troubled when he first hit town. But now his nerves were no longer bent. They weren’t mangled into...
Oak Harbor, Washington
Oak Harbor, Washington shivered in bristly fog. The town was fine and the online marketing workshop was lame. A waste of time, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by up and leaving. The presenter had been with a global marketing agency. Probably got laid...
Springerville, Arizona
Springerville, Arizona sat back waiting for election results. Nobody was calling for any upsets. Nobody could imagine what might happen to keep Eisenhower from taking the state. At least none of the guys at the Cattleguard Café possessed such an imagination....
Newport Beach, California
Newport Beach, California turned out to be the right town at the wrong time. That’s how he sized it up. A fetching place but for now, not for him. Maybe a bit too crowded. That was his problem, not the town’s. Dodging crowds was simply a matter of getting up...
Bishop, California
Bishop, California rattled like a dustbin in a hot, dry wind. Stiff breezes roared down from the dry throat of a thin blue canyon. A snowboarder came into the café, told the bartender the hellhound was on his trail and he could only stay for three or four beers. Then...
Stateline, Nevada
Stateline, Nevada was where she stopped for breakfast. She hadn’t hit a buffet in ages. Not a bad hour and a half drive down from Fernley, Nevada where the desk clerk in the motel had kept her waiting. The ashen man behind the cluttered front desk couldn’t pull...
Stanfield, Oregon
Stanfield, Oregon just up and vanished. Seven storms crashed through and turned the place into a ghost town. Then another seven storms hit. After that, the town decided to come back to life. But not much of a life. Only a ramshackle work camp where everybody kept...
Woodside, Utah
Woodside, Utah never meant much to them because they weren’t churchgoers. Hadn’t sat in a pew since back in Havre, Montana. Seven days and seven nights they could have stood on the west bank of the Price River. Had they not been chasing more earthly pursuits they...
Sunnyside, Utah
Sunnyside, Utah struck her as a contender, possibly a good place to lie low. Early one morning when she was still in Los Angeles, when it was still early and creamy light fell on her poolside cabana at the Bel-Air, she studied the map. But only briefly. Word gets out...
Tehachapi, California
Tehachapi, California shook like a bedsheet rippling on a clothesline. Those Southern Pacific freight trains made the land feel like it was rolling over on itself. In bed at night the little girl would always wake up when an eastbound freight rumbled through. Her...
Hotel Bel-Air
Hotel Bel-Air guests like her were as commonplace as its hydrangeas and gardenias. Statuesque, reserved and apparently preoccupied with matters more worthy than those of anyone else. She had been in her suite for a week. She gauged the extent of her boredom as...
Carlsbad, New Mexico
Carlsbad New Mexico lies along the Pecos River a few miles east from where Jim White rode his horse right up to the edge of a mystery. Jim first saw it back in 1901. A swirling mystery, unfolding every summer evening at dusk since the dawn of time. Off in the...
Helena Flats, Montana
Helena Flats, Montana felt as if it had fallen out of tune. After being away a few years, the changes in town seemed inescapable. New construction, heavier traffic and all the other predictable accompaniments of growth. And something else, unpredictable and...
