An Exercise in Time

"Freddy and Clark and I stood with shoulders hunched, hands in our pockets, and looked on as Ivan circled Tanker's old pickup and explained why it wasn't his fault the tires were mired almost to the axle."

Tobias Wolff, Our Story Begins, Flyboys, pg. 153

The wind was blowing hard, almost to the point of howling, yet it made no noise. It seemed to penetrate my jacket, my shirt, my pants, my hat, and left my skin feeling cold and damp. Goosebumps the size of mosquito bites had risen on my arms and the back of my neck, and I was shivering ever so slightly. Clark's hood whipped back and forth in the wind, sounding like the standard of a ship raised high into the sky and crackling under the force of the zephyr that buffeted it. Fraddy's hair was blown across his face, making him look like a mop being used to vigorously scrub someone's ceiling. The curious thing about this wind was that it kept changing direction, as if its creator was having a bout of indicision as to what he was going to do with this powerful gale he had created. The sky was overcast, and it seemed like night, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon. Dark clouds rolled across the sky, moving shadows across the empty landscape. They were hulking, menacing things, looking like demons converging down upon any sorry soul who was foolish enough to be outside. You could tell it was going to rain, almost taste it in the air. The taste of freshly mown grass mixed with muddy water overwhelmed the senses, even though not a drop of rainfall had fallen from the sky. The truck was pulled over on the side of an unused dirt road, which cut through a barren landscape that stetched out in every direction - as far as the eye could see in such conditions. There were small shrubs dotted throughout the otherwise flat plain, seemingly holding on for dear life so as not to be uprooted. And there were those shrubs who had failed to withstand the onslaught of the wind, the tubleweeds, rolling across the road faster than the winner of the Gloucestershire cheese rolling.

And then it began to pour.