I rubbed my hands on my knees to keep them from freezing. There was thunder, though I did not see lightning. I thought of all the mud turtles in Arizona letting go. Did Arizona even have mud turtles? An old man my mama used to clean for would say if it thunders in January it will snow in July. Clearly he had never been to Arizona. Or perhaps he had.
We got out of the open car and stood under the concrete wings to stay dry. Turtle was looking interested in the scenery, which was a first. Up to then the only thing that appeared to interest her was my special way of starting the car.
"This is a foreign country," I told her. "Arizona. You know as much about it as I do. We're even Steven."
The hail turned to rain and kept up for half an hour. A guy came out of the little boarded-up building and leaned against one of the orange poles near us. I wondered if he lived there, or what. (If he did live there, did he paint the sperms?) He had on camouflage army pants and a black baseball cap with cloth flaps hanging down in the back, such as Gregory Peck or whoever it was always wore in those old Foreign Legion movies. His T-shirt said VISITOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET. That's me, I thought. I should be wearing that shirt.
"You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car.
"No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks.
He lit a cigarette. "What'd you pay for that bucket of bolts?"
"A buck two-eighty."
"Sassy one, aren't you?"
"You got that one right, buster," I said. I wished to God I wasn't going to have to make such a spectacle of myself later on, starting the car.
The sun came out even before the hail stopped. There was a rainbow over the mountains behind the city, and over that another rainbow with the colors upside down. Between the two rainbows the sky was brighter than everywhere else, like a white sheet lit from the back. In a few minutes it was hot. I had on a big red pullover sweater and was starting to sweat. Arizona didn't do anything halfway. If Arizona was a movie you wouldn't believe it. You'd say it was too corny for words.
I knew I had better stay put for a few more minutes to give the engine a chance to dry out. The guy was still hanging around, smoking and making me nervous.
"Watch out," he said. There was this hairy spider about the size of a small farm animal making its way across the pavement. Its legs jerked up and down like the rubber spiders on a string that you get from a gumball machine.
"I've seen worse," I said, although to tell you the truth I hadn't. It looked like something that might have crawled out of the Midnight Creature Feature.
"That's a tarantula," he said. "You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It's a special kind of poison."
This I didn't believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?
"What's it coming around here for?" I said. "Is it your pet, or your girlfriend?"
"Nah," he said, squashing out his cigarette, and I decided he was dumber than he was mean.
There were a lot more bugs crawling up on the cement slab. A whole swarm of black ants came out of a crack and milled around the cigarette butt trying, for reasons I could not imagine, to take it apart. Some truck had carried that tobacco all the way from Kentucky maybe, from some Hardbine's or Richey's or Biddle's farm, and now a bunch of ants were going to break it into little pieces to take back to their queen. You just never knew where something was going to end up.
"We had a lot of rain lately," the guy said. "When the ground gets full of water, the critters drown out of their holes. They got to come up and dry off." He reached out with his foot and squashed a large, shiny black bug with horns. Its wings split apart and white stuff oozed out between. It was the type that you wouldn't have guessed had wings, although I knew from experience that just about every bug has wings of one kind or another. Not including spiders.
He lit another cigarette and threw the match at the tarantula, missing it by a couple of inches. The spider raised its two front legs toward the flame like a scared lady in an old movie.
"I got things to do," I said. "So long." I put Turtle in the car, then went around to the other side and put it in neutral and started to push.
He laughed. "What is that, a car or a skateboard?"
"Look, buster, you can help give me a push, or you can stand and watch, but either way I'm out of here. This car got me here from Kentucky, and I reckon she's got a few thousand left in her."