body, and that is why I was the only person who ever knew Margie.

The others never knew how she felt in your arms when she was very happy or very sad. I don’t give a damn how many arms she’s been in; she’s only happy or sad with me. With the others she crawled into a shell as thin and tight as skin, and the others think that shell is Margie.

But it isn’t.

I felt sorry for the others, if you want to know the truth. I felt sorry for them because they never stayed all night with Margie and woke up with her tears matting the hair on their chests and her body warm and quiet.

When I asked her to marry me she cried more than ever and told me I was crazy and I didn’t mean it. Then she said yes, and cried some more and we made love so beautifully that even thinking about it weeks later made me shake a little.

I finished cleaning the gun and set it up on the rack on the wall. I skinned the rabbits and dressed them and salted them down, and then I washed up and changed my shirt and headed towards Margie’s place. She lived by herself in a little cabin on the outskirts of the town.

Days she clerked in the five-and-dime in town, but that was going to change. She’d be coming to my place and she’d be my woman, and then she wouldn’t have to work anymore. She didn’t have to do a thing she didn’t want to. She could just lie around the house all day loving me.

That would be enough.

The moon was up by the time I got to her cabin. The moon was round and bright and golden and it floated like a California orange. When I opened Margie’s door, the wind nearly tore it clear off its hinges.

The wind blew all night long, but I didn’t hear it.

I think the wind set a record for our part of Kansas. It kept up day after day, each day a little worse than the last, and you could tell there was more than a storm brewing. You could smell it the way the wheat was bowed over so much it looked like it grew that way.

The wind was all over. There was a rush of accidents—a two-car head-on collision at the intersection of Mill Run and 68, a blowout just a mile from our house, a freak accident with a telephone pole dropping on a parked car.

Nobody walked away from those accidents. Five people died in the two-car deal and a salesman got sandwiched in the blowout when his car turned over. And there were two kids from the high school in the backseat of that parked car. You couldn’t tell which was which, the way the telephone pole pressed their bodies together.

It sounded silly, but everybody knew it was the wind. And the wind kept blowing without a storm.

And the wind was in Brad, the way he kept up with his needling and prodding. He was getting through to me more often and my hand was sore from making a fist and relaxing it. He made up stories about Margie and who she went with and what they did and how many times and other crazy things. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

“I’m telling you this for your own good,” he would say. “Hell—get what you can. I don’t blame you for that. But I have to keep you from marrying her. I’ve gotta look out for my older brother. You farmers don’t know all the angles.”

That got Pa mad. He started off how there was nothing wrong with being a farmer and how it wasn’t as bad as the Navy where all you did was ride a tin boat or maybe kill some folk if there was a war on.

Every day was just that much worse than the last.

But when it happened I wasn’t ready for it. I walked to her place in a harder and colder wind than ever, and when I got there she was all alone. She was sitting hunched up on her bed with her head almost touching her knees and her hair falling down over her face. I couldn’t see her face. I pulled the door shut and walked over to her.

When I went to give her a kiss she turned her face to the wall and wouldn’t look at me. I knew something was wrong, and I guess