You can always blame it on the heat. One thing about Montana, you could watch rain coming a long way off. It had already been raining for six days when the enormous shoe washed up onto the beach. One things about boundary lines, Curtis Daniels thought, as he twisted a little in his saddle in an attempt to ease his aching back, they didn't mean a whole hell of a lot when it came to the weather. Then there was the bad weather.
Nobody thinks about death on a nice spring day.
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. There was a university somewhere in the Midwest, Jack had once heard on the radio, which had an instrument package designed to go inside a tornado. This time death was like being in the center of a whirlpool, inside the heart of a roaring tornado. Bernice was sixteen years old when she witnessed her father's murder, and she watched the sequence of events that led to it with curious indifference. She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.