How Okies look to natives.(Short story)

THE SUMMER BEFORE HE LEFT FOR COLLEGE Gib Harrell had been haunted by a fear too deep for reason. It was 1969, he was eighteen, and he felt stalked by something terrible and mortal, afraid he was going to die before he'd lived. Nothing he tried, not beer or weed or backseat groping, could take his mind from his dark thoughts; and so when his uncle offered a job clearing some land out on the high plains of New Mexico, Gib took it.

While his friends sweated the draft lottery back home in Memphis, he was camped alone in a stone sheepherder's hut out on the Llano Estacado. Under a sky so wide he could track the passage of the sun from horizon to horizon, he hauled rocks the size of nail kegs and piled them into cairns. Nights he sat at the hut's door, alert for rattlesnakes, many thicker than his arm. His shouts and wild stomp dances failed to rout them, and he slept uneasily until he laid a rope around the hut to ward them off. He wasn't sure the trick was anything but television cowboy lore, but it seemed to work, and he began to enjoy the night. Star clouds glimmered pale as glass, the Perseids shot sparks, and he liked to imagine he was the lone recipient of light from ages past. At the end of August he went off to Vanderbilt to begin the life that had proceeded without obstacle until the present.

Now he was fifty. The millennium had newly turned. He had a sturdy marriage to a woman he loved, a son at Tulane and twin daughters in their last year of boarding school in Vicksburg, a radiology practice with congenial colleagues in his hometown, an orderly, contented life into which the black dog had come again.

He saw death everywhere: in the starry efflorescences on X-ray films, shadowy tumors, a near miss on the freeway, even when he mowed the lawn. His parents were in robust health, his children flourished, but these mercies somehow made it worse, made loss more imminent. His luck, he feared, was running out, his number coming up. He decided that at summer's end he'd take time off and drive west on the back roads to the stretch of badland between Milnesand and Lingo to see if what had cured him before would cure him now.

In the last days of August he drove the twins to St. Margaret's, mustered them on the dormitory steps to deliver what they called his "danger talk": cautions about hair dryers near bathtubs, reminders about sunscreen and vitamins. They'd heard it all before. Listing toward their classmates gathering in a grove, they pledged to be careful. "Nothing bad will happen, Dad" He stood by while they murmured endearments to Hal--the deaf red setter who had come along for the ride--hugged them, and then remanded them to the delta heat and the other beautiful immortals waiting under the tupelos. He held open the car door so Hal could ricket his long body inside, and then got in himself, belted up, and drove out of town and onto the bridge.

The Mississippi was down. Sandbars stretched nearly to the middle where barges plied the coffee-colored water. As the bluffs of the battleground--so many dead, a mountain--receded in his rearview, it struck him that he'd taken a wrong turn. This hitch rattled him, but there was no way to check the map until he reached the Louisiana side and pulled into the parking lot of a barbecue stand.

A homemade sign proclaimed Lucky's open for business. On the sign in front of Lucky's name a vandal, or maybe Lucky himself, had spray-painted the letters UN. In a clump of knotgrass a billboard teetered. Across its collapsing scaffold plywood farm animals--a paint-scabbed cow, a pig in a top hat, a rooster wearing a jaunty-looking bib--jigged on hind legs. Smoke roiled from the chimney pipe of a meat smoker parked hazardously close to a propane tank. Briefly he wondered if he'd warned the twins about what to do in case of fire.