Dust Devil Read Online Free PDF Page A

forearms, in
its pocket a pack of cigarettes, which the man reached for as he
stood there staring at the newspaper building. His movements deft and
sure, he shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it with a lighter
taken from the pocket of his black chinos. He inhaled deeply, then
blew a cloud of smoke into the air.
    I’m
dreaming, Sarah
thought dumbly, frozen where she stood, feeling as though she had
just been struck a sickening blow to her head or midsection. She was
suffering a nightmare or imagining things because of her conversation
with Lucille inside the salon. That was it. That must be
it! Sarah told herself desperately.
    Only,
it wasn’t.
    In
that instant, it seemed impossible to her that it was just an
ordinary summer day, with the bright yellow noon sun beating down on
the small town, the humid breeze rustling the leaves of the tall old
trees that dotted the grassy green square and lined the wide streets.
With children playing tag and tetherball in the park, the townspeople
strolling along the sidewalks, talking, laughing, calling greetings
to one another. With traffic crawling along at its usual
Saturday-afternoon snail’s pace, impatient teenagers in a hurry
to go nowhere blasting their car horns.
    She
should have had some word, some warning of what this day was to
bring, Sarah reflected dimly in some dark comer of her mind. But
there had been nothing. There was nothing.
Nothing except the sweet, wild, unexpected rush of heat that rose
from the core of her very being to spread throughout her entire body,
so it was suddenly as though more than a decade had not passed and
she lay naked again upon the wooded summer grass just beyond the old,
abandoned quarry that had once served as the local swimming hole—and
felt the man’s warm, welcome weight pressing her down.
    Feeling
strangely as though she somehow floated somewhere beyond her own
body, watching both herself and him from a distance, Sarah
thought, It
all began with that old lunch box. For
she didn’t know—she had never known—that for Renzo
Cassavettes, it had begun long before that, in a rundown tenement of
the big city where he was born, and with the butterfly that had shown
him what, despite his harsh, inauspicious origins, he might someday
become....

    I
do not know whether I was then a man
    dreaming
I was a butterfly,
    or
whether I am now a butterfly,
    dreaming
I am a man.

    On
Leveling All Things
    — Chuang-tzu

    A
Tenement, The Midwest, Twenty-Seven Years Ago
    That
Renzo Cassavettes should have witnessed the butterfly’s
emergence into the world was no more than the smallest incidence of
chance—yet it changed his life forever, as he somehow knew even
then it would, knew with a child’s pure and simple faith. Had
he been indoctrinated into the Catholic religion of his parents and
grandparents, as some few decades earlier, he would have been, Renzo
would have viewed the butterfly as a sign from God or, at the very
least, a saint. But in the eternal rebellion of youth convinced it
suffered as no other generation before it had ever done, his patents
had cast off their Madonnas, their crucifixes and their rosaries as
deliberately and determinedly as they had cast off all the rest of
the teachings; of their short lifetimes, along with the
ever-too-tight, ever-too-far-reaching familial tentacles that had
embraced, if not nurtured them. His parents had still been young
enough then to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that no matter how
long and violent the struggle to be free of that initial childhood
bonding and imprinting was, escape was never truly and wholly
possible.
    There
are some things that are with you always. They lie buried deep,
perhaps. Still, they are there, the worm Ouroboros of the soul.
    Renzo
had only a vague, child’s memory of his father, who had seemed
to him to tower ten feet above him, a veritable giant of a man, long
and lean and hard muscled, with mercurial moods, quick fists and a
black, surly temper worsened by drink