Dinosaur Wars

Chapter 15

It was a bright and sunny Nebraska Sunday morning. The left front fender of Bob Eastley’s old blue pickup made a "tack-etta, tack-etta, tack-etta" sound as the washboard surface of the gravel road sent a throbbing vibration through it. It sounded like it might just rattle right off this trip. Bob knew he could get rid of the noise by slowing down, but he liked to ride these wide plains as fast as he could go and still keep the truck on the roadway. Otherwise he’d never get where he was going, given the distance between the farm and just about anywhere else. Travel was simple enough here in corn country. Forty acres of foot-high corn sprouts on one side, forty acres of soy beans on the other, then forty of alfalfa and another forty of corn, and a dirt road between them as straight as an arrow. Even if you lost control on a bumpy stretch, you’d just spin off into a field without the inconvenience of a ditch, and then you’d pull right back on and keep a-going wherever it was you were headed.

This morning, that would be church, thirteen miles straight ahead in Albion. Bob ordinarily had little use for services when plowing and planting got busy this time of year. But there was that other matter-the world was coming to an end-and well, his mother had just insisted on church today.

He’d often wondered how such a tiny little woman could give birth to a big lug like him. He was one hoss of a farmer, with hands like hams and a kiester as big as a pair of watermelons; he had a sun-hardened, square-jawed, fat-cheeked face that gawked out from under his dirty white-straw cowboy hat like a big tomato. Beside him, she looked like a midget sitting quietly with her purse in her lap, dressed in her dark blue Sunday dress. She was just about as small as a woman could get and scrawny as a new lamb. And, as dusty as his coveralls were, that’s how clean she was. It was like she still needed to be an example of cleanliness to him and teach him some manners-which maybe she did. Above her pasty white face the black hat with flowers on top was just as tidy and perfectly straight as it could be.

He kept his boot down on the accelerator and the pickup truck barreled along at a clip of almost seventy miles per hour. The vibrations rumbling through the truck didn’t do anything more to his mother than make the flowers on her hat jiggle a little bit.

This morning, of course, he kept a wary eye out along the flat horizon. Strictly speaking, they weren’t supposed to be out here halfway between home and town, what with the invasion and martial law and all that. But his mother had insisted. She was about the strictest Lutheran in the county, and there wasn’t much that could keep her from Sunday worship.

She had said, "God will keep us and protect us on our way," and he hadn’t been able to argue with that.

Besides, there’d been no sign of an invasion other than the radio and TV being out. Nor was there any sign of the Army, the police or anything else going on around these parts. That was just like always-real quiet-so Bob had decided he was better off taking his mother into town without any back-sass. So far, rattling along under a clear blue sky, he had no cause to regret it.