She slowed to a stop on the leveling roadway, and leaned her forearms on the armrests, dug her elbows into her sides. The wicker creaked under her shifting weight. The bones of her back were locked in the steel grip of bunched muscles. Her long neck craned and crackled as she rotated her head to stretch out a cramp. Her caftan was growing damp between her thighs and she was tempted to remove the head wrap and let her scalp and nappy hair breathe in the cooling air.

The moonlight sifted through the leaves of the trees on the left, and glimmered on the hedgerow. From the other side, she could hear two voices outside a nearby house at the entrance to a loop of roadway. The darkness seemed to magnify every sound. The hiss of propane lanterns filled the brief silences between the rise and fall of their bellowed promises of revenge, uttered between gulps of beer, loud burps, and glass breaking against concrete.

She knew them to be not more than one generation out of the south, Texas from the sound of their accents. She knew them by the stink of fear that filtered out onto the roadway in the slow lazy wind. She knew them by the bravado of empty threats against a nameless enemy and the words they useddesert niggers, ragheads, camel jockeysand more phrases her seasoned ears refused to hear any more. These were the kind of men who wouldn’t distinguish one dark skinned person from another. Her womanhood would not protect her. That she didn’t belong here, not as servant, not as resident, would be clear the moment they laid eyes on her.

She closed her eyes, breathed her heartbeat down to a lope, stretched her arms behind her head, reached aching hands for the wheelrims, then hesitated. The flicker of lightning in the dark, without the slow roll of thunder overhead, caught her attention. She opened her senses to the nature of itheat lightning maybe, or a distant storm that might cool the air and drive hot tempers inside. She had a poncho in the rucksack clipped onto the back of the chair if need be.

Ordinary lightning didn’t worry her. Her chair was made of hardwood and wicker, with rubber tires, pegged entirely with wooden dowels. Not a nail or screw had been used in the making of it for her grandmother. The only metal was in the wheel bearings in the hubs, and only because she’d not been able to find a true wheelwright in Kansas who could make proper repairs. There was nothing else that would draw lightning to hershe could wheel herself through the worst electrical storm without fear, though she usually preferred not to.

No, ordinary lightning was nothing to fear. But there was that other, the kind that chilled her blood and made her look for shelter where she could find it. She couldn’t be sure which kind was brewing. The sky was peculiar, in what way she couldn’t quite say. Vague shapes seemed to take form, swell, flare and dissolve. But she could smell rain on the air, and she slumped in relief, gripped the wheels and began to push herself forward, hoping the men were so deeply pre-occupied with planning their own last stand at the Hollywood Alamo that she could slip past unheard and unseen.

The hair on her arms and neck prickled the warning too late. It streaked in low over the trees, dragging white heat as it passed. The flash lit the scenery with a deadly blue-white light that gave everything the eerie look of a black and white photograph. The familiar CRACK of the strike was quickly followed by a rain of debris, then a screamed curse.

“FUCK! My house! They fucking blew up my fucking house!”

Her chair jittered to a stop as one wheel locked up, its bearings melted by the heat of the passing lightning, and she was thrown to the ground, letting out an involuntary cry as her head struck pavement. Her fingers dug furrows into the graveled berm as she tried to drag herself into the shadows of the hedge before the men belonging to the pounding footsteps reached her.

“THERE! THERE!” One man screamed. She heard a round being chambered into a pump shotgun.

“YOU! YOU FUCKING CUNT!” A hand grabbed her caftan and jerked her back. “I’m gonna fucking kill youteach YOU to blow up my house.”

He rolled her over onto her back and spat in her face.

“C’mon, Jake, she’s a cripshe was out here on the road. She couldna blown up the house.” The saner of the two crazy men argued.

“Then she had help. Where are they, bitch? HUH?” He shoved the barrel of the gun under her chin. She watched his index finger twitch on the trigger.

“Ain’t nobody with me,” she said in the calmest voice she could muster. “Didn’t blow up your damn house either.”

“Yeah?” He poked the barrel into her flesh. “Just blew itself up, did it?”

“Lighnin’,” she gasped for air. “Didn’t ya see it? Came from right over there?” She waved weakly toward the trees to the left.

“I didn’t see SHIT, bitch, except my house blowin’ up. Where are they? Where are your friends? I’m gonna blow their asses back to Saudee Arabeeya.”

“It was lightnin’, I’m tellin’ ya,” she insisted weakly. “Came right in over the trees. Prob’ly you had a gas leak. That’s all it takes. A little gas and a spark. Prob’ly saved your life, too.” That was the only explanation she was willing to give. She wasn’t about to try to explain what it was that rode the lightning down, aimed it right for HIS house, nobody else’s. His! Then picked itself up out of the rubble and walked away.

“Oh yeah, right!” His eyes rolled back, showing the whites. “I got no place to live, bitch, thanks to you!”

“Jake,” his friend reached out and touched his arm lightly. “Cool out, man. Maybe she’s”

“Maybe she’s part of the bunch that blew up the power plant.”

“Hey, man, we don’t.”

Jake wheeled around, clipping her jaw with the gunbarrel, and leaned into his friend’s face, lips curled around bad teeth. “I know what I know! And so do you! You think this just happened all by itself?” He waved the gun around the dark road, then jammed it into her throat again. “You got to the count of three to tell me where your raghead friends are. Then I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”

“Hey!” A woman’s voice filtered through the dark. “Hey!” She yelled again, louder this time.

The two men jerked their heads up to see a group of women trotting down the road. They looked each other and grinned lewdly. “Hey, lookee here, we got company. Girls!”

Alice was the first to reach them. Her eyes had hardened to dark buttons, and she was pounding the sock of marbles against her hand. Dana was a few steps behind, reaching out to pull her back. “Jeez, Alice, he’s got a gun.”

“That’s right, bitches. I got a gun.” Jake raised the shotgun and pointed it at the group.

Alice took a step back and stumbled over Dana’s foot, caught herself and stiffened her back. “Big deal, bone-head.”

“Alice!” Dana whispered. “Stop it.”

Shane stepped out from behind them, tapping the tire iron against her leg. Carmen’s face went white in the moonlight.

Jake swiveled his head, cutting his eyes from Alice to Shane and back again. “You think you can swing that before I blow the bitch’s head off?”

For a moment, no one moved, nobody said anything. There was only the sound of breathing, fast and hard. “C’mon, Harlan, show ‘em your hardware.”

“Oh puh-leeze,” Alice snorted, “trust me, he doesn’t have anything I haven’t” The words died her throat as Harlan pulled a .357 magnum out of his belt and leveled it at the group of women, who had slowly formed a semi-circle around the woman on the ground.

Stalemate.