He still listens for sirens. He doesn’t hear them, not exactly, but he waits for them, waits for the whole damned thing to come down.

A police siren, a plain blue warble, and you don’t know if they’re coming for you or heading somewhere else.

That town, swear to God, moved and breathed, and the only thing you could smell was its filthy haunches. Sometimes it smelled like the detritus of the dieback wheat, and sometimes it smelled like his father, cotton work pants and Wildroot cream. But mostly he remembers the dark reek of potato vodka slopping on the old man’s undershirt.

The summer Eldridge turned ten, those sirens cut apart his sleep. When your world was a flat plate of broom corn and empty wind, sirens busted everything open. When you’re feverish from the day heat, still slick at ten o’clock at night, you remember. Most times, the silence was so thick you could feel it crawl around your ears. But when those sirens cut through the night like a squall, it scratched scars on your memory.

The sound terrified Eldridge, and made him giddy. Maybe his old man had been knifed in the downtown beer parlor, or maybe he was the knifer. Didn’t matter. When his father slammed the porch screen at 2:30 the next morning, Eldridge was still awake.

“Boy got runned over on Little Route,” his old man said. “Thought it might be you, but I was pitching nickels with Thimble Wyatt and one of them Ostrander fellas, and didn’t have time to check. Now fetch me a beer and get on back to bed.”

And on and on through a hollow span of days and nights, until they moved away from that awful Oklahoma town for good. But the sirens kept chasing him down. One day they’d be for him, and for good reason.

**From The Stone Age — a work-in-progress**