There had been only the shadow, creeping over the pinkish, blistered desert soil that looked so much like sunburnt, peeling skin, moving closer, ever closer, until at last it resolved itself into a human form, tall and dark, smoky with distance, but unmistakable now.Īt the corner of his service station, Bill Needham leaned against the Coke machine and watched.īill Needham had inherited two things from his father-a long, angular, oddly pinched face and the service station. He was out there alone, and he was walking slowly, deliberately, crossing the bleak stretches of gray shale and alkaline sand, coming toward the town.Īt first, he’d been no more than a smudge on the landscape, a wavering shadow amid the ghost flowers and the skeletonweed, like the shadow of a hawk cast by the westering sun but there had been no hawk. Where the desert met the sky, there was a man.Ī tall man dressed in black, a distant figure shimmering like a mirage behind a tremulous curtain of heat. A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
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