> "A story must always have conflict. Man against man, man against nature, man against himself, et cetera." - Thelma Kling, high school English teacher

## The Weather and Wildlife of Willow Creek Country Estates

IT hasn't rained all day, though the weatherman said it would, and the dark clouds have been marching quietly overhead like the unsmiling muddy faces of retreating infantry. The atmosphere is shrunken and strung tight and carries our talk farther than we expect, and so we strain the cheeriness of our voices to the breaking point and smile long to fill the uncomfortable pauses in conversation. Even the buttercups bent in the garden seem like yellow monks of doleful prophesy resigned to the storm.

The wind comes and goes, sometimes hurrying tumbleweeds and loud- clanging aluminum mobile-home siding over speed-bumps and across the street to catch in the fence along the railroad tracks, other times motionless but moaning in the distance like the memory of a dream.

The trains go by just as before, uninterested in the darkening sky, but the rattle of the loose wheels echoes lower to the ground today, and sitting on the porch watching my neighbor's television set through his half-closed drapes, I hear the unique voice of every car and sometimes I think I know what they are saying.

The stray cats have got me figured out. There aren't more than half a dozen days like this every year in California, but each time I pull my pipe and tobacco out from behind the cribbage board and go to sit under the aluminum awning on my astroturf front steps, the cats are there to meet me and fight for my lap and my attention. They keep my legs warm but they always pull out their claws when the thunder starts.

While I try to keep my pipe lit the cats sleep on my lap, or the younger ones play with my shoelaces, or watch the idiot pigeons trying to keep their balance in the wind on the electric wires. Every once in a while the cat on my lap will get up -- startled by a crashing trash-can lid or distant thunder-clap, impatient with the way I worry my pipe, or just heeding some irresistable feline whim -- and knead my thighs for a moment before collapsing again into compact contentment.

And the pigeons keep rocking, clumsily flipping their tails and flapping their wings in what must be the fat bird equivalent of a Richard Simmons workout. I never see them abandon the wire, but some time during the storm I will look up and they will have gone away to steadier perches.

The blackbirds leave last. Smarter than pigeons, they have staked out the electric towers rather than the wires, and play leapfrog on the framework until they, too, grow tired and leave in a windblown sprinkle of pepper.

Grown-ups seem worried and try to feel responsible, glancing with troubled eyes at the clouds now and then, then quickly looking back down to earth as if there were a few more things to tie down or seal up. The children though, expand rather than contract, as if the kinetic energy of the struggling stormfront had been transfered electrically into their sugar- charged bodies. They prance around in their clean California rain gear, fresh from the Christmas boxes where they have lain waiting for this day.

But still the rain refuses to come, though the clouds have thickened and the sky is as dark as if the sun had already fallen and the wind has stoked my pipe until the last embers have faded to ash. The cars coming home from work have their headlights on now, and the cats are starting to leave, one by one, hoping for an open door or shelter under a hot engine in a driveway.

Then hints begin. A windswept quantum of coolness strikes your cheek or lower lip, a dark spot stains the warped brick walkway, a child stops her play and looks up with her palm thrust out like a beggar. Soon the ground is freckled and the patchy grey of the sky becomes a uniform blanket and the children scream and run about and stick their tongues up at the offering.

And the metal roofs and awnings become a neighborhood of popcorn poppers and the cars coming home from work speed faster over the speed bumps, more eager than ever for the dry warmth of home. And the unsuspecting plants tremble spasmodically in masochistic ecstasy and the earthworms wake up and look around and think about a promenade.

And now the asphalt reflects the world in crooked bouncing shades of grey and the tapping on the roof becomes more insistant and even the children go home, the wind driven rain driving deep under slick yellow plastic to chill toes and chafe at elastic underwear bands.

The pigeons and the blackbirds are gone, the cats and the children, and only the side of the tree facing me is as dry as my back. The pipe is cold in my fingers and I can hear the thunder just as well inside and wait for the smell of the sidewalks tomorrow morning.

- Dave Gross