Shit, he thought, rooting through his closest duffel bag for a jacket. Blame it on el niño or la niña. We’ve blamed everything else on them for the past five or six years.

Dale stepped out of the Land Cruiser, tugged on his jacket, shivered, and looked at the house looming over him.

As a writer, Dale had been forced to learn a little bit about basic house types and architecture—writers have to learn a little bit about almost everything, was his opinion—and he recognized the McBride farmhouse as a “National Pyramidal Family Folk Home.” It sounded complicated, but all the term really meant was that it was one of about a million plain, equilaterally hipped-roofed houses in the Midwest, built around the time of the First World War. The McBride place was a two-story pyramidal—tall, with no side gables or interesting windows or details. Flat all around, except for a tiny porch roof over the side door that Dale remembered the McBrides using almost exclusively. Most pyramidal family farmhouses had large front porches, but this front door boasted only a stoop and a bit of skimpy lawn. The side door opened onto the muddy turnaround area between the house and the outbuildings—two tool sheds, a couple of small-garage-size general utility sheds, a chicken coop, and a huge barn where Mr. McBride had kept his farm equipment.

Dale just hoped that the plumbing worked. He had to piss as bad as the proverbial racehorse. Plumbing? he thought. I don’t need no steenking plumbing. He was at an abandoned farmhouse three miles from a dying little Illinois village. Dale glanced once down the long, dreary driveway toward the road and then went around to the east side of the Land Cruiser to pee. The light snow was trying to turn to rain, but his urine melted a small circle on the frosted mud of the McBride’s turnaround.