The storm came down Speedway the way they always did in July, as a brown wall first and weather second.
Carter Lowell saw it from the parking lot of Video Vault, where he had just paid a dollar ninety-nine to rent The Goonies for the third time. The clerk with the mustache had looked at the box, looked at Carter, and said, "You know you could just ask your folks to buy it," and Carter had said, "It's seventy-nine dollars," and the clerk had shrugged like seventy-nine dollars was a thing that grew on palo verde trees. Now the cassette was in a plastic case in the wire basket of his Mongoose, and the sky over the Rincons had gone the color of a paper sack.
He knew what that meant. Everybody in Tucson knew. You had maybe four minutes before the dust hit, and then maybe ten more before the rain, and if you were eleven years old and two miles from home, you found a wall to put your back against and you waited.
He pedaled hard for the bus shelter at Speedway and Columbus because it had a bench and a back panel and a roof, and because the Circle K across the street would let you stand inside if you bought something, but he had spent his money on the Goonies.
There was somebody already in the shelter. An old woman in a blue cotton dress and white canvas shoes, sitting very straight, with a straw purse on one side of her and a shoebox on her lap. The shoebox was tied shut with kitchen string. She had both hands on top of it, the way you would hold down a cat.
"You'd better get in here," she said, before he had even stopped. "That's a big one."
He dropped the bike against the side panel and squeezed in. The first grit was already ticking against the plexiglass. Up the road the traffic lights had started to swing.
"Thanks," he said.
"Don't thank me. I don't own it." She looked at the sky with an expression he would think about later, a narrow, measuring look, as if the storm were a customer who had come in late and wanted something complicated. "Sun Tran says the number six comes every twenty minutes. Sun Tran is a liar."
Carter laughed. He didn't mean to. She glanced at him sideways and he saw that she had meant it to be funny, and that she was pleased.
Then the wind hit.
It came with a sound like a truck going by too close, a long hollow roar, and the whole shelter shuddered on its bolts. Dust filled the air so thick the Circle K vanished. Carter pulled the neck of his T-shirt up over his nose. Something metal went clattering down the gutter. A trash can lid, maybe, or a sign.
And the old woman's shoebox came apart.
It wasn't the wind exactly. It was the string. He saw it later, when he was replaying it, the way he replayed the boulder scene in The Goonies, frame by frame: the old woman had lifted one hand to shield her eyes, and the box, which was soft with age at the corners, buckled under the other hand, and the string slid off the end like a ring off a finger. The lid went first. It flipped up and was gone. Then the photographs went, not one at a time but all at once, a fat brown and white fountain of them, sucked up out of the box and into the air like the wind had been waiting for exactly this.
"No," the old woman said. Not loud. The way you would say it to a dog about to run into the road. "No, no, no."