We went out the side door into the cold, the captain and Chuy and me, with Ingot ahead of us. Hank stayed at the engine, at the radio, with the bay door going up behind us on its chain, groaning the way it always did. The wind hit us coming around the corner of the station, straight down out of the north, and it was so cold it hurt my teeth. The light was already going. At the end of February in Pueblo the sun goes down behind the mountains before five-thirty, and the sky over the mill was turning the color of a bruise, and the streetlights on Evans had come on and were humming.
The captain walked fast with the receiver held up next to his face and Chuy beside him carrying the orange jump kit in one hand and the green oxygen bottle in its case in the other. I ran to keep up. I wasn't supposed to be there, I knew that, nobody had told me to come and nobody had told me to stay, and I think they'd both forgotten I existed. Ingot did not run ahead the way she did beside the engine. She went at a fast trot, ten feet in front of the captain, with her head low and tipped, and every few steps she stopped and lifted her head and turned her good ear to the wind and listened, and then went on.
At the corner of Evans, under the streetlight, the captain stopped and held the receiver out at arm's length, and turned it, and brought it back to his ear. The hiss had gone down. You could hear it: the voice was clearer, it didn't break up anymore. I could hear the television in it now, plain as anything, the music from a game show, people clapping. And the little girl, singing. That was the worst part, I think. She was singing something under her breath, very slow, the way a kid sings to herself when she's falling asleep. Twinkle, twinkle. Then she stopped in the middle of a line, and didn't start again.
"She's getting sleepy," Chuy said. His voice had gone strange.
"I know it," said the captain.
The Gurulé house was dark. That's what I remember. Every other house on Evans had a light on in the front room by then, because it was after four-thirty and the sky was going, but the Gurulé house was dark in front, with the drapes pulled shut, and only a dim yellow light coming from somewhere at the back. The Country Squire was in the driveway with frost all over its windshield, a thick white fur of it, like it hadn't moved in days. The mattress was gone off the roof. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney. Every other chimney on the street had smoke coming out of it, and this one had nothing, and I remember the captain looking up at it and his mouth going thin.
Ingot went up the front walk and up the two steps onto the sagging porch and put her nose to the bottom of the front door and barked. Three barks, the old way, three and a stop.