Wichita (9781609458904) Read online

  Coming toward them around a gradual curve in the paved road is a caravan of ten or so vans and SUVs. The lead van has a white radar dish bolted to the roof.

  “Keep ahead of them!” Bishop cries, pounding the dash with his fist. “Go, go, go!” Abby pulls out into the road in front of the van with the Doppler dish, which honks at them merrily.

  “Good job, babe!” Bishop says, looking back. “We do not want to get stuck behind them. That’s the Doppler brigade.”

  He rolls his window down and leans out, pointing at the storm bank. “Do you guys see what I see, at about ten o’clock? That lowering? That’s a funnel cloud!”

  Abby slows the car down and leans toward Bishop to see out. The car behind them honks.

  “If that touches down, it’s a tornado!” Bishop cries, bouncing in his seat like a child. “We’re looking at a tornado-to-be right there! Hot damn!”

  “This is awesome!” Drew says, leaning across Lewis to see out. He turns on his camcorder and holds it out the window. Seth seems to be asleep, his head nestled into a windbreaker wadded up against the window.

  “Can we find somewhere to pull off?” Abby asks Bishop.

  “Right here!” he says, banging the side of the Escalade with his fist.

  “Oh, this is perfect,” she says, pulling onto the soft shoulder. The sunlight from the west strikes the rear wall of the storm with strong clear light. “You are good, Bishop!”

  Everyone piles out and moves into the field, Seth too now.

  “If this thing produces,” Bishop says, pointing at a vague area near the bottom of the storm, “it’ll be an absolutely elegant twister.”

  The supercell is mountainous but close and clear at the same time—too close for Lewis’s taste, like an amphitheater. The farthest trailing edge of the storm, a ragged soot-gray wasp’s leg, is almost directly overhead. The air has turned a seasick gray-green. The caravan of other chasers has driven past them and pulled over further down the road, hazard lights flashing. Spidery silhouetted figures set up tripods, bend over viewfinders.

  They all stand staring across the field except for Seth, who’s sitting on the hood of the Escalade with his arms folded. Maybe a mile away behind them, visible through a stand of trees, is another tiny town, a silver water tower. From that direction a tornado siren begins to wail, floating up over the trees.

  “Tornado siren!” Bishop shouts happily, cupping a hand to an ear.

  The air goes suddenly still then just as suddenly a stiff breeze begins to blow. His wispy white hair raised by it, Bishop holds up the palms of his hands. “That’s gen-u-ine rear-flank downdraft!” he announces, his T-shirt fluttering.

  A cruiser with the roof light going but no siren swoops along the narrow dark road, slowing by the Doppler radar caravan then again by the Escalade. Lewis finds himself watching narrowly, braced against the whisk-whisk of the squad car transmission, Tasers, handcuffs, furry forearms.

  “You guys are on your own!” the cop calls out the window.

  “Right-o!” Bishop calls back delightedly, giving a double thumbs-up out of a crouch. He turns back to the storm as to a huge drive-in movie screen. “That’s the actionary, the updraft, we’re seeing,” Bishop says, pointing.

  They stand waiting, watching the evil lower clouds turn slowly, mutate, configure and reconfigure in a lazy ominous motion. “There’s no place I’d rather be right now!” Bishop says.

  Then nothing except for this slow swirling, which gradually halts, fades away like a mist. Minutes pass. Arms crossed, Seth has lain back on the hood of the Escalade. A flock of crows sweeps past like leaves caught in a strong gust.

  Lewis contemplates a distant farmhouse and wonders what that life is like. “What now?” he asks finally.

  “Now we just wait a little longer,” Bishop says, a hint of disappointment entering his voice.

  Drew takes a knee in the grass. He’s been speaking to someone on a cellphone and when he gets off, Bishop asks him, “Did you hear what Bush said when he flew into Greenburg?”

  “Is this a joke?” Drew asks with good-humored wariness, not to be fooled twice.

  “If only,” Abby says.

  “You know about Greenburg, right?” Bishop asks. “Little town about hundred miles southeast of Wichita? An F-5 just destroyed it.”

  “I saw the pictures,” Drew says, nodding solemnly. “Just terrible.”

  “It’s like an atomic bomb went off down there,” Abby says.

  “Quite a few folks are moving away,” Bishop says, nodding. “Lost everything; can’t imagine rebuilding after that. So anyway, Bush flies in—” Bishop starts laughing in advance, bent at the waist. “So Bush flies in,” he says, beginning again, “and Bush says—through a bullhorn or something, you know how he does. ‘My mission—” Bishop seizes his white-bearded jaw to keep from laughing—“’my mission is to touch somebody’s soul . . . by representing our country!”

  They all burst out laughing, Drew following suit after a beat but uncertainly, peering from face to face as if to grasp the real gist.

  “Touch somebody’s soul!” Bishop cries. Then, as if the intimacy of it just struck him, he adds, “Don’t touch my soul! Keep your hands off my soul!”

  “Don’t represent our country,” Lewis says.

  “Too late,” Abby says.

  They turn back to the storm, which has acquired a static quality—no movement at all now.

  “Well, come on!” Bishop calls. “Come on, you mother!”

  Down the road, the Doppler brigade is packing up their cameras and tripods with military efficiency. Their silhouettes then slip into the vehicles, which are soon driving past, the headlights on in the dying light.

  “What’s happening?” Abby asks, watching them go. Bishop watches them too, hands on his hips, squinting. He shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says in his neutral, admirably honest fashion.

  “You would if your laptop worked,” Abby points out.

  “True,” Bishop admits with an embarrassed chortle.

  She sighs, shakes her head. “You and your record-sized hail. One for the local newspapers!”

  Bishop squints up at the storm as if willing it to send down a face-saving twister then announces, “I guess this may not happen after all, people!”

  The tornado siren has fallen silent. Lewis watches the taillights of the last minivan in the Doppler brigade disappear around a descending curve in the road. To the northeast, thin slanting curtains of rain move across a golden band of horizon at the far perimeter of the storm.

  “It’s still incredibly beautiful,” Abby says, waving her arm at the massive, sterile cloud creature. The twilight falls across her suddenly weary features as if to veil them from view.

  Now, in the quadrant where the caravan was headed, there’s a tremendous lightning strike and everyone flinches.

  “I mean look at that!” Abby cries, startled out of her melancholy.

  “It’s the Goddess, all right,” Bishop says wistfully. “If there were any community, they would’ve stopped to give us a heads-up,” he adds, staring bitterly down the road after the Doppler caravan. “Every man for himself, I guess!”

  “We could follow them,” Lewis suggests.

  “Nah, it’s too late,” Bishop says. “Every fucking man for himself!”

  “We don’t guarantee a tornado,” Abby tells Drew, “but we absolutely guarantee beauty.” She makes a theatrical sweep with her arm. “This is a real glimpse of Gaia.”

  “It’s pretty incredible, all right,” Drew says but clicks off his camcorder and lets it hang limp from his neck.

  “Well,” Bishop says with a concluding note. As they’re turning to go back to the car, there’s a movement in the far corner of the field.

  “What’s that?” Lewis asks, catching Bishop by the wrist. Bishop pauses and looks back, squinting hard, straining his neck forward tortoise-like.

  “Is it burning?” Lewis asks.

  Wisps of smoke or is it earth are risi
ng snakily into the air, two, three of them. Lewis thinks it must be from a lightning strike, fire in the field. Then the tendrils or snakes of smoke rise in sheets and grow larger, forming a rough circle like enormous ghosts in a ring dance, Sioux warriors risen on the prairie. Now they reach up to join tatters of clouds from the bottom of the storm, helically intertwining.

  Then it’s simply there, out of nowhere, this long stout elephant trunk or length of intestine.

  “Oh!” Abby and Bishop shout in unison, as if orgasming. “Oh my God!”

  “Wild!” Lewis yells, a funny sort of happiness flooding him.

  “Seth!” Abby cries, pointing at it and jumping up and down. “Look! Look!”

  Lewis turns back to see Seth is snapped out of his numb detachment, grinning and shaking his head in amazement. His teeth glow in the gloaming. He eases himself down from the hood of the Escalade and takes a few steps forward into the field. Abby goes back to meet him and circles an arm around his shoulder. Lewis joins them. He leans near Seth’s ear and says, “You made a tornado happen after all—it was just a bit delayed!” Seth nods. Lewis chucks him on the shoulder and they stand together watching it. Lewis is filled with a sense of great optimism and hope, as if it’s borne on the air and he’s inhaling it like laughing gas.

  Quickly filling itself in, the tornado is more like a water tower now, thick, bluish-white, cocked to one side, phallic. Lewis walks forward to stand next to Drew, who has set up a tripod for his camcorder and is filming away meanwhile speaking into his cell phone. “It’s a dream come true!” he tells whoever’s on the other end. “Literally!”

  Bishop is doing a little goat dance. “A tornado on our first chase!” he says, holding a camcorder toward it. “What a blessing, what an amazing blessing!”

  “Just look at that thing!” Abby tells Seth. “It’s truly a god!” As if she never truly believed all the talk about Gaia and Goddesses. “It’s neither earth nor sky, it’s some new union!”

  “It’s making me hot!” Bishop says, speeding up his little goat dance.

  “Listen to him!” she says, letting go of Seth to run forward and tickle Bishop in the ribs. They embrace without taking their eyes off the twister and do a giddy little two-step in the wind-bent grass. “You led us right to it!” she tells him. “My hero! My hunter!”

  “And all those conformist Doppler fools missed it!” Bishop crows. The outdraft is blowing his thin white hair around like cord grass. “Don’t you love that?”

  “Is it getting bigger?” Drew asks now. He looks up from his viewfinder and then back.

  “I needed to have my laptop broken!” Bishop tells Abby. “That was necessary!”

  “Absolutely!” she agrees.

  “It’s gotten bigger,” Drew says conclusively.

  It has, Lewis sees. It’s also turning the color of the field as it sucks the earth up into itself. Just how far off is it? He holds up a hand to shield the light and squints. It’s hard to gauge. The tornado itself seems safely behind glass, sealed off by the idea of it, the concept “tornado.”

  Suddenly there are two huge lightning blasts in the dark, widening base, like strobic bombs detonating.

  “Yeah, OK, people!” Bishop says, looking sobered up, even frightened. He’s walking backwards toward the car but can’t seem to take his gaze from the twister.

  “Just gorgeous!” Abby says, her blouse fluttering madly, the tip of the crepe scarf flickering like the tongue of a prophetess.

  Lewis thought for no good reason that the twister would stay put or head off to one side or recede, rejoin the storm. But it’s broken away from the matrix of the dark clouds and is headed if not right at them then in their direction.

  He moves over and shouts at Bishop. “What’s happening?”

  “We need to go is what’s happening!” Bishop says. Halfway across the field, what looks like a sheet of plywood sails upward and vanishes skyward in a dusty sun-struck haze.

  “Now, right now!” Bishop calls. There’s dirt in the air; Lewis tastes it on his tongue, squints to see through it.

  No one moves for one last look, held in place by the golden-brown beauty of the twister, which is lit gold now by the light of the setting sun.

  As if aware of the rapt audience, it wobbles on its axis then lunges sideways with an alarming, savage quickness, like a boxer feinting. Then it holds still. Then it jumps halfway across the field toward them, looming upward like a skyscraper thrust up through the crust of the earth.

  “Seth!” Abby is shouting. Seth has opened the rear hatch of the Escalade, which is jouncing madly in the wind, and has the moped on the ground. He hops on the seat. “We’re leaving right now!”

  “Seth!” Abby shouts. “Get in the car—we’re going! Seth!”

  He’s started the thing up, the snarl of the motor just audible in the growing shriek of the twister. Looking neither left nor right, he rides down the road in the direction the Doppler caravan went. He’s panicking, Lewis thinks, he can’t wait for them.

  But Seth turns out onto the field and drives straight at the tornado. Objects are flashing past, clumps of grass, a branch, a section of fence. Lewis’s clothes and skin are rippling in the howling wind. He can barely see through dust in the air. He shouts at Seth to stop but Seth is leaning forward over the handlebars, the white bandage on his head glowing in the gray-green light.

  “Seth!” Abby shouts and breaks into a run, flashing past Lewis, who chases her down and wraps his arms around her.

  “No!” he shouts. Something strikes his leg. There’s a blinding flash and they’re sitting on the ground ten feet apart. There’s dirt in his mouth, in his teeth. He crawls to her.

  “We can’t leave him!” Abby sobs. She’s quaking, clawing at him.

  Curtains of dirt fill the air. Seth has disappeared. Bishop helps Lewis half drag, half carry Abby to the car.

  Lewis can barely get the door open then he leans backwards with all his weight to hold it as Bishop and Drew push Abby into the back seat, climb in after her.

  The roar is enormous, pitiless, chug-chug. Lewis finds himself crawling along the ground. He gropes up into the driver’s seat but can’t shut the door, can’t see out. The car is rocked side to side then back and forth, then both at the same time. His ears pop as the air pressure plunges and he hits his head on the dash and blacks out, coming to as an enormous star appears on the windshield.

  27

  Lewis gets out of bed, steps over a tray of food, goes to the window. He listens for a moment then lifts the blinds. A man is digging a hole in the backyard. He lays down the shovel and walks out of view. In the bush outside the window, sunlight traces a filament of spiderweb strung between two leaves. A breeze lifts the web, sunlight flashes along its length then vanishes as the web falls back.

  The man comes back carrying a young birch. He kneels on the ground and with a blade cuts away the twine and burlap wrapping. He brushes his hands over the root ball, loosening the soil, then lowers the tree into the hole and shovels in dirt. He goes away again.

  A sparrow lights in the bush and passes its beak back and forth across a branch, one-two. Then it flicks its tail feathers and drops from sight.

  The man comes back with a hose and stands watering the ground around the tree, the sound of water spattering on the earth fills the air.

  ***

  The leaves of the bush nod in the breeze, yes, yes, yes, all the leaves he can see confirm: it happened, it happened, it happened.

  ***

  Lewis swings his legs out of bed and sits for a long time on the edge then gets up and washes his face, brushes his teeth. He finds a pair of scissors in the drawer of his desk and cuts off his beard, clumps of rust-colored hair falling onto the porcelain and his hands, coarse, foreign. He peers at himself in the mirror and considers cutting off all the hair on his head too. He raises the scissors then lets them fall.

  On the bedside table, V.’s condolence letter, the grain of the paper visible in the angled sunlight
coming in through the venetian blinds. He picks it up, his eyes passing over the handwriting, cramped yet clear, like brushing the features of her face with his fingertips. “Love,” it’s signed. She must have weighed that. It would have been too cold without it and so it gets used because there’s no middle ground, it’s either life or death.

  Abby is coming out of her own room with an air of trying to remember something. Her smile when she notices him there in the hallway is wan.

  “Very nice,” she says of his clean-shaven face. From the living room and dining room comes a hushed bustle. People are rearranging furniture, laying out food. The rich, faintly nauseating fragrance of a cake baking reaches them.

  The bruise on her cheek is yellow in the center shading out to mottled green and blue and purple. Beneath the house robe, her body feels warm and boneless. He intuits her as an old woman, slow-moving, replete with incorporated days. She reaches up to but does not touch the bandage on his brow. He asks whether someone planted a tree in the yard.

  “A birch,” she says, nodding.

  “I thought I might’ve dreamed it.”

  She produces another wan smile, shakes her head: no, he didn’t dream it. “It’s for a ceremony Louise is going to perform.”

  “A tree ceremony?” he says.

  ‘It’s done to settle spirits who have had—” she pauses as if she’s momentarily forgotten the phrase, “—violent passings.”

  In Mongolia it’s done, Lewis thinks, and in Siberia. But he works to keep this disenchanted thought from appearing in his face. Over Abby’s shoulder he sees Stacy and her parents come in from the kitchen, the father, wearing a bolo tie, guiding the wheelchair. Stacy’s expression is strangely washed-out and disoriented, as if she’s been given a powerful sedative. Her father is the designated driver.

  Bishop takes Lewis by the elbow and steers him through the house. Summer light flickers at all the windows. They pause to speak to Stacy and her parents and Lewis finds that he understands what Stacy says before it’s translated.