Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I have to go back to work,” she said.

  “You can work in Fayetteville. We have plenty of emergencies there.”

  Bobby and Olivia got to the airport just as the plane pulled in. Bobby let Olivia out at the door and she went running through the terminal while he parked the car. She made it to the gate just as her father came through the door. “This is some weather you’re having, honey,” he said, taking her hands. “I was worried about you driving in it.”

  “I know. It’s a tornado watch. But don’t worry about it. We’re used to it. Bobby’s parking the car. I want you to like him, Dad. But I’m going to live with him whether you do or not.”

  “Let’s go get my bags.” He took her arm and they began to walk down past the gates. “I rode out a hurricane once, in New Orleans. I guess I can stand a tornado watch.” He looked up and saw a tall tanned boy coming toward them. Well, he looked like a man. At least he was a man.

  “This is my boyfriend, Bobby Tree.” Olivia stepped back. The men shook hands.

  “Nice to meet you,” Daniel said.

  “It’s good to meet you, sir. I’ve been looking forward to it.”

  “Olivia says you used to rodeo.”

  “I still rodeo if I need the money. It’s a hell of a way to make a living. It’s mostly cutting horses I’m interested in now. Raising them and training them.”

  “They’re exciting animals. I’ve been on a few.” The men walked along together, talking about horses. As if I wasn’t even here, Olivia thought. As if I’m not the reason for all this.

  They reached the baggage carousel. “You’re looking mighty good, honey,” Daniel said, turning to her, propping one foot up on the edge of the carousel. “You look like you’re getting taller.”

  “It’s the boots.”

  “We had to beat that weather all the way from Atlanta. That old DC-9 was bucking like a ship at sea.”

  “Soon as we get your bag we’ll head on back. It’s probably just a storm but it makes the roads slow.”

  “Granddaddy’s been waiting for you for days.” Olivia took hold of her father’s arm. “He wants to talk to you about the oil. He wants you to tell him how to invest it.”

  “I’m the last one to ask about that.” Daniel laughed his irresistible laugh. “Maybe he’ll loan me some money.” He picked his suitcase off the carousel and looked out toward the street. “It looks like it’s clearing out there to me. What do you think, Bobby?”

  “I think we better start driving if we want to get to Tahlequah.”

  They went out into the parking lot and put Daniel’s bag in the trunk of the car. “You drive, Bobby,” Daniel said. “I don’t know where I’m going.” Then Daniel got into the passenger seat by Bobby, and Olivia got in the backseat and they started on their way. The sun was out and the sky had cleared to the north and east, but by the time they were halfway to Tahlequah it clouded over and started raining again.

  “We need to go straight to Grandmother’s house,” Olivia said, leaning up to touch her father’s shoulder. “They’re going to be worried about us.”

  “How’s your Tulsa baseball team doing this year?” Daniel asked. “I used to follow the minors when I was in school. You’ve had some great players come out of the Drillers. Ivan Rodriguez went to Texas last year, didn’t he?”

  “I saw him play three or four times. We used to come up here all the time for the games.”

  “I think we ought to turn on the radio.” Olivia was halfway into the front seat now. “It looks terrible out there. I’ve already been in one tornado this summer. I was driving home from seeing my psychiatrist. Well, they were called tornado-force winds, but it was terrible. It scared me to death. I was so glad I was in this heavy car. He’s really a wonderful man, Dad. He’s helped me so much. I love you for spending all that money for him. I think it’s made a difference in my life. The other thing is this teacher I have, Ms. Georgia Jones. I really want you to meet her if you can. She’s leaving tomorrow afternoon to go back to practicing medicine. She’s a doctor, but she quit because she saw this little girl die and it was the last straw.”

  “That’s nice, sweetie.” Daniel reached over and turned on the radio. There was only static at first, then finally a station came on. “This is Green Country weather. The tornado watch has been upgraded to a tornado warning. Seek shelter immediately. Repeat, a tornado warning is in effect for Green Country and including the towns of Stillwater, Tahlequah, Regrade, Dumont, Dumas and Siloam Springs. A tornado has been sighted five miles east of Stillwater and moving to the southeast at a rate of two hundred miles an hour. . . .”

  “That’s toward Tahlequah,” Bobby said. “It’s coming our way.”

  “What should we do?” Daniel asked. “Should we stop or keep on going?”

  “It’s a crap shoot. There’s a little town about five miles up this way.”

  “We have to see about them,” Olivia was saying. “They might not be listening to the radio. They never watch TV. Granddaddy can’t stand it.”

  “How far is it to the farm?”

  “About twelve miles.”

  “There’s a storm cellar,” Olivia said. “We have to go there. We have to go see about them. They’re old, Daddy. I’m going whether you go or not.”

  “We can make twelve miles, can’t we?” Daniel was addressing Bobby.

  “Sure. I think so. You want to try it?”

  “Yeah. Start driving. Drive this goddamn German car. You got your seat belt on, honey? Sit back and put it on. Okay, son, drive the car.” Daniel leaned back in his seat. Bobby leaned into the wheel and kept on driving. In six minutes they were within a mile of the house.

  “It’s right up here,” Bobby said. “There’s the turn to the road.” The rain was harder now, pelting the car with hail. Bobby slowed the car and turned onto the gravel road and began to drive the last stretch to the house.

  “This is where I was born,” Olivia said. “Right here. Momma and me.”

  “Let’s just make sure it isn’t where we die.” Bobby turned into the yard and parked the car in a cleared place by the barn and they got out and went running toward the house. Little Sun and Mary Lily and Crow were in mackintoshes, getting ready to make a run for the storm cellar. Crow had a basket in each hand and Mary Lily had a plastic sack filled with cookies and crackers. They handed flashlights and sweaters and coats and hats to the travelers, and then, with Little Sun leading, they filed out into the yard to a dirt embankment past the well. Bobby and Daniel pulled open the wooden cover and held it while Mary Lily and Crow and Little Sun and Olivia went down the stairs, carrying the folding chairs that were by the well. “I’ve got the bug spray,” Mary Lily said. “There’s no use in saving you from the storm if we all get bit by brown recluse spiders.”

  “I cleaned it out a month ago,” Crow said. “After those winds that other time.” They unfolded the chairs and set them up in the crowded passageway and Mary Lily lay a blanket down on the floor and spread the food out on it.

  “Did you bring the radio?” Little Sun asked.

  “I left it there. Oh, God, I left it in the kitchen.”

  “I’ll go get it. We need to know what’s going on.” Bobby pushed open the cover and disappeared into the storm. The rain was coming in gusts now, the trees were whirling, the sky was black from horizon to horizon. In a few minutes Bobby returned with the radio wrapped in plastic and they turned it on and huddled around it. “A tornado has been sighted on a line two miles west and one mile north of Highway Sixty-five at Tahlequah, moving to the east-northeast with winds of two hundred miles an hour. Take cover. Repeat, a tornado is in the vicinity. Take cover immediately.”

  “That’s us,” Mary Lily said. “It’s headed our way.”

  The shelter they were in had been built by an Irish stonemason in 1917. It was twelve feet long and six feet deep and four feet wide, with an even wider space just below the entrance. Wooden uprights a foot thick supported the walls. The floor was lined with lar
ge flat stones. “I used to play in here all the time when I was little,” Olivia said. “We always kept it swept back then, didn’t we, Aunt Lily?”

  “I swept it just last month,” Crow repeated. “When we had those winds.”

  “It sure is good to get to know you folks at last,” Daniel said. “I been wanting to come and see you for a number of years.”

  “It wasn’t your fault Summer died.” Little Sun sat up very straight on his chair. “Come, move your seat over here by me. We will sit together while this storm passes.”

  “See if you can get a stronger station,” Crow said. “We need to hear where it is.” She and Bobby began to fiddle with the radio but before they could find a clear station, they heard the roar that heralded the twister. It sounded like it was a few feet away and it sounded like it was moving. Olivia threw herself into Bobby’s arms. Mary Lily folded her arms around her chest and began to pray to all the gods of Roman Catholicism and the Cherokee. Daniel closed his eyes. Little Sun thought of his ancestors.

  “What if it takes the barn?” Olivia said. “It might kill Bess.”

  “It would be a good way for an old mare to die,” Crow answered. “She’d never know what hit her.” Then, above the roar of the wind, they seemed to hear a mare whinny.

  “I heard her,” Olivia screamed. “I know I heard her. Was she tied up?”

  “No, I let her out in the pasture hours ago,” Little Sun said. “They know where to go.”

  “Arletti came in at four this afternoon and climbed into a closet,” Mary Lily said. “She’s still in it.”

  “I knew it was coming.” Little Sun reached over and put his hand on Daniel’s knee. “The birds and animals have known it all day. There hasn’t been a sound out of a squirrel.”

  “He always watches the animals,” Olivia put in. “That’s how he knows what to do.”

  “I loved your daughter, Mr. Wagoner. I want you to know that. But I was a very young man. I had a bad temper. When she left me, I didn’t know where she was going. I sure didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  “She was very hardheaded,” Mary Lily offered. “No one could ever budge her. We used to call her the stubborn mule, didn’t we, Mother?”

  “I’m glad to be here,” Daniel said. “I’m mighty glad to be here with you folks.”

  The wind was even louder now and they pulled their chairs closer together and did not speak for several long minutes.

  “Turn the radio back on,” Little Sun said at last. “It sounds like it’s moved away.” Bobby fiddled with the radio and finally got a station.

  “The storm struck first in MurMur Heights, moved across Highway Twenty-five, and headed into town,” a voice was saying.

  “The tornado seemed to gain intensity as it swept through Tahlequah,” another said.

  “It was moving with two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds. A tornado like that tears up trees. Trees are everywhere. I never saw so many trees lying on the streets.”

  “Three trees are on top of my truck,” a fourth voice was saying. “It took the trailer and threw it across the yard.”

  “That was the voice of Lonnie Paterson,” an announcer said. “Lonnie and Elaine’s nineteen-foot trailer was picked up by the twister, thrown over the top of their van, then dumped upside down in the side yard of their house. The trailer is destroyed. This is station KIND, Tahlequah, Oklahoma. We are here on Muskogee Avenue where three stores have been gutted and a restaurant cleaned out by the wind. Carl Crow of Tahlequah is standing by to tell us his story. Carl is the manager of Stone and Workman. Carl.”

  “I was in the store when I saw a dark funnel forming in the direction of the park. It was a dark, black-like thing. I thought, My God, that’s a tornado. It formed and ran down the street and was gone before I could finish a thought. I felt the walls shake, but Jannette and I, Jannette Sorel was here with me. We escaped death. It’s a miracle we are here.”

  “Let’s go up now,” Little Sun said. He stood up and stretched his legs. “Let’s go and see if we have a house.”

  “Let’s see if we have a car,” Mary Lily added.

  “I wouldn’t care if it was all swept away,” Crow put in. “I been thinking we should all move into town.”

  Georgia and Zach were asleep when the tornado hit. They woke up and grabbed each other. “What was that?” Georgia asked, but they both knew.

  “Get in the hall,” Zach said. He pushed her off the bed and grabbed an armload of pillows and bedcovers and followed her out into the small crowded hall. He shut the doors to the bedroom and to the bathroom and to the second bedroom. The entrance to the living room and kitchen had no door. Outside the house the noise was deafening. Getting louder every second.

  “We should have left a window open,” he said.

  “Forget it,” Georgia answered. “Get under these covers. Wait, there’s a closet here. Let’s get in there.” She pulled open the door to a small linen closet that contained the heating and air-conditioning units and squeezed herself into a corner. Zach squeezed in beside her and began to try to shut the door. The noise was even louder now, a crescendo of sound, thunder and a sound like a tunnel of wind. This is it, Georgia decided. Ground zero. The end. “I love you so much,” she said out loud. “I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you. Thank God you’re here. Thank God you’re here with me.” She buried her face in his chest and pulled the blanket around them. The air conditioner hummed by their shoulders.

  Zach was still trying to get the door shut when the living room windows burst and glass flew everywhere. “Oh, God,” Georgia screamed. “Oh, my God. Armageddon. The Bitter End.”

  Bobby and Daniel pushed open the door to the storm cellar and stepped up into the air. They looked around. The wind had dragged tree limbs and garbage cans and old harness and rocks and boards across the yard. The cars were covered with debris. Daniel stooped over and picked up an oak limb that had fallen across a wheelbarrow. “Look at the size of this. Well, son, I want you to know one thing. You can’t live with my daughter unless you marry her. Aside from that, I’ll stay out of your life.”

  “I’ve begged her to marry me, Mr. Hand. I offered my life to her, everything I have to give.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it. And I wish you luck with it, too. I’ve felt that way about women, not that it did me much good. Sometimes I think it was my fault. Other times I think I was doing everything a man could do, and they still left. What do women want? That’s the question. Well, we’re all still here. And the house is standing.”

  The others were coming up the stairs from the cellar, starting to survey the damage. The yard chairs were gone. Limbs were all over the roof of the house and, from the look of the power lines, there wouldn’t be any electricity for a while.

  Crow and Little Sun moved toward the house. Mary Lily walked toward her new Pontiac. Olivia started in the direction of the barn. A pygmy goat from a neighboring farm came out from under the hen house and nuzzled her hand. “I’m going to look for Bess,” Olivia said. “When did you see her last?”

  “She was here all afternoon. I turned her loose. They know where to go when it storms.” Little Sun turned her way. “Come on into the house. If she isn’t back in the morning, we’ll go look for her.”

  Then they all went into the house and lit candles and Olivia and Mary Lily and Crow began to get out things for dinner. By eight-fifteen the phone started working again and they called the family members and a few friends and Roper and his brother Sam showed up and began to tell about the damage in the town. Olivia called Georgia first.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m back in love,” Georgia answered. “I have the illusion that he saved my life. How about you? What happened out there?”

  “I think Dad likes him. I haven’t told him we’re going to Montana yet. I guess he’ll have a fit when he finds out I’m not going to drive home with him.”

  “When are you going to tell him?”

  “I don’t know. What d
o you suggest?”

  “Tell the truth as fast as you can.”

  “Okay. Well, that’s pretty hard advice.”

  “Try it and report back to me. I’ll try a little on my end. I haven’t told him yet I won’t live with him. I mean, I haven’t told him in a week or so. He’s so insidious. He thinks if he doesn’t react, I’ll change my mind. Well, I have to get off the phone. Zach needs to make some calls.”

  Olivia hung up the phone and went back into the kitchen to tell her father she wasn’t driving home with him in the morning. “Dad,” she began, but he held up his hand. Roper was talking about turkey hunting.

  “We got birds in these woods that have never smelled a man,” Roper bragged. “But you have to know where to go. You come back up as soon as the leaves turn. We’ll take you with us, won’t we, Sam?”

  “It will be a good fall for quail too,” Little Sun put in. “This much rain makes fat quail in the fall.”

  “Dad, Bobby and I are going to Montana.”

  “That’s fine, sugar. So where do you hunt these birds? It’s all hills? Or you got some bottom land?” Daniel was sitting between the two young men. Drinking iced tea with sugar and lemon and watching Bobby. That’s how it is, he was thinking. About the time your dick gets soft, somebody starts screwing your daughter. Well, he looks like a man. He acts like a man. They all say he was a man in New Orleans, even if he did agree to keep the dope addict there all night.

  “I don’t know where we’re all going to sleep,” Mary Lily was saying. “I guess Daniel can have my room and I’ll sleep with Olivia, and Bobby can sleep on the sofa, if he wants to stay.”

  “I’m going to Montana,” Olivia said again.

  “That’s good, sugar,” Daniel said. “We’ll talk about it later. So what do you use to hunt turkey with down here? I use a four-ten, but I know a man who hunts them with a thirty-eight revolver. I been raising them for twenty years. I’ve gotten so attached to them I hardly shoot them anymore. Just ride out in the truck and watch them walk around. They come up on a rise like a flock of leaves, then scurry across like the wind was blowing them. They’re pretty birds, once you get to know them.”