Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  She was dying.

  She buried her nose in the litterfall, stifling these visions until they ebbed and faded.

  It just so happened that a game warden was wandering in that part of the woods, hours later or maybe days. Something in the ravine caught his eye—low to the ground, a flash of unexpected silver. He dropped to his knees for a closer look.

  “Oh!” he gasped, calloused hands parting the dead leaves.

  VII. THE TWO HUBERTS

  The greyhound lived with the game warden, in a cottage at the edge of a town. He was not a particularly creative man, and he gave the dog his same name: Hubert. He treated her wounds as those of a human child, with poultices and bandages. She slept curled at the foot of his bed and woke each morning to the new green of a million spring buds erupting out of logs, sky-blue birdsong, minced chlorophyll.

  “Bonjour, Hubert!” Hubert would call, sending himself into hysterics, and Hubert the dog would bound into his arms—and their love was like this, a joke that never grew old. And like this they passed five years.

  Early one December evening Hubert accompanied Hubert to Yonville, to say a prayer over the grave of his mother. The snow hid the tombstones, and only the most stalwart mourners came out for such a grim treasure hunt. Among them was Emma Bovary. From within her hooded crimson cloak she noticed a shape darting between the snowflakes—a gray ghost trotting with its lips peeled back from black gums.

  “Oh!” she cried. “How precious you are! Come here—”

  Her whistle pierced the dog’s chest, splintering into antipodal desires:

  Run.

  Stay.

  And it was in this struggle that the dog encountered herself, felt a shimmering precursor to consciousness—the same stirring that lifted the iron hairs on her neck whenever she peered into mirrors, or discovered a small, odorless dog inside a lake.

  The whistle rose in pitch, and now she did remember: Midnight in Tostes. The walks through the ruined pavilion. Crows at dusk. The tug of a leather leash. Piano music. Egg yolk in a perfumed hand. Sad, impatient fingers scratching her ears.

  Something bubbled and broke inside the creature’s heart.

  Emma was walking through the thick snow, toward the oblivious game warden, one dark strand of hair loose and blowing in the twilight.

  “Oh, monsieur! I, too, once had a greyhound!” She shut her eyes and sighed longingly, as if straining to call back not only the memory but the dog herself.

  And she very nearly succeeded.

  The greyhound’s tail began helplessly to wag.

  “Her name was Deeeaaaa…Dahhh…”

  And then the dog remembered, too, calloused hands brushing dead leaves from her fur, clearing the seams of blackflies from her eyelids and nostrils, lifting her from the trench. Their sturdy fingers clasped firmly around her belly as she flew through evening air. The man’s rank, tuberlike scent enveloping her, the firelight in the eyes of her rescuer. Over his shoulder she’d glimpsed the shallow imprint of a dog’s body in the mud.

  With a lovely, amnesiac smile, Emma Bovary continued to fail to remember the name of her greyhound. And each soft sound she mouthed tugged the dog deeper into the past.

  It was an impossible moment, and the pain the animal experienced—staring from old, rumpled Hubert to the pale, evanescing Emma—did feel very much like an ax falling through her snow-wet fur, splitting down the rail of her tingling spine, fatally dividing her.

  “My dog’s name is Hubert,” Hubert said to Madame Bovary, with his stupid frankness. He glanced fondly at little Hubert, attributing the greyhound’s spasms in the cemetery drifts to the usual culprits: giddiness or fleas.

  Writhing in an agony, the dog rose to her feet. She closed the small, incredibly cold gulf of snow between herself and her master.

  Sit, she then commanded herself, and she obeyed.

  The Tornado Auction

  You know, there was never any money in it, even back then. If you were a breakeven, you were a success.

  I’d been fully retired for nearly fifteen years when I decided, on a whim, to return to the sale barn. Driving home from the pharmacy, passing the shoals of purple corn, I watched the wheel turning in my hands. The barn’s howling interior, with its warrens of wind hoses, was as familiar to me as my home, but I recognized almost no one. How young the faces had become! Just about everybody I’ve ever wanted to impress, I’ve now outlived.

  Baby southerlies whinnied around, shrieking their inhuman sounds. Violet funnels chased one another beneath the shivering ducts. Crocus-blue mists, soft as exhalations, fogged their incubator walls. I felt a growl under my navel as I passed Chute 7—the doorway out of which my own twisters had flown, once upon a time. New lunacies greeted me on either side. What a catalog of weathers my peers were now breeding, dreaming up on their ranchlands. Clouds branded Pink Cauliflower and Lucifer’s Bridal Veil. Clouds almost too bloated with rain to move. I found plenty to admire, despite the grim forecasts I’d been reading all year.

  Moisture began to clot on my glasses, so I removed them. Some things, I swear, I see better without correction. Tornadoes, for one. My eyes often snag on irrelevancies when I’m wearing my glasses; without them, I can take in more. The panorama, you know, the whole sublime blur. Estelle, I think, hated the sight of my naked face. (Jesus, Robert! Do you know how scary you look, wandering around out there like Mr. Magoo?)

  The national anthem cranked up, and everyone stood. By the old custom, one of the local families had donated a runty funnel, set to manifest at the crowd’s off-key crescendo. So while we sang, hands on hearts, a howler blew out of Chute 1.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed. And I felt the way I always hope to feel in church. As the twister kicked and spun around the arena floor, the howl rose from its center, throbbing without discrimination into and through each of us, and row by row we fell helplessly to our knees.

  * * *

  —

  The auction is a quarterly event, and until my retirement I attended every one. You’ll read in the papers that ours is a “graying community,” a defunct way of life. But on auction day, it never feels so. Scattered around the parking lot, more than a hundred twitching, immature storms dimple the roofs of their trailers, like pipping chicks testing their shells. Their wailing surrounds and fills the barn, harmonizing with the hum of machinery. The viper pit of hoses, the blue convection modules stuck to every wall like big square dewdrops—the various modern wet nurses that keep a developing storm alive. “Back in the Dark Ages, all we had to work with was liquid propane and the real wind,” my old man liked to remind me.

  On my way to the sale barn, I’d passed a quintet of freshly weaned storms, all sired by the same cumuliform supercell out of Dalhart. Beautiful orphans, thriving independently. I’d known this line of clouds my whole life; that Dalhart stud cell was famous when I was a kid. Its signature thunder went rolling through this very sale barn, and I smiled to hear it once more. TORNADO ALLEY SUPERCELL: THE FASTEST WINDS ON EARTH. You hear those young clouds rumbling, you get the child-joy, the child-fever. I’ll turn seventy-four this March, and it doesn’t matter: that joy regresses you.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been a bad season for seasons. Not just here in Gosper County but all across the country. After the anthem, we sat while the flag was attacked by the last of the purebred gusts and the cloud danced itself out. Then I saw the one face I’d been counting on seeing, as surely as flipping over a penny to find mournful Lincoln: the Rev.

  “I don’t care what your politics are,” the Rev crooned. “I think it’s time we all admit that the weather is changing…”

  A few boos, though most were nodding, hat bills stabbing at the air like a bunch of dour woodpeckers. Everybody here has been hit by the warming. This year, if you wanted cold, moist air, you had to pipe it in. The d
ry-line days on which we breeders rely did not come.

  Guilt rose from the bleachers like a rippling stink. Relative to the West Texas cloud-seeding corporations, our approach here in southern Nebraska remains pretty Amish. Still, when you’re raising weather by artificial means, it’s hard to pretend you don’t have a hand in the Change.

  I feel less culpable than some because I always stayed small—I didn’t mess with the supercells or the silver iodide; I never went for broke with the ten-thousand-dollar anemometers, the quarter-million-dollar accelerators. One twister at a time, I raised almost by hand.

  And I raised them for demolition. This was the seventies, on the ranchlands of Tornado Alley. You can bring down a city block with a rental tornado, and we had contracts. My twisters have felled fire-damaged silos and bankrupt casinos, foundering Chick-N-Shacks and neglected libraries. So long as you properly configured the chute and programmed the expulsion vents, a tornado would roll toward a condemned building as inexorably as a pregnant lady toward rocky road ice cream, as Estelle used to joke in her joking days, when the girls were still small. Elsewhere, I hear, they rent out beehives to pollinate fruit trees. Nowadays, of course, armies of American litigators have made weather-assisted demolition illegal. I suppose that’s progress.

  Prices for violent storms have bottomed out, and farmers are downsizing, doing dust devils, doing siroccos. Walls of dust raise themselves, some reaching eight thousand feet under the blazing sun, swallowing the gas flares over the oil wells. The jet stream is not cooperating. Neither, for that matter, is the economy. There was a time when a family could support itself with the sale of one or two tornadoes a year, but those days are long gone. To survive you have to sell out to the rodeos, the monster-truck rallies. We don’t suffer alone. Offshore rigs report that waterspouts have all but dried up. Here on the plains, an early frost snuffed every budding funnel cloud.

  These days anybody with sense farms winds. Winds are the growth industry. Clean energy. You want to get out ahead of the apocalypse, get into winds.

  Supercells, those alpha storms that bulge with precipitation like muscle, cost too much in upkeep and insurance for all but the corporate outfits. Culls deemed unfit for sale are left to spin out in the green canyons, thousands of acres of privately held weather graveyards.

  A few family farms are still trying to develop prestige twisters; I saw two in utero while driving into town. Sister funnels, housed in adjacent incubators. They looked lonely out there, spinning on their single toes. Purple monsters, twice the height of the cork-colored barn, yawing up and down, consuming bitter air. What it must be costing to irrigate them all through July, to keep those updrafts tight, I shudder to imagine.

  Any storm you see at auction was artificially bred, artificially maintained. Coriolis Farms, our family’s outfit, was no exception. Our tornadoes we advertised as “hell in a handbasket”—Estelle’s copy. Typically rotating around sixty or seventy miles per hour, rarely more than fifty meters across. EF0, EF1. Compact enough to rage in a corral and strong enough to flip a car.

  But even corporate-raised stock is far less powerful than the Act-of-God twisters that destroy whole towns. I’ve seen mobile homes conscripted into a cosmic game of kick the can, and that cruelty is assigned randomly, by forces unknown. Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime—people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.

  If a tornado farmer makes a mistake, all hell breaks loose. Whenever a ground-traveling cloud escapes its enclosure, a vigilante mob shows up at the breeder’s ranch. Give people a name to blame for their suffering, and you, too, can expect a flood of furious attention. On the night my storm escaped me, the entire county read the damage swath as my autograph.

  Just when I’d reconciled myself to anonymity, Lemon Guyron slid onto my bench with his oldest son beside him. I’ve known Lemon for decades. His deep froggy laugh and his fortressed smile.

  “Can that be Wurman? I almost didn’t recognize you!”

  “We’ve got some age on us, I guess. How’ve you been, Lemon?”

  “Never better, never better. Bad year for weather, but that’ll pass, of course.” A grin spread like a moat around his face. “I got no complaints.”

  Lemon’s son, what was his name?

  “Actually, Mr. Wurman,” said this forty-year-old boy, who’d inherited his father’s bassoon of a voice but not his belligerent cheer, “we’ve had a helluva time finding a buyer this spring. A lot of the state fairs are moving away from tornado riding. Too much liability, and the kids aren’t interested.” He smiled with his gums, lifting his mustache into a gloomy rainbow. “Like jai alai and unprotected group sex, it has seen its day.” We chuckled our stage chuckles, staring ahead.

  “You in the market this year, Wurman?”

  “I’m not buying,” I said. “Just fantasizing.”

  “Looks like something’s coming down…”

  Knee to knee, we all craned in, stubby number 2s poised above scratch pads. The clouds were loaded in the pens now, coerced into a temporary calm, like genies in their bottles. Bodiless, they could not paw the earth. But we heard them readying for expulsion, whining for release, behind every steel door.

  Chute 2 opened first: out whirled a dust devil, shrubby and meek, gyring in place like a music-box ballerina, already dissipating into the golden afternoon air.

  “It would exhaust itself right here,” I murmured to Lemon, “if it weren’t for those hoses stringing it up like a corset.”

  “That’s what the Ahmad brothers are putting up?”

  “I heard they had some trouble with their incubator.”

  “Looks like bad breath.”

  The Rev chanted over the gusts: “One thousand, now two, now two, who’ll give me two? Two, now three, now three, who’ll give me three?”

  Last year, the nation’s top recorded price for a storm was a quarter-million dollars for an EF4 tornado named Jericho, raised by Gomez & Daughters, one of the last matriarchal weather ranches in Texas, and sold to Franklin Fair & Rodeo. That may sound like a lot of money, but consider what it takes to run an aeolian generator, and redo the math; like I said, if you’re a breakeven, you’re doing better than ninety percent of breeders. People get desperate, they make strange compromises. Pinky Searle told me that, last May, two producers approached his family about a reality TV show.

  Two rows down, a kid with bad razor burn and a bony-white Stetson was saying, “I don’t think the market will fall out of bed, but I’m saying the highs are in place.”

  The Rev called speeds into the clown-nosed mic, singing the praises of the yet-to-be. This one, full grown, was sure to be another “storm of the century.” That one, the “future terror of the Great Plains.” I can tell you what was happening inside the buyer’s mind, as the Rev seeded us with his enthusiasm: a second tornado was building. Bigger, faster, stronger, and immensely profitable, the sort of sublime weather that reduces grown men to bed wetters.

  Four plummy funnels were rotating around the corral; mushroomy and odd as she was, I couldn’t take my eyes off the white one.

  “What’s got you pinked up? Not that ugly loaf?”

  “Maybe so. Who sired it?”

  “Supercell Four. Molly’s outfit.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t like the looks of it, no. Everybody knows they ionize with junk from China.”

  “Molly does?”

  “Oh, heck yes. That downdraft look natural to you?”

  “I’m not buying, anyhow—”

  Molly’s cull turned a sluggish circle under the fans, a beautiful light streaking her center, like those shy colors inside a marble. My pencil never touched the scratch pad.

  “Three thousand, who’ll give me four?”

  I lifted my paddle.

  “The hell are you thinking?”<
br />
  Lemon turned his stare on me. His wintry eye, assessing.

  “You’re a fool,” he offered. “You want to burn up all your kids’ money?”

  “The girls are grown. They don’t need my money.”

  He laughed angrily. Scared for me, or maybe of me.

  “Find a hobby, Wurman. Raise a puppy.”

  Another paddle went up, jumping the price a thousand dollars. The boy’s powder-blue vest revealed him as a proxy of the biggest Texas weather factory, Cloudsmart Corp.

  I lifted my paddle.

  “You’re mad at the girls, I can see that.”

  “This has nothing to do with the girls.”

  “Be angry. You have every right. But this is a mistake.”

  “Twelve thousand, do I have thirteen?”

  I lifted my paddle.

  The Cloudsmart kid raised, too. It wasn’t his money, was it? Possibly he’d decided his duckling pride would be injured, losing a cloud to the likes of me.

  I lifted my paddle.

  “Fifteen, do I have sixteen?”

  “Yep!”

  “Jesus, Wurman. You don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Who are you to tell me what I’ve got?”

  “You really want to ruin yourself, go jump in the river—it’s quicker.”

  I lifted my paddle.

  “Going, going…”

  Gone. She was mine.

  “It’s a bad bet.”

  “My worst,” I happily agreed.

  * * *

  “It may die before you get home. You’re aware of that possibility?”

  The ranching of storms has come a long way since wranglers drove those silent clouds, black and distended, up the Goodnight Trail, or captured Colorado River mists on horseback. But the sale of a tornado is still very much a handshake business.