Sentimental Journey

by Jill Barnett

  “Your plane should be safe enough inside the garage. It might look like the roof could cave in, but it won’t.”

  “I’ve never seen hail like this. It’s huge.”

  “Then you haven’t been in Texas long.”

  She pushed away from the window looking as out of place in the shabby, small room as a silver dollar in a handful of plug nickels. She was so tall she could look him in the eye. He’d never seen a woman that tall before . . . well, at least not a pretty woman.

  “I was in Lubbock last night and had planned to be in Wichita Falls by this afternoon. Instead I’m in . . . ” She paused, then looked at him, frowning. “Just where am I?”

  “Acme, Texas.”

  “Oh.”

  “A hundred miles west of Wichita Falls.”

  For a second the only sound in the place was the hammering of the hailstones from outside. He went to hitch his hip on the corner of the kitchen table and sat down instead on the distributor. He felt his face flush hot and red, so he turned and tried to push the parts aside.

  He sort of wished she would keep talking. The silence made him feel naked. He said all the wrong things to this fly-gal. He’d just never expected a female pilot to land in his gas station. Who would? But she made him feel like he was dumber than toast.

  It was strange, the way she jumped to the conclusion that he thought she couldn’t make a living at being a pilot because she was a woman. All he’d been surprised at was that anyone could be paid for something as fantastic as flying an airplane.

  He might have set her straight, but somehow he figured there was a big argument in that, at least when she was still mad as hens at him for something he didn’t really say.

  He was a little rusty at talking to women, except for Nettie, his sister, and Ruth Wendell, Pastor Wendell’s wife, who invited him for beef dinner the first Sunday of every month. He talked to female customers once in a while, but most of them were older than Eve. They had known his granddaddy as well as his daddy, had white hair, and remembered the day Red got his first tooth and his first haircut.

  She wasn’t looking at him, but around the room.

  He wondered what she thought when she looked at the place. All he ever saw was the emptiness of it. It wasn’t much different from how it had looked when his mama left, except for the three-year-old Kadette radio on the kitchen counter, and the barren windows with only five-and-dime store roller shades wedged into the top of the window frames.

  On the day his daddy died he’d finally taken down those old, rotting lace curtains his mama made. Nettie wanted to take them down before, when they’d gotten the postcard from Dallas. But their daddy had always said no. Perhaps they reminded him of another time, when Red’s mama hadn’t wanted to run away, when she had been a woman who sewed for her man and her children, and made the place a home.

  “What’s this you’re working on?” She had crossed to the table and was staring down at the engine parts.

  His mama had always gone on and on about greasy auto parts on the kitchen table. She and his daddy had fought about it.

  Charley Morrison picked up a piston and turned it this way and that, completely ignoring the grease all over it. She set it down and casually wiped her hand on her jumpsuit as she studied everything on the table. “Pistons, barrels, carburetor . . . ”

  She knew what they were.

  He almost said something stupid like, Well, I’ll be damned. Hell, with that chip on her shoulder a comment like that might get him slapped.

  “I’d say by the look on your face that you think women don’t know about engines.” She sounded exasperated with him.

  What was it about his face that told this woman something he was surely not thinking?

  “Is that what you think?”

  Finally he just laughed and raised his hands in the air. “Not me. I’m no fool. I’m not thinking anything except what you want me to think.”

  “You’re a fast learner, Red Walker.”

  They stood there, neither of them saying anything.

  “Your turn,” she finally said.

  “My turn for what?”

  “To ask me a question. I ask you a question, then you ask me a question. It’s called conversation.”

  “Well, okay . . . Right now I’m trying to figure out if I should ask you where you learned what a piston looked like.”

  “Afraid I’m going to bite your head off?”

  “Something like that.”

  She sat back and gave him a direct look, then crossed her arms and one leg over a knee. “My pop told me a long time ago that if you’re going to fly a plane, you’d better know how it works, especially when you’re running it thousands of feet in the air.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  The hail had stopped. Now it sounded like regular rain pounding down on the roof.

  She shifted her weight to one side, unzipped a pocket, and stuck her hand inside it, rummaging around for something. “Look. Can I get something to drink?” She set some change on the table. “I saw the soda pop advertisement on the building, so I figure you must sell them, right?”

  “I’ll get you one.” He stood up so fast he hit a knee on the table and wanted to swear. “Stay put,” he said, walking for the door. “The cooler’s in the station.”

  “Wait! Here’s some money.”

  “I’ll get it.” He was already half outside. The screen rattled closed behind him. He went inside the station and got a couple of bottles of soda, stuffed some bags of peanuts into his pockets; then he stepped back outside.

  The wind had stopped. Now it was quiet, that empty kind of quiet that preceded something just the opposite, the kind of silence that made you stop and pay attention.

  He walked toward the open side of the station and stood there a minute, holding the cold Dr. Pepper bottles by their long, damp necks.

  Off toward the south, the clouds were black as iron and rolling over and over, down and sideways, twisting and moving toward the ground. A narrow outline of thin black was spinning like thread from the bottom of those heavy clouds.

  He turned and ran to the house.

  She met him at the door, standing with the screen propped open against her back.

  “Here’s your drink.” He shoved it at her, then kept walking past. After a second he called back, “Come on.”

  “Come on where? Where are you going?”

  “This way!” He made straight for the tower. “Out back!”

  He heard her run down the steps. “What’s going on?”

  He turned around, but continued trotting backwards. “That’s tornado weather off toward the south. Look! There’s a funnel cloud!”

  Not only did she have a name like a man. She swore like one.

  “LEANING ON THE OLD TOP RAIL”

  Charley froze where she was, the word shit still hanging in the air. She turned to the south. High in the sky were clouds black as coal dust. Two long, dark, spiral clouds were joined together by a thin thread and were hanging down from the storm like some kind of uneven jump rope that moved constantly.

  She ran after him, around the corner of the old wooden building that was the base of the water tower.

  He had disappeared.

  She looked around on the ground for the doors to a cellar or storm shelter of some kind.

  There was nothing.

  She scanned the area and saw nothing but a freshly combined wheat field and a dark sky.

  “The view’s better from up here.”

  She looked up.

  Red Walker was leaning on a wooden railing, looking down at her from a narrow platform that ran around the tower.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Watching the tornado. You coming up?”

  “Up? Don’t you think we should go someplace safer?”

  “Like where?”

  “In a cellar or storm shelter. Underground. Far away?”

  He laughed. “Why?”

  “So we don’t
die.”

  “We’re not going to die. It’s only a tornado.”

  Charley looked off toward the clouds.

  Only a tornado. That’s like saying only an airplane crash.

  She could see a funnel beginning to form beneath the roiling storm clouds. She looked back at him. “Are you crazy?”

  He shrugged. “If you’re scared, don’t come up, but that seems a little strange to me.”

  “What seems strange? That I’m afraid of a tornado cloud? Pilots have to fly around them, Red. Planes can’t fly as high as that cloud.”

  “Have you ever seen a tornado?”

  “Not up close, thank you.”

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Interesting? Why?”

  “You claim we shouldn’t accept the ordinary, but here you have a chance to do something out of the ordinary and you won’t do it.”

  She gave him what she hoped was a look as dark as those clouds, then she turned on her heel and climbed up the ladder. She crawled through the ladder hole and onto the platform.

  He was sitting down with his back to the splintered wood of the tower, his long legs dangling freely over the edge.

  He faced her and patted the platform. “Sit.”

  She shifted into the same position he was and watched the clouds warily. She began to fidget. She wanted to be someplace below-ground, not high above it. It was humid and warm and sticky. She unsnapped the cuffs on her flight suit and shoved the sleeves back to her elbows.

  He just sat there, calm as a toad in the sun.

  She realized there was suddenly no sound outside. No birds. No wind. Nothing. Just strange, empty air. “How come there’s no siren blowing?”

  “They have warning sirens in town. This is farm country. Out here we don’t have any sirens, and if we did, they wouldn’t do a lick of good. Most farms are a few hundred acres.”

  “If that’s supposed to reassure me, it doesn’t. I can’t believe I’m just sitting here calmly—”

  He laughed. “Calmly?”

  “All right, sitting here hysterically and watching weather that could easily kill us.”

  “These storms don’t move that fast.”

  “Who said?”

  “I just know.”

  “Did you ever think that you just might not have seen one that moves fast?”

  “You understand weather when you live in it all your life.”

  “Okay.” She eyed the storm uneasily. It was still far enough away to make her not want to run screaming from the tower. “How long have you been doing this crazy thing?”

  “Probably longer than you’ve been flying a plane.”

  “That long?”

  “Since I could climb the tower, I guess. These marks here in the wood are for the tornadoes I’ve seen go by.” He took out a pocket knife with a bone handle and made a mark on the rim of the platform. There were at least five long rows of marks. “The number isn’t true. I didn’t start marking them here until I had a pocket knife, after my granddaddy died. Then I started cutting a notch in the wood for every tornado that went by.”

  “There must be nearly a hundred marks there.”

  “Yep.”

  “You’ve never had a tornado come straight through here?”

  “Nope. One came close enough to pull the leaves off that pecan tree over there, but that was about it. The twister dropped down for only a second or two, then went right back up into the sky.”

  “And you were sitting here when that one hit?”

  “I sure was. Hell . . . when you live in Texas, you see tornadoes come down and take the feathers right off of the chickens.”

  She stared at him, then laughed. “You’re teasing me.”

  He shook his head and, with a perfectly straight face, said, “It’s true. Afterward the chickens will be just standing in the yard, pecking away, but they’re as bald as the head on a turkey buzzard.”

  “And just where are all these bald chickens?”

  “I ate ’em.”

  She laughed. “I’m not swallowing that.”

  “I swallowed ’em and they were right good, too. Fried ’em up for Sunday dinner. Didn’t even have to pluck ’em.”

  “I think you’re telling one of those tall Texas tales I’ve heard so much about.”

  “That’s only because you’ve never seen a bald chicken.”

  He was clowning with her. The funny thing was, you couldn’t tell he was joking from his straight face. He was maybe two or three years younger than she was. She thought about him sitting here, as a young boy, and wondered what would have happened if a tornado had turned and headed for him. “Didn’t your mother worry about you sitting up here all alone in such dangerous weather?”

  He snapped the pocket knife closed, leaned forward a bit, and stuck it back in his pocket as he looked off at something somewhere in the distance, his expression as wooden as the platform they were sitting on. “My mama was gone.”

  She wanted to ask him where his mother had gone. If she was gone as in “she left,” or if she was gone as in “gone to heaven.”

  His expression told her to leave it alone.

  She could see the funnel cloud was still some distance away and off toward the southwest. The cone was getting wider and deeper in color. There was a long black column coming up from the ground like it was being sucked clean up into those clouds.

  He shifted and brought one leg up, then rested his hand on it. “I always sort of figured if I had to, I could outrun a twister.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to test that theory today.”

  “My bet is it’ll pass south of us.”

  “What’s that black spot there? See?” She pointed.

  “The funnel cloud is touching down. Watch that tail, the one that looks like a kite tail. It’ll whip down. See?”

  “Look at that!” She watched it spin, strangely—spinning like crazy yet seeming to move toward them molasses-slow. “Look. It’s growing. I heard once that they can be miles wide.”

  She knew tornado clouds could be over thirty thousand feet high. You never tried to fly over one. “It’s so huge . . . ”

  “Yep. Everything’s big in Texas.”

  She looked at him then.

  He grinned at her. “My granddaddy used to say that.” He gestured at the soda bottle still in her hand. “You gonna drink that?”

  She held it up. “The cap’s still on.”

  He took it from her and leaned forward, placed the cap on the edge of the rail, and slammed his fist down on it. The cap flew off. He handed it back to her.

  All along the railing she noticed little teeth marks, like bites—a hundred or more bottle caps had made their marks along that wooden rail. The history of Red Walker.

  He opened his soda bottle and took a long swig, then pulled a package of peanuts from his pocket, tore it open with his teeth, and emptied the peanuts into the Dr. Pepper. He crumpled up the empty bag and stuffed it in his pocket.

  A second later he raised the bottle to his mouth and swallowed Dr. Pepper and peanuts.

  “And you think people from California are nuts.”

  “If I had made that kind of bad pun, I’d bet you’d have had something snippy to say.” He pulled another package of peanuts from his coveralls and handed it to her. “Here. You try it.”

  She stared at the peanut bag.

  “Go on. Try it. It’ll give us something new we can argue about.”

  He had a good sense of humor.

  She opened the bag, but only put three of the peanuts in the bottle, one at a time.

  He was staring straight ahead, as if he hadn’t been watching her. But he said quietly, “No guts.”

  “Weak stomach,” she said without looking back.

  So they sat there like that, as the tornado swirled in the distance, pulling up so much red Texas dirt that the funnel looked rusted.

  The storm was traveling northeast, and as it moved, there was a distant hollow kind of sound, t
he kind that comes from deep inside a drum. The sound grew deeper, louder, more hollow sounding, until it was like some unearthly being screaming.

  The wind whipped violently even in the storm’s perimeter, and the tower, well, the tower just quivered like a coward.

  The air felt electric. Charley looked down, and the fine hair on her forearms was standing on end from the static. The heavy surrounding air tasted of dirt and rain and destruction.

  The tornado whirled through a fallow farm field, kicking up a mess. The wind blew so hard that sitting there, even from a good distance away, it was like flying in an open cockpit. Her hair flew straight back, her eyes teared, and she had to close her lips because the force of the wind hurt her front teeth.

  It passed by as he had predicted, and she realized she was sitting there, hugging her knees tightly, and smiling.

  It was the very same feeling she’d had the first time she ever flew. She just looked at that tornado blowing across the flat land and said, “Wow!”

  “I’d say that about says it all.”

  The funnel cloud was spinning along the road, before she finally relaxed and leaned back against the tower again. Still half-turned, she watched it slowly disappear.

  It was the strangest thing. It just wound down as if it were just getting tired of spinning. One moment the cone was there, and the next it looked like it had been swallowed up by the clouds. Gone.

  The dark and heavy clouds were thinning. They faded from black to gray, and a shot of clear golden sunlight streamed through the eastern side of the storm front and cast purple shadows on the ground, where debris lay sprawled over the remnants of the field.

  A large tree had been pulled from the ground and lay there; its roots looked like clawing fingers that had tried to hold on. Whole bushes, weathered and splintered boards, and an old tire were tossed there, stolen from only God knew where.

  “See? You had nothing to worry about. It didn’t even come close.” Red killed off the last of his soda and was chewing on the peanuts.

  She wasn’t certain what she felt. She’d sat out a tornado on an old water tower with this wild kid drinking Dr. Pepper and peanuts. “You know, I’ve heard people call flying a plane sheer craziness. They say it’s nothing but a danger-seeking thrill.”