Tornado Weather

by Deborah E. Kennedy

  “Brianna,” the blonde said. “Brianna Pogue.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “So, Maria, you’re accusing Brianna of stealing money from you.”

  “No,” Maria said. “She stole from the high school. From her own mother, even.”

  “Oh my God.” Brianna leaned back and folded her arms behind her head. “You’re just making shit up now.”

  “I don’t make shit up,” Maria said to Brianna. “I don’t tell lies. That’s your department.”

  It was Brianna’s turn to roll her eyes. “Jesus titty-fucking Christ.”

  Randy stared down at the table, at Brianna’s wide palms drumming the surface. Someone had carved her initials into the wood. STD. Or maybe it was a joke and the joke was on him.

  “I don’t understand,” Randy said. “Help me out.”

  “There’s nothing to understand,” Brianna said. “She’s spreading lies about me, probably because she’s tired of spreading her legs for every Tom, Dick, and Hay-sooce who dares put a dollar up her hooha.” She turned to Maria, lit a cigarette, blew the smoke in her face. “Why don’t you just go back where you came from?”

  Maria was out of her chair before Randy could stop her, pointy finger in Brianna’s chest this time. “You are the ugliest person I’ve ever seen,” Maria said, “and I’m not just talking about your greasy mug or your cottage cheese thighs. I’m talking about your soul. Your racist, thieving, disgusting, cottage cheese soul. Who steals from their own mother? Who takes the food right out of our children’s mouths like that?”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes I do. Daisy told me.”

  “Daisy?” Randy asked. “What does any of this have to do with Daisy?”

  The cell phone rang again. Touched for the very first time. Like a viriririrgin …

  Maria grew icy. She spoke slowly, deliberately, like a witness in a courtroom, coached and calm. “Daisy informed me just a week before she disappeared that Brianna stole a bunch of money from the high school cafeteria till while Shellie wasn’t looking. A lot of money.”

  “Lying whore!” Brianna shouted, arms pinwheeling at Maria’s face.

  “Thieving slut!” Maria spit.

  Randy broke them up. “Hey there.” He felt less like a capable principal now and more like a babysitter charged with solving an unsolvable dilemma. He wished he could put both women in time-out. “You two simmer down.”

  They sat down again and faced the mirror. Maria rubbed coconut oil on her legs and watched herself while she did and Brianna plucked the small space between her eyebrows. Their chests were still heaving.

  So Brianna was Shellie Pogue’s daughter, Randy thought. Shellie was the head cafeteria lady at the high school, and the last time Randy questioned Hector Gonzalez, Hector had mentioned something about Shellie watching Daisy once in a while when he was particularly busy grading tests and papers and prepping for the next day’s class. Shellie would wash dishes in the back or wipe down cafeteria tables and Daisy would “help” her. Probably, Randy supposed, by making a mess. Randy would have to talk to Shellie again, but this time he’d have to distract her from her desire to point the finger at Helen Garrety and ask her what she knew about her daughter’s supposed theft.

  Stan McElroy peeked in then, a chicken wing in his hand. Heavy metal poured through the open door. “Maria,” he said, “you’re going on in two minutes. Pick out your song.”

  Maria shot Brianna a scathing look. “‘Crazy Bitch’ seems appropriate.”

  “Yeah it does,” Brianna said.

  “I’m truly sorry,” Maria said, hand on hip, “that business is so bad you had to resort to stealing. I feel responsible.”

  “You feel responsible?”

  “It’s too bad all your old clients prefer me to you, but really who can blame them when you can’t be bothered to wash your pussy on a regular basis.”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a full response,” Brianna said.

  Maria laughed. Then she leaned over Brianna, dropping a condescending kiss on the blond girl’s forehead. “My God, you’re an idiot.”

  After she left, Brianna wadded up a Kleenex, wiped the kiss off, and threw the tissue across the room.

  Randy waited a moment for Brianna to settle down. When she started brushing out her fake eyelashes, he launched what he supposed was a relatively safe line of questioning. “Is it true about the money?” he asked. “If so, I’d suggest you return it.”

  Brianna put a dab of concealer in the middle of her forehead and spread it around. “Or what? You’ll book me? Of course it’s not true. Maria hates me is all. Has it in for me. Just ask anyone here.”

  “Why would she have it in for you?”

  “How should I know? Green-eyed monster, probably.” Brianna drew a beauty mark next to her thin-lipped mouth. “En. Vy.”

  “I see,” Randy said. “But back to the cafeteria thing … I was just wondering…”

  “Yes?”

  “If you’d seen her lately.”

  “My mom?”

  “No. Daisy.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Brianna swiveled around and faced him. Randy couldn’t help himself. His eyes drifted to her chest. Her breasts were flat and pancake shaped but they were also young and bare and it had been a very long time since Randy had been in a small room with a naked woman.

  “Stare a little longer and I’ll charge you,” she said.

  Randy blushed and coughed into his hand. Then he stood and started to let himself out of the dressing room. He needed a vacation. And a real lead in the Daisy Gonzalez case. And a drink. “Take care of yourself, Miss Pogue.”

  “Oh I will,” she said, turning back to the mirror and teasing her hair into a beehive. “Besides robbery, taking care of myself is what I’m best at.”

  Back in the main room of Miss Kitty’s, Maria was onstage, spraying down a bronze pole with Windex. She rubbed it clean in rhythm to the first few notes of her song, and the motion was sensual, sexy, but instead of watching her dance, Randy fixed his eyes on a television hanging above the bar. It was tuned to CNN and a breaking news alert about a suicide bombing in Iraq.

  A cute bartender who introduced herself as “Cherry Pi, Pi like the mathematical symbol not the dessert” gave him a beer.

  “On the house,” she said. “You look like you could use it.”

  He smiled gratefully at her. “That obvious, eh?”

  “Eh,” she said.

  Randy glanced back at the television. He couldn’t believe what he heard. The closed-captioning was a second behind the audio feed but there it was. The boy’s name in yellow letters superimposed over a shot of desert, wailing women, smoking tanks.

  “Holy shit,” Randy said.

  Cherry paused and set down the glass she was polishing. “What?”

  He pointed to the TV. They both stared, openmouthed, at the screen, watched until, inexplicably, the story changed to one about red wine and weight loss.

  “It’s a small world, isn’t it?” Cherry said. Her big blue eyes seemed to glow in the gloom. She poured herself a shot of Apple Pucker and downed it in one gulp. Then she did another. Circling her smooth neck was a tattoo of black, tangled briars. Blood dripped from the branches. “He was my prom date. Senior year. What a sweetheart.” She adjusted her leather bustier. Randy watched as the pink moles at the tops of her breasts rearranged themselves into a straight line. Orion’s belt, he thought. Or maybe his knife. “Well,” she corrected herself, “he was.”

  Honor

  (May)

  We turned the Humvee into an ice-cream truck for the afternoon. It was Winter’s idea.

  “Hearts and minds, people,” he said. “Hearts and minds.”

  We knew he wanted to do it to impress that Shiite girl whose brother was dying of some horrible cancer, but no one teased him. We just followed orders.

  “Chocolate?”

  “Check.”

  �
��Vanilla?”

  “Check.”

  “Cookies and cream?”

  “Check.”

  “Pistachio?”

  “Who the fuck eats pistachio?”

  “My old man, that’s who, so suck my dick and put it on the truck.”

  It was sweet, the whole operation and Winter’s puppy love for that girl with her beautiful copper eyes and the way she had of shuffling every day in her bright pink shoes between her house and the hospital in town armed with comic books and a basket of burned bread. That was Winter for you, falling in love with someone he’d probably talked to only once and had never really seen because she wore what looked like a heavy black sofa cover everywhere she went.

  “How we going to hand this out?” Junior asked. “There aren’t any spoons.”

  Petes shook his head. “People’ve got tongues, haven’t they?” Petes was so big he never went by just plain Pete. His sheer girth warranted the s. “Use your imagination, Junior.”

  The ice cream came from some rich guy in Austin, Texas, who wrote a letter to all of us explaining that he’d been transformed by September 11. “Irrevocably,” he said. He also apparently had more money and patriotism than sense. The ice cream was vacuum-packed in dry ice and when Winter opened one of the fifty boxes, plastered all over with American flag stickers, the freezing steam turned his pale face almost blue.

  “My what?” Junior asked.

  “Forget it,” Petes said.

  Henzlick was the only one of us who seemed annoyed by Operation Get Rid of It Before It Melts. “So the girl’s brother likes Superman and carbs,” he mumbled as we stacked the individually wrapped cups in sweating towers on the Humvee’s floor. We called the truck Hoosier in honor of my home state. “How do we know he likes ice cream?”

  “What kid doesn’t like ice cream?” said Petes. “That’s un-American.”

  “Then just because I’m lactose intolerant I’m un-American?” Junior said.

  I shoved him, and he shoved me back. I took the CD Winter tossed my way.

  “Scott Joplin?” I said. “Who’s he?”

  “Just load it.”

  * * *

  We were supposed to be on the hunt for these three guys who, according to the major, were deputies of deputies of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Really, truly, horrible, evil men, the major said. Insane. They’d kill you for refusing to diaper your goats. Winter got the orders to scour the streets in Sadr City, go house by house. We’d been assigned such searches before. They gave Junior the shakes and usually ended with us in a tiny room, shining our flashlights in the faces of people so terrified they peed themselves and then had to usher us out across floors wet with their own urine. Before our last raid, we’d been given family pictures of five men wanted for the bombing of a Sunni farmer’s market. The pictures were bright, beautiful. They were taken at a wedding. This time we just had a few rough sketches of the men to go by, pen-and-ink drawings that could have been anybody. Winter took the drawings and taped them up next to one of Hoosier’s windows.

  “We’ll get to those later,” Winter said. “Move on out, boys.”

  Hoosier was cool inside and smelled like sugar.

  “We’re going to be in a world of shit,” Henzlick said.

  Henzlick didn’t usually question Winter. Like everyone else, he seemed to think that Winter was pretty much as good a soldier as you’d see anywhere—knew enough Arabic to get us through some hairy checkpoints, handsome but not pretty, smart but not superior, and brave without being reckless like the last lieutenant we’d had—Uhrick, that crazy German from Pennsylvania who almost got himself killed running into a burning building after some kid’s pet bird. Uhrick was dead now. Helicopter crash. I thought about him sometimes, but mostly his face was just a flash that would come to me at unexpected moments, a charred circle framed with parrot feathers. Lots of people were dead now.

  “What’s your problem, Henzlick?” Petes threw an ice-cream cup at Henzlick’s head.

  “Yeah, Henzlick,” Junior said. “What’s your supreme unction?”

  “The raid, asshole,” Henzlick said to Petes, dodging the ice cream. He ignored Junior, which is pretty much standard operating procedure around here. “You think they’re not going to notice that we’re screwing around instead of doing our job?”

  The ice cream hit the sketch of a bearded man who was supposed to be the ringleader. In the drawing, the man had big alien eyes and a slit for a mouth.

  Petes wiped at the line of ice cream streaked across the man’s face like a milk mustache and licked his finger. “Hmm. Tastes like chicken,” he said.

  Winter didn’t seem to hear any of this. He was too pumped up. We’d stopped on the girl’s street, a run-down Shiite block where almost every building was riddled with bullets. “Petes, put Hoosier in park. Let’s do this.”

  Of course there was a crowd of kids. When we first got to Iraq we used to joke that the kids must have had metal in their arms the way they flocked to Humvees like shavings to magnets. But those kinds of jokes didn’t fly anymore. We’d been in the country two years now. The war was almost three times that old and nobody back home even remembered what we were doing here.

  Winter motioned to Junior to open Hoosier’s back door, a spot everyone called the panty hatch because Petes had spray-painted it to look like the seat of a woman’s polka-dot underwear. “Garrety,” he said to me, “cue the music.”

  The first few notes of “The Entertainer” hit the hot air. Winter and Petes started tossing cups of melting ice cream at a hundred outstretched brown hands. I took a few vanillas and handed them to a young girl whose fluttering fingers made me think of butterfly wings. I felt indestructible. I threw the cups far and wide. Petes went into the stretch, pretended to pick off a runner at first. We were doing a good thing, a right thing. The music encircled us like a benevolent force field. Bombs could not hit us here. The children must have felt the same way because they skipped and shouted, dancing along the roadside where less than a week ago IEDs had burst from below piles of trash.

  “C’mon, Henzlick,” I said, pushing a tower of chocolate his way.

  Henzlick kicked the ice cream back at me. “Nope. No dishonorable discharge for me, thanks.”

  The plan was to hand out the ice cream, and then, if we didn’t see the girl, move to another block and hand out some more, but Hoosier was surrounded. The kids just kept coming back. They filled their ragged T-shirts with cups, shouting, “My sister! My sister!”

  “How do they know English?” Petes asked.

  “All the schools we’re building,” I said. Then we laughed because we had to. The only thing we’d built in the last six months was a boxing ring where Junior was forever challenging Petes to rematches that all ended the same way—with Junior’s face on the mat and Petes picking him up gently the way you would a sleeping kid, saying, “Nigger, I told you. Give it up.”

  Junior said he’d get the trots just holding the ice cream, so instead of joining me and Petes and Winter he climbed down into the crowd and tried to teach a pack of street kids a new game. Bloody strips of old bandages flapped at their skinny ankles. Flies buzzed face wounds. “Repeat after me,” Junior said. “I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.”

  “You are seriously fucked up,” Petes said.

  A boy, probably about four years old, tugged on my sleeve. “For Mama,” he said. His voice was smoky.

  I handed him two cookies and cream. “This is the best,” I said.

  The boy smiled. I didn’t know if he understood me. It didn’t matter. Winter was a genius. These kids needed this. We needed this. This is what it’s all about, I thought. This is why we’re here. Dessert in the desert. We’re winning this war.

  But then the boy was gone and I realized that there were too many people. Their shiny black heads made me dizzy. We’d never have enough ice cream for all of them. We’d never have enough. Handfuls of gravel hit my helmet and chest.

  “Gotta cut and run,” Pe
tes said, looking at Hoosier’s empty floors. “We’re pretty much out anyway.”

  Winter stood for a moment longer, scanning the crowd. He reminded me of an explorer, the kind you see all the time in children’s history books, striking a strong pose on a mountain crag, pondering the country’s destiny. The hot sun turned the sharp planes of his face into something heroic and beautiful and I thought of the talk the two of us had a few nights before when everyone else was watching a movie in the chow hall, a piece-of-shit action flick with Ben Affleck as the star. Winter and I both agreed Ben Affleck was a douche, or at least played a good one on TV, so we were sitting on our bunks, Winter with a book, me in front of a blank laptop screen. I wanted to write an e-mail to my grandma back home in Indiana, but every line was a false start. Dear Grandma, I found the arm of a girl in the street today. Grandma, there are no trees here. Grandma, I feel like I might die soon.

  The last message I got from her was full of bad news—deer in her garden, Mom on the run again, a girl named for a flower gone missing and feared dead because, as Grandma put it, that was the way of the world.

  Colliersville isn’t the same since you left. Nothing’s the same anymore.

  Amen, Grandma. Amen.

  While I tried to think of something to write to Grandma to make her feel better, Winter laughed and threw his shoe at me. “Garrety,” he said. “Earth to Garrety.”

  “Dude.” I threw the shoe back. “I’m writing to my fucking grandma.”

  “Well, stop writing to your fucking grandma and listen to me.”

  “What? What is it? I’m listening, okay? You’ve got every ounce of my fucking attention.”

  Winter was looking in my direction but it was as if he could see through me and the thin white walls of the tent to the city beyond. His face was filled with light. “We’re here for the right reasons. Years from now, history will show we were the real heroes. Don’t ask me how I know. I just know it.” And I believed him. I wondered if he would be president someday.

  Today with the ice cream and the swelling crowd, he was just as sure. “Cut the music, Garrety,” he said. Then he got on Hoosier’s loudspeaker system and launched into Arabic. All I caught was, “Sorry. No more.”