Tornado Weather

by Deborah E. Kennedy

  “Daisy and me discussed this very issue on the bus the day she disappeared.” Tiara rubbed at her throat. The mermaid dangling there, missing some sparklies over the breasts and on the tip of the tail, looked like she could use a dip in the fishbowl. “I’m scared.”

  “Me too,” Fikus said.

  “Do you think they’ll find her?”

  “I really hope so.”

  “She knew where I was coming from because she was coming from the Bottoms and, seriously, Maple Leaf and the Bottoms, same-same. Apples and apples. But then you got people like Alex, who if he wouldn’t fucking repeat himself—”

  “Language…”

  “Sorry. If he wouldn’t repeat things a million effing times would sort of have it made in the shade.”

  “Because his family has money?”

  “Our door fell off yesterday.”

  “What?”

  Tiara stood and walked to Fikus’s front door (which was his only door) and swung it open. It did not fall off. Then she shouted, “I hate this place! Hey, Asperger’s Alex! Can you hear me from your mansion over there? I hate this place I hate this place I hate this place I hate this fucking place!”

  “Close that door, Tiara.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re disturbing the peace.”

  “What peace? Here?”

  Fikus looked down at Murphy, still listless at the bottom of the bowl. Also bloated. “You’re scaring your fish.”

  “Okay, I’ll shut the door, but first come look at something.”

  “At what?”

  “Just come look.”

  Fikus relented and, in front of them, on B Street, was a small pack of boys holding two dead kittens and a makeshift noose fashioned from an orange extension cord. One of the boys swung a kitten over his head like a lasso, hooting and smiling up at the sky, eyes wild, teeth gray.

  Tiara shook her head. “Maple Leaf, represent.” Then she sighed, heavily and long. She was so much like her mother. “Now do you see what I mean?”

  The Pretty Faces

  (June)

  Irv was lucky that morning. The buck didn’t have a face. It didn’t even have a head, which meant it was probably a ten- or twelve-pointer. Usually it took at least a six to tempt a passerby to chop off the head for a wall trophy, and this one was big, full grown, and regal as the mascot in a bank commercial. The midsection was sliced up pretty good. There were guts on the concrete, watery red like a spilled sno-cone. Alive, the buck must have weighed two hundred pounds, and even headless, it took up most of the westbound lane of Route 20 in front of Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park.

  It was early morning and the spitting rain left a shine on the sign at the entrance to the trailer park, one of Colliersville’s many eyesores, now shrouded in a forgiving fog. Across the street was the Baptist church where Irv went to AA meetings in the eighties, and stapled to the church’s front door was a faded blue flyer offering a reward for information regarding the disappearance of Daisy Gonzalez. Irv couldn’t read the flyer from where he stood but he’d seen enough of them around town to know what it said: “MISSING. Five-year-old girl with black hair and eyes, last seen wearing a pink shirt and blue corduroys. Wheelchair-bound. REWARD.” The pumpkin-cheeked girl went missing on the way home from school. Her bus driver, Fikus Ward, was one of the last people to see her alive.

  Irv hadn’t thought of Fikus for years, but he lived just a few hundred feet away in Maple Leaf in a shingled double-wide squeezed in between the park’s moldy pool and the power substation. Fikus had been Irv’s first and only partner for a short time in the early aughts, back when working for the county meant something. Borrowed from salt spreading to help Irv get through the summer, Fikus had melted down one day over a deer, that, like this one, had been decapitated by a trophy hunter. He told Irv that deer were his favorite animal, “my spirit animal, Irv, my heart.” Then he basically went nuts, left the job that very afternoon talking to the voices in his head and spent some time in the county hospital.

  Irv considered visiting Fikus, seeing if he was okay, but he’d found him annoying eight years ago and chances were he still would. People didn’t change. That was one truth. Best to let dead dogs stay dead. That was another.

  Irv climbed into his truck and backed it up slowly, sliding two big metal forks under the body of the buck. He flipped a switch under the steering column and the forks raised the deer up and into the bed like it weighed nothing. Like it was made of feathers. With the hoist and a rack of rakes and shovels, it was easy to work alone, and Irv didn’t miss Fikus, only felt for him. Death and disaster seemed to cling to certain men like wet leaves to a shoe and there was nothing they could do about it. What did that song say? Some guys had all the luck. Some guys got all the breaks. And some guys were born to scrape flesh off the pavement.

  People always asked Irv about the smell. They were fascinated by the smell of death. “How can you stand it?” they asked him, over and over, in line at the White Swan Grocery Store, at the gas pump, after a football game at the high school. “Does it make you go out of your mind?” they wondered, or did he carry something around with him, like a scented hanky, to mask it?

  Mostly Irv just shrugged and kept quiet, but if he’d been drinking he might venture to say, “Yeah, you know. I almost never leave home without my nosegay,” but no one seemed to find that funny. No one except Rita, of course.

  It made sense that people would think the smell the worst part of the job, especially in summer when the sun-cooked flesh and bloated bodies rotted fast and ugly. It was a terrible bouquet of decomposition, escaping gas, and old blood. Fikus used to throw up a lot, took three showers a night to try to wash off the stench, but Irv told him that there was no escaping it. “Stop that before you rub your skin off,” he said, but Fikus didn’t, and his skin was always pink and raw.

  What he hadn’t been able to tell Fikus or anyone really but Rita was that the smell didn’t bother him so much. What bugged him, haunted him, were the faces, all the pretty faces with their lights turned out. The faces remained in his memory, multiplied down the years like a line of mirrors. Sometimes when he closed his eyes he was sure he could see them all, from his very first puppy to yesterday’s raccoon. The only way he’d survived twenty years of it, of helpless things turned to nothing, to stillness and stink, was to imagine the animals living a new life in a strange land where their faces were whole and beautiful again, where there were no roads or cars or fences, just wide-open fields and dense forests and deer paths.

  Irv had to picture Rita there too or he’d never sleep. The minute his mind started to process the fact that she, like the animals, was rotting, it shut down and rebooted itself, and he could again focus on the Rita he wanted to, naked and warm and stunning in that highwayless, carless land, petting dogs as they passed and stroking the pony Irv picked up ten years before, dead of what looked like a crossbow wound and on its side, bleeding its heart out across Spencerville Road.

  Lately, he’d started seeing Daisy Gonzalez in that peaceful place too, fixed up with a new set of legs and watched over by Rita and Fikus’s magic doe. Irv figured the little girl was as dead as Rita, as dead as the departed Bambi leaking behind him, but the search for her was still in high gear. Every weekend men like Irv’s boss, Yuhl Butz, strapped on hip waders and safety orange and scoured woods and soybean fields, parking lots and neighborhoods, for a sign of the girl, but so far all they’d uncovered was a goat skeleton, a rusted-out safe full of fancy shotguns, and a Model T Ford half-buried behind a barn.

  Irv supposed he should try to make it out on one of the searches, but something held him back.

  “Asshole!”

  A girl in a Toyota screeched out of the mobile home park, narrowly missing Irv’s trailer hitch with her side mirror and flipping him off as she sped by, face distorted behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  How did she know?

  Irv put the truck in gear and called dispatch on his cell phone. If they told him about ot
her pickups, he’d keep driving, but if the roads were relatively clear he’d drop the buck off at the dump—a glorified two-hundred-foot-diameter hole in the ground brimming with deer and dog and kitten carcasses—and take an early lunch.

  “Yeah.” It was Greta, the new girl who’d managed in just a few short weeks to break two hearts in leaf removal.

  “Irv here. More jobs for me?”

  Silence, followed by the sound of her opening a potato-chip bag. “Give me a sec, okay?”

  “Sure.” Then Irv heard a squeak. At first he thought it was Greta being cute, but he held the phone away from his ear and realized it was coming from a ditch in front of the church. It was soft and plaintive. Irv cut the engine and walked across the road. Why, according to Ernest Hemingway, did the chicken cross the road? he once asked Rita. Why? she asked. He loved her for not saying, “Who?” To die, Irv said. In the rain.

  Lying near the bottom of the ditch in a pool of water was a little dog, a mix maybe between a Yorkie and a pug, its back leg twisted underneath it and bleeding. His brown eyes blinked up at Irv and at the sky where a hawk was circling. The dog’s snout was stubby and crinkled, like a crushed beer can.

  “Irv, you there?”

  Irv nodded into his phone, reaching a hand out to the dog, daring him to bite. The bony dog licked his fingers instead and Irv thought, No. No way in hell. Don’t even think about it.

  * * *

  He should have taken the dog to the pound. That’s what he should have done. To the pound or the vet, saying, It’s your lucky day, as he handed the dog to some pretty girl volunteer, who would coo over the thing’s bloody leg and darting tongue. But he didn’t. Instead, Irv took the dog home with him, straight home, and so the buck was still in the back, bleeding out the tailgate, and the roads around Colliersville, Spencerville, Auburn, and Angola went uncleaned for the night. Poor Greta. He’d hung up on her by accident and ignored her repeated attempts to reach him. Irv could see the scene at the public works building now. Yuhl would be having his usual conniption. There would be spilled coffee and an excess of drama and worry, but not enough real concern for anyone to come check on him, and Irv thought with an odd sort of pleasure that he, like Fikus, might be going crazy. Did crazy feel like this? Like freedom? Like not giving two shits?

  He left his cell phone on the front seat, wrapped the dog up in the reflective vest Yuhl insisted he wear even at high noon—his “Be Safe Be Seen” gear—and took him right to the tub to clean the wounds on his leg and side. The dog shivered and quaked when the water hit him. Irv could feel the knobby spine through the dog’s fur, itself tangled and ratted with burrs. The leg was tender at the hip and bleeding in four jagged lines but not too bad. It was as if the dog had been hit by someone on a bike, or maybe the same douchebag who killed the buck might have decided, as a parting gesture, to beat a stray dog and leave him on the side of the road to drown as the ditch filled with rain.

  Nothing surprised Irv anymore. He’d seen a mother raccoon, her belly ripped open, dead but still giving birth; a red-tailed hawk with its beak torn off, flying away into the woods, blood falling from the sky; an enormous dairy cow turning one whole block of Elm Street to a river of milk; and two squalid boys pulling a deer carcass home on a sled so their mom could turn it into venison. Nothing shocked him, nothing, that is, except Rita’s leaving him alone.

  Irv fished one of her old towels from the back of the bathroom closet and cocooned the dog so he couldn’t move. Then he set him on the couch in front of the local news, giving him a bowl of water, which the dog quickly lapped up, and a stew bone from the freezer. The dog gnawed it hungrily, drooling and making funny growling noises as he did. The poor thing seemed on the verge of starving, so even though Irv was tempted to give him a whole T-bone, he held back, knowing that introducing food slowly would have the best results. “Maybe some rice and hamburger in a half hour,” he said. “Dished up in small portions.” The dog did not look up. Some blood joined the drool on the couch but Irv didn’t care. He’d throw a blanket over it. Or a pillow. If he had any left from the Rita days.

  He poured himself a bourbon and Coke and nuked a lunch of leftover chili mac. Then he added a handful of limp fries to the plate and tossed a piece of garlic bread on top. It was the kind of meal that would have driven Rita nuts.

  Your food’s all the same color, she used to say, handing him a bowl of salad or popping a plum into his mouth. You need to eat the rainbow.

  Men wanted Rita Washburn. They couldn’t help it. When Irv fell in love with her for real, she was a middle-aged mother, a member of the PTA, and the prettiest waitress at the Flying J Truck Stop. Pushing fifty, she still put the other waitresses to shame. Wherever she went, people smelled lemon pie and possibility, so who in Colliersville would’ve believed she’d fall for Irv Peoples and his pin head, bowling-ball gut, and job as the most accomplished roadkill collector for four counties? Nobody.

  The town’s opinion of Irv was that he was different, which, next to being a fag or Mexican or both, was pretty much as bad as it got. (Exceptions were made for little Mexican girls, missing and presumed dead.) There was even a rumor Irv had strangled a guy at Bass Lake over a bluegill. He had no idea where that came from, although Fikus was known to have told some tall tales while he was in his padded cell, and people in Colliersville believed what they wanted to believe.

  Rita was the only one who’d really taken the time to get to know him. If he thought of her too much, if he let himself think about what it was like then, loving her, being with her, and what it was like now, he’d end up drunk by nine P.M., listening to Conway Twitty and crying into the cracks in the floor.

  “They don’t make them like that anymore,” Irv told the dog when he’d finished his food. The dog was shaking under Rita’s towel, a tender paw exposed. Irv sat down next to him and covered him back up. “She was a breed apart.”

  Funny then that Rita’s daughter, Shannon, should be so mousy and keep-to-herself. Poor girl, Irv thought, motherless and in love with a Seaver besides. Loving a Seaver was about as bad an idea as loving Irv. Ask anyone in Colliersville and they’d tell you that the whole clan was cursed, although “cursed” implied a lack of culpability. Irv believed the Seavers deserved everything they got, and he even suspected they were behind the bad luck that had broken out at the Ranasack Apartments. First, “Spics go home!” appears on someone’s truck and the basketball court where the Mexicans played their three-on-three tournaments. Original, that one. Then two young women report to Randy Richardville that a man in a red ski mask was haunting their rooms at night, whispering threats through the screens. Irv was gut sure that was Shannon’s boyfriend, Josh, in the ski mask. And what if Josh somehow had a hand in Daisy’s disappearance? What about that? Irv didn’t say anything to anyone about this—sharing wasn’t his strong suit—but he had an odd feeling, driving by Shannon’s house. He kept his eyes open but his head down.

  Shannon lived in Rita’s old house just up Hate Henry Road from Irv, and a few weeks back he’d helped free her car (another Rita hand-me-down) from their swamp of a shared road. Later, she’d hollered at him when he was on his evening constitutional, keeping the paths around their houses clear for walking, and begged him to chop off her Rapunzel hair. That hair, which flowed almost to her feet, was the only thing that marked Shannon as the daughter of someone special—Rita often bragged about it, said it took hours to wash and dry—and he wondered why a girl would choose to rid herself of something so beautiful, so distinguishing. He didn’t question her. It wasn’t his right, but still, his conscience smote him. He and his ax were responsible for that, for stripping the world of one of its few beauties, for hacking off something Rita had cherished.

  The dog was looking him intently.

  “What? What do you want?”

  He scratched at Irv’s arm, like, Go on, tell me more. Irv shrugged. He supposed secrets were safe with a dog.

  “I’ll be the first to admit that there have been other women,
” Irv said. “Last long enough on this planet and you’re bound to get some action, but there’s been no love. No love before Rita and none after.” He cleared his throat and launched into his best Humphrey Bogart impression. “It all started over a Reuben at Flying J’s…”

  * * *

  Rita was nearing the end of her shift when Irv dropped by the restaurant on his way home from work. The truck stop café smelled like hamburgers and coffee. A handful of patrons took up three booths along the front where the windows, fogged to their edges and pink from the sunset, gave the place the cozy feel of a grandmother’s kitchen. It was exactly what Irv needed that day. It’d been a record setter: ten deer and a couple dogs. His back and brain were killing him. He was dazed with death and told Rita he had to quit, he couldn’t take it anymore. Rita was dazed, too. Up until then, she had no idea what he did.

  “I thought you planted trees or something,” she said.

  Better yet, she didn’t care.

  “Can’t you smell me?” he asked.

  “What? English Leather and desperation?”

  Somehow, after three cups of coffee, he’d gotten up the balls to ask her to come home with him. When she said yes he had to catch his breath. They’d been neighbors since the eighties but never talked much. He shoveled her walk and plowed her drive. She baked him cookies at Christmas. He never dreamed she’d look at him as anything but the weird guy who didn’t get out much.

  But then there she was, an hour later, standing in his kitchen in her uniform and hairnet and light jacket, high heels left at the door so she could rub her sore soles and stretch her toes. She stayed over, giving him and his stupid body until morning to muster a hard-on and then thrilled him by climbing on top, dawn creeping up the backs of her thighs, her long hair in his face forming a cave. Safe. He felt safe and loved and a part of something. Like from then on he’d be on the inside, a member of the club everyone else seemed to belong to without ever having to pay dues.