Tornado Weather

by Deborah E. Kennedy

  Hector hadn’t eaten much of anything since the sort of tacos at Renee Seaver’s. He was starting to see things when he stood up too quickly and his limbs felt full of air. He wasn’t teaching anymore. Or was he? Sometimes, when he woke from a fevered nap and floated down the hall, he would find his sophomore history class there waiting for him. The room anyway, the desks in neat rows, and the computers, too, their screens dusty, dark. But no students. The emptiness felt like his fault. In his guilt, he dropped erasers. He was always dropping erasers and when they fell the white dust rose upwards, choked him for a moment, made a pattern on his glasses in the shape of the man on the moon.

  He wasn’t dropping an eraser now. Too busy. Too needed. He was darting around his yard while the sky came apart around his head. He was looking for her, calling for her still. Daisy. Daisy Face. Flower Power. Powder Puff. Pretty Pants. Honeybreath, Tigger Tail, Bug Bug, Pookie Pie. He remembered the nickname “Pookie Pie,” made up when she smashed a piece of pumpkin pie in his face as a joke, but had forgotten her, his own daughter. Thanks to a ridiculous phone call from Renee Seaver’s uncle during his planning period, Hector had forgotten to pick Daisy up at the bus stop that fateful day, and then Marissa Marino, whom he hated now more than any Seaver, had forgotten her, too, no doubt caught up in her own little world of transcripts, grade inflation, and prom dresses. Daisy was only supposed to be left alone for an hour. After school, Marissa would take over and together they’d watch Little Mermaid, or, at the very least, “Under the Sea” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and “Kiss the Girl.” That was the plan. What had happened to the plan? What had happened to Hector’s entire world? It didn’t look like a world anymore. It looked like a soupy fog he was pushing through. He bumped into a wheelbarrow, a clothesline, a car door. Behind his shed, he nearly collided with a group of four figures marching in a line, all of them dressed in Revolution-era garb. There was General Henry Colliers holding a musket and his ditz of a daughter holding her heart and Chief Talking Stick holding a bow and arrow. Horace Beancoop, the eccentric credited with planting all of the trees on the tree streets, was there, too, spreading his seeds and glancing up at the sky every once in a while as if to ascertain whether the falling rain would set them in their spots and give them a chance to grow or wash them out completely. Here they were, in the fog—the entire Colliersville, Indiana history unit in the flesh, prepackaged for easy digestion by his sophomores. The reason he was placed on “administrative leave, indefinite.” Hector blinked. They disappeared. He was in his nice neighbor’s backyard but didn’t know why. The nice neighbor, whose name he suddenly couldn’t remember, was yelling at him from her doorway to go inside because “there’s a tornado on.”

  There’s a tornado on. Hector swore that’s what the woman said. Hector yelled back, I know, I know, that’s why I’m here, I’m trying to find my daughter, she can’t be out in this. Hector ran down the hill toward the river. It was swollen and foamy and filled with trash and trees. He was scanning the water for a glimpse of black pigtail, metal chair, small hand. He was watching a great blue heron, spooked from the shallows, lift its way into the air and disappear around the bend, body like a compass needle pointing north. He was pulling off his shirt and pants and preparing to jump in when his neighbor grabbed him and held him back.

  “She’s not there,” the nice neighbor said. She had cut her hair. She looked younger and smaller somehow. “She’s not here. Come on, Hector. Now. I mean it. You need to come with me.”

  4.

  Once I had two sons. Now I have none. One son died. The war. He didn’t know I existed. The other thinks he’s a girl so I guess in a way you could say I have a daughter but she won’t talk to me—considers me the devil incarnate—so there you go.

  Once I had a whole farm, a booming business. That can be taken away, too. Even here in America, land of the dream and the free and the brave, what you work so hard to build from the ground up can be snatched away and given to someone else. Just like that. All my cows. The machines. Years and years of labor. My father’s land, in my family since William Henry Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory, gone. Frannie said she heard the farm was going to be cleared for a shopping center, a tacky strip mall with a Wal-Mart and a Shoe Carnival and a Subway. A once noble plot turned into a playground for the poor. I don’t know where Frannie gets her information, but I guess that’s what’s called “spreading the wealth.” Robbing from the rich and giving to the undeserving. Hey, Robbing Hood. Hey, Barack Hussein Obama, why don’t you go back where you came from?

  I have nothing left to lose. The tornado, wide as my old barn, is over my left shoulder. I’m racing it. It looks like a wall of insects, a spinning spiral of ticks, and out of habit I start talking to Birdy in the passenger seat about the year all the cows got heartwater and died before we could vaccinate them. Convulsing in the fields, the poor fuckers, legs up and moaning. Terrible. The worst night of our lives. Right, babe? Only Birdy’s not there. A handful of turkey jerky is. And a gallon of Mountain Dew and some PowerBars. It’s what I wanted and I have to remember that.

  Frannie said no one will find me where I’m going. There’s a wall around the place two stories high and three feet thick. Turrets here and there. They make their own guns and everyone has one, Frannie, her eighty-five-year-old neighbor lady, even the kids. Three-D printers, Frannie whispers to me at night over the phone, her voice deeper than I remember. There’s nothing they can’t do. She says Hank Seaver and his militia are nothing, are basically Greenpeace compared to her people. Let my people be your people, she says.

  State lines, here I come. I’ll cross five before I’m done.

  The thing I don’t understand are the birds I hear on my way out of town. Shrieking like there’s no tomorrow. Three hit my windshield, crack it so it’s hard to see. What the hell. The birds fall dead and broken necked to the concrete. Red first, then yellow, then green like a traffic light. The only one for miles.

  5.

  Dear Frannie,

  There’s a tree in my bathroom and a fishing boat in my bedroom and I’m in this shelter, which is really the elementary school, wondering where you are.

  Randy’s not here, either. Got a call, I guess. Emergency at the Fun Spot. Emergency at the Fun Spot. Sounds like a porn video. Or a really bad horror movie. Remember when we used to waste whole weekends watching Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street with Brianna Pogue? All those dead pretty girls. You said you wanted to be one, and while Brianna didn’t get it, I did. You wanted to disappear when you were still young and beautiful and leave behind a whole town to mourn. Well, mission accomplished.

  I don’t know why I write to you. You never answer me. I’m not even sure you see my messages. It’s like e-mailing a ghost. Your mom told me the people/cult members you’re living with screen all your calls and read your mail and don’t let you have Internet because it’s the devil’s playground.

  Randy would probably agree with them about the Internet. He thinks all I do is play Candy Crush and get on Facebook and that’s sort of true. What else is there to do?

  Anyway, I just wanted to tell you about the tornado that came through tonight. Hence the tree and the boat. My woods are gone and I watched them leave. There was no siren, no warning. I thought I might die, see Kenny soon, but some nice firemen came to rescue me and bring me here and so I lived to write to you another day. Which is ridiculous I know because even if you hear about this storm somehow, you won’t worry about me. You’ll be thinking of Helman and his cows. Here’s some news for you—the cows don’t live here anymore and Helman’s still an asshole. He’s always been one and always will be one and the fact that you can’t seem to accept that proves love is nothing but damage waiting to happen, collateral and otherwise.

  Speaking of damage, everyone here is saying insurance won’t pay to fix our houses. An act of God, they say, eyes rolled upward. A couple people from the Ranasack Apartments are in the corner crying because someone died when the seco
nd floor collapsed. Two someones, I think. A few bit it at the Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park, too. Tossed, crushed, smothered, like a salad. Or a Waffle House scramble. Order up.

  Everyone on the tree streets and in Wyndham-on-the-River survived unscathed, I guess because Jesus loves rich people? What would your fellow cult members say to that? And why did your lovely God see fit to spare me?

  My home for the night is a canvas cot and a musty blanket in the middle of the gym. No privacy, but Pastor Rush, who made us all join him in prayer a few minutes ago, thinks we should be grateful for our lives. To my right is a girl who keeps saying, “Fuck this.” She’s got a book bag and a fish in a bowl. To my left is a middle-aged dude stinking of whiskey. Yuhl Butz seems to be running the operation, which isn’t really an operation at all. No triage, just chaos. And the girls’ bathroom toilets are clogged because, according to Yuhl’s wife, Pearl, a “Maple Leaf skank” flushed a bunch of pads down them.

  “Can’t they read the signs?” Pearl says to me. She’s holding her sticky-eyed poodle.

  “There aren’t any,” I tell her. “This is the elementary school.”

  “I got my period when I was ten,” Pearl says.

  “So did I,” I say.

  And so did you.

  A man from Fort Wayne came to drop off a metric ton of bottled water and some Meals Ready to Eat. How nice. And oh dear Frannie darling, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that same man just announced to the room that Helman Yoder’s missing. MIA. It was all I could do not to clap. A few Ranasack Apartments people did clap. And they woohooed, too. Screw Helman. You know what he did to you. Don’t talk to me about gray areas and romantic fogs and things open to interpretation. Don’t you dare say anything about forgiveness or bygones being bygones. I’ve heard all that before and I’m tired of it. I’m so tired.

  What I’m really trying to say is come home. Care or something. And call your mother.

  6.

  In the blackness and the wind, Randy’s flashlight seems a strobe. But it’s really his nerves that make it shake. We can’t believe our eyes. This whole time, she’s been right here. This whole time. Jack leaves, can’t handle it, but Irv Peoples’s little dog doesn’t move a muscle. He sits ramrod straight, nose in the air, guarding her. Anyone tries to get close, he snaps. It’s the little dogs you have to watch out for.

  “Call him off,” Randy says to Irv. Randy’s yelling but still it’s hard to hear. The wind and the rain are drowning out almost everything. The Ferris wheel and its parasite tree groan above us. “We have to get her and get out of here.” There’s radio talk of a tornado touching down in Spencerville but I couldn’t care less. Not now. Bring it on.

  “But isn’t she evidence? We can’t move her.”

  Randy looks at me like I did this. “We can and we will.”

  We’re all soaking wet and I’m so sad I want to join Jack, who’s leaning his fat head against the ticket booth, but I stay where I am and look. I don’t know why I look. The wind’s trying to cover my eyes with my own hair, but I go ahead and follow the flashlight beam because. I don’t know. I can’t explain.

  Randy’s the one with the bag. He brought it from the station. Em found it under a pile of old phone books in the back room. The only one in stock. It’s clear plastic, which why the fuck? But never mind. Not important. Irv and Randy and I go in and grab what’s there. Randy zips the bag around the body and Irv and I lift her. It’s so dark we can’t tell where our own feet are and there’s some tripping, some stumbling. We do not drop her, though. We do not do that. Randy goes back for the wheelchair and throws it in his trunk. Then we’re all in our own cars where we wanted to be all along because we can cry in quiet and privacy and that’s when I called you, baby, because it’s when I feel like this that I need you the most.

  The thing is I can’t unsee what I saw. A bony shadow of a girl and the wheelchair in the background holding her together. Like a frame or something. A picture frame. I want to see her the way she was, the way she looks in all the flyers all over town, but now there’s this image in my mind and I don’t know what to do with it. Please tell me what to do with it.

  Book of Shame

  (July)

  Viv stoked the fire blue hot and high in the neighbor’s burn barrel late at night when she knew Trevor was dead asleep and the Smiths all far away on a camping trip to Michigan. She’d gotten a postcard from them that very morning—Tahquamenon Falls State Park! it said on the front in fat yellow letters. Wish You Were Here. She would burn it, too, along with the scrapbook and her favorite housedress and Olé! Mexico from Agua to Zapata, the DVD about Mexican cultural traditions Trevor’d ordered for her off the Internet.

  All of it in some way reminded her of Daisy, poor little Daisy Gonzalez, whom Viv Hochstetler had never met but felt she knew, inside and out, like she knew Trevor and Lina Lordell, the no-nonsense detective from the Women’s Channel Primetime Mystery Movie Nights. Unlike Trevor and Lina, though, Daisy was dead and so there was no more knowing her, and the scrapbook Viv had kept since the day she disappeared now seemed not only tacky and voyeuristic, but also unkind, ridiculous, sinful.

  Viv’s father had taught her how to build a fire. Newspapers then sticks then more papers. Like a lasagna. Always use dry wood, he said. Never turn your back on the flames. She burned the housedress first. The faded pansy smock had served as Viv’s veritable uniform for the last several weeks and now the sight of it and its white buttons and yellow scalloped sleeves was hateful. Viv was amazed how long it took to flake to ash, the size 22 tag staring her in the face the entire time like an insult or a dare. How had Viv let herself get so fat? Henry, had he lived past forty, would be stunned, she thought, to see her now. She’d always been plump and he liked her that way—said she was like a sturdy glass of good beer: My little mug of imperial stout! he’d said—but this was too much. She never got near her scale anymore, afraid the needle would fly past the 250 mark and right out into space. Even standing at the burn barrel hurt. Her knees wanted to buckle but she wouldn’t let them. Not today. Starting now, things would be different. No more food comas. No more falling asleep with a mostly eaten pie in her lap. No more living vicariously through motherless wheelchair-bound girls. She was a mother herself, wasn’t she, and it was time she started doing her job. Clearly Trevor needed her to do more than pack his lunch and remind him to take his meds. Somewhere along the line, she’d failed him. How else to explain the fact that Trevor, her Trevor Lever, had known all along what had happened to Daisy and somehow found it fine to say nothing? How else to account for the fact that her sweet son had gone to work every day and fallen asleep in his recliner every night like he wasn’t harboring a dark and horrible secret? Instead of going to the police immediately with what he knew, Trevor had watched as Viv padded her Book of Shame. He’d even helped her add to her stash of morbid memorabilia. It was her fault. It was all her fault.

  The crescent moon hanging above her house sent out a bright, crooked smile of agreement. Seriously, Viv Hochstetler. What have you been doing with your life? Even before you let yourself become obsessed with a missing crippled girl, you were up to no good. Cooking and cleaning some, sure, but less and less with each passing year and gained pound, and no job or direction to speak of. Living off Henry’s insurance money and Social Security, volunteering at the church when asked but usually preferring to stay home with Lina Lordell and Trevor and Mr. Greenjeans because … well, why? Because, when one ventures into the outside world, one is almost sure to meet a twelve-year-old boy or even three of them and everyone knows twelve-year-old boys are cruel to fat people, fat women especially. Viv didn’t think she could bear one more whale joke, one more “Your mama’s so fat…” At home, no one noticed her weight. The TV didn’t talk back and Trevor rarely spoke unless spoken to. Likewise as silent were the pictures of Daisy she glued in her scrapbook, but Viv knew, just from looking at the girl’s round black eyes, that she understood. What had twelve-year-old boys said to h
er as she wheeled herself around town? Did they tape terrible signs to her back? Throw things at her useless legs? Firecrackers. Spitballs. Sticks.

  Viv imagined these things and rotted inside the walls of her home, pinning all her hopes on someone, anyone, finding Daisy Gonzalez alive. The scrapbook was her way of gathering evidence, of being a part of it all. Making a difference, at least that’s what she thought as she painstakingly glued every article, every photo, every fragile piece of newsprint and MISSING, REWARD flyer and clue she could find to the scrapbook’s bright white pages, securing each souvenir with yellow, daisy-shaped stickers that, when scratched, gave off the smallest hint of sweet scent.

  What folly. What vanity. What madness.

  And who was to say that Viv’s sinfulness hadn’t helped bring the Lord’s attention to, and fury down on, the town in the form of the F5 that had turned Colliersville, or parts of it anyway, into a veritable wasteland? Viv could not say this for sure, because God had seen fit to spare her house at the last minute. All she and Trevor had to deal with were some branches littering their front walk and several hours without power, whereas people like the Smiths were looking at months of homelessness and expensive roof repairs and mold removal. As she stood there, Viv could hear bucket trucks roaring down Beacon Street. Probably to work on the power lines downed during the storm. She thought of the suffering of the poor people living in Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park and prayed for the souls of those who lost their lives not just in that neighborhood, but in the Bottoms and downtown as well. There was Greg Steele and Pam Seaver and Jason Nelson and Stan McElroy and some poor wayward girl named Cherry. Also a man named Ulises and a woman named Elena, living at the Ranasack Apartments, and Gina Holt and every single one of her pet chinchillas. Helman Yoder, too. Found in his car, which had been tossed into the river and then got hung up on a log, water streaming through the windows, stripping Helman naked as a baby. Randy Richardville was quoted in that morning’s Record as saying there would probably be more dead to add to that number as search-and-rescue teams combed through the wreckage. A travesty. And one for which Viv might be at least partly to blame.…