by Richard Cox
Jonathan slammed on the brakes. The car slid toward the drainage ditch. The horizon tilted. The car slipped off the shoulder.
Now Jonathan threw open his car door. He seized Alicia’s arm and she scrambled over the center console. They climbed outside and Jonathan pointed toward the culvert, which for now would double as a human-sized shelter made of concrete.
“Go,” he yelled. “Now!”
Alicia went.
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Sally’s face was angelic. When she smiled at him, Gholson thought of that windy Friday in 1976, the day after Thanksgiving, when the two of them had shared their first kiss as husband and wife. He remembered thinking how Sally had altered his entire world view, how she had helped him see life not as a series of obstacles to overcome, of miseries to endure, but rather a long journey on open road, a journey with an uncertain but hopeful conclusion.
Over the years, as Sally’s health declined, as she became more distant and reclusive, Gholson had clung desperately to the optimistic feelings she taught him to embrace. Even when she stopped speaking completely, he had never given up on her.
And now here Sally was, her beautiful face young again, her eyes bright and lucid and shrouded in a field of white.
She was at home in here. She was alive.
Sally took his hand and together they flew at a silent, extraordinary speed. The field of white gave way to rectangles of color: golden folders, photographs, moving pictures, organized grids of numbers, executables, blocks of code, and long, written documents that might have been stories written by someone. Books written by someone.
“Where are we going?” he asked her.
“Anywhere you want. Just say it and we’ll go.”
Gholson smiled.
“Do you remember,” Sally asked, “what we asked the minister to include in our vows?”
“‘Until death do we part,” he said. “And even in death we shall not part.’”
“And just look at us now,” Sally said, and smiled again.
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The spiraling tornado stretched across the horizon as far as Jonathan could see. The air began to vibrate, to tremble; he could feel the subsonic rumble of the storm even in his bones. There was a dark mass above him and a swirl of browns and reds before him. Black, wispy scud clouds were being sucked toward the funnel complex at unfathomable speeds. Mesquite trees leaned at blasphemous angles, waiting to be uprooted as the tornado approached. With no shirt on he was suddenly freezing. The roar of the storm was organic and deafening.
Jonathan had always believed, when death was imminent, that he would experience fear as a white and incomprehensible void. But as he directed Alicia into the culvert, her hair whipping him in the face, Jonathan was instead buoyed by a sense of purpose that he pictured as a paragraph of narrative and descriptive text. Such a paragraph would reveal how death, while terrifying, was a fair price to pay to save someone else’s life.
Alicia was almost fully inside the culvert. She was pushing up with her hands as Jonathan pressed forward on the soles of her shoes. The wind threatened to suck him backward. He turned around briefly
don’t look back you can never look back
and saw the leading edge of circulation was no more than two hundred yards away. By now it had swallowed the airport. Multiple horizontal funnels orbited the main circulation. These vortices looked like spiraling elephant trunks or octopus legs. Debris was raining down around him. Mesquite tree branches, an airplane propeller, and papers, papers, everywhere. The sound of the tornado and the crashing debris was overwhelming. Alicia was inside the culvert and now Jonathan knelt to follow her. The opening was barely tall enough for him to fit inside, and using his arms to propel himself forward was nearly impossible. The concrete surface grated his chest and he barely noticed the pain. He wiggled and shimmied and tried to use Alicia’s ankles to pull himself forward. He was only halfway inside. It was dark and he could barely see Alicia even though she was inches away. Something landed on his right calf, punching a hole in him, and Jonathan screamed through gritting teeth.
“Are you okay?” Alicia cried.
“Something hit me. I have to keep moving and get inside before I lose both my legs.”
He wiggled forward and tried to push with his toes. His chest was bleeding. His right calf was slick with blood.
There was nothing in the world but the sound of the tornado, the growl, the rumble, the shrieking debris flying through the air and crashing into the ground. Jonathan had just pulled his feet into the culvert when the world became black. The tornado was on top of them. He could feel the rumble of it in every cell of his body, as if he were plugged into the energy of the world somehow. Alicia’s feet were centimeters from his face. She was trembling.
“Are you all right?” he yelled.
“Jonathan I’m scared! I’m afraid we’re going to get stuck in here and I think there’s a spider crawling up my leg!”
“Just close your eyes! It’ll be over soon!”
He hoped that was true, because the shrieking, animal growl seemed to go on forever.
But it didn’t.
And after the storm, sunshine.
PART NINE
June 2, 2008 and beyond
ZONE FORECAST PRODUCT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORMAN OK
TXZ086-031000-
WICHITA-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF ... WICHITA FALLS
314 PM CDT MON JUNE 2 2008
.REST OF TODAY ... MOSTLY CLOUDY WITH FALLING TEMPERATURES. SCATTERED SHOWERS. WINDS NW 25-35 MPH. CHANCE OF RAIN 40 PERCENT.
.TONIGHT ... CLOUDY AND COOLER. LOW NEAR 45. WINDS NW 25-35 MPH. CHANCE OF RAIN 20 PERCENT.
.TUESDAY ... PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGH IN THE LOWER 70S. NW WINDS 10-15 MPH.
.WEDNESDAY ... MOSTLY SUNNY AND WARMER. HIGH IN THE UPPER 70S. WINDS LIGHT AND VARIABLE.
.THURSDAY ... SUNNY AND MILD. HIGH IN THE LOWER 80S.
.FRIDAY ... SUNNY AND WARM. HIGH IN THE MID 80S.
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Fantastic and horrific video images glued the nation to its collective television set for days afterward. The Weather Channel reported its highest Nielsen ratings of all time and quickly revised its advertising rates to reflect the new audience. Major networks set up makeshift television studios. National morning shows interviewed hundreds of survivors, who reliably cried on cue. Al Roker predicted a return to sunny skies for Wichita Falls and then passed the baton to local weathermen who informed everyone else how the weather would fare in their neck of the woods.
Final tally: 9,351 dead. 51,249 injured. An estimated 85,000 homeless.
The 1979 tornado had cut a mile-wide swath of destruction through Wichita Falls, had destroyed entire neighborhoods with its core of 260-mile per hour, F4 winds that flattened almost every structure in its path. The tornado of June 2008 carved a spiraling path of EF5 damage four miles in diameter through the heart of Wichita Falls, and its powerful center of circulation opened a corridor two-thousand yards wide where nothing—no structure of any kind, no debris, not even foundation concrete—was left behind. Meteorologists, unable to estimate wind speeds in this area with the normal method—by analyzing debris patterns left behind by the storm—instead resorted to video footage and radar data, which revealed wind speeds in excess of 400 mph. These measurements certified the June 2008 tornado as author of the most powerful winds in recorded human history.
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But before all this, there was tragedy still to be lived. Like Adam Altman in a jail cell, watching out his barred window as sirens and people screamed. Debris swirled and shrieked, the sights and sounds of hard materials in conflict. For a while Adam could detect no visible funnel, just a chaotic cloud of black and brown and red, but then swirling vortices finally emerged, closer than he had expected, and he stood tall in defiance of the storm. He prayed for the safety of his wife and daughter (who did, in fact, survive). He begged God to take him instead. God’s answer was a blinding crash of stone on metal, a growl of win
d, and when Adam looked down again he saw a street sign sticking out of his thigh. Blood poured out of the wound, coating the white letters, but as Adam faded away he thought he saw the word “Shady.”
Storm chaser Jeff Piotrowski was on the tornado from its formation near the town of Holliday. “The base of this supercell was the largest I’ve ever seen,” he said in a later interview with CNN. “You could see from the beginning it was going to be a monster. Typically you have the parent thunderstorm, and a wall cloud hanging beneath it, and then a funnel or tornado poking out of the wall cloud. With this storm the wall cloud was the tornado, at least for a while. But then the entire storm seemed to squat on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like it. My wife and I followed it on Highway 1954, well south of town, and even from that distance we knew people were dying. The tornado covered basically the entire city limits, like it was trying to smother everyone who lived there. I even saw the storm swallow an airplane, what appeared from our location to be a private jet. We would have gone into town sooner, to help anyone we could, but then we would have died, too. And the worst thing is the town’s history. All storm chasers know the story of the ‘79 tornado in Wichita Falls. It was the event that introduced people my age to the kind of devastation these storms can do. So when my wife and I finally drove into town, ready to render aid,” (here Piotrowski stopped to compose himself) “I tell you, what I saw will haunt me until the day I die. I’ve seen destruction. I’ve seen people’s lives ripped apart. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sort of despair I saw that day. The people of Wichita Falls didn’t even seem surprised. It’s like they knew it was coming. It’s like they had been waiting on it for twenty-nine years.”
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In the weeks that followed, Wichita Falls leaders designed a predictable campaign to once again bring the city back from disaster. Thousands of FEMA trailers formed a temporary living area south of the city that resembled an oil drilling boomtown. But even though the program ultimately succeeded in clearing debris and reviving infrastructure, most of the affected families finally gave up and moved away. A 2009 interim census survey estimated the city’s population at 36,000, down substantially from the official 2000 count of 104,120. Two of the departed were none other than Jonathan Crane and Alicia Ulbrecht.
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For several months they lived together in one of the FEMA trailers. Unmarried citizens were asked to share living spaces in order to maximize the rescue effort, so it made sense for Jonathan and Alicia to split one rather than be put with someone they didn’t know. Alicia’s mother and father had died in the storm, as had Jonathan’s mother, and for the first few weeks the trailer was mainly silent. There was no television or cell service for many days, and Alicia spent much of her time away from the trailer, walking up and down highways south of the city. One day the two of them took a government bus to Dallas, where they picked up some new clothes, and where Jonathan purchased an inexpensive laptop. After some searching, he managed to find a copy of The End of the World buried in his email Sent folder, but upon reading this manuscript again he discovered he hated every word of it.
He decided instead to write a novel about what had happened to Wichita Falls.
The project would be a high-concept narrative that blended fiction with fact and ended with the vividly recreated, real-life disaster that destroyed a Texas town. Jonathan suspected the project would be an easy sell, and in fact, before he had written even a quarter of it, one of the agents who rejected him long ago actually called him on the phone. In what was surely the most bittersweet conversation of his life, Jonathan explained his story idea, and the agent suggested he could sell the project while Jonathan was still writing it. Three days after reading Jonathan’s first seventy pages, the agent had called again with news that an auction for the partial manuscript had netted a high six-figure offer from Random House. Now there was a film agent involved, and Jonathan could expect to hear something from Hollywood in the next couple of weeks, if not sooner.
For reasons both kind and selfish, he kept this information to himself for a while.
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Alicia’s grief felt gratuitous considering the tragedy that had befallen the city of Wichita Falls was nearly without measure. How could she spend weeks mourning her parents, her friends, when so many entire families had been lost? The living arrangement with Jonathan was awkward, to say the least, but he was sensible enough to give her space. Alicia had expected Gholson’s partner, Daniels, to come around sometime and question them, but he hadn’t. With so much carnage and bloodshed, Gholson’s gunshot wound had probably gone unnoticed. Maybe his body had been so badly deformed that the wounds had not been visible. Maybe his body had never been found.
She also didn’t understand who had arrived on the plane. David had arranged for Thomas to be taken away, obviously, but Alicia thought he had been surprised by the gunfire. Like maybe the people who showed up weren’t exactly who David had called. And once the plane had been inhaled by the tornado, there was no way to know.
On their third bus trip to Dallas, Jonathan bought himself a car, a 60’s-era Ford Mustang convertible. When she inquired about the money it cost, the effect such a purchase might have on his finances, Jonathan offered an oblique answer about his upcoming insurance settlement and a savings account. Something had been different about him for a while now, though she couldn’t quite say what. He walked more upright, he spoke with more authority in a slightly deeper voice, and he smiled a lot. He made plenty of jokes, too, even in a climate that was not friendly to humor.
After signing paperwork for the car, Jonathan had taken her to an expensive steak dinner, and then in a bar on lower Greenville, while they sat watching golf in a dark corner, he had kissed her like he meant it. Alicia hadn’t been surprised. The eventuality of their relationship had colored every moment of her time with him since the tornado. She wondered sometimes what would happen if she walked away from the trailer and didn’t return, if she stuck out her thumb next to the highway and let some man drive her to a distant, unknown destination. Would Jonathan come looking for her? Would she eventually surrender and find her way back to him? She remembered how miserable she felt when she went away to college, and how the pain had vanished the moment she returned to Wichita Falls. Did that mean she was never meant to leave this place? Or had her presence been required, as she had come to suspect, for some larger plan that was now complete?
As it turned out, Jonathan’s kiss at the restaurant pleased her deeply, and later, in a downtown hotel room, she had welcomed his hands on her. His large and confident hands.
A few weeks after the car purchase, Jonathan announced his intention to move to Austin.
“Why Austin?” she asked.
“I want to be involved in the art community. I want to feel like part of something greater than myself, and Austin’s the only place in Texas like that. Maybe someday it would be cool to live in California or New York, but for now this is a good start. I just can’t handle living in this trailer anymore, and I don’t think I want to rebuild my house, anyway.”
It was no coincidence, she supposed, that Jonathan’s plan resembled the kind of escape Alicia had dreamed about for years. How else would one have expected their story to end?
“Have you looked for jobs there?” she asked him. “Austin is more expensive than what we’re used to.”
“I think we can work something out.”
And though Jonathan’s easygoing confidence had become his most attractive quality, it was natural to question a seemingly arbitrary decision to move. Under more typical conditions, Alicia might also have asked how he planned to fund such an adventure. But this particular narrative, she predicted, had answered that question before she thought to ask it.
“You said ‘we,’ didn’t you?”
“I did.”
It was lovely how Alicia could know Jonathan would eventually ask her this and still be floored by the reality of it. Her heart fluttered in her chest.
“Are you asking me to go with you?”
“I already did that. Now I’m waiting on your answer.”
“I would love to go,” she said. “But I don’t know how we’re going to make it with no jobs. Even if you have savings—”
“That’s the other thing I need to talk to you about. I have some news.”
Jonathan grabbed a stack of printed pages from their makeshift kitchen table and handed them to her.
“What is this?” she asked, and looked at the opening page.
The day was electric, charged with possibility. Bobby Steele could feel it in the humid air and freshening wind, the power of the world. Ahead of him the sky was a gathering darkness. He was ten years old and had the strange feeling something important was about to happen, something that would alter the course of his life forever. At the moment Bobby was headed south toward Jonathan Crane’s house, and by the time he crossed Midwestern Parkway it was barely five o’clock.
His feathered hair bounced against his head, blonde and thick and sculpted by the wind. His smile was magnetic. It was the second day of Spring Break and his mom didn’t expect him before dark. She would have let him stay out longer if it weren’t for his dad, Kenny, who was unreasonable when it came to Bobby spending time with Jonathan. . . .
“It’s a novel I’m working on about what happened here,” he said, and winked at her. “Like a fact-meets-fiction story.”
There was a moment, post-wink, when Alicia believed Jonathan’s awareness of their reality matched her own. If he had written something like this, especially after seeing the opening page Thomas had composed, surely he must be in on the joke. But the moment passed without comment or change of expression.