The Stormchasers: A Novel

by Jenna Blum

  Karena says, “Pleased to meet you,” then laughs, given the circumstances. Kevin snorts.

  “Seriously, thank you for helping me,” she says. “I’m really sorry I made you get wet. But you were heroic to get out in the core.”

  Kevin gives her a quick glance. “The core?” he says. “What core?”

  “All that rain we just drove through? Was that not the core?”

  “Actually no,” Kevin says. “It wasn’t. It was just RFD.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The rear-flank downdraft. Just a little wind.”

  “Oh,” says Karena in a small voice.

  They drive on.

  10

  That night Karena is walking across the rear courtyard of the Pony Express Lodge behind the Sapp Bros, carrying a case of beer. She knows she’s still a little shocky because she had a terrible time choosing the brand. She deliberated for half an hour in the travel plaza’s beer cave, bemused and distracted by the alcoholic lemonade, the wine in a bag, the lime-flavored salt. Finally the clerk had to come assist her and, when they chose Budweiser, help Karena extract her ATM card from her wallet.

  At the back of the Pony Express courtyard, almost hidden by the pines separating the hotel’s property from the highway, is a hot tub. The pool next to it is covered as if in deference to the sign that says NO SWIMMING AFTER 10 P.M.! The hot tub is not, and the three guides are sitting in it. Or rather Dan Mitchell and Kevin Wiebke are, while Dennis is perched on the side, still wearing his floppy fishing hat. He’s talking energetically about something as Karena approaches, but Kevin sees her. He tips his chin up, and Dennis turns.

  “Greetings,” he says. “You must be Our Lady of Budweiser.”

  “I am,” says Karena, setting the case down near the edge of the hot tub and rubbing the insides of her elbows, where the sharp edges of the cardboard box have bitten into her skin. She’s a little apprehensive about bothering them, but she theorizes that any group of men will be happy to see a woman with beer.

  “It’s the least I could do after that stunt I pulled today,” she says. “Thanks again for coming back for me. I’m really sorry.”

  She looks at Dan Mitchell, trying to pretend he’s not half naked, his beefy chest muscled and streaming with wet blond hair. He shrugs.

  “It happens,” he says, as Kevin did earlier.

  “What, people routinely freak out on you?” Karena asks.

  “I wouldn’t say routinely,” says Dan. “But sometimes. The storms are big, and they mean business. People get scared.”

  Dennis cracks a beer and hands it to Karena.

  “Have a seat,” he says.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” says Karena. She has been planning to go back up to the room she is sharing with Fern and another tourist, Alicia, because the Pony Express is overbooked, and file notes for her story, and call all the area motels to see if Charles is at any of them.

  “We insist,” says Dennis, and Dan nods.

  “All media in the hot tub,” he says. “It’s mandatory.”

  Karena laughs. “Somehow that sounds a little suspect to me, but . . . okay.”

  She toes off her new Walmart sneakers, lowers herself to the chlorine-smelling pavement, and eases her feet into the hot water. Dennis hands around beers. Karena sips hers. It’s half warm and maybe the best beer she has ever tasted.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “De nada,” says Dennis, and for a minute nobody says anything. The bubbling of the water seems very loud, and Karena feels supremely conscious of being the only woman in a hot tub with three men, even if two of them are wearing shirts. The jets keep pushing her feet across the pool toward Kevin’s submerged lap.

  “So,” she says, “tell me it’s not just the newbies like me. Or the guests. You guys must get scared sometimes, right?”

  Dan Mitchell lets out a huff, and Dennis nods.

  “Sure,” he says. “If you’re not scared, you should be worried. It means you’re getting too cocky. Although—I wouldn’t say scared, exactly. More like alert and respectful. You have to be willing to learn from the storms. They always teach you something.”

  Dan Mitchell stretches his arms across the back of the tub. “Or sometimes they’re just plain scary,” he says.

  “That too,” says Dennis. He swigs from his bottle and says, “HAH!”

  “It must really take something to scare you guys, though,” says Karena.

  She pats her shorts pockets and wishes she had brought her recorder. But maybe these guys wouldn’t talk to her candidly if she had.

  “When’s the last time you got yourself into a situation that scared you?” she asks, and holds up her empty hands. “Off the record.”

  “May twenty-second of this year,” Dennis says promptly. “Before I joined up with Tour Four. Gove County. Central Kansas. Man, Mother Nature really let her dragons out to play that day.”

  He opens another beer. “I was supposed to be chasing with this goober”—he kicks water toward Kevin—“but he hadn’t gotten his act together. Hadn’t even left St. Paul yet. So I was tooling around on my own in the ol’ purple PT Cruiser—”

  “The Eggplant,” says Dan.

  “Yeah, the Eggplant,” says Dennis. “And the SPC issued a high risk that morning—which actually I don’t like to see because the storms can get messy,” he tells Karena, “the situation can spin out of control real fast. Which is exactly what then happened.”

  He swigs his beer.

  “So the cells were firing all around me,” he continues. “Boom! Boom! Boom! All I had to do was get in position. It was that kind of day, when every cell that went up would be a monster, and they’d all produce. It wasn’t even like you had to decide which one to chase. All you had to do was sit there and wait for them to come along, and when one was done the next would come spinning right up the dryline.”

  “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” says Dan.

  “Exactly,” says Dennis, pointing at him. “It should have been. But it wasn’t, because I got stupid. So there I was driving along this farm road, watching this cell at my eleven o’clock. It had already been warned, and it was rotating like crazy, and let me tell you, that thing was a beast. Something about the storms that day, it’s not just that they were huge and moving fast. They seemed angry.”

  He pauses to take a swallow.

  “So I’m watching this meso form right above me—you know what a meso is, Laredo? Sorry, what is your real name, anyway?”

  “Karena,” says Karena.

  “Very pretty name,” says Dennis. “Norwegian, I’m going to guess. But I’ll stick with Laredo, since I’m used to it now, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” says Karena, smiling. “So what happened?”

  “So I’m watching this meso,” Dennis repeats, “this tight little area of rotation the tornado’s going to come from, what we call the area of interest. And the radar’s showing this beautiful tight couplet and my scanner’s going crazy, wah, wah, wah, tornado warnings all over the place. And I’m saying to myself, man, that thing’s right on top of me, maybe I’d better drop southeast, when suddenly there’s this POP and a light goes on on my dashboard.”

  He turns to Karena. “You believe that?” he says. “POP!” He laughs. “You know what that was?”

  She shakes her head.

  “My tire,” says Dennis. “Rear left. Somehow I’d picked up a spike in it. Not a nail, a spike, with a washer on it the size of a quarter. I mean, that thing had teeth. So there I was sitting under this tornado-warned storm, and it was cranking, just going nuts, and my freakin’ tire was gone.”

  “Wow,” says Karena, frantically taking mental notes. Her pulse is rapid in her throat. “So what’d you do?”

  “What do you think I did?” Dennis says. “I jumped out of the car and ran around the back and threw everything out to get the spare, except guess what?”

  “Oh no,” says Karena.

  “Oh yes,” says De
nnis. “My brother’d borrowed the car the month before and had a blowout, and the nimrod never replaced the spare. So forget outrunning this thing. There was a farmhouse about a mile down on the left, and I was just about to drive my sorry ass—excuse me—down there on the rim and take cover when this guy came along.” He nods at Dan. “With Tour Three. So we threw all my equipment in the back of the van and got the hell out of there.”

  “Storms were pretty violent that day,” Dan says. “What’d that Gove County cell drop, an F-3?”

  “Yup,” says Dennis. “Right where I was. It’s a pretty safe bet that farmhouse isn’t there anymore.”

  He takes out a pack of cigarettes, offers it to Karena, lights one.

  “So yes!” he says, spreading his arms. “Do I get scared? You bet I get scared! But that day taught me a valuable lesson. I never, never should have left the house without checking the spare. And ever since then, I carry this . . .”

  He shifts to get at something in his back pocket and produces a Caribou Coffee notepad.

  “The checklist,” says Dennis, cigarette clenched between his teeth. He flips back the cover to show Karena the handwriting inside. “Every day I ask myself, how can I make this chase safer? How can I make it better for the guests? What have I overlooked?”

  He puts the notebook back.

  “You can’t control everything,” he says. “That’s what makes chasing interesting. But the number one rule is, Be prepared.”

  “Actually, that’s the Boy Scout motto,” says Dan.

  “Well, that too,” says Dennis. “I’m the original Boy Scout.”

  Karena smiles and shakes herself.

  “Whoa,” she says. “That’s quite a story. Thank you for telling it.”

  “My pleasure,” says Dennis, bowing his head.

  “So tomorrow,” says Dan Mitchell, stretching, “I’m going to move one of you guys to her vehicle with the spare ham. Kevin?”

  “No prob,” says Kevin, punching down his Whirlwind T-shirt, which has bellied up from the force of the jets. Karena realizes although he’s been listening the whole time, he hasn’t—rather uncharacteristically, it seems—said a word.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she says. “I can’t inconvenience you guys more than I already have.”

  “There’s no alternative,” Dan says. “We can’t have you out of the loop. It endangers everyone. And media’s not allowed to leave the tour. Tim would have a fit.”

  Karena laughs, although she’s not sure if Dan is joking or not.

  “In that case,” she says.

  She makes an apologetic grimace at Kevin. He raises his eyebrows.

  “You’re all being awfully nice,” she says.

  “We’re all Boy Scouts,” says Kevin. “At heart.”

  Karena gets to her feet, water sluicing off her legs.

  “Gentlemen,” she says. “I’ve caused enough trouble for one day. I’ll leave you to your beer. Thanks for the war stories.”

  Dennis toasts her. “Thanks for the beer.”

  Karena hooks up her sneakers with two fingers. She is halfway across the courtyard when she turns back. She still must not be quite right if she’s forgotten to ask them.

  “Hey,” she says, “any of you know a chaser named Charles Hallingdahl?”

  The men are talking among themselves again, but at her question they all look up.

  “You mean Chuck?” says Dennis.

  “Yes, right, Chuck,” says Karena, thinking, Chuck. Oh dear.

  “Sure, we know Chuck,” says Dennis. “Everyone knows Chuck. Why?”

  Karena stammers for a moment.

  “No reason,” she says. “I mean—we grew up together. In the same hometown, and my editor thought it’d be cool if I could include him in the article. The personal-tie angle. He was always into chasing storms then too.”

  She smiles, although her face is burning. From across the hot tub Kevin is watching her with that squinty, quizzical expression.

  “Haven’t seen him this season,” he says. He looks at the others. “Have you?”

  “Not for years,” says Dennis. “Man, Chuck H, that crazy mofo. Remember the time he—”

  “We haven’t seen him,” says Kevin.

  “Okay,” says Karena. “If we do run into him, could you point him out to me?”

  “You bet,” says Kevin.

  “Thanks,” Karena says. “Good night.”

  She squishes off across the cement, swearing at herself. What was that all about? She feels bad for having lied to these men, especially after they’ve gone out of their way to help her. Saved her, in fact. She’s not sure why she has. Probably because although they may be too polite to ask, the chasers would certainly wonder why Karena and Charles are estranged, why she can’t find him any other way, and that’s personal. Family business. We don’t talk about this, Karena remembers Frank saying, as they drove back from the Mayo Clinic after Charles’s first episode, the one at the Starlite. Also, lying gets to be a habit after a while. Secrecy too. Karena sighs and picks up her pace.

  In the back corridor she is struggling with the pop machine, trying to mash a damp dollar into the slot, when the courtyard door opens and Kevin pads up the hall toward her. He stops very close, and Karena’s stomach flips. Usually she doesn’t like people being in her space, but Kevin doesn’t feel like a stranger. He smells familiar somehow, of childhood maybe, water-heated skin and chlorine.

  “Fear,” he says. He plucks the dollar out of her hand and leans past her to feed it into the slot. “I just wanted to say one thing about fear.”

  “Which would be . . . ,” Karena says, watching the machine eat the dollar with its vssssht noise.

  Kevin turns to face her. His eyes are not brown, as Karena thought, but hazel. Bright slashes in his round face.

  “Fear is good,” he says.

  “Do tell,” says Karena.

  “Most people think of fear the wrong way,” says Kevin. “They fear fear. They get as paralyzed by fear as by what they fear.”

  “‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’?” Karena quotes.

  “That’s right,” says Kevin. “But you know what? Fear is your survival instinct kicking in. Fear is your body’s primal way of saying I don’t have enough information about this situation. How can I get more information? How can I learn more to keep myself safe?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Karena says.

  “Now, what’d you want?” says Kevin.

  “What?” says Karena. “Oh. Diet pop, please.”

  Kevin presses a glowing button and a plastic bottle clunks into the trough.

  “Remember,” he says, “fear is good. Or can be.”

  He looks as though he wants to say something else, actually opens his mouth to do so, but then appears to reconsider.

  “Is something wrong?” says Karena.

  “Not a thing,” says Kevin.

  He hands Karena her pop.

  “Sleep tight,” he says, “don’t let the bedbugs bite,” and squishes off down the hall, leaving amoeba-shaped wet footprints on the carpet.

  11

  Karena has already shown the mullet photo to the clerk on duty at the front desk, ascertaining that although the hotel is full of chasers who have doubled back after today’s storms, Charles is not among them. But she returns to the lobby anyway to ask for a local phone book. It’s late, almost midnight, and her roommates will be sleeping. Karena doesn’t want to wake them by rummaging around for her laptop. She sits with the Ogallala Yellow Pages on one of the leather couches, then on impulse gets up, goes up the staircase past the mural of stagecoach and horses, and exits the hotel again onto the rear balcony. For some reason she is drawn to look down at the hot tub. But the chasers aren’t in it anymore, and the cover is pulled over it as though they had never been there. There is only the drone of eighteen-wheelers, invisible but powerful behind the cyclone fencing and trees, and a huge, fat orange moon.

  Karena takes her cell phon
e from her back pocket, sees she has some signal here, and gets started, working her way through the motel listings. There is no Charles, Chuck, nor C Hallingdahl staying in any of them. Karena tries the campgrounds next, reaching mostly recordings, and then, in a last-ditch effort, the hospitals. Nobody has seen her brother. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, though. Charles could be using a fake name. More likely, Karena thinks, he is sleeping in his uninsured death trap of a car. Karena hangs on the railing, stretching her arms, and stares at the moon. The last time she saw it this big was when they were eight, and Karena told Charles a moon this size meant it was going to crash into the earth and kill everyone. Charles cried all night. Is he somewhere nearby, sleeping beneath it or looking at it too? Some instinct tells Karena he is.

  Her cell phone buzzes in her hand and her breath catches—Charles?—but of course, it’s not. It’s Tiff. Karena flips the phone open.

  “God, finally,” Tiff says. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Where are you?”

  “Kansas—no, Nebraska,” says Karena. “Where are you? You sound like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

  “I’m in the garage,” Tiff says. The FFfffff sound comes again. “I’m smoking. I just can’t take it anymore.”

  “That’s not good,” says Karena. “Put down the cigarettes and back away slowly. Why are you in the garage?”

  “That kid,” Tiff says, “I swear he has baby bat ears. Matthew, I mean. If I’m anywhere in the house, he’ll hear me and wake up. And he’s up like five times a night anyway. I’ve basically given up sleeping.”

  “Oh no, Tiff,” says Karena. “I’m sorry. What about the pills?”

  “Then I won’t wake up when he needs me,” Tiff says.

  “But—what if he needs you while you’re in the garage?” Karena asks.

  “Baby monitor,” says Tiff.

  She exhales in a deafening blast of static. “So where are you again?”

  “Ogallala, Nebraska,” says Karena, “at the Pony Express Lodge!” She says this with a flourish, her tone implying, Ta da! but Tiff is unimpressed.

  “Whyyyy?” she says.