The Stormchasers

by Jenna Blum

  If only she had more time. Just a little more time to convince him there are other options. To remind him why he should remain alive and free: The taste of iced tea on a hot day. Sun. The smell of wind. The chance to help people who aren’t behind bars, a meal of his own choosing when he’s hungry—

  Karena will start with that.

  “Come on,” she says, standing and extending her hand.

  Charles looks up, his expression divided between hope and suspicion. “You’re coming to the sheriff with me, K?”

  “No,” says Karena, then amends it: “Not yet. Let’s go have lunch, okay? Let’s go somewhere and talk about it.”

  A sedan cruises down the center of Lincoln Street, slowing to a crawl so its occupants can get a good look at the grown man sitting on the lawn of the old Hallingdahl house. Karena recognizes the Rices, bridge partners of Siri’s. She lifts a hand. The sedan zooms away.

  “We’d better go somewhere nobody knows us,” she adds, “if we’re going to talk about this. La Crosse, maybe.”

  Charles squints at her, then turns back to the house, chewing his parsley. Karena makes an exasperated noise and walks out into the road, unhooking her keys from her belt.

  “Seriously, Charles,” she says, “I’m starving—” And then she sees it, burgeoning up over downtown like a nuclear cloud, although in reality it is probably fifty miles away or more. The familiar chef-hat shape. It still amazes Karena, how something so big can be so sneaky—or rather is surprising simply because it is so huge, the brain not calibrated to recognize something that size.

  Karena has never been so happy to see a storm.

  “Hey Charles,” she calls.

  “Hey what,” Charles says.

  “You want to chase this thing or what?”

  52

  Charles looks up.

  “Excuse me?” he says.

  “You heard me.”

  “Did you just ask me if I want to chase?” Charles laughs. “Who are you, and what have you done with my sister?”

  “Stop screwing around, Charles. Do you want to chase or not?”

  Charles gets up, scattering grass, and walks to the edge of the lawn. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll bite. Is there really a storm there?”

  Karena points.

  “Anvil,” she says. “Ten o’clock.”

  Charles raises his eyebrows.

  “I’ll be damned,” he says. “And listen to you, sistah. The Loaf taught you well.”

  Karena longs to hit him. She walks a few feet away so she won’t be tempted, and the urge dissipates as quickly as it came, leaving her with the desire to do nothing more than sit right down in the middle of Lincoln Street, with its oil stains and sharp pebbles and bits of glass, and just stay there in deepest misery.

  “Oh, shit,” she hears Charles say.

  He comes over to rub her back. “I’m sorry, K,” he says. “He’ll come around, though.”

  Karena looks at her brother’s sandaled feet, the big square toenails, the grimy Ace bandage. “I don’t think so,” she says.

  “He will, though,” Charles insists. “I know him.”

  Oh, right, because you know Kevin so much better than I know Kevin, Karena wants to snap. Instead she walks out from beneath Charles’s hand.

  “Seriously,” she says, “do you want to chase that or not?” Charles slips his hands in his back pockets and inspects the anvil. “Do you?” he says.

  “I asked you.”

  “Well . . . sure, I guess,” he says, glancing at Karena. “One last chase before the slammer couldn’t hurt.”

  “Charles.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  When they’re both buckled into Karena’s car, Karena drives back through town and out the other side. Too late she realizes they could have, should have stopped to see Frank at the New Heidelburg Good Samaritan Center. It flashes past, a one-story cinderblock building beneath a cheery billboard: LET US ALL REMEMBER THE AGED. YES, EVEN YOU ARE GETTING OLD!!! But the storm is growing right in front of them, taking on its distinctive anvil shape. And others are popping up all around it, smaller ice-cream scoops exploding in the distance.

  “Juicy setup today,” Karena observes, as New Heidelburg’s water towers dwindle behind them.

  Charles, who has been gazing through the windshield, ducks his head in a way that suggests he’s hiding a grin. “Sure is,” he agrees.

  “Make yourself useful,” Karena says. “What’s our best route?”

  Charles opens the glove box. “Don’t you have a GPS in here?”

  “Uh,” says Karena. They should have taken Charles’s Volvo, since although it’s a ’98 like hers, it has been modified with radar and a ham radio and a laptop stand and an antenna for signal boosting and everything else they’d need, whereas Karena’s has nothing and even her scanner, she remembers now, is uncharged, in the trunk.

  “Chasin’ old-school,” Charles says, rummaging in the backseat and finding Karena’s atlas. He flips to the state of Minnesota, checks the sky, glances at the map again, then tosses the atlas over his shoulder.

  “Keep going up to I-90,” he says, “then 90 West to Highway 13 North. Boom. Almost too easy.”

  “Copy that,” says Karena. They’re making good time, on the other side of Clinton already. The WELCOME TO IOWA sign winks past on the left, and Karena can’t help glancing at it. Charles doesn’t seem to notice. He sits with his arms folded, head tipped back, looking sleepy.

  “I just hope you’re not doing what I think you’re trying to do, K,” he says eventually, as they’re passing through Plainfield. “Because you’ll be disappointed.”

  “And what is it you think I’m trying to do?” Karena asks.

  “Dissuade me,” Charles says, with a jaw-cracking yawn. “Distract me from my mission. Tempt me away from turning myself in by reminding me what I love best in life—outside of you, of course. Chasing.”

  Karena scowls. As much of a blessing as it is to be known as well as Charles knows her—a need, Karena sometimes thinks, as primal as that for food or water or shelter—there are times when it’s really inconvenient to be transparent.

  “Could you be a little more egotistical?” she asks. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I like chasing? That if it hadn’t been for you grabbing all the storm genes in the womb, I might have turned out to be the chaser in the family? Did you ever think of that?”

  “Um, no,” says Charles.

  “Well,” says Karena. “There you go.”

  “Okay,” says Charles. “I’m not debating you, K. I’m just saying.”

  Karena swings into the oncoming lane to pass a flatbed piled with hay, then back around it just in time to exit onto the Interstate. The highway darkens and brightens and darkens again as huge, fat-bellied Cu pass overhead. Trucks cough past them in the opposite lane, and their storm’s anvil spreads toward them like pancake batter, starting to blot out the light. Karena sits forward to take stock, evaluating and reevaluating what she sees. She’s surprised to find what she said to Charles is true, in a way: She has missed this, the skin-crawling alertness. You have to kick it up a notch when you’re chasing, she remembers Kevin saying, to be your best and sharpest self, that’s part of the fun, and Karena realizes too why she’s scanning the shoulder even though Charles is right next to her: She’s watching for Kevin. Even though he’s probably at soccer practice, and although if he’s not he could be chasing another of these storms—and just what does Karena think will happen if she does see him, anyway?—she can’t help looking for him nonetheless.

  “Hey Charles,” she says.

  “Yes, sistah.”

  “Are we going for the right cell?” Karena asks, for their storm is now one of several, a fleet of motherships silently ringing the horizon.

  Charles shrugs. “Chaser’s dilemma, K,” he says, “you never know. And without radar it’s impossible to tell.”

  “So?” Karena says. “What should I do?”

&nb
sp; “Your call,” says Charles, “it’s your chase.”

  Karena frowns at him, annoyed. He is slumped listlessly against his door, watching the scenery with his chin propped on one hand, as if he’s attending a rather dull movie.

  “What would you do if you were by yourself, Charles?”

  “Probably stick with the original.”

  “Fine,” says Karena. “I will.”

  Charles points out Highway 13 when it comes up, and Karena takes the exit. Now they are on a two-lane road running straight north through the farmland. Instead of reaching the anvil, though, they start to encounter low clouds, formless and featureless. Drizzle condenses on the windshield, and the air in the Volvo grows so sticky Karena has to put the defrost on. The light dulls, everything around them gray and green. Karena squints up. “I can’t see anything,” she says. “I can’t see the storm’s structure.”

  “That’s because we’ve hit a stratus deck,” says Charles. “That’s all right, though. The updraft looked pretty healthy, so as long as this crapvection doesn’t choke off all the storm’s juice, it should stay alive. Keep going—if you want.”

  Karena does want. As they pass through Otisco and Waseca she sits up straighter, monitoring the sky, which way the flags are blowing, what the light is doing. Soon the clouds thicken into their familiar layers, and near Waterville the storm’s base comes into view. It is not a tidal wave like the Iowa storm, or purple-brown like the Ogallala supercell or black and gigantic like the parent storm of the wedge, but still, this one is big, gray, and ragged. Large triangular flaps of cloud hang from it like pointed teeth, and more clouds rise into it from the horizon, getting sucked up.

  “Charles,” Karena says.

  “Huh!” says Charles, who has been dozing. He unsticks his cheek from his hand. “Uch,” he mutters in disgust.

  “What do you think of that?” Karena asks, pointing to the cycling clouds.

  Charles looks. “That’s just scud,” he says. “It’s not anything.” But the light disappears as they enter Waterville, the afternoon blackening to night except for that glowing white strip beneath the base to the north, like light coming from under a door. They pass a motel, two residential streets, a Sinclair gas station, and then they are on the other side of town. Karena has to pull over to let a state trooper go racing past, his light bar flashing, a string of pickups and muscle cars behind it. Yahoos, Kevin would call them, locals hoping to take pictures of the tornado with their cell phones. The chasers’ nightmare, law enforcement too, because the yahoos don’t know what they’re doing around big weather and often get in the way, putting everyone at risk.

  Then the Waterville siren goes off behind them, cranking up to a steady keen. “Whoa,” Karena says, and then, “Look!” She pokes Charles, and they watch a solid gray curtain like a thick mushroom stem travel slowly across the horizon from west to east. Behind it tiny smoky funnels stretch down and pull back up, stretch down and pull back up, all at different times like carousel horses.

  “Is that a tornado?” Karena asks of the stem.

  “No, that’s the core,” says Charles. “Although . . .” He leans forward and peers. “There could be a rain-wrapped tornado in there somewhere.”

  “And those little—wispy things, are they tornadoes?”

  “I can’t tell if they’re touching all the way down or not,” Charles admits. “The trees’re in the way, and I don’t see any debris. But they’re definitely funnels.”

  “So that’s the area of interest?” Karena asks.

  Charles cricks his neck back and forth. “This is all area of interest, K,” he says. “We’re in the bear’s cage.”

  “Get out!” says Karena, then promptly does. She opens the door and steps onto the shoulder to look up. Right above the Volvo the black clouds are colliding, a bank moving west and another moving east, speeding toward each other as fast as cars—at least fifty, sixty miles an hour. They knit and swirl, directly overhead. It is like standing at the bottom of a sink drain.

  Karena climbs back into the Volvo as the siren swings toward them. “I don’t feel safe here,” she says.

  “What?” says Charles.

  “I don’t feel safe!” Karena yells.

  Charles shrugs and says something.

  “What?”

  “I said okay,” he shouts.

  “I think we should go back to that gas station,” Karena yells.

  Charles says something else.

  “What?” Karena shouts.

  “Fine!” Charles says. “Let’s go, K! Let it go.”

  Karena scans the highway in both directions, then turns around and drives the few miles back into Waterville. She has a terrible feeling, of being a chicken, of having been checkmated. There’s nothing else she can do. It’s all over. The Sinclair sign is a brilliant yellow-white against the black and swirling sky, and Karena pulls in beneath it, then points them north so they can still watch the storm. There’s a small lake next to the gas station and a handful of trailer homes. Rain hits the windshield in fat spats.

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” she says.

  Charles is picking at his unraveling Ace bandage. “What?” he says.

  “I’m sorry!” Karena shouts, just as the siren winds down.

  EEEEEEERRRRRRRRrrrrrrooooooowwwwwwwwwrrrrrrrrr. She doesn’t understand why they’ve shut it off, since the little taffy funnels are still pulling down, some just on the other side of the water. But nothing makes sense anymore.

  “Forget it, K,” says Charles. “I didn’t want to chase anyway. It was your idea.”

  “I know,” Karena says. “I’m sorry I made you do this. And I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry about Motorcycle Guy, and I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you that day, and I’m sorry I didn’t protect you. I’m sorry I was so selfish and cowardly and just left you there in Black Wing—”

  “You’re not selfish and cowardly, K,” Charles interrupts.

  “Okay, but wait, just let me say this, all right? I’m sorry you got it. The disorder, or your condition or visions or whatever you want to call it, I’m so sorry you got it and I didn’t. I’ve been sorry about that our entire life,” Karena says. “More sorry than you know.”

  Charles lifts his head and looks out the windshield. “I do know, K,” he says. “That’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not, Charles,” says Karena.

  Charles smiles a little.

  “You’re right,” he says, “it’s not. It’s completely unfair, to be honest. But it’s not your fault, K, and I appreciate your saying all that. I truly do. Thank you.”

  Karena sits back.

  “Really?” she says.

  “Really.”

  “Thank you, Charles.”

  “You’re welcome, K.”

  They watch the carousel of funnels through the windshield. Behind them people have started to emerge from the gas station, to wander around staring upward as if waiting to get picked up by the mothership. Karena can hear them exclaiming, see camera flashes in her wing mirror.

  “K,” Charles says.

  She looks over at him.

  “You need to take me back now,” he says.

  Karena locks eyes with him: Are you sure?

  Charles gazes steadily back: Yes.

  They stare at each other: unstoppable force meeting immovable object.

  Finally Karena sighs, puts the car in gear, and drives out of the Sinclair lot.

  Heading south on 13, they encounter rain bands momentarily blinding, precipitation lifting off the fields. The edge of their storm’s anvil runs into another one, so where there should be blue sky beyond, there is only a ribbon of it, then more solid cloud bumpy with mammatus. “Don’t go back to the Interstate,” Charles says, consulting the atlas. “We’re surrounded. Take 14 East to 52, and don’t go above fifty miles an hour or so. We should be okay that way.”

  Karena does as he says. They wend through the small towns, passing spotters on the shoulders, civilians standing on the
ir porches with their faces turned to the sky. Charles waves, and most wave back. The going is slow, since they are boxed in by storms. There are towering Cu in every direction, lighting up like giant brains having bright ideas. Lightning skewers the horizon, pulses in tangles and snarls and flares. But Karena and Charles stay safe because of their steady pace, as if they are traveling in a little bubble, and by the time they intersect Highway 52 and turn south toward New Heidelburg, it is dark, the fireflies coming out. There are masses of them, more than Karena or Charles has ever seen before. Maybe they’re responding to the lightning, Charles guesses, or the humidity of the purple-black night, Karena suggests. Either way they all come out at once, effervescing from the fields on either side of the road. Thousands and thousands of fireflies, wave upon sparkling wave.

  53

  When they get back to New Heidelburg they check into the American Inn & Suites on Highway 44. It seems weird and counterintuitive to Karena to stay in a motel in her own town, but what choice do they have? “We could always go to the Widow’s,” Charles suggests, and Karena says, “That’s a good idea, Charles. Call me and let me know how it turns out.” The pretty girl on desk gives them rooms across the hall from each other, Charles in 106 with a front view, Karena in 105 facing the back. They consider and reject the idea of going to dinner, which at this hour, after ten, would mean driving out to the Starlite and having popcorn at the bar. Instead they hug quickly and say good night, and although Karena has the feeling of sundering she always gets when she’s parted from Charles, no matter for how short a time, she is also relieved. He is too, she can tell. It has been a long day.

  Her room is big and clean and cheerful, with the usual multicolored bedspread of abstract floral design, green flecked carpet, maroon curtains. As she sets down her bag and laptop and washes her face, Karena is gripped by a loneliness so profound it squeezes her chest. She thinks of Fern and Alicia, of Marla and Scout and Dennis and Dan. She thinks of the Sandhills Inn & Suites, the Stagecoach, Pierre. She thinks, of course, of Kevin. My summer of motels, she thinks, and pinches the coverlet off the bed nearest the window. Even in this new a place, it’s probably still a petri dish of germs.