Wichita (9781609458904) (20 page)

“There's room for everyone.”

“Am I going?” He's actually stir-crazy enough to want to.

“If Seth comes along, you should too. You'll be sorry you missed it, whatever we end up seeing.”

“Oh, and thank you for the yard work!” she says off-handedly, walking away.

Lewis turns to take it in. In the farthest corner, a small flock of starlings is picking its way over the stubbly ground, like a search party moving across a field.

 

D
ropping Lewis off in the driveway, Astrid gives his thigh an uncertain pat. While he searches his tired brain for something to say to her, Seth emerges from the garage as from a cave and sits desolately on the rear fender of the Escalade. The stitched-up gash is at the back of his head but the thick white bandage is wrapped all the way around, WW-I-casualty style. Astrid says, “God!”

“It's not as bad as it looks,” Lewis assures her and, grateful for the distraction, gets out, gets away. He frowns at Seth to discourage any quips but Seth, oblivious and meds-blunted, gazes catatonically at the ground between his shoes. Why he's bothering to come on the chase Lewis can't understand but is glad he is, since if he stayed home, Lewis would have to watch him and Lewis got so little sleep last night that it would be torture to stay awake. Now he can safely crash in the Escalade and Abby and Bishop can keep an eye on Seth.

As Astrid drives off, the storm-chase client pulls up to the curb in a white rental, which means Lewis won't have time to shower and change clothes.

Lewis and then Seth too watch the man climb out of the car. He's wearing a khaki baseball cap and a yellow T-shirt tucked into denim shorts, running shoes, a video camera on a strap that seems to yoke forward his neck. The blue-jean shorts are belted tight. He looks to be in his mid-thirties, endearingly harmless and nerdy.

“Drew,” he says, introducing himself. When he shakes Seth's limply proffered, doubtless clammy hand he can be seen struggling over whether to ask about the head wound.

“That happened on a recent chase,” Lewis says deadpan then regrets it as Drew's eyes widen in concern and fear.

“Chunk o' debris,” Seth says with a shrug, his speech slurred from the meds. “Price you pay for getting close to the beast.” Lewis chuckles appreciatively. It's the first joke Lewis has heard Seth make in a week and he's glad, on second thought, to have created an opening for it.

“Don't believe a word of it, Drew!” Abby says, materializing beside them. She has an orange crepe scarf tied around her hair and fashionably bulbous sunglasses. “He fell on his skateboard yesterday.”

“Phew!” Drew says, honking out a relieved laugh. “You guys!” he says, shaking a finger at them. “Jerking my chain!”

“Well, now that you've met my two sons—who are,” Abby says, tipping down her sunglasses to cut Lewis and Seth disapproving looks—“usually better mannered!— welcome to Tornado Ally!”

She gives Drew a quick hug, which causes him to shrink back slightly.

“The day is shaping up
really
nicely, Drew!” Abby says and Lewis is mildly appalled at her adoption of a slightly hucksterish, “expert” tone. Though maybe that's what the occasion calls for. “I just checked in with our navigator, Bishop. He tells me there's an entire
string
of storms headed our way from southern Colorado.” She gestures vaguely at the sky, which is a clear blue except for a long swath of white cloud like a sandbar.

“Outstanding!” Drew says, looking up at the sky.

“So let's hit the road, guys!” Abby says.

She's backed the Escalade out of the driveway and is starting off down the street when Cody appears through a break in a hedge across the street, his specialty, waving his arm to flag them down as he scoots along in his lowrider jeans.

Abby brakes and rolls down her window. “There room for one more?” Cody asks her eagerly, peering in at the empty seats through the driver's side window.

“Ooh, I'm afraid not, Cody,” she says. “We're going to pick up Bishop. And other folks,” she adds, apparently remembering the other seats. The Escalade is like a small bus. She eases it forward. “We'll take lots of video!”

“It's not the same,” Cody says, moving alongside. He shoots a pleading look at Seth, who sits staring numbly out the window.

“No, it's not,” Abby says, patting his hand. “You can come next time,” she says, speeding up. “Okay?”

“Okay!” Cody says dejectedly, releasing the window. But he trots down the street in the wake of the car, holding up his jeans with one hand and waving with the other.

They immediately hit traffic. Despite the cheerful chatter Abby keeps up, the chase seems off to an inauspicious start. There's a whiff of burning tar and ahead of them for an eternity is the slot-like rear window of a black muscle car in which a blinding granular reflection of the sun is concentrated. When they finally reach the Wichita State University campus, Bishop is standing at the curb beside his moped. He's wearing sunglasses, his Reality Check Mark T-shirt, shorts, Teva-s. He has the laptop open and is shielding the screen from the glare with his forearm.

Abby toots the horn to get his attention and he waves and reaches in to shake Drew's hand, waggling the laptop. “There's a
tasty supercell
in the area, Drew!”

“Great!” Drew says, bouncing slightly in his seat. He takes a map out of his backpack and begins unfolding it. Lewis gets out and takes a seat in the back row, looking forward to napping once they're out on the highway.

“If we can head basically out
into the Flinthills
we can intercept it,” Bishop tells Abby then settles in and puts on his seatbelt. Abby sits still for a moment as if giving Bishop a chance to remember then asks, “What do you want to do about
the moped
?”

“Ah, right,” Bishop says, turning to look at it where it stands on the curb, sunlight glinting off the chrome.

Abby glances deadpan into the rearview, shaking her head. “Would you have left it there if I hadn't said anything?”

“Hmm,” Bishop says, considering the question objectively. “I'm not sure.”

He thinks for a moment and says, “Well, I don't dare leave it there, even locked up.” Turning around to address Drew, he says, “The meth addiction is really bringing this town to its knees.”

“Throw it in the back!” Abby cries, popping the trunk. “But let's go!”

Lewis gets out to help. They move aside one of the orange reserve gas tanks and heave the moped into the rear compartment then wrangle it to prevent the handlebars from blocking Abby's view in the rear mirror.

When they're underway, Bishop turns to face Drew again. “So what attracted you to our outfit?” Lewis can tell he's fishing for compliments about the website. “What distinguished us from the pack?”

Drew makes an apologetic duck of the head and says, “To be honest? All the other chasers were booked.”

Seth quietly snorts out a laugh into this hand at this, his first sign of life, and Bishop, visibly crestfallen, says, “Ah-ha. Well, I can
assure
you, this will be a unique experience. We're
utterly
unlike the pack,” Bishop says, facing forward. “We're not part of the pack
whatsoever
.”

“Well, your website is definitely, um,
unique
,” Drew says, nodding eagerly. “I'll say that.”

Bishop turns back to face Drew. “That's because we approach weather
as inseparable from consciousness
.”

“O
K
,” Drew says, nodding gamely.

“In other words,” Bishop says, “we reject the whole materialist paradigm of meteorological phenomena—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Abby says. “Which way here, Bishop?”

“To be continued!” Bishop tells Drew, consulting the GPS.

“I have to tell you guys the story of the early-morning session we had!” Bishop says to the car generally.

“Bishop is involved in a drug-research program,” Abby explains to Drew with a detectable undertone of caution for Bishop's ears, unsure of whether Drew is a suitable audience for whatever Bishop is about to say. “Drew has no idea what ‘session' means, Bishop. And anyway, isn't this stuff
confidential
?” Nudge, nudge.

Bishop looks at her. “I won't use the subject's real name.”

“I actually need you to focus on the navigating again, Bishop,” Abby says. “I think I missed the turn.” She passes Bishop what looks like the large bound map of the state by counties and Bishop bends over it.

Lewis stretches out across the seats in the back row and closes his eyes, memories of the night Astrid arriving in wedges, like Dopplering noise: she wants to become a “healer,” she told him as he lay on the massage table, and Lewis wondered about the appeal of this idea to New Agers, the world as a holistic triage center. They drank red wine and talked until there seemed to be nothing more to say and she looked at him as if squinting into sunlight. She wore a scoop-necked spandex top that squeezed her shoulder blades together and flattened her breasts. She's nearly Abby's age, it struck him. He lay the back of his hand against her cheek and she closed her eyes with tremulous gratitude. The hair at her temples was thinning, he noticed, and the skin of her forehead so taut and papery that the skull seemed to bulge beneath. He sat back away from her, unable to go on, and he could see the hurt in her eyes.

He wakes with a guilty start and sits up. On the side of a highway a small oil derrick pumps away like a toy bird. A wedge of five bikers with sinister insignia written in a chalky white on the backs of their leather vests—Lewis can't make out what it says—breaks apart and swoops past like the ghosts of cattle rustlers haunting the plains. Thinking of the roadside strip club, Lewis glances at Seth for his reaction but Seth has none, seems to be noticing nothing.

Lewis lies back across the seats and sleeps and is woken up later to the muffled clunk of the Escalade doors shutting. They've pulled over on the side of a narrow two-lane road in the middle of gently rolling but essentially flat, saturated green fields.

“The Flint Hills!” Bishop announces, making a broad impresario sweep of one arm.

It's quiet—insects, a single bird singing. The sky is mostly clear blue, with small white clouds in ranks trundling past from the south. Fifty feet away, Seth stands pissing into waist-high prairie grass, the rustle of the stream faintly audible.

“I dream about tornados a lot,” Drew says as they're pulling out. A tour bus—long and dull green and high-windowed, sealed off like a canister—sweeps slowly past in the distance.

“Is that right?” Abby says into the rearview mirror.

“But they're not mine,” Drew says. This gives everyone pause. Even Seth stirs and shifts towards him as if curious.

“What do you mean, they're not
yours
?” Abby asks.

“The tornados I'm seeing in my dreams are based on photos and videos,” Drew says. “I didn't see them firsthand.”

“But they're
your dreams
!” Bishop says.

“It's not the same,” Drew says with a shrug. Which begins a philosophical discussion during which Lewis nods off again and when he wakes up Abby is parking at an overlook. There's a gazebo on a ridge, a walkway leading to a railed viewing platform. Lewis goes numbly along with the others and peers out at the view of a winding deeply cut creek crowded with cottonwoods and scrub in a landscape out of Africa, a faint white haze hammocked above the treetops. Along the horizon, a tumbleweed-like procession of dark clouds. Drew snaps photos of them.

A two-lane road, green fields, the yellow dividing line sun-faded. Buzzards, strikingly big seen from so close, flap up into the bright air while, fifty yards away, a doe stands looking over her shoulder at them.

They pass through a small town, white houses in one yard of which what Lewis thinks excitedly might be Outsider Art turns out to be an upturned rotary plough; more fields, open and flat and endless, isolated oaks bent from a prevailing wind; a grain elevator, bales of wheat like cubed gold.

Lewis lies down again. He's woken by the sound of the car doors slamming and joins the others outside to stare up at an enormous, multi-tiered bank of dark-gray clouds reaching into clear sky.

“This thing is just
huge
,” Bishop says, looking up at the storm and down at his laptop as if not quite believing. Along the lower flanks is a ragged, restless detachment of soot-gray clouds.

“There's
rotation
,” he adds in an even more surprised voice, pointing upward while looking at the laptop screen. Peering over his shoulder, Lewis sees a spinning icon within a purple blob.

Suddenly a wire-like stab of lightning then a thick, jagged bolt. Everyone flinches.

“Whoa!” Drew says and begins filming with his camcorder.

“And we're getting a bit of outdraft here, as you can feel,” Abby adds, holding up her palms. She looks tired from all the driving but happy, invigorated by the beauty of the storm, the ions in the air. Drew sweeps the area to get a shot of the grasses bent in the wind.

Then it begins to rain and everyone gets back into the Escalade. For a few minutes, Bishop studies the laptop and pages through the large paperback map of the state while the rain clatters on the roof.

“Okay,” he says finally, raising his voice to be heard over what's become a downpour. “Now the thing is, we're near the leading edge of the storm. Which is great, there'll be some nice views eventually? But where we really want to be is at the
back edge
.”

“Which is where tornados typically form, right?” Drew says

“Right, Drew! Drew is all over this stuff! Now there's another storm to our south. We can go after that and hope for the best.” This option clearly bores Bishop: too safe. “
Or
we can try to
get to the back
of this storm here. And to get to the
back
edge we'll have to cross through this area here—“Bishop holds up the laptop—“marked in purple on the radar? This is all heavy rain and probably some hail too.”

“The core,” Drew says.

“Exactly!” Bishop says. “The core.”

“We could ‘core-punch,'” says Drew. “Right?”