Snapper (2 page)

“Pretty good,” I lied.

“Good,” he said. “You need to work out the distances between nests.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“We’re collecting variables that will enable you to work it out,” he said.

Oh.

“And when do I do that?”

“After work.”

Years later I took undergraduates out in the field on my own projects and they blatantly made stuff up.

“I brought a book for you if you get stuck,” he said. It was a high school trigonometry textbook, but coming from Gerald it was a gift from the heart.

“Some Old Horses Chew Apples Happily Throughout Old Age,” I told Lola. She had dropped by my house in the early evening. In summer she wore pretty floral-print dresses that left her shoulders bare and clung to her hips.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s a mnemonic device for trigonometry,” I explained. “Sine equals Opposite divided by Hypotenuse, and Cosine equals Adjacent divided by Hypoten—”

She looked at my book.

“Sweet Octopus Hash Can Alleviate Heart Trouble Or Acne,” she said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “This is important. Triangles are important. They’re how you cross oceans and build stuff and study birds.”

“Soft Orchids Hope Cats Ask Hippies To Ogle Azaleas,” she suggested.

“I have to get this stuff down,” I said.

“Let me see,” she said, leaning over me. Her hand lay on my shoulder and her hair brushed my ear. She wasn’t bone-thin and bedraggled like most of the student body, including me. She was composed of natural curves, not alien angles. Her lips were red from wine.

“Surveying stuff,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“So that you can align your Kansas with my Missouri,” she suggested.

“Kansas?”

“And lay your panhandle across my Great Plains. My New Orleans next to your Boston.” She couldn’t quite keep a straight face or a level voice.

We both laughed, and obviously I couldn’t concentrate on angles anymore. So we resumed our conversation in bed, where we flattened Switzerland and drained Australia of sand and drove Mexico straight over Egypt, until we sprawled spent over Canada with log-heavy limbs and nothing on our minds.

I spent the following couple of nights at home alone, studying.

Let D = ground distance. Let H
₁
and H
₂
be the nest heights. The distance between nests is the square root of D
^{^}
₂
+ (H
₂
– H
₁
)
^{^}
₂
.

Example: D = 12 feet, H
₁
= 20 feet, H
₂
= 25 feet. The distance is the square root of (12)
^{^}
₂
+ (25 – 20)
^{^}
₂
, which is the square root of 144 + 25, which is the square root of 169, which is 13. Therefore a pillaging crow flies 13 feet while a humanoid on the ground must walk 12 feet. This example assumes level ground.

On site, the relationship between a nest and a tree looked pretty straightforward. Re-creating and modeling the entire topography of the square mile containing that and other nests, in a computer lab after months of data collection, would be like playing a symphony by yourself after hearing it once. Every painstaking measurement was a single note in the score.

To deal with slope you need the angle, call it T degrees, from the bottom (call this A) to the top (call this B) of the hill, ridge, rock, bump, or other geoprotuberance. D becomes the horizontal distance underneath slope distance H, from A to B. You find it with D = H times cosine of T. A modern inclinometer will give you the sine, cosine, and tangent you need.

Somehow, Gerald worked these things out in his head as he measured. Such exactitude was essential to study patterns of predation and parasitism between nests. It would not be required for a less specialized study. But it is worth noting that although the nests are long gone, and some of the trees, too, Gerald’s data set is still in use in ornithology labs around the world. In fact, all of Gerald’s data sets are still in use. No hardware or software developed since then—or, I would hazard, in the near future—can match his meticulous mapping. He was pressed in vinyl, perhaps the last of his kind.

On the third morning after I had seen Lola I was out in the field—that is, the forest—when a tornado struck. I had seen tornadoes from a distance—seen them forming briefly before rushing to the basement with a battery-powered transistor radio. I had not experienced one up close and out of doors.

A proper Indiana twister looks something like God got fed up with his spinach. God in this instance is about six years old, but his spinach bowl is ample to seal the whole world beneath it. Much as moonlight may turn everything silver or blue, tornado light causes great swirling wet wisps of green cloud, wavering green shadows on the ground. It doesn’t always rain much at first but the air is so moist you feel you are breathing algae. As the wind swells the trees sound like gunfire or fireworks with an occasional whoosh as a branch comes down.

When the funnel cloud snaps from sky to earth, God has just turned sixteen and that is his middle finger.

My truck was a mile away. Whether it was more or less safe than the open forest is a moot point: increments of safety are all negligible if you are not underground. Motorists far
from shelter are advised to abandon their vehicles and fling themselves in a ditch, then hope that ditch is not prone to flash floods. I found myself pelted by leaves. They were so thick in the air I couldn’t see more than twenty feet and they were beginning to sting my face and hands. They did not whirl and dance in pretty concentric patterns; they raged. I was annoyed by them but strangely oblivious to my own safety. I was worried about my nests and the awful prospect of re-mapping devastated territory. When I saw blood on my hand I realized the rush of leaves was slicing my skin, and I looked for shelter from them rather than any other more dangerous thing. I lay facedown in the mud between two roots of a huge tulip poplar. I did my best to cover my hands with my sleeves and I covered my head with my hands.

Some people describe the sound of a tornado as akin to a freight train, which is like comparing a wolf to a beagle. I have sat, with Lola and a brace of beer, directly beneath rolling trains on the Dogtown trestle bridge over the Ohio River: they’re rhythmic, clattering, dependable, and their sound, though loud, suggests a sort of restrained power. As I clutched my head between those poplar roots what I heard was purely chaotic, an unhinged and unpredictable malevolence, demon song; lightning struck twice nearby and I could not hear the thunderclaps because the whole chorus of hell overwhelmed them. God, perhaps suffering a midlife crisis by now, was off seeking deliverance on all the coasts of dark destruction where every wave sounds the rush and crumble of ruin. I found it hard to sympathize.

Abruptly the sound diminished and I was in a predictable, chummy sort of thunderstorm. The leaves settled and the rain poured and the call-and-response of lightning and thunder drifted slowly away from me toward the west. I became
aware of some aches in my arms and back and legs. These developed later into bruises. I don’t know what hit me but to look at me a week later you’d guess that I was a spectacularly inept toreador. All around me were lethal-looking branches freshly shorn from their trees.

That tornado left a six-mile swath of houses in splinters and twenty-nine dead after touching down four miles away from where I cowered in the mud. As if God had driven his Camaro through there with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a rented blonde in the other, AC/DC loud on the stereo. I don’t know how you can look at an occurrence like that without concluding that God
is
white trash, but you don’t say that kind of thing in Indiana.

I didn’t know about the damage yet, of course. I knew only that I appeared to be okay, so I ran to the truck. It was scratched and dented and probably needed a creative paint job, but nothing was smashed, so I got in and headed for Lola’s house.

I was astonished to see Gerald on his front lawn inspecting a branch there, wondering what neighbor’s tree had donated it. Everyone was doing this, of course—by this time, twenty minutes later, the sun was out, and the sidewalks steaming. Across the street a pin oak had dispatched one wall of a garage attached to a family home, but this far from the funnel cloud damage was minimal. Still, I had thought that Gerald must have been in the forest, too, with some tornado-evasion technique that he had used dozens of times before. He was perfectly dry, in clean clothes, outside his house. I was one big shade of mud, like something extracted from the shallows of a stagnant pond.

He was alarmed. “You were out in that?” he said.

“We work in all weather,” I said.

“Did I say that?”

“My interview,” I said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’m fine. I’m glad you’re fine. I came to check on Lola.”

“Oh.”

“Have you seen her?”

He didn’t reply. I looked at her house; a large branch lay on the roof and had dislodged several shingles. I repeated myself.

“She hasn’t been home for two days,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I couldn’t tell you whether either of my neighbors had been home for a month. But then I didn’t live next to Lola. In ordinary circumstances, I would have drawn the correct conclusion: that she had made a new friend who had invited her back to his nest. In the aftermath of the storm I was too worried to think straight, and I approached her door in a panic. If she was inside, she was undoubtedly safe but probably freaked out. Moreover, she knew that I had been in the forest and was probably quivering with worry for me.

She didn’t answer.

I went around the corner to the window of her kitchenette. I had made a hasty exit from that window once and I thought I could unlatch it with my pocketknife. I was right. To my surprise I found Gerald over my shoulder.

“You’re breaking and entering,” he said.

“She does it to me all the time,” I said. She had done it once. In those days a cell phone was a shoe-box-size thing you plugged into your car battery, and if you owned one you
probably had a speedboat or a pilot’s license or a wine cellar too. I didn’t think twice about letting myself into Lola’s, mud and all, during an emergency.

“I’ll let you in the front door,” I said.

All the dishes were clean in the kitchen. I peered in the bedroom on the way to the front door, and the bed was made. I let Gerald in. On the living room sofa lay an open book, but there was always an open book on her sofa. It was never one I’d given her.

An empty house, however familiar, is always unsettling, as though it resents you. And Lola’s house in particular was not so much clean as beaten into spotless submission—something I always found at odds with her character—and to see it without her was somehow to witness its pain.

“I guess she wasn’t home for the storm,” I said pointlessly. Gerald nodded. He looked a little uncomfortable, but I didn’t realize that he didn’t suspect the nature of my relationship with her until I said I was going to change clothes. I was pretty sure I had some old jeans and a T-shirt beneath her bed. His face turned as red as his beard.

“I’m sure she’s safe,” I called to the living room. Gerald made no reply. I went to the adjoining bathroom to wash my face and hands. When I returned to the living room I found Gerald on his knees with a wet paper towel, trying unsuccessfully to remove some mud that had come from my boots. He looked more at home than I felt.

“She’s an Indiana girl,” I said. “I suppose she knows what to do.”

“The storm isn’t the problem,” he said. “I told you she’s been missing for two days. Virgil doesn’t have any food. Or water.” Both bowls on the kitchen floor were empty.

“Have you seen him?”

“No.”

“I’ll clean that mud up. The cat food is under the sink.”

“I think that if she had planned to be away for any length of time she would have asked me to feed the cat,” he said. He meant because he lived next door, but he sounded possessive about it, as if letting him feed Virgil would have been a special personal favor she granted.

“Has she ever asked you to feed the cat before?” I said.

“Not yet,” he said.

Not
yet
? So much turns on a single syllable. Was Gerald waiting, heart in hand, for Lola to ask him any favor at all?

“But you thought she’d get around to it,” I said.

“If she were planning to go away for any length,” he said defensively. “Someone should water her plants.”

“Would you like that honor, Gerald? Maybe you could check her mailbox while you’re at it.”

“That’s illegal,” he said. “So I’ll leave it to you.”

I was beginning to frame an idea. That is, my storm-induced anxieties gave way to wisdom borne of experience. A few months previously Lola had been involved with a comparative literature professor. She got bored with him eventually, but perhaps she had changed her mind. Though probably not. “He said my
interpretations
were too
facile
,” she had explained, “and we were talking about
breakfast
.”